Mary, the mother of Jesus: a Protestant sermon

Luke1.26-38

‘And Mary said, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.” And the angel departed from her’.

It isn’t the ordinary everyday experience of a young unmarried girl, aged about fourteen or so, that a messenger from God should suddenly appear and tell her that she’s going to have a child. No wonder she was greatly troubled: young, pregnant girls, even in the most liberal of societies (which ancient Israel wasn’t) are, to say the very least, sometimes an embarrassment and even a disaster for the dishonour they visit upon their families. I’m surprised that Mary managed so gracious a response. I imagine most young women would have thought: typical of a man to bring bad tidings dressed up as good news, and then depart, quickly.

Gabriel the messenger wasn’t even totally honest with her. He was what politicians might call economical with the truth, and what the rest of us would call downright misleading. He told her that the baby would be a big shot, an even bigger shot than the offspring of her kinswoman Elizabeth who, though widely known to be past it, was finally and amazingly pregnant. So possibly Mary thought: ‘Well, this isn’t what I’d have planned. But it can’t be bad to be the mother of a divinely-inspired boy, to have God grateful to me for my obedience. It’s not every girl engaged to the local odd-job man who can claim that and not be called a liar’.

No wonder, then, that she managed to put on a brave face and get out the pious response: ‘Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word’. But when Gabriel departed, task done and no consequences for him to bear, she must have thought: ‘Wait a minute. He didn’t tell me how to persuade Joseph that it’s a good thing I’m going to have a baby that isn’t his’. In the years ahead, she must have created a long list of things she was going to take up, indignantly, with Gabriel when she saw him again.

As when Jesus, her eldest boy who should be supporting her, left home to become a travelling preacher and healer. Gabriel hadn’t told her about that, and she wasn’t best pleased about it. Not only was Jesus failing to support her, he was embarrassing her. When Mary heard that some were saying that Jesus was mad, off she went with the rest of her family to fetch him home, and she received a stinging rebuke for her pains. Jesus said to the crowd who told him of the arrival of his relatives: ‘Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and sister, and mother’ (Mark 3.31-35). In other words: his own family, including Mary, don’t get him. It’s left to others, however dimly, to understand who he is and what he must be and do.

Slowly and painfully, Mary worked out that her son was divinely called to a life of service, not entitlement; and that his suffering and death were the way to hope and life for others. What parent would want this for their child? Did Gabriel mention any of this?: no, he did not. No wonder it took time for the penny to drop for Mary.

But drop it eventually did. In a wonderfully poignant and tender moment, the evangelist John depicts her at the foot of the cross, entrusted by Jesus to his most beloved disciple, to take her into his home and look after her (John 19.25-27). Mary was there for Jesus, and he for her, at the end of the day. And at the beginning of a new moment in history, after the resurrection of Jesus when the world is charged with the grandeur of God’s spirit-filled power, she’s with the disciples as they set the world on fire with the message of God’s love (Acts 1.14).

No thanks to Gabriel that I finally worked things out, Mary must sometimes have thought. In fact, the earliest hint she got that things would be tough was from Simeon, when Mary and Joseph went to the Temple in Jerusalem to have Jesus, their new-born baby, circumcised. Simeon said to her, almost as an aside: ‘And a sword will pierce through your own soul also’. She must have remembered those words, long years later, as she stood at the foot of the cross on which her son hung, tortured and slowly dying.

Significantly, Simeon was an old man, and wise in the spirit. He had seen much and learned much. And he was sensible enough to tell Mary enough to light her through the following years, but not too much to bedazzle, blind or dispirit her. She, like all of us, had to learn the price of obedience to God’s will. To be told too early about what the venture of faith will demand of us is to risk us misunderstanding because of our inexperience, or because of many other things that get in the way. Only as Mary looked back could she, like Simeon before her, see the grace of God that bore her up when she was powerless to aid herself, and brought her safely to an astute acceptance of what she had done and been and become.

So this story of the annunciation, of Gabriel’s visit to Mary, is about the cost of discipleship. It’s one thing to accept God’s will when you’re young and idealistic; it’s quite another to sail the frail barque of your faith into port, having survived the storms of life that you might once have thought you’d be spared if God were really to look after his own. Faith, of course, is what it’s all about. Faith: the capacity to trust God through good and ill, to cling onto hope in the worst of times, believing that underneath are the everlasting arms and that, if we falter and fall, it will be into grace.

