Malformation

 

Reflection on Job 19.21-27 and Luke 10.1-12

There’s a story in the bible concerning a tribal chieftain of the ancient near east called Job, who, in the prime of his life loses everything. His children are killed when a building collapses. His livestock – his livelihood, his wealth, his resources – are stolen by violent men who murder those employed to care for the animals, also leaving their dependents fatherless. Quite understandably, Job’s wife falls into a deep depression.

Four friends of Job do something beautiful beyond words. They come to him and sit with him, in silence – for there are no words – for seven days and seven nights. Simply holding him in meaningful connection through their presence.

And then they open their mouths and put their feet in it. They try to control, to correct, Job’s thoughts and feelings. To belittle them. They attempt to fix their friend. To explain and justify what he has gone through. Every which way, it is ugly as hell.

Eventually Job has had enough. He calls on them to be silent again, and emphatically states his belief that, even having lost everything, he would see God restore to him all that he had lost.

If I wanted to get rich quick, I would put a swear jar in my church for every time I asked someone how they were and they replied, oh, you know, there’s always someone worse off.

This is abuse, beloved. This is how abusers seek to exercise control over their victim. By conjuring up a hypothetical someone to diminish our emotions and responses to our emotions. To belittle us and invalidate our experience. (Even if the hypothetical someone existed, it would not help them one bit to be told, oh well, there’s always someone doing better than you.)

But we have had these words spoken over us so many times over so many years, have internalised them and spoken them over ourselves, that when I call it out as abuse, I am questioned or dismissed, and when I call it ungodly, I am told that I am going too far.

This is also spiritual abuse, because we have been taught that this response is how we put others before ourselves, as mature Christians ought to do. But Jesus said we are to love our neighbour as – or in the same way as, or according to the same measure by which, we love – ourselves. For the extent to which we are able to accept and love ourselves is the extent to which we are able (the limit on) to love our neighbour. If we habitually belittle ourselves, we will habitually belittle them.

If you came to me and told me that you were expecting a baby but that it had died in the womb, or that your sister had cancer, or that your marriage was falling apart, or that you were waiting for the results of medical tests, and I said to you, oh well, there’s always someone worse off, would you feel heard? Would you feel valued? Would you say I was being pastorally sensitive? Would you come away glad that you had spoken to me, feeling that even if there was nothing to be done – no answers – that somehow you felt more at peace? No, you would not.

And yet, we say these very words to ourselves all the time.

Read that again.

In the Gospels, Jesus sends out his apprentices ahead of him, to every place he intended to pass through. He instructs them to seek out hospitality, and to be present to whoever welcomes them. He also instructs them not to insulate themselves against the emotions, but to remain vulnerable – no excess resources, no financial get-out-of-jail card, not even shoes to shield them from feeling the ground beneath their feet. On entering a house – on being invited into a life – they are to proclaim peace. They are not to seek to control or fix, but to be led by the one who has welcomed their presence, validating whatever they place on the table.

And Jesus promises them that healing will come, wherever it is needed, through their vulnerable presence with their neighbour. Through meaningful connection.

 

Let go

 

Jesus’ greatest interpreter was a Pharisee known as Paul, from Tarsus in what is now Turkey, who had trained under Gamaliel, who was the head of the rabbinical school of thought named for his grandfather Hillel. In correspondence with the church in Corinth, Paul wrote:

‘...For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in the presence of God...So let no one boast in humans. For all things are yours, whether [three master-teachers known to the church in Corinth, whose teachings – way of life – they argued about] or the world or life or death or the present or [that which will happen to you in] the future – all these things are yours, and you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.’

(1 Corinthians 3.18-23)

I am struck by how Paul reframes the things we – according to the wisdom of the world – try to control, as things that belong to us – that are intrinsically proper to our being – over which we have neither control nor the need to control them. Instead, Paul invites us to receive them as gifts, and to enter deeper into the mystery of these gifts.

I am struck by the inclusion of death in that list. As something to embrace, not fear. We are mortal (or, as Paul lists more fully, we are human creatures on the earth, who experience birth and death and the passage of time). And Jesus chose to embrace death, walking into this mysterious unknown adventure before us, transforming it – as so with life, with the world, with the present and the future – into its fullest, most complete, perfect expression. Not the end, but a new season. (To put it another way, death is not the consequence of sin, death as separation from God is the consequence of sin.)

