Readings: Ephesians 2:12-22; Luke 12:35-38
Paul is falling over himself with metaphors today, mixing and matching like crazy, but all to one end: the urgent communication of a distance dwindled to nothing.
In Christ, foreign has become familiar. In Christ, two become one. In Christ, distance becomes closeness; hostility, harmony; war, peace.
2 comments October 24th, 2006
Readings: Isaiah 53:10-11; Hebrews 4:14-16; Mark 10:35-45
I was watching a rerun of the West Wing the other evening, right back from the first series, and there was President Bartlett delivering an impassioned pep-talk to his daughter Zoë. She was about to leave for College and the passion flowed as the president grappled for words, trying to find how to say what he felt he needed to say. Here was his youngest about to step beyond the limits of his protection into an unsafe world and he wanted to say all that was in his heart of care and concern, of advice and admonition, of what to do and what not to do, who to know and who not to know—above all of who to be. All the stuff that needs to be said, yet cannot be said, but somehow is heard.
I remember being on the receiving end of just such a heart-to-heart—embarrassing and baffling and touching. To hear my father’s pride in me and his doubt and to see a strange vulnerability come over him as I realised the depth of my power to hurt him and the power of my desire not to. Here he was trying to give me the low-down, the pith of what he wanted for me, the essence of what he held most dear, the lessons he had learned, his fragile legacy of wisdom… for me, his son, to stand me in good stead, to make me a man.
Add comment October 22nd, 2006
Readings: Job 38:1, 12-21, 40:3-5; Luke 10:13-16
We get a rare glimpse of a family likeness today: Father and Son both letting off steam, both sounding provoked beyond endurance, both ticked off. And both complaining that we continue to be wilfully blind to the plain and glorious truth under our noses.
I love Job, the man, the book. He won’t let up his demand for explanation. And it won’t give up any answer to Job’s predicament. What we do get—which finally silences Job—is this tirade from the tempest’s heart. Who are you? Can you not see? Do you not know? Will you not wonder?
3 comments October 6th, 2006
Readings: 1 Cor 7:25-31; Lk 6:20-26
Setting his misogyny aside, I do love Paul’s urgency and absolute conviction that everything has changed. Everything is different after the death and resurrection of Jesus, with a difference that has diverted human—and even cosmic history—in a new direction. And in that new direction all the old rules cease to apply, all our customs and cultures are flimsy and fading. Kinship and consumerism, marriage and mirth—every bond and tie is loosened by the call of the coming kingdom.
I love that urgency—but of course I can’t feel it—even the greatest head of steam fizzles away over 2000 years. The world as we know it hasn’t passed away and we’ve all gone back to owning and operating with a certain relief.
1 comment September 13th, 2006
Readings: Isaiah 35:4-7; James 2:1-5; Mark 7:31-37
It seems likely that that word ephphatha, be opened, was the first thing that man ever heard. That he came to hearing with that as his first word. Wouldn’t it echo in his opened ears for the rest of his life? Wouldn’t that be the word he cherished and held dear and whispered to himself in the middle of the night?
It used to be part of the roman rite of baptism, blowing on the child’s ears and eyes and lips and speaking the word ephphatha. It is the first word of every Christian life: ephphatha, be opened.
2 comments September 10th, 2006
Readings: 1 Cor 3:1-9; Luke 4:38-44
What would it take for us to be weaned? For us to be beyond the milk of spirituality—past the rusks and the stewed apple even—and eating the spiritual food of adults?
Paul is pretty clear that the first thing to go would have to be the jealousy and wrangling and all those spiritual slogans that set us against each other in the church and the churches and make us such a laughing stock in the eyes of the real world. I can’t remember the context but it was Henry Kissinger who said of some situation of fevered hostility and bitter rivalry that it was all because the stakes were so low. And isn’t that how we must look from the outside? Which way should the altar face? What kind of music is allowed in church? What can a minister safely do in the bedroom—and with whom? Do you praise this Pope or the previous or the one before that?
