.........Being believed in

Most of us know how being believed in makes us feel real.

And according to Marcus Borg, a theologian, our English word believe comes from the middle English word spelled beleve or belieue. It means "to belove." Apparently if you read Shakespeare and Chaucer, and keep on replacing the word “believe” with the word “love”, it almost always works interchangeably.

Until the 17th century, when you beloved, you believed. It was to: "hold dear;" "prize," "love;" "give one's loyalty to;" "give one's self to;" "commit one's self." Belief is a relational term. No wonder then that being believed in can make us feel real.

But following the Enlightenment, the meaning of the word believe shifted and become more about giving your intellectual assent to a proposition. This sort of belief was tested and questionable. No longer was the object of relationship a person; now it was a hypothesis.

I heard someone recently questioning the virgin birth by saying: “Do you believe in the virgin birth?” Now to be sure, I do like questions. But working with the definition of “belief” above, which, remember, is “to belove”, it is one’s relationship with the Virgin Mary which matters, not one’s intellectual assent to a proposition about conception without a sperm cell. (Cloning techniques have already proven it possible anyway, but that’s beside the point!)

It’s a bit like the time I saw comedian Jimmy Carr joking on television. He said that when he was young he used to have an imaginary friend… but then when he grew up, he simply stopped going to Church. It raised a laugh.

But does imaginary always mean unreal?

Religious images are the images of a real presence. This is what makes the image of Jesus different from that of a vivid Dickensian character, or from Harry Potter. As “images” in the human mind, we think of Jesus, a Dickens character and Harry Potter as somehow “imaginary”. But Jesus is the odd one out, because his image is of a living although invisible Being.

In the sense that God is Spirit (Jn 4:24), God is not a physical visible “thing”, so God is “no-thing”. But God is still present, and though no one has seen ever seen God (1 Jn 4:12), Jesus has shown people what God would look like if anyone ever had done. A bit like lightning, which shows people electricity, or like a kite which shows people air, or like someone’s son who is “chip off the old block”, even though they have never seen his Father. Jesus is an image of the invisible. (Col 1:15)

Similarly, when we think about the Virgin Mary, we can go back to the middle English word spelled beleve or belieue, and see how “believing” in her is “holding someone dear”. We are “beloved” by the invisible Being who makes us real in the midst of life and death. As Theresa of Avila said: “All things are passing, God alone is sufficient.” That which is not in a flux, is God, and whoever remains beloved (believed in), remains real.

Fourth century Christian monk Evagrius emphasized the virtue of simplicity when he said that: “one who prays is a theologian”. And in Anglicanism, it is said that the tool used to work out belief is like a ‘three-legged stool’ made of Scripture, Tradition, and Reason. As a stool sits best on the floor, I suggest that the floor is Experience.

So may you experience God’s gift as a presence who beloves (believes) in you.

............ ONE NATION UNDER CCTV .............

Picture the scene if you will.
A conversation between Jesus, James and John.

"What do you want me to do for you?" Jesus asked.
James and John replied: "Let one of us sit at your right and the other at your left in your glory.”

“You don't know what you are asking," he replied.

As they heard this story from Mark’s gospel, the original readers could well have recalled the actual crucifixion of Jesus. Because if Mark’s gospel was written between 65–70 AD, its readers may have witnessed the very scene 30 years earlier, and if not, they would have been told about the two robbers, one on Jesus’ right, one on his left. And so, by having James and John ask Jesus for these very same places in his glory, the author offers an ironic teaching for any disciples of Christ who go seeking glory.... suffering is likely to be involved.

Remember how Roman glory seeking meant conquest through force and guile, and crucifixion was a punishment designed to subjugate, to humiliate and to destroy, all in a public and drawn out manner. There was absolutely no glory at all in being pinned up naked to lose control of your bodily functions. There was only utter powerlessness, your body left up for the crows to peck at.

And this fills us with horror precisely because it was supposed to. Asking for a place at Jesus’ side rather throws your glory into question. You might seem like just another weak fool getting himself crucified. After all, a civilisation is built on power and wisdom.

This may be why in Mark’s gospel we meet a Jesus trying to explain to James and John, and by implication to all of us, that there is a cost to his particular kind of glory. Let’s not go overboard, it needn’t mean a crucifixion, or even a violent death. Indeed, Acts 12 tells us James was put to death under the sword but we don’t know what happened to John, and some traditions have him living to a ripe old age.