The invitation is to let go and enjoy the incomparable gift we have been given. To go deeper into what it means to be human, in the imagination of the One who gave us life.

 

Wellbeing

 

Since 2009/10, The Children’s Society has published an annual, longitudinal report of the wellbeing of children and young people in the UK. They look at:

evaluative wellbeing – thoughts and evaluations about how life is going;

affective wellbeing – ‘good’ and ‘bad’ feelings and emotions; and

eudaimonic wellbeing – a sense of meaning in life, such as, do I have a sense of purpose? strong relationships? self-belief?

The latest report, just published and available online, shows that our children and young people have significantly poorer levels of wellbeing than they did fifteen years ago, and that our fifteen-year-olds have lower levels of wellbeing than their peers across 27 European nations.

Jesus was a rabbi, which means master, or, one who had mastered life. One, we might say, who had a high level of wellbeing, and when other people spent time with him their wellbeing levels increased too. Someone you might look at and say, they seem to have their sh*t together. Life isn’t simply happening to them, or around them, but they are living purposefully, a life with meaning. Like most rabbis at the time, he did this in the context of a very ordinary life, in Jesus’ case as a stone mason and carpenter in a small community.

Of course, Jesus wasn’t the only person who was seeking to live life purposefully. It wasn’t an unusual idea. Wellbeing isn’t a new idea; it is an ancient one. In Hebrew it is expressed as shalom. Jesus wasn’t the only person seeking to love God fully and love other people deeply. Many people were.

One such group was the Pharisees. They advocated that the ritual practices by which the priests in the temple at Jerusalem kept themselves oriented towards God, and symbolically remade the world – that gave them a strong eudaimonic wellbeing that in turn strengthened their evaluative wellbeing and affective wellbeing – should be adopted by all Jews in every place.

The biographer Mark records some Pharisees asking Jesus why his disciples didn’t observe such rituals? (See Mark 7.) In particular, why didn’t they ritually wash their hands (note, this is not a matter of hygiene) before eating a meal that involved bread (an extension of the priestly practice of washing their hands before handling grain offerings). For the benefit of his non-Jewish audience, Mark mentions some other examples of ritual practice observed by the Pharisees. The point is not, look how ridiculous these people were, how wrong they had got it! The point is that whatever their own cultural background, the audience might recognise the human tendency to depend on certain rituals – including twenty-first century secular Western societies. It is meant as an a-ha! moment.

Jesus responds by calling people out as hypocrites, that is, actors who present a mask to the world. It is important to note that this is not a dismissal of Judaism (or even a dismissal of Pharisaism). Jesus was a Jew. His disciples were Jews. They observed a kosher diet and played a full part in the ritual world of their culture, including the key events and celebrations that strengthen communal wellbeing. This is an internal debate between people with a shared vested interest in promoting wellbeing (shalom).

Jesus lists several harmful behaviours that result from poor wellbeing, or the absence of shalom – behaviours which the Pharisees would also have been concerned about – as evidence that ritual alone is inadequate and can even be harmful when it allows us to deceive ourselves as to what is going on On The Inside. Certainly, fixating on ritual is unhealthy.

One of the significant things about the findings of The Children’s Society is seeing children and young people brave enough to take off the masks we hide behind to Present a Brave Face, or a toxically positive outlook, as we so often see – and is so damaging to wellbeing – on social media.

If we are to help them grow a healthier evaluative, affective, and eudaimonic wellbeing, ritual will have a part to play. For my part, I love welcoming children to communion, in which I am led by their desire to take part. But it starts – as all love starts – with hearing. Really hearing. (As in, Hear, O Israel...) Not being quick to mould them into our image, bent out of shape as it is, but recognising the likeness of God in them. They are the canary in the mine.

 

God is not the king

The evangelical tradition – of which I am part – is vulnerable to narcissists because of the way in which we habitually misread Jesus’ parables.

