THE GREATEST STORY NEVER TOLD

Playing a Roman Centurion in the 1965 film “The Greatest Story Ever Told” John Wayne only had one line to say: “Surely this man was the Son of God.” When the director asked him to repeat it with awe, he tried in a cowboy drawl: “Awwwwwwe surely this man was the Son of God.”

The awe gets lost. The true stuff of the love of Jesus of Nazareth lives on, but the way it is communicated has become culturally irrelevant, so you can hardly blame anyone for disinterest or misunderstanding.

Jesus showed that the fundamental stuff of life is not physical material but spiritual consciousness, and this is a lesson we still need to learn.

I have a book on my shelves explaining: “The God part of the Brain”, as if the Creator of brains can be reduced to a creation of the brain.

Anyone bereaved knows we humans experience the strange presence of recently dead loved ones, but the love in Jesus of Nazareth lives on two millennia after he died, and he didn’t even have a family of his own.

The gospels tell us Jesus preached pacifism. Jesus used simple agricultural symbols to communicate. Jesus loved the powerless in his culture, women and children. Jesus healed those oppressed by disease and death. Jesus broke social taboos by mixing with law-breakers and ethnic outsiders. Jesus emphasised inner disposition over outward rule and form.

This challenged a religious establishment struggling under Roman occupation, and led Jesus to an inevitable struggle with the political-military alliance of his day and a famous execution in 33AD.

Jesus spoke Aramaic, but the dominant Greco Roman culture identified him as Christ, the Greek rendering of a Hebrew term, Messiah, meaning anointed one, after a ritual symbolising God’s empowerment by covering leaders in oil.

Jesus made tables. Jesus didn’t write a book. 15 years after Jesus’ demise Paul started this on Jesus’ behalf. Paul had had powerful post-mortem experiences of the love of Christ and interpreted them within his own framework, a Jewish tradition stretching back into a culture of appeasement to primitive fear of the unknown, the vicarious suffering of innocent animals, and even human sacrifice. Abraham was willing to kill his own child for his fear of God. So you could hardly blame anyone today for misunderstanding the living love of Jesus of Nazareth.

Paul also projected his post mortem experiences of the love of Jesus Christ forward, by writing the letter to the Romans into an imperial culture which dominated the known world through relentless organisation, ruthless violence and ceremonial pomp.

Then came the essentialist Greek philosophy which gave us the creeds, still in use. And so it was, a simple ecstatic experience of the living love in Jesus became a more static and highly complex hierarchical system, Christianity.

Culturally irrelevant as this can be, the fundamental stuff in Jesus, not physical material but spiritual consciousness, lives on, as it had for Paul.

“He appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve,” wrote Paul. “Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.”

Paul didn’t mention a tomb. At least 18 years later, Mark did that. But by then it was easily 65 AD, and in his earliest short manuscripts Mark ends with a man in a white robe saying to three women who loved Jesus: “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.”

The written account ends like this: “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. All that had been commanded them they told briefly to those around Peter. And afterwards Jesus himself sent out through them, from east to west, the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation.”

Now then, why am I giving you boring Biblical history rather than the transcendent truth? Because at this point in the emerging New Testament record, we still don’t have a physical body of Jesus, at least as the author of “the God part of the brain” might understand one.

Paul harmonises our matter/spirit dichotomy by talking not about a physical body but spiritual body, or ‘pneumatikon soma’. And in a materialist culture like ours, fully material bodies not appearing can be as unsettling for Christians as their appearance where we don’t need them can be for anyone else.

The vicar, at my parents' church, for example, preaching when someone on the front pew keeled over dead. Or my sister, waiting on hotel tables during a catering exam. She repeatedly offered the sweet menu before looking closer to discover her diner had died after the main course. Or the apocryphal story of the coffin bearer having a heart attack.

But not to worry, from 80 AD on, Luke comes to the rescue by writing about an obviously more physical Jesus who can enjoy eating fish in Jerusalem and then show off his hands and feet. In doing this, Luke says that the true presence in Jesus is not a mere apparition. And then along comes Matthew, writing after 85 AD, describing a big farewell and mission action plan, eleven disciples sent to the entire world.

“When they saw him, they worshipped him; but some doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

Finally in the chronology, gospel Johnny come lately John confirms Jesus’ appearance in Jerusalem the evening of the day he rose, adding that the door was locked, as if to emphasise the risen Christ is not bound by normal space time conditions. He adds that it was locked for fear of the Jews, but disciples rejoiced anyway. Though it enters through walls, the love of Christ is not merely a ghost, and it can turn fear into joy.

Like Narnia’s Aslan in the witches frozen kingdom, the fundamental stuff of Jesus' spiritual consciousness breathes on prisoners of death, and says: ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.’

Here’s something truly relevant - the ancient Greek word for forgiveness, aphesis, doesn’t mean: ‘I know you did wrong but I’ll overlook it.’ It means I let go. And the tense used, apheontai, suggests that John means: ‘If you forgive the sins of any, they are already forgiven.’ Whereas Jesus of Nazareth used to forgive, now forgiveness has already taken place and you realise this in letting go of interpretations and evaluations you have projected onto people. We see the world not as it is, but as we are, using an internal construction, which can separate us from God – and this is exactly what sin is, a separation from the greatest reality there is.

John has transformed the Lucan understanding of forgiveness using material similar to Matthew 16:19 … “the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, “Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax-collectors and sinners!” Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.”

Within a minimum 60 years of Jesus’ death, the word become flesh was turned back into words. But to exist at all, God must come out of time place and language. We must not keep Jesus in an ideological tomb.

Physical death used to be defined as the heart and lungs stopping. Then we learnt to start them, so it became when brain activity stopped. Now maybe it’s just the neo-cortex.

A hospice musician writes this: “How can I possibly express what I have learned? I believe there is a mask we all wear, the mask of controlling, grasping intellect, which tries to impose order on our experiences and will accept things only in a certain way. Another name for it is fear. In many people who are terminally ill, the mask begins to slip.

“It is as though the individual, completely a citizen of the earth, begins to be aware of another home behind the mask. When the strength of the body begins to fail, the part which expresses fear and feeds on physical strength, the controlling intellect, also recedes.”

Colossians 3: 2-4 calls this our true life: “Set your mind on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you will be revealed.”

The key is to recognise that the fundamental stuff of Jesus lives on in us, as it had in Paul. Not empty physical material but hidden spiritual conscious immaterial. Phillipians 2 says it best of all - Christ Jesus emptied himself, therefore God exalted him, and we should have this same mind.

Then Being expands beyond our little form and takes in everything.

Just as invisible warm breath becomes visible but transient in cold air, so do worldly things arise only to pass, regimes, romances, careers, perspectives, rules, relationships and religions. Even persons? Not quite. Love is more. Love is not a mere feeling, and God is not a person, but a personalising presence. Love it is not static physical matter on which our power is based, but the fundamental basis of reality, ecstatic animating conscious spirit beyond intellect and words, though we say God, and into God Jesus’ love lives eternally. Jesus knew it would. So should we.

Being a God bearer now

I want to say something, which I think is both blatantly obvious and really very wonderful.

But people fail to see the obvious.

It is not just an interesting fact, such as that the annunciation, the revelation to Mary about her child, is celebrated in Islam, or that in Lebanon it is a national holiday for Muslim and Christian.

And it is not a belief either.

Nor is it a thing of aesthetic beauty, like the Orthodox hymn of the annunciation, which goes like this:

Today is the beginning of our salvation,
And the revelation of the eternal mystery!
The Son of God becomes the Son of the Virgin
As Gabriel announces the coming of Grace.
Together with him let us cry to the Theotokos:
"Rejoice, O Full of Grace, the Lord is with you!"


The annunciation necessarily comes nine months before Jesus’ birth, and from a particular point of view in the Church year this seems to clash with the Easter narrative. Either Jesus is about to be conceived, or he is about to be crucified. So what is it to be?

But to be is not to be stuck in a particular point of view or a narrative.

It is not time bound.

Thomas Merton said the spiritual life is not a long path where we eventually get somewhere. It consists in opening your eyes and seeing you are already here.

No, this is really wonderful.

The word Theotokos means God bearer.

That’s Mary, but it is also us.

Today is the beginning of our salvation, and the revelation of the eternal mystery.

Being stuck in time is not being in the now. And being in the now is encountering God, being, if you like, a God bearer.

St Augustine described eternity as the now which does not pass away, and when you are in the now which does not pass away, you are in eternity.

The Latin for the eternal present is Nunc Stans, which means Now Standing, or the now that remains, it does not pass away.

In a sense, this is eternal life. We are God bearers in the now because humans can experience eternity, and then really exist, because to exist means to stick out, or stand out, provided we are in the eternal present.