But Jesus’ message about the cost of glory is clear. Whoever wants to become great must be servant, whoever wants to be first among you must be slave of All. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.

Glory seeking fantasies easily end up with disillusionment and suffering.

There’s a wonderful story about a traveller who is lost at nightfall in a large wet forest, and he can see no way out of it. So in desperation he climbs up a tree, and from the top he spies a hilltop clearing with a cottage. A light is on inside and smoke is coming from the chimney. Delighted, he climbs back down and starts a very long faltering trudge towards the hilltop. Every now and again he has to climb up and down another tree to see where he is again before trudging on. It is hard work, and he is tired and hungry, so along the way he starts fantasizing about what will happen when he gets to the clearing, and how comfortable it will be in the cottage.

Maybe a man will greet him, and then there will be a roaring fire, and the man will ask his daughter to cook a warm meal. As the traveller perseveres through the dense wood his fantasy becomes more real for him all the time. Maybe after this meal by the fire the daughter is running a hot bath for him, making his bed, and even climbing into it alongside him once he is asleep. He is getting quite excited now, and his imagination is gloriously real for him. He can’t help fearing that the cottage owner will suddenly realize what has happened and burst into the room armed with a knife, and as he imagines this in his mind’s eye he is so terrified, he also imagines being forced to flee for his life, rushing half dressed back out of the cottage and into the night.

His whole self is on its guard, and just at this very moment he arrives exhausted at the cottage door, his breath visible in the cold night air. He knocks furiously, and a small smiling man with spectacles gently opens the door to him. But this is not what the lost man sees. His glorious fantasy has become his reality, and he presses his face close up to the bemused old gentleman’s and yells: “You can keep your so called hospitality, and as for your daughter, I wouldn’t go near her if you paid me!”

The implication is that many of us, much of the time, are living in our own glorious fantasy rather than living in reality, which is the glory itself, and this creates chaos and suffering - in and around us. We no longer simply trust things the way they really are, in all their glory, and we imagine we have to be on our guard instead, trying to preserve glory, or manufacture it.

Jesus tells us that if we do want glory, we must serve reality, not try to have it serve us. If you like, we should be one nation under God, not one nation under CCTV. Really participating in God, really serving God in and amoung us, and not serving our selves, valuable creations though we are, or serving our own ideas, useful tools though they can be for us.

The Cambridge theologian and liturgist Catherine Pickstock describes this experience as: “That broader context which sees the whole of reality as arriving from a divine creative source.”

“The human self,” she says, “is by definition a divided self when it is trying to enthrone its own constructs… it starts to lead a duplicitous existence … but a liturgical self acknowledges fully its complete dependence upon another being … a divine transcendent reality, and is so committed to that reality that it can’t admit any kind of division or internal contradiction … it simply says I am nothing, and I depend upon you and I worship you, and along with that comes a recognition that everything around us arrives as a gift from God.”

Jesus knows that to be truly great is to be part of that gift, and not just to belong to our suffering self, becoming the stories we manufacture, the stories which it manufactures in us. As we read in Isaiah 55:8; "My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the LORD. As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways above your ways and my thoughts above your thoughts".

Above and behind what visibly appears in our mind’s eye, on the closed circuit of our own personal CCTV systems, all shall be well, all is well.

When you look up at the night sky and consider your own place as a tiny fleeting speck within an unimaginably infinite cosmos evolving in God, don’t run away scared from this glorious realisation of your own insignificance. When your personal meaning dissolves and you feel lost in an empty sea of what is, this suchness makes space for a much greater glory, the kind of glory a resurrection experience must have required.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to them. What defines true glory and greatness is not our fantasy about it, but our trust in the invisible Other who is revealed in this very moment, where we are in a flux, and where we are, as Jesus puts it to James and John… servants of all, be a servant of All.

So the message is do be assured, and don't keep it to yourself.

CALMING of the WAVES

I must warn you I've been advised to tell some jokes and I don't know any.

But, I have brought you five or six genuine responses given to preachers at the church door by well meaning members of different congregations.

Good sermon vicar, you kept me on the verge of consciousness.

Did you know there are 240 panes of glass in the east window?

Has anyone told you what a good preacher you are? No? Think about it.

Would you say that interpretation was more pre than post millenial, and can we meet to discuss it?

Sorry I got a bit lost, who rose from the dead?

And my favourite... well it was quite a difficult passage, thanks for trying.