Despite the fact that God tells Samuel that kings represent a rejection of God’s invitation to relationship with him;

despite the fact that kings are repeatedly recorded as rejecting God's ways and leading their people away from knowing him;

so that even the very few kings considered good are corrupted, to the extent that a direct parallel is drawn between David killing Uriah to take his wife and Ahab killing Naboth to take his vineyard;

despite Pharaoh;

despite the consistent testimony against kings of the nations by the prophets;

despite the fact that kings have John the baptizer, Jesus, and several of Jesus’ disciples put to death;

despite all this, whenever a king appears in a parable Jesus tells, evangelicals assume that the king represents God, and that the behaviour and actions of the king reveal God’s character.

They don’t. And for as long as we teach that they do – for as long as we perpetuate lazy and dangerous readings – we will be vulnerable to narcissists.

Jesus employs parables about kings in the context of his impending death at the hands of the authorities. These include a parable of a king who throws a banquet for his son, a stinging critique of the high priestly family of Annas and Caiaphas, in which Jesus prepares his disciples for his trial, complete with enlisted crowd, and execution outside the city wall. But this parable is routinely co-opted by evangelicals to show that God will punish those who do not show him deference with hell.

Jesus employs parables about kings to judge the kingdoms of the world. In one he presents a man of wealth who seeks the title king from an external source, in the face of a counter-delegation by those who know him; who distributes resources to ten servants (seven of whom we do not hear of again) rewarding success and punishing failure to accumulate for him dishonest gain. This accurately describes the way in which Herod the Great had come to power as a client-king of Rome, sought to secure succession for three sons, one of whom would have his land annexed by direct Roman rule. Or the way Tiberius, emperor at the time of Jesus’ public ministry and death, negotiated power, rewarded Germanicus with a full triumph for quelling rebellion, delegated rule in Rome to Sejanus while Tiberius removed himself to Capri to live a life of debauched indulgence, before having Sejanus executed for planning a coup. Or the way narcissists operate today. The parable is a warning against getting drawn into such ways – this is not the way of Jesus – and yet it is routinely co-opted by evangelicals to show that God will punish those who do not use the talents he gives them to his glory.

Jesus employs parables of kings to contrast the way of the world with the divine way. Asked by Peter how often we must forgive others, Jesus effectively says, there is no limit. He then goes on to tell a parable in which there is a limit - to highlight the contrast. A king who has been reckless with his fortune seeks to take back what he has given out. One of his slaves, who has done very well for himself by keeping close, is unable to repay him. The king makes a show of writing off the debt. However, the slave then goes out and demands repayment of a far smaller debt owed him by a fellow slave, and shows no mercy when it is not forthcoming. This causes such a scandal that it reflects badly on the king who had written off that slave’s debt. In effect, he asks, ‘This is how you repay me? Making me look foolish in public?’ The king has the servant cast out to rot in prison. This is classic narcissistic behaviour. It could be straight out of the Trump playbook – or the way in which narcissistic church leaders make people feel special before ghosting them or threatening to prevent their future prospects. And yet this parable is routinely co-opted by evangelicals to show that God will treat people this way – which justifies narcissistic behaviour.

I could go on. Teaching on persistence in the face of injustice, Jesus tells a parable of a widow who keeps coming to a judge. The judge has no regard for God or his neighbour – is the embodied antithesis of the commandments to love God and love your neighbour. Despite this, and despite the fact that it is the woman – who has no power except commitment to justice – who demonstrates persistence, evangelicals are more likely to see God as the judge (male, position of power) than the widow. But God is not found in the places we want to find God.

We need to do better. For a tradition that claims to honour the Bible, we need to go back to the texts. But the cognitive dissonance will be enormous.

  

Stone, part 2

 

The biographer Matthew doesn’t record a great many of Jesus’ parables of the kingdom of heaven (that is, what God’s delegated sovereignty looks like on earth). But when he does, he introduces them saying, “The kingdom of heaven is like...”

There are two exceptions, where Jesus begins, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to...” In fact, it is the same root word, but used in a different way, to suggest comparison or to suggest that something ‘has become’ like something else. This is not a case of Matthew’s year four English teacher asking him to think of another word for ‘like.’ It indicates a qualitative difference. In both cases, the parable in question includes a king decreeing a punishment.

In chapter 22, Matthew records a parable in which Jesus describes what the kingdom of heaven has become, in contrast to what it is meant to be. A king throws a banquet for his son. None of the summoned guests comes. Note, this is not that most refuse, and a few take up the invitation. No one wants to be there, and, when pressed, even mount a violent insurrection, which is put down without mercy. Then, anyone who can be pressed to attend is so pressed. Not one is there except under duress. The king interrogates a man who has refused to put on the wedding gown, the symbol that he accepts the king’s patronage. The man is silent before his accuser. The king has him bound and taken outside the walls, to the place where there is weeping and bitter, futile anger.

