30/08/2011
29/08/2011
Such variety
There is such variety to the worship across three churches where I am currently serving as a curate. I am reflecting a lot on the joy and the pain of all this.
There are stories we can share of God surprising us... like Jacob in his saying how God was always there but he had just not realised it.
There are people, in general, I am speaking generally now, who are able to grasp this God who speaks in such varied ways so that we all express spiritualities and have preferences because we testify to experiencing his manifest presence in particular contexts.
We have to learn our own spiritual language in terms of recognising God's love language to us. He will manifest himself slightly differently to each of us, of course.
As we all rattle along together, we get caught up in these struggles with one another, sometimes like jealous siblings competing for the attention of our Father.
It is good to reflect on the idea that this is nothing new, that our searchings into the heart of God are going to cause us to wrestle with one another. I am trying to explore this wrestling, that we can damage each other's hip in the process but the motivation is our desperate desire to know the Father better. Perhaps we should also require blessing from one another. We should say to one another - please affirm that God lives in me, leave me with words of kindness, affirmation, not just with the bruises but with your reassurance of attempting love for me. Bless me, for as I struggle with you, I am sharing with you the way that I enter the presence of God and the way that he speaks to me - for you it is so different, so how then shall we work out how to travel this path together?
On this issue, I repost an article that caught my attention from Ekklesia a few years ago.
by Simon Barrow
Conflict, then, is at the heart of the Christian story. It is not new, and it can be deadly. How, then, do we handle it? That is the question confronting Anglicans and others right now. ...Jerusalem and Antioch were the two places where arguments over the distinct missions of Peter and Paul took shape – one resting on the conviction that adherence to inherited Jewish rituals and codes was crucial to Christian integrity in the future, the other believing that experimentation, change and development were possible according to the operation of the Spirit.
In this struggle, Paul was a liberal and Peter was a conservative, says modern typology. As with today, the reality was much more complicated. The Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15 (which is a bit hard to tie up with other accounts of the arguments) looks like a classic Anglican-style fudge. Paul, who seems to have lost the tussle in Galatia, not least because he had little scriptural precedent on his side, was allowed to continue his work from several centres in the East Mediterranean without making circumcision a requirement, while the Jerusalem church retained a strong traditional identity.
However, the Council did retain prohibitions against Gentile converts eating meat containing blood, or meat of animals not properly slain. But Paul seems to ignore this among the Corinthians. Likewise, he opposes circumcision in Philippians (“mutilation” he calls it), while praising the same in the different context of Romans and permitting Timothy to undergo the ritual in Acts 16. He was, it seems, a pragmatist and a radical all at once. And while he may have lost influence in Antioch, his revisionism won out in the end – otherwise we, here, might still be eating kosher food. Peter too, whose restrictive ethic was dubbed “clearly wrong” by Paul in Galatians, was prepared to put aside his reservations in the particular case of the converted Roman centurion Cornelius, when a dream persuaded him to relax his attitude to ritual purity.
What Peter says when he sees the undeniable faith of a pagan is, “Who was I to hinder God?” But Paul was the one to recognise most forcefully that, in practice, the love of Christ is larger than our social, cultural and, yes, religious limitations. For social reasons, God-fearing gentiles were not able to become full Jewish proselytes. Nevertheless they were attracted to the monotheism and the ethical rigour of the faith. By sitting on its edges they were therefore able to benefit without having to betray their own cultural heritage. So it was to the edges that Paul went, to discover God at work where many least expected it. The result was that less than 20 years after the death of Jesus, pagans and Jews were sharing table fellowship in Syria.
This should have been unthinkable, and to the purists and rigorists it was. But Paul, remember, preached about of a Jewish reform prophet embodying acceptance by God and triumphing over the power of death without a total embracing of the weight of the Law as a precondition. This was manna from heaven. It pulled in recruits from the gentile fringe while having relatively little impact among the Jews.
What does all this have to teach us today? Well, it might suggest to us that Jerusalem isn’t always right – or wrong! It might make us ponder the idea that if we take the Bible seriously, then scriptural precedent, as St Paul shows, should not become an obstacle to the Good News and to God’s gracious work among those we may have come to think of as unclean or unworthy. The mission of Acts is to the ends of the earth, not to the end of our tethers. Certainly, it should make us question those ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ labels that get used these days to tell us who the goodies and baddies are. When the Gospel of God’s life-changing love in Christ is unleashed it subverts those categories too, which is why people who posit Jesus against Paul and then dismiss Paul in the name of progress are so mistaken, it seems to me.
... Peter and Paul, I suggested earlier, held “diverging commitments exercised in great faithfulness to the truth of a person” – Jesus Christ. “And you… who do you say I am?” Jesus asks Peter, and us, according to Matthew.
The answer is that Jesus is the one who leads us beyond what we imagine of limited persons and into the very heart of God. He is the Messiah, the offspring of the Most High – the decisive evidence that God blesses the messy vulnerability of texts, history and flesh; so that none of us dare limit the love that can bend the divine to reach lower than we could ever hope to stoop.
But there is a warning attached to this. In receiving the kingdom of God and preaching it, as we are bound to do, we will continue to draw circles that some will fall within and some without. And for this we are answerable before heaven, as Peter was when the cock crowed before Gethsemane, and as Paul was when he decided to break the religious rules and to join with those who told Emperors that there is another kind of king, Jesus.
Jesus, remember, was clear that the Spirit of the Lord was calling him to proclaim good news to the poor, not the self-satisfied; the sick and the subjugated, not the well and the worthy. In following this Jesus, we will take risks and make mistakes. But that is not the worst thing. The worst thing is to think that it is our rules, structures and institutions, rather than God’s capacity to remake lives, forgive sins and free us from bondage, that really counts.
For “all at once, a messenger of the Lord stood there and the cell was ablaze with light. He tapped Peter on the shoulder to wake him. ‘Quick! Get up!’ he said, and the chains fell away from Peter…”
In this struggle, Paul was a liberal and Peter was a conservative, says modern typology. As with today, the reality was much more complicated. The Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15 (which is a bit hard to tie up with other accounts of the arguments) looks like a classic Anglican-style fudge. Paul, who seems to have lost the tussle in Galatia, not least because he had little scriptural precedent on his side, was allowed to continue his work from several centres in the East Mediterranean without making circumcision a requirement, while the Jerusalem church retained a strong traditional identity.
However, the Council did retain prohibitions against Gentile converts eating meat containing blood, or meat of animals not properly slain. But Paul seems to ignore this among the Corinthians. Likewise, he opposes circumcision in Philippians (“mutilation” he calls it), while praising the same in the different context of Romans and permitting Timothy to undergo the ritual in Acts 16. He was, it seems, a pragmatist and a radical all at once. And while he may have lost influence in Antioch, his revisionism won out in the end – otherwise we, here, might still be eating kosher food. Peter too, whose restrictive ethic was dubbed “clearly wrong” by Paul in Galatians, was prepared to put aside his reservations in the particular case of the converted Roman centurion Cornelius, when a dream persuaded him to relax his attitude to ritual purity.
What Peter says when he sees the undeniable faith of a pagan is, “Who was I to hinder God?” But Paul was the one to recognise most forcefully that, in practice, the love of Christ is larger than our social, cultural and, yes, religious limitations. For social reasons, God-fearing gentiles were not able to become full Jewish proselytes. Nevertheless they were attracted to the monotheism and the ethical rigour of the faith. By sitting on its edges they were therefore able to benefit without having to betray their own cultural heritage. So it was to the edges that Paul went, to discover God at work where many least expected it. The result was that less than 20 years after the death of Jesus, pagans and Jews were sharing table fellowship in Syria.
This should have been unthinkable, and to the purists and rigorists it was. But Paul, remember, preached about of a Jewish reform prophet embodying acceptance by God and triumphing over the power of death without a total embracing of the weight of the Law as a precondition. This was manna from heaven. It pulled in recruits from the gentile fringe while having relatively little impact among the Jews.
What does all this have to teach us today? Well, it might suggest to us that Jerusalem isn’t always right – or wrong! It might make us ponder the idea that if we take the Bible seriously, then scriptural precedent, as St Paul shows, should not become an obstacle to the Good News and to God’s gracious work among those we may have come to think of as unclean or unworthy. The mission of Acts is to the ends of the earth, not to the end of our tethers. Certainly, it should make us question those ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ labels that get used these days to tell us who the goodies and baddies are. When the Gospel of God’s life-changing love in Christ is unleashed it subverts those categories too, which is why people who posit Jesus against Paul and then dismiss Paul in the name of progress are so mistaken, it seems to me.
... Peter and Paul, I suggested earlier, held “diverging commitments exercised in great faithfulness to the truth of a person” – Jesus Christ. “And you… who do you say I am?” Jesus asks Peter, and us, according to Matthew.
