OF FALLING TOWERS AND WAYS TO DIE

At that very time there were some present who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. 2 He asked them, ‘Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? 3 No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish like them. 4 Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them—do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? 5 No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish like them.’

To the question ‘does shit happen to sinners because they have sinned?’ Yeshua answers, No. There is no necessary connection between nasties that happen to us and the moral quality of our antecedent behaviour. That is already a huge thing to say. Because what it implies is that Shit Happens. Sometimes it’s an Act of Nature: a woman I knew was killed climbing in the Rockies when thaw dislodged a stone 1200 feet above which fell and cut her rope. Sometimes it’s somebody’s fault: that tower in Siloam may have had a fault in the foundation because of somebody’s negligence. But it is not the victim’s fault.

Moreover, Shit Happens, and when it does it is not God’s fault. This is much harder to conceive. God does not micromanage this or, we may assume, any other planet. God knows when every sparrow falls; but He does not stop its falling. Why not? Because, first, the whole life of the planet is based on mortality and replacement. We need to die to make room for our grandchildren. The tree bears seed so that a new tree can replace it. So why, then, not make mortality such that each human dies in a kindly and harmonious way? Because even when a loved person dies at the right moment, for those around, weeping, it is still a trauma, the moment is never right. And finally, we forget Satan at our peril. His presence – tempting us to sin and busily collecting our IOUs -- ensures that much that might have been harmonious will not be.  

Then Yeshua goes on to say, ‘but if you do not turn your mind around, you will perish like them.’ My daughter, in her sermon, elaborated that beautifully in saying that we need to turn from our pages and screens and news cycles to ‘bask in God’s love’ – which will necessarily make us pass on that love to others. But what also intrigues me is the ‘perishing like them.’ The point here, I think, is that we all die, whether peacefully in our beds, painfully in a hospital, horribly in a car crash or a fire, or among many in a natural disaster (see Leonard Cohen’s moving song ‘Who by Fire’, based on a Day of Atonement text). So why does He say ‘unless you turn around’? Will that exempt us from mortality? No – we know that. But if we have turned definitively to God – which means turning to the Anointed One – we will die, but not like them. We will die differently. We will die in the warmth of God’s love, and whatever awaits us on the other side will be a form of that. 

Photo: New York, September 11, 2001, by Detective Greg Semendinger, New York City Police Aviation Unit.  

"NOT A SAD TIME"

It’s been too long since I’ve written anything here. But now, at the beginning of another Lent, it may be useful to set down a few thoughts. 

CHEERFULNESS

In his Ash Wednesday sermon, our Franco-Algerian priest reminded us that Lent is not meant to be a time of sadness. Coming just after the Old Testament reading from the Book of Joel where we are told to rend our hearts (not our garments) and to proclaim a public fast and massive repentance in the faint hope that the Lord may spare us His chastisement, this might seem just a little bouncy. 

The Israel of Joel was a community, and religion was its raison d’être and what held it together. Communal, and even more so, national, repentance these days seems scarcely thinkable (except perhaps in the new idolatrous religion of Ecology). If modern communications have done anything, it has been to turn us into individualists, in religion as elsewhere. Our sins, we tend to think, are our own. Hence repentance, if repentance there be, is our own. And, mindful of Jesus’ warning against showing off while fasting or praying, we tend to keep quiet about it. And we are often not quite sure what to do about Lent. Unlike Muslims, who keep Ramadan with admirable consistency, we haver and dither: do we “give up” something, like chocolate, or alcohol, or binge-watching Netflix? And if we do, what relation does that have to our relation to God? 

The Church often tells us not to concentrate on Lent as an accomplishment: “making a good Lent” (which we usually fail at). It would be too much like New Year’s resolutions. In fact, listening to the Church may well help us. As Pope Francis reminds us, Lent is quite simply about three things: fasting, praying, and sharing. 

Real fasting is something very few of us do; traditionally the Church told us to give up meat (“carne vale”: goodbye, meat) and replace it with fish, seafood, or vegetarian meals. This is still one way to fulfil that particular obligation. And with moderation: if you are invited to dinner by unbelievers, you should not refuse to eat their pork roast, as that would be showing off. You can always compensate by skipping lunch next day. 

