on unbinding

 

Some things are a storm in a teacup. Some things are a weather front rattling and entire dinner service. There has been much sound and fury of late claiming that our Christian heritage is being lost to Muslim immigrants. This is racism trying out new clothes. If we are losing our Christian heritage, it is not because some of our neighbours faithfully attend the mosque on Fridays, but because we have become disconnected from the stories that inform and shape Christian faith. There are complex reasons for this, including two World Wars in the last century, the rise of individualist self-expression, suspicion of institutions, scandals within the Church; very little to do with immigration, which has brought us many Christians, who happen not to be white. But a core part of my own vocation is to help people make and strengthen connections between their own lives and the Christian story.

Two weeks out from Easter, the Church tells again the account, found in John’s Gospel, of Jesus raising his friend Lazarus from the dead. This is the moment he goes too far, crosses a line, from which there can be no going back: the event that seals Jesus’ own murder. On Sunday, my colleague Katherine Cooper-Young spoke from this text, focusing on the end of the account, where Jesus, having called Lazarus out of the tomb, instructs the witnesses to remove the grave clothes from him so that he can go free.

Katherine asked us to imagine Lazarus’ life post- this event, an event which changes everything. Though his sisters Martha and Mary are highly articulate, Lazarus himself does not speak in the Gospels, not one word. Yet there are two traditions that claim that, after he was raised from the dead, Lazarus became an evangelist—one who proclaims the good news of Jesus—and a bishop. The Eastern (Orthodox) Church claims that he was run out of town, fleeing to Cyprus, where he was eventually made Bishop of Kition (today, Larnaca) by St Paul. The Western (Catholic) Church claims that the three siblings were pushed out to sea in a boat without sail or rudder, whereupon the winds carried them to France; there, they went three separate ways, proclaiming the Gospel as they went; Lazarus becoming Bishop of Marseilles.

The veracity of these stories does not depend on their historicity (see also: the bones of St Andrew were never carried to Scotland) but on communities of believers making connections between their lives and the story they read together. Communities that saw some transformative hope they wanted to claim for themselves too.

Katherine invited us to call to mind the things that bind us, that tie us in knots, preventing us from experiencing freedom—the life God longs for us, in reaching in and lifting us out from the graves we make for ourselves. To acknowledge those things in the presence of Jesus, who weeps for our pain and who, in compassion, speaks a new life—not merely a restoration of what has been lost, but new possibilities—into being.

Neuroscience would inform us that many of these grave clothes—acts of self-preservation—are wrapped around us in the first seven or so years of life; and though they serve us well at the time—the best we can do—they become unhelpful later on, constraining our ability to respond to other relationships. It is fascinating that Jesus enlists the help of a community—those who have borne witness to grief with tender compassion—in bringing progressive freedom; and that this involves physical touch and movement.

This is a vision of what the church could be.

 

what Lazarus does for Jesus

 

Today marks the start of Passiontide, the two-week run-in to Easter. In this context, passion refers to things that are done to us (Greek: paschō) as opposed to things we do by our own agency (Greek: poiō). Through much of the Gospels we see Jesus doing things—as he describes it, doing (only) what he sees the Father doing. But as we reach the climax of the story, as time slows down (with as much ink dedicated to days as has been dedicated to years of ministry) there is a shift from things Jesus does to things done to him by others. Some of these are loving things; some are hateful, or treacherous, or tragic; and some are deeply mystical.

The Gospel passage set for this Sunday is a long chunk (technical term) from John chapter 11. Here we encounter friends of Jesus, the siblings Martha, Mary and Lazarus. Luke also writes about the sisters in his Gospel (Luke chapter 10).

They are a fascinating family. They appear to live together, and Martha appears to run their home. Culturally, it would seem unusual that neither sister is married, and that Lazarus is not responsible for his unmarried sisters, in the absence of parents. Martha and Mary are both highly articulate, but Lazarus is silent whenever he is mentioned. (Some scholars believe that Lazarus is the ‘beloved disciple’ at the Last Supper—unnamed but traditionally identified as the disciple and later gospel-writer John—in which case he speaks three words, asking a simple question.) These observations lead some scholars to believe that Lazarus has some form of disability, and perhaps learning disability; that he may be unable to speak, or be situationally mute (that is, can speak, but doesn’t, whether by choice or defence mechanism).

