Quote for the Day

In the process of moving and reorganizing some bookshelves in the middle of October, I recovered something long out of place. A small Nativity scene carved out of olive wood had been inadvertently left behind from the previous year's Christmas. Holding it in my hand, I cowered at the thought of digging through boxes in the garage long buried by post-Christmas storage. At this point, it seemed better to be two months early in setting it up than ten months late in packing it away. I decided to keep the carving out.

Strangely enough, my decision then coincided with a friend's mentioning of a good Christmas quote. Advent was suddenly all around me. In a Christmas sermon given December 2, 1928, Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, "The celebration of Advent is possible only to those who are troubled in soul, who know themselves to be poor and imperfect, who look forward to something greater to come. For these, it is enough to wait in humble fear until the Holy One himself comes down to us, God in the child in the manger. God comes. The Lord Jesus comes. Christmas comes.  Christians rejoice!" To be early with my Nativity scene suddenly seemed a wise, but convicting thought. I had kept it around for the sake of convenience, what about the sake of remembering?

Jill Carattini, managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia - from A Slice of Infinity emailing, 28th November 2012

Sunday Sermon 25th November 2012

In El Salvador refugees flee the government troops, hiding in the jungle only a couple of thousand yards away from the troops. The group stops long enough for a woman to give birth. The silence and pain are devastating. The woman around hold her, willing her to make no sound. The child, once born, is passed from hand to hand, prayed over. Will this be the child that will free the people and bring peace to the land. Then they move on, with new life to be celebrated at the first place it is safe to sing, rejoice and eat.

(- adapted from Mary, Shadow of Grace by Megan McKenna, 59)

We are approaching Advent. We begin to think of Mary pregnant with the Christ-child, bearing him in an area where war and conflict still make no child safe.

She bears the child, full of hope. Christians have long called her the God-bearer.

26 In the sixth month of Elizabeth's pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, 27 to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin's name was Mary. 28 The angel went to her and said, 'Greetings, you who are highly favoured! The Lord is with you.'

29 Mary was greatly troubled at his words... 30 But the angel said to her, 'Do not be afraid, Mary, you have found favour with God. 31 You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. 32 He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, 33...; his kingdom will never end.'

34 'How will this be,' Mary asked the angel, 'since I am a virgin?'

35 The angel answered, 'The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God.

To her child, so weak and totally helpless, she brings the gifts of a mother.

Caring, compassion, gentleness, tenderness, patience, listening, pain, suffering, tireless love, sacrifice.

Wonderful virtues, on which we all depend.

In a male governed world, qualities that are easily forgotten, seen as  weak.

Women know they are not weak

And Mary bears the Christ Child

God.

Straight away as we read the Bible (though in reality months if not years may have intervened) power, violence announce themselves.

Herod wants to kill this child.

Mary flees Bethlehem to Egypt,

As Herod's troops sweep in, to kill the God-child she has born. He massacres the children of Bethlehem

Three weak people flee, God cares for them

Joseph too cares

For he has something of God's ways

And trusts.

The weakness of motherhood triumphs

And of course, I speak as a fool

For as my very story tells

It is not weakness but strength

But male power

Thinks the opposite

In swoops Herod. He massacres the innocent. He thinks power wins.

But years later, another Herod will swoop in with Pilate

And catch up with that child

Hang him on a cross

And power will pat itself on the back

Think it has triumphed.

And Mary will be at the cross, crying in anguish. Watching over her son

As only a mother knows how.

From the moment of his birth to tragically

that of his death

And a mother's love triumphs again.

For there is another power

A power so powerful that those of this world do not recognise it

This world thinks it is foolishness

In the Narnia stories, the Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe

The White Witch has killed the Christ figure, the Lion Aslan

She has overcome his powers by her Powerful magic.

But Aslan rises from the grave

Aslan says, "though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know: Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitors stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards..."

And so it will always be for those who love power

Who ignore the ways of God

Who do not know the ways of God.

Mary, the God-bearer.

Sharing in the suffering of motherhood

Through the bearing of children, women, and all of us, are saved.

For Mary bore Christ.

A woman, the God-bearer

The first one to proclaim Christ's coming

Another Mary the first one to announce the resurrection.

Women still suffering as we still do not yet listen to St Paul's who tells us that in Christ there is no male, no female. Still treated unequally in church leadership.

But God's ways will triumph.

Women, who are so vital for the health and well-being of our families

Still so often made to take second place in marriages

Men thinking of themselves as having authority over a woman, their head. But in the ancient world the heart and soul were in the heart not in the head; head rarely means authority.

It probably here means source. Woman came from Adam. Paul is speaking of interdependence, not authority.

Men, love and honour your wives. raise them up to the same authority you have. Do not rule over them. Submit to one another in the Lord.

