Catholic Contextual urban Theology, Mimetic Theory, Contemplative Prayer. And other random ramblings.

Monday 15 October 2012

Sermon at Parish Mass, St Margaret’s Leytonstone, Trinity 19 2012




Amos 5:6-7, 10-15
Hebrews 4:12-end
Mark 10:17-31

What do you give a man who has everything? Well, the shops are already filling with their stock for Christmas and the advertisers will soon be urging us to part with more of our cash for this or that present that we must give, or perhaps this or that thing that we want ourselves, and have to get someone else to give to us. And sadly some families will get seriously into debt to buy things they don’t need.
What do you give a man who has everything? The man who kneels before Jesus in today’s gospel seems to be a man who has everything. He is rich, he has many possessions. Besides that, he has kept the whole law from his youth onwards. He has everything he needs, he has ticked every box. He is the perfect “self-made man”.
And yet for some reason he feels impelled to run up to Jesus and kneel before him. And he asks, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”. Eternal life is the life that God lives, the life of the Holy Trinity which is complete openness to the other, overflowing in love and generosity, giving, not grasping, entirely free from acquisitiveness, rivalry and envy. Perhaps this man, in the presence of Jesus, has suddenly caught a glimpse of what the life of God is like, and has seen the contrast with his own life of self-made self-sufficiency. Despite his seeming to possess everything and to have achieved everything, he senses that somewhere there is a huge gap, a deep longing and a desperate need. And it is to Jesus that he feels he must turn.
And Jesus, we are told, looked at him and loved him, though there is a sharp irony in his response. “There is one thing you lack”, he says - to the man who has everything. And the one thing he lacks is - that he has everything! “Sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then, come, follow me.”
The one thing he lacked was to stop grasping onto what he imagined was his own, his self-constructed image built up through endless acquisition of possessions and spiritual achievement. The one thing he lacked was the ability to receive as a gift the life that God wanted to share with him. What do you give the man who has everything? It’s a trick question. You can’t give him anything, because he’s stopped being able to receive.
This encounter comes just after the scene in last week’s gospel where Jesus welcomed the little children and said “whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will not enter it”. And now, in contrast, we have today’s scene with the rich man who is unable to receive the kingdom, because he has too many possessions. 
The contrast is between being able to receive to the Kingdom of God as a gift, and hanging on to all the acquisitiveness and cravings and illusions that we accumulate and label as “mine”. We can only receive the Kingdom as children because little children simply receive. They have nothing to bargain with, and know perfectly well that life comes to them entirely gratuitously and not by their own making.
To put it more simply, it is a contrast of desires. On the one hand our own disordered desires, cravings, compulsions and the addictions which are always outpacing our ability to satisfy them, desires which close us in on ourselves. And on the other the desire of God, which is the giving of himself in complete openness, generosity and freedom. 
God’s desire is life which rises continually from the very source of life, pouring itself out without ever being exhausted. God’s desire is realised in Jesus, who is God’s own gift of himself, God’s own image of himself, God’s own life so completely and perfectly poured out, without diminishing its source, that he is God himself, the Son eternally born of the eternal Father. Jesus is God’s desire entirely realised in a human life, and a human life entirely realised in God. 
If we learn to desire as God desires, then we will leave behind the disordered, death-bound desires that close us in on ourselves. By no longer grasping onto the false life that we think we can create for ourselves, we will come in free and generous openness to the life of God, receiving that life as a gift and not grasping it as “mine”.  
So the call that Jesus gives to the rich man, in one way or another, is the call to us too: to give up everything, so that we might have treasure in heaven. It is the call to repentance, which is not so much saying we are sorry as the complete turning around of our lives, re-ordering our lives according to God. It is the call to the conversion of desire. To leave behind our old disordered desires which close us in on ourselves, and to be open instead to the entirely gratuitous life of God which is given to us in Jesus. 
The Archbishop of Canterbury spoke about this last week when he addressed the Synod of Bishops in Rome for the 50th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council. He reminded the bishops of the remarkable revival in those 50 years, and the urgent need, of contemplative prayer for all Christians. 
Contemplative prayer is nothing complicated. It is the prayer of the heart in stillness and silence. It is prayer which is simply focussed on loving attention to God who alone can draw us out from our closed-in selves. It is God alone who can expose and convert our corrupted desires. It is God alone who can draw us into his own desiring, the perfect outpouring of the self to the other that is shown to us in Jesus. It is God alone who will remake us in the image of Christ, which is God’s own image of himself.
When we are open to receiving God’s life as a gift freely poured out for us, then we will find that we are open to receiving everything else as a gift as well. Contemplative attention to God bears fruit in a contemplative habit of life. In being freed from our self-centred desires we are able to see, and rejoice in, the gratuitous generosity of the whole of creation. Even, as Jesus today tells us, in this life, in this age. 
The Trappist monk Basil Pennington had lived for many years with his order in voluntary poverty, hard work and contemplative prayer. Then in 1973 he had the opportunity to spend some time on Mount Athos, the Greek Orthodox monastic centre. 
In his notes Fr Basil speaks of how, for him, his life of renunciation opened him up to receiving everything as a gift. Everything he experienced, the natural beauty, the hospitality of the monks, came to him with a fresh intensity and richness because they were a free gift from the abundance of God, and not anything that he had to grasp or possess. He felt he was receiving the “hundredfold” reward that Jesus promises in today’s gospel.
We cannot free ourselves from our disordered desires by simply trying to drive them away. Because that is still to focus the attention on ourselves, on something we are trying to achieve. We can only be free from our desires by not looking at ourselves any more but at God, and allowing him to covert us, to remake us in his image.
That is true all the time, and not only as we approach the Christmas shopping season. But it is a timely reminder. Before you make your Christmas lists, may I suggest you make time for contemplative prayer, silent meditation, if it is not already part of your pattern of life. Ten or twenty minutes every day is not much, compared to the time we spend on the internet or watching television. There are meditation groups which people can join, but really there is nothing to it.
Sit still, be relaxed but attentive, let go of any noise and bustle that may be going on, and repeat a simple prayer such as the Jesus prayer to still the mind and descend into the heart. “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” And in the silence of the heart, be attentive to God revealing himself, forming in you his own image, who is Jesus, in whom alone we find our true life. 
What do you give the man who has everything? Nothing, because he is no longer able to receive. What do you give a child, who is simply open to receive what is given? The Kingdom of God.

Sunday 7 October 2012

Sermon at Parish Mass, St Mary’s Somers Town, Trinity 18 2012



Genesis 2:18-24
Hebrews 2:9-11
Mark 10:2-16

The parish where I live in east London has a fete every summer, with cakes, teas, tombola, and all the usual things going on in the churchyard and garden round the church. The sound system and music have been provided for years by a member of the congregation whose repertoire includes Agadoo, the Birdie Song, and all the Country and Western classics of the most pessimistic and despairing variety. 
One year, by co-incidence, a wedding blessing took place in the church at the same time as the fete. And at the end the happy couple emerged from church to be greeted by Dolly Parton blaring out of the loudspeakers with, “D-I-V-O-R-C-E”...
Sometimes I think that the Church, when speaking on matters of personal relationships and morality, gets into loudspeaker mode: booming out things that we think we need to say to people without bothering to listen or to get alongside. 
We, as followers of Jesus Christ, carry his good news for the world. But passages like today’s Gospel can seem difficult. Jesus says some quite clear and uncompromising things about divorce. Now that’s not an abstraction. Divorce is a real issue affecting many people both inside and outside the church. Real people, in churches up and down the country, our brothers and sisters, listening to the gospel with us today, and perhaps finding it rather painful. The gospel is not best preached from loudspeakers.
But the gospel is good news nonetheless. And today’s gospel reading is, at least, good news about marriage. But, more deeply, it is good news about being human, about God’s purpose in creating humanity. That is good news for everyone, married or not. But to understand how it is good news, we need to look more closely at the context in which Jesus gives this teaching, and what he is responding to. 
The place where this encounter happens, according to Mark’s Gospel, is “the region of Judea beyond the Jordan”. That is, it is the same place that Jesus went to be tempted by the Devil for forty days. And the same word is used of what the Pharisees do, they ask him a question “to test him”, just as the Devil did. 
Now this testing, the question that the Pharisees put to Jesus, is not really an attempt to get to the truth about something. The Pharisees think they already know the answer, they are just trying to catch Jesus out to find some basis of accusing him, as they do on a number of other occasions. 
They ask if it is against the law for a man to divorce his wife. The Pharisees think they know the answer to that because the Bible says that men can divorce their wives: Deuteronomy 24:1-4. But Jesus replies that this actually isn’t a commandment from God - although it’s in the Bible - it is just a concession to human weakness. 
Jesus has a radically different approach to the Bible than the Pharisees, and indeed than some Christians of our own day. You can’t simply come up with the answer to difficult questions by quoting isolated Bible texts. You need instead to understand the big picture, the big story that the Bible tells. That means looking at what is true “from the beginning”, as Jesus says, the truth of human beings in creation.
Now, “in the beginning”, in Hebrew thought, doesn’t just mean something that happened a long time ago. It means something that is foundationally true, an underlying principle.
So Jesus reminds the Pharisees that “from the beginning” God made human beings male and female, but not so that they could remain for ever separate. No, human beings are created to seek unity. According to the extract from Genesis that we heard this morning, Adam, who represents the human race, was initially alone. But then, to provide a companion, God performed that operation with the rib, and drew out from Adam a new, separate identity. Adam, humanity, was divided into two individuals, male and female. Divided not to remain alone, but to seek unity. To seek to return into one body which is no longer alone but now a new reality, a true communion of distinct persons. 
Here we are at the heart of what Jesus is teaching. The purpose of marriage is the purpose of being human. It is to seek unity, a return into one body, one new human nature, a true communion in which our individuality is not lost but fulfilled. 
Jesus presents here a high and beautiful ideal of marriage, of unity founded on mutual love. This contrasts with the idea current at the time, when marriage was seen more as a convenient arrangement to do with property. Marriages were arranged by negotiation between families - the men of the families - and the wife was seen as her husband’s property. So divorce was allowed - by men - in much the same way that you might decide to sell your house or other property and move to a new one.
Deeper than this contrast of ideas about marriage, we have a contrast of desire. The Pharisees’ approach to Jesus is motivated by a desire for rivalry, for accusation, for defining themselves over against Jesus. It is a desire for division. Us against him. But Jesus presents a model of desire in marriage which is a desire for unity. And that desire for unity, says Jesus, is what is true “from the beginning”, in God’s purpose in creation. Marriage is about the conversion of desire, from division to unity, through mutual self-giving and belonging. An end which can only really be served by faithfulness and life long commitment.
Now although Jesus holds up marriage as his example, the union of different persons in one body is an idea that runs through the whole of the New Testament, and it is called the Church. 
The Church is a body - the Body of Christ. Those who are baptized into Christ, the New Adam, are united in him in his renewed humanity. In the Church all humanity is being remade by grace in one Body as a communion of distinct persons, the image of God the Holy Trinity. In the Church our desire is being converted from disorder and division into unity. The New Testament teaching about the Church is so close to Jesus’ teaching about marriage that St Paul in Ephesians calls the union of husband and wife “the mystery of Christ and the Church”.
And this perhaps is why marriage is called a sacrament, although it is a way of life common to all religions and none, because for Christians it is a sign pointing to the new reality of the Church which we enter by grace.
Of course, not everyone is married, and marriage isn’t the only way of life for Christians, or the only way of seeking unity in Christ. We enter the Church by baptism, not by marriage. For those who are single - though that is such an inadequate word - friendships, extended families and neighbours are true and valid expressions of human community. Then there is the celibate life lived in community, that of monks and nuns, which is recognised and blessed by the Church because it too is a sign of unity in the Body of Christ, enacted through lives of simplicity and prayer.
Today the church, like Martha, seems to be anxious about many things: the rise in cohabitation, civil partnerships, and what is essential to our understanding of marriage and sexuality. Nevertheless, beyond these things, the foundational reality remains the one new humanity that God has established in Christ, the end that we must keep in view. Marriage stands as a sign of that reality, of the faithfulness and commitment of Christ to his Church. But the Church is for all people, in all kinds of relationships, and the call to all of us is to seek unity in Christ through faithful self giving, mutual belonging, and the conversion of desire from division to unity.
Whatever people’s circumstances and personal relationships, for Christians all boundaries of “singleness” and isolation, all categories of difference, are overcome in the Church, which is the community of the Eucharist, the sacrament of unity in the Body of Christ.
In the Eucharist we receive by grace our belonging together and our unity in Christ.  That is our purpose in creation, and what God has made possible for us in Christ. Our life as a church community should reflect that in the way we welcome all people, of all states of life. We are one in Christ, one body, partakers of one bread, the sacrament and sign of the unity of all things in Christ, which is our good news.

