Lenten Almsgivings - Almsgiving (5)

Well I had intended to end this series on Almsgiving with my last post, but a chance comment from a dear friend triggered a further thought, with regard to the secrecy of Almsgiving - 'do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing'.

I have already expressed this in terms of the Reckless Love of God, and Abundance and Light that we flee from, such careful and fearful lives do we lead - seeing perhaps what the World does to those who dare to Live in the Light, rather than the shadow of fear.

However another way to express this Giving, is that of Authenticity. Lent is meant to be a time of paring back to the Essence. What was the Wilderness, for Israel, for Christ, but to 'let go of everything that hinders', that which some nowadays call 'the false self'. Jesus in the Wilderness fasted forty days and was left with nothing, but his Essence - there was nothing but his Pure Life, nothing to sustain him, save who he Was.

Sin, or to put it another way, the Avoidance of God, is like an accretion. Slowly we build a life for ourselves, hiding from God, denying the Life that we have been given. Lent is a time to take hold of the disciplines of the church, and thus, in letting go of those things which we use to build our own life, to discover within ourselves how far that process has taken us away from a Life which is Gift.

With regard to our Human Nature, we in the West tend to fall into one of two errors. Those who are, for want of a better word 'Conservative' (particularly those who take their lead from Calvin), in an effort to magnify the Grace of God (which needs not be done - God needs no advocates :) ), speak of the Depravity of the human heart. As if our Essential nature is Evil, by virtue of Adam's Sin.
Those of a Liberal bent, in part reacting against this, use the phrase 'Image of God' to Justify our sinfulness - that we are by and large Good. Neither I believe is correct, or indeed is ultimately of any use in our journey into God.

Here, Orthodox (Eastern) theology comes to our rescue with its Insistence on the Goodness of our Essence - that we are Created Good and that Nothing can undo that, but at the same time that Who we Are can be Readily buried under our 'false self', our determination to say No! to God, to say No! to who we Are, by our determination to sin.

In Lent, in going into the desert, in prayer and fasting and almsgving, we allow God to remove the layers of filthy rags, our hopeless efforts to be ourselves rather than Be OurSelves - Goodness Created In Love, Through Love and For Love.

When we are stripped away to our bare Essence, we lose our Sense of self - for that is something we have created. Rather we become that which we were always meant to be Pure Act. Nothing now is self conscious, all there is is the Conscious Self, fully Alive - giving no heed to living  - just Alive. No longer living in the realm of careful and fearful calculation, rather set Free through forgiveness and healing to Be. Such that the left hand has no idea what the right is about, and what's more sees no point in caring about it.

This sense of who we truly Are is expressed all around us in the rest of Creation, which waits with eager longing for us to join in and Be children of God.

This is given no better expression than in the life of Christ, who is unSelfconscious, who only does what he sees the Father doing. And this is beautifully spoken of in this wonderful poem of Authenticity written by the Jesuit, Gerard Manley Hopkins. that as the rest of Creation cannot help but be Authentic - Christ in Us sets Free Authentic Life. What I Do is Me, for that I came.

AS kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.
I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Christ—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

A rambling thought

I was just reflecting after a day of sermon writing, about how unhelpful labels are, especially 'Churchmanship'. I started out thinking about how useless such labels were as they didn't tell nearly half the story - I went on to think how they didn't translate to other cultures (even where the common language spoken is all that divides)  - I then went on to think rather sadly about how often the label is used to damn someone because of their associations.

I remembered a Man who got crucified for associating with with Prostitutes and Tax Collectors - and how now we his followers anathematize those who either label themselves as or associate with 'Liberals' 'Evangelicals' 'Catholics' (yes sadly, it still Does go on).

St Paul ( a bit of a hate figure himself amongst some of the crucified guys followers ) once said 'To the pure all things are pure' - I think that this means that The Pure One will associate with anyone.

I Remember a some years ago listening to a Powerful poem written about Easter - it may have come from the Iona Community or a fellow trainee vicar - I can't remember, but perhaps someone may put me right. The refrain went along the lines of 'How far will you go, Jesus'  as each verse moved him closer to Calvary. I think the question those who scorned him asked was 'How Low will you go?' - I guess that's the question he's asking us.

