Archive for 2004
I’m suffering from deja vu all over again. The last time I preached on All Saints Day was a Sunday exactly four years ago but half a world away in Oakland, California. Then, like now, it was just a couple of days before a presidential election. A couple of wars later, the decisions placed before the people of that parish seem even weightier than they did at the time—those choices have changed the world for all of us. And who knows what next Tuesday’s choosing will bring?
What is sanctity but a habit of making good choices? Today, All Saints day, we find ourselves calling on all those holy women and men through the ages who have chosen well. Sometimes the choices were big, heroic ones that won them martyrdom. Sometimes little daily choices that shaped their lives into a pattern that Jesus might have lived if he were in their shoes. The astonishing thing is that so few of the saints we honour today ever had the freedom and responsibility that we do: the chance to vote. And that’s a problem for us because we don’t yet know how to be holy people and political people at the same time. We have so few examples. Our saints have taught us how to be holy in our private lives; they have shown us about charity, heroism, honour, piety, virtue, forgiveness, even resistance. They have shown us how to die and how to live … but they have not shown us how to vote. We desperately need to have living examples of ordinary, political holiness. Not just theories—God knows we have theories—but witnesses; lives given, choices written in flesh and tested in blood.
The American scene gives us a Polaroid picture of the problems you get when religion and politics mix. Lots of heat but very little light. Is that where saints are being made? Or sinners?
But what about the rest of us, in our own political scene, wherever we find it, how do we do that? Make holy political choices with so few saints to guide us. Not just at voting time but every day.
The Church offers us the Beatitudes to help us think about our choices. A simple question: where is Jesus’ heart? And a striking answer: With those whose spirit is broken, those who have lost what they loved, those without a voice, those who yearn for the bread of justice. On the side of mercy not punishment, at home with passion not comfort, with the ones who risk peace beyond the ease of anger.
Taking Jesus at his impractical word would surely challenge our political system to the core. And maybe make some saints along the way.
November 1st, 2004
Interpreting the signs is always a difficult thing. How do we interpret the differences between us, between ourselves here or, on a larger stage, between nations, races, religions? Because different we are, often strangely so, sometimes monstrously.
Paul, in the face of difference, is pleading for unity—for charity, selflessness, gentleness and patience. Differences, in his opinion, have to be borne with for the sake of the unity of the Body: one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and one God who is father of all, over all, through all and within all.
The appeal to unity has a certain stirring beauty about it. Classically, unity is the hallmark of beauty; simplicity, harmony, unity of form. But too much unity and you have uniformity. And, where the things being unified are you and I, uniformity can become control. So why must there only be one? Why can’t there be two honest opinions? Three noble truths? Four ways of living life fully and justly?
Look at the fallout of 9/11 to see what can be done politically in the name of unity and the fear of difference.
But unity has never been the only trademark of beauty. Alongside unity there has always been colour. Look at the trees this week! They find new beauty at this time of year because they go wild with colour: they weren’t a uniform green before, but right now they are every shade of brown and gold, russet and rose.
Colour and pattern and difference. “Glory be to God for dappled things!” says Hopkins. “He Fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: praise Him!” Look at the rich, strange, dappled world and you see a God in love with colour and with differences. And, Hopkins says, in every beautiful difference God makes Godself known. That’s the way we can interpret the difference between us: as signs of God at work, making beauty be.
There’s the challenge for us as political animals: will we trust difference and make it be the beautiful thing it might be, even though it take effort and ingenuity and above all love?
I think that the political challenge is also our personal hope. Judged by the standards of unity and form our lives often seem a complete mess. We lack integrity. We know our own failings. Bits stick out. Wholeness eludes us. But … look at the colours! Look at what God has to work with! In God’s creative eye all that mess is pigment on the palette—potential, possibility, hope. And the bits that in our own eyes don’t fit are just the kind of challenge God likes, just the kind of challenge that can make a good work great.
Glory be to God, we are works of art, we are works in progress and God alone knows how beautifully we will work out.
October 22nd, 2004
‘May God enlighten the eyes of your mind so that you can see how infinitely great is the power that he has exercised for us.’
There are angels in both readings today. They are being used in each to underline a point, to make clear the gravity of a situation, to guarantee a truth: in the gospel to give weight to the declaration or disavowal of mortals. What we speak before each other the Son speaks before God’s angels. They stand as binding witnesses. What they see they do.