You see, the word exist comes from the Latin ex sistere – ex, meaning out, and sistere, meaning to set or to stand in place.

So when we do really exist now, we stand out, we stick out of our place in mere time, we are above thought, we are in eternity, we are, now.

NOW, this moment may include planning for the future, remembering something from the past, but is very different from being caught up in past or future.

It is the difference between having ones attention centred and having ones attention captured.

Not to be here today, where salvation is, is to bewail what happened, to long to bring it back, to fear what might happen, to fail to wait for it. In other words, not to be in the now is to be lost, and to be really present is to be saved.

Saved people give the impression that they are really present, and they make you really present too. Because today is the beginning of our salvation.

That is, being present now, is not being caught up with the past and future, which is our little ego, and not our true self.

When we are present in the now, we notice those who are not.

Somehow they don’t fully exist. They are not in eternal life.
So be here now, and you will be full of grace. The Lord will be with you.

KILL JESUS

As I walked down the road this morning I saw two words scratched into the frost on a car windscreen. “Kill Jesus.”

So I added four more: “It’s already been tried.”

Jesus is an inconvenient truth.

Imagine kneeling at an altar rail while gunmen enter the church and shoot the heads of those alongside you, mingling their blood with the communion wine.

That you would be upset is an absolute understatement, you would react with shock, horror and hatred. But just such a massacre by Pilate’s forces in the temple is presented in Luke 13:1-9, and Jesus simply dismisses it as if it has not happened.

Or imagine a tower block suddenly falling and crushing 18 people in your neighbourhood. This calamity, in the form of the collapsed tower of Siloam, is also presented to Jesus in Luke 13:1-9. He isn’t shocked, he doesn’t gush sympathy or offer an explanation. He just says: ‘Repent!’

What?

Jesus doesn’t threaten us, he undermines us, because we are asleep.

Our taken for granted, deeply held bed-rock belief is that physical matter is everything.

Or if we believe in a just God, we may think everything happens for a reason, so God allows bad things when people somehow deserve them.

Jesus simply won’t endorse this ignorance.

He doesn’t say the Godless will be struck by an asteroid, good fortune is God's blessing, or suffering is due to sin.

Jesus’ reality is not the parroting of religious platitudes.

He is aware of life's fragility and the suddenness with which death comes. He doesn’t need murder and natural disaster to remind him.

I once wrote a sermon containing the image of dead bodies to shock, and a tutor warned me not to upset people. Which made me think, to coin that dreadful phrase, what would Jesus do? Well what does he do? Preach repentance in this life, or serve up inoffensive pie in the sky when you die?

It was Jesus who, when told about a funeral, said this: “Let the dead bury their own dead”.

Do we imagine a vicar saying this?

Those who die in Haiti and Chile and Iraq are not news items, unconscious intercessory reflexes, or chances to rationalise it all away.

They are nothing less than the very contingency of our own humanity reflected back to us.

There’s an unwritten rule in news-reporting which states that one death in your local news outlet is worth hundreds in your country, thousands on your continent, and millions on the other side of your world.

But a Church shocked by even one death is asleep.

Because repent means wake up, we are more than this, it shouldn’t take tragedy to nudge us into God.

Jesus commands us to repent, and repentance, or metanoia, simply is not some ritualistic religious expression of regret in some Sunday morning cultural backwater.

Repentance is a changed mind, new being, fuller consciousness, a way to see, to discover a different perspective which arcs toward joy in God just as it lives in the awful precariousness and odd beauty of our fleeting existence.

Repentance says live, because we are not this, so wake up, ACT, but out of peace, not fear, or compulsion, or desire, or profit.

You may have seen the film called: ‘Bucket List’, starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman. The two characters meet in a hospital because they have each been diagnosed with cancer. When they realize they are dying they set about writing a list of everything they now intend to get done.

But who isn’t dying?

If we live the knowledge of mortality, we become someone much greater, with no Bucket list required.

This is repentance, or as the Bishop of Lyons put it more than 1,800 years ago: “In his infinite Love, God became what we are, in order to make us what he is himself.”

Repentance then is learning to live wholly and fully.

Later on is always too late.

We have not been cut down, but we should not presume we have the fruit of God’s infinite and higher Self.

Our stay of execution is our opportunity to interpret the present times, the fundamental stuff of this life, which depends not upon dead matter, but conscious living spirit.

The "sin" of the fig tree is not that it is doing something bad, but that it is doing nothing in particular.

It is just comfortable, complacent, and taking up space in God’s economy until shocked to find physical life is nasty brutish and short.

While he may correct some bad theology, Jesus stays silent about why God, the supreme consciousness who expresses this unstable universe as his body, will allow bad things to happen to good people.

Repent, he says, look at it this way. The time to grow and watch and pray and turn on the light is always now, because we are in a much much much bigger picture, which is supremely good and conscious.

There IS more than this.

To repent then, is to act on this haiku by the Japanese poet Toyohiko Kagawa:

I read

In a book

That a man called Christ

Went about doing good

It is very disconcerting to me

That I am so easily

Satisfied

With just Going about.

Just Deserts

Asked in an exam to explain what a desert is, a child wrote this: It is so hot in some parts of the world that the people who live there have to live in other places.

Perhaps they know deserts are places of enforced learning.

More exam papers later, but first, a newspaper.

The Daily Telegraph, which recently reported how Karl Rabeder, an Austrian business millionaire, suddenly woke up and sold everything to charity, and bought a bedsit.

He had become heavy and unhappy with his version of success, and he kept hearing the words: ‘Stop what you are doing and start your real life'.

It all came to a head during a very expensive three-week five star holiday in Hawaii.

“We spent all the money we could possibly spend,” he said, “but we had the feeling we hadn't met a single real person.

“We were all just actors. The staff played the role of being friendly, and the guests played the role of being important.”

Jesus is also offered civilized rewards.

Maybe not, he says.

And when he opens the scroll in the temple and claims Isaiah’s word applies to him, it’s an astonishing sermon, but they still say of him: “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?”

Maybe it isn’t, God says.

And maybe we are not just children of men either.

We journey through the world but we can reflect a parallel world in the crucible of the desert, like Jesus trying to work out what it meant to be Jesus.

Because it wasn’t clear at that point that he knew who he was.

He discovered it in the crucible of being tested, in his response to God.

Change stones to bread - assert your status. Maybe not.

Make angels rescue you - rely on drama. Maybe not.

Bow down to me - become the way of the world. Maybe not.

Use fantasy shortcuts to happiness, counterfeit attempts to avoid suffering, and pursue worldly recognition. Maybe not.

There is a richer reality whenever we die to a lesser reality, because God is unimpressed with our power.

Like this other comment, also from a children’s science exam:

Asked to explain horsepower, a child wrote: “One horsepower is the amount of energy it takes to drag a horse 500 feet in one second.”

And asked about the relationship between thunder and lightning, another pupil wrote:

“You can listen out for thunder after you see lightning, to tell you how close you came to getting hit. But if you don't hear it at all, then you were hit, so never mind.”

And really never mind - the Christian life is a daily embrace of death and REAL life.

Because spiritual health is killed off by obsessive physical health, living faith by blind devotion, and genuine trust by trivial tests.

So if we too are in the desert, an enforced learning environment, do we depend on God, or do we do a spiritual risk assessment instead?

Do we share life or protect it instead?

Do we really meet people or engage in games instead?

Do we enlarge our capacity to suffer or project our fear instead?

Do we deepen our humanity or repress its difficult parts instead?

And is our faith attractively light - or tiresomely heavy, instead?

One final exam paper in the desert -

A child was asked how clouds are formed, and said this:

I am not sure how clouds get formed.

But the clouds know how to do it, and that is the important thing.

Amen.

The I of God

If someone in the street stopped you and prayed for you to be washed in the blood of the lamb, you may feel a little uneasy, even if you are not a vegetarian.

Not that this would comfort you, but it’s Biblical, from Hebrews 19:
“If the blood of bulls and goats, and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling the unclean sanctifies to the purifying of the flesh: How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?”

There is a cultural problem with religious language - it gets trapped in time and space - usually someone else's.

Because on an average day, the average person where I live does many odd things, but they don’t sacrifice and burn bulls or goats and sprinkle themselves with the ashes to get clean.

A shower usually suffices quite well for that.

The Bible can be culturally inappropriate.

But remembering we are dust and to dust we return is always a relevant human experience.

If you've ever seen a cremated body you'll know what it means to say we are dust, give or take a knee joint.

And this is why people put ash on their heads. Ash Wednesday reminds us to turn to a higher Being than the dust.

Archaeologists say that about 40,000 years ago something really radical happened to us homo sapiens. We started to make things of beauty – and not just tools. We started painting and talking and making music. And we started burying each other, with flowers and gifts, and possibly also with a belief in the afterlife.

But there's a second cultural problem with the word "after" as in afterlife. It implies durational time, and life beyond dust is non-durational, it is eternity, it is spiritual.

It is beneath the appearances of dust and space and time. It is beyond our understanding of nature, and therefore it is even supernatural.

But we don’t need to use that word.

Consider the voice the Bible says spoke to Moses from a burning bush.

It said: ‘I am that I am’.

This reminds us of an even more peculiar word than supernatural.
The word: ‘I’.

What is I?

I does not identify any material object in the world in which we are situated, nor any object out of that world.

What is it to look into someone’s eye and see the other eye look out at you?

It is an experience called Transcendence - it is metaphysically obscure and unintelligible.

But we are faced with this experience every single day, and so religion makes sense of it for us.

The Christian religion trusts in Jesus as the sensible image of this unintelligible eternity and mysterious spirituality.

But even for those who don’t have Jesus, or any religion at all, this unseen experience of I is always still there, because it is only the dust we can see physically.

Which is why, in the Bible, after his suffering and questioning of God is over, Job says: “I abhor my words and repent, seeing that I am dust and ashes.”

A human life is just like this.

It is all our experience to recognize that our lives are contingent on mysterious Being, Being greater than our own personal lifespan.

We Christians may trust in the particular and perculiar qualities of Jesus, but St Thomas Aquinas, the most famous Catholic theologian, said God cannot be a person - or a substance - or a thing - or even a being at all, because God IS Being.

Being is intelligent and conscious, but it does not need a skull and a forehead which turn to dust.

In our culture we may not sacrifice animals or dress in sackcloth and pour ashes on our heads – but we are dust… and to dust we return, and really knowing this in our experience will open us up to Being.

Being, not dust, and Being has persisted in us ever since we began.

And God is Being, the origin of all dust, space and time.

Acknowledging this is called repentance because it turns us to God, and opens us, and can fill us.

So permit me to use some religious language - for I acknowledge a Creator beyond us, as much creator of now as any other time, a Redeemer within us, as real as anything else within us, and a Spirit between us.

In the name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Come again? Lord Jesus

This year the school nativity service had to pause.

Instead of the doll we were expecting to use as the infant Jesus, we discovered that all we had been brought was a small, furry, purple, bear.

Meanwhile, a friend of mine put on a nativity, but three young boys dressed as Kings couldn’t remember their words.

There was a pause there too, and the first boy was prompted.

‘I bring you myrrh’ he said.
‘Oh! I bring you gold’ blurted the second boy.
And Frank sents you this! shouted the third.

They say don’t work with children or animals.

Perhaps wise women would be more practical.

Wise women may have bought better gifts, arrived on time, helped deliver the baby, cleaned the stable, and made a casserole.
But no, Jesus doesn't discriminate.

God as a baby says, 'yes, there is indeed another world, and it is right here in this one!'

Shouldn’t that cause us to pause?

God as a human is called incarnation, and it says humanity is indeed good.

But some of us have celebrated Jesus’ birth even more times than I.

42 times, I have celebrated Baby Jesus being born, over and over and over and over and over again.

So I ask you - isn’t this more like reincarnation than incarnation?

Isn’t this the first coming being celebrated over and over again?

God created us in his image, says the Bible, and we returned the favour, added Voltaire.

Perhaps he had a point.

We don’t turn Jesus into a small furry purple bear or call one of the Kings Frank – but our churches do make God into a judge with all the responsibility.

Supernatural Love may indeed be a much better judge than we are, but Jesus didn’t stay in a crib.

He grew into perfect adult humanity, and he urged us to grow up spiritually, too.

So let’s pause.

Matthew 5, verses 43-48: ‘You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy,” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.’

Jesus left the crib, faced danger, suffering, and death, and before his resurrection, he made no distinction between outsider and insider, or between good and evil.

And likewise, humankind, that’s us, before we ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, couldn’t distinguish between good and evil, which was the reason this life was paradise – we treated all life as a gift.

Well, according to Genesis.
But the fact is this.

All life is a gift.
None of us earns life.
None of us avoids death.

So we do live a life that is a gift.

In daily life, we can therefore celebrate the second coming, not merely remember the first.

One Benedictine monk puts it so well: “In daily life we must see that it is not happiness that makes us grateful, but gratefulness that makes us happy.”

In daily life, we must see that is not happiness that makes us grateful, but gratefulness that makes us happy.

Life is gift, gratefulness is the response, an appreciation for something unearned, free and gratuitous, our existence, our belonging, the voice of our God, and they all come, literally, from a great-full-ness.

So, let us pray.

Giver of all good gifts, you spread out the world before us like a feast.

Help us to be open to your gift and alive in your presence.

Let us not attempt to give your presence back and look after ourselves, as if we were returning something we bought.

It is all gift.

In us too, realise the power of a good God, the infinite compassion of a returning Christ, the abandoned delight of the Holy Spirit, and let us practice gratefulness, every day, so Jesus will really come.

Happy Christmas Everyone.

Hard to follow, harder to refuse

The TV phenomenon called X factor relies on recycling.

200,000 hopefuls recycle songs, get whittled down to two finalists, re-cycle some fading pop-stars by singing with them, and a winner emerges from and disappears into obscurity while another series is planned.

Re-cycling clearly works.

In our very home the bins have become so diverse I barely understand how to throw anything away.

Mary also has a recycled song: “My soul glorifies the Lord … for he has been mindful of the humble state of his servant. He has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts. He has brought down rulers from their thrones but lifted up the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things.”

I say Mary’s song is recycled because it is similar to Zechariah’s song, and to Simeon’s song, both also in Luke’s gospel, and because the song of Mary, mother of Jesus, is based on the song of Hannah, mother of Samuel: “My heart exults in the Lord … talk no more so very proudly, let not arrogance come from your mouth. The bows of the mighty are broken, the feeble gird on strength ... Those who were hungry are fat with spoil. Not by might does one prevail.”

Re-cycling isn’t confined to TV or scripture.

In the Christian tradition, Mary is now immortalised by this: “Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.”

Beautiful, but which is the un-recycled truth? The X factor?

Mary sings that only those open to receive can receive. People who exploit self-sufficiency, however it is done, by pride, power, riches or by a legion of subtle psychological ways, close themselves to God’s future as it unfolds, here in the present. Mary is singing that the open can receive, and only the open. The Lord’s Loving presence does not force itself into self-sufficiency.

And the Bible is full of this truth re-cycled relentlessly, as the song of Hannah, of Zechariah, of Simeon, of Mary, and the lyrics of Jesus. All about the dead end of human self-sufficiency.

Proverbs 16: “Everyone who is proud in heart is an abomination to the Lord.” Hannah’s song: “Not by might does one prevail.” Mary’s song: “He has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts. Luke’s gospel: “Everyone who exalts himself shall be humbled, and he who humbles himself, exalted.”

There’s a joke about a safe Preacher and an unsafe taxi driver. Both men arrive at St Peter’s pearly gates, but only the driver is richly rewarded. So the Preacher asks what in heaven is going on? "Simple really, answers St Peter. God’s aim is relationship, and as you preached, people slept. But when the driver drove, people really prayed."

Whatever else we think prayer is, it is not self-sufficiency, and nothing convinces us of this better than death, if we face it. But the lesson is for life. God can only relate in relationship. Only the open receive.

Bestselling paperback "the Shack" asserts that independence is the source of evil. Sin, whatever else we think it is or is not, is a separation from God, and Hell, whatever else we think it is or is not, is an everlasting separation from God.

The implication is that independence separates us from Love in the present, and whatever else we may think of God, God is a presence.

If life and eternal life is merely an independent struggle for survival, we are all diminished.

Even in the name of God, people diminish themselves by clinging and locking God out, but the Trinity itself is a relationship - one God as three interrelating presences. A parental presence beyond us, a Christ presence within us, a Spiritual presence between us, and each relates to the other in one Being, so none is in control.

For a human being, self-respect is vital, but self-sufficiency is not, and Eternal Love is only received by relinquishing.

As poet John Donne once said: “There are no human islands, and humankind is of one author. Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

Mother Mary would agree.

Hers is not an X-factor Christmas pop song.
But she eternally sings: “The Lord is mindful of the humble state of his servant.”

LETTERS TO THE COSMOS

“There shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations with perplexity, the sea and the waves roaring; men’s hearts failing them for fear.” Luke 21:25

For human beings there have always been signs in the sun and stars, distress and perplexity on earth, and waves roaring. We are the cosmos knowing itself – we study heavenly bodies which share the same elements as our own bodies, and our war and perplexity all stems from fear that this is not enough.