Women, who bear the brunt of family life, bearing and bringing up children

With men still not listening to the injunction of Paul in Ephesians 5.21 that men should submit to women; indeed, that they make the greater sacrifice. 

Ephesians 5.22 - women should submit; but this is balanced by male submission; indeed, a harder submission is spoken of for the man in v 25, that of agape love, men should submit and lay down their lives.

There I guess - and I am guessing - will be men here who use computers for inappropriate images.

This does not encourage submission to one another.

You know what you have to do in Christ

There will be men here tempted to leave their wives

But learn from Joseph, who was faithful

Mary, the God-bearer

We are all God-bearers

We are together a Temple of God's Holy Spirit

"let yourselves be used in building the spiritual temple" 1 Peter 2:5

As you walk from hear bearing God, bearing the Spirit of Christ, in your life

What will you bring to birth today, this week?

What will you do to safeguard the Christ within your life.

For you too are Mary - God-bearer

You too are Joseph - called to be faithful

Go and be God's people in the world. Be a Transforming Presence. Be temples of God's Spirit.

Prayer Spaces in Harlow

This evening at the Heart4Harlow prayer meeting we heard about Prayer Spaces. This is now underway in Primary Schools. The vision is for this to be in every Harlow school.
Prayer Spaces is open to all faiths and none.
Prayer Spaces begin by speaking to children (Key Stage 2) about prayer. Then half the children visit a prayer space, the others do craft related activities eg painting, drawing etc. on paper plates in a prayerful way.
In the Prayer Spaces are various stations eg Sorry, Fizzy Forgiveness, the Plasma Ball etc. The children are encouraged to make the best use of each space.
After 15/20" the children swap over.
Feedback has included:
"Prayer is a powerful thing, and it works"
"When I need help I only have to prayer"
So far, Prayer Spaces is underway in 2 schools. The aim is to be underway in 4 more school this coming year.
Please pray for more to be involved.

Today's Poverty

Part of my retreat is about preparing for Advent and Christmas.

Today I read some of Luke 1 and 2, followed by a portion of Mary, Shadow of Grace, by Megan McKenna. I have been pondering how I / the church should respond to the anticipated financial hardship of further welfare changes next financial year. Sadly I anticipate an increase in use of the foodbank.

McKenna tells a story of the birth of a child to El Salvador refugees. Suddenly I realise that the story of Mary in her hour of need is also the story of so many around us.

Strange things occur around the birth of Christ, things that become good news. But all focuses on the child. Mary stores these things in her heart. She is a 'believer, not a knower. She believes in her child.... She treasures words, events, moments in her life...Simple, ordinary occurrences are her path to knowledge. She experiences conversion, insight and ever-deepening awareness and love of God by the way God deals with her, in her present reality.' (McKenna, 63).

I must yet learn yet more of contemplation. This is what Luke puts here at the beginning of his gospel, where interestingly he is also paralleling Pentecost. We learn of each from the other, I believe. Contemplation is not something I have immediately associated with Acts 2. It is however strong in Acts 1, as the disciples 'waited'. Which brings me to my reflections on waiting on God here.

Contemplation and Mission

The story of Christmas is in part the story of Mary, who treasured and pondered things in her heart.

These words from the Archbishop of Canterbury are perhaps relevant:

Evangelization, old or new, must be rooted in a profound confidence that we have a distinctive human destiny to show and share with the world. There are many ways of spelling this out, but in these brief remarks I want to concentrate on one aspect in particular.

To be fully human is to be recreated in the image of Christ’s humanity;  and that humanity is the perfect human ‘translation’ of the relationship of the eternal Son to the eternal Father, a relationship of loving and adoring self-giving, a pouring out of life towards the Other.  Thus the humanity we are growing into in the Spirit, the humanity that we seek to share with the world as the fruit of Christ’s redeeming work, is a contemplative humanity...

To be contemplative as Christ is contemplative is to be open to all the fullness that the Father wishes to pour into our hearts.  With our minds made still and ready to receive, with our self-generated fantasies about God and ourselves reduced to silence, we are at last at the point where we may begin to grow...

And we seek this not because we are in search of some private ‘religious experience’ that will make us feel secure or holy.  We seek it because in this self-forgetting gazing towards the light of God in Christ we learn how to look at one another and at the whole of God’s creation...

[C]]ontemplation is very far from being just one kind of thing that Christians do: it is the key to prayer, liturgy, art and ethics, the key to the essence of a renewed humanity that is capable of seeing the world and other subjects in the world with freedom – freedom from self-oriented, acquisitive habits and the distorted understanding that comes from them...