Luke’s account of the sisters is almost universally misinterpreted. They appear in the context of Jesus sending out seventy plus disciples, or apprentices, ahead of him, to every village where he intended to go, sent to find persons of peace whose homes might become the hub of a community of disciples—what we would call a local church congregation. Martha is presented as a deacon, as the local minister to the proto-church in her village. Mary is presented as one who sat at Jesus’ feet, which is code for a disciple: which is to say, she is one of the seventy plus Jesus has sent out ahead of him. Martha tells Jesus that there is more work to be done ministering to her village than she can attend to alone, and asks Jesus to find Mary and send her back home to work alongside Martha. Jesus declines, affirming the different vocations—deacon, evangelist—of both sisters. This is a far cry from Martha being in the kitchen and complaining about Mary not helping prepare food.

In John’s Gospel, we meet the siblings again, this time including their brother Lazarus. Jesus has recently been in Jerusalem, but has withdrawn down into the rift valley that is the lowest point on the surface of the earth, crossing over the river Jordan, getting away from enemies who had attempted to stone him. Lazarus falls ill, and the sisters send word to Jesus, most likely through the network he had established across the countryside.

Jesus does not come to the sisters until after Lazarus has died. Their brother’s death turns the sisters’ lives on their heads. Martha, who had ministered in the context of her own home and village, now leaves her village behind to find Jesus on his way. Mary, who had been travelling ahead of Jesus to village after village, is unable to leave the family home. The vocation of each has flipped. Martha has become Mary, and Mary has become Martha. Such is often the way in the wake of death.

Both sisters know that Jesus could have healed Lazarus (could have acted to do so: poiō) but they still trust him. They present to him their faith and hope and need of consolation, a mess of co-existing emotions, feelings and thoughts. Jesus does not respond by doing, but by being moved with compassion, a visceral experience, something, in a sense, done to us (paschō). Jesus is not in mastery of this response, which wracks him like a wild animal. And that raw compassion enables Martha to return home, empowers Mary to leave home, and brings Lazarus back from the dead.

But there is another gem in this passage. Jesus asks the community that has come from Jerusalem to be with—to surround, with love—Martha and Mary in their grief, where Lazarus had been laid, and they take him to the tomb. This echoes what John records in chapter 1 of his Gospel, two disciples of John the Baptiser who were following Jesus: he turns and asks them ‘What are you looking for?’ and when they ask, ‘Where are you staying?’ responds, ‘Come and see.’ (Interestingly, this takes place at the same place where Jesus will first hear news that his friend Lazarus is sick.) Now Jesus asks to see where Lazarus is staying, and invited to come and see. And so the disabled man—the dead man—Lazarus becomes the one who shows Jesus what it is to dwell in a tomb—and to rise from the dead.

Lazarus does for Jesus what Jesus cannot do for himself, but needs to know. Paschō.

We are created to be inter-dependent. And agency matters, what we choose to do with our lives, with our bodies, matters. But we do not have unlimited freedom. Our actions are constrained by the existence of others—not only by what they do, their actions, but by the place they occupy in the world, in the grace of God. The good news is that poiō is only half the story: the other side is paschō. In entrusting ourselves to others, to how they might respond to us—for good or ill—and trusting God to work through all of this, the kingdom of heaven can break into this world through us.

 

silence

 

Note: includes discussion of suicide.

Lectionary readings for Holy Communion today: Jeremiah 7.23-28 and Luke 11.14-23.

I have been thinking about silence of late. Silence, and listening. One of the things God says, repeatedly, through the prophets, is that the people don’t listen to him, when God cries out in the voice of the poor and those weighed down by heavy burdens. The more the world changes, the more it stays the same. In our age, we are trained, by social media—surely Orwellian double speak—to listen to shout down with counter-argument, rather than to understand another’s experience and meet them with compassion.