And in Paul, how great is that power exercised for us? It is the same power which raised Jesus from the dead, the same power that set him above angels—above sovereignties and authorities, above powers and dominations. That’s how big Jesus has become and therein lies the hope his call holds for us.
Sadly, angels don’t impress us much these days—however popular they’ve become. Jesus is more powerful than angels—big deal! The kinship Jesus claims for us is witnessed before God’s very angels—yawn!
What would impress us? What would weigh profoundly enough?
This is where I need to get cosmic. Think of the weight of a thousand stars. Think of the suns light, the ocean’s volume, the eagle’s flight. Think of how many beetles there are or grains of dust. Think of a black holes pull, of an atom’s hidden core, of tangled strand of flu virus. Think of a green leaf’s pumping heart. Think of a baby’s toes or the law that brings age upon us all. Think of all creation in its richness and strangeness, its power and vastness and wonder. Think of all that has been and is yet to be.
Then think: all that stands in witness as Jesus speaks your name in love.
October 15th, 2004
‘Clean’ and ‘unclean’ don’t really mean that much to us nowadays. But for Jesus and his contemporaries they gave life shape and structure. We still have some sense of it in the ickiness of dirt above and beyond hygiene and appearance but the Hebrew idea went beyond that. It’s like the world was full of high-voltage things you daren’t touch. At best you’d get a nasty shock at worst you’d die. And that’s what the big signs are for, all the black-and-yellow-stripy tape—to make it clear what will blow your socks off. That’s what the Law was for—to lay out in precise detail what would hurt and what would not. What’s kosher and what is not.
Touch a corpse, for example, and you become unclean. You can’t be with other people for risk of spreading the impurity. You can’t take part in any public religious ritual. You are an outsider until you follow the ritual to get clean again: wash, wait till night fall, whatever.
But what the proverbial problem was the unmarked tomb—the source of contamination you didn’t know about. You could walk on it and not know. Never know. Never know that despite appearances you too were now an unmarked tomb. That was the fear people had when AIDS appeared; it’s why we fear radiation—because we can’t see the damage done.
It is no wonder Jesus made enemies when he called the Pharisees unmarked tombs. He is telling the ones who were most religious about upholding the system of holiness, most careful about the rules; he’s telling them they are the worst thing their system can imagine. They themselves are what smash the system apart.
There’s a word there too for you and me. What do the Pharisees overlook? According to Jesus they overlook justice and the love of God.
It isn’t hard to hear God being drafted in to justify any sort of holy system, any hard-line agenda, you just need to open the paper. It happens in the Whitehouse. It happens in the Middle East. It happens in our Churches. But the system never matters more than simple justice and the love of God. Whenever it seems that God has to be protected from bad people you know that something has gone badly wrong.
But we do it ourselves too. It’s good to remember at the end of retreat that God doesn’t need our protection. God isn’t afraid. There are any number of things we can see inside us we worry could mess up our relationship with God. We all have our worries and our what ifs. We know our own hearts. But all that isn’t God. The one thing we can rely on is God and God’s love. God isn’t afraid of you and me. God has a way of sidestepping our systems, of skirting even our holiness and surprising us with new things, new life, new hope, new love. God is more devoted to our life than we could ever be.
October 13th, 2004
Paul is at his most pungent today: ‘are you stark raving mad’, he asks the Galatians. Why would you settle for the Law when you have the Spirit? What did the rulebook ever do for you but weigh like a burden on your back?
That question echoes through the centuries. It found a focus at the reformation. It continues to trouble our communities even today. Law and Spirit. Faith and Works. Rules and Freedom.
It seems we have to be continually choosing freedom, faith, and Spirit because the burden of Law is paradoxically attractive to us. Some part of us—stark raving mad it must be—keeps picking up the harness, putting back the yoke, shouldering the load.
For some strange reason we can never maintain our belief in a generous, abundant, blessing God for long. We start to wonder if that apparent generosity might not have to be earned, that abundant blessing only given if… if we are good enough, if we follow the rules, if we are nice people, if we pray enough, if our faith is strong enough … you name it—we all have our ifs.
We prefer the God who has to be pestered, to the God who loves to give.