The transformation of a young girl into Mary, the mother of God, Our Lady, was enabled by two things. First, by God’s discernment that she would do, that she had the courage and flair to get through dark days, though not without the setbacks and doubts that are part of the human condition and that we all must work through. Since God gives us the free will to disobey and disappoint him, she could have let him down and failed to measure up to his hopes for her. If, sometimes, we think that God has failed us, perhaps then we ought to reflect that we also fail him. His will can only be done when we cooperate, the human and the divine, to mend the world together.

The second part of the transformation was Gabriel’s wise silence. Maybe, after all, God’s messenger doesn’t quite deserve the bad press I’ve given him today. Though Mary must sometimes wryly have thought as she looked back on his visit: surely he could have dropped me a hint or two! Still, he gave her something more precious by far: space to let her intuition, her understanding and her obedience flourish and flower. He told her enough, but not too much, to make the crucial choice, and then from it other choices, that would make her the person she has become in God’s providence and in the faith of the church.

So Mary has become the exemplary Christian. Sometimes, she has been turned by men into a figure who feeds their fantasies of what women should be like: servile, knowing their place, someone who’ll mother the little boy in them who won’t grow up. But the real Mary doesn’t fit there. No, she was: a feisty village girl who made a man of captivating, transcendental magnetism out of the babe she’d been given; a woman who got things wrong but then got them wonderfully and transformingly right; a young girl whose obedience shows us that God’s creative energies are not put to the ends of war and desolation but to peace and salvation.

For, as we see Mary, we see God working through her: his tender love; his commitment to the world; his capacity to bring out of hate and death, love and life. And thus we are encouraged to let him work through our lives too, taking the risk that much of the good we do, we’ll only see in retrospect. For now, often we’ll misunderstand, and feel that too much has been asked of us. And yet: Mary reassures us that it’s worth it, that faith and hope and love are invincible.

She gives us the hope to believe that it’s open to us all to say, if we have the courage and commitment to do it: ‘Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word’. Doing so, we shall learn that the risk of faith is worth it. That, Mary supremely illustrates.

Day of the Dead

A while ago, a contributor to one of my editorial projects let me down on the subject of Day of the Dead. I found myself scrambling to become an instant expert, in order to meet a publishing deadline.

I hadn’t appreciated how widespread similar festivals are, in the world’s religions and cultures. Often they take place as fall turns to winter, as the world darkens. Whether then or upon a similar occasion at another time, we remember not just death, but the dead.

Current obsessions with vampires, werewolves, zombies and other such unwholesome inhabitants of the twilight zone don’t exactly fill me with delight. Particularly because a major teaching of All Souls’ Day, or Dia de los Muertos, or Diwali or analogous commemorations is that the membrane between life and death is very thin indeed, so that there can be and occasionally is some kind of transaction between here and the hereafter. It’s one thing for me to hold as true and holy and encouraging that sometimes my father can seem as close to me as he was in life, closer maybe; quite another thing to suppose that Count Dracula might pitch up for a little liquid refreshment. Which disagreeable thought leads me to three random points about this time of the year.

First: what a pity when Halloween became or becomes simply a focus for bloodcurdling fun, candy and ghosts.  More wonderfully, it encourages us to brood over the souls of the departed, who have much to teach us for good and ill whether, like me, you are embarked upon reading biographies of people as diverse as Winston Churchill, Socrates, St. Augustine and Queen Victoria; or, also like me, you remember with deep thankfulness those people, now dead, who had an unforgettable impact upon your life. I find that there are more such memorable people now than once there were, a reminder of passing years.

Which is one reason for the second point: there’s melancholy at the heart of all this ghoulish glee. There are various strands to the sadness I feel, and all have in common a sense of failure. Well, failure may be too strong a word, but dissatisfaction, frustration or some such words begin to convey what I mean. These impactful people from my past are a source of rebuke as well as encouragement, a reminder of what I’ve failed to be and do as much as what I’ve managed to achieve. And other figures from my past, difficult family members and friends, trouble  me because I couldