Month: March 2013

Through the Bible in a Year – March 5

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The Scheme for March and April can be found here

Lev 8-9; Romans 14; Psalm 80

Christian faith can only be known in and through the community of faith, Christ’s body, the Church. Jesus tells us ‘when two or more are gathered in my name, there I am, in the midst of them’. This it must be said is at best a minor note in much contemporary Christian faith. Church, although we all know better, is still primarily related to in terms of place and the services – worship and pastoral – which it provides.

This community of faith reveals the Life of Christ in the world, but in order to do so, each of its members relate to one another only in and through Christ. Thus the emphasis on not judging one another – that we must consider that each member lives to the Lord.

Paul warns against our actions causing offence to ‘weaker’ brethren. Here the issue is eating foods which may have been offered in pagan sacrifice. Paul knows that this is not a matter which should concern the believers, but that not everyone is sufficiently grown in faith to have come to this realisation, thus the more mature should refrain from eating such food, for fear effectively that the eyes of the members of the community ‘younger in faith’ fall from looking to Christ and instead fall upon what they might yet consider to be unclean practices.

The clear teaching of Jesus, not to judge one another, is given clear commentary here by Paul. Of course it sounds hoplessly idealistic, unless we take the first commandment with complete seriousness. We are to Love God with all our heart, and all our soul, and all our mind, and all our strength. In other words, our eyes are always to be fixed on Christ. This is in as far as it is possible a physical requirement, that we do not as it were stand beside our brethren, looking first at Christ, then at them, then at Christ and telling him what we have seen in our kindred, rather that we Only see our brothers and sisters in and through Christ – remembering ‘that there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.’ That we who were guilty have been pronounced innocent in and through Christ, as have our brethren.

The Church as a body is one that should always be growing more and more into the fullness of Christ, as each individually plays his or her part and grows deeper into the reality of the new life we have been given in Him. This is what we are all called to – and our focus is not the behaviour of our brethren, but the Life revealed to un in Christ.

If our vision is not captivated by Christ – that we fail to see our brothers and sisters in Him, that we fail to see that they too are redeemed and are being sanctified, that we see rather their faults and judge them – then clearly we too have much growing to do.

Through the Bible in a Year – March 4

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The Scheme for March and April can be found here

Lev 6-7; Romans 12-13; Psalm 79

We move from the Sacrifice of Leviticus – to the response to God’s mercy – that we present our bodies as living Sacrifices – holy and acceptable to God – which is your ‘Reasonable’ or ‘Spiritual’ act of worship.

The Greek word here can be translated either way. Of course in view of God’s mercy – it is Entirely reasonable – were it not for the fact that sacrificing ourselves goes against everything the world tells us to do. In the twisted understanding of wider culture – self sacrifice is at times pathologised – we feel sorry for those who live their lives for others and not for themselves.

We say they have missed out on so much – and the siren voices warn us against such ‘reasonable’ acts of worship. Thus our churches are by and large comfortable clubs for the religiously inclined – rather than communities which in their mutual love and service one for the other cause the passer by to shake their heads and pity us for such ‘sad behaviour’

The Risen Christ says ‘unless you deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me, you cannot be my disciple’. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts it – when Christ bids a man come, he bids him come and die.’ It is that dying, that is not the end of our discipleship – but its beginning. the Christian Life begins with the surrender of our lives – this is our reasonable act of worship. It is only then that we begin the long hard work of the battle with sin – indeed, without that response to Christ, to die and so live, we will not embark on that battle.

Unfortunately . . . no, that is far to weak . . . Tragically, we have substituted religious formulas, intellectual assents to doctrines for the obedience to Christ’s call. The New Life is Christ is unknown to us, for we are content with a religious version of our old life.

Paul towards the end of chapter 12 of Romans unpacks what such a life looks like. There is no ‘sitting around’ enjoying the presence of ‘god’ about it. There is nothing about having the correct doctrines – rather it is embodied obedience – the Body has been offered to God – so Love is the hallmark, indeed we are to compete with one another in this – challenging one another to love more and more – we give and give – contributing to the needs of our brothers and sisters, giving hospitality, not to our friends, but to strangers – we feed our hungry enemies, we overcome evil with Good. Thus in our Living we enter into the Triumph of the one who by laying down his life overcame the final enemy, death, itself.

