Tag: church

Love Takes Root in the Little We Are Left With

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This week’s readings (Romans 8:26-end and Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52) ask one of the most searching questions in the New Testament: Can anything separate us from the love of God? Paul answers with a resounding “No.” Jesus then invites us to discover why—not in the spectacular or the powerful, but in the smallest, most easily overlooked signs of God’s kingdom. Perhaps the first step in following Jesus is simply learning to see what he sees.

Can anything separate us from the love of God?

There could hardly be a greater contrast than the contrast between ourselves and the people Paul was addressing in his letter to the church in Rome.

Just imagine what they were going through.

Paul gives us a glimpse:

hardship,
distress,
persecution,
famine,
nakedness,
peril
and sword.

This is no rhetorical exaggeration.
Paul is writing to communities living under the shadow of the Roman Empire,
where persecution, imprisonment, poverty and execution were genuine possibilities.
These are the lived realities of many of the Christians to whom he writes.

Over the years I have become increasingly aware that much of Scripture comes to us through the experience of people who were oppressed, enslaved, exiled or hated.

We read Scripture, as it were, over their shoulders.

Not that we do not know suffering ourselves.
We face other hardships.
Other powers can seem overwhelming.
Other fears can drain the life from us.

And so we, too, may hear this letter as though it were addressed to us.

We hear Paul insist that nothing in all creation—
not hardship or distress,
persecution or famine,
nakedness, peril or sword
—can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

Neither death nor life.
Neither angels nor rulers.
Neither things present nor things to come.
Nor powers.
Neither height nor depth.
Nor anything else in all creation.

It is one of the boldest claims in the New Testament.
Paul doesn’t merely hope this is true.
He is utterly convinced of it.

And if Paul tells us that nothing can separate us from the love of God,
Jesus tells us why.

The answer comes in what Jesus sees, and who he sees.

Who he sees first are the least, the last and the lost in the ways of the world.
And he sees the little they are left with,
and the little we have.

He sees in the little people have all the signs of the kingdom,
the love of God, the presence of God, the rule of God.
And he wants us to see what he sees in the things he points out.

There’s the tiny seed – the tiniest of seeds.
There’s the yeast in the bread.

There’s all the things overlooked by the powers that be
with their attention preoccupied with what is bigger and better in their own eyes.

Jesus looks at the ordinary world and sees the kingdom of God.

A seed.
Some yeast.
A field.

Where others see almost nothing, Jesus sees everything.

He sees the tiny mustard seed growing to the huge shelter for the birds of the field.
He sees the yeast folded into the dough for the daily bread that keeps us going.
He sees a field and sees the treasure hidden within it that is never going to be found by those looking for bigger and better things.

He is always asking “What have you got – let me see?”
“What have you got?” Jesus asked
“Five loaves and two fish – what’s the good in that?”, the disciples replied.

“Just wait and see” Jesus said

The disciples see five loaves and Jesus sees a feast.

That’s the miracle.

Jesus sees the ways of God in the little people have,
and he points them out for the world to see:
the love of God,
the presence of God,
the kingdom of God,
hidden in the little things of their lives,

not in the big things.

The kingdom of God is revealed in such little things
and we are captivated by what Jesus sees.

To follow Jesus is to follow his finger –
to look where he is looking,
To notice who he notices,
to treasure what he treasures,

until, little by little,
we begin to see the world through his eyes.

And that is why Paul can say,
with such astonishing confidence,

that nothing can separate us from the love of God.

It is true: the powers can destroy bodies,
they can imprison us,
they can persecute us and hate us for all sorts of reasons,
they can starve us, they can threaten us
but none of that can separate us from the love of God
because God’s love is always finding somewhere to take root

in a seed
in some yeast
in a field
in five loaves and two fish
in a child
in the poor in spirit
in the meek
in those who hunger and thirst for righteousness
in those who mourn
in those who are persecuted
in a cross
in an empty tomb

Nothing can separate us from the love of God
because God’s love is always finding somewhere to take root
in the little we are left with.