This parable follows on from the one before, which is explicitly identified as a parable against the chief priests and rulers of the people. In other words, it is a continuation. The kingdom of heaven has become something indistinguishable from the violent kingdoms of the world, under the leadership of the politico-religious leaders.

As Matthew continues his biography, we will find Jesus dragged, against his will, into the presence of Annas and Caiaphas. Historically, the high priest was a position for life, but the Romans had changed that, appointing and removing whom they chose. Annas was a previous (and still considered to be) high priest, and his son Caiaphas the current high priest. A king and his son. Jesus is dragged into their courtyard, and interrogated. He refuses to answer, and is sent away, first to a similar interrogation before the Roman governor, where we also see a crowd dragged off the streets to ensure he is condemned. He is made to wear a ‘wedding’ gown, again against his will, and taken outside the city wall to the waste incinerator, and executed in the presence of his closest family and friends.

God is not violent against people. But, sadly, many devoutly religious people, especially religious leaders, are. The kingdom of heaven is, at times, turned into a travesty of what it is meant to be. The biographer Matthew tells us to expect this. But it is not the final word.

The lectionary for today pairs this parable with a passage from the prophet Ezekiel where the Lord God promises to remove from his people (whose actions have profaned God’s holy name before the watching world) their heart of stone and put within them a heart of flesh. Stone symbolises all the ways in which we divide between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ while flesh symbolises our common humanity.

Whether your heart is stone or flesh determines how you hear Jesus’ parables.

 

Stone

 

‘A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.’

the Lord God (Ezekiel 36.26)

Stone. In Old Testament Hebrew, this word is put to many uses. Precious stones, symbols of the way in which we give excessive abstract value to certain things, and, by extension, to those people who can afford them. Marble, to line the homes of the rich. Weights, and the false measures by which we exploit one another, and cheat the poor. Slingstones, as weapons; and iron ore extracted from the earth to make metal weapons. Hailstones, that destroy crops. Stone is a fitting symbol of the ways we ‘us’ and ‘them’ one another.

Flesh. Our mutual belonging to one another, and, by extension, to every living thing.

Today, teenagers in England, Wales and Northern Ireland receive exam results (those in Scotland have already received theirs) that reflect and reinforce the heart of stone. Lord, have mercy on us.

 

The kids

 

My son has friends round. They are so kind, thoughtful, generous and warm that I feel churlish giving them their own space. In fact, I wish more older people were like them. The kids are going to be just fine.

Young adults need cheerleaders, not detractors.

 

ADD

 

The Hail Mary prayer,
“Hail Mary, full of grace,
the Lord is with you.
Blessed are you among women,
and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God,
pray for us sinners
now and at the hour of our death.
Amen”

was surely penned by someone with Attention Deficit Disorder.

Because for someone with ADD, there is only ‘Now’ and ‘The Hour Of Our Death,’ that is, a point beyond later. Such that this thing must be attended to right now, or else it will not be turned to until the deadline is upon us and it is too late.

Without aid, there is no Setting Apart Time For This Tomorrow, or In Two Days’ Time, or Next Tuesday At 1.00 p.m. (Conversely, with aid, they can be incredibly creative.)

If you know someone with ADD, you might like to join Mary in praying for them now, which might also be one of the very frequent hours of their death...

 

gods

 

Who are your gods?

To clarify, by god I mean something beyond, and greater than, yourself, in which you put your hope and trust for salvation – that is, for healing; to make you well, or whole.

I am not aware of knowing any atheists (it is, quite simply, very hard to live that way in the world) (though I do know some who aspire to be atheists).

To be honest, I am not sure that I know any monotheists either (again) (and also).

There’s a story told of Moses’ apprentice and successor, Joshua, calling together the public figures of his community and putting a challenge to them: choose this day whom you will serve. Because we don’t only hope and trust in our gods, we invest our energy and entrust our resources to them. Or, to put it another way, we serve them.

The Market. The Nation, or the Land. Family. Our football team. Our addiction or distraction of choice. Church.