I spent a morning with amputees last week and I came away exhausted, so I walked on the beach. Waves smashed in as the wind shook the sky and a sandstorm reflected the chaos in our bodies and emotions. In the turmoil a personalising ordering presence was seeking me as itself.

Nature’s imagination is reflected in us, and this personalising presence is sometimes called the Mind of God, what the Greeks called Logos, the divine reason filling the universe, which will not pass away.

Humans are connected to one another biologically, and to the earth chemically, and to the rest of the universe atomically. As cosmologist Carl Sagan put it: “We live in an in-between universe where things change according to patterns which we call laws of nature … [and] the beauty of a living thing is not in the atoms that go into it, but in the way those atoms are put together.”

The molecules in our bodies are traceable phenomenon in the cosmos, and although chaos and death is ready to re-exert itself, we need not fear chaos or death at all. There is a personalising presence at work revealing itself, as it revealed itself in the cosmic Christ Jesus of the New Testament.

Luke’s gospel goes on: “When these things begin to come to pass, look up, lift up your heads, for your redemption draws nigh … this generation shall not pass away till all be fulfilled: heaven and earth shall pass away; but my words shall not.”

Sin is acting on the the belief that we are separate from all this, that we are better, that we should be protected. Love is knowing that this is false, but that the presence is always coming again in us, as it was in Christ.

R.I.P DR. BOTTOM

A university friend died suddenly. Simon had sent me off in the direction of writing and performing, because I sang my poems to his guitar playing. I thanked him as I scattered soil on his casket. His face smiles from his Facebook page, but he has left behind a wife with three young daughters.

His was a humanist funeral, which the celebrant said was for those with no strong religious belief. The celebrant also said a person’s death was the last event of a person’s life, which it seems to me is a belief a lot stronger than many religious ones.

I intuitively regard true life as eternal.

Meeting two friends in Whitby last week, we walked some of the Cleveland way along the cliff tops next to the North Sea. Before going our separate ways, we prayed that as we left one anothers’ physical sight, we would not leave one another’s spiritual sight, and they seemed to stay with me while I travelled through train stations hundreds of miles away. How much more is this the case with those who have gone beyond nature.

Our proverb: “Out of sight out of mind”, does not take into account the mind of God, a spiritual sight.

In John’s gospel, after Jesus leaves his disciples physically, the writer stresses his spiritual presence: “If you loved me,” Jesus says: “you would rejoice that I am going to the Father, because the Father is greater than I … the Holy Spirit will remind you of all that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you: I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.”

The pain of a disciples loss is raw, but Jesus adds this qualification: “I do NOT give to you as the world gives.”

The world gives pain and trouble. Even today the world defines peace as merely a temporary cessation of open hostility, with tension and trouble still expressed or repressed. But true peace flows out from how we define who we are. Creations of God have an eternal nature, which is God.

Pain is real and we miss those we love, but true Love involves letting people be where they are. We will be there soon enough. Some say “Who is Jesus?” is the most important question in the world, but I disagree. “Who am I?” is the really dangerous question.

When the fourteenth century Christian Priest and mystic Meister Eckhart preached that “God and I are One”, he was brought before Pope John XXII and forced to recant. When the tenth century Islamic mystic Al Hallaj used language that claimed an identity with God, he was crucified.

Heresy got Jesus nailed to a cross. Claiming to be God today might not get you that, but it could possibly get you sectioned under the mental health act.

Mystics, however, are not psychotic, because when they say; “I am God”, they are not talking about their individual person, but their truest self.

Roman Catholic Thomas Merton put it clearly like this: “If I penetrate to the depths of my own existence and my own present reality, the indefinable am that is myself in its deepest roots, then through this deep centre I pass into the infinite I am, which is the very name of the Almighty.”

I am is one of the Hebrew names of God, the fullest background consciousness, the true light, the spiritual reality which makes hearts still, unafraid and untroubled.

But it cannot be grasped or defended, which is precisely why Jesus says it is a peace which the world cannot give. We identify with the presence beyond all our death.

St Augustine said: “People travel to wonder at the height of the mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering … [but] God is closer to you than you are to yourself."

Jesus’ physical presence left his disciples, but it wasn't the whole picture, just as it isn't the whole picture when our loved ones leave us physically. One day we will be changed too. “I am going away, and I am coming to you … I have told you this before it occurs,” says Jesus, “so that when it does, you may believe.”

There is a funeral prayer by the Quaker William Penn: “We give them back to thee, dear Lord, who gavest them to us. Yet thou didst not lose them in giving, so we have not lost them by their return. What thou gavest thou takest not away, O Lover of souls; for what is thine is ours also, if we are thine.”

So death is not the last event, it is merely the opposite of birth.
We miss them in time, but Life is outside time, it is eternal.

SILLY SIGNS

There’s a sign in a Paris hotel lobby: “Please leave your values at the front desk.”

And another in the restaurant: “Customers who find our waiting staff rude should see the manager.”

Mistranslations make what is genuine sound silly.

There’s a sign in a Greek hotel: “Visitors are expected to complain at the office between the hours of 9 and 11 daily.”

In a Japanese hotel: “You are invited to take advantage of the chambermaid.”

In an Egyptian hotel: “If you require room service, please open the door and shout room service.”

And outside a dry-cleaners in the USA: “Drop your pants here and you will receive prompt attention.”

Mistranslations make a genuine sign sound silly.

Signs are unusual, even miraculous, and in Hebrew the word miracle means both a sign and a wonder.

God is described in Deuteronomy 26:8 as having brought the Israelites out of Egypt: "with an outstretched arm and with signs and wonders".

But the Jewish Talmud recognizes these signs and wonders as ordinary when it says: “it is as wonderful to watch the support of a family for someone in trouble as it is to see the parting of the Red Sea.”

The fact that life exists at all is a sign and a wonder. The miracle of self-consciousness is that other animals have to be born and live and die, but as far as we know, none of them also have to be aware of it like us. And what is this awareness?

If we are empty of our own spirit, we can be filled with God's. And Jesus was sign and wonder, going around Galilee curing demoniacs, epileptics and paralytics, giving a teaching we now call the Beatitudes, which means Blessednesses – as in ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’.

These Blessednesses: ‘Blessed are the pure in heart,’ etc, were written in Greek, but Greek was not Jesus’ native tongue. So even though some people imagine him waking up one morning and getting out of bed to announce he was fully human and fully divine in one hypostatic union, he walked Galiliee before the Talmud, before Rabbinical Judaism, and before the Christian creeds.

So he would have dreamt in Aramaic, and thought and spoken in Aramaic, which can help us get behind the text a little.

In the New Testament, the Blessings open with the word ‘Makarios’, a Greek translation of the Hebrew word ‘Ashrei’, which in our modern English means: ‘firmly and deeply happy’, firm, as a house is firm.

So what we get is something like: ‘Firmly and deeply joyful are the peacemakers.’ Jesus is holding up a mirror to the world, he is reflecting reality to show us where happiness already is.

‘Blessed are the poor in spirit,’ is the only text to include the phrase: ‘poor in spirit’. Almost. Because it also appears in the Dead Sea scrolls, which helps give us the Aramaic idiom Jesus dreamt in. And once you leave this context, the idiom is difficult to translate. Maybe it’s a bit like the hotel signs again, or like trying to translate: ‘Bob’s your uncle’ or ‘That’s the bees knees’ into another language.

Because an Aramaic phrase which is something like: ‘Ashrei Nedav Sedic’ gets translated through Greek into English to become ‘Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness.’

But biblical scholars like the one I met on a hot insect filled day above a cool calm sea of Galillee say re-applying the idiom of the Dead Sea scrolls would make it more like: ‘Deeply and firmly happy are those in whom the urgent desire for justice and salvation is so strong that they literally cannot sleep at night.’

They are pursued by that desire, until justice and salvation is spread across the earth, and the Kingdom of Heaven is brought down to earth.

This, of course, is less like a future state and more like holding up that mirror to the world which shows us where happiness already is, having nothing and being empty of everything but the potential of the Kingdom.

It’s so easy to turn the Kingdom of God into something it was never intended to be. I remember being at a service at theological college which was based on these Blessings, and one young man got up to do the prayers. He loudly invoked: “King Jesus” who he announced would destroy followers of other faiths.

But I just can’t imagine Jesus beginning the Lord’s prayer with “Our Jesus”, and announcing he had come to start a religion named after himself, or “live by the sword die by the sword” as early campaign propaganda on the way to later world domination.

The ten commandments for healthy living may begin ‘Thou Shalt Not’, but the Beatitudes are not even suggestions. They reflect on a reality which can still be ours today, empty and open to receive, nothing to claim or cling to and at odds with this world, but also a salt and light to it, like a sign which brings glory to God.

We Christians can be far too clear about what we are trusting. Really to have faith, really to trust in God requires not knowing, because when we know, we no longer need to reach out in trust, to receive the signs and the wonders.

FORGET CHRISTIANTY, learn Christ

The word Christianity doesn’t appear once in the New Testament. Why not?

It almost seems we shouldn’t even be Christians, since that’s an unimportant word in the New Testament. It appears only three times.

We should be disciples, because that word, meaning a student, learner, follower in the way, appears 261 times.

When his followers found him on the other side of the lake, they asked him: "Rabbi, when did you get here?"

“At sunrise”, or “just after lunch” we might expect him to reply.

Not Jesus.

Why give a straight answer to a straight question about the timing of a ferry ride when you can say something really odd like:

"You are looking for me, not because you saw miraculous signs but because you ate the loaves.

“Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life."

If our life is not about literal bread, we still don’t get it. UK obesity is expected to have increased 50% by 2015.

Jesus has said: “Man cannot live by bread alone” and: “it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven”.

But according to the US food and agriculture organization, there are currently 800 million undernourished people and one billion obese people.

There are well over two billion Christians in the world, but the top one per cent of the adult population owns 40% of the wealth, while 50% of us own just one per cent of the world's wealth. 30% of us try to survive on less than the equivalent of 60p a day, while the phenomenon of super rich elites is increasing in the new and upcoming powers. In the West we are discussing living on the Moon and Mars but we don’t yet know how to live on the Earth.

So when Jesus says: “I am the true bread” it’s not the metaphorical bread of our free market capitalism.

Jesus isn’t even talking about the manna of the Old Testament, which appeared each morning as the dew evaporated. But that would be closer to the truth.

They didn’t know what manna was or where it came from. If anyone tried to hoard or keep it overnight, it went mouldy and revolting, rather like our world economic situation. In the West we regard a crisis as moving from obscene wealth to extreme wealth.

The miracle of life isn’t grasped but received, accepted. Jesus, like the very gift of life, our life, is to be used today, not exploited and amassed and hoarded.

But our obsession with wealth wipes out three animal or plant species every hour of every day.

Use life wisely or lose it altogether, God may be saying.

Jesus’ use it or lose it cannot be kept by for a rainy day, when we decide he will be useful.

He comes to us today or not at all, and facing our own mortality could teach us this.

But like the people in John 6, we ask: "What must we do to do the works God requires?" Jesus answers: "The work of God is this: believe in the one he has sent."

Is that it? It just all seems too easy. Surely the point is to achieve things, not let God do his work through us, in a living trust, releasing us from the narrative of attainment targets, policies regulations and post-mortem analysis.

But Jesus describes himself as "living bread", which reinforces the point. Bread is no use sitting on the baker’s shelf. To be part of us, to give us strength and grace and wisdom it has to be digested and made part of us and lived.

Christ is no use sitting on a mountain, on the page of the Bible, or on an altar.

That’s dead bread. Dead wisdom.

Living bread and living wisdom gets taken into our lives to make a difference to other people in the outside world.

Jesus declares, "I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty,” and this may be an illusion to a very contrary statement in Jewish literature, in the book of Sirach, 24:21, when Wisdom is speaking.

She says that her memory and possession is so sweet that: “those who eat of me will hunger for more, and those who drink of me will thirst for more.”

Jesus on the other hand is wisdom personified, embodied and lived out, and this does satisfy us.

Look at our faces in the average street, any day of the week. Human beings are dis-satisfied.

Dis-satisfied because we work for the things of this world which run down, break down, rust away, crumble, corrode and die. None of us could make a loaf of bread if God was not first making all of nature.

Our daily bread is a gift. Sunshine, rain, good soil, the atmosphere which allows miracle to happen. Our daily needs provided, which is why we say: “Our Father.. Give us this day, or daily bread”. What we don’t say is: “Our Father.. we earn your daily bread for you by charging the going rate.”

So I invite you to think of a challenge you face, right now, before reading on.

Feeding the multitude is one of many challenges for Jesus. It looks like there are no resources as he faces feeding the multitude, but the first thing he does is to acknowledge what he already has.

In the New Testament, the first thing he does, before breaking those loaves, is to give his thanks, his thanks to the Father, for what he already has, just a few loaves.

This attitude of gratitude could be ours, the acknowledgement that life is an unlimited gift from God.

Our very selves are a gift.

But how far are the British from this giftedness.

The British are among the biggest borrowers in the world, personal debt twice as high as any other European.

Genuine happiness is in the giftedness of everything in us and around us.

Our need to: “put the bread on the table”, might be better put in the context of this beautiful prayer:

Place your burden at the feet of the Lord of the Universe, who accomplishes everything. Remain, all the time, steadfast in the heart of the transcendental absolute. God is Love. God knows the past, present and future. He will determine the future for you, and accomplish the work. What is to be done will be done at the proper time. Don’t worry, abide in the heart. Surrender all your acts to the divine.

Remember that in the New Testament Jesus liked to withdraw to mountains by himself, so perhaps a remote mountain Kingdom still has something to teach the rest of civilisation.

While we pursue Gross National Product by focusing on the material value of goods and services and output and ignoring environmental damage and human discontent, the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan’s official policy is to measure Gross National Happiness, which includes spiritual cultural and environmental well-being.

True bread transforms the pattern of this world, it is not conformed to it.

“Bread": is one of many "I am" sayings of Jesus.
I am the vine, the light, resurrection,
way, shepherd, truth, door, life.



These are about guidance, protection, sustenance, renewal, and perspective.

The letter to the Ephesians speaks of ‘Learning Christ’.
Christianity, on the other hand, that is a word that doesn’t even appear in the New Testament.

FEEL MY WRONGTEOUS ANGER

What can Jesus mean when he says that if we are angry with our brother and sister, we will be liable to judgement?
And that if we insult a brother or sister, we will be liable to the council and the hell of fire?

In 2008, a day after his 16th birthday, Jimmy Mizen went to buy his first lottery ticket. Then, along with his brother, he
entered a bakery shop in south east London, so that his brother could buy a sausage roll. He never left the shop.

They had fallen into an argument with an angry 19 year-old, and Jimmy was attacked, wounded in the neck, and was soon bleeding to death.

Remarkably, his Catholic mother was later saying that when people asked why she was not angry about his death, she answered that it was anger which had killed Jimmy in the first place.

"There is too much anger in the world," she added.

"I could be angry now, but what's going to happen? It's going to make me much more difficult to live with, and my family need
me.

"And it's not going to bring Jimmy back."

"But we didn't get here overnight," the family went on, referring to street violence.

This problem is the result of 20 to 30 years of the way society has been living, but we can still change it."

Presuming Mrs Mizen wasn't still in shock, these remarkable words, made 2,000 years after Jesus said them, suggest
that a love which is merely the opposite of anger is a very partial love.

A God of love which is merely the opposite of a God of wrath, is presumably just as partial.

So what strikes me is the way Jesus makes no allowance for justified or righteous anger, but describes anger as a problem
making us liable to judgement.

Even anger towards the devil is not allowed by Jesus. Does this present us with a decision to make between
Jesus' recommendations about anger, and those of Judeo-Christian scribes both before and after Jesus?

And if it does, and we are to chose the tradition or the book over Jesus, are we, like the Pharisees, replacing relationships with rules?

Because Jesus is emphasising relationships for us when he says that if we are offering our gift to the altar, and we remember
that our brother or sister has something against us, then we are to leave our gift and first be reconciled with them before
offering it.

The saviour emphasises the importance of relationships over ritual. He tries to shift our attention away from the outward act and places it firmly on the inward state.

Because it is so easy to spot faults in another person, and so hard to be aware of the person who is doing the fault spotting.

Jesus urges us to come to terms with accusers on the way to court. Perhaps he knows the effects on society of attempting to solve differences with a conflict, however civilised. Or perhaps Jesus is urging us to go beyond our own little concerns and body and see the bigger picture, God's perspective.

Once we focus on inward states, there may be no end to it.

The beautiful thing about Jesus is that he doesn't seem to think he is any better than the sinners - rather, this is what others think of him. So does he live on in his followers?

Barking mad and loving it, my dear St Dawkins

Tommy has just got back from the beach.

“Were there any other children there?” asked his Mum?

“Yes.” said Tommy.

“Boys or Girls?”

“How should I know? They didn’t have any clothes on!”

Tommy sees only what he is trained to see.

The television-watching children of a man who wanted to foster the love of music in them were bought a piano. When he got home, he found them looking for the plug. People see what they want to see.

Herod was no different. A client king of the Roman Empire, he knew John the Baptist was a righteous and holy-man with an unusual message, but he saw only a threat.

The Jewish historian Josephus corroborates this in his Antiquities. Josephus describes how Herod knew people were massing around John the Baptist, greatly moved by John’s words, exhorting them to virtue, to justice, and to reverence for God.

He feared that such a strong influence over the people might lead to a revolt, and had John killed.

Mark’s Gospel puts John’s execution down to a bizarre request by Herod’s scheming wife Herodias at a family banquet. Bur both authors agree, John communicated an authentic experience of God.

Herod killed him but he couldn’t kill him off. Later on, according to Mark 6:14, when Herod heard what Jesus was doing, he was unsettled, haunted by the thought that John had been resurrected.

The God experience was living on.

For a King with a guilty conscience, here was a greater presence. Unable to risk the insecurity this experience entailed, Herod had beheaded John, and what he was intrigued by was now returning.

And how different are we? Do we want someone else to do our questing and questioning and struggling and thinking and praying and faith sharing, while we look on from a safe distance like the husband, who, after 30 years of watching television, says to his wife:

“Let’s do something really exciting tonight.”

Instantly this conjures up visions for her of an all night trip into the heart of the unexplored city, maybe galleries and nightclubs, and maybe a river trip, a hotel, or even a flight. Who knows?

“Great, she says!” “What shall we do?”, and eagerly awaits his response.

“Well……. we could swap chairs.”

This presence we don’t control, we try to tame or ignore.

Herod couldn’t be sure that his attempt to kill off the experience of God in John the Baptist would work, because trust in God is never final or certain, neat, safe or controllable. It seeks and moves and asks and explores. It opens itself and finds itself beyond its comfort zone, entering the uncertainty of a living faith outside the security of a dead religion.

In other words, we can’t put God into our box.

It’s worth remembering this when we want to tame God and make God understandable for our own purposes, treating God like our ideology, or our errand boy, or even an old lady who needs helping across the road.

God transcends us, banking up on all sides.

I wonder how often we trust God?

I was re-accquainted with an old friend recently. I found myself discussing faith with her. She said to me: “OK, so I’m prepared to accept there was someone called Jesus, and he was good to people.

“And let’s just imagine,” she added, “just for the sake of the discussion, that I am also prepared to accept that Jesus came back from the dead - because I won’t say anything is impossible.”

Modern physics suggests matter is energy, so why should it be? But that wasn’t her point anyway, so I waited for her to get to it.

“Even if Jesus did come back from the dead,” she finished off: “then, so what? What does it mean?”

Like anything else in life, in order to ring true, faith has to have a bearing on our experience. If it doesn’t, it is irrelevant.

I take seriously the perception of religion given out on television, because it reaches hearts and minds and it’s the only theology some people ever get, if you can call it theology.

So inevitably I end up watching people like Richard Dawkins, who was recently theologizing on Channel 4. In his own words then, he says this:

“According to scientific views of pre-history, Adam, the supposed perpetrator of the original sin, never existed in the first place … An awkward fact, which undermines the premise of St Paul’s whole sado-masochistic theory. Oh but of course the story of Adam and Eve was only ever symbolic wasn’t it? Symbolic? So Jesus had himself tortured and executed for a symbolic sin by a non-existent individual. Nobody not brought up in the faith could reach any verdict other than barking mad.”

Powerful stuff, but what St Richard doesn’t appreciate, if you’ll forgive me canonizing him, is that Jesus doesn’t have to mean to Saints you and I what Jesus meant to St Paul or St Augustine.

Because a living faith has never been a pinned down set of time bound ancient propositions received on authority, it is a personal encounter with a timeless God, here and now.

In the spiritual life, letting someone else do our thinking and questing and sharing for us is like being thirsty and asking someone to drink for us.

Anglican Bishop Hugh Montefiore, who died four years ago, was brought up in a Jewish family, but when he was 16, he was sitting in his study when he saw an apparition of Jesus saying: "Follow me." He converted. Experience is a basic truth. It can’t be disputed, and it should be shared.

I remember reading the entire New Testament for the first time whilst recovering on a train. Christ seemed to leap off the page and join me in the carriage.

I remember driving home from a hospital visit where someone was dying, and feeling shot through with God’s beyondness connecting people.

I remember sitting against a gatepost in Herefordshire, and suddenly had an awareness at a sub-atomic level. The narrative of 'I' had gone, and with it all sense of separateness. It was an experience of the dissolution of the whole ego construct and the body, which St Paul may have described as: ‘Not I, but Christ in me’.

The point is not me here, but that narratives and experiences are basic truths we should be sharing by letting our trust in God gently enter the ebb and flow of our everyday lives and conversations.

It’s not easy I know, and I can understand and sympathise with Richard Dawkins. “The Old Testament,” he says, “is the root of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The God of the Old Testament has got to be the most unpleasant character in all fiction,” he says. “Jealous and proud of it, petty, vindictive, unjust, unforgiving, racist, an ethnic-cleanser, urging his people on to acts of genocide.” But there were no Richard Dawkins figures when the Old Testament was written. The question in those days wasn’t: “How can you believe in God?” but: “How can you believe in that God?” The ancient world had so many Gods that tribalistic primitive images of God were inevitable. But when he reveals himself to people, God has got to work with what is there, and progress to something truer.

God has to be allowed to purify our ideas about God.

In an unstable world with freedom to evolve and grow, things are unpredictable enough to go belly up. So a God who enters this suffering and goes beyond it and redeems it is a God worth keeping.

This is the God in the man Jesus, which Pilate’s authority tried to kill off, just as Herod’s authority tried to kill off God in John the Baptist, so we need to be careful where we place authority today.

Take for example the view that there is nothing to life but solid mechanical physical matter, and our consciousness is accidentally dependent upon it. This popular science is unsupported by evidence. It is untested dogma, and the belief that mind is solid physical matter leads to another dogma that we are born for no reason and extinguished for no reason.

That is mindless science, while mindless religion, on the other hand can lead to idolatry. Our word idolatry comes from the Greek word eidolo-latria, which means image-worship, and the images in our minds are far more powerful than any statue or graven image, so I suggest we stop worshipping ideas about God, and start worshipping God.

There is a well-worn joke about God being a builder. God is a builder, the joke goes, because God is coming back, but no-one ever knows when.

The joke is on us until we stop waiting for God to show up in the future. Let us let God be God and be here and now.

WATCH OUT FOR THAT DITCH...

"Can a blind man lead a blind man? Will they not both fall into a pit?” says the parable.

A blind priest I know recently recalled how he was told that this parable was offensive to blind people. But he just finds it funny.

You don’t have to miss the point, even though it is embedded in a fairly ancient cultural context.

Religious revelations are always time bound, but Jesus parables ring eternally true.

Take this one, for example: “Judge not, lest you be judged.”

If we have our attention on the faults of others to the exclusion of our own weaknesses, then even with the best possible motives, we will be unable to help anyone into the clear.

In the spiritual life, it’s like a man whose arm is on fire. A second man spots him, and sees the urgent need to put out the fire, but rushes to the hosepipe without being aware it is connected to the petrol pump. Both of them will start to burn.

It takes proper awareness to be a positive influence in any situation, because whichever situation you enter is changed by the very fact that you have entered it. You don’t just observe, you participate. And wherever you go, there you are, taking the weather along with you as you go.

So we need to be aware of our own prejudices and emotions in the sacrament of the present moment. They affect the way we see things. People say 'Love is blind', but they are talking about human emotional attachment. Spiritual love is actually very clear sighted, because it is aware of its own emotions and attachments, rather than being controlled by them.

Jesus is open to what is there, and this encourages an open response, while blind prejudice encourages more of the same.

And how often do we set out to find whatever confirms our own prejudice, and then try to convince ourselves that we are discovering some objective truth?

Whether it is rushing into a pre-emptive war because we have projected our own fears outwards, or finding faults in our business competitors because we are insecure about ourselves, or failing to be compassionate with our fellow human because their neurosis and misery affects us.

We needn’t pretend, or shut ourselves away. But be aware.

With these parables, Jesus is trying to tell us that in the spiritual life, the attitude that: “I am OK only when the world around me is OK” simply won’t do. With that attitude, I won’t be OK, and nor will those around me.

But if our response is clear sighted, then it will also be accurate, and the world can be transformed, not because we absolutely must be there for people out of some compulsion that we feel, but because we are capable of being there for people without leading them into all our own ditches.

The rest is all detail.

BE FULLY HUMAN..

BUT NOT LIKE THIS…



OR THIS…



PERHAPS MORE LIKE THIS -



WHY?

