Tag: relationships

Calling, names and insults – a homily on Matthew 5

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I learned a lot doing this homily. The Gospel for the day was Matthew 5:20-26. The text that attracted me was:

You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, “You shall not murder”, and “whoever murders shall be liable to judgement.” But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or  sister, you will be liable to judgement, and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council, and if you say “you fool” you will be liable to the hell of fire.

The homily follows:

Jesus says to us: that if we are angry with a brother or sister, or if we insult a brother or sister, or if we say “you fool” we will be liable to judgement and the hell of fire. Jesus speaks these words in the same breath as he repeats the commandment that we should not murder.

Being part of the kingdom of heaven depends on us following Jesus’ teaching on how we relate to one another, how we manage the anger which is at the heart of us, turning that to the purposes of righteousness, and how we manage our name calling.

If we say “you fool” or anything like it we are liable to judgement. The question that will be asked in court is what possible justification is there for such harsh judgements? 

What we say to people to their face matters. We know that. What we say to people behind their backs matters. We know that. What we call people under our breath matters. We’re inclined to forget that.

What we say to their face can be extremely hurtful and can leave scars that may never heal over. Those words can be premeditated or spoken in the heat of the moment – but they often go to the heart and cause great hurt. 

What we say behind people’s backs can damage a person’s reputation and will draw others into conspiracy and prejudice. We talk about getting “stabbed in the back” so maybe Jesus isn’t so far off the mark when he puts murder together with insults and name calling in the same sentence.

It matters greatly what we say to others, what we say to their face, and what we say behind their backs, and what we say under our breath – just as what has been said to us and about us through our lives has the effect of building or destroying confidence and self-esteem.

Some people can’t hear the voice of God above all the names they are being called. 

Imagine being hemmed in one of our hotels as an asylum seeker and listening to the angry name calling and abuse of protesters. Yet there is the still, small voice of God calling their blessing, even in the midst of the hatred they are facing.

In the story of creation, of all creatures we are the name-callers. Right from Eden God has wondered what we would call others.

The Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them, and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild animals.
But for Adam no suitable helper was found. So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep, and while he was sleeping he took one of the man’s ribs and then closed up the place with flesh. Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.
The man said, “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ‘woman’, for she was taken out of man.” Genesis 2:19-23

What was true in that first relationship and the first human experience has become true for all relationships and all human experience. We wouldn’t be able to communicate, have conversation or live together without calling one another names. It is how we make sense of one another. It is how we love one another.

But it is also what divides us and forces us apart – the careless word and the barbed insult, they fester and go viral. The abusive word reverberates in people’s lives, sometimes for generations and often hardening into enmity and breakdown.

How we name others, what we call them, reflects what’s going on in our hearts, the state of our own minds (which in turn are affected by what and how we are called and named). With humble and thankful hearts we call others with love. “Ah, he’s the one who sings” or “she’s the one we turn to” or “they’ve been through so much”. These are names of appreciation. Whereas the names we come up with when feeling afraid, tired or resentful are often demeaning and insulting.

God has a real stake in what we call one another and the name calling in our relationships. The naming he leaves to us, and the repairing of the damage of our naming he also leaves to us though he promises to be with us in our work of reconciliation. 

In the kingdom of heaven, in the rule of God, it matters what and how we call others, and it matters that we seek reconciliation with any brother or sister who may have something against us for how we may have dealt with them, including anything we may have done to give them a bad name.

In Matthew’s gospel, a fool is one who hears the call of Jesus but doesn’t put it into practice and becomes the one not prepared for the kingdom of heaven. So the one who doesn’t leave their gift before the altar while they make peace with the brother or sister who has something against them becomes “the fool” – so-called by God in his loving judgement, so-called by God who is far slower in condemning others than we are, so-called by God whose judgement is merciful.

Spring Learning

David Herbert6 Comments

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In my own life, as winters turn into spring, I find it not only hard to cope with mud but also hard to credit the small harbingers of larger life to come, hard to hope until the outcome is secure. Spring teaches me to look more carefully for the green stems of possibility; for the intuitive hunch that may turn into a larger insight, for the glance or touch that may thaw a frozen relationship, for the stranger’s act of kindness that makes the world seem hospitable again.

Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak

Big ain’t beautiful

David Herbert2 Comments

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.

Hope springs …

David Herbert3 Comments

We celebrated our wedding anniversary by going to watch the film Hope springs … It is a touching story about a couple who have been married nearly as long as we have. Their relationship has become stale. The couple have lost touch with each other. There is no contact apart from the mindless peck on the cheek. They sleep in separate rooms. The film follows Kay’s (played by Meryl Streep) attempt to reconnect with her husband (played by Tommy Lee Jones).