The Christian walk has not begun until this sacrifice has been made.

Of course, it is hard to stomach in an age so full of itself, but our forebears knew and lived better . . .

‘go into your room, and close the door’

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For all the talk that people are increasingly spiritual, which from the point of view of Christian faith is neither here nor there, it is evident both statistically and in the reality of church life, that we pray less than ever before.

There is something about prayer which goes entirely contrary to the Spirit of this Age. Of course it also went against each and every previous zeitgeist, but it is this age that has seen such precipitate decline in prayer (along with public worship, generosity in giving alms and of course fasting as a central discipline of the the faith).

Jesus counsel on prayer, in Matthew 6 should really be seen not as a simple instruction, but rather as a disposition of the Life that is eternal – that from our perspective, it is hidden.

This is something which our age, perhaps above all others cannot bear. From every corner, we are exhorted to be ‘Out there’, to ‘Express ourselves’. Through Twitter and Facebook, through talk shows, and endless opinion polls – we are ‘extroverted’. Our own sense that our lives are of Significance, indeed of Ultimate significance is remorselessly fed and so we ‘put ourselves out there in many ways’ . . . and yes that does include blogging.

But this apparent ‘excuvatus’, is no more or less than the massive projection of ourselves, the paradoxical evidence that we are ‘incurvatus se’, turned in ourselves, self obsessed, thinking that our lives are of such interest to others that we must detail them for the sake of our ‘friends’.

Jesus is frequently, conversely, hiding – the source of his life is not himself – public exposure is shunned – rather He is Revealed. He goes secretly to the feast after his brethren have exhorted him to ‘‘Leave here and go to Judea so that your disciples also may see the works you are doing; for no one who wants to be widely known acts in secret. If you do these things, show yourself to the world.’

“No one who wants to be widely known acts in secret.” In our age it is the height of wisdom – and it is Revealed in scripture as unbelief.

We are exhorted by Paul, to pray continually – it is the call to the inner room – the call which Orients us to the Truth that our Life is no longer our own, but His. Insofar as it is Seen, it is Revealed, it does not need to be paraded. Indeed it is not ours to parade.

To go into our room and close the door is The disposition of Life.

If we are to know Life in ourselves and the church, this is perhaps The Lesson we most need to learn.

Sermon for Lent 3 – 2013 – Year C ‘Time is running out’

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Sermon for Lent 3 – 2013 – Year C
Isa 55:1-9
Ps 63:1-8
1 Cor 10:1-13
Luke 13:1-9

‘Time is running out’

Whilst I was on retreat I celebrated my 51st birthday – and to celebrate, did something I love and actually haven’t done since I arrived here – I climbed Ben Lomond above Queenstown. Like it’s namesake in Scotland it’s a friendly hill, a gentle climb, and has the same amount of ascent as Ben Nevis, Scotland’s highest mountain and an old friend. So the day triggered many memories for me. In particular, as I skipped up and down in five hours, it triggered a memory of my father.

When I was growing up, we always went as a family to North Wales for a week’s holiday in a rented caravan – and sometimes, we’d climb Mount Snowdon – the highest point in Wales – and a serious hill – Sir Edmund Hillary and the rest trained there for their ascent of Everest. the particular memory it triggered was of the last time I remember hill walking with my father. Together with my mother and one of my brothers, we set off up what is called the Watkin path – a less popular way up than many, it is a long and very easy climb until you come to a large rock, at which point the path turns what we might call vertiginous – Steep it most definitely is. As teenage lads we raced on ahead to the bottom of this climb, and when my parents finally caught up – they announced they weren’t going any further – Dad couldn’t manage it. He was 50. As young lads we just thought, ‘he’s getting old’, as I guess did he.