After hardship,
after grief,
after disappointment
after persecution,
after loss.
what are we left with?

We don’t always come to Christ with abundance.
Sometimes we come with the little we are left with.

And Jesus says, “let me see”.

“Let me see what you have,
not what you haven’t,
nor what you wish you had.”

His love takes root in the little we have.

In the little faith.
In the little hope.
In this little church.
In this little time

he plants a tiny seed

pointing us to the way of the kingdom,
showing us that this is what the kingdom of God is like.

Nothing can separate us from the love of God

because God’s love is always finding somewhere to take root
in the little we are left with.

A message from Oscar Romero

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Today marks the anniversary of Archbishop Oscar Romero’s martyrdom. He was shot dead on March 24th 1980 when celebrating Mass in the cancer hospital where he lived. This is from one of his sermons:

Those who have listened to me here in church on Sundays
with sincerity,
without prejudices,
without hatred,
without ill will,
without intending to defend indefensible interests,
those who have listened to me here cannot say
I am giving political or subversive sermons.
All that is simply slander.
You are listening to  me at this moment,
and I am saying what I have always said.
What I want to say here in the cathedral pulpit
is what the church is,
and in the name of the church
I want to support what is good,
applaud it,
encourage it,
console the victims of atrocities, of injustices,
and also with courage
disclose the atrocities,
the tortures,
the disappearance of prisoners,
the social injustice.
This is not engaging in politics;
this is building up the church
and carrying out the church’s duty
as imposed by the church’s identity
My conscience is undisturbed,
and I call on all of you:
Let us build up the true church!

Sermon preached on September 10th 1978, from Oscar Romero: the Violence of Love

Big ain’t beautiful

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Richard Beck, in Experimental Theology, quotes William James:

“I am against bigness and greatness in all their forms, and with the invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, stealing in through the crannies of the world like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, and yet rending the hardest monuments of man’s pride, if you give them time. The bigger the unit you deal with, the hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is the life displayed. So I am against all big organizations as such, national ones first and foremost; against all big successes and big results; and in favor of the eternal forces of truth which always work in the individual and immediately unsuccessful way, under-dogs always, till history comes, after they are long dead, and puts them on top.” William James

Richard Beck’s blog is well worth following. He has helpfully organised his blog into series of posts. One of them is A Walk with William James. Richard regards James as one who anticipated the leading ideas of the emergent church movement as well as the “greatest American psychologist”.

I am increasingly struck by the big significance of the small, and the tiny significance of the big. The large institutions are increasingly seen as disappointing. It is the tiniest interactions which constitute nature and these are becoming our trusted teachers.  This subversion was already realised in Jesus. His subjects included a mustard seed, a small child, a raven. His relationships were in the margins of the alienating big society.

Frazzled institutions

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NetWork

The photograph by Cea is Branching Morphogenesis, a walk-through installation by Jenny Sabin, consisting of 75,000 cable ties resembling neural net of the brain. This is a pattern and organising structure at the heart of our nature – and a far cry from institutional patterns highlighted by the likes of Virginia Woolf in an earlier post.

Diarmuid O’Murchu calls institutions “frazzled” in Adult Faith. The financial crisis of 2008 has reminded us that “banking institutions are more vulnerable than anybody had suspected”. O’Murchu’s observation that “all major institutions are in a state of identity crisis” reflects Dee Hock’s view of “organisations increasingly unable to achieve the purpose for which they were created, yet continuing to expand as they devour scarce resources, demean the human spirit and destroy the environment.” (Birth of the Chaordic Age, p 28). He lists:

  • Schools that can’t teach
  • universities far from universal
  • corporations that can neither cooperate or compete, only consolidate
  • unhealthy health-care systems
  • welfare systems in which no one fares well
  • farming systems that destroy soil and poison food
  • families far from familial
  • police that can’t enforce the law
  • judicial systems without justice
  • governments that can’t govern
  • economies that can’t economise

Hock’s comment on this is that “such universal, ever accelerated institutional failure suggests there is some deep, pervasive question we have not asked.”

One question I often bear in mind in relationships is “how big or small do I now feel?” Our usual answer is “small” in relation to institutional life. There’s not much we feel we can do except for the institution in which we walk tall and big ourselves up in relation to everyone else. We walk away, in increasing numbers, where we can.

For Hock, the problem is our “Industrial Age organisational concept” which is “a wrong concept of organisation and leadership based on a false metaphor with which we must deal. Until our consciousness of the relational aspect of the world and all life therein shall change, the problems that crush the young and make grown people cry will get progressively worse.”

For O’Murchu “all the major institutions we know today evolved as instruments for the implementation of patriarchal power. Many are beaking down and losing credibility, giving way to networks with a greater potential for collaboration and adult empowerment”. For O’Murchu institutions “inherently disempower” however democratic they may try to be. “No matter how democratic a hierarchical system is, it will fail to do justice to the aspirations of the people. People want to participate. They want to be involved; in a word, they want to exercise their adult creativity. And when that goal is jeopardised, it is then we need policing … the prevailing power – culturally, politically, religiously – feeds power. Only in a minimal and superficial way does it empower.”

Competition and control are the assumed guiding principles for institutions and our evolutionary history. But work done by micro-biologist Lynn Margulis suggests a paradigm shift to our thinking and our organisation. Margulis’s theory of symbiogenesis highlights an orientation for cooperation rather than competition.

Human imagination has been “domesticated” by institutions, according to O’Murchu, so that the “human being is seen primarily as a deviant creature whose behaviour has to be tightly controlled. Instead of being perceived as creative adults, whose long evolutionary history verifies … a heavy commitment to conviviality and collaboration, humans have been subjected to highly destructive imperial control.”

O’Murchu suggests that there are other “structural strategies” besides institutions with their “top-down hierarchical line of control, usually with clear distinctions between “us” (at the top) and “them” (at the base)”.

I suppose that our institutional framework has been shaped by the myth of The Fall. But there is a dangerous circularity to that assumption. The argument may be that the Fall accounts for human sinfulness which needs to be controlled (by institutions). But institutions (religious) account for the Fall. One depends on the other as is being increasingly recognised. The emperor/institution really is in the all together.

In some ways the church has been tarred with the same brush and there is decline in confidence and “bums on seats”. But then there is another more hopeful sense in which some Christians are behaving less like institutionalised “bums on seats” who are envisaging alternative structures for the sake of the least, last and lost.

Developing viable alternative structures seems vital (as well as inevitable) in a world in which  institutions have become so devalued. Alternative structures are already emerging in the form of networks but the context for that emergence is still governed by institutions who become ever more fearful and seem ever more remote from a (human) nature that is essentially cooperative, collaborative and convivial.

 

Preparing for responsible companionship

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Theological perspectives have changed. Tonight I am meeting with our “Readers’ Council” to hear their concerns about their “Continuing Ministerial (Professional) Development”.These changes in theological perspective will be very much on my mind.

Reader ministry in the Church of England was “revived” in 1561 and in 1866 to minister in poorer parishes “destitute of an incumbent” and to cope with the population explosion in cities in the early 19th century. They had a different point of view from the clergy. The Bishop of Bangor (in 1894) saw the advantage of “Christian men who can bridge the gap between the different classes of society” – And the Dean of Manchester  recognised that most Readers were “more in unison with the masses with whom they mixed”. Although the Diocesan Readers came from the professions, the Parochial Readers were described as ‘the better educated from among the uneducated’. Nowadays Readers and clergy train together both before and after licensing and ordination. I have been ordained long enough to remember that this was not always so, and to remember that the idea that Readers and clergy could train together seemed preposterous. Now we take it for granted and appreciate the advantages of learning together.