Prayer, though, is more important than fasting. It is in any case the key to a life of faith. Talk to God; argue with God; weep to God; listen to God; it’s all prayer, and it’s the breath of life. He may not always talk; but He always listens, and He always loves. You. 

And sharing is what used to be called almsgiving. Giving to those who need. Not just money, though some of that is always welcome. No, comfort; kindness; respect; a hug; a smile, even; they are all gifts, alms, sharing. 

To come back to our priest: as he said, Lent is the spring cleaning of the soul. You may sometimes find it onerous (incidentally, who still does spring cleaning in the old way, I wonder?); but you don’t do it grumbling, grouching, and kvetching. Housecleaning the soul should, like the other kind, be thorough – it’s when you finally get at those corners behind the stove and at those spiders’ webs in the corners of the ceiling – but cheerful, looking forward to the celebration of Easter. 

You begin with ashes: yes, we’re all headed for the dustheap. But no: it’s not final. You face up to the shit you have done, said, and been, because we all have, at some time. And you sincerely say, out loud if only to your Abba, your Father, that you’re sorry, that you wish you hadn’t, and that you need help not to do, say, and be that in future. 

And then you get out the mop, the broom, the pail, and get to work. Whistling. 

  

SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS

With her permission I reproduce here the column my daughter the Rev. Tess Kuin Lawton, an Anglican priest and chaplain of Magdalen College School in Oxford, put on Facebook yesterday. I found it the most moving and pertinent comment I have seen.

It is rare to have an item of news so appalling that the instinctive human reaction is not to listen, watch or read about it at all; but in the story of the murder of 140 school children by the Taliban in Pakistan on Tuesday, that is what has been thrust into the heart of the pre-Christmas glitter and sparkle and the juxtaposition is impossible to bear.

Yet, the religiously minded among us cannot help hearing the echo of both Pharaoh and Herod and we find ourselves once more taking off our shoes as we wait for the Theophany. The religious narrative of our souls has shown that when God has come into the world, it has been a world of violence and horror. These things are not new. They are part of the human condition every bit as much as hope and anticipation and joy.

The Fall is not simply a colourful myth we can weave into carol services and set to beautiful music. It is reality of human nature which allows each one of us to sink to untold depths of depravity and paint a picture which can nevertheless justify our actions. There is a rationale behind every act of moral evil; a way to explain it, make sense of it. We seem to need to be able to do that somehow, in order to comprehend the darkness. So we have heard about revenge for the West honouring a teenage girl who champions education, we have heard of children bearing the punishment for the sins of their fathers in the army, we have even heard some try to suggest that education is un-Islamic.

Pharaoh feared the growing numbers of Israelite slaves and gave orders that the midwives kill all new-born boys. When the midwives could not do this, Pharaoh ordered that new-born boys be drowned in the Nile instead. The words used in Exodus for Pharaoh’s dealings with the Israelites are ‘shrewd’ and ‘ruthless’. Today, in a society where we are protected from reality by a screen, we are used to hearing these words used in a response to a budget report, not as a way of dealing with people. In the second chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, Herod works ‘in secret’ to ‘search for the child and destroy him.’ When his plan is thwarted and the holy family flee into the same Egypt of their ancestors, Herod’s fury leads him to ‘kill all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years or under.’

We read it out, we remember it in the Church’s calendar, but until this week, we have had no idea of the absolute horror of such an act. Turn off the radio, turn your faces away from the front page of the newspaper, change channels on the television. This blood is too much, these teenage faces caught in a moment of terrifying death is too awful for us.

How do we respond to the depths of sin in this world? What words can explain? None, of course. This is the season of watching and waiting. And sometimes what we watch is too much for us. ‘Maranatha’, come Lord. We have taken off our shoes, we have covered our heads, we have rent our clothes. Come into the heart of this evil. Gather into one, in your kingdom, the pain of all these broken lives. Lift up the souls of each child and never let them go.

This is what Christmas is about. The true light, which enlightens everyone is coming into the world. What we may have forgotten is how extreme the task of the Word really is. We know, because we hear it every year, that he is in the world but the world does not know him. This week, we have been reminded how far away from the light we have strayed. The reading which begins our carol services is not a nostalgic nicety, it is the painful and gritty truth. There is no health in us.

