An astonishing Epiphany

 

Matthew tells us that magoi came seeking the one born King of the Jews.  King of the Jews is the title about which he will say Pilate asked and then wrote at the time of the crucifixion.

The word magoi occurs elsewhere both in the New Testament and in contemporary non-biblical writing, something which ought to get better attention.  Such magoi seem most likely to have been Zoroastrians whose worship included focussing on fire and astrology, easily mistaken for magicians and sorcerers.

In Acts 13 Sergio Paulo, Roman proconsul on Cyprus, does not have a chaplain or a court fool at hand in his household, but a magos (singular of magoi).  When Barnabas and Saul spoke the word of God to the proconsul, it was this magos who intervened seeking to put the proconsul off.  That particular magos is rendered blind as a result, perhaps both literally and deeply symbolically. 

In Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia (30.16) the Armenian visitors doing obeisance to Nero in 66 AD include magoi.  It is a major event about which others also write.  Pliny notes that the magoi regarded having freckles as a successful way of avoiding the notice of the Gods and that they would not travel by sea for fear of polluting it.

So I imagine a Christian group in Rome in serious danger, keeping their heads down in the face of Nero’s persecution.  They receive a new longer story of Jesus’ life and pass it secretly from hand to hand.  What we will call Chapter 1 sets the scene of the human and divine origins of Jesus’ birth.  They read on eagerly to the next story.

They could not be more astonished to find that it was about star-led magoi coming to worship Jesus.  Those who had opposed Barnabas and Saul’s preaching.  Those who had lauded Nero as God-like. 

There is a later habit of representing three magoi as one coming from Africa, one from Asia and one from Europe – the wisdom of the whole world turning towards this event.  Perhaps Matthew’s purpose, and the first reader’s astonishment, would best be represented by different trio, something like a militant atheist, a scientologist and a member of the Taliban.

The picture is Whitley Bay at the New Year.  The picture in the previous post are two angels high in a window in Grimsby Minster carrying symbols of Jesus’ execution – a seamless garment with the dice for which it was gambled and the hammer and pliers for the nailing and un-nailing of Jesus on the cross.

Stripping

 

I remember one account of practice in a particular monastery was what was called ‘stripping’, the annual accounting for things in each nun’s cell.  What has accumulated.  What is not needed as personal possession.  What should therefore now be stripped out. 

St Francis’ request as he was dying was that he should be laid naked on the earth, which takes all this to a natural conclusion.

I’ve blogged before about

The carefully managed dislocation between thirty-seven years of stipendiary ministry and whatever priestly ministry was to follow was well aided by a compulsory gap of six months without a licence or any permission to officiate at all. 

I thought I saw the point that those of us whose only experience of church membership over many years had been to have a measure of control, even when the ‘control’ is that of promoting collaboration. 

We needed to get used to having no role at all before something quite different and supportive could have any chance of emerging.

and then

I think I am beginning to see a deeper point.  Habitual delivery of ministry can be at the cost of the development of personal discipleship.  However much one guards against it, the obvious example is too often asking not so much ‘how do this Sunday’s readings cut into me?’ as ‘what shall I say about them?’. 

Something more fundamental struck me today as 1 Corinthians 1.26-29 was read as the Epistle for the feast of the Holy Innocents (a passage strangely not otherwise set to be read at a Principal Service on a Sunday).

Not many of those to whom Paul wrote, he says, were wise, powerful or well born.  God chooses the foolish, weak and base.  All so that nobody (‘all flesh’) should boast of themselves. 

Yet ordained stipendiary ministry is one place in which necessarily to exercise at the very least informed teaching, appropriate guidance and a level of visible precedence.

Don’t, I now hear Paul tell me, clutter up your cell with that unnecessary accumulation of honed answers, desire to achieve or perceived status.  Strip it out. 

If not, I will be the subject of my own self satisfaction (the word ‘boast’ is in the future tense and the middle voice) and not laid out naked before the mystery, mercy and majesty of God.

A sermon for Advent 2

 

The ancient writings we have are there to guide us, so that by sticking at it, and by the encouragement of the scripture, we might have hope.  (Romans 15.4)

The BBC World Service is, among many other things, a friend to those who are unexpectedly wide awake in the middle of the night.  So, at 3.00 in the morning, one morning last month, I learnt about an Australian novelist called Melissa Lucashenko.  She has won a lot of prizes – and she has given most of the money away.

The story is this.  Lucashenko, as you might suspect from her name, has eastern European heritage.  Australia is a melting pot of immigrants from Europe and from elsewhere.  But, what she didn’t know as a child, was that one of her grandmothers was an indigenous Australian, aboriginal.  Luckashenko was one of those whose family allowed her skin colour to be passed off silently as southern European so as not to attract the extreme prejudice which aboriginal people suffer.