This movement of theology is reflected in many of our traditions. From a Roman Catholic perspective, Ilia Delio traces the development of theology from the preserve of the priest in his academic study to a vast lay, creative and inter-disciplinary movement. This huge paradigm shift is dated back as recently as the 1970’s when only 5% of theologians were non-priests. That figure has grown to over 60%. Theological education is now well beyond the control of the institutional church. Diarmuid O’Murchu lists features of this shift in his book Adult Faith:

  1. Theology is no longer reserved to the academic domain.
  2. Theology has gone global, even beyond the boundaries acknowledged in multi-faith dialogue.
  3. Theology has become quite multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary. “The contemporary lay theologian seeks to address the here-and-now of evolutionary creation … [casting] a wide net within a contextual landscape … [seeking] dialogue with partners in various fields of learning, transcending wherever possible the dualistic distinction between the sacred and the secular” (O’Murchu, p66f).
  4. Lay theologians do theology in a vastly different way from their clerical counterparts, who “prioritise the church, its traditions, teachings and expectations” (O’Murchu, p119)
  5. Christian theology has become radicalised as theologians “sought to realign Christian faith with one pervasive theme of the Christian Gospels: the New Reign of God”. (O’Murchu). Christian life is increasingly seen as “empowerment” and “called to be a counterculture to all forms of destructive power … facilitated not by some new benign form of hierarchical mediation, but by dynamic creative communities.” (O’Murchu).

For O’Murchu the “Kingdom of God” is “the companionship of empowerment” with theology being the “servant wisdom” of that companionship, so that “theology once more becomes a subversive dangerous memory, unambiguously committed to liberty from all oppressions and to empowerment for that fullness of life to which all creatures are called.” (O’Murchu, p65).

Theology has changed. In many traditions theology was thought to have been the preserve of the clergy. Readers and other lay ministers helped to open those boundaries, but their tendency remains to “prioritise the church, its traditions, teachings and expectations.” Now we increasingly realise that theology goes beyond the church (why has that taken so long?). Our shared “ministerial development” is to realise this, to overcome the tendency to prioritise the church and to engage with the “companionship of empowerment” wherever that is found.

In-built learning dynamic of church – or not

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This quote from Roger Walton about Christian education landed on my desk today. I thought it was worth sharing because it says well that the organisation, system and church of which we are members is already a learning and teaching organisation before any training courses are ever thought of. We are learning all the time. We flourish and engage if the organisation is working well, but we shy away or shrink in an organisation that is not working well at a relational level. Some estimates suggest that as much as 80% happens informally, and that only 20% occurs through formal training. Canadian researcher Allen Tough uses the idea of the iceberg as a metaphor about learning. The bit above the surface is the formal training situation in which some learning happens, but the rest is under the surface. “You just don’t see it. You could forget it’s there unless you keep reminding yourself that it’s there.”

“Stanley Hauerwas once wrote: ‘The church does not “do” religious education…..The church is a form of education.’  Because it is a group of people in relationship with God through Christ, because it tells a story about how the world is, based on the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, because it is engaged in living together as a radical new and alternative community, it has a built-in pedagogical dynamic…….
This is not an excuse for not planning or running programmes or courses…..It is important, however, to make this broader claim about Christian education before turning to specific suggestions and ideas or we may miss the most critical aspect of Christian education.  Before any Alpha course is put on, small group is formed, or Lent programme devised, Christian education is operating in a church, either attracting, forming and transforming people or leaving them untouched, unengaged or even driven away…
In its practice of gathering together for worship and ordering its life, in its people and their relationships with each other, in its simple routines for sharing bread and wine, welcoming newcomers or using its financial resources, in the quality of spirituality and its expressions of compassion, forgiveness and delight, it offers a potent learning environment.”
Roger Walton, The Reflective Disciple (2009, Epworth) pp158 – 9

Ringing bells with our wishing wells

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World Peace Bell
World Peace Bell – Newport, Kentucky

Dan Clenendin highlights in his post, the outrage of outsiders, repeats depressing research findings from America (Kinnaman 2007) showing how 16-29 year olds regard the church. Here are the percentages of people outside the church who think that the following words describe present-day Christianity:

antihomosexual 91%, judgmental 87%, hypocritical 85%, old-fashioned 78%, too political 75%, out of touch with reality 72%, insensitive to others 70%, boring 68%.