Jacob Needleman, in a controversial and challenging book called Lost Christianity: the words of the Gospel, he says, are addressed to human beings who ‘do not yet exist’.  That is to say, responding in a life-giving way to what the Gospel requires of us means a transforming of our whole self, our feelings and thoughts and imaginings.  To be converted to the faith does not mean simply acquiring a new set of beliefs, but becoming a new person, a person in communion with God and others through Jesus Christ...

Invoking the Holy Spirit is a matter of asking the third person of the Trinity to enter my spirit and bring the clarity I need to see where I am in slavery to cravings and fantasies and to give me patience and stillness as God’s light and love penetrate my inner life...

In a very important sense, a true enterprise of evangelisation will always be a re-evangelisation of ourselves as Christians also, a rediscovery of why our faith is different, transfiguring – a recovery of our own new humanity.

And of course it happens most effectively when we are not planning or struggling for it.  To turn to de Lubac once again, ‘He who will best answer the needs of his time will be someone who will not have first sought to answer them’ (op. cit. pp.111-2); and ‘The man who seeks sincerity, instead of seeking truth in self-forgetfulness, is like the man who seeks to be detached instead of laying himself open in love’ (p.114).  The enemy of all proclamation of the Gospel is self-consciousness, and, by definition, we cannot overcome this by being more self-conscious.  We have to return to St Paul and ask, ‘Where are we looking?’  Do we look anxiously to the problems of our day, the varieties of unfaithfulness or of threat to faith and morals, the weakness of the institution?  Or are we seeking to look to Jesus, to the unveiled face of God’s image in the light of which we see the image further reflected in ourselves and our neighbours?

That simply reminds us that evangelisation is always an overflow of something else – the disciple’s journey to maturity in Christ, a journey not organised by the ambitious ego but the result of the prompting and drawing of the Spirit in us.  In our considerations of how we are once again to make the Gospel of Christ compellingly attractive to men and women of our age, I hope we never lose sight of what makes it compelling to ourselves, to each one of us in our diverse ministries.

Rowan William, Archbishop of Canterbury, to the Synod of Bishops in Rome, 10 October 2012

Full address here

On Retreat

Am on retreat. As before, when I have set time aside, it seems that God is here already (which of course he is!). The books I slightly randomly decided to pick up (ones that related to spirituality rather than 'work') leading me down a particular path.

One is Bill Johnson's  Face to Face with God (p18f), which struck me because at the moment I am reflecting on Psalm 139 which includes from a different perspective the ideas that follow (and which nicely link into 1 Peter 2 on which I am preaching on Sunday in the context of Bishop Stephen's Transforming Presence.)

'First, we must realise that seeking the presence of God is not about trying to get God to do something. He's already given us the Holy Spirit without measure...
'Another foundational revelation about the presence of God is that God actually holds all things together.' He refers to Colossians 1:17.
'A more profound truth is that God has come to live in each person who receives Jesus Christ through his work on the cross...
'We progress to a deeper truth when we learn that whenever there are two or three people gathered in His name, He is there in their midst...
'David discovered a wonderful and even deeper truth that adds to this revelation of increasing degrees of His presence. he said , "You... are enthroned upon the praises of Israel" (Psalms 22:3). His throne is an even greater measure of His presence.'
I'm not sure I like the sense of progression. My sense is that any one contains the others within it. But it is perhaps helpful if seen as a journey WE progress in.
That be as it may, today I am learning verse 4 of Ps 139:

Before a word is on my tongue
you, LORD, know it completely

Later, Bill Johnson speaks of seeking God. This too rings a chime with me. I arrived on retreat with a certain passivity towards the tasks I am involved in - passively committing them to God while energetically I get on with them. The more energetic - (and I enjoy energetic) - the less I feel able to 'shape' what I am involved in, which is not helpful.

Then on Monday in the midst of working hard I had a real sense of calling out to God - in effect that I would know his power. I was deeply aware if my weakness and ineffectiveness. So anything which has to do with 'seeking God' is going to catch my eye, as an answer to that prayer.

Bill Johnson speaks of 'seeking God' in various ways (chapter 6):

- resting in the Lord (Psalm 37:7)
He suggest that as well as meaning, be still in the Lord, it can also mean 'take a leisure walk'. That is what I do as part of my devotions each day. He links this to the thought of how Adam was with God in the Garden of Eden. Thus any obstacle is overcome - all is provided for in salvation. And this I think is strongly present in my spirituality. He gives the example of Mary and Martha: 'To say that we need Marys and Marthas is to miss the point entirely... Mary wasn't a non-worker. Rather she was beginning to be like her master, who only did what He saw the Father do.

- then he speaks of 'waiting patiently for the Lord. We tend to define patience as a sort of passivity. But in the Bible the Hebrew word is used of waiting 4 times, but of 'writhing in pain, as in childbirth', or 'whirling in the air in dance', 49 times. Now I probably need to do work on the Hebrew, as definitions are tricky. But there is at least food for thought here. There is an intensity about such waiting.