Advent is about facing this. In ourselves and in the world around us. We dress the Church is purple because it is a season of penitence. Have mercy on us, miserable sinners. At times, we forget it in the glittery rush for Christmas and in our desire to lift our spirits in a season of grey skies and long nights. At school, we were singing ‘Good King Wenceslas’ in joyful parts as King and page, as soon as December 1st arrived. But for another school, the slaughter of the innocents was just around the corner.

One commentator on the radio shed some light on the subject when she pointed out that this act of murder by the Taliban was a sign of their weakness rather than strength. Like Pharaoh and Herod before them, they are fearful of the power which (in this case) one young girl might have. Luke’s Gospel begins each of his first three chapters with a ruler: King Herod, Emperor Augustus, Emperor Tiberius. Yet we know that in not one of these cases does the power really lie here and we urge the reader to tell us about John the Baptist, Mary, the shepherds.

The horror of the murdered schoolchildren must make us reflect deeply on our own sin, our own culpability in this world, in a way which perhaps the familiarity of the readings and carols have inured us to. It must take us back to the raw power of God as we await the greatest theophany of history and, in humility and awe, we must pray. 

WE MIGHT NOT HAVE LIKED HIM

Today is the feast of St John the Baptist, here portrayed by the immense Florentine sculptor Donatello. I'm not sure we should have liked him. He was extreme in every way. He went off to live in the desert where he ate locusts and wild honey -- the locusts, presumably, raw. In order to preach, he can't have lived entirely alone, unless he preached to the bees that provided his honey. Preaching, he was extreme also. "Repent!" he shouted, in what was presumably a hoarse if stentorian voice: "Repent!" He was a kind of extreme version of an Old Testament prophet, someone who said what God had commanded him to say, to whom God had commanded him to say it (even, sometimes, to the King), and let the chips fall where they may. 
What was he telling people to do? Matthew's original Greek (well, John actually spoke something like Aramaic, but we know about him in Greek) word translated as "repentance" is metanoia, which we might also translate as "changing one's mentality". This is interesting, because "repent" has come to connote feeling sorry, apologising to God and men, grovelling; whereas metanoia lays the accent on changing. And why is this necessary? Because the basileia tôn ouranôn, the "kingship of the heavens" has arrived. Not "will arrive soon": it has arrived. 
An uncomfortable situation; and John did nothing to make it less so. When you go to Luke, you get much more of what he said. Not concerned to flatter his audience, he called them a brood of poisonous snakes: a set of sterile fruit-trees, good only for firewood. He seems to have had a massive presence, for instead of going home or stoning him, they meekly asked him what, then, they should do? And he had simple, practical answers. To the ordinary  folk: if you have two coats, give one to the guy who has none. If you have more than enough to eat, share it. To the collaborationist tax-collectors he said, Don't take a rake-off, just collect what the rules say. To some soldiers he said, Don't do violence to civilians, don't make false accusations, be content with your wages. 
In other words, Shape up. Be decent people. Change your mindset. Simple decency, sharing, taking what you're given and no more. It doesn't seem like a huge program, yet it blew people's minds. Because there was that something more: the Why. The Reign of Heaven has arrived. I just seal your good intentions with water; but there is Someone arriving just after me, and He is the real thing. He won't be using water. He'll be using wind and fire. (Wind: pneuma is breath, wind, spirit.) He'll be bearing a flail and threshing you like corn; and the husks, the empty chaff, will go into the fire. 
In other words: guys, this is serious. It doesn't get more serious, it won't ever get more serious.  
And when the Someone turned up, just quietly standing in the lineup to get into the river and have water poured on his head, John couldn't believe it. You? Baptised by me? 
It seems that John was genuinely staggered. Perhaps not just by the fact that the Someone had really arrived and was standing in front of him, but that the Someone was not breathing wind and fire. And this may have marked a change, a metanoia, even in John himself. He had to learn that Yeshua, the chap he'd more or less known, or known about, from childhood, was a different kind of Meschiach: not an avenging angel but Isaiah's Suffering Servant.
It is interesting that John did not become a disciple. Instead, as far as we know, he went on being a fiery prophet until he admonished one King too many, and was beheaded by Herod. His own capacity for metanoia seems to have gone only so far.

BETTER THAN I COULD HAVE SAID IT

It is a great privilege (as well as a challenge) to have a daughter who is both a priest (in the Church of England) and a teacher and chaplain (at Magdalen College School in Oxford). She is kind enough to send me her sermons for the school chapel; and the recent one on "Trying to Make Sense of Advent" I found so striking that I asked her if I could publish it on my blog. I do so here with her permission.

TRYING TO MAKE SENSE OF ADVENT 

   There are plenty of Christian words in the lexicon whose meaning I find myself having to explain. Many have been taken over by business. So,  Confirmation is something I will do after pencilling in a meeting and then making sure I can attend. Font is what I can spend hours choosing to make sure that my document makes the best first impression on my peers. Luckily, Advent still has a vestige of its original meaning: mostly thanks to the commercial world who have retained it for their myriad chocolate advent calendars.

   In fact, even a sense of what it means is contained within that commercial wrapper, because ‘advent’ means ‘coming towards’ and includes a sense of anticipation and excitement, of waiting and watching. Anyone who can remember being very young, or anyone who has cousins or nephews who are very little will know how painful the wait can be; particularly for those whose understanding of time still comes in terms of ‘three sleeps’ … or ‘four episodes of peppa pig’.

   In Church, at this time of year we get the incredible readings from the Prophets: ‘the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light. On them hath the light shined.’ And this introduces the central theme of advent and one which it is so easy to appreciate and understand as the evening draw in and the mornings take forever to arrive: from darkness to light.

   Advent comes at that particularly difficult time of year, just after the clocks have changed and just before we start getting properly excited about Christmas and it offers us two things: hope and the chance to think beyond ourselves. It lifts us up and shines a light into the dark corners of our hearts at the same time.

   The advent we are waiting for is an extraordinary and unbelievable event. It is the moment in history when a timeless, changeless God decides to intervene in our mucky, grotty world. It is the thing we all want God to do ‘why wont he just intervene’ and yet refuse to believe he ever does. We argue about the impossibility of suffering and a benevolent God and say that if God really did care and really was omnipotent then he would DO something but we cant hear the hollow laughter in the wings as God whispers to his main actor ‘but I already have done something and they still wont believe me.’

   Of course, we are being asked to believe in the most ridiculous miracle anyone could posit. The creator of the universe, the First Cause of the Big Bang, the author of Time itself cares enough about each tiny speck of human matter enough to find a way to enter time, to be created to live a life of cause and effect. I don’t actually have a problem believing stories of shepherds and angels, of a virgin birth, of a miraculous escape from a cruel tyrant. Part of the reason that the empirical veracity of these stories don’t trouble me is because their truth lies in the meaning behind them. And part of the reason they don’t trouble me is because if God really is the creator of the universe, of course God is capable of being born of a virgin.  

   So, hope and repentance. How does advent package up these two things?

  Hope first of all. When terrible things happen to us, or to those we love, one of the reasons we can feel overwhelmed is because hope has been extinguished.  Hope is what lets you live from one day to the next without the walls closing in on you. Hope is what gives you a reason to get up in the morning. Hope is what gives you a point to life. Hope gives you a path through the pain and out the other side. Hope is what makes you believe there might a path out the other side.

   The idea that God might be interested enough in you and me is what starts to turn the story around. Not that God will swagger in like Clint Eastwood and gun down the baddies, but that a seed of hope can be brought into the darkness by the birth of a baby. We all know how wonderful new life is: how many of you have seen the picture of Mr Elton’s new baby? Babies are cute, they are adorable, the make us smile, they give us hope.

And the creator of the universe creates hope in us through the creation of  new life. This is how God wants to save us. Not as part of a wild west action movie but by connecting with our most sentimental side, the side of us that knows what love is and knows how to love. Why would God do it this way?  To make sure we are not threatened or bludgeoned into belief, but encouraged and drawn into belief. Belief that there is indeed good in the world, when all around us seems to contradict that. The belief that there might even be a future even when life feels utterly bleak. The belief that joy is an actual  thing.

