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Lenten Reflections

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Lent I, 2010

Luke 4: 21st February 2010

Our journey through Lent to Easter always begins like this: the story of Jesus tempted, or tested in the wilderness. The wild place. I’m reminded of Maurice Sendak’s book, Where the Wild things are. The two pieces of writing have lots in common — they both have a mythic quality that reaches beyond the literal words into our deep psyche. Both are dealing with a reality that’s wild. Max dances with the wild things, but in the end, what he needs and what he wants is his supper. Being sent to bed is the catalyst for his fantasy, but the real thing is as simple as a hot supper.

The Gospels invite us to stop seeing this as a story about Jesus, and to make connections between the dynamics of the story and our own lives. This is deep spirituality, not a story about Jesus being tempted that we are invited to look on as spectators, and then go off into life saying that’s nice, he survived. How fortunate for him and us.

Luke begins by reminding us that this story is about a heightened sense of God. 1”Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the desert, 2where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and at the end of them he was hungry.” As is characteristic for Luke, Jesus is “full of the Holy Spirit.” Luke likes this phrase. It appears over a dozen times in Luke/Acts, but not at all in Matthew, Mark, or John. For Luke, it usually marks a time of great spiritual intensity. This encounter with testing is spirit-led. Therefore it’s an essential part of the spiritual journey. If we note the way the temptations unfold in Luke, they echo much that we already know.

The first distraction from being with God is simple, physical hunger. That’s why fasting has been a common religious ritual. Overcome the rumbling of the gut. The brain tells us to eat. Yet the body doesn’t always need food in response to that feeling. When I was seeing a dietician recently she was very clear about this: if you feel hungry between meals, learn to drink water instead. Nline times out of 10 the feeling of hunger will go away. But the brain is a powerful stimulant. It tells us things we keep believing, and therefore act on. On the spiritual journey we need to understand well the pull of physical hunger to take us away from our focus. Stones look like bread. But crumbs don’t taste like dust. Shrove Tuesday in English is Mardi Gras in French. Fat Tuesday. The day to get rid of all the food that is going to go rotten over the next weeks of Lent because we’re fasting. Feast up large. Then fast for Lent. Hunger is a powerful distraction. It demands gratification.

The second distraction Luke notices on the spiritual journey is that of power. In this case it’s the power of control. It’s politics — the art of being with others in a community. Authority and splendour are stimulants that will keep us awake at night. They’re played out on international stages, on national stages, and in the small stages of our houses. This distraction has gotten us intoall sorts of troublesome places. The possibility of being top of the class when we’re young. The satisfaction from ordering others about, and being the boss. The ways we manipulate situations to our advantage. The dynamics of this distraction go deep into our need to be needed, and the core of the way we generate our self-esteem. We might laugh at preening kid-kissing politicians, but not look in the mirror when we get the family to do what we want for the holidays despite them wanting something else. Power is a second powerful distraction. It demands gratification too.

The third distraction Luke notices for us is quite subtle. It’s the temple. The religious heart. The place where our spirit is nurtured. We’ve noted many times how important these walls are to all sorts of people who never come here, but once did, to get married perhaps. The place in itself represents something else though. The sense that if we come here, God will offer us favours. Life will somehow be on a more charmed course than if we didn’t come. It’s a subtle distraction because for a while it feels plausible. Pray for a parking space and one will come. Score a try and God has paved the way. It’s subtle because it doesn’t feel like putting God to the test. Yet the idea of a religious life leading to a charmed life is very easy to adopt. Special. But it’s a distraction. Yet it too demands gratification.

Luke offers us three distractions. Spirit-led into confronting them, Jesus makes his way out of the wilderness, but, as Luke also points out, not away from temptation. At another opportune time, Jesus will be offered the choice of a way out to avoid crucifixion. Once more, although the struggle sweats blood for him, he chooses his way and becomes The Way. Hard testing and distraction from God is the norm of the spiritual life. Jesus, we are glad to know was like us. His rootedness in his scriptures is given as his way of dealing with these tests. Know the book well. Let it sink in. Some things stick and return to memory when all else has gone.

Underneath this story lies another. The providence of God. God as grace-filled provider of the means of life. Providence is for us an old-fashioned word. Within our lives there are always desert times. Times when we feel in danger of starvation. Times when we feel the world is dust around us, and even the best food tastes of nothing. With his insistence on the Spirit of God being integral to Jesus’ wilderness experience, Luke is at pains to help us understand the providence of God in these times too. The only way through the desert is through the desert. There is no going round. But embracing such experiences is not what we are programmed to do. Everything in our world is designed to cushion us. Take a pain-killing pill. Run fast in another direction. Take a trip. Move house. We can do all these things as part of a normal life, but sometimes we also choose them to dull the desert. That’s when we discover such ways don’t work. We take ourselves with us. Such a pain that~ If only we could park ourselves on a shelf while we sort our other self out, and then come back and pick ourselves up again. We’ve probably all tried that. And we know it doesn’t work. We crave solitude and find loneliness instead.