So I say to you: ask, seek, knock; be confident, for our God loves to give, loves to be found, loves to open his heart to us.
October 7th, 2004
We dig the ditch, we build the walls, we try our hardest to keep them at bay as best we can—poverty, disease, terror, discomfort. We do not want these hideous things in our lives. No one wants to be sick. No one wants to be poor. No one wants to be afraid. We dig the ditch. We do not want to see. We do not want to know. We do not want to remember.
That’s the story today. Not about wealth in itself but about the gulf we fix between ourselves and those we call ‘unfortunate’, those touched by what we fear.
This is a parable, a story with a twist, and the twist is this—by the time we have dug the ditch finally deep enough to fix the gulf between ourselves and what we fear we find we are on the wrong side. We thought we were keeping ourselves safe and in fact we were walling ourselves up.
We’d all like to be called compassionate. But com-passion means suffering with, suffering alongside. And isn’t that what we protect ourselves and our families from—from being in the same boat as those who suffer? Who wouldn’t? Suffering is wrong. That’s our deepest instinct—that this world was made good and suffering is a mistake, a horror, an evil. Compassion makes no sense.
And yet we know it does. But only in the context of desire and attraction and of love. There are already those we would not hesitate to suffer for—those we love in sickness and in health, for better or worse. Love bridges the gulf as nothing else can. Love is our only way out.
How does this help? How do we stop digging the ditch? Only by loving indiscriminately the way Jesus did. The way God does. But maybe that is too hard for us, any of us. Maybe it is enough to know we are loved indiscriminately by our indiscriminate God. Maybe that is a taste of our own medicine—to know what it is like to be on the end of that kind of love—to find for ourselves that God doesn’t shun us the way we shun Lazarus; to find that God knows our name.
Maybe we might find we are already on the wrong side of that gulf, already among the poor, the flawed, the weak, the unworthy. Maybe when God loves us we’ll find whose side we are on. Maybe Lazarus is already our brother.
September 25th, 2004
One thing the book of proverbs has going for it is clarity. Collections of pithy sayings that always sound like reminders of things you have always known. You heard them at your mother’s knee: be good; be kind to others; don’t be resentful; be careful of the company you keep.
Schoolteachers spent their breath repeating these things. I dare say priests a-plenty have underlined them since. Religious superiors, too. By now we accuse ourselves with them in our sleep.
Jesus by contrast is often unclear to the point of confusion. What he says doesn’t collect well. I think I grasp what he means about the lamp and the lamp-stand. And I almost follow him when he warns about secrets coming to light even though the link is really only in the image of light. But what that has to do with taking care of what we hear I do not know. I’m not even sure I know how to take care what I hear. Let alone how it then follows that the one who has will be given more …
And yet … and yet, there’s something like poetry in the package. There’s a meaning in the whole that I can’t find in the parts. I can’t articulate it—but it’s there to contemplate, to touch.
As I listen I’m not sure I get to know what he means but I get the strange sense I’ve been listening to someone real. Someone I want to know better. Someone I would take care to hear.
September 20th, 2004
In my bible it gives a title to these two gospel stories: the lost sheep and the lost coin. I think they should be called the “The Crazy Woman” and “The Bad Shepherd”.
What kind of shepherd leaves the 99 at risk to go seek the one? 1% is an acceptable loss; 99% is a ridiculous risk. And what kind of shepherd forgets the flock entirely and takes the stray home for a party: a bad shepherd!
And why does the woman seek the coin so earnestly? Because it is a tenth of all she has, which is already very little. That might explain her thoroughness but she wastes a day’s wage to find a coin worth a day’s wage and then spends god knows how much to celebrate the finding…
What do we learn about God? God is crazy, reckless and immoderate. Oh and God likes a party. If you listened to parables like these you could only imagine heaven as one long riot of laughter and rejoicing.
The gospel begins with a po-faced complaint along those lines: ‘this man welcomes sinners and eats with them’. So Jesus tells them these stories but, where the complainers were talking about sin and propriety and the making of judgements, Jesus talks about finding what has been lost. All question of blame passes out of frame—you can’t after all un-lose yourself—and what comes to focus is the disproportionate value of the lost coin or the lost sheep and the intemperate joy of the finding.
