PLENI SUNT

 

·      “I am the Resurrection and the Life. He that has faith in me, even though he dies, shall live. And all that live and have faith in me shall never die.” (John 11:25)

·      Why are we believers not in a state of perpetual wonder at the magnitude of the gift we have received? Perhaps because we are not often faced with evidence of it in our daily lives. Getting and spending we lay waste our wonder. Worse, infirmities and blows befall us, and worse befalls the Umwelt, the wider world; all of which the Adversary incites us to parse as counter-evidence.

·      Is there, then, a way back, or forward, into recognition and thus renewal? Yes.

·      Pleni sunt cœli et terra gloria tua. We live, move and have our being in an ocean of God’s glory. Oh yeah? say our atheist friends. Yeah.

·      Begin at beginners’ level: an April day in the Southern French countryside. Everything is in flower, from the humble campion via pale irises and roses’ intensity to the pouring gold of laburnums and the Tyrian shout of Judas-trees. Bees crawl over the wistaria in an ecstasy of fulfilment. A cuckoo sounds in the distance. Bright golden sunshine touches your eyelids, and a cool breeze murmurs to your hair. Yes, you say to yourself: this one’s easy. Nature doesn’t get much better. Glory is all about.

·      The Spoiler, though, is only briefly embarrassed. Look, he says. You are walking slowly, with two sticks. You discover a new pain every day. You have prostate cancer. Your neighbour has had much of his intestine removed and carries a stroma. One of your friends ended up, too young, with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Your mother died of a stroke after five interminable years of Alzheimer’s. Glorious?

·      After a brief prayer you reply, Yes. I am here, giving thanks and praise; not only for Thibault the donkey whose nose I just stroked, but for his lookalike, the young radiotherapist who treated my cancer, and the tireless ladies who tended his machine. My neighbour has kept his huge echoing laugh and every scrap of his fighting soul. My friend was cared for with extraordinary love by his wife, a nurse, and his condition brought his friends and colleagues to organise an entire small conference in his honour, in his own remote city, where he was surrounded by honour and affection in his last year. And my mother’s illness brought out in my father a depth of sacrificial love and self-abnegation neither he nor we dreamed he possessed. All conditions of the earth earthy; but that terra was and is plena also of glory.

·      The Contrarian gnashes his teeth, allowing you at last to hear what that sounds like. As we know, he is expert at teleportation; and he whisks you in a whoosh to another part of the country where the houses are experiencing their fifth flooding in two months, women and men are hopelessly piling furniture and working mops and pumps and discovering that their insurance has found an excuse not to pay up even as their walls crack and peel with the absorbed moisture. Aye, he grins. There’s glory for you.

·      But his eyes darken as the Fire Brigade appears. The young men and women are all volunteers, part-timers, the friends and neighbours of the afflicted, They turn up with boats of several kinds, helped by local farmers with tall tractors that brush aside the water; they help the elderly out of their flooded houses, wrap them in blankets and take them to the high-school gym where other volunteers are already preparing hot coffee, tea and cocoa, as well as comforting hugs. Glory creeps in through the windows and swirls invisibly among the rafters. Level Three, and it’s still there: stronger than ever, perhaps.

·      Now the Enemy switches on the television even as he tunes your smartphone to three different social networks simultaneously. As casualty figures from Sudan mingle with Russian atrocities in Ukraine, Islamist decapitations in the Middle East and teenagers kicking other teenagers to death in a Parisian suburb, he grins. Gloria in excelsis? he hisses.

·      Yes, well, this is the graduate course. Were you ever told it was going to be easy? You go back and pray. Time out: need to work on this one. And yet, and yet, something comes tiptoeing out of the wreckage and the gore. Something difficult at first to identify, but call it Horror. You can see it in the faces of the reporters in Boutcha, in the womens’ eyes behind the niqabs, and in the classmates of the French teenagers as well as their parents. It is a strange glory, this: it crawls with agonizing slowness from Fear to No Complicity to Resistance – and it is a glory, perhaps the greatest even: a glory crowned with thorns.  