There is a silence that leads to life, and a silence that leads to death; and we must discern one from the other.

Here at St Nicholas’ Church this Lent, some of us have been sitting together in shared silence. This is a profound experience. I spend some hours every day alone at my desk, with no radio or music in the background. But this is not silence. Inside my head there is a running commentary, on what I am doing, on what I need to do next, and after that. Shared silence is a discipline of allowing the internal noise to be stilled, the mind to come to rest. Sitting with others in 20 minutes of shared silence on Tuesday night, I realised that my mind does not know how to rest. I understand the theological importance of rest; I gift rest to my body; but my mind does not know how to enter into rest. My mind is not a machine, that can be turned off and later on again. My mind is a creature—God’s good creation—that is stuck in a trauma response—for me that is to freeze, in hope that if I stay very still, the danger I sense will go away. But a frozen mind is not a mind at rest; it is a mind at constant high alert.

Shared silence is a discipline, a posture that opens us to the possibility of encountering God; and encountering, more deeply, others; and encountering, more truthfully, ourselves. Shared silence invites us to let go of the false self, the barriers we construct between us and others, which, eventually, come between us and the self we fear to acknowledge, because we cannot gaze upon ourselves with the depth of love with which God gazes upon us.

There is a silence that leads to life, and a silence that leads to death. Some days ago, a local teenage boy completed suicide in the park across the intersection from the church. His friends and classmates and their wider peer group have gathered where he died each day since, at the end of the school day, in small groups, leaving flowers and lighting candles. I have been deeply impressed by how they are caring for one another. And a recurring theme in the cards they have left is, we wish you had felt able to speak up; we would have supported you.

We wish you had felt able to speak up.

The silence we freely choose leads to life. The silence that feels imposed upon us, by the world around us, the shape of society, by an exercising of control we might even call demonic, leads to death. In some cases, tragically, in a literal sense.

The perhaps counterintuitive thing is that shared silence may help us to listen more attentively, carefully, compassionately, when another person does speak up. Because we have disciplined ourselves not to cut them up, not to speak over them.

As the local church, we need to hold safe space for shared silence—safe space, because to enter into silence, letting go of the noise that distracts us, is a deeply vulnerable posture. And we need to hold safe space for being listened to, where people can find a voice to say, ‘This is what I am burdened with right now.’

Our young people need such safe spaces, as do our senior citizens, and anyone in between. Spaces where we might experience the freedom that God, who has made himself known to us in the face of Jesus Christ, longs for us to know.

I have been thinking about silence of late. Silence, and listening.

 

finding ourselves in the story

 

This Sunday, I shall be speaking about Abraham, who is also known as the father of faith. We meet him in Genesis, the first book of the Bible, the origin-stories.

By way of context, we first meet his father, Terah. Terah lived in what today we would call southern Iraq, and had three sons, Abram, Nahor and Haran. Haran pre-deceases his father, and after this loss, Terah determines to set out for Canaan. He is searching for something, and though it is not made explicit, the implications is that he is searching for the God who will be known by his son Abram. His eldest son and his orphaned grandson go with him, while his other surviving son chooses to remain in the place he knows. They travel north along the Fertile Crescent between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, until they reach the foothills of the mountains of what we know as Turkey, coming to a place called Haran. It is a different language, different root and meaning, but the name sounds like the name of his dead son. Whether that is painful, or comforting, or both, Terah finds himself unable to go any further, settling and eventually dying there.

It is possible that Terah’s story is your story. I meet quite a few people who have an innate sense that God exists, and even a strong hunch that he might be encountered in a church, in the local church I serve; who make a plan to turn up at public worship, but who — for a variety of reasons — just can’t get over the threshold. It is too daunting. I know others who come every week, perhaps out of force of habit or sense of duty, but who carry some sense of loss that prevents them from knowing God as fully as they had hoped, or once did. Terah’s story is not unusual; but more is possible.