Add comment September 6th, 2006
Readings: Jeremiah 1:17-19; Mark 6:17-29
You could hardly have two readings more calculated to contradict each other than these. The first is bracing with promise: you will be a pillar of iron, a wall of bronze; they will not overcome you. And it’s quite a ‘they’ arrayed against the prophet: kings, princes, priests, and people. And it’s a promise that God does not keep. In the end Jeremiah is doomed and defeated: the Lord neither delivers him nor the people.
John the Baptizer fares no better: his message arrays the powers of his day against him and … and his God does not deliver him either. On its own that is bad enough, but we have that promise made to Jeremiah in our ears, awakening the engrained conviction that things really should go better for those who speak God’s word and do God’s work?
Add comment August 29th, 2006
When I was at university some friends of mine signed up for VSO, Voluntary Service Overseas, to head off for Papua New Guinea. With the ghoulish interest of a 21 year old I thought to myself ‘mmm, cannibals! head-hunters!’ and hit the library, intent on scaring the life out of my buddies. I discovered that though dying out, the practice still existed but that it wasn’t a straightforwardly bloodthirsty activity but a deeply religious one. It was about bringing the tribe together around a sacred table where you literally made a meal of outsiders. You ate them—daintily I’m sure—to ensure that you all knew who you were and who you were not. It was a meal that formed and reformed you as a people. A meal to make your gods dwell among you, within you. A rite of communion and community.
Now doesn’t that sound just like what Jesus is talking about here? ‘Eat my flesh’, ‘drink my blood’. Notice there’s no talk of bread and wine here: this is stronger meat for stronger stomachs. Flesh that is real food, real meat; blood that is real drink, thick as soup.
5 comments August 20th, 2006
Bread. Bread for the journey, bread to keep you going in the desert when you are done with doing…
We join Elijah in mid story, sulking under a tree. ‘I’ve had enough. I want to die.’ But in truth he’s been eating the bread of death for a long time. He’s been fighting a guerrilla war for the honour of his God, culminating in a showdown with the massed priests of Ba’al. How do you prove your God is better than theirs? You turn to the tools of death. You settle the score with sacrifice, with a wager. 450 priests chanting and praying and gashing themselves for fire to descend and burn up their offering of a bull. Elijah taunting all the time… Nothing! Then our hero, building his altar, butchering his bull, getting his enemies to douse the lot with water, and then again, and once again, building it all up to a showman’s climax of fire licking from the sky consuming all before it. And the people loving it, leaping up with one voice: ‘Yeah! Yahweh for us!’
But the sacrifice doesn’t satisfy Elijah. Not enough. … It has only fed the fires that are burning him up. He seizes on the blood lust of the people and butchers all the priests of Ba’al.
Which sends him on the run… We catch him in the desert, under a thorn tree, his elation drained away, wanting to die. ‘Enough’, he says, though he is famished and still hungry for death. The bread of death hasn’t satisfied him.
Add comment August 13th, 2006
Readings: Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14; 2 Peter 1:16-19; Mark 9:2-10
We’ve reached here the highpoint of Jesus ministry. Literally. In recent weeks he’s raised the dead, he’s made a meal for a multitude out of scraps and gleanings, he’s walked on water … and everywhere the crowds are following him in droves. These are his glory days. And here on this mountain top his glory is unwrapped for a moment in light and shadow for us to glimpse what he is and what he will become. Metamorphosis, the Greek calls it. He speaks here as equal—and more—with Moses and Elijah. And the voice that at his baptism had whispered in his ear, ‘Beloved’, now roars it out from the cloud of glory, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved. Listen to him’.
But this is the high point of his ministry and from here on there’s no way but down. And downhill it will go, into opposition and misunderstanding and failure and fear and pain and death. So much for glory.
5 comments August 6th, 2006
| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| « Oct | ||||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |||
| 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 |
| 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 |
| 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 |
| 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | |