Sunday 14 December 2014

Rejoice, pray, give thanks.

Isaiah 61, Psalm 126, 1st Thessalonians 5, John 1


Isaiah 61 begins with a tremendous declaration of hope, and even gives a reason for it: ‘I the LORD love justice, I hate robbery and wrongdoing’. And yet, in God’s world this week, we can read about continuing racial prejudice in the USA, a Palestinian government minister dying in the attempt to prevent more of his people’s land being stolen by the occupying forces, pharmaceutical companies attempting to block the manufacture of affordable medicines in India, and torturers getting more protection than those who expose or suffer from their activities.

Psalm 126 celebrates the restoration of Zion, which calls for some subtle interpretation, but goes on to say that those who sow in tears might reap with shouts of joy. Let’s hope so. The next thing we hear is that God’s people should ‘rejoice always, pray without ceasing, and give thanks in all circumstances’.

All circumstances? Well, St. Paul knew a thing or two about all circumstances, having explored a number of them for himself, and became adept at rejoicing in them. He might, like John the Baptist, have thought of himself as a voice crying out in the wilderness—a lonely voice in an empty desert—except that, for him, the emptiness of the world had been filled with the presence of God (an echo of the act of creation), and the emptiness within had been filled with the love of Christ. So he really could rejoice, pray and give thanks.

Wednesday 12 November 2014

Ultimate Concern



Judges 4, 1st Thessalonians 5, Matthew 25

‘Be ready!’ says today’s gospel. According to today’s first reading, disaster would ensue for Israel if there was any move away from an exclusive faith in their God. Many people in today’s Israel would agree, but there might be less agreement about the meaning of that exclusive faith.

God (according to Paul Tillich) can be defined in two ways: as the ground of our being, and the as object of our ultimate concern. When our ultimate concern really is the ground of our being, we are in a true relationship with God. When our ultimate concern is directed away from the ground of our being, we are tending towards idolatry.

Remembrance is always partly and act of repentance, and the root of our need for repentance on this occasion, as on many others, is the fact that nations can easily become ultimately concerned with nothing greater than themselves, with either laughable or destructive results.

St Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians, written in a very different situation from that which faced Joshua, encourages the faithful with an assurance that their lives are ultimately safe in God’s hands. Could it be a way of saying that, whether or not we are ultimately concerned with the ground of our being, God is ultimately concerned with us? The call of today’s gospel is to readiness for the kingdom that God is offering.


Sunday 19 October 2014

The God who Drops In to the World



When Moses (in Exodus 33) asks to be shown God’s ways, and God’s glory, the most he is allowed to see is God’s departing back. Not until the Christian identification of Jesus as God-with-us is there any hint that we might be able to see God’s face, but this raises a question: is the glory of God to be identified with the physical features of Jesus?

Presumably not. Among other things, we are reminded elsewhere in scripture that ‘God is spirit’, so it is more appropriate to identify the divine with Jesus’ nature as a person than with his physical appearance. This is comforting, as we know quite a lot about what Jesus said and did, but almost nothing about what he looked like.

In Matthew 22.15-22, we read about his response to the question of whether taxes should be paid to the Roman authorities. To many conscientious people this seemed like an unacceptable compromise with the occupying forces of a foreign power. Some preferred to opt out altogether, and live in self-sufficient communities unpolluted by contact with the ungodly.

Today’s equivalent question might be whether we should opt out of the morally questionable worlds of finance and politics altogether until they have cleaned up their acts considerably, and there are communities today that attempt greater or lesser degrees of separation from the rest of the world.

This does not seem to have been the way of Jesus, but his answer to the tax question was ingenious, demonstrating that even those who went out of their way to avoid pollution from the ways of the world carried part of that world in their pockets. Whose, after all, was the coin that bore Caesar’s image?

The nature of God is to be found in the person of Jesus, and the way of God is to be found in his risky participation in the world—in the conviction that we are not polluted by contact with the ungodly, but that the ungodly will be enriched by whatever touch of God’s presence we can bring to it.





Monday 13 October 2014

The Visible Presence of God



Do we need visible symbols of God? We certainly need to be reminded that God is with us, but the episode of the golden calf reminds us of a number of possible dangers. Actually the story reminds us of several of the worse forms of religious behaviour, and of the vital importance of realising that the writers of the Bible were not all admirable people with a perfect insight into the nature of God.

The narrative in Exodus chapter 32 has a complex history, but it comes to us as an account of how a nomadic community responded when they grew weary of waiting to hear what God was saying. The image itself seems to have a few well-chosen characteristics: it is an object of value, it represents a source of nourishment, and the people themselves have contributed to it. The problem, of course is that it contravened the recently given commandments.

However, the story goes from bad to worse when Moses comes back down the mountain, sees what has been going on in his absence, and acts swiftly to ‘purify the camp’. The least bad part of it is the psychological violence involved in grinding the image to dust, scattering it on the water, and forcing the people to drink it.

Skip from there to what we still do, and there is one small similarity: we ingest the symbols of our God. It’s the only similarity between the two events, though. The golden calf was only ever meant to represent God, whereas on most occasions bread and wine simply represent bread and wine. In the context Jesus gave it, however, it represents a life given in love for people who suffer ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’.

Another virtue of bread and wine as symbols of God is the fact that they are temporary and perishable. If we ever gaze at them in wonder, we are not gazing at their beauty and grandeur, but at the paradoxical insistence that everything we believe about God can be identified with something so ordinary. God is here not to direct our lives from on high, but to be used up in our lives. Used up completely, in fact, except that the more God is given and shared in the world, the more there is to give and share, and the more our common humanity is able to live in God’s presence.

The Great Feast



Matthew 22.1-14 is a mess. It looks like an adaptation of Luke 14.15ff, with a bit of eschatological condemnation tacked on to the end for good measure. The original meaning seems to have been that no-one is excluded from God’s kingdom except by having chosen to go elsewhere, but Matthew adds the worrying spectacle of a latecomer being punished for ignoring the dress code. If nothing else, it’s a useful reminder that the Bible should not always be taken literally. If there’s a meaning in this for us, we need to find it by working on the metaphor.


Friday 10 October 2014

The Essence of Christianity

Dangerous ground! if anybody can disagree about anything, they can disagree about the essence of their faith. Christians are no exception. Are some Christians just plain wrong about the essence of their faith? Does the essence of Christianity vary from place to place, or from age to age? We often speak the language of eternal truth, but find that our descriptions of that truth seem somewhat transient. On the basis of recent conversations among the faithful, however, I feel that I can offer (in no particular order) some stable criteria for genuine Christianity.

* It's about community: Christ is with us in our solitude, but is identifiable in our love for each other.

* It's about acceptance: Where people are rejected by any community, even those with Christian labels, Christ is with them rather than those who have cast them out.

* It's about liberation: Christ is the truth that sets us free. If we are still longing for our freedom, then we're still longing for Christ.

* It's a journey: Christ is our companion on the way, not the distant objective (that's the kingdom of God).

* It's about the outrageous presence of God in the middle of all that seems most distant from God, who does not keep a sanctified distance from the world, but risks getting right into it.

* It's about opening our eyes to where God is, and what God is doing, and joining in. It's about experiencing God's life and sharing it.

Tuesday 30 September 2014

Refreshment Rocks


Water from the rock! A life-saving intervention by God in history, or a sign that there can be miraculous refreshment even in the driest stretches of life's journey? It could be both of course, but the point is that we can be sceptical about miracles in ancient history without losing the meaning of the story.

 

What does need to be credible, though, is the hope that God will indeed provide refreshment. Perhaps even more important is the need to go beyond scripture and assert that God was not merely interested in giving life-saving refreshment to those people at that time, but to all who cry out in need.

 

I nearly wrote 'cry out to him', but held back for two reasons. The first was that I baulked at gender-specific pronouns, and will try all sorts of grammatical tricks to avoid them. The second was that so much desperate need is felt by people who have no real idea that there is a God to call on.

 

In 1st Corinthians 10, St. Paul writes that the rock was Christ. The nomads in the desert had no idea of that, of course, which means that large numbers of people in today's world really do have something in common with them. Throughout history, perhaps even within the Church, Christ has often been present as or in the unrecognised stranger.

 

Unrecognised partly because he empties himself of his glory in order to serve us. Within the church, we are used to the thought that his life is poured into bread and wine for us. Elsewhere, he is recognisable in his works.

Sunday 14 September 2014

Our Dedication

One hundred and eighteen years ago this week, All Souls' was dedicated as a house of prayer. Today, we thank God for all our blessings and ask that those who seek God here may find God. That is the starting point of our life as a church. For part of the continuation, it is worth reading Christian Aid's September Reflection.
'Everywhere we look in the world at the present time, we seem to see conflict - local, national and international. From the crisis in Gaza to the horror sweeping across northern Iraq and the tragedy that is Syria, the Middle East is engulfed in conflict and the humanitarian situation is grim, with the poorest and most vulnerable suffering the most as always. 
'In these difficult days, the Epistle readings for September are a salutary reminder of the ways in which Paul urges the young churches to live together and address their differences. 
'He reminds us that 'Love does no wrong to a neighbour; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law' (Romans 13:10). And he offers challenging words on judgement and reconciliation, even in times of trouble. For in war, justice is the first casualty - and without justice, there can be no true peace...'
For the remainder of this reflection, please visit: 
http://www.christianaid.org.uk/resources/churches/reflections/reflections.aspx 

Wednesday 10 September 2014

Fulfilling the Law


Romans 13.8-14, Matthew 18.15-20

St. Paul, like Rabbi Gamaliel, simplifies the Law by subsuming what are sometimes known as the ‘ethical commandments’ under a general instruction to love one another, and adding that love is the fulfilling of the law. It is attractive partly because of its simplicity, partly because it is a positive instruction rather than a series of bad deeds to avoid, and partly because love is such an obviously desirable virtue. It reaches the parts of life that other commandments can’t reach.

Today’s gospel reading comes in from a different angle. Talking about how to deal with sin in the community—specifically, someone who sins against you. There’s a graded list of procedures for reconciliation, starting with a personal conversation and culminating in an appeal to the whole church. If it all fails, the last resort is to treat the offending party like ‘a gentile or a tax-collector’.

The last resort is the most puzzling. It speaks volumes about the setting in which the first gospel was assembled and taken as authoritative, and about the background of early Christianity. Essentially, gentiles and tax-collectors are those who don’t belong, agents of a foreign power, or both.

There have always been parts of the church which have understood this as St. Matthew might have meant it: in the end, there are some people who must be excluded, perhaps even ostracized. It’s at this point that I remind myself how Jesus treated gentiles and tax collectors, and that we are called to be Christ-like. About 50% of the population of Scotland will need that inspiration a few weeks from now.

Tuesday 2 September 2014

Knowing God

Exodus 3.1-15, Psalm 105, Romans 12.9-21, Matthew 16.21-28


How does God become known to us? The story of Moses and the burning bush suggests that first hand experience would be ideal, along with a family recommendation. God speaks directly to Moses from the bush, and introduces himself  as the God of Moses’ ancestors. When Moses mentions the problem of how to identify God to a third party, he is given the cryptic ‘I am that I am’.
Classical Hebrew has only two tenses: the perfect, indicating completed action, and the imperfect. Consequently, God’s name has sometimes been translated as ‘I will be what (or who) I will be’ - an indication, perhaps, of a God who can’t be pinned down and labelled.
The same risky dynamism is expressed in Jesus’ famously worrying saying about losing ones lives in the effort to save it. Life, like God, cannot be pinned down and labelled: it can only be lived, and living always carries some degree of risk. There is, perhaps, a fear that using one’s life might mean ‘using it up’, but this is the point of the other half of the saying: it’s only in using our lives that we actually have life.
The greatest risks we might face, and which are faced by Christians and others, involve direct threats to life. In the face of the ultimate danger, St. Paul urges the Christians in Rome not to repay evil for evil or to be overcome by evil, but to overcome evil with good. Only by doing so is the life of God made known.

Monday 25 August 2014

Uncertain Security



Exodus 1, Psalm 124, Romans 12, Matthew 16

In the first chapter of Exodus, we hear of an oppressed people and one family’s risky, but ultimately successful way of coping with their situation. It isn’t planned as any more than the saving of one life, but it is the back-story to the liberation of an entire nation.

We could spend hours discussing the extent to which this foundation myth of Israel is genuinely historical, but the vital point is the perception of an entire people that their existence was hanging by a thread.

The gospel reading also talks about foundations, describing Peter as a rock. We know the rest of the story well enough to be aware that he could be a rather rocky rock, but there it is: our foundations are laid by Christ on a fallible human being.

The message seems to be that our security as the people of God will always be liberally mixed with insecurity: everything could fall apart, and nothing at all is guaranteed except by the grace of God. The great thing about Jesus’ words to Peter is that he recognised this and still said it. The great thing about Peter’s response is that he knew it, but never gave up.

Sunday 17 August 2014

On Not Being Exclusive

Genesis 45, Psalm 133, Romans 11, Matthew 15.



How good it is when brothers and sisters live together in unity! Today's Psalm celebrates the best of human society, but leaves out the essential question about who is accepted as family. One of the unfortunate characteristics of religious and ethnic groups is that, the stronger the sense of family, the greater sense there is that others do not belong.

In today's reading from the letter to the Romans, St. Paul continues agonising about the proper places of Jew and Gentile in God's eternal plan. A modern Christian reader might well wonder why he felt that it was such a complicated question, but our sense of ease about belonging in an ethnically diverse church is partly his gift to us. Perhaps other traditions need to identify their St. Pauls (plenty to discuss there).

Two other people are agonising about the same question in today's gospel. One of them is a gentile woman asking for Jesus' help, unable to see any sense in being categorised and treated as an outsider. The other is Jesus himself. The gospel writer clearly wants his readers to get the point that nobody is outside God's community. Perhaps this was the occasion upon which it became clear to Jesus.

Joseph's reconciliation with his brothers is a marvellous story of recognition and acceptance. What we don't know, of course, is the extent to which the Israelites were ever accepted in Egypt. My guess is that they were tolerated until employment and resources became scarce, then treated as undesirable aliens. How very contemporary.