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The Scheme for March – April can be found here

Jos 10-11; Tit 1-3; Psalm 136

I grew up in a church tradition which looked down on ‘mindless repetition’

It seems to me many years later that this was foolish on more than one count

Firstly it was INCREDIBLY judgmental in more ways than one – it presumed that people were just saying things without thinking, it presumed that repetition was in itself a poor substitute for what transpired eventually to be mere novelty (who can honestly remember all those NEW songs that were SO with it :), it assumed that if the mind was not engaged nothing was, which so privleleges the mind [and thus a sophisticated ‘intelligent’ elite] in a way that Scripture never does.

Secondly, following on from the last of those examples, it showed a complete lack of understanding of how we learn deep truth – learn things so that they become second nature. We do this all around us all the time without thinking about it. I drive a car. My conscious mind cannot be engaged all the time on every aspect, indeed most (95%) of driving is ‘unthinking’ – and I could multiply examples many times over. Oh that we so deep learned the things of faith that they passed into our unconscious and were JUST LIVED! 🙂

Thirdly it completely overlooked the value of what was being repeated. Repetition in itself was seen as a bad thing (see note above about novelty). Actually as human beings we seem to be hard wired for novelty – it sets off our chemical responses in the brain – with terrible effect in more ways than I can even begin to recount. God’s ‘new thing’ (behold I am doing a new thing) is the death and resurrection of Jesus!! There is not a long list of new things to keep uas entertained and away from boredom – no rather we go into the DEPTHS of this ONE new thing.

So our Psalm today . . . of course in Joshua and Titus we may find many things to be distracted, angry, disturbed, confounded by . . . whereas in the Psalm we repeat over and over ‘for his steadfast love endures for ever’. Without this lesson anchored deep within our hearts we cannot begin to cope with the other scriptures before us today. Let it sink from mind to heart – that we might KNOW it. For in the end the only Knowledge that counts is that which resides in the very depths of our being, where Christ dwells if we did but know it. Why seek for anything new, when Everything is to be found there??

These are just the brief notes – I hope to include some audio – but for now I hope this gives you a flavour

St John the Evangelist, Roslyn
LENT COURSE 2013
Called to be Saints –
The Extraordinary Nature of
‘the Church Militant here in Earth’
‘It is probably the case that only a vibrant fullness of the Christian Church,
that is itself sufficiently mature to be the bearer of a Christian ethos,
is capable of surviving the onslaught of modern secularism.’
Fr Stephen Freeman

Session 5 – Church as Community of Formation – Lessons from the past

A prayer of St Thomas More (1478-1535)
‘Give us Lord, A humble, quiet, peaceable, tender and charitable mind
And in all our thoughts, words, and deeds a taste of The Holy Spirit
Give us Lord, A lively faith, a firm hop, a fervent charity, a love of you
Take from us all lukewarmness in meditation, all dullness in prayer
Give us fervour and delight in thinking of you, and your grace and tender compassion towards us
The things which we pray for, give us grace to labour for

Amen’

Speaking the truth in Love
Confession and forgiveness – the way to growth
The challenge to unconditional love – Love one another, as I have loved you
Shared Life – not just ‘sharing’ our lives
Koinonia = Communion cf. ‘Fellowship’
Christ Is our Koinonia – 2 or 3 are gathered
Is it possible to come together and NOT pray??
‘Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart
Humility as the touchstone

Church reimagined – in the light of Christ and the announcement of the Imminent Kingdom of God

Jesus is LORD – all of life must be re-oriented around him
Church as the foretaste – Church as Eschatological community – expressing in itself the age to come as made known to us in the Risen Christ – Community of the Resurrection
Ephesians 1:15-22
Church – Community of re-orientation – disciples following Jesus. Growing more and more in his likeness and thus more and more distinctive in the world. I.e. Growing in faith
Embodied in relationship. (John 13:34-5 – ‘as I have loved you’ – Losing our life for the sake of one another)
Church decerebrates Faith
The uniquely toxic nature of modern society and its impact on Church – the shattering of connection – the loss of Common Life
The most poignant of questions in all of Scripture – ‘Where are you?’

From Garden to City? The move from Rurality to the Urban
From Common Lives to Virtual ‘Space’ – ‘Family mealtime’
The end of History and the end of geography
From mutual accountability – to radical individualism
From a faith of Growth, to Faith as as set of fixed ideas
From Stability to radical mobility
The Age of Entertainment and Novelty

Some questions
What resonances do I find with the story of the church here?
When was the last time I changed how I was living because of something I read in Scripture or heard in a sermon, or someone said to me?
To whom have we been accountable in our life?
To whom ARE we accountable?
St Paul says ‘submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. How might mutual submission benefit our faith?

A story from the deep history of the Church
A bleak picture, BUT – There is nothing new under the sun – We have been here before
A history lesson – the loss of church as communities of mutual accountability – ‘Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ’ – The Genius of Benedict (RB 1.3-5) Community forms faith
Monasticism as a renewal movement – a place of formation, from the beginning
If you wanted to be ‘a Christian’ you went to the monastery
A contentious suggestion . . .

Life needs a vessel – the neo-pentecostal dilemma, life without structure

Treasure in clay jars

Shared life requires shaping – Vows (Commitment) and Regula (Shaping)
Obedience
‘Conversatio moralis’
‘Poverty’ – Common ownership
Stability
‘Chastity’ – Faithfulness
Stability as ESSENTIAL (Yet we move from church to church, driven by more important things like career . . .)
Staying put – the garden as the place of growth
Pruning – when church gets uncomfortable its quite possibly doing its work 🙂
Place and people
‘God places us in a community of people with whom we would not have chosen to live, had it been up to us’ – cf Marriage also 🙂
Human – humus – of the soil – Adam – Admah – Mud creature 🙂
Neo- monasticism – exciting but costly – like following Jesus 🙂

NEXT TIME!!! Exploring Vows and Rule in the Life of a church

Apologies, but I inadvertently published an empty posting

The Text for April 9 can be found updated here

And so we come to the last hour – we take an hour out of our ordinary lives to come and contemplate that which, as Jo reminded us last night, is the very heart of our faith . . . take an hour out of our ordinary lives . . .

If you really want to irritate a Priest, tell them about how life is ‘in the real world’ – some of course may well be irritated because they wish they still ‘lived in the real world’ – but others will be irritated because hundreds if not thousands of sermons have fallen on deaf ears. To paraphrase the writer Eugene Peterson, ‘the work of the minister is quietly to put a bomb under people’s preconceived ideas of The Real World’, steadily to remind those in there care that Sunday Worship – participation in the Eucharistic feast is The Real World.

For our assertion as Christians is not so much that the events of the Triduum – the three days that perhaps a little lazily we call Easter – our assertion is not so much that these are the heart of our faith, which they are, but that they are the Centre of all human existence. That these days define The Real World. That if we are going to make any sense of the world in which we live, we can only do so using these three days as our starting presuppositions about reality. The death and the resurrection of Jesus, defines Everything.

Of course our culture of tolerance and refusal to allow anything have the last word on anything, except that is, the twin gods of technology and economics, would deem such a claim arrogant in the extreme. To say that in contemplating the death of Jesus we are seeing into what Richard Neuhaus calls, the ‘axis mundi’ – The hub of reality around which Everything is ordered – is to the ears of many, too much to swallow.

But there is no room for arrogance in this assertion. There is here, to thwart the modern hermeneutic of suspicion, no attempt here to seize power, only in humility to declare what is True. One of the unremarked repetitive elements of the Scriptural narrative is how often God works whilst we are asleep. Adam must be put to sleep in order for humanity to come into the fulness of male and female, the disciples notoriously cannot stay awake in the midst of the transaction between the Son and the Father in Gethsemane – and that failure to stay awake takes us way back into this story – to that of Abraham.

We are trained, not entirely unreasonably to understand Good Friday in terms of Moses and the Exodus from Egypt – but there is another Old Testament Narrative which serves just as well, if not better, the story of Abraham.

In Genesis 15 – God makes his covenant with Abraham, but there is a crucial difference between the Sinai Covenant, which of course the New Testament writers say is inneffective and the covenant God makes with Abraham, and that is Abraham has no part in what happens. We think of a Covenant as an agreement between two parties, and that it is, but in the mysterious text of Genesis 15, Abraham having set the stage for the covenant  Then God said to Abraham ‘I am the Lord who brought you from Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to possess.’ But he said, ‘O Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess it?’ He said to him, ‘Bring me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtle-dove, and a young pigeon.’ He brought him all these and cut them in two, laying each half over against the other; but he did not cut the birds in two. And when birds of prey came down on the carcasses, Abram drove them away.
As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram, and a deep and terrifying darkness descended upon him. Then the Lord said to Abram, ‘Know this for certain, that your offspring shall be aliens in a land that is not theirs, and shall be slaves there, and they shall be oppressed for four hundred years; but I will bring judgement on the nation that they serve, and afterwards they shall come out with great possessions. As for yourself, you shall go to your ancestors in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age. And they shall come back here in the fourth generation; for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.’
The covenant to bring God’s people into God’s Land is made with Abraham – but he is asleep – God makes the covenant with himself, God is the only party to the covenant. We are asleep – Like the disciples, as God the Son prays with God the Father in Gethsemane. The covenant is made – not my will but thine be done – and we are asleep. Unlike Sinai, the covenant of bondage which we could never keep – here God covenants with himself to redeem the world
Again we think of Abraham with respect of Genesis 22 – the story of God’s command to sacrifice Isaac, which is stopped only at the last moment – here we see how the covenant will be made. The faithful one of the Covenant will himself provide a lamb – provide a Son for the sacrifice. God will not require anything of Abraham – except faith – he will provide the Son
So that is all that is asked of us, faith that that which we witness once again today is in truth the axis mundi – the heart of Everything.
There is no place for arrogance on our part. We are not the centre of all things – we are asleep in sin and death – and, mystery of mysteries – there is no arrogance in God. The Cross is no act of Power. No, it is God’s willing submission into the hands of evil men, that is you and I – God does not overcome by force, but by willing submission. He proves to us, a lesson we are slow to learn, that Love overcomes all things.
Jesus last words from the Cross – ‘it is finished’ – the world can throw no more at him – the hatred of the world has done its worst – he has absorbed it all – he has made himself nothing, becoming submissive unto death, even the death of a cross.
The chief deadly sin is Pride – like all sin it is nothing less that the contradiction of The Imago Dei – the Image of God in us. Pride is the Contradiction of the image of God.
In this utterly broken, scourged naked Jew, nailed to two rough timbers the fullest nature of God is revealed – his utter Humilty. Much rightly is made of how the Cross expresses God’s Love for us – but more than that, it expresses his utter preparedness to go to any lengths  – to be utterly humiliated for us. Without humility, love is not possible. Love demands the divesting of all power. If as we are so bold to assert ‘God is Love’, then God is the one who refuses to call legions of angels, refuses to use any power, refuses to leap from the temple, to turn stones into bread, to worship demonic pride and power.
At the Last, The Cross returns us to the beginning of the journey of Lent – it is all of a whole – we lay down all our pretensions to life in our name, and so discover Life in His, the one who lays down everything, in Humility and Love.

This is the Axis Mundi – This is the Meaning of Everything – This is the Real World – The Word made flesh – crucified before our eyes

The Scheme for March – April can be found here

Num 4; 1 Cor 15; Psalm 95-96

Paul’s profound exposition of the Resurrection is utterly remarkable. As I have noted elsewhere, any attempts on the part of the church to render itself credible in the eyes of the world are radically undone by the central claim of our faith – that he died for our sins . . . was buried . . . and that on the third day, God raised him from the dead. Not metaphorically, not in some sense that ‘life’ as a principle cannot be overcome, but as a flesh and blood Fact. In many respects the Resurrection is the vindication of the doctrine of the Incarnation. It is utterly remarkable that often those who make most of Christ’s incarnation, are the very ones who for the sake of relevance or because ‘we know so much more about the world now’, must deny the Resurrection.

Paul reminds us that if the Resurrection of Jesus is not historic fact in the plainest sense of that phrase then we may as well give up on the whole idea of church and faith – being ‘of all people most to be pitied’.

But in fact Christ Has been raised from the dead. The outworking of this we think little about – the idea that the Resurrection of Jesus is meant to transform our lives in the here and now – we still relegate it as a doctrine to the ‘for use after I die’ pile. Rather Paul would have us die every day, put our lives on the line. That is to live lives that only make sense in the light of the Resurrection – lives which have no security in the things of the world, for they have a far more sure and certain security – the Risen Christ.

The Scheme for March and April can be found here

Lev 26-27; 1 Cor 11; Psalm 91

As we saw yesterday, Paul’s arguments concerning both the unity of the church, and also the question of meat sacrificed to idols, come to a focus in the Eucharist.

Here we see how so much of Paul’s theology of the church and the work and life of Christ is shaped by the extraordinary and unique genius of Christian life and faith, foreshadowed in the Old Testament – that is God’s radical identification with his people. In Ephesians 5, we read Paul speaking of the union that is betwixt Christ and his church using the imagery of marriage – the two becoming one flesh. We think supremely of the words of the Risen one in John’s Gospel – ‘abide in me, as I abide in you’ [It is always the Risen one who addresses us in the gospels and this is explicit throughout the gospel of John where the glory of the Cross is not hidden as it is from those who have no faith]

Given that identification, Paul’s language of ‘discerning the body’ is that double edged sword – it is discerning Christ in bread and wine and it is discerning Christ in our brother and sister. We cannot come to the table of the LORD – put another way, we cannot enter the Kingdom of God – if we do not discern Christ. Upon the Cross he takes hold of his people – in Baptism we enter into his death, and are also raised to new life in His resurrection. To look upon or brother and sister is to see, though through a glass darkly, the new creation that is Christ, the Risen one.

Thus Paul is quite clear, our relationships with each other are every bit as significant as our relationship with Christ. They are not one and the same, but Christ has taken our brother and sister into himself in his death ad resurrection, as he has us. We cannot be present to Christ, and absent from our brethren. The measure of our Love for Christ is discerned in this discernment.

By This shall all know that you are Mine – your love for one another.