But once she knew about her aboriginal heritage she wanted to explore it.  More than that, eventually she wanted to re-inhabit it.  Eventually she moved to live on what had been her grandmother’s lands.  She discovered its culture. 

She didn’t come to think of that simply as more communal and more environmentally aware.  Fundamentally, she found that family and land and values were all part of what she calls a single tapestry.  An interdependence of people and place just seemed natural.  Singing songs about it, telling stories about it, making paintings of it, were all part of inhabiting it.

And it also meant she came to regard the culture and values in which she had been brought up as a bit too individualistic and a bit too exploitative.  That is to say many people like me might tend to focus on ourselves, what I’m entitled to, what would benefit me.  And we may tend to view things around us simply as resources for our own use.

So she was not surprised that people like me are surprised that she gave away the prize money.  For her, it had simply become the most natural thing to do.  If I receive an unexpected gift, why wouldn’t I want to share it?  With the neighbour whose business is struggling.  With the single parent nearby who is finding it hard to make ends meet; she had been such a single parent herself.

Anyway, that is what has been feeding my soul over the last few weeks.  But this is meant to be sermon and not an inspirational talk, so let me take a further step.  What I think I have found myself asking myself a lot over the last few weeks is ‘isn’t Christianity meant to be a bit like that?’.

Every Christian person will have been brought up in one of the diverse cultures of the world.  We absorb the value system around us.  We simply pick up what is an acceptable way to behave.  We don’t notice what has shaped our attitudes. 

Most people in a feudal system must have simply assumed it was normal.  Most people in a society which is formed around ideas like avoiding shame and maintaining family honour will live by that code.  Most people like me will assume that doing as well for myself as possible, and taking as much as I need from the resources around me as possible, is a natural way to be.

But is what we are doing turning up her each week, at least in part, an attempt deliberately to inhabit a different way of understanding the world?  And the singing, story telling, artistic expression are all part of it. 

And in particular we deliberately expose ourselves to three sometimes quite long chunks of scripture each week.  It comes in a three year cycle.  As it happens, two weeks ago we had the last readings for the third year of the cycle.  Last Sunday we went back to the beginning again.  We are on the second set of readings for Year A today.

The Gospel reading is John the Baptist calling people to repentance.  And the word translated ‘repentance’ is a compound of ‘after’ and ‘thinking’ – so it is exactly something which grows out of a fresh way of understanding things.

I think it is in Luke’s Gospel that there is a bit of the story Matthew misses out.  People ask what this repentance things actually means in practice.  Jesus’ reply there isn’t about our spiritual lives.  If you’ve got more food and clothing than you need, share it.  If you work in finance, don’t be tempted to make more profit than is reasonable.  If you have power over people, don’t use it to extract money from them.

So we are not surprised that most people are surprised by Christian understanding and behaviour when they do see it.  Really hard things like forgiving enemies.  Turning the other cheek.  Freeing people from obligations.  Sacrificial acts.  Praying for those who are nasty to us.  A failure to keep a record of wrongs.  Not making anything of the money we do give away simply because we’ve forgotten about it as soon as it is done.

But the verses from Luke aren’t actually part of our readings for today, so let me land finally somewhere quite different, on a single verse from our second reading.  We’ve actually been hearing it read for a second time in a few weeks.  A part of Romans 15 was used for Bible Sunday in Year C just a few weeks ago.  A different part is set as a reading for the Second Sunday in Advent in Year A today.  And the two happen to overlap for one verse:

The ancient writings we have are to guide us, so that by sticking at it, and by the encouragement of the scripture, we might have hope. 

The purpose of all this isn’t that we are better at Bible Study.  It isn’t that we learn to point fingers at the culture around us.  Or at the Christian people we know who don’t measure up.  Or at ourselves as falling short.  It is that we might have hope. 

I suspect that the reason I was so caught by the story of Melissa Lucashenko’s prize money was that fundamentally it was eliciting hope in me.  There are other ways of understanding the world.  There are other ways of responding to its challenges. 

The life and teaching of John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth have always been trying to elcit that awareness and response.  We need showing the way.  We need to stick at it.  We need to be encouraged on the way.  But it is that we might have hope.   

The ancient writings we have are to guide us, so that by sticking at it, and by the encouragement of the scripture, we might have hope.    

The picture is stone quarried from the Lincoln edge waiting to be used for repairs to Lincoln Cathedral, which is in the distance.

Thou disentedst

At the weekend, the Cathedral marked 30 years of girl choristers.  I was first living in Lincoln and attending the Cathedral in the mid-1990s.  I looked out my much used copy of the first CD they produced which I would have bought a liitle later. 

All I could find was the CD case, not the disc itself.  Perhaps I played a track for a service or group at some point, brought the case home, and left the disc behind in whichever machine had been used?