That story about Joshua is paired with a story about Jesus in the lectionary for this coming Sunday (Joshua 24.1-2a, 14-18 and John 6.56-69). Interestingly, Joshua and Jesus are the same name, rendered in two different languages, with a responsive meaning to cry out for help / to rescue or deliver or save. In the Jesus story, many of his would-be apprentices walk away, deciding that it is simply too difficult, too demanding, to apprentice under him. Jesus asks his core apprentices, Do you also wish to go away? Are you, also, desiring, intending, planning to gradually go on your own way? There is a sense of cost to this, an understanding that if to be with Jesus is difficult, then so is continuing on without him.

Peter (who is to Jesus as Joshua is to Moses) nails that dual sense of cost. Yes, it is costly to be your apprentice, but, to whom else would we turn? It is in apprenticing under you that we enter into and continue in a life of unparalleled quality. Anything else is a slow decline towards death, in comparison.

I’m pretty sure most people I know long for a deeper quality of life, one marked by greater freedom from the things that hold us captive, greater healing from the wounds those things have caused us. I’m not sure anyone who is, or who longs to be, healthy wants less quality of life (though, ironically, the path to greater quality of life involves less busyness and fewer things).

The question is, who are your gods?

 

Proof and evidence

 

What is the proof that you are waiting for?

There is no constructed instrument by which we can determine, no calibrated scale by which we can measure, courage. We can demonstrate the effect of the need for courage and of the act of courage on the body, but not the existence of courage. And yet we know that courage exists.

We know, each time we walk away from an abusive relationship. Each time we refuse to walk away from a relationship that is hard work and, at this moment in time, unrewarding. Each time we ask for forgiveness of another, or of ourselves.

Courage exists. There is plenty of evidence for this. The world is full of evidence.

And yet, there is no instrument, and no agreed scale. There is, of course, the court of public opinion. But the observer is not an especially reliable instrument or scale, for what requires much courage to one person requires little to the next. It requires courage of me to cross a bridge, something others do without it crossing their mind. Neither is the individual who has exercised courage especially reliable, for it is often (not always) the case that what required great courage in anticipation turned out to (appear to) require less from the perspective of completion.

Still, courage exists. There is more than sufficient evidence to take this on faith. It is beyond (good and proper and necessary) reasonable doubt.

Courage exists, as do many other things for which there is neither objective instrument nor scale, but the utterly relational human soul, constructed (and restored) and calibrated (and recalibrated) by God. The soul, which registers evidence, not proof. Evidence of the immeasurable and unscalable. Such as love (which looks like courage in the world).

What is the proof that you are waiting for – in relation to anything? Or, better, what is the evidence? What will it take for you to act?

Take courage.

 

Signs

 

This morning’s weather started out clement enough for me to eat breakfast outside, but is now rapidly deteriorating. I tried to say this, but also this morning my dyspraxic mouth did not possess the agility to handle six syllables in quick succession, and I got caught in a loop at -or-

deterior-or-or-ay-deterior-or-or-ay

Speech is a skill many of us take for granted, and certainly one expected of a public speaker. But speech is a provisional sign, and what it points to is not dependent on our proficiency.

Listening is also a skill; one we pay even less attention than speech. Listening is not so much the interpretation of the speech-sign, as an act of co-creation of the sign.

As all creation declares the Creator’s praise, and as we listen to the provisional voice of the wind, the gathering clouds, the rain, we become more aware of the One from whom we flow and to whom we return.

 

Mary

 

Today the Church remembers Mary, the mother of Jesus.

By the Holy Spirit, Jesus lived and grew in Mary’s womb for nine months, and thereafter lived and grew in her heart.

By that same Spirit, that same Jesus lives (or can live, if, like Mary, we say yes to God) and grows in our hearts.

The latter is dependent on, but by no means a lesser miracle than, the former. Just as the ‘second’ (not secondary) vocation or purpose of being human, to ‘Love your neighbour as yourself,’ is ‘like’ (that is, dependent on, but the same in every way as) the ‘first,’ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your mind, and with all your strength, and with all your soul.’ Or just as the Son is dependent on, but in all ways equal to, the Father.

As we gaze upon Mary gazing upon Jesus in love, may our lives be transformed so that we look, and live, more and more like him.