Sermon at Parish Mass Trinity 17 2012




Numbers 11:25-29
James 5:1-6
Mark 9:38-48

I wonder how many people here like solving sudoku puzzles. I don’t do them very often, but on a long journey they are a useful way of passing the time whilst keeping the brain cells stimulated.
If you’re as good at sudoku as me, you’ll be familiar with that sinking feeling, usually when you’ve filled in most of the grid, that it just isn’t going to work out. Somewhere back along the line you’ve put one wrong number in a cell, and that makes everything else wrong, too. There’s nothing for it but to undo the whole thing, go back to the beginning and start again.
In today’s gospel reading the disciples are trying to solve the puzzle of Jesus. Who is he? What is he about? They think they’ve got the answer, but actually somewhere back along the line they’ve got something basically wrong, and that makes the whole of their understanding of Jesus wrong. There is nothing for it but to go back and undo the first mistake, and start again.
They think they’ve got the answer, because about a chapter back in Mark - two Sundays ago in our readings - Jesus had asked them who they thought he was, and Peter had said, “you are the Messiah”. And he was right, but he didn’t understand what that meant. He thought the Messiah was about power and control and imposing God’s kingdom by force. 
But Jesus tried to teach him that instead the Messiah must be rejected and suffer, and be put to death, and rise again. None of which Peter understood. And when he tried to talk sense into Jesus he earned the stinging rebuke, “get behind me, Satan!”. Peter, he said, had to stop thinking in a human way and start thinking in God’s way. 
But as they carried on their journey up to Jerusalem, it didn’t get any better. They saw the glory of Jesus revealed on the Mount of Transfiguration, but then Jesus had told them a second time that he was going to be betrayed, and killed, and would rise again. And they had no idea what he was talking about. Blank. Not a clue. 
So then the disciples started arguing which of them was the greatest. They were still inside that mindset of power and control and imposition. So Jesus took a little child, someone without any power or control, no position in society, unable to impose anything. And Jesus said, if you welcome this little child, you welcome me. This is what I’m about. This is the imagination you need to get inside to understand the Messiah. 
But, as we heard today, still they don’t get it. “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.” They’re still thinking in terms of power and control, and therefore rivalry and fear. They think that when Jesus imposes his Kingdom, they are going to be his inner circle, his right hand men. So they can’t have anyone else threatening that position. 
But Jesus says, simply, don’t stop them. “Whoever is not against us is for us.” There simply is no need, no place, for rivalry and fear in God’s kingdom. Because God’s kingdom is about love being made known in a world which is deeply resistant to love. It is therefore about love being made known in the excluded, the powerless, in the victim of human rivalry and fear and control. It is about love made known in a Man on a cross. 
Now to the disciples, and to anyone who is still thinking the way the world thinks, that is a contradiction and a scandal. And scandal is the big theme that runs through today’s Gospel reading, and indeed through most of the New Testament.
Scandal, skandalon in Greek, crops up all the time, though we aren’t always aware of it because it’s translated in a number of ways: scandal, stumbling-block, offence, obstacle, and sometimes as “sin”. The image is of a block of stone in your path that you fall over or can’t get round, but at the same time that you can’t leave alone. It worries away at you. And the big scandal of the New Testament is the crucified Messiah, a seeming contradiction which is an obstacle to faith for those who can’t understand it. St Paul says in 1 Corinthians “We proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.”
Jesus does not want the disciples to avoid the approaching scandal. The scandal that the Messiah, the saviour of Israel, is going to end up on a Roman cross. But they still want to think that there isn’t a scandal. So he confronts them directly with what seems to be very scandalous teaching: 
If any of you put a stumbling-block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea. If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off... And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off... And if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out...
This saying of Jesus is really quite shocking. And it is meant to be. But it is not really about hands and feet and eyes so much as about the scandal itself, the stumbling block. And there’s irony in it, because if your foot or your eye caused you to stumble, you wouldn’t exactly cure the problem by cutting it off or tearing it out.  
Jesus is trying to focus the eyes of the disciples on the scandal, the stumbling block, that they are trying to avoid. They are still thinking of the Messiah in earthly terms, of power and control and fear, and that is an obstacle for them. They need to unlearn that, to go back to the beginning of the puzzle and start again, and learn that God’s kingdom is quite other from what they had thought. They need to learn that God’s kingdom will be brought in by a Messiah who will be rejected, and killed, and will rise from the dead.
In the end, they still don’t get it, and they still won’t understand, right up to Good Friday itself, when the betrayal and crucifixion of Jesus will finally completely shatter their whole conception of what God and his Kingdom are about. And it was only once everything they thought they believed had been taken away from them, that they could start from the beginning again. 
And they began again when the risen Christ came to them, forgiveness and love triumphant beyond the worst that the world could do. They began again, this time with the new imagination of God transforming their minds, their lives, and, through them, beginning the transformation of the world.
We too are called to that path of radical transformation, of beginning again in God’s Kingdom. Like the disciples, we too need to be alert for the scandal we are trying to avoid. Scandal can mean many things: stumbling-block, obstacle, offence, sin. What is there in our own lives which is an obstacle to our coming to Jesus, to us giving ourselves totally to him? Where are we still following the way the world thinks, the way of power, control and fear? Where is it that we still need to be liberated by the fearless, deathless love of God?
This affects not only ourselves but others too. Sin has an effect in the community. “Take care that you do not cause one of these little ones to stumble.” What we do can become an obstacle preventing others from coming to Jesus. Greed keeps others poor, deprives them of the necessities of life. Anger leads to violence, both physical and emotional. Lust erodes faithfulness in families and relationships. 
Jesus calls us to turn to him, whatever our stumbling blocks, our scandals and sins. Jesus calls us to repent and be forgiven. And in that forgiveness, that embrace of God’s love, to find our minds transformed as we leave behind the way the world thinks, trapped in power and control and fear, and are set free into the unlimited, deathless, utterly vivacious love of God.