·      So: pleni sunt cœli et terra gloria tua? Indeed they are; but often unexpectedly. Which brings us back to That Man. Yeshua Meshiach. Who was expected to turn up as a new King David, with an army, to take Jerusalem and then make the Romans an offer they couldn’t refuse; and who instead appeared as a tall, bony itinerant rabbi striding through the North Country, preaching in villages an unlikely message of returning the measureless love of an invisible Father and extending risky affection to troublesome neighbours. A supposed monarch who rode into town on a donkey; a holy man who let himself be put to a hideous death with slaves and killers; a dead man who came back and ate fish on the beach with his friends. From his life to his message to his return, everything about him is unexpected. You can’t make this up. This isn’t a religion: gods don’t act like this. Gods drink nectar on mountaintops and flirt with nymphs.

·      So, this being the case, we may expect gloria sua also not always to be probable either. And it works both ways. If we learn to recognize the glory, from the laburnums all the way to the resistance, then perhaps we can begin to understand the Gift – a Gift which, like the glory, lives below and beside our everyday life, an insistent and reassuring heartbeat. A vita eterna that has already begun, coursing silently but mightily through our days, always only the whistle-thin membrane of a prayer away.

AS COMPACT AS YOUR GPS - TRINITY 14

Now imagine 40 years of this, with 80,000 people bitching...

Leonine sacramentary

OMNIPOTENS sempiterne Deus, da nobis fidei, spei, et charitatis augmentum ; et, ut assequamur quod promittis, fac nos amare quod praecipis ; per Jesum Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen. 

1549 / 1662

ALMIGHTYE and everlastyng God, geve unto us the increase of faythe, hope, and charitie; and that we may obteine that whiche thou doest promise; make us to love that whiche thou doest commaunde, through Jesus Christe our Lorde.

Cranmer translated this literally, and the revisers of 1662 wisely left the handsome parallellism alone.

Someone wrote that there could almost be no more compact expression of the Christian faith than this Collect. It is brief and shapely, and of an extreme simplicity. We ask God – the Almighty and Everlasting God, the Creator of the Universe – to give us the three qualities that St Paul described as “what remains”: the irreducible core of the Christian’s life, the most basic psychic waybread, that which we survive on as we travel from birth to death in the company of the others who make up the new Israel. We cannot produce them for ourselves, as the old Israel could not produce its own food in the Negev but had to be fed by the hand of God with manna and quails. We need faith, because without it we cannot recognise the God who loves us. We need hope, because without it we have no reason to go on when the going is hard. And we need charity because we are not alone in our journey, but in the company of others as frail and frightened as we ourselves. 

Yet there is more. God has given us promises. (Remember? Last week we ran to them.) The Collects, when they refer to these, do not spell them out, mainly because the form is too compact to allow this. It may be useful to pause and remember what they are. God has given us His love: that’s not a promise because we have it already – whether we are ready to receive it or not. What he has promised us is chayei olam, “eternal life”. The modern Church is embarrassed by this, and tends to insist that we should not (necessarily) think of this as something after death, but that what it really refers to is an eternal dimension of life, potentially present even in this terrestrial life. I don’t want to get into this now, because either way it is something not immediately present to almost all of us, and thus proper material for a promise. 

Either way, though, eternal life has certain characteristics. The chief one is the real, actual presence of God. In the chayei olam we are in the presence of God: of the primal light and joy that brought the Universe into being, but also of the living Father whose love (His very nature) embraces not only the dance of planets but every living human creature. Because imagination is part of our equipment we can, however dimly, imagine what it must be like not, as now, always to be divided from the one we pray to, from the one who loves us, not always to have to decode, to imagine, to piece together His answers: we would open like a flower to the morning sun. 

But how to get there? Such a promise is worth running to, but by what trail? Ah, says the Collect: here is the answer. To get to the promise, to obtain (and the Latin assequamur is even richer, since it also means “to understand”) what is promised, we need to obey God’s commands. But, since He is Love, since love is his very nature, the only way we can do so, the only way we can obey his commands in the spirit in which they were given, is to understand them; and the only way to understand them is in the spirit of love. That we need to love what we are ordered to do sounds at first hearing both odd and rebarbative: kiss the rod, you scum. Not a bit of it. God has given us orders because we are in a dire state and slow on the uptake: orders at least are clear. And since we are wandering through a desert, when we understand that the orders are what will see us through and beyond, we will undoubtedly love them. 

Finally, how do we obey them? What is it we are ordered to do? Like other Collects, this one describes a perfect circle. We obey God’s commands by using, by living, the faith, the hope, and the charity we pray Him to give us. And in all of this, the central figure, the model, the living “command” is Yeshua Ha-moshiach, Jesus the Anointed. If we keep our eyes on him, if we walk with him, if we stick to him like glue, if we – like seconds on a climbing rope – try to follow His moves in the rocks and ledges and gullies of the desert we are traversing, then – in whatever dimension, this side of the grave and/or beyond it, the light and the warmth of our Father’s love is there, open and waiting.

SPRINT OR MARATHON? TRINITY 11

Could this be the origin of "runner's high"?

Latin Collect (<Gelasian Sacramentary)

DEUS, qui omnipotentiam tuam parcendo maxime et miserendo manifestas, multiplica super nos
misericordiam tuam, ut ad tua promissa currentes cœlestium bonorum facias esse participes. Per Jesum Christum Dominum nostrum.

Prayer book of 1549

GOD, which declarest thy almighty power most chiefly in shewyng mercy and pitie; Geve unto us abundauntly thy grace, that we, running to thy promises, may be made partakers of thy heavenly treasure; through Jesus Christe our Lorde.

Prayer book of 1662

O GOD, who declarest thy almighty power most chiefly in shewing mercy and pity; Mercifully grant unto us such a measure of thy grace, that we, running the way of thy commandments, may obtain thy gracious promises, and be made partakers of thy heavenly treasure; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

(It's interesting that the Latin “parcendo et miserendo” is translated by “showing mercy and pity”. The mercy is the furthest from the Latin: “parco” means to spare. And “misericordia” is translated as “grace”.)

This is a curious Collect, and an attractive one. The attraction lies in the “currentes”: we run to God’s promises of heavenly treasure. But it is also odd: what is the relation between that running and God’s power shown in mercy and pity?

So we start thinking. Usually, in a Collect, the relation between pts 2 and 3 is somehow causal: so here we ask God to multiply upon us his mercy, so that we may run to his promises and thus may be made partakers of his heavenly treasure. In other words, we need his mercy to start running. We cannot run toward God without his mercy; and there we see the genius of Cranmer as a translator – here he has understood that what we need even to be able to start running toward God is God’s own grace.

We can do nothing good of ourselves. We are stuck in the mud of our own little barnyard, and our feet can barely suck themselves out of it to take a single step. Yet when we hear what God promises us, we are on fire with enthusiasm: we want to go, to run even, toward him and toward the treasure he promises us. But the world is too much with us: getting and spending, we lay waste our powers. So we pray for mercy, we pray for grace, to free us, to pull us out of the mud so that at last we can run.

And the interesting thing is that the essence of the promise itself is grace. What is the heavenly treasure? Eternal life: a life without time, lived in the permanent presence, in the glorious ambient grace, of the Triune God. We need his grace to run to his grace. A wonderfully virtuous circle.

FOR ALL YOU DOUBTING THOMASES

Worcester College

On this First Sunday After Easter, alias Mercy Sunday, I can do no better than repost, with her permission and my gratitude, today's sermon by my priestly daughter, now Chaplain of Worcester College, Oxford. Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.

Thomas

TESS KUIN LAWTON·SUNDAY, 8 APRIL 2018

On this Sunday after Easter, we are offered some remarkable stories about discipleship and it seems like a good opportunity to use them to reflect on our own journeys of faith.

The first, and most obvious story is that of Thomas. There is a method of spiritual reading of the Bible which encourages us to imagine ourselves as one of the characters in the narrative and really live the event from their point of view. During Holy Week and Easter, it is almost impossible not to do this. The characters are so full of life and the narrative is so vivid that we are drawn inexorably into the way of the cross as we tread the path with Jesus. Sometimes we are Mary, watching and waiting as the event unfolds. Sometimes Peter, denying we are followers of Jesus at all. Sometimes the accuser, sometimes the soldiers, sometimes the women laying his precious body to rest.

The beauty of the narrative is that it invites this kind of reading. The author of the Gospel of John is explicit when he says that he has written everything ‘so that we might believe.’ There is a profound interplay here between the written word and the way it speaks to our faith in God. John is writing the Gospel so that everyone who reads it and hears it might believe that Jesus is the Son of God. If you believe that this is the case, John is convinced of two things: that you will have found a way to have, as Jesus puts it ‘life in all its fullness’ and that this abundance of life will not end with death. ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.’ (John 3.16)

When I was a school Chaplain, I was lucky enough to meet a man from the Gideons who told me about his mission to prisoners. He would take the small red New Testaments into prison and distribute them with words of encouragement. One day a man came to tell him that the thin pages were the perfect size for cigarette paper and he had indeed smoked his way through Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. By the time he got to Acts, he felt that perhaps he should read the pages before smoking them. He was converted by Peter’s speech on the resurrection of Jesus and had come to ask my friend for a new copy of the Bible.

These words on cigarette-thin paper were written ‘so that you might believe’. They are words to comfort and to heal. Words to challenge and to inspire. Words which echo across centuries and reach into your heart today.

The story of doubting Thomas plays its part in this conversation between us and God. The resurrected Jesus meets his friends for the first time and knowing exactly the level of their fear and anxiety, his first words to them are ‘peace be with you.’ He says it twice. He understands.

Peace. We know what it feels like. The sunshine reminds us of it. A feeling of calm. Of beauty. Of ease. Those times in life when we are aligned with the world, in tune with the basso continuo of life. No worries to niggle us. No stress to unsettle us. No sadness to drag us down.

Imagine how deeply sad the disciples must have been. Imagine the weight of their grief. Not only their beloved friend, but their longest running snap-chat streak, the one they spoke to every day and who settled them and made sense of life; not only this but also the leader of their community, their purpose, their reason to live. All this died in them when he died. The locked doors are not only factual in John’s story. They are symbolic. In the face of grief, we lock down.

And into this, the risen life of Christ walks. Through the locked doors, breathing peace into the fear. ‘Peace be with you.’

Thomas was not part of it and the disciples are not good at explaining. They don’t really know what has happened and they are not making a lot of sense to Thomas. He needs to see, feel, hold, touch the man who made sense of his life.

And Jesus gets this. He holds out his hands and he invites Thomas to touch. This is no ghost, no apparition or wish fulfilment. This is real. Thomas gets it.

‘My Lord and My God.’

Our readings today have important things to teach us about the practical life of a follower of Jesus. John’s Gospel reminds us that we have the power of forgiveness, each one of us and there is enough in a single verse of the Gospel to give us food for prayer for the rest of the week as we reflect on our own ability to forgive. Jesus considers forgiveness to be the gift of the Holy Spirit, and it is so central to his message about how we should live that it has a central role in the prayer we say every day: ‘forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.’

The book of Acts, the one which converted our smoking friend in prison, gives us a really remarkable reading in chapter 4 about how we should live as a community: sharing and giving up our own wealth so that our neighbours in Christ might be cared for, ‘there was not a needy person among them.’ (4.34) This earliest group of Christians were characterised by two things, we are told. Verse 32 says ‘now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul.’ And the following verse tells us that ‘great grace was upon them all.’

This is a powerful image of the possibilities of living the resurrection life and the church should hold on to it with joy and hope. But today’s readings highlight the contrast between this and the immediate aftermath of the crucifixion. This transformed, grace-filled life begins behind the locked doors of the upper room. And it takes doubt as its starting point.

It is not hard to inhabit the character of Thomas, because doubt is part of the journey of faith: particularly in the empiricist world in which we now live. And what our readings tell us this morning is that God knows. God knows that doubt is part of the human condition and God responds to it at the level we need: ‘reach our your hand and put it into my wounds’ (John 20.27).

God does not love us less, if we doubt. God is always reaching out to us. Continually. But at some point, we have to reach back towards God and we must trust that it is true. ‘My Lord and My God.’

HATE SPEECH?

Cosimo Rosselli, 'The Sermon on the Mount' 

`If any one doth come unto me, and doth not hate his own father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brothers, and sisters, and yet even his own life, he is not able to be my disciple;  and whoever doth not bear his cross, and come after me, is not able to be my disciple.’ (Luke 14:26-7; today's Gospel.)

There is no way around it: J.B. Phillips, in his modern New Testament translation, put quotation marks around ‘hate’, but the Greek verb is uncompromising. This is one of Jesus’ more rebarbative sayings, one of those we would rather forget; the more as the current Church insists that every believer should be a mathètès, a disciple. So, we say, what about the man and wife who are to be one flesh? We are to love the little ones, the children – just not our children? We are to honour our parents, yet hate them?

The saying goes, of course, with Jesus’ snarky reaction to his mother and brothers’ coming to visit him: ‘Who are my mother and my brothers? . . . These are mother and my brothers’, pointing to the disciples (Mt 12:46-7); and Matthew 19:29, where anyone who leaves everything (home, father, mother, sisters, brothers, wife, and property) to follow him will receive a hundredfold return and eternal life. Extreme, also: still, giving up is less than hating.

How do we deal with such a saying? One way is to say that Jesus, in his humanity, was truly human (in all things, we are told, except sin), and that thus he was capable of impatience and irritation as he was of exhaustion and depression. In that sense, the saying Luke reports comes from a simple, indeed a simplistic, binary ‘love’ and ‘hate’. He does not, in other words, mean the verb literally. (Hence Phillips’ quotation marks.)

Another way of dealing with it is to remember that ‘Matthew’ was part of the early Church, and that his Gospel, like the other Synoptics, doesn’t want only to recount Jesus’s sayings and doings in great accuracy but is engaged, as part of the Church, in building an edifice for those who have not been there, and future generations, to live in. The extreme terms, then, are those of a community that has to deal with members who regularly privilege their private affairs over those of the ecclesia.

Leaving history aside, though, we need to know how we are to deal with these words.  And there, I think, another passage from Matthew comes to our aid. This comes in the discourse on the lilies of the field that toil not, neither do they spin, yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Therefore take no thought for the morrow, says Jesus: but ‘seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.’ (Matthew 6:33)

Here, I think, may be the key to our passage of hate. Hyperbole aside, we need to concentrate on the kingdom (basileia, perhaps better translated the ‘kingship’, the reign) of God: both on recognising it in Jesus, who is the Kingdom, and in bringing it about in the world where he is no longer physically present. ‘Seeking first’ is beginning the day with the prayer that we may do His will that day, and that we may not forget that by lunchtime. (The noontime Angelus is a good reminder.) It’s not a matter of hating A, but of going all out to pursue B – in which case, if A gets in the way, you brush A aside impatiently – which, to A, may feel like hate but isn’t. (And in any case, it only happens if A gets in the way.) 

And, he says, if we do so; if all we consciously care about is doing His will, is living His kingship; why, then our parents, our spouse, our children, our property, ‘will be added unto us’, will be there, but as gifts, not earnings, and thus all the more precious. Not only will we find what we seek, i.e. the kingdom of God, but we will find ourselves showered with all those other good things that we thought we had but didn’t really until now, when we receive them all over again, as God’s gifts. And eternal life as well. 

One final thought: on the way to the kingdom of God, on the way of our pursuit, there may well be a cross. And that we cannot, must not brush aside: for He is the kingdom, and it is from the Cross that He reigns. At the very least there is death, for all of us; for some there is great suffering. But among the gifts we receive there is Resurrection -- Zoèn aionion, eternal life.

OF CASH, OF CAMELS, AND OF TIGHT PLACES

A Needle's Eye in Jerusalem

Today’s Gospel reading in the now-combined Roman Catholic and Anglican Lectionaries was St Mark’s rather touching story of the young man who came to Jesus and asked what he should do to obtain eternal life. Jesus told him that as a good Jew, he ought to know the answer: keep the Commandments. Yes, but I’ve done that faithfully all my life, said the youth sadly; implying that he felt there was still some essential ingredient missing. Jesus, says Mark, looked at him, and loved him. I’ve always imagined Jesus previously occupied with something else, and as it were replying over his shoulder, almost mechanically. And only now turning and looking at him, and ‘loving him’. There aren’t a lot of places in the Gospels where we are told that Jesus loved someone. John, of course; Martha, Mary, and Lazarus; and this anonymous young man, who thus finds himself in very select company. Jesus looked at him, and loved him, and saw at once what the lack was. Go sell your possessions, give what they bring to the poor, and come and follow me – sensing perhaps already that the Twelve would become Eleven?

            This, clearly, was not what the youth had been prepared for. He thought for a minute, then with infinite sadness shook his head and walked slowly away, ‘because he had many possessions’. And Jesus, equally sad, turned to his disciples and said, How hard it is for someone who has much to get into the Kingdom of Heaven! It is harder than it is for a camel to get through the Needle’s Eye.

            We were reminded that Needles' Eyes were particularly narrow gates in Jerusalem, used by pedestrians after the great gates were shut, and that even a very young and skinny camel would have a hard time getting through, let alone a plump or laden one. (Also, apparently, the rich and grand wouldn't use them because it mean stooping and squeezing, most undignified.)

            What I found interesting in both the homily that followed and in the commentaries in Prions en Eglise, by Emmanuel Schwab and Marc Sevin, was the way they all pointed up a lesson, a moral, that had not occurred to me. The obvious moral is depressing to all but the dispossessed; but as Fr Jean-Kamel pointed out, we are all rich in something. As Fr Schwab wrote, if selling all your possessions was the point, you would be buying your way into the kingdom. No, the point is that any riches you have – money, goods, talent, sophistication, intelligence, culture, beauty, strength, generosity, what you will – any wealth you have that serves to make you feel secure and stops you a) helping those who need it and b) pulling up sticks and following Jesus – this is what you have to learn to distance yourself from. Not to get rid of, necessarily; but to regard with equanimity and to give. To give to those who need it; to give to Him who is the Kingdom.

            Again, the point is not necessarily to donate everything to the local food bank or to create an association helping leukemia-patients in Angola. As someone else wrote, what is asked of us is being there. Not to be in our parallel world of Facebook or Twitter or Nintendo; not to dwell in a cherished past; not to strain toward a hoped-for future; but to be there in God’s time: the present. As a wonderful Sixties book put it: Remember Be Here Now. If you wear your riches lightly, you can be there for whoever needs you right now, at any time, and all your riches will be available at once. If you wear them lightly, you can be there and follow when He calls, right now, at any time. If each of us is the rich young man, then each of us is on the receiving end of that look of Jesus’s, and of that loving. In very select company.    

CODA: How not to walk away grieving. 
After publishing this, I remembered that there was another point to the commentaries I had read. The way not to be 'rich' is to be poor.  To be poor in spirit is to be blessed. How does one become poor in spirit? By realising, in the bottom of one's heart, that one can give oneself nothing. That everything is given by God, and that we need to ask for everything. If the real riches are those of the spirit, then we are all poor. Seek, and you shall find. Ask, and it shall be given to you. Given to you, not earned by you. Quæsumus, Domine. Gratias agimus tibi.