After Terah dies, the Lord God speaks to Abram. And that is noteworthy in itself. The story takes it for granted that God speaks, to humans. And not just to vanishingly rare Important People. If God speaks to the father of faith, anyone who traces their heritage back to Abraham — Jews, Christians, Muslims — should expect to hear this God speak to them, too. To hear God’s voice. To learn to recognise the voice of God, the things that God would say to us.

And what God says is, Get out, get away — there is a sense of urgency here — from your country and your kindred and your father’s house. Not because these things don’t matter, but because God does not want us to find our security in them. Because, ultimately, these things aren’t secure. Who settles, and who rules over, geography changes continuously over time, not only over long stretches of time but in a continually ebb and flow. Culture changes, from generation to generation, so that you are quickly left behind by the concerns, the vocabulary, of the generation below you. Family can be a source of strength, but also of wounding, of enmity, of division. The word for ‘house’ can also be translated ‘palace’ or ‘dungeon’: families can exercise a hold over us; even where we love and are loved by our families, they can prevent us from going beyond where we now are.

Jesus will call these things — sources of privilege such as ethnicity, nationality, socio-economic background, gender, sexuality, education — the flesh, saying flesh gives birth to flesh but the Spirit of God gives birth to the spirit. It is also noteworthy that Jesus called the Temple in Jerusalem ‘my Father’s house,’ and for some, our cherished church practices can become a dungeon that imprisons us. If that is your story, the Spirit of God wants to set you free.

Instead of in these things, God wants Abram to find security in God. In knowing himself to be a child of God. In knowing God to be a loving Father. As my wife would put it, knowing WHO you are, and knowing WHOSE you are.

(Abram means Great, or Exalted, Father. But Abram is childless. He has no heir. His name is as unwelcome as a Best Dad In The World mug to a man with low sperm count. But God wants to bring healing to Abram, first by showing Abram that he, God, is a Loving Father, and in time by giving Abram a new name, Abraham, the Father of a Multitude, the father of all who follow in his footsteps walking with God.)

God calls Abram — and his descendants — out of every familiar source of hoped-for security, to become foreigners wherever they find themselves. To identify with the immigrants, those on the outside of national identity, cultural identity, self-interest. To be a significant sub-group within the host people but not of the host people. To be, as immigrant communities usually are, a community who seek to bless the host people. To serve their neighbours. To add value.

God tells Abram that if he sets out on this adventure, he will meet two kinds of people. He will meet those who bless him, who affirm him, encourage him, those who ask how they can support him. And he will meet those who curse him, who speak ill of him, on account of his faith, who oppose him. God tells Abram to expect both responses, and that God will multiply blessing wherever the intention to bless is found; and frustrate all intention to curse Abram, working to constrain evil, to transform it effectively against itself by bringing good out of actions intended for harm.

If you have set out on the journey of faith in the footsteps of Abram, you can expect to encounter the same reactions. We should not be surprised by this. We can give thanks for openness and hostility, for invitations and challenges, for favour and frustration, all as signs of still being on the path to a destination we don’t yet fully know, in the company of a trustworthy guide.

Maybe you recognise yourself in the story of Abram. Of faith, stalled by circumstances. Of the search for security — identity, meaning — in structures that are, inherently, unstable. Or perhaps of feeling like an outsider, and feeling alone, not part of a mighty people-group. Maybe you want to be a blessing, but struggle to see yourself in such terms, as something — someone — who is a gift to the world. Or perhaps you are struggling with the hostile reaction of others towards the things that matter to you.

Abraham’s story is the story of his descendants in faith. If that story resonates with you — if anything above intrigues you — I’d love to talk to you about that, to hear your story. To bless you. And to pray for you, that you would see and hear and know God more clearly.

If you are geographically local to me, you’d be most welcome to join us on Sunday morning, at 10.30 a.m. at St Nicholas Church, Sunderland

Genesis 12.1-4

‘Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” So Abram went, as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran.’