- finally he notes that in Psalm 37:9, waiting means 'to lie in wait', as in setting up an ambush. There is thus a sense of looking eagerly for him. This is something I am not so good at. I need to learn from the woman who reached out to touch Jesus' hem (Matthew 9.21).

And with the thought that perhaps that is exactly what I decided to do by coming on retreat, I have a sense that perhaps in this too God is at work in me before I knew it (which of course he is.)

Synod voting

Was so hopeful yesterday and so sad at the vote. I believe the scriptures are with those longing for women bishops. I hear this in Paul himself - in the sense of relief he has in turning from 'in culture' to 'in Christ' as it were in 1 Corinthians 11: 11.
We are now experiencing the cruciformity I wrote of in the last blog. Good Friday is very bleak, verty painful, very dark.  But it is not to lessen the awfulness by saying that resurrection comes in Easter Sunday. That is the point of resurrection - it surprises, comes from nowhere, and doesn't look like we anticipate.
I'm not over-bothered by how this is viewed in the wider world (though there are consequences.) I give thanks that I am part of God's church where we can struggle with these issues. And I believe that God is bigger than us all - the God who leads us all into cruciformly.

Quote of the Day - Cruciformity

I so enjoy Michael J Gorman's, Cruciformity. He presents an exegesis and spirituality that makes sense of Paul's writings. It brings together but steps beyond the normal approaches both in theological terms and in day to day spirituality. With regard to those passages that I have always we missed something (eg Phil 2:5), I go 'ahahhh!' ("Have this mindset in your community, which is indeed a community in Christ … ")

Today I have enjoyed p 48f:
'Cruciformity... is a term more appropriate for what has often been referred to as the "imitation" of Christ. Cruciformity is an ongoing pattern of living in Christ as of dying with him that produces a Christ like (cruciform) person...
'[C]ruciformity cannot be attributed to human effort. There is a power at work within him and within his communities that somehow... produces Christ-like qualities. This power enables the exalted crucified Christ to take shape in and among those who belong to him and live in him. It enables the narrative of the cross to be retold and relived. This power is, for Paul, the Spirit of God.'

P.57: '[F]or Paul the Spirit is the Spirit of cruciformity.'

At p 56, quoting Robert Tannehill: 'the Spirit has an active killing function.' (Italics in original)
P 55 '[T]he Spirit powerfully brings life out of sin and death.'

This helpfully links in my heart to Robert Farrer Capon's approach to the parables in his writings, and hence helps me draw together various strands of the New Testament.

Note that this is not just the experience of one person, such as Paul. It 'is the defining characteristic of the Spirit-filled community as a whole...' '[T]he Spirit dwells in our midst, not just in our hearts. The Spirit of cruciformity is the Spirit of Christian community, and it is by means of cruciformity that the Spirit produces unity. That is the explicit or implicit foundation of every call to unity found in the Pauline epistles.' (p.61) Gorman then gives the example of Philippians 2:1-11, 'in which the cruciform Lord Christ is set forth in narrative as the paradigm of the Spirit's activity in the Philippian church.' (p61f)

Sabbath Keeping

In his memoir, The Pastor, Eugene Peterson, who writes the only really good material I have ever read or come across, about Christian pastoral work as a whole, describes Holy Saturday through to the Sabbath Keeping of Easter Day as 'Staying in touch with people in despair, knowing them by name, and waiting for resurrection.'
He has just written of the Pastor's "work" assignment as paying more attention to what God does than I do, and then guiding others to find those daily, weekly, yearly rhythms that help get this awareness into our bones. And part of the awareness is the waiting of Holy Saturday.
This is to do with being alongside people in heir waiting. It is the 'Jesus wept' of pastoral ministry, the phase than spoke to me in the recent fire of Barn Mead.
Eugene Peterson learnt his lesson of Holy Saturday for the whole of ministry. Much of my ministry has to do with waiting. This gives me a Biblical context, at the heart of the Easter Story.
And i I must revisit what Isaiah says about Sabbaths. Isaiah 58:3 is relevant here. I must explore further this as an understanding of the Sabbath. Perhaps this has to do with Sabbaths as well as Saturdays, for the Sabbath of Sabbaths (Leviticus 16:29-31) is to do with fasting.

Isaiah 58:
6 “Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
to loose the chains of injustice
and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free
and break every yoke?
7 Is it not to share your food with the hungry
and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—
when you see the naked, to clothe them,
and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?
8 Then your light will break forth like the dawn,
and your healing will quickly appear;
then your righteousness[a] will go before you,
and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard.
9 Then you will call, and the Lord will answer;
you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I.

Interesting sign in Stratford upon Avon