His invitation may well be

Want to be clean?  Come join me in the 'Dirt'

O Oriens - The Rising Sun

The 'O Antiphons' are sung according to tradition, during the evening liturgy on the last days of Advent. Each one is a named attribute of The Christ, to whose coming the church looks forward with eager and in these latter days, heightened expectation

O Oriens

Sung by the Dominican student brothers of Blackfriars, Oxford

It is perhaps no co-incidence that we celebrate O Oriens, O Rising Sun on this day, the 21st of December - Solstice wherever we are - the day the sun stands still. Whether as here in the Southern hemisphere it stands as high in the sky as it will all year, or as in the Northern its height at midday marks the turn towards longer days, the sun's appearing is significant

One of the features of living nearer to the equator as I now do, is the relatively short length of both dawn and dusk. It is not long light here before sunrise and not long after sunset that darkness covers the earth. I know from short experience and wider reading that at or reasonably near the equator this experience is far sharper, the sun plunging close to vertically unto the Horizon and rising perpendicularly with dramatic effect, like the brightest light being switched on in the depths of darkness. And it is this Suddenness of the appearing that is hinted at in the other familiar name for this Antiphon, O Dayspring, remembering the words of Isaiah 

The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined. 

Listening this morning to some Advent reflections by the Fransican Priest, Richard Rohr, I was reminded of a word that seems to have slipped from popular Christian discourse. Perhaps it never was that popular but I am sure it once was more commonly used than in these days. Rohr was talking about how the increasingly and now staggeringly affluent church in the West had got Scripture back to front. We went to the Scriptures he said, for comfort. But that was the last thing we find there - not that it isn';t to be found,. but it is discovered last - the comfort is for those who are first Challenged by the Word, then (and here is the 'old-fashioned' word . . .) Converted by the Word. Those whose only hope is now in Him may find True comfort their, and only they.

Conversion is a word which we use less and less the more and more comfortable we become - we now talk much more readily about faith in terms we might employ of a holiday, or a retirement cruise - it ha become 'a journey of faith' and a very gradualist one at that. If we hear the word Conversion at all it is invariably prefaced by such words as 'Sudden!' or 'Dramatic!'. It is not Usual, or Normal.

Of course the church in the West situated as it is away from the equator is not a place of 'sudden light' and also it is a place where we tend to have insulated ourselves against the reality of the world. Central heating and Air conditioning mean we are never Hot or Cold, Electric light means we little heed the rising sun, or its setting - conditions are neither one thing nor the other. So comfortable are we with the lights we have made for ourselves, we may say that we are not at all far from the Kingdom of God and forget that those are words which we cannot say, for we cannot See - for in reality it is dark, very dark.

In Advent we await the coming of a Saviour, not a therapist

If we will for a moment cease from our remorseless talk, in the Silence we may hear voices from behind a large stone which up until that point we had not regarded. 

We may perhaps extinguish the lights we have made for ourselves to discover how dark things are. After a while it becomes obvious that our eyes will not adapt to this Pitch darkness. 

The voices behind the stone become louder, there is the sound of astonishment.

A voice of command

The Stone begins to move

A Light brighter than the Sun at noonday pours blindingly into our 'place of comfort', 

which is revealed for what it is . . .

A voice is heard, like the sound of many waters

Lazarus, Come Out!

Christ, whose glory fills the skies,
Christ, the true, the only light,
Sun of Righteousness, arise,
Triumph o'er the shades of night;
Dayspring from on high, be near;
Daystar, in my heart appear.

Dark and cheerless is the morn
Unaccompanied by thee;
Joyless is the day's return,
Till thy mercy's beams I see;
Till they inward light impart,
Glad my eyes and warm my heart.

Visit then this soul of mine;
Pierce the gloom of sin and grief;
Fill me, Radiancy divine,
Scatter all my unbelief;
More and more thyself display,
Shining to the perfect day.


O Dayspring,
splendour of light eternal and sun of righteousness:
Come and enlighten those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death. 
O Come, O Come Emmanuel

 

 

'Ethics in the Presence of Christ'

This past week has seen me very privileged in being invited to speak at two very different events. The first was James' Hardings ordination, the second, the launch of Chris Holmes' new book, 'Ethics in the Presence of Christ'

[Chris is a Senior lecturer in the Department of Theology at the University of Otago 
and Associate Priest at St John's Roslyn]

Here is my commendation - "Tolle, lege!"