A specially commissioned new setting for George Herbert’s King of Glory, King of Peace was sung at the commemoration service.  I’d always assumed the hymn was the whole of one of his poems, but I was in fact struck by lines which I’d never sung or heard.

The growest soft and moist with tears,

   thou relentest;

and when Justice called for fears,

   thou disentedst.

A quick looking up showed the hymn consists of six of Herbert’s poem’s seven verses, first placed by Robert Bridges in the Yattendon Hymnal in the 1890s (the parish hymnbooks which also introduced All my hope on God is founded, words translated by Bridges).

Perhaps Bridges left out the verse so that the remaining six could be set out in pairs as a three verse hymn?  Perhaps he judged the verse as the least easily comprehended or least felicitous?  The hymn has certainly always felt complete without the verse.

Now I know, I am sorry that the idea of God’s grief was lost (long before twentieth century theological speculation about whether God suffers).  I’m also treasuring the idea that our potential fear of God’s justice is misplaced.

 

There are no levers to pull

 

Yesterday began with the opening verses of Isaiah, the set first reading at Matins.  God is revolted by the sacrifices his people offer, sees their festivals as futile, and turns his ears from their persistent prayer.  He pleads with them instead to ‘learn to do good, pursue justice, support the oppressed, champion the orphans, and plead the widow’s cause’.

The day ended at a consultation event for the diocese’s developing new strategy.  Although almost the first PowerPoint slide reminded us that one of the three strands of its long existing strategy is ‘joyful service of the community’, every one of the ‘emerging themes’ of the new strategy focussed on the life of the church.  There was no hint that ‘kingdom seeking’, justice promoting or marginalised supporting was to feature in our future.

The work being done, we were told, is undergirded by a Theological Reference Group, but the Diocesan Secretary declined an invitation to name a theological insight which informed the process or these themes. 

‘Raising the spiritual temperature’ has been much referenced in diocesan communication, and was there as both one of three new objectives and repeated slightly strangely as one of the five ways to reach these objectives.  Someone asked what this actually meant, and was told that the Bishop has written three papers about it and a young communications officer present was working on how this might be summarised accessibly.  Things used not to be done like that.

So we got on with the set task anyway.  We had post-it notes to affix to laminated posters of the five emerging themes, unsure of what some of them meant (‘a church in reach’?), uniformed about the actions the ‘lever groups’ (seriously?) were considering recommending, and unable to query whether they were actually the themes which capture the directions in which we should go. 

But things took a turn this morning when I went back into the dedicated section of the diocesan website where I had previously found the first of the Bishop’s papers, and now found all three, laid out across sixteen pages.  It is almost the only thing there with actual content about anything other than the process of developing the strategy.

The Bishop’s papers do not advocate the sort of shift towards a more cult-like enthusiasm which the slogan might make people fear.  They actually set out a vast range of the sorts of things (‘a miscellany of many regular tropes and themes’) about Christian spirituality which I have been taught for sixty years, which I have taught for forty (very often with exactly the same illustrations and references the Bishop uses), and some of which I have sought to practise.

Early in the first paper, he acknowledges the kingdom grows in hidden and unexpected ways.  He says he ‘treasures those who witness through service’.  In the second, he says growth ‘is not just about size – it is about health, attitude and outlook’.  In both the second and third, he references the Five Marks of Mission (only the first two of which are about the life of the church, while the last three are about service of neighbour, community and world).  He even situated the pursuit of Carbon Zero in the last of these.

While I continue to be puzzled and even troubled by the narrowness of the emerging themes with which we were presented, and about by the educational design of the evening, it would be hopeful if the proposals which do emerge grow from these steers.

I also wonder if the reassurance will apply more widely.  I even hope that the yet to be released Seeking God: Seeking Growth material, which the Bishop mentions and of which I recently spent eighteen months in Grimsby fruitlessly asking to see drafts, might also turn out to be well pitched.  Perhaps even like the sort of Mission Action Planning tool which the diocesan Mission and Training Development Forum was sharing with the diocese when I was a member of that team at end of the last century.

So I’m again almost nostalgic for Robert Warren’s Missionary Congregation approach which we promoted then – a church both ‘distinctive’ (something not totally unlike ‘raising the spiritual temperature’?) and ‘engaged’ (not allowing inevitable concerns for church flourishing to distract us from being deeply involved in the concerns of a place).  What if a new diocesan strategy turned out to be about renewing faithfulness – giving thanks for the dedicated right approach through the unpropitious time of the last couple of generations and encouraging a recommitment to them in this present time?

The view is one which those climbing to the belfry in Grimsby Minster see, and will be fully populated with a welcoming congregation when a new Vicar is launched there at a service this week.