Because we do not control our own birth and death.
Because we are not in control of the birth and death of the universe.
Because of the fifth dimension, where chance is not God.
Because although his name is abused, the energy of Christ is here.
Because the spirit of his 'Father' is not a delusion.
It is ours.

It stands to Reason.

CHRIST and PLATO - The Mystical Theology

Who really KNOWS God?


Two classic Platonic Christian works which address this question are both attributed to the man who was converted by St Paul at the Areopagus, a council in Athens.


And this happened shortly after Paul had identified the Greek statue of the Unknown God as the same God he had come to preach: `A few men became followers of Paul and believed. Among them was Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus.' (Acts 18:34). Eusebius tells us that this same Dionysius became the Bishop of Athens.1


But modern scholarship dates the references in he writings to the 5th or 6th century, and in the same way that the Apostles Creed is not believed to have been actually written by the Apostles, but is an attempt to express their belief, the works of Dionysius express the truth held by Christians influenced by Plato. They regarded the true world as One pure and eternal world which is only imitated by this changeable physical world of the senses which we now inhabit.


The Mystical Theology begins like this:

` O Trinity
beyond being
beyond divinity
beyond goodness
and guide of Christians in divine wisdom
direct us to the mystical summits
more than unknown and beyond light... '.


What could these terms: `beyond being', `beyond goodness', and `more than unknown' mean? To me, they express the Trinitarian Christian God as the creator and the source of our being, but also as a source so beyond our being that he himself does not depend on us being at all. He is not just the top story of our own universe when we work backwards from our physical to intellectual selves and beyond.


He is not dependent on anything so he does not need the creation in order to exist. In the same way, he is `beyond divinity' and `beyond goodness' because they too are of the creation - human ideas and expressions which he does not depend upon. In this way he is indeed the unknown God which St Paul identified him with. But, and this is important in The Mystical Theology, to be `more than unknown' to a human is not necessarily to become known - because God himself cannot logically be contained within a human mind he has created.


It is for this reason that Dionysius moves onto advising his reader ( presented in the Mystical Theology as Timothy) to:


` ...abandon all sensation and all intellectual activities, all that is sensed and intelligible, all non-beings and all beings,
thus you will unknowingly be elevated, as far as possible, to the unity of that beyond being and knowledge.'


We have the identification of the Trinity of Father Son and Holy Spirit with the One God, but also, the assertion that God does not depend upon these or any other mental constructs or upon anything else at all. And we then have the assertion that this is a state that we too might participate in: `by the irrepressible and absolving ecstastis of yourself and of all, and going away from all'.


What this means we cannot say, but the suggestion is that it feeds us and is to be experienced directly, without interpretation or description, once we drop created attempts at it - because it is not created itself. Dionysius warns Timothy that this is not for the `uninitiated' who are 'entangled in beings' and who `imagine nothing to be beyond beingly beyond beings' - a phrase which is itself a little tangled!!


But, a phrase which points to a presence behind all things - rather than an absence. The warning is disconcerting as it seems to set the Mystical Theology apart for a select few, which is the mark of a cult - but it should be remembered that Jesus himself spoke of those who had `ears to hear' (Matthew 11.15) and Paul said: `God has given them a spirit of stupor, eyes that they should not see and ears that they should not hear.' (Romans 11.8).


What Dionysyius is saying is that knowledge is of eternal truths, while belief is of ephemeral and contingent things. This is a Platonic statement, but The Mystical Theology sets it firmly in the Judeo Christian tradition:


`It is not to be taken lightly that the divine Moses was ordered first to purify himself, and again to be separated from those who were not pure ... yet ... he does not come to be with God himself; he does not see God -- for God is unseen -- but the place where God is ... and then Moses abandons those who see and what is seen and enters into the really mystical darkness of unknowing ... knowing beyond intellect by knowing nothing.'


What is it to `know nothing' - could it mean to know that God himself is no-thing - in that he is not a thing but the source of any and every-thing. The stress in all these works is that God is ineffable, and the divine name of God is a name. This going beyond of language about God to the source of our ability to create language about God is open to suspicion because its poetry is seen in other traditions.


When Dionysius talks of the cause of all as: `not greatness, not smallness, not equality, not inequality, not likeness, not unlikeness, not unmoved, not moved ... not something among what is not, not something among what is' one could be listening to the Upanishads.


And yet there is not only the message that All is One, but that all is from God, and the distinction that all that we can see and know is only a part of this God, and not the one God himself. Dionysius distinguishes between Platonism and Christianity by saying being is derived from God alone, and that divine names are names for the One God. All of this is echoed by continuing references to Christian scripture and to Jesus. These works are concerned with the reality behind the word, and this can be a deeply fulfilling view.


Existence exists in a very real way, but not here with our temporary existence and our contingent description. The Cappadocian Church Fathers themselves are said to have stated that they believed in God, but not that he exists!!2 But this is not a statement of atheism, rather an affirmation that God's existence is not ours -- and ours is the only existence human beings can positively describe.


The title of the last chapter affirms this in another way: `The cause of anything intelligible is not anything intelligible', and the first of the Letters which follows, to Gaius, picks up the theme: `If someone sees God and has understood what has been seen, he has not seen God but something of God among what is and what is known.'


The New Testament describes God as he who: `dwells in unapproachable light, and whom no human being has seen or can see' (Tim 6:16). So also the final Letter, 5, to Dorotheus: `divine darkness is the inaccessible light in which God is said to dwell invisibly'. It goes on: `into this darkness come all who are worthy to see and know God', and refers to David's statement that: `such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain.' (Psalm 139:6).


The letters interpret Paul's statement that God's judgements are `unsearchable' (Rom 11:33) his gift `indescribable' (2 Cor 9:15) and his peace `transcends all understanding' (Phil 4:7) as demonstrating how Paul `discovered that beyond all and has known that beyond intellect-ion: it is beyond all, being cause of all.'


Dinosysius explains Jesus' miracles as: `overfull and always beyond being coming truly into being' and showing us: `a new divine-human activity.'


He firmly expresses Christian faith: `The sudden is what is brought forward, against hope ... I believe the theology has intimated this in reference to the love of man in Christ: the beyond being had proceeded from hiddenness into a manifested taking on of being in a human way. It is hidden after the manifestation, or, to speak more divinely, it is hidden in the manifestation. For this remains hidden about Jesus: the mystery in him is not brought forward by any logos or intellect. Rather, it remains ineffable in being spoken, and unknown in being thought.'


SO, ineffable in being spoken, and unknown in being thought. The task of all scripture may be to express the inexpressible, but these works express Christian doctrine in an ultimate way, impossible with our positive statements about `knowing God'. PROVIDED GOD IS REAL, IF ANYONE IS REALLY KNOWING, IT IS NOT US.


Footnotes -


1 Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers, series two volume one. Eusebius' Church History (III.4.11) http://www.ccel.org/fathers2/NPNF2-01/Npnf2-01-08.htm#P1497_696002 visited on 23 Oct 06

2 Negative Theology in the Christian Tradition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophatic_theology visited on 23 Oct 06

Bibliography -

Jones, John David., 'The Hidden and Manifest Divinity: A study and translation of the Divine Names and Mystical Theology of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite'. (Boston: Boston College Graduate School, 1976)

- Louth, Andrew. 'Denys the Areopagite'. (USA. Morehouse Barlow 1989. ISBN 0 8192 1486 8)

YOU BROOD OF VIPERS!

Life is fragile, and one day this person who is a bit jaded,battered and confused in life decides that God might just be real, and he might just be available. So he decides to give it a go by turning up at church. Picture the scene and imagine this person is us, is me, and is you.

You step into the church building slowly, wondering what you are letting yourself in for. What is there to lose really? You might even perceive God somehow, and at the very worst you won't, and it'll all just be dull or slightly irritating. So anyway, you are getting a feel for the place now and the unusual smell and atmosphere, and you are deciding where to sit and settle down quietly when all of a sudden you spot the vicar making his way towards you. No sweat you say to yourself, this is the Church of England after all, if he notices you at all he'll probably just smile and say something polite and forgettable, and then you can just smile back and find your seat.

But this particular vicar looks a bit crazed, and suddenly he jumps up onto the top of the pew right in front of you, fixes his stare into you and starts: "You viper..! You snake..! What do you think you are slithering in here for?"

"Erm, Pardon?"

"What right have you got to slide up and expect God? What made you crawl out of your cosy hole and come in here?"

Well, its not dull but it's hardly a service with a smile is it? This crazed vicar is doing exactly what John the Baptist is doing to the people who turn up looking for a baptism in the Jordan and a relationship with God. So what exactly does John the Baptist think he is doing then - has the desert sun addled his overheated brain? After comparing the people to serpents he tells us that God won't really be there for us like a parent just because we happen to be in the family.