Enter the providence of God in the guise of the Spirit. A glimpse of glory as someone once said. A whisper on the wind. A quietness that overtakes us in turmoil, even for a second, that whispers, hey, let it be, and understand the spirit who is with you, not against you. You can do this. There is another place. Not yet maybe, but lone day there comes an end to this. You are fed, not just fed up. And in those moments we come closest to hearing the words with which Luke begins this episode:

"Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the desert, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and at the end of them he was hungry.”

And so we begin again the journey of Lent.

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Lent II, 2010: "What's in a Name?"

Luke 13:31-35

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet."
Juliet says to Romeo.  What’s in a name indeed!

What we call each other makes a difference.  What we call anything makes a difference!  Last week a small controversy was attempted around the name Nigger on several locations of Mt Whyte Station.  It was a good natured debate about a name that once denoted one thing, but now carries a different and insulting meaning.  Names are an important way of human beings getting a handle on the world we live in.  If you like, it’s an exercise of our power.  It was recognised in one of the Genesis myths of creation where Adam is given the right to name his world’s contents.  When a child is born we take great care about the name chosen.  Names carry emotions.  Ask any school teacher about which names they dislike.  Usually there is a list that’s been generated by behaviours of children with those names.  Names are so important that in English we give them a capital letter.  In old times, knowing a person’s true name was to obtain a source of power over them.  So in several Biblical stories, the protagonist asks for a name – Moses asks the burning bush and receives a very enigmatic name back I am who I am.  Jacob wrestles but isn’t given the name of his opponent.

We have grown up with names meaning things or at least carrying huge emotional weight.  Sometimes the emotional baggage is not based on balanced information.  Take the word Pharisee for example.  Mention that word in combination with Jesus, and most people who have church connections will assume them to be in opposition.  Not so, as today’s Gospel points out.  Some Pharisees come to warn Jesus he is in danger.   They name the danger with a capital H – Herod wants to kill you.  Get out of here while you can.  Jesus had a lot to do with Pharisees, who were a lay religious movement who were behind the setting up of synagogues as the places to learn Torah, the fence of Jewish Law.  In other words they had moved beyond the temple as the only way to understand how to be Jewish.  Jesus has a lot in common with them, and indeed is called rabbi himself.  So let’s not assume this word automatically means opposition to Jesus.

Jesus' response to their friendly warning is to engage in some name-calling himself.  Herod is a fox.  A harmless predator of the fields.  Not something to be afraid of.  Rulers of the day liked to be known as Lions but not foxes.  This is scathing name-calling.  I’m not scared of you.  I have a place to be, things to do, and you will not put me off.  Jesus puts himself into the lineup of prophets, and claims their lineage as he sets his face towards the place where his ultimate test will come.
 
Jerusalem, another capital letter name, has a capital value too.  It’s the centre.  For us, it’s Wellington that we head towards.  A hikoi to challenge our ruling powers is unlikely to head for Bluff as its ultimate destination. 

It’s a great Lenten reminder that the challenge to ourselves is whether we’d ever challenge anything.   Especially if we get sucked in to the NZ mantra that politics and religion are separate entities.  It’s so ingrained into our way of life that we have become almost the most secular society on earth, with the church and religious point of view getting more and more muted and sent to the sidelines.  Over the past few years the church has dismantled many of the social initiatives, and councils which were often in critically challenging places.  When Phil Heatley resigned his Cabinet post this week, I heard a radio reporter mentioning that he thought Phil was a Christian and therefore had principles.  It was hard to gauge whether the reporter was being admiring or disparaging, or reporting in a neutral fashion.  But challenge is something largely lacking these days in our understanding of being church.

Having been told by generations of politicians that religion and politics are not to be mistaken for each other we have believed it, and become part of the silence of injustice and intolerance that exists.  Years ago, if the Government had suggested raising GST the Council of Christian Social Services would have jumped up and down, raising issues of equality and justice.  Not now.  The Council was dismantled.  Now it’s left to someone on Facebook to form a group to oppose it in the name of a Christian understanding of justice.  That urgent sense of the prophetic is muted within current NZ Christian thought.  So the faith is seen as a personal insurance policy for eternal life, or a feel-good place to go for a while, or a place where we can dump our cares and worries.  All of which have relevance.  But taken in a heap, they also blunt any sense of the public domain of being Christian.  We leave that to individuals to write to the Editor of the Press.