It’s not a great film by any stretch of the imagination – (74% on the tomatometer at Rotten Tomatoes) but this (non) touching story reminds me that there needs to be routines and structures for us to keep in touch with each other. This is true of marriage and any community. There comes a time when we can no longer say that we are in touch if our relationships are starved of physical expression.

I love  The Touching Place  by John Bell and Graham Maule. It is a beautiful song set to the tune Dream Angus.

Christ’s is the world in which we move.
Christ’s are the folk we’re summoned to love,
Christ’s is the voice which calls us to care,
and Christ is the One who meets us here.

To the lost Christ shows his face;
to the unloved He gives His embrace;
to those who cry in pain or disgrace,
Christ, makes, with His friends, a touching place.

Feel for the people we most avoid.
Strange or bereaved or never employed;
Feel for the women, and feel for the men
who hear that their living is all in vain.

Feel for the parents who lost their child,
feel for the woman whom men have defiled.
Feel for the baby for whom there’s no breast,
and feel for the weary who find no rest.

Feel for the lives by life confused.
Riddled with doubt, in loving abused;
Feel for the lonely heart, conscious of sin,
which longs to be pure but fears to begin.

Without physical expression feelings become empty. Our feelings get blown away with the wind without physical routines and structures. Community is made of touching places.

I have posted a reflection on the importance of touch by John Hull from his account of the onset of his blindness.

Results, relegation and relationships

David Herbert10 Comments

The football season is virtually over, relegation issues are settled and just a few teams have any further stake in the rest of the season as they fight for promotion through the play-offs. This wool gathering of a northern dean has some useful insights into the mind of the footballing world, particularly exploring the feelings of players who have failed to perform to expectation and feel the responsibility for relegation.

At the same time, our Year 6 children are sitting their tests and are expected to produce the results that, as they say, won’t let themselves down , their parents down, their teachers down, their schools down and everything else down. Are “results” an  obsession of our age? Is the fascination for measurement and standardisation something that has grown through the industrial revolution and our increasing capacity for measurement?

Results measure success and failure. Kenny Dalglish has discovered that not getting enough of them (wins) while managing Liverpool FC is fatal. Results are the stuff of competition, with the result that they set team against team and performer against performer. In battle there is only one winner and many losers, and, therefore, it is best to avoid that result by finding peace. Some are driven by results, but most of us, most of the time work without seeing results for our effort. How do we keep going?

Thanks to Meg Wheatley (Finding our Way: leadership for an Uncertain Time) I have these thoughts to challenge our results culture: the first is from Vaclav Havel, and the other is from a letter written by Thomas Merton to peace activist Jim Forest.

Hope is a dimension of the soul … an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. It transcends the world that is immediately experienced and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons … It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.

Do not depend on the hope of results … You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness,the truth of the work itself … You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people … In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.

Wheatley’s own comment is that hope and fear are inescapable partners. “Any time we hope for a certain outcome, and work hard to make it happen, then we also introduce fear – fear of failing, fear of loss.” She says that we can live beyond hope and fear, and that all we need is each other.

I couldn’t resist including the photo I found here. I have asked for permission to use it.

a thousand kisses deep

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For lovers of Leonard Cohen, a “thousand kisses deep” is an amazing poem/song (song is here) measuring the relationship between lovers. What if it was used as a different sort of measure? Our knowledge of one another is superficially assessed within twenty seconds. Apparently – and worryingly – we are only right 70% of the time. 70% may sound first class but for the 30% misjudged, denied jobs, shut out that statistic can be disastrous.

Us clergy, ministers, community developers and planners come and go. Sensibly we audit our place before forming opinions – but the data is skewed by preconceptions and historic artefacts of superficial excavation. What if we went a thousand kisses deep?

Down into the passions, convictions, emotions of successive generation and regeneration we would go. On our cheeks the hot breath of passion and the tears of betrayal. Lips caressing disconsolate children, the embrace of neighbours in the face of disaster, the kiss for a bereaved friend for whom there are no words. Seamly and unseemly: love denied and love made – our findings from a thousand kisses deep. Mining, owning, knowing.

Ricky Yates helpfully reminds us of the great store we set by outward appearance, and our use of image consultants. We remember Hyacinth Bucket (Bouquet) in long-running TV comedy Keeping up Appearances. For her, attraction was but a surface veneer – with relationships barely a peck deep. But, as Ricky says, the Lord doesn’t look on the outside, but on the inside (Mark 7:15) – a thousand kisses deep, at least!