It would be hard to overestimate, says Kinnaman, “how firmly people reject — and feel rejected by — Christians” (19). Or think about it this way, he suggests: “When you introduce yourself as a Christian to a friend, neighbor, or business associate who is an outsider, you might as well have it tattooed on your arm: antihomosexual, gay-hater, homophobic. I doubt you think of yourself in these terms, but that’s what outsiders think of you” (93). This is a far cry from the reception of the first believers, who, according to Luke, “enjoyed the favour of all the people” (Luke 2:47). The church’s message isn’t ringing the right bells for generations of our people.

I wonder if we have forgotten to love our neighbour – that person who lives the other side of the fence with a different lifestyle and set of beliefs. In a fearful culture neighbours are suspect until they prove themselves otherwise  by “coming round” to our way of thinking. The first believers lived a different culture, being sent out to neighbours with the simplest of messages “peace to this house: peace to you” and with a love that was to overcome all sorts of barriers and offences. I wonder if we could ring more bells with more resounding wishing wells to those who now see themselves the other side of the wall – and the wrong side of-fence.

>Life Together

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>
This is from a graphic novel of Bonhoeffer I found on bonhoefferblog.

Bonhoeffer wrote a book called Life Together laying down guidelines for communal living in the 20th century. He was a vehement opponent of the Third Reich. At a time when Nazi policy was to eliiminate the weakest (Jews, gays, gypsies, mentally ill et al) Bonhoeffer was arguing for small family-like units to protect the smallest and the weakest. He used the image of chain links as in this quote from Life Together:

In a Christian community, everything depends upon whether each individual is an indispensable link in a chain. Only when even the smallest link is securely interlocked is the chain unbreakable. A community which allows unemployed members to exist within it will perish because of them. It will be well, therefore, if every member receives a definite task to perform for the community, that he may know in hours of doubt that he, too, is not useless and unusable. Every Christian community must realize that not only do the weak need the strong, but also that the strong cannot exist without the weak. The elimination of the weak is the death of the fellowship.

While reflecting on this I have been reading The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (film clip below). This is a very powerful – and very simple – story of two boys who strike up a friendship either side of the wire fence of Auschwitz. A different sort of story of Hitler’s Germany. Another story is told in the film Defiance – a film of four Jewish brothers from Poland who escape the Nazis to fight back to rescue fellow Jews – (on my list of films to see).

Leonard Cohen and his band of angels

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At last we see Leonard Cohen – a brilliant concert at the NEC in Birmingham. Jeanette and I both commented on his music being a strong thread through our lives.

Fantastic band of musicians, The audience was spell bound at the end by the singing of the “sublime” Webb Sisters (pictured above) singing “If it be your will”. Here it is – beautiful.

The concert led me to think of this all as a sign of heaven – I mean the band playing together, round one another, giving way to one another, respecting one another – producing harmony in spite of the underlying knowledge shared by LC that there is no such thing as “our perfect offering“.

And on the other hand, I am preparing for our “patronal festival” – church dedicated to St Andrew – and wonder why we use individuals so much as our “icons” of God, instead of community, band, group, family and Trinity. In that case, I wonder what communities (or what sort of communities)become the windows for seeing God’s love. Is it the local church, the communities of reconciliation? Is it the bands of artists who play together, the teams of scientists who work together and the local Christians who pray together?

How about this:

I am so often accused of gloominess and melancholy. And I think I’m probably the most cheerful man around. I don’t consider myself a pessimist at all. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel completely soaked to the skin. … I think those descriptions of me are quite inappropriate to the gravity of the predicament that faces us all. I’ve always been free from hope. It’s never been one of my great solaces. I feel that more and more we’re invited to make ourselves strong and cheerful. …. I think that it was Ben Johnson, I have studied all the theologies and all the philosophies, but cheerfulness keeps breaking through.

Leonard Cohen quoted in “The Joking Troubadour of Gloom” – Telegraph 26th April 1993