   And what about the other side of the story? That Advent shines a light on our darkest places? This is the Church’s belief that advent is also about the coming of Judgement. When Pure Goodness enters our world, we see our own shadows very clearly in the bright light it casts and we are judged by it. We see perfection and we know we cannot measure up. And our response is repentance. Or at least it should be. Suddenly we recognise our own part in the muck and gloom of the world. We see how evil and wickedness are not just things which are ‘out there’ they also reside in our own hearts. And so we take the time to look more closely at ourselves and to acknowledge those things we ought not to have done and to offer them back to God. ‘There is no health in us, Lord and we are sorry.’ Deceit. Self aggrandisement.  Cruelty. Arrogance. We know them all. The people in our community with whom we come into contact every day … if you asked them to write you a reference what would they say? Mine would be equally split between those who think I am an angel and those whom I am permanently letting down because I never have enough time for them. What about you? Where have you fallen short of the very best you can be? Is it in the way you spoke to the boy in your houseroom this morning? Or the teacher you lied to? Or the excuses you gave for not spending time with your parents? Or the hurtful things you said to your sister? In exactly the same way you would try and get your house ready for Christmas, or even your houseroom, you should be trying to get your own house in order – the house where your soul resides. Jesus is on his way and you should be taking the time to think seriously about that. There may be some decisions to be made. Some discussions to be had. Some tidying up to be done.

   Advent. Anticipation. Excitement. Joy. A time to look forward to what could be. A time to consider ourselves as the people we could become. A time to prepare. A time to wait. Knowing that there is light in our darkness and that the darkness can not overcome it. Redemption. Reconciliation. Hope.

Rev. Dr Tess Kuin Lawton

    

SNAKES, CRUNCHY INSECTS AND THE BIG DIPPER

Donatello, John the Baptist

This second Sunday in Advent we were invited to contemplate that disconcerting hippie, Jochanan the Baptizer. Not a friendly type, yet he seems to have attracted big crowds, who came to him, not vice versa. In other words, they went out of town, mostly on foot, and travelled into the desert to hear this famous prophet. He was not a nice man. He wasn’t particularly clean, dressed in what appear to have been tatters, as thin as an anorexic, or as you and even I would be if we lived in 115F heat and fed on locusts and wild honey. (NB: he was ahead of his time, as we are now coming back to eating crunchy insects; but if you have to catch them first you’re not going to put back a lot of the calories. Also, have you ever tried to find wild honey?) So he was a bit of a famous spectacle, worth half a day’s hike to go and see. Moreover, he harangued people, which they always like: he told them, in a voice hoarse with shouting, that they were on a fast train to a blank wall, and that the only way out of the misery they were creating for themselves was to drown.

To drown in the river, and then come up and out. What you will have drowned, he said, is the Old You which, whatever you thought of it, wasn’t worth squat, and definitely not worth saving. What you come back on dry land with is the New You, which at least has a chance.

It worked. Masses of people came out to see him, drowned the Old They in the Jordan, and emerged looking slightly dazed and wondering what the New They would look and feel like.

Then there arrived some classy types, the spiritual establishment, who came out – why? The story doesn’t say explicitly, but one assumes they came out polite, intellectually interested, but with a seriously sceptical attitude, to take a look and possibly sneer. Yet something seems to have happened, because at least some of them appear to have got in the waiting-queue for the drowning. And at that point Jochanan lost his temper. Brood of vipers, he called them: crawly and vile, yet with a kind of low cunning. What got into you, he asked them furiously, to make you come here to escape what’s coming to you?

We don’t know what they replied. One or two may have ended up persuading him they were sincere; we can assume that the others left in a huff, growling at that uncouth and unmannerly man.

But having touched on what was coming, he went on to say that there was Someone on the way much, much more powerful than he, who was coming with a flail, to sort out the harvested corn on His threshing-floor. What I’m doing, he said, is giving you a chance to turn from weightless, pointless and useless chaff into decent grain which He can then bake into pita bread to feed the next five thousand poor hungry buggers. Do it now, before the flail arrives. Go drown; come up; go home. Be new.

What, one wonders, did they feel like during the next week, when the circumstances of their lives clearly hadn’t changed? One suspects that they sort of trudged on, trying to remember that they were now grain, and wondering what that was going to mean. Until the man Jochanan had told them about did arrive. But that’s another story.