The answer is that Jesus is the one who leads us beyond what we imagine of limited persons and into the very heart of God. He is the Messiah, the offspring of the Most High – the decisive evidence that God blesses the messy vulnerability of texts, history and flesh; so that none of us dare limit the love that can bend the divine to reach lower than we could ever hope to stoop.
But there is a warning attached to this. In receiving the kingdom of God and preaching it, as we are bound to do, we will continue to draw circles that some will fall within and some without. And for this we are answerable before heaven, as Peter was when the cock crowed before Gethsemane, and as Paul was when he decided to break the religious rules and to join with those who told Emperors that there is another kind of king, Jesus.
Jesus, remember, was clear that the Spirit of the Lord was calling him to proclaim good news to the poor, not the self-satisfied; the sick and the subjugated, not the well and the worthy. In following this Jesus, we will take risks and make mistakes. But that is not the worst thing. The worst thing is to think that it is our rules, structures and institutions, rather than God’s capacity to remake lives, forgive sins and free us from bondage, that really counts.
For “all at once, a messenger of the Lord stood there and the cell was ablaze with light. He tapped Peter on the shoulder to wake him. ‘Quick! Get up!’ he said, and the chains fell away from Peter…”
28/08/2011
As God sees...
See yourself as GOD sees you...
You are the salt of the earth...Matt.5:13
You are the light of the world...Matt.5:14
When you speak according to the Word and will of God,
Heaven responds...Mark.11:23-24
You are protected from the evil one...John.17:15
You are among the called of Jesus Christ...Rom.1:6
You have life in your mortal body through
His Spirit who dwells in you...Rom.8:11
ALL things are working together for your good...Rom.8:28
You are in Christ Jesus who gives you wisdom,
sanctification, and redemption...1 Cor.1:30
You are sealed in Christ!...2 Cor.1:22
You are His chosen...Eph.1:4
You are God's child...John 1:12
You are Christ's friend...John 15:15
You have been justified...Rom. 5:1
You are united with the Lord, and You are one spirit with Him...1 Cor.6:17
You have been bought with a price. You belong to God...1 Cor.6:19-20
You are a member of Christ's body...1 Cor.12:27
You are a saint...Eph.1:1
You have direct access to God through the Holy Spirit...Eph. 2:18
You have been redeemed and forgiven of all your sins...Col. 1:14
You are complete in Christ...Col. 2:10
You are free forever from condemnation...Rom. 8:1-2
You are free from any condemning charges against you...Rom. 8:31
You cannot be separated from the love of God...Rom. 8:35
You have been established, anointed, and sealed by God...2 Cor. 1:21-22
You are hidden with Christ in God...Col. 3:3
You are confident that the good work that God has begun in you
will be perfected...Phil. 1:6
You are a citizen of heaven...Phil. 3:20
You have not been given a spirit of fear
but of power, love, and a sound mind...2 Tim. 1:7
You can find grace and mercy in time of need...Hebrews 4:16
You are a branch of the true vine...John 15:1
You have been chosen and appointed to bear fruit...John 15:16
You are God's temple...1 Corin. 3:16
You are a minister of reconciliation for God...2 Cor. 5:17
You are God's co-worker...2 Cor. 6:1
You are seated with Christ in the heavenly realm...Eph. 2:6
You are God's workmanship...Eph. 2:10
You may approach God with freedom and confidence... Eph. 3:12
You can do all things through Christ who gives you strength...Phil. 4:13
24/08/2011
Revisingreform meets Pluralist Speaks
Adrian has studied the sociology of Religion and has engaged with Anglicanism from an academic perspective for numerous years. He was really interesting to talk to and it struck me how much we understood about each other's mindsets because we have been reading each other's reflections on faith for a number of years. We also talked about those other virtual friends whose minds we seem to know or perhaps think we know through our own interpretative lenses. When is knowing really knowing? How much do bloggers expose a real version of who they are? Perhaps it is not that there is a lack of authenticity, just that there are decisions to be made about what it is appropriate to reveal.
We talked about how some bloggers expose more and others less about their lives and opinions. There are personalities on display, sometimes hearts, often brains, wit and controversy and in Adrian's case quite a number of caricatures of many folk that have certainly caused my kids to laugh as they have guessed whether that looks anything like mummy or not - some pictures have been very close to the mark. There are bloggers finding it difficult to get posts and bishops whose blogging has helped their appeal and many in between these two extremes.
...so perhaps one day all these bloggers in their blogging circles could share food and conversation together - it would look something like facebook in the flesh all occurring in google plus circles of chairs with cuppas on the go and plenty of food and chat - sounds like quite a nice idea really. Now if I was Adrian I might draw that but seeing as I am me and a poem would be way too twee, I will leave that task to my now less virtual friend and herein my reflection on this evening will end!
It could be that Graham Richards is organising something at Greenbelt - I know there was a tweet that went around about the social media brigade getting together. I can not go but keep me in the loop someone out there please.
The pastor and the Eucharist
The ministry of the cure of souls, or pastoral care, consists of helping acts, done by representative Christian persons, directed toward the healing, guiding, sustaining, and reconciling of troubled persons whose troubles arise in the context of ultimate meanings and concerns.1
Post-modern responses to this definition are aware that language of the 'soul' can propagate a false dichotomy between body and soul. 'Soul-care' requires a biblical underpinning. Significantly, the Hebrew word nephesh and the Greek word psyche do not connote the same sense of disembodied immaterial spirit as the English word 'soul'. With kidneys that rejoice (Proverbs 23:16) and the soul that thirsts and hungers for the Lord (Ps 42:2 and 84:2a), the Scriptures guard against dualism. Our worship is experienced bodily through movement, touch (particularly in sharing 'the peace') and eating (the consecrated elements). Pastoral care should attend to people 'wholeistically' because we are 'psycho-spiritual-somatic beings.'2
Pastoral Care
The word 'pastoral' can be too narrowly associated with the clerical paradigm. We are 'members of one living body, exercising toward one another a spiritual or priestly office.'3
We are always encountering the world's diverse ideologies and faith systems. The Eucharist can be a spectacle, unfamiliar to people, who might gaze wonderingly upon the intimacies being shared as it is celebrated. In this way too it draws people in, I like to think.
During home Holy Communions, there are expectations as to what this encounter should look like. I also hope for 'moments of genuine human connection.'5 I am free to be myself, without the need for any expert knowledge. It is quite simple what we do there, unbounded by liturgy and particular expressions of sitting and standing as one often finds in a church service. Buber describes how being present with someone is an education of character, not requiring expertise or special position but an ability to support the 'becoming' or 'unfolding' of the other;6 the 'guiding' described by Clebsch and Jaekle.
Christian faith stories are less stable than they are in the church congregation because testimonies are not corroborated by the shared life of the particularised Christian congregation. Hear me when I say, they are no less valid. These are people exploring 'ultimate meanings and concerns'7 from within their own spiritual framework, often in the face of illness and their own mortality.
What is often encountered is people's expressions of sin and regret, although they rarely use sin to describe their experiences of brokenness. Each human encounter can be a very mutual and broken affair. As I listen and speak into people's expressions of sinfulness, I reflect on both my own brokenness and mortality in response.9 For Lake, historically 'soul care' deals with suffering and 'spiritual care' deals with sin and 'pastoral care is defective unless it can deal thoroughly both with these evils we have suffered as well as with the sins we have committed.'10
The Eucharist and connection
When engaging in a specific liturgical act of the people of God, the Eucharist, at home visits, I sense the ritual's heightened profundity. Off-setting my own uncertainty about the 'sustaining, healing, guiding and reconciling'12 efficacy of my interactions with people, where from time to time, I am conscious of saying the wrong thing, being uncertain or either listening or talking too much, here is this ritual act which binds us together as equals in a way that my visit alone does not quite do. A simple visit without the Eucharist leaves me conscious that despite Buber's insistence on being 'fully present,' I am in role, dressed as I am as an ordained person. Buber describes how there are two distinct modes of existence, one of which 'poceeds from what one really is, the other from what one wishes to seem'.13 I think that sometimes I lapse into conversation, on a visit, governed by what I expect the person expects from me. I experience moments of 'I/Thou' dialectic but I was am often fit to the unfit, mobile to the immobile and free to the bodily limited. During the Eucharist, however, we both sit to receive the bread and wine, we all choose to be there and both our souls are unfit and in need of repair. My physical fitness seems less of a marked difference.
How much pastoral care becomes the agenda for the Eucharist
Some liturgical scholars suggest that Worship (and here I mean our shared praise) should be governed by what will best engender genuine connection, if it is to have a pastoral efficacy. As Bradbury explains, 'God's love has to be translated...liturgy has to start with people's experiences and feelings as they are.' 14 Our Worship, governed particularly by the Word, seeks to do this, as on home visits the message is shaped and related so that it addresses that person's situation more particularly. It is also, however, inappropriate for Worship and the Word to be manipulated to these ends. Liturgy can 'never be focussed solely around the pastoral needs of people,'15 and yet the Eucharist, 'as a context for pastoral care...16 is capable of articulating those theological and ethical dimensions which otherwise might be difficult to express.'17
How the Eucharist functions as a key context for Pastoral Care
Its stability
The Eucharist is an event outside time, or at least addressing such a multitude of times that there is a sense of being caught up in the eternal, so that the enormity of whatever confronts us in the present somehow diminishes. ‘Do this in remembrance’ means that the Eucharist has a retrospective dimension. In focussing also on the eschaton, it has an anticpatory dimension, and in calling us to share in the transformation of God's Kingdom, it addresses the present. Past, future and present are connected. Carl Jung suggests, '(a) that worship enables us to get in touch with the depths of human experience; and (b) that it protects us from being overwhelmed by those depths by containing us within a patterned ritual.'18 As the Eucharist expresses 'those theological and ethical dimensions which might be otherwise difficult to express'19, it is, in essense, disclosing 'what it means to be human at a rock-bottom level.'20In other words, it is disclosing 'theology' (who we are and who God is, in whose image we are made) and 'ethics' (our shared life). Being human is complex and ever-changing. Erik Erikson in the 1950s and many others since, suggest that humans go through various sequential stages in their growth to maturity and fullness.21
This necessitates a mindful response to our desire to proclaim everything 'afresh'.22 Cottrell describes how, 'An increasing number of churches are growing suspicious of the eucharist [because] they think it is difficult,23 but Rappaport reminds us, that adaptive changes should always preserve some more integral part of the whole system unchanged because ‘liturgical orders...establish and constitute order, rather than chaos or disorder. 24 If the unchanging core ingredients of this ritual remain unchanged, it fosters a secure place where 'participants transmit information concerning their own current physical, psychic or social states to themselves and to other participants '25 There is something about that visit that shapes the week, centres the day and marks the passage of time. Diary filling for the next appointment is almost a part of the shape of the ordinary liturgy that each visit is shaped by. We create a liturgy when we least anticipate we are doing so.
The Eucharist generates Communitas through liminality
As Jung states human beings need more than just stability to flourish. At any given stage of the life cycle, it is of comfort to know that one is not alone. 'In the beginning' Buber writes in I and Thou 'is relation'.26 From within the stability of the liturgical constants, our very untidy 'physical, psychic or social states'27 can be recreated and experienced as we journey through Christ's humiliation, suffering and sacrifice and into new life, rebirth and future promise. This all helps to counteract Campbell's concern that: 'In a world of abstract categories the organized world of emotional and bodily reactions has no place, yet this is the world in which most people encounter their greatest problems'.28
He laments that it is 'small wonder that what Churches say seems largely irrelevant to the majority of people in modern times.'29 I am more hopeful than Campbell. Where words fail to reach people within a post-modern context,30 symbol and shared action can. We need to relate to one another and give and receive love. 'It is the Christian claim that each human being can only be completed beyond her or himself...through the neighbour and through God.'31 Worship is a corporate activity, there is a corporate confession and the creed expresses shared beliefs. A meal is shared. Identity is solidified by seeing our own image reflected in that person next to us as we enter into fellowship through bread and wine. Identity is also rooted in the Creator Trinity who made us and as Christ's 'precense is extolled, and his final coming implored...fellowship (communio) with the Lord is communicated.32 Identity is grasped vertically and horizontally and happens through the sharing of a meta-narrative, which is not only recounted but participated in.
There is something very active about the Eucharist. We eat! If the eucharistic anamnesis is a spectacle or mysterious phenomenon for those who look on (no bad thing perhaps, if it provokes questions and longings), for those who share in it, there is something profoundly healing. Identity changes as time passes and so our feelings about our value ichange. Turner describes that when people becomes liminal together, such as when they are captivated by a sacred story event, they enter a state he calls Communitas.33 Communitas is a collective state of liminality, in which all participants exist in a state of equality and oneness, since the normal roles and status of their structured world do not apply. The liminal point is the transformation of a life in Christ, on offer, regardless of social status, who experience together the Eucharistic symbols. People become caught up in a state of being neither here nor there, it is betwixt and between their own and the world of the story. It is a place where brokenness and restoration is played out so that our own stories are given meaning by being taken up into the very actions of Christ.
The transformation of the ordinary
If ordinary bread and wine are transformed then there is reason to hope that ordinary people and their stories will be transformed too. The bread shared at the Eucharist begins as the ordinary food of every-day life. Bread is a basic food-stuff within many cultures, eaten by people of diverse status and age, often forming part of the meals we share. These simple ingredients which satisfy bodily need, come to have 'inexhaustible meaning [as they are] 'doing and giving what they embody.’34 They satisfy the 'soul that thirsts and hungers for the Lord'. In the Eucharist, this everyday ordinary substance creates Communitas and communion with God.
I am learning that the shape and promise of the Eucharist can be my starting point for the care God can give. If those of us whose identities are rooted in Christ cease to proclaim the efficacy of his work, then we are left to rely on secular models of therapy. While secular models have value, if they are not grounded in what we do as we worship, pastoral care can become what Campbell calls a perversion of Christian ministry. Campbell explains:
Pastoral Care
The word 'pastoral' can be too narrowly associated with the clerical paradigm. We are 'members of one living body, exercising toward one another a spiritual or priestly office.'3
We are always encountering the world's diverse ideologies and faith systems. The Eucharist can be a spectacle, unfamiliar to people, who might gaze wonderingly upon the intimacies being shared as it is celebrated. In this way too it draws people in, I like to think.
During home Holy Communions, there are expectations as to what this encounter should look like. I also hope for 'moments of genuine human connection.'5 I am free to be myself, without the need for any expert knowledge. It is quite simple what we do there, unbounded by liturgy and particular expressions of sitting and standing as one often finds in a church service. Buber describes how being present with someone is an education of character, not requiring expertise or special position but an ability to support the 'becoming' or 'unfolding' of the other;6 the 'guiding' described by Clebsch and Jaekle.
Christian faith stories are less stable than they are in the church congregation because testimonies are not corroborated by the shared life of the particularised Christian congregation. Hear me when I say, they are no less valid. These are people exploring 'ultimate meanings and concerns'7 from within their own spiritual framework, often in the face of illness and their own mortality.
What is often encountered is people's expressions of sin and regret, although they rarely use sin to describe their experiences of brokenness. Each human encounter can be a very mutual and broken affair. As I listen and speak into people's expressions of sinfulness, I reflect on both my own brokenness and mortality in response.9 For Lake, historically 'soul care' deals with suffering and 'spiritual care' deals with sin and 'pastoral care is defective unless it can deal thoroughly both with these evils we have suffered as well as with the sins we have committed.'10
The Eucharist and connection
When engaging in a specific liturgical act of the people of God, the Eucharist, at home visits, I sense the ritual's heightened profundity. Off-setting my own uncertainty about the 'sustaining, healing, guiding and reconciling'12 efficacy of my interactions with people, where from time to time, I am conscious of saying the wrong thing, being uncertain or either listening or talking too much, here is this ritual act which binds us together as equals in a way that my visit alone does not quite do. A simple visit without the Eucharist leaves me conscious that despite Buber's insistence on being 'fully present,' I am in role, dressed as I am as an ordained person. Buber describes how there are two distinct modes of existence, one of which 'poceeds from what one really is, the other from what one wishes to seem'.13 I think that sometimes I lapse into conversation, on a visit, governed by what I expect the person expects from me. I experience moments of 'I/Thou' dialectic but I was am often fit to the unfit, mobile to the immobile and free to the bodily limited. During the Eucharist, however, we both sit to receive the bread and wine, we all choose to be there and both our souls are unfit and in need of repair. My physical fitness seems less of a marked difference.
How much pastoral care becomes the agenda for the Eucharist
Some liturgical scholars suggest that Worship (and here I mean our shared praise) should be governed by what will best engender genuine connection, if it is to have a pastoral efficacy. As Bradbury explains, 'God's love has to be translated...liturgy has to start with people's experiences and feelings as they are.' 14 Our Worship, governed particularly by the Word, seeks to do this, as on home visits the message is shaped and related so that it addresses that person's situation more particularly. It is also, however, inappropriate for Worship and the Word to be manipulated to these ends. Liturgy can 'never be focussed solely around the pastoral needs of people,'15 and yet the Eucharist, 'as a context for pastoral care...16 is capable of articulating those theological and ethical dimensions which otherwise might be difficult to express.'17
How the Eucharist functions as a key context for Pastoral Care
Its stability
The Eucharist is an event outside time, or at least addressing such a multitude of times that there is a sense of being caught up in the eternal, so that the enormity of whatever confronts us in the present somehow diminishes. ‘Do this in remembrance’ means that the Eucharist has a retrospective dimension. In focussing also on the eschaton, it has an anticpatory dimension, and in calling us to share in the transformation of God's Kingdom, it addresses the present. Past, future and present are connected. Carl Jung suggests, '(a) that worship enables us to get in touch with the depths of human experience; and (b) that it protects us from being overwhelmed by those depths by containing us within a patterned ritual.'18 As the Eucharist expresses 'those theological and ethical dimensions which might be otherwise difficult to express'19, it is, in essense, disclosing 'what it means to be human at a rock-bottom level.'20In other words, it is disclosing 'theology' (who we are and who God is, in whose image we are made) and 'ethics' (our shared life). Being human is complex and ever-changing. Erik Erikson in the 1950s and many others since, suggest that humans go through various sequential stages in their growth to maturity and fullness.21
This necessitates a mindful response to our desire to proclaim everything 'afresh'.22 Cottrell describes how, 'An increasing number of churches are growing suspicious of the eucharist [because] they think it is difficult,23 but Rappaport reminds us, that adaptive changes should always preserve some more integral part of the whole system unchanged because ‘liturgical orders...establish and constitute order, rather than chaos or disorder. 24 If the unchanging core ingredients of this ritual remain unchanged, it fosters a secure place where 'participants transmit information concerning their own current physical, psychic or social states to themselves and to other participants '25 There is something about that visit that shapes the week, centres the day and marks the passage of time. Diary filling for the next appointment is almost a part of the shape of the ordinary liturgy that each visit is shaped by. We create a liturgy when we least anticipate we are doing so.
The Eucharist generates Communitas through liminality
As Jung states human beings need more than just stability to flourish. At any given stage of the life cycle, it is of comfort to know that one is not alone. 'In the beginning' Buber writes in I and Thou 'is relation'.26 From within the stability of the liturgical constants, our very untidy 'physical, psychic or social states'27 can be recreated and experienced as we journey through Christ's humiliation, suffering and sacrifice and into new life, rebirth and future promise. This all helps to counteract Campbell's concern that: 'In a world of abstract categories the organized world of emotional and bodily reactions has no place, yet this is the world in which most people encounter their greatest problems'.28
He laments that it is 'small wonder that what Churches say seems largely irrelevant to the majority of people in modern times.'29 I am more hopeful than Campbell. Where words fail to reach people within a post-modern context,30 symbol and shared action can. We need to relate to one another and give and receive love. 'It is the Christian claim that each human being can only be completed beyond her or himself...through the neighbour and through God.'31 Worship is a corporate activity, there is a corporate confession and the creed expresses shared beliefs. A meal is shared. Identity is solidified by seeing our own image reflected in that person next to us as we enter into fellowship through bread and wine. Identity is also rooted in the Creator Trinity who made us and as Christ's 'precense is extolled, and his final coming implored...fellowship (communio) with the Lord is communicated.32 Identity is grasped vertically and horizontally and happens through the sharing of a meta-narrative, which is not only recounted but participated in.
There is something very active about the Eucharist. We eat! If the eucharistic anamnesis is a spectacle or mysterious phenomenon for those who look on (no bad thing perhaps, if it provokes questions and longings), for those who share in it, there is something profoundly healing. Identity changes as time passes and so our feelings about our value ichange. Turner describes that when people becomes liminal together, such as when they are captivated by a sacred story event, they enter a state he calls Communitas.33 Communitas is a collective state of liminality, in which all participants exist in a state of equality and oneness, since the normal roles and status of their structured world do not apply. The liminal point is the transformation of a life in Christ, on offer, regardless of social status, who experience together the Eucharistic symbols. People become caught up in a state of being neither here nor there, it is betwixt and between their own and the world of the story. It is a place where brokenness and restoration is played out so that our own stories are given meaning by being taken up into the very actions of Christ.
The transformation of the ordinary
If ordinary bread and wine are transformed then there is reason to hope that ordinary people and their stories will be transformed too. The bread shared at the Eucharist begins as the ordinary food of every-day life. Bread is a basic food-stuff within many cultures, eaten by people of diverse status and age, often forming part of the meals we share. These simple ingredients which satisfy bodily need, come to have 'inexhaustible meaning [as they are] 'doing and giving what they embody.’34 They satisfy the 'soul that thirsts and hungers for the Lord'. In the Eucharist, this everyday ordinary substance creates Communitas and communion with God.
I am learning that the shape and promise of the Eucharist can be my starting point for the care God can give. If those of us whose identities are rooted in Christ cease to proclaim the efficacy of his work, then we are left to rely on secular models of therapy. While secular models have value, if they are not grounded in what we do as we worship, pastoral care can become what Campbell calls a perversion of Christian ministry. Campbell explains:
relationship does not depend primarily upon the acquisition of knowledge or the development of skill. Rather it depends upon the caring attitude towards others which comes from our own experience of pain, fear and loss and our release from their deadening grip. 35
Release from that 'deadening grip' is a promise of the Eucharist and not a promise professionals can deliver.
It is for this reason that the framework with which I seek to enter into pastoral care is that which I understand from the Eucharist liturgy. 'Healing' comes through the sharing of story, in the Eucharistic anemnesis and through listening to one another. 'Guiding' is towards a belief in the transformation of the ordinary bread, wine and our lives. The 'sustaining' is of a wholeness through a reclaiming of the sanctity of our lives as we see each other through God's eyes. 'Reconciliation' is of community, which can begin with journeying together actively into a liminality, played out by touch, as we have with the sharing of the peace and those eucharistic meals, which transform the ordinary and corporate response, which points to shared human experience.
Ultimately, the Eucharist is a key context for pastoral care both for how it addresses our human condition by its shape and symbols and for how it calls out from of us a response to the sufferings of our brothers and sisters in the world. C.S. Lewis, describes how 'next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses.' 36 It is by journeying through the Eucharist that we might most closely come to appreciate how much we are loved. As a consequence, we might passionately 'Go in peace to love and serve the Lord' by loving that very neighbour presented to our senses.
1Clebsch & Jaekle, Pastoral Care in Historical Perspective, 4.
2Benner, "Nurturing Spiritual Growth"
3John T. McNeill, A History of the Cure of Souls, 190.
4Doherty, “Morality and spirituality in therapy”, in F. M. Walsh (Ed.), Spiritual resources in family therapy, pp. 179-192.
5Hall, “Psychoanalysis, Attachment, and Spirituality”
6Buber, I and Thou, 197
7Clebsch & Jaekle, op. cit
8Benner, “Nurturing Spiritual Growth”
9Particularly guilt for having fallen ill and regret about unhappy relationships. The guilt about falling ill is comically brought alive by Erikson, The Life Cycle Completed , 66: 'This sense of urgency seems best expressed in the story of the old man who was dying. As he lay there with his eyes closed, his wife whispered to him, naming every member of the family who was there to wish him shalom. "And who," he suddenly asked, sitting up abruptly, "who is minding the store?"'
10Lake, Clinical Theology, 21
11Benner, “Nurturing Spiritual Growth”
12Clebsch & Jaekle, op. sit
13Buber, I and Thou, 76
14Woodward, The Blackwell reader in pastoral and practical theology, 176
15Green, Only Connect, 14
16This quote helpfully alludes back to the title of this essay
17Green, Only Connect, 14
18Green, Only Connect, 125
19Ibid.
20Ibid, 13
21See Erikson, The Life Cycle Completed
22Declaration of Assent, the Ordinal
23Ward P, Mass Culture, 57
24Rappaport, Ritual and religion,169
25Ibid, 52
26Buber, I and Thou, 18
27Rappaport, op.cit
28Campbell, Rediscovering Pastoral Care, 37
29Ibid.
30Hopes to explore problems over religious language and accessibility did not have room here.
31Green, Only Connect, 10
32 Kasper, Theology and Church, 183.
33Turner, Ritual Process, 96.
34Bradshaw, Dictionary of Liturgy And Worship, 438-40.
35 Campbell, Rediscovering Pastoral Care ,37
36Lewis, The Weight of glory, 180
It is for this reason that the framework with which I seek to enter into pastoral care is that which I understand from the Eucharist liturgy. 'Healing' comes through the sharing of story, in the Eucharistic anemnesis and through listening to one another. 'Guiding' is towards a belief in the transformation of the ordinary bread, wine and our lives. The 'sustaining' is of a wholeness through a reclaiming of the sanctity of our lives as we see each other through God's eyes. 'Reconciliation' is of community, which can begin with journeying together actively into a liminality, played out by touch, as we have with the sharing of the peace and those eucharistic meals, which transform the ordinary and corporate response, which points to shared human experience.
Ultimately, the Eucharist is a key context for pastoral care both for how it addresses our human condition by its shape and symbols and for how it calls out from of us a response to the sufferings of our brothers and sisters in the world. C.S. Lewis, describes how 'next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses.' 36 It is by journeying through the Eucharist that we might most closely come to appreciate how much we are loved. As a consequence, we might passionately 'Go in peace to love and serve the Lord' by loving that very neighbour presented to our senses.
1Clebsch & Jaekle, Pastoral Care in Historical Perspective, 4.
2Benner, "Nurturing Spiritual Growth"
3John T. McNeill, A History of the Cure of Souls, 190.
4Doherty, “Morality and spirituality in therapy”, in F. M. Walsh (Ed.), Spiritual resources in family therapy, pp. 179-192.
5Hall, “Psychoanalysis, Attachment, and Spirituality”
6Buber, I and Thou, 197
7Clebsch & Jaekle, op. cit
8Benner, “Nurturing Spiritual Growth”
9Particularly guilt for having fallen ill and regret about unhappy relationships. The guilt about falling ill is comically brought alive by Erikson, The Life Cycle Completed , 66: 'This sense of urgency seems best expressed in the story of the old man who was dying. As he lay there with his eyes closed, his wife whispered to him, naming every member of the family who was there to wish him shalom. "And who," he suddenly asked, sitting up abruptly, "who is minding the store?"'
10Lake, Clinical Theology, 21
11Benner, “Nurturing Spiritual Growth”
12Clebsch & Jaekle, op. sit
13Buber, I and Thou, 76
14Woodward, The Blackwell reader in pastoral and practical theology, 176
15Green, Only Connect, 14
16This quote helpfully alludes back to the title of this essay
17Green, Only Connect, 14
18Green, Only Connect, 125
19Ibid.
20Ibid, 13
21See Erikson, The Life Cycle Completed
22Declaration of Assent, the Ordinal
23Ward P, Mass Culture, 57
24Rappaport, Ritual and religion,169
25Ibid, 52
26Buber, I and Thou, 18
27Rappaport, op.cit
28Campbell, Rediscovering Pastoral Care, 37
29Ibid.
30Hopes to explore problems over religious language and accessibility did not have room here.
31Green, Only Connect, 10
32 Kasper, Theology and Church, 183.
33Turner, Ritual Process, 96.
34Bradshaw, Dictionary of Liturgy And Worship, 438-40.
35 Campbell, Rediscovering Pastoral Care ,37
36Lewis, The Weight of glory, 180
23/08/2011
Holy Communion
I know that there are many curates who will be taking communion at the daily mass if they are Anglo-Catholic. I think I am low evangelical but I have a high view of the eucharist. I do not believe in transubstantiation as I think a Catholic would believe in it but I also harbour a suspicion that Anglicans have exaggerated and are not quite understanding the subtleties of transubstantiation. I am perhaps rejecting only the caricature. One thing that I was once surprised about at college was my own very emotional (hidden - I kept it in) reaction to someone in our group on hospital chaplaincy placement accidentally putting the consecrated element in the bin - I felt gutted ... upset, but couldn't really understand why completely.
I have a high view of the Eucharist mainly because of the gospel (synoptics') focus but I think the Eucharist is both healing in itself and missional. The prayer about being not worthy to gather up the crumbs from under his table always stirs me to the core and I love its missional impetus - that we are sent to be bread and wine, if you like, to the world, however much we fail to do this, it is still God's aim. As Buber (1996, 164) explains in 'I and Thou, 'The encounter with God does not come to us in order that we may henceforth attend to God but... that we may prove its meaning in action... revelation is a calling and a mission...' Where the Eucharist is referred to as the Mass it recalls the words said at the end of the Lord’s Supper in the Medieval church: Ite Missa est- 'You are sent out.' Willimon (1981, 11) explains, 'In the Mass, Christians receive the nourishment and sustenance they need in order to go out into the world to do the work that they are supposed to do. ' Where it is most obvious, the liturgy of the Eucharist shapes our outward response at the dismissal,'1 where there is 'the urgent plea of the Church for the restoration of all things...the spirit calls [us] to serve God in the World,' (Holeton, 1996, 19). Yoder (1997, 44) is a passionate advocate for a recovery of the true sense of the Eucharist, writing: 'At the Lord's table, those who have bread bring it, and all are fed; that is the model for the Christian social vision in all times and places.' Of all the meals it symbolises: the heavenly banquet of God's elect (Isa 38:10-20) at our final redemption, the feeding of the multitude in the Gospels, the meals Jesus ate with outcasts and the Last Supper, Yoder (1997, 59) locates meaning in what 'Marion calls the Eucharistic present [which] is the commitment of charity, which signifies the true reception of the gift of the Eucharist.' In his explorations of the Eucharist, Ford (1989, 137) values Bonhoeffer who says 'The church is the church, only when it exists for others.'
The Eucharist does more, even though I think its missional imperative is key.
Participation
Ford (1989, 110) locates the reformers' reaction to the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation in their dis-ease with the 'miracle of transubstantiation in the priest's blessing of the bread and wine, rather than the transformation of the community itself in its participation in the Eucharist.' Marion wants to guard against the reduction of God to the material; his 'presence reduced to the dimensions of a thing,' (1995, 164). This would be for God 'to consecrate in a thing distinct from the community,' (1995, 165-6). It is rather that the mystical action takes place in the ecclesiastical body. One of the calls of the Eucharist is to become a gift to others. 'That we may evermore dwell in him and he in us,' points to our transformation rather than the transformation of the elements as Augustine (1991, 124) captures in his Confessions: 'I am the food of the fully grown; grow and you will feed on me. And you will not change me into you like the food your flesh eats, but you will be changed into me.' Jesus articulates the relationship between the eating and the drinking and the being sent: 'Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood, abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me,' (John 6). On being sent, Jesus lives, the same is true again as Christians are made conscious, through the language of the eucharistic prayer, that as his body, they too are 'sent' and live as they give life to others through acts of social justice in the many ways that manifests itself. In transforming the world and bringing justice, eucharistic prayer E (CW Order One), asks the 'Lord of all life,/ [to] help us to work together for that day/ when your kingdom comes/ and justice and mercy will be seen in all the earth. '
Holeton (1996, 21) insists that 'liturgical and pastoral ministries are not disengaged from one another' and this is a driving concern for liturgists:
It … becomes an important function of the liturgy to make us more attentive and responsive to those around us, to help us to have what St Paul calls ‘the mind of Christ’, so that we can be sent out to express that mind of Christ in our attentive dealing with the needs of individuals and the pressing issues of our society. (GS 1651, 1997, 2.4)
Anemnesis
Green (1987, 67) describes how, 'It is not caring to lay huge ethical responsibilities on individuals without providing an adequate symbolic framework with which to respond to those responsibilities.' The language of the Eucharist creates a symbolic framework, playing with an ordinary linear sense of time, so that the Eucharist's missional call is felt but does not overwhelm. In obedience to Jesus' command to do this in 'remembrance' (1 Cor 11:24, 25) or 'memory' (Luke 22:19) of me, the Eucharist looks backwards, but moreover, it is anemnetic, recreating in the present that act of the past, Christ's work, without reducing the original sufficiency of the oblation. It is also proleptic with its focus on the eschaton, its anticipatory dimension, calling Christians to share in the transformation of God's Kingdom. In so doing, it addresses the present. Marion (1991, 172) puts it this way: 'The event remains less a past fact than a pledge given in the past in order, today still, to appeal to a future.' There is an incorporation into a kind of temporality about which Kierkegaard (1980, 90) describes the past redeeming the present by arriving in the form of hope from the future. For a congregation, linear time is compressed and multi-dimensional as the liturgy conveys Christ's humiliation, suffering and sacrifice and the new life, rebirth and future promise. A meta-narrative is shared both through the retelling with the prayer of institution and through the active participation, in the giving and receiving of bread and wine. Rowan Williams (1994, 114) says that this is 'more than the imitation of a remembered historical pattern of life: it is the uncovering of the eternal sapientia of God.'
Presence
An emphasis on the Church as Christ's body can eclipse the presence of Christ himself in the Eucharist but Transubstantiation locates Christ too precisely and ubiquitarianism perhaps lessens too dramatically Christ's particularity. It is difficult to articulate precisely where Christ locates himself during the Eucharist. Catholic theologians articulate more the transubstantiated real presence and the eucharistic celebration as a sacrifice, than their Protestant cousins. It would seem, however, that theologians like Pickstock, Williams and Ford are nuancing the old debate with fresh insight. Pickstock unpicks the relation of the Word (Logos) to the word spoken in the Eucharist and explores the lack of a gap between sign and referent. Williams describes Christ in the Eucharist as 'an effective sign, a converting sign' (Williams, 2000, 205). This conversion is to Christ and to others in mission, to those diverse others with whom we become the body. Barth is heard here as he elucidates, even if he denies the Eucharist as a sacrament par excellence, that Christ is the author of any event happening. He draws attention to God's initiation, Christ's self-disclosure and Williams helps with his reminder that it is the 'eternal sapientia of God' that the Eucharist uncovers. For Williams, the Eucharist is 'a symbol of mutuality' and Millband and Pickstock (2001, xiv), in their study of Aquinas, interpret what goes on in the Eucharist with words that capture the mutuality of a relationship out of which mission becomes possible: 'the mutuality of touch which is most intensely taste... as foretaste of our beatitude, newly discloses to us that this supreme intuition is itself also a touching.' It is best to concentrate on relationship and not objectify Christ, with puzzles over the elements, but hear him address us afresh. He does this in our tasting of the bread and wine and through the words we hear. But in the tasting, there is the immediate to our senses and also the call to become this food and drink (Augustine). 'This is my body' and 'this is my blood,' those key parts of the prayer of initiation, made real in food and drink, signify the gift that is Christ but so much more. Where the Calvinists rally against supposed fixed-meaning, 'the Eucharist, as interpreted by Aquinas, allows for - even demands - the greatest inexhaustibility of meaning, but at the same time overcomes the problem of a sheer indeterminacy of meaning...' (Millbank and Pickstock, 2001, 77). Buchanan (1998, 12) explores that 'liberty of interpretation' over whether the Spirit at the Epiclesis is being invoked upon the elements, the action or the people. Could it be that the Spirit makes sacred Christ as the Word addressing us (the sacred scriptures); the bread and wine given and received (the sacred species), his body (the sacred gathered) who partake of him and then the world (the sacred creation) into which they are sent? Cyril of Jerusalem (Tovey, 2004, 69) says 'whatever the Holy Spirit touches is sanctified and transformed.' In this way the missional work has its origin in God with Christians engaging in that mission as they participate in the Eucharist, not as a separate action once the Eucharist is over. Platten (GS 1651, 1997, 2.3) explains: 'We must not let the familiar words of the dismissal mislead us into thinking that, while we are still at worship, our active service has not yet begun...'
To conclude, significantly, the Eucharist prevents our reducing the relation of Christ and the Church to pure identity because in the bread and the wine Christ addresses us as an entity separate from us before being received. It is important for our reformed heritage that our self-offering is separated from what God offers us in Christ. Moreover, standing in an anemnetic juncture where Christ has been given (incarnation, death and resurrection) but will be given again (parousia), maintains an otherness that can not be controlled. It is perhaps in this way that Christians can best hear the mission of God that has already unfolded in time and be receptive to the mission that awaits them as they enter the world, not knowing what awaits but dependent on the Spirit to reveal the needs of the community. In the liminal space that is the Eucharist, mission is happening to, through and around the gathered, it is the gift of salvation that has already unfolded in time and it is something yet to be completed, into which there is an invitation to participate. Perhaps in order to avoid the old and ever-ongoing debate about where Christ locates himself in the Eucharist, Christians ought to ask themselves where Christ's call locates them.
22/08/2011
21/08/2011
Sermons to pick holes in if you so care
I analysed preaching styles at New Wine this year. They are not all polished - many are but people lose notes at times and start sentences over - I heard Pilavachi preach a sermon he had preached before, God still did some serious business through it. God uses us despite our clever turns of phrase or awkward analogies - I take comfort in this. So I will upload mine here. Is this a fruitful thing to do. I don't know. If people do not want to read it, they can move on, no harm done. If people would be prepared to unpick some of the stuff, question it, add to it, even better.
Here's the latest one on 1 Cor 13, verses 1-3.
One of my favourite stories as a child was the Velveteen Rabbit... a toy rabbit who is taken everywhere by a little boy getting covered in mud, being left in the rain, losing an eye and needing its ears patching in the process. This rabbit desperately wants to be a real rabbit. 'Real isn't how you are made,' the rabbit is told by another toy – 'It is a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you not just to play with but really loves you then you become real.'
Another story that I read and reread as a child was called The Magic Paintbrush, a story from Chinese folklore. It is the tale of a boy who paints watercolours of the most beautiful creatures but with his last brush stroke they leap from the page as they come alive. For a while the boy decides to make great wealth from his work but to sell it he must leave each picture unfinished. In the end he learns the joy from seeing the paintings burst into life and sacrifices the pride he feels in his artistic talent.
Paul's words to us at the beginning of chapter 13 are such a challenge in a world which would have us measure our accomplishments, boast in our achievements and rate our talents. To hear that these count for nothing in the Kingdom of God is a serious challenge indeed.
It is said that two things most dominate our thinking as human beings – our accomplishments and our relationships. We measure out our lives in terms of our achievements: riding a bike, winning at sports, passing exams, pursuing a career. We also look at our lives and remember falling in love, making friends, being cared for by others. But it would seem that our world is increasingly obsessed by the first, whilst Jesus calls us into the second.
The last two weeks of events in our inner cities works as an illustration of the states of our lives if we focus on the wrong things.
Over the last two weeks we have watched people climb all over each other in pursuit of the things that they think define them.
In the past two weeks we have heard about a fatherless generation.
In the past two weeks we have watched as people have rioted and looted the hearts of our cities, destroying the very communities to which they belong.
Paul's message in this letter to the church in Corinth is a radical challenge to our rioting hearts.
It calls us to concentrate on the giver of our gifts and not the gifts themselves
...to behave not as if we are fatherless but rather through our behaviour to demonstrate who the father is
In the past two weeks we have heard about a fatherless generation.
In the past two weeks we have watched as people have rioted and looted the hearts of our cities, destroying the very communities to which they belong.
Paul's message in this letter to the church in Corinth is a radical challenge to our rioting hearts.
It calls us to concentrate on the giver of our gifts and not the gifts themselves
...to behave not as if we are fatherless but rather through our behaviour to demonstrate who the father is
...and it calls us to define ourselves in terms of one thing only – love.
In other words Paul's message asks us to replace rioting hearts with hearts that dare instead to communicate who God is through our actions. We have this painful and joyful responsibility as citizens of the kingdom rather than citizens of the world to reveal who the father is both to people who know him already and also importantly to people who are yet to know him. Jesus calls us to love even our enemies too as we heard in the reading from Matthew. It is in loving and being loved that we become fully human, fully real and the means through which we can give life to others.
But it comes at a cost.
It was costly to the boy who so loved his rabbit but let it go,
...costly to the Chinese artist who poured out so much paint to see it leap away,
...costly to the Son of God, our saviour Jesus Christ who poured out his very life so that we might live.
It has to be costly to us too.
The velveteen rabbit asks about what it is like to be real, 'Does it hurt? He says
'Sometimes,' is the reply 'When you are Real you don't mind being hurt, - generally by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby.'
(I love this – I also think it's a great reason to feel more secure about our hair-loss as we age, we can just say – I am becoming more real and it has all been loved off.)
Jesus didn't ask us simply to love one another, he asked us to love one another as I have loved you.
This means that we love when it is hard to love,
...when we would rather do anything but love
...and it means that we make a choice to love.
This is not a love based on feelings, this is a love that is a decision of the will, just like it was for Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemene. We must choose to love.
Dorothy Day who began Catholic communities which are now world wide, describes in one of her journals how:
"...my love is too small; I even feel ...'I have no love...' [but]...I ... pretend I have.... [and] strange and wonderful, the make-believe becomes true. If you will to love someone you soon do."
Isn't that wonderful! It's so freeing. We do not have to find this love stuff easy. It is not something that we're zapped to be able to do as soon as we become Christians. It is okay to feel as though it is the last thing that we actually want to do. But we can will to do it, we can even play make-believe, we can act in a loving way, even when we do not feel loving and we will find that God in his grace, will supply the rest, he'll supply the love we lack.
How comforting. God knows sometimes we will clash like cymbals instead of feeling in harmony with one another, instead of loving one another. Perhaps we can also take some comfort from how Paul describes us in our attempts to be loving. He says that when we focus on the wrong things we are clanging gongs and clashing cymbals and I am sure we can imagine how God must see us in our attempts to join in with his symphony of love whilst all the while we are out of tune.
We have all sat as parents and grandparents through those primary school productions as children have bashed out their first tunes on their first percussion instruments, so determined to get it right. Our nerves become quite frayed but there is nearly always a moment though when searching eyes find us in the audience and for as long as that child looks at us we unscrew our faces and smile back. If we could just look at the father as we attempt to play our part in the orchestra, we would understand more obviously the noise that we are to make, the father directs our attention to all the other people playing instruments with us and once we can keep time with them as well, we begin to make a more joyful noise. We clash less. With our eyes on the one who is love we will learn how to love each other. For as long as we are only staring at the instrument in front of us and in terms of our passage that would be our abilities, spiritual gifts and good deeds, we will lose our focus, turning away from the father we produce that clashing sound again. Thank God he gives us time to learn and we do that best together as a community as we are doing as a parish of churches together. (Illustration from recent episode of parish life - churches coming together for worship weekend.)
John says in his first letter “No one has ever seen God, but if we love one another, people WILL see him, because they’ll see in us the love and care that can come only from him. They will see what God’s character looks like in physical reality and they will understand who he is.” It is love that we are asked to show towards one another so that the world knows we are Jesus' disciples. It is love that makes us so attractive that people are attracted like magnets to join us. We are called to reveal who God is through our loving behaviour towards one another.
For much of the bible we see God through his actions, the sending of his Son, his costly love in sacrificing him, their giving up the Spirit so that the Spirit could come and dwell with us on earth. Jesus demonstrates the gospel with signs and wonders as well as with words and stories. Spending less time telling us who they are and more time demonstrating it, we are also called to demonstrate that God is love. For No one has ever seen God, but if we love one another... people will begin to ask us questions,
... people will begin to be curious...
...people will begin to ask us the reason for the hope that lives within us...
Love exists in the first place because God is love – the creator of all things and he loved us first before the creation of the world and whilst we were a very long way off.
If our love is to be God-shaped, Jesus-shaped, then it is a love that offers itself, that puts the other first...such a hard thing to do, our greatest challenge - risky and difficult.
In other words Paul's message asks us to replace rioting hearts with hearts that dare instead to communicate who God is through our actions. We have this painful and joyful responsibility as citizens of the kingdom rather than citizens of the world to reveal who the father is both to people who know him already and also importantly to people who are yet to know him. Jesus calls us to love even our enemies too as we heard in the reading from Matthew. It is in loving and being loved that we become fully human, fully real and the means through which we can give life to others.
But it comes at a cost.
It was costly to the boy who so loved his rabbit but let it go,
...costly to the Chinese artist who poured out so much paint to see it leap away,
...costly to the Son of God, our saviour Jesus Christ who poured out his very life so that we might live.
It has to be costly to us too.
The velveteen rabbit asks about what it is like to be real, 'Does it hurt? He says
'Sometimes,' is the reply 'When you are Real you don't mind being hurt, - generally by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby.'
(I love this – I also think it's a great reason to feel more secure about our hair-loss as we age, we can just say – I am becoming more real and it has all been loved off.)
Jesus didn't ask us simply to love one another, he asked us to love one another as I have loved you.
This means that we love when it is hard to love,
...when we would rather do anything but love
...and it means that we make a choice to love.
This is not a love based on feelings, this is a love that is a decision of the will, just like it was for Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemene. We must choose to love.
Dorothy Day who began Catholic communities which are now world wide, describes in one of her journals how:
"...my love is too small; I even feel ...'I have no love...' [but]...I ... pretend I have.... [and] strange and wonderful, the make-believe becomes true. If you will to love someone you soon do."
Isn't that wonderful! It's so freeing. We do not have to find this love stuff easy. It is not something that we're zapped to be able to do as soon as we become Christians. It is okay to feel as though it is the last thing that we actually want to do. But we can will to do it, we can even play make-believe, we can act in a loving way, even when we do not feel loving and we will find that God in his grace, will supply the rest, he'll supply the love we lack.
How comforting. God knows sometimes we will clash like cymbals instead of feeling in harmony with one another, instead of loving one another. Perhaps we can also take some comfort from how Paul describes us in our attempts to be loving. He says that when we focus on the wrong things we are clanging gongs and clashing cymbals and I am sure we can imagine how God must see us in our attempts to join in with his symphony of love whilst all the while we are out of tune.
We have all sat as parents and grandparents through those primary school productions as children have bashed out their first tunes on their first percussion instruments, so determined to get it right. Our nerves become quite frayed but there is nearly always a moment though when searching eyes find us in the audience and for as long as that child looks at us we unscrew our faces and smile back. If we could just look at the father as we attempt to play our part in the orchestra, we would understand more obviously the noise that we are to make, the father directs our attention to all the other people playing instruments with us and once we can keep time with them as well, we begin to make a more joyful noise. We clash less. With our eyes on the one who is love we will learn how to love each other. For as long as we are only staring at the instrument in front of us and in terms of our passage that would be our abilities, spiritual gifts and good deeds, we will lose our focus, turning away from the father we produce that clashing sound again. Thank God he gives us time to learn and we do that best together as a community as we are doing as a parish of churches together. (Illustration from recent episode of parish life - churches coming together for worship weekend.)
John says in his first letter “No one has ever seen God, but if we love one another, people WILL see him, because they’ll see in us the love and care that can come only from him. They will see what God’s character looks like in physical reality and they will understand who he is.” It is love that we are asked to show towards one another so that the world knows we are Jesus' disciples. It is love that makes us so attractive that people are attracted like magnets to join us. We are called to reveal who God is through our loving behaviour towards one another.
For much of the bible we see God through his actions, the sending of his Son, his costly love in sacrificing him, their giving up the Spirit so that the Spirit could come and dwell with us on earth. Jesus demonstrates the gospel with signs and wonders as well as with words and stories. Spending less time telling us who they are and more time demonstrating it, we are also called to demonstrate that God is love. For No one has ever seen God, but if we love one another... people will begin to ask us questions,
... people will begin to be curious...
...people will begin to ask us the reason for the hope that lives within us...
Love exists in the first place because God is love – the creator of all things and he loved us first before the creation of the world and whilst we were a very long way off.
If our love is to be God-shaped, Jesus-shaped, then it is a love that offers itself, that puts the other first...such a hard thing to do, our greatest challenge - risky and difficult.
The love of God in a community like ours is not about demanding perfection but finding a community that can accept us in all our imperfections, with our patched up ears and our rubbed-off hair. This is the love all human beings need in order to become real, in order to leap from the canvas. We can not finish each painting but the author and perfecter of our faith promises to finish what he has begun, to present us pure and spotless on the final day so in the meantime, should our hair rub off a little and our ears need patching from all the clanging and the clashing we have been making as we learn to love, let's risk a little mud and love one another.
...so we must all try a little harder to love...to will to love...to make a decision to love. Perhaps we all have a note to write, an email to send, a phonecall to make, a friendship to restore. Perhaps we all need to tell that unlovable, hard to love, challenging person in our life that we love them.
...so we must all try a little harder to love...to will to love...to make a decision to love. Perhaps we all have a note to write, an email to send, a phonecall to make, a friendship to restore. Perhaps we all need to tell that unlovable, hard to love, challenging person in our life that we love them.
Let's start calling each other out into the realness of a Kingdom life... into the symphony of a joyful noise. Let's choose the most excellent way and begin to really live. Risk yourself, will love, make-believe to begin with – God will do the rest.
20/08/2011
Worship/speaker recommendation and blog recommendation
Blog on biblical preaching
This looks like it might be useful as curates in the early days develop their preaching.
12/08/2011
09/08/2011
Flash prayer-mob
Social media and networking is doing much to mobilise rioters but it is doing much to mobilise pray-ers too. Tim Gosling of Derby Church net was quick to start texting for support.
This morning texts and emails came through to assemble at the fountain in Derby to begin praying at 1:30pm. I left a funeral I was observing in time to make it there with my husband and two girls. We stood together and prayed and sang, standing to face the surrounding people with the Lord's prayer as we finished. BBC radio Derby were present to interview us and recorded the Lord's Prayer and Gosling's hopes on the 5 o'clock news show.
This call to pray united people across denominations and was an opportunity for a Christian witness as we were seen praying on our streets. Some passers-by joined in. Whilst it is good to be seen praying, prayer must also be accompanied by practical action; God calling us to be his hands and feet. Praying encouraged some to then prayer-walk Derby's tougher areas. The city centre seemed calm with a couple of police vans standing by and an obvious police presence. We will wait and see...
It would seem that the church can speak into the fear gripping our cities. To many, Christianity is irrelevant as the church keeps its people inside its buildings and speaks a language that ordinary people, unfamiliar with the scriptures, does not understand. When people are able to see street pastors mobilising, ministers and and their congregations involved in practical acts which reach victims of the violence and encourage a sense of conviction for perpetrators but not condemnation because there is none of that in Jesus...when we can speak with a generous vocabulary...quite frankly words like scum just don't help anyone... when we go the extra mile and clean up our streets and feed and nurture and shelter those effected in our cities...something of the hope for which we live for will be manifest and witnessed. God will win people for himself through these terrible times. The church needs to cooperate with his will, praying that he frustrates the plans of those intent on violence, drawing them into a realisation that there must be more than this ... and identity can come from something beyond mob-status and organised hatred. Through the church, God offers the salvation that is desperately desired. Before people believe, they need to belong. In this generation suffering isolationism, fear and uncertainty, the church must welcome, include, feed and nurture - we all long to be a part of something bigger than ourselves, to have purpose, to be in close relationships... to form community... to find something in a constantly shifting world that can anchor us. I pray that the church might become such a place to people finding a fleeting security in a kind of mob identity that will only spit you out eventually and leave you to the dogs as those whom you thought were your community, climb all over you to grab as much security as they can for themselves, to only pick the glass out of it and find that it had got broken in the scramble anyway.
08/08/2011
More delicious NEW WINE
Andrew writes...
... that we are good – is far harder for Christians to learn, because we are conditioned to believe that we are sinners and that there is no good in us. But the connection of the two parts of that belief-statement needs examining. It is true that we are sinners, but does that mean we are not good? I am not sure what Angus would say about our being good, from the point-of-view of mental health and dis-ease, but he has got me reflecting on it. God’s statement of his creation was that it was good. In Christ, I am a new creation. Jesus moves from identifying himself as the light of the world, to identifying the community of his family as being the light of the world. We are stars that shine in the universe, in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation. My identity is not that I was separated from God, but that I have been made one with Christ. God has prepared good works for me to discover and do, since before the world was made. Not only must I put to death the sinful nature, but this is now possible: God does not set us up for a fall.
But there is also a sense in which I have always been good, without denying for one moment my need for someone else who can save me from my insistence on hiding from God and neighbour as an act of self-preservation. Something cataclysmic happened in Eden. As a consequence, God says that the serpent is cursed, and so is the ground...but not the humans. As a consequence, humans will experience success – child-bearing, met desire, bringing forth crops – and failure – pain in child-bearing, oppressing our wives, toil – and each will be used to move us from infancy to maturity. God does not say the human has gone from good to bad: rather, the Trinity in conversation says that the human has become like them in knowing good and evil – but lacking the maturity to handle such knowledge. And so the human is barred from the Tree of Life, not as a permanent situation, but until such time as God himself becomes for us the Tree of Life; not as judgement, but as grace. There is a sense in which I am good not only because I am a new creation, but because I am God’s creation to begin with. Will I choose to listen to the voice of God, who calls his creation good; or to the voice of the serpent, who accuses God of with-holding his likeness from us, of hiding from us for his own self-protection – who accuses God of being a sinner? God delights in us, and he cannot delight in evil.
Why do we need to learn that we are good? Because if we believe that we are fundamentally bad, we will not believe that we are deserving of the gifts God wants to give us. We will believe God to have made a mistake, and will hide from him. And also because we will not be willing or able to offer ourselves as an acceptable sacrifice, only as a blighted offering. Until we learn that we are good, through experiencing success in some area, we will not be able to rely on God and partner with him. But as I said, Christians struggle to accept that they are good.
02/08/2011
Steve Chalke and the God of wrath
It's always interesting listening to Steve Chalke preach. He is passionate and quite intellectual in his approach but because of who he is and what he has been through, he can not fail to engage your heart as well. He spoke about Moses and his experiences of a God who reveals himself in a burning bush, an indecipherable name and a face too holy to behold. As we began to look at Exodus three together, I thought about how I need to unpack a little further Yahweh's 'I have observed...' 'I have heard...' 'I know...' 'I will come...' 'Go.' One of the ways in which God responds to our suffering is through his sending other people, us, into the fray. People often look for a separate and distinct work of God when we are the work of God sent into a situation.
The other day, on my way out of church, I got talking to a heroin addict, his girlfriend and a recovering alcoholic. This time wearing a collar became an opener for conversation, they were curious that I was a 'priest.' As I was asked questions about this God who seems to allow such suffering to occur, I spoke about the God of the Open theists who weeps when we weep, whose face is racked with pain as we feel pain. As I talk this way, the Classical theists' God of wrath, who dealt in penal substitutionary atonement often enters the room as well and these two aspects of God jar in my head. The God of love wins through but I carry the baggage of this kind of indoctrination. As Steve preached, you could hear his past transforming his present, his emphases were those brought to light too because he has spent some of his life in the presence of this God of wrath and anger.
I have also heard from Graham Dow this week that we can carry the hurts of a kind of evangelicalism that has us dwell too often and too much on our depravity, our falling short... it can breed a kind of guilt that infects and bounds. Chalke captured me for the way that he said we all do theology. Even if we think we are leaving theology to our clergy, in actual fact we are all doing theology and what matters is whether we do good or bad theology. He reflected on the bad theology of the Dutch Reformed Church and how their theory that all black people are derived from Ham (Noah's son) and are therefore living under some kind of curse has infected the way that they preach so that they actually preach a gospel of racial inferiority - no gospel (good news) at all. It goes wider, if our artists and our thinkers and our writers and our police do bad theology, we all suffer.
He alluded to the idea that our churches are as full of gods as the Old Testament. When we all think we are talking about the same God, very often we are not. We looked at Genesis 12 and Abraham's relationship with Terah, how the Jewish Midrash and the Koran tell us more about this early story - how Abraham went and smashed up the idols that his father was making, proclaiming that there can only be one God. This is the God who declares to Moses 'I am who I am' and there is something evasive about this, according to Chalke. I have never seen it this way before - it has always conveyed to me power because I have always considered his declaration - 'I am' in terms of 'all - being', 'forever', 'ongoing being', 'to be' being our most powerful verb. But perhaps English teacher days persuade me to think this way too.
So the idea of God revealing unrevelation at this point in his journey with his people is a new way to think it through for me. For Chalke God is not revealing who he is in a name - names are so bad at telling us anything about a person. They do not work for God either - it is in fact God's way of dissuading us from boxing him in. Names do reveal little - you have to journey with God and follow him as Abraham does into a new land, as Moses does across the desert, as the disciples follow Jesus, who leave their nets. It is God's way of preventing us from bottling him up in a couple of doctrines that only result in us saying that we are right and others are wrong.
Chalke takes us to Exodus 33 and this idea of Moses being sheltered in the rock because if he looks on God's holy face, he can not live. It is a passage that seems to conjure within us a kind of aversion to something frighteningly powerful. We then listen to testimony of Chalke's time in Tailand, visiting an orphanage for sick children piled ten high to a bed, babies packed in on their sides for the best fit and we are taken with him to one such bed containing a ten year old boy who does nothing but rock backwards and forwards in oblivion - how Steve rested a hand on this boy's forehead for him to respond for a few seconds before Steve is called away and the boy resumes the rocking action. After this Steve describes movingly and genuinely his desire at that point to simply give up and die, leave the planet with a pain too much to bear and it was at this point that the face that he understands Moses can not look upon is so anguished (in wrath) so angry, so disturbed by what God is looking upon, his children in this kind of rocking pain, that this is the reason we can not look at God's face - it would kill us to see this much love...LOVE... anguish, pain. I think to myself at this point where I would go with this.
This is the face of love and compassion, the face that in Jesus weeps at the loss of one of his best friends, I write my own thoughts as Steve preaches about how if I were to look upon a face that loved so much as God loves - a holy and perfect love, I would want to leave planet earth too to be united with this love. This is how the love of God first felt for me. I wonder if one day, I will share this in a preach. I can see myself now walking up over Eaton bank, staring into the country-side and being so overwhelmed by this new thing that God had done in my life, pouring his Holy Spirit into me for the first time, that I had to pray quite hard against this feeling of just wanting to join him right there and then. Do not get me wrong, I was not about to throw myself off the bank to hurry the life process to death and eternal union, there are not quite words but I was overwhelmed by this wanting desoerately to be with God fully.
Steve says we can not look at God's face because it is his pained love that we can not behold and live with.
The point that Steve is making and which I think is probably liberating the many present whom he suspects are stuck with the theology of a God of wrath and their never measuring up to damaging degree, is this God of an agony, an anguish of love. For Chalke preaches that sin generates its own consequences. I have blogged about this before and our reading of the early chapters of Romans. I too believe that sin, as the Proverbs discuss, causes its own consequences, God does not smite and obliterate and dish out his wrath in punishment. I can not preach this kind of a gospel.
I tell the heroin addict at the bottom of the driveway of the church that it is the heroin doing the damage, this is not God's punishment for anything this young man has done - God weeps with a heart breaking for the son he loves every time that liquid is injected.
...and so Steve's preach liberates me too, the God of the classical theists, unmoved does not shout charges of patripassianism quite so loudly. The God of love flings open his arms a little wider and ideas begin to flow for how I will communicate this love of 1 Corinthians 13 for my first preach in a new church later this month, where uncluttered by powerpoint, I will be able to proclaim what I think about this God of love for twenty minutes from the pulpit.
We worship the God who has revealed himself in Jesus, who weeps, is humble, merciful - the foot-washing God who asks us to throw ourselves into his arms and asks us to journey with him as he absorbs our pain - and on that word I hear Chalke's testimony to a theory of the atonement where there is expiation rather than propitiation - where God absorbs our pain and I hear the voice of a preacher who has been in agony, splitting Spring Harvest, condemned by parts of the church for his theology and I say - Yes - Thank God - Steve Chalke - you are welcome here.
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