And public speaking can be very trying. Some years ago, at the start of a career in broadcast journalism, I went to try to interview the visiting Chinese first secretary to Hong Kong.

I was rushed and eager and trying to prove myself, and he looked so calm and happy when I arrived at the community centre that I just quickly took his arm and hurriedly went straight onto the airwaves microphone in hand to introduce him. Then I found out that he spoke only fluent Mandarin, live, and to the population of Middlesbrough, England.

But he tried his best for me by switching to pigeon English and repeating the phrase: "Hong Kong, capitalist, China communist", several times whilst looking, and sounding quite delighted with himself, and quite unlike the producer sounded, who I could hear shouting through my headphones. But when you are really trying, your mind is rushing, and I couldn't slow down, I was always rushing.

I would be meeting people I had never spoken to before, in places I had never been to before, and I never had enough time to arrange these meetings myself. For every mission assigned to me the answer to the question "When do you want this?" was 'yesterday', and the answer to "How do I get there" was: Find out on the way." Storms rose in the mind, I couldn't remember names, and I fussed over small details. This type of on the hoof last minute seat of the pants work may all be familiar to some of you too.

And it is really hard sometimes for us in our lives to know the difference between relying on ourselves and relying on God, and to know if there is a difference.

But there is a story in exodus in the Bible, where Moses asks God his name, so that Moses can tell the people who has sent him. God answers by saying to Moses: "I AM who I AM. Tell the people of Israel, I AM has sent you."

And this I AM exists in each and everyone of us, because he is the uncreated Creator who does not depend on anything, or anyone. It is no coincidence that Psalm 46 tells us to: "Be still, and know that I AM"
God, when you are still, does become clearer.

When we are each just overriding God like surging waves leaving the ocean, we each use our freewill to get lost in a big mess. After a lifetime of searching for meaning, the relentlessly questioning philosopher in the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes tells us: "All I have learned is this: God made us very simple, and we have made ourselves very complicated."

In Luke's gospel, the disciples were sailing on Galillee, when a terrific storm came up suddenly on the lake. Water poured in, and disciples were about to capsize. They had to wake Jesus: "Master, Master, we're going to drown!" Getting to his feet, he told the wind, "Silence!" And the lake became smooth as glass. Then he said to his disciples, "Why can't you trust me?" They were in absolute awe, staggered and stammering, "Who is this, anyway?"

This is I AM, the inner Christ, in the middle of a raging storm. But how are we to understand this in our own lives? In my life I remember reading the story to my son, out of a huge old children's Bible I had not opened in a very long time. In it there was a picture of Jesus wearing a blue robe, standing on the bough of the boat, holding out his hand below overcast skies. After I had read the story, my son asked me if it was true. And I had just been going through a very turbulent storm of emotions in my own life, trying to navigate in the dark for some time, and things were finally calming down and lightening up. So was the story true?

I told my son that not everyone believed the story was true, but that I did. Truth can be a really hard thing to pin down, and we don't own it. Whenever I have problems with miracles in the Bible, I remember that if the I AM can create a universe, then the I AM can also still the storms which we will meet in that universe. So for me this story is not so much about believing in the idea of miracles as it is about trusting in the miracle behind all of this stormy universe, and beyond all this change in the universe.

The Greek translation of the Bible understands God as the fulness of Being. It says all creatures receive all that they are and have from him; but he alone is his very being, and he is of himself everything that he is. He is that I AM. I AM is in you and in your neighbours. I AM is in me. I AM is also beyond the winds and the stormy sea. I AM will lead us beside the still waters.

When our will is God's will, we do not need calm conditions, because it is the trust which will make everything clear and still.
An old man, not the tall wiry looking Chinese first secretary to Hong Kong this time but a big slow Burmese man, once told me that there are four types of people in this world. There are those who are moving from darkness to light, those who are moving from darkness to more darkness, those who are moving from light to darkness, and those who are moving from light to more light.

We are all different but in the little boat of our own life experience, if we are always moving in one of these four directions, waves rise and fall and the boat can fill with water. It creaks and rolls. Spray and wind lashes and all can look lost as we try to own the truth. But in the same story, Jesus is just lying asleep in the boat. He trusts, and he asks each of us where our trust is when things are difficult. We sail into storms, and we sail out of them, providing we can show trust. And when we do trust, we won't sink.

Finally, in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells us: "I AM with you always, even unto the end of the world."

- I am in that I AM.