So on my 51st birthday, as i wandered back down Ben Lomond – congratulating myself on conquering the hill two hours faster than the times shown on the DOC notices, I remembered my dad and thought once more of how things have changed and how now – we are so fortunate to have trained ourselves to stay alive longer. . . to our infinite cost

We live in perhaps a unique age, an age where we fear death far more than we fear God. My father’s generation was the last where Church was in any sense normative.
The vertiginous decline in the church both in England and here in New Zealand began around the time I was born – and the last 50 years have seen unparalleled growth both in the arena of medical technology and interest in bodily health – keeping fit – putting death off as long as we can.  When God is wiped from the horizon of life, as he is for many, or reduced to the role of Chaplain to Our lives as many understand Christian faith, then this is the obvious thing to do. Life is short, we need to make the most of it and to do our best to extend it as long as we can. We have trained ourselves to imagine that the goal is to stay alive longer – we are perhaps thus more averse than ever to hearing the costly word of Grace which tells us that to know Life in its fulness we must first die to the life we have.

As we have journeyed thus far through Lent, I have been at pains to re-emphasise the message of Ash Wednesday, with its focus on our mortality and need for repentance towards God, that we might know the Life he has for us. But it would be all too easy to turn that into a message about preparing for our physical death, which is only part of what we are called to. Rather the confrontation with our mortality is intended to Wake us up to the seriousness of our condition – to bring us to repentance Now.
So, Jesus points to the deaths of the Galileans whose blood Pilate mixed with his sacrifices, and to the death of those upon whom the tower of Siloam fell, not to raise abstract questions about the goodness of God or the evil of men – but to confront his hearers with the FACT of their deaths and the Urgent need for repentance – and the heart of Repentance of that appeal, is that this life is not about Us, but about God – a theme which I picked up on last week and our gospel today takes us deeper into.
The seriousness of this we pick up when we realise that Jesus really is Not interested in our questions – he recognises that at their heart, they are but carefully concealed means of avoiding the Cost of discipleship. We avoid it by insisting that he makes sense of it all for us, we unlike the fishermen want to stick with the boats, not leave our lives behind, and so we start interrogating Jesus, ourselves.

I remember Nicky Gumbel, the driving force behind the Alpha course describing an encounter with a young man who had LOADS of questions. He, rather wisely I think, asked him – ‘If I answer all your questions, will you become a Christian – the young man thought for a while and said, ‘probably not’, and Nicky was thereby saved what many of us have discovered to be a futile path. The list of questions is unmasked as unbelief.
I further remember that on our website we pride ourselves on being a church where we don’t check in our brains at the door when we come in, nor our faith at the door when we leave. But, in this, there is an insidious trap. For if our minds have not been consecrated to Christ, if we have not died to our sinful desire for Knowledge of God, to get him worked out, then as is the case with all too many churches today, that apparently Christian trait, thinking, takes us further and further away from Christ. St Paul calls us to be transformed, by the renewing of our minds. Minds that are not given over to the love and worship of Christ, to a sincere desire to follow him wherever he goes, to acknowledge that God’s thoughts are not our thoughts and that often the ways Christ leads us will make no sense to us, as it did not to the first disciples – such minds will always rebel at the Truth of the Gospel call. We start by willingly laying down our lives – our ways and our thoughts, and asking Christ to renew them – for we are helpless in and of ourselves so to do, dead in sin as we are.

So people ARE asking Jesus, ‘what about those Galileans – Pilate mixed their blood with his sacrifices!!’ Or those on whom the tower of Siloam fell!! They must have been great sinners!! And Jesus is not interested in their questions [note how our questions have swung 180 degrees round – now we look at that and Say – does God exist?? ] Terrible things happen and are not seen as evidence for God but against God. Our questions, distorted by our disobedient hearts seem as reasonable to us, indeed moreso, for “we aren’t so primitive and superstitious as those ridiculous people who came to Jesus” . . . – but Jesus is having none of it, he knows that at the heart of all our questions is the desire to keep him one step removed from our lives.

Face Reality, Jesus says! Away with your sepeculations – LOOK! People Die! Unless you repent, you all will perish likewise!
Jesus does not look for a meaning in those deaths – Death is the ultimate meaningless event, for it is the absence of Good, it is the absence of Life – it has No Meaning.  It is the wages of Sin. And Jesus says, your time is coming, the sands are running out, your death is inevitable – the question is will it like these deaths be meaningless?? Repent!

But, we may ask . . . how does repentance change this?? and the simple answer is this – it gets our dying out of the way. The whole point of the Christian life is that it is not about our lives – it is about the Life of God – so we might say with Paul, We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.
Whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s – we no longer belong to ourselves, we belong to Christ. We are no longer the centre of things – the lives we live are not about us, rather in all we do we are instruments of Christ – the one who has conquered Death. In dying to ourselves we die the only meaningful death there is, the only death that produces the fruit of Life!

We cannot begin to be Christian without this – it is the meaning of our baptism – we are baptised into the death of Christ – Baptism is The Sign that this life is not about us – we begin by dying. Discipleship is impossible without this.

Jesus then goes on to tell a parable, of the fig tree, and I want to think very briefly about this idea of ‘the self centered life’ from another perspective, for the worldview of Scripture is Corporate – it is about a body of people. And bodies of people can be just as self centered. Indeed perhaps The Clash Jesus has with the Pharisees is precisely this – in them we see a people totally turned in on themselves, defending the barricades, defining their own life together.
Well, the Diocese and the life of the churches of the diocese has been much on my mind these past weeks – and I have to say I was utterly stunned by the timeliness of this  parable of Jesus, as time runs out for us here. The Word of God is inexhaustible and I noticed something I had never seen before.  As Jesus tells the story of the Barren fig tree, he says this ‘A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the gardener, “See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?” I had never seen those last words of the owner of the tree – ‘Why should it be wasting the soil?’ Why should it be draining the ground of resources and not producing fruit?? And this really hit me like a hammer blow – for this reminded forcibly of many if not most parishes I have ever known, that their goal was to survive. As one of my former bishops would constantly complained, both privately and publicly – he was sick and tired of hearing parishes say – ‘as long as it sees me out’ – as long as the resources don’t run dry before I die – or clergy who said – ‘as long as there’s a pension scheme in place for me’ Parishes who demanded to have a vicar – even though there were not the resources for them, who gave next to nothing to the parish financially, but who wanted someone to be there for them. And as I sat through Diocesan council this week and heard the words ‘The key question is how we can continue to provide ministry . . .’ All I could hear were the words of Jesus – ‘Why should it be wasting the soil?’

‘It will see me out’ – ‘it will provide for my needs’ – the church exists to look after me – and actually who can blame people for thinking that way – the Pastoral model of church is the only model we know- we grew up with it, and our forebears, from generation to generation – it is all we have known. And likewise those who came to Jesus with their questions, and likewise us to when we come with ours – it is the way of life we have been trained into, in the same way I had conditioned myself to stay alive longer and so could still get up the hill.

To us all, the Gospel is Christ and his Word – unless you repent, you will likewise perish! The Church does not exist as an instrument of pastoral care for its own, but as the means by which the fruit of the life of God is made present in the world – We do not exist for ourselves – for we no longer live for ourselves but for Christ – it is the meaning of our baptism. Unless we repent we will likewise die meaningless deaths, fruitless, no seed in the ground to bear more life. I cannot but think of that image of the fruitless deaths of the galileans and those on whom the tower fell, I cannot think of the fruitless fig tree, without seeing what seems to lie ahead for parishes in this diocese. But the gospel is always a word of Grace – Time Is running out – indeed those words of the servant are very prescient at this moment – “Sir, let it alone for one more year until I dig around it and feed it – If it bears fruit next year, well and good; If not you can cut it down” It is nearly a year since the bishop told us we had two years – We have a year – a Year of Grace – may it be according to that word of grace made known to us in Christ and his gracious command to Repentance

Amen

Through the Bible in a Year – March 3

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The Scheme for March and April can be found here

Lev 4-5; Romans 11; Psalm 78 vs 32-end

One of the great themes of Paul’s teaching is against boasting. Insofar as he boasts, he boasts in his humiliations – those things which make him nothing. In his correspondence with the Corinthians, he berates them for their boasting over Spiritual gifts.

Central to his thinking is that boasting is inappropriate, for all is by grace, not works. In other words,we have what we have purely by God’s unmerited goodness – and that very often if not always that Grace is mediated through the giants on whose shoulders we stand – that we have not lifted ourselves us – rather we have been lifted up.

As Mary reminds us in the Maginificat, he has exalted the humble and meek – but he has scattered the proud in the vain imaginings of their hearts.

Throughout the story of the people of God as told in the Old Testament, in worship they are continuously reminded of that dependence on Grace – the sacrificial system, at the heart of their worship is meant in large part to act a s reminder of their utter dependence on Grace, and that it is only through the death of another, that they have life. [We in Western technological societies, have little sense of the care of the shepherd for sheep in such cultures as that described to us in Leviticus – the sheep was not a unit of industrial production, it was a living being – created according to our deep story on the same day as the human]

And so as we shall see later, as the people approach the promised land, they are warned against the boastfulness that says, ‘by the strength of my right hand I gained all this’. In many ways our ‘advanced’ civilisation has this refrain written through it. Our educational systems all are geared towards the myth of the self made person, to the point often of effectively removing all responsibility for ‘growth’ from the birth family. We are as it were being taught to be greedy and boastful, although of course we would never call it that.

Our ancestors in faith, for all their failings took these deep sins – the deadly sins – Pride, Anger, Lust, Envy, Gluttony, Avarice and Sloth – seriously – that they were DEADLY. Generally we live in a culture that ignores history, that we stand on the shoulders of others, that our lives are lived at the expense of others, and we find the idea of blood sacrifice ‘uncultured’ or ‘primitive’.

It is only those who are utterly unaware of themselves who can think this way – and also only those who are utterly unaware of themselves that can actually not even begin to comprehend the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God.

Paul, and the Levitical law have one purpose – to remind us that our Election is to humility.

Hard as we may find it to believe – this is Election to Life – for it is Election to humiliation, in the way of Christ, who made himself nothing.

It is through his humiliation, that we find life. Boasting is excluded, for it separates us from Christ, as so many of the Israelites were, though elect – their election became the source of their falling away.

Let us not ignore the Fullness of the reality of the Life to which we have been called.

Through the Bible in a Year – March 2

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The Scheme for March and April can be found here

Lev 1-3; Romans 10; Psalm 78 vs 1-31

‘Of the best that thou hast given, Earth and Heaven render thee’

First today, we note the Psalm. The neglect of the Psalms in the life of the church is a grievous omission. Nothing perhaps better exemplifies the narcissistic temperament of so much of contemporary Christianity than the neglect of the Psalms – for where else in all sacred scriptures are a people so unremittingly self critical. Where else are we so honest with God, most especially about our own faults than in the Psalms. Their place in the liturgy of God’s people down through the ages, the prayer book by which Christ so thoroughly identified himself with us, must be restored if we are to move more fully into the life that God wishes to offer us – a life free of dissimulation and conceits, a life of Honesty and Truthfulness. The Psalms, in rehearsing our sorry history, do not leave us with the hubristic satisfaction of saying, ‘look how far we have come’!

Viewed in such a light, thus our Salvation is very Great – as the writer to the Hebrews puts it ‘How shall we escape if we ignore so great a salvation?’ A New and Living way opened for us. And at its heart is sacrifice. The Sacrificial system is marked out by the words, the best, the choice, the unblemished. As the various offerings are outlined in the opening chapters of Leviticus, this is a recurrent theme, and indeed later its failure to be heeded is the source of the sharpest denunciation of the prophets. These sacrifices are not propitiatory, they are Sacrifices of Praise – they are not to elicit Salvation, they are in response to it. Those who know they have been forgiven much, love much.

The Psalms keep us reminded of the scope of God’s salvation – all we can do is our reasonable act of worship – to offer our souls and bodies, as living sacrifices, in the pattern of the One who offered up himself.

What are we afraid of?

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I very clearly remember my father’s 40th birthday

I remember how old he seemed

I also vividly remember an incident from his 51st year, when he was just a few months younger than I am now. It was a family holiday and, as was our custom, we’d spent a week in a caravan on the coast of North Wales. One day, I guess the weather was clement, we decided to climb Yr Wydffa [Snowdon to the uninitiates – the highest mountain in England and Wales, and yes it is a mountain – Edmund Hillary trained there for his ascent of Everest, and I’ve sat several times in the bar where he and the rest of the team relaxed after a day testing themselves on the ice clad cliffs of Cloggy]

My memory was of how my dad stopped at the Gladstone Rock, not because he was pausing, he just couldn’t go any further.

The other week, I ‘celebrated’ my 51st birthday by climbing Ben Lomond above Queenstown: as straightforward a climb as it’s namesake just north of Glasgow; as much climbing as ‘The Ben’; and with views from the summit every bit as good as the latter. I whipped up and down in 5 hrs and remembered my dad, and thought of how I’d been trained to stay alive longer. (My father died at 63 from advanced heart disease. Of course we weren’t as alert to, (or troubled by??), such things in those days, we just thought he couldn’t get up the hill because he was old . . . as did he)

It strikes me that by and large the people of my dads generation were the last that weren’t obsessed with ‘keeping fit’, ‘cardiac health’, etc. The last that were in some sense accepting of ‘three score and ten’. They were also in my experience the last generation for whom Christian life was in some sense ‘the norm’

Even at 51, I’m a bit of an anomaly in seeking to be a disciple of Jesus, my children may as well be from Mars.

It also strikes me that these two facts are not unrelated.

Jesus calls us to an act of profound self forgetfulness, to live as though dead. Put another way, to get our dying out of the way ahead of time, to put aside our desires to live forever, in order that we might Live.

Perhaps my birthday ascent of Ben Lomond wasn’t the feat I’d so complimented myself on. I realised I’d been taught by the world that the real thing was to avoid death, thus making discipleship impossible.

Through the Bible in a Year – March 1

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The Scheme for March and April can be found here

Exodus 39-40; Romans 9; Psalm 77

So Moses finished the work . . . then the cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the LORD filled the Tabernacle.

So God finished all the work that he had done . . .

And God will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and he will be their God

The Word became flesh and tabernacled amongst us, and we have seen his Glory

Throughout the entire narrative of the Bible, like the threads of Gold, blue, purple and crimson, the purposes of God are being worked out – all the while moving to the fulfilment of the new heaven and the new earth, and always prefiguring it.

The Arena of the worship of God was always meant to be Creation . . . God walking in the garden in the cool of the Day and the layout of the tabernacle, with its divisions and lights and sea, and Ark of the Covenant perfectly models the Created order.

In these last days, God himself becomes the tabernacle in Christ, and his people, the church his dwelling place.

The Saving work of God woven throughout the whole story and thus St Paul as he speaks of the Israelites, his kindred in the flesh, he too cannot but speak of God’s work throughout, his word coming down through Patriarchs and prophets in a word of Hope, that at the last, God will be all and in all – that Israel’s unbelief is somehow part of all that God is accomplishing in and through Christ.

For now we see, as through a glass darkly – like Moses we cannot bear the full weight of Glory – we are not yet made perfect in Love, so do not see as he sees. But One does, one who is Love incarnate, dwelling amongst us, and who like Obedient Israel, who camp and break camp as the cloud stops or moves, only does what he sees the Father doing.

At the Last he will weave his vision into the hearts and minds even of frail human flesh. It is of a whole.

[Once more I note that these are like those things which Paul sees in a vision, of which one may not speak, perhaps lacking a sense of the Holy in our age, it is only modern artists who try to portray the tabernacle]