We are that lost sheep; that lost coin. If we’ve got any nous we should be happy to be perpetually lost so that can be continually finding us. But we struggle to pretend we can find ourselves, that we can bestow some worth on our selves. Our value in God’s eyes has nothing to do with the worth we seek for ourselves. Our value lies in being lost, our joy in dropping the pretence of not needing to be found.
I don’t think Jesus was any different. He knew where he belonged. He welcomed the lost, feasted with them, rejoiced, partied. He knew his own value in his father’s heart. His life was one long being found and he revelled in it and he let others revel in it too.
September 11th, 2004
‘Who do you say that I am?’ Today’s scripture gives challenging hints. Look at Jesus. Jesus is someone who doesn’t fit into our religious categories. He didn’t then and I don’t think he does now. Every attempt to tame him harms him. Or harms us.
‘If you see the Buddha on the road kill him’, says the Buddhist proverb. The God we think we have nailed down is only ever an impostor.
That doesn’t mean that God isn’t real and present and sometimes obvious to us. It means God is too real to be pinned down, too real to be wrapped in rules. He breaks through our boxes. She crosses our church boundaries. God won’t be contained.
But God wants to be known; wants to be with us; wants to surprise us; wants to know us in return.
In the end that’s the only way we’ll ever know ourselves, either. As Paul is saying, our own lives often baffle us. We don’t turn out to be who we thought we were. Our lives don’t turn out the way we imagined. Sometimes the pain of that or the joy of that is too much to bear alone. But we are not alone. When we find ourselves outside the box—we find ourselves with Jesus. When we are edged out of bounds—we meet the God who has already taken the risky journey before us.
God is offering us not understanding but companionship.
September 4th, 2004
I don’t know what it’s like in your church but one of my bugbears as a catholic priest is the way people sit at the back. On a bad Sunday evening everyone is the length of a football pitch away and you feel like you are performing for empty pews and distant empty faces. I blame today’s gospel and others like it. … Take the worst seat, accept the least praise, think better of others than yourself. Downward mobility. Such ideas have been a charter for an odd piety of humility—a striving to be humbler and holier than thou. Is this what Jesus is after? That we don’t risk asserting ourselves or celebrating our gifts or making a stand?
There is something strange going on here. Jesus himself seems to have set us the example: defeated, humiliated and nailed to a cross—a death he freely accepted says the Eucharistic prayer. And there’s something gloriously upside down about that. An incomprehensible act of God that challenges the world’s perception of what is valuable and what is not, of what’s worth dying for, and what counts as victory. In a world of winners Jesus surely counts as the ultimate loser—even the victory of the resurrection which we celebrate at this table hasn’t made much difference to the degree of distress and violence and poverty in the wider world.
So is there a new Christian value-system with the poles reversed: to win is to lose, to lose is victory? Take the lowest seat because you will be raised up? Is this God’s preferential option for the poor? Is this the mighty cast from their thrones?
The catch is that, 2000 years on, we have substituted one scale of virtue with another, an old standard of achievement for a new one. We might like it better. It might still be as counter-cultural as ever. But it still functions to grade us, to draw lines that divide the sheep from the goats.
We still ask the question “who’s in and who’s out?” There’s a really daring, maybe even rude, Jesus asking that question tonight. Here he is, a dinner guest, commenting on the behaviour of his fellows at table and on his host, watching them draw the lines that divide, watching them battle to be in and not out. Watching and sticking the verbal boot in. Is he enjoying himself?
Did Jesus die to turn the scales upside down? No; he died to give the lie to the whole myth of exclusion. In God’s eyes there is no in or out; no scapegoats. We are the poor fools who do the grading. We are the idiots who would rather do away with Jesus than have him ruin our dinner party with his home truths. God has no favourites. Or rather God’s love for each of us makes the idea of favouritism silly. Jesus didn’t just turn the world upside-down, he did away with the illusion of insiders and outsiders altogether and he asks us to live in the light of that—to lobby and vote in the light of that. Think what a world that might be. Think what it would mean personally, to receive life as gift and not have to earn it. Think what it would mean politically, if all could receive life as gift and not have to struggle for it against those on the inside.
I think that is what Jesus is asking of us tonight, on retreat: to give up. To give up and stop self-judging, stop grading. To let God love us. Let ourselves know and feel how God loves us. To be without fear. Without effort. At peace. At ease.
August 25th, 2004
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