It’s good to be reminded as we come to Easter, of the public domain of following Jesus as the Way to God.  It’s not about personal piety alone.  There is a public face to be re-found.  For me that public face doesn’t need to be controversial or confronting, although there may well be times when that’s what it is.  It can be a gentle public face too, gathering the chickens under the wing.  It’s one of the reasons I believe so strongly in a community development model of church.  It’s one of the reasons we were at the City Council Older persons day last week.  The church in the public space, contributing as a church to debates and to gathering chickens is vital to the church and being Christian having any relevance in the 21st century.  The last 30 years of the 20th century was when we lost that sense of public domain.  As I sit with Jesus and Herod, the fox and the broody hen, I’m reminded of the importance of regaining a sense of public face, the prophetic edge that characterised so much of the way we understood the faith’s value.  John Wesley used to say he was only interested in practical religion, with an outcome in people’s lives, not in our private life only, but in the way we are together as a society.

Can we recover a public domain as a church?  That’s not up to anyone else but ourselves.  It’s not always a comfortable place to be, and we know we like comfort.  It’s sometimes confrontational, and we know we dislike disagreement.  But the power of the fox is found in its ability to eat chickens.  And chickens need help and protection.  Today’s Gospel places us into a dynamic of fox-chicken name calling.  But more importantly, into the realm of the way our walking on the Way of Jesus has a public domain which we have largely ignored.  Why else was Jesus a problem to not just the religious arena of the Temple?  Why was Herod interested?  Because in the Way to God espoused by Jesus, there is no huge distinction between public domain and private piety.  Both are part of the Way.  The question for us is how we walk it, and where it leads us.  Walk with care.

Lent III, 2010

Pending

Dearest Earth Our Mother

Tune: Cranham Irregular - G. Holst. CH3 Hymmary 50. Lyrics: (c)Bill Wallace

1. Dearest Earth, our mother,
   Kind and bountiful;
   Loving all your children,
   Giving life to all;
   We are all your whanau
   Joined by spiral thread,
   Binding all the living,
   Linking all the dead.

2. Earth will live forever
   Ancient wisdom said
   Modern wisdom tells us
   Earth may soon be dead.
   Mother Earth lies bleeding
   Tortured by our hands
   Seeking endless profits
   From the finite land.

3. A-o-te-a-ro-a
   Sacred Island space,
   Home where God is nature
   Shows a furrowed face
   Land for all our children
   Born and yet to be -
   May your weeping help us
   Long to set you free!

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Today's World

God of compassion: we often feel that we are far from the centres of power and
influence, of turmoil and pain in this world.
But we know that we really are not so far:
We are joined by our common humanity, our sharing of this world,
its resources, its blessings and its pain.

And so we specially pray
for the victims of war:
in The Lebanon, in Palestine, in Afghanistan, in the Sudan,
in East Timor and Iraq.
Innocent victims; bereaved families,
and all caught up in the horror of events:
We pray for families who have lost their fathers and their sons:
or lost their children through malnutrition
in the aftermath of sanctions.

Guide our leaders in seeking to address the underlying causes of such events.
May they learn to act with justice and effectiveness,
without escalating the spiral of violence, injustice and hate.
We pray for all arms manufacturers and traders,
Military and political leaders engaged in escalating weapon systems
May they come to see that their enterprise brings no security at all.

Guide all who work for just peace: diplomats, protestors,
Missionaries, peacekeepers and aid workers.

We pray that religious faith may not be distorted to incite bigotry,
fanaticism and hate, and instead promote understanding, respect and a sense of care
for all peoples, all creation.

We pray that those who warn about environmental problems may be heeded: that the
tide of species depletion and global warming may be turned; that we may all learn to
tread lightly on this fragile earth;
Appreciate its sacredness, and our deep connection to all life, habitats and cycles of
nature.

Finally, we commend to your healing love O God, all those who are sick,
all who are bereaved, all who are troubled.
We pray in the name of Jesus, whom we cal The Christ.
Amen

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Dedication Prayer

We commit ourselves to join with you O God
To care for the plants and the animals,
And the sacred womb of air and sea and soil.

We offer with these token gifts,
Our ability to create and our potential to release
people's loving energies for the benefit of all creation.

We sing with you the song of the universe
We dance with you the dance of life!
We are yours, and you in us are hope for the renewing of nature
through the healing of the nations. Amen!

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Go into the World

Go into the world: Dance, laugh, sing and create:
Go into the world: risk, explore, and love.
Go into the world: believe, hope, struggle and remember.

And go with the assurance of God's Love! Amen!

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Divine Wisdom

In our worship we have discovered something of the
presence of God: Holy Spirit; Divine Wisdom.

May that holy presence guide and direct us
in the fullness of Life.
In our worship we have discovered
that there is always another way.
May ours be the way of Christ,
the way of peace, and of accepting love.
So bless us as we go, in Jesus' name,
Amen.

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