But he doesn't stop there. He goes on to say that if we don't repent and bear good fruit we'll be chopped down like dead trees and burnt, or if we don't repent and produce good grain we'll be thrown into the air by a winnowing fork, and blown away like chaff in the wind. Well I don't know about you but I have had better welcomes in this world. It's hardly 'Hello there, good to see you again, shall we talk about the weather, take care and do mind how you go now won't you'. Would you be back again the following week to be called a reptile which needed burning?

And yet Luke tells us that this is John the Baptist preaching good news to the people. Does it make you like me wonder how heart warming John's really great news is or how cheery his utterly amazing news might be....

But then the really funny thing is that next these people stay on.
They ask John what they will have to do to be with God.
So he tells them.

Share clothes and food and to be happy with your pay. He tells the despised taxmen not to overcharge people and the powerful soldiers not to threaten and extort money from anyone. Most of all though he talks about repentance and how it is necessary.

Repentance? What does that mean then?

In the New Testament repentance is translated from the Greek word metanoia, which literally means to think differently after, to have an after thought, or to have a change of heart and mind, or a change of consciousness.

At the start of this story I spoke about life being fragile, but that God might just be real, and that he might just be here for us, so one day when we are feeling a bit jaded, battered and confused in life we decide to give him a real go. Maybe that means we think differently after God, we have an after thought, a change of heart and mind and consciousness.

It is a short life we have here, and St Isaac of Syria said: "This life has been given you for repentance. Do not waste it on vain pursuits.".

John the Baptist is not very polite and very middle of the road Church of England but he is saying that if God is real for us we will change, and be different to the way we are when he is not real for us, that when God is more to us than just being in the right place and saying the right three letter word then we will see differently after being in that same place and saying that same word. We will have a change of consciousness, and our consciousness is one of the few things our science has not been able to fully pin down about us. It cannot be fully measured and understood and in that sense it is the place where the creator can have a real life of his own within us.

We can repent and rethink and notice the parts of our hearts and minds which always fail to produce good fruit being burned up. We can allow our useless dead old chaff to blow away into the wind like it would have done from a Jewish farmers' winnowing fork, and we can spiritually build up our grain stores to give us new life despite ourselves.

"His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire." I like to think of Jesus as that unquenchable fire, which we can all move towards and which we can all move away from.

If we only see him as an on off switch which we either assent or fail to assent to once and for all time then we won't be allowing God to change our consciousness for real. We all know people can reflect the warmth and light of the fire at times and in ways which don't seem outwardly religious or Christian.

But this is exactly what John the crazed Baptist wants to say to us, that God loves us and can be real for us provided we keep on turning to him and allowing him to change our minds and to to reveal the real fruit of good news, and despite our short and fragile journey in this creation.

The people by the Jordan questioned whether John the Baptist might be the Christ, and so John answered them saying, "I baptize you with water, but he who is mightier than I is coming, the strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie."

The untying of sandals was a slave's task, and this slave John ended up being beheaded for his calling people snakes. But the good news he preached to God's people is a journey to take, not an place to end.

I thirst for truth

I am sure some of you will have experienced this sort of thing yourselves, but one of my sons once came home from primary school talking about: “Lord Jesus Price” and: “Deliver us from Eagle.” And the other son is at that stage where he has that insatiable thirst for knowledge which can be infuriating. Knowledge isn't always the full picture.

Every answer you can give just creates another busy question. The other day he asked us: “Why do people have foreheads?” That one wasn't too hard to deal with but I did struggle more with: "What is DNA"? I answered this one by talking about brown eyes and brown hair, but then came the killer punch: "But how come I have your DNA if I came from Mum?" Then there was a very long pause as I was floored..... Then: "Oh I know," he said, "when you were kissing!" I felt so relieved I started talking all about test tube cloning and Dolly the sheep, until another of the children suddenly said: "Oh, so I understand now. Mum is going to turn into a sheep."

I had failed miserably to properly satisfy the thirsty quest for knowledge, but I am working on it. This thirst is a great thing though because it isn't always easily put off. I know some of you have experienced the really thirsty children ask you: “But who created God?"

This is another infuriating but brilliant question, although it IS a little easier for me to tackle than explaining human DNA transfer without mentioning any of the details.

But to answer: "Who created God?" we need to remember why we can't get away with saying that the universe has just always been around in a sort of spiritual steady state - Because we know that the universe had a beginning if we are to trust our astrophysicists, who agree that the Big Bang happened about 14 billion years ago. The fraction of the universe that we can actually see is still expanding outwards as a result, and we call 75 per cent of the stuff of the universe dark energy -- because we don't know where it came from. But it is driving the expansion out which could mean everything will eventually cool down so much it will all die.

Of course the Big Bang doesn't prove the Big Banger, but let's follow the thirst for knowledge and think about this. Each of us knows that our individual human life had a beginning and will have an end, and we each know that all natural life is much bigger than our own lifespan. In the same way, eternal life could be much bigger than the natural lifespan of our universe. But this eternity we call God did not begin like the universe began. Creator God is beyond the universe and beyond our created thought processes. I know I have tried to bring myself to accept that before birth and after death there is only oblivion, but I cannot. Again, no-one can prove any of this with the thirst for knowledge alone, but as human beings, the thirst for knowledge is not our only thirst. We also have a thirst for truth, to use a high-folluting phrase.

And contrary to what Richard Dawkins wishes to say, Biology isn't the only way to explore truth. "Seek Truth" said the Greek philosopher seeker Plato. "What is truth?" said the Roman governor politician Pontius Pilate. And, according to John's gospel, "I am the Truth" said Jesus.

But maybe this truth talk is all a bit too grand for you. Yet God’s thirst for us is an experience, not just our statement of faith. It is a thirst which can be quenched provided we act on the statement of faith and walk the Christian truth. As the early church Father Irenaeus once put it: "God became human so that humans could become God".

But a word of caution for us human beings too, because we like to settle for a different thirst on the way -- our thirst for power. We don’t have to look far to see the effects of this today and every day. And in his own day, Jesus ran into trouble by publicly acknowledging a quite different source of power to the power humankind seeks, a quite distinct power to the power which the occupying Roman forces and the Jewish religious authorities were concerned with. As he broke bread and drank wine it wasn’t the worldy empire or the temple transaction kind of power he proclaimed. It was a higher claim on us, which he called the Kingdom. What good did it do him though? Did it quench his thirst? How would we know? Well when he was about die for his trouble in living out God's power, he did speak about his thirst - according to John 19:28:

“Later, knowing that all was now completed, and so that the Scripture would be fulfilled, Jesus said: 'I am thirsty.' A jar of wine vinegar was there, so they soaked a sponge in it, put the sponge on a stalk of the hyssop plant, and lifted it to Jesus' lips. When he had received the drink, Jesus said, 'It is finished.' With that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit."

What is this scripture which was fulfilled? A reference to Psalm 22, the cry to God for help. Jesus the Hebrew God man would have known this scripture well. It goes like this:

“Scorn has broken my heart and has left me helpless; I looked for sympathy, but there was none, for comforters, but I found none. They put gall in my food and gave me vinegar for my thirst.”
So did he quench his thirst? Vinegar is the very last thing a thirsty person needs - I am not a farmer but it is like giving gall - which is a parasitic growth on a plant - to the hungry. Unsatisfying. In his own suffering thirst during death, cheap vinegary wine is all he was offered.

I may not be accquainted with countryside terms like gall but I am told that alcohol is dehydrating and not hydrating. I must try it one day :)

But it wouldn't have helped Jesus much.

When the boy of God suffered and died, as all of us here will also suffer and die, perhaps it was a different type of thirst altogether which was being quenched.

Jesus' life on earth had been transparent to the transcendent creator of our natural universe. What he did represented the meeting of our human thirst for God and God’s thirst for us humans. And we are told that Jesus said to a fellow sufferer on the cross: "Today you will be with me in Paradise".

We may not ever be crucified on a cross but none of us can avoid being fellow sufferers, and we certainly can't avoid death. But we can choose to seek to live out the eternal life which can contain and fulfill our natural lives, so that we too will be what we were intended to be - images of God – people guided by a power beyond our tiny little lives and beyond the beginning and end of our wonderful but unreliable natural universe.

I want to thank you for reading, and ask that all of us as a Royal Priesthood pray through our lives as we live and love and suffer and die. More than that I pray that we will all watch and experience the resurrection who quenches a thirst for a truth altogether different to the truths of DNA transfer.

So may the power who acted on Jesus raise us to life in him.