 

When I first met Chris over a cup of coffee just a few months ago we soon got to talking theology, perhaps unsurprisingly and I gave vent to one of my ongoing laments, that we gave little time and theological energy to the PRESENT implications of the Resurrection of Christ – Put another way, if we listen to the words of the risen Christ to John in Revelation I am the first and the last, and the living one. I was dead, and see, I am alive for ever and ever; the contemporary church may well ask, ‘So What? What does this mean for us NOW?’. I didn’t realize at the time that Chris was completing a book that would give a very suggestive theological framework as to how we might begin to answer that question – but more than just that, a book which suggests to us how the Risen Christ creates and indeed Is the Reality in which those answers are worked out

So much theology and the witness of the church in word and deed seems deals with Christ as a Past Presence and perhaps less so, a Future presence and tries to figure out what that might mean for the here and now and comes to some fairly confusing and often mutual contradictory conclusions about how we might live in the present. This approach I think best exemplified by NT Wright who effectively says, Well Jesus is the culmination of Israel’s story – he was born, died, rose again and ascended into heaven – he will come again and in the meantime we need to Improvise based on these two poles of experience. Or, it’s up to us

On the other hand we have those from all parts of the theological spectrum who are encouraging the church  - ‘to look out for what God is doing in the world and get in on it’. This exhortation I find troubling for it lacks any concrete apprehension of what we mean when we say ‘God’ and thus how we may recognize Him at work, a situation which I suggest resonates to a degree with the Germany of 100 years ago.

Thus Christian Ethics is effectively if not explicitly rooted in a theology of Christ’s absence where Human action is the primary thing -  and I think it is interesting and telling that Chris’s book opens with an account of the displacement of Christology and the lack of a Christological account of God’s present work in the world,.

Ethics in the Presence of Christ is a work which has no truck with any sense of the absence of Christ from the Present, rather we are led to contemplate the Gospel as descriptive “of the Grain of the universe, which is [no less than] the outworking in time of the life of the Trinity, specifically the Son” And that Christian ethics properly understood is no more than our seeking to align our actions with the Present work of Christ in creation, a Presence which has the Force of Law in a sense the same as the Law of Gravity – that in his exaltation to the highest place that which has happened in the past Has a Present reality of stunning significance,  that to quote St Paul ‘He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.’ That it is Precisely because and ONLY because Christ is so Present and Acting, constituting the reality of the New Creation that Christian life is remotely possible and that in Loving Him we correspond to the Love that he eternally is

Chris considers three aspects of the Presence of Christ – the Presence of His Power, His Truth and His Love using passages from John’s gospel which are eternal in their nature, as Presently real as in the time of Christ’s earthly life – and throughout the text is dense and closely argued but at the same time Chris’s enthusiasm for his argument comes through in such a way that it moves beyond argument to appeal – it is in some sense apologetic in its tone – in other words an argument that compels, but without resort to rhetoric

What authenticated his argument for me was that as I read I found myself in mental discussion with all of the Scriptures and with the saints of the church down through the ages. Chris engages with amongst others Augustine, Barth and Bonhoeffer, Calvin and particularly helpfully I think engages and critiques the highly influential theology of Reinhold Niebuhr , but I found myself throughout making connections to the Church Fathers, the various medieval schools of theology, the Reformers and many and varied writers from our own era. Thus in part it was authenticated for me because of its Orthodoxy. I found myself saying 'Yes' over and again, In a sense this could not be otherwise for Chris’s subject is Christ who constitutes in Himself Reality and thus Orthodox faith, who is both God’s yes to human kind and humanity’s Yes to God.

I found myself reading also a compelling account of Freedom in Obedience to the Law that is Christ and what it is to Believe in Christ – an account that comprehensively bridged any Faith vs works divide – by locating both faith and works in the Present Christ and refusing to reduce Christ to ‘an ideal’. He radically disallows that the command can be separated from the person of Christ risen and Present, that we must not fall into the trap of wrongly describing reality apart from Christ’s Presence and Christian ethics in terms of conformity to Transcendent Ideals, that he is not merely as many tend to assume a model for human life, he is also by his Spirit, The Means and the Reality of Christian life

But what really sealed this book for me was that it led me to pray and it led me to desire to further align my own life with what is herein revealed. As he says in speaking of the presence of Christ’s Power “That we learn to live in alignment with the presence of this power which continually breaks our will [to power] and is so doing humanizes it, might just make all the difference for who we are and how we live” Whilst being a work of Academic theology it points us in an immensely Practical direction, a Way of Life – that of Christ..

In his invitation to me to speak today, Chris said my role was to say something along the lines of ‘this is the best thing since sliced bread’ Well I grew up in a household where sliced bread wasn’t allowed! Rather I’d say that this work is a far more wholesome meal than that – there are non of those junk filled Fast carbs here, rather a wholesome meal which deserves to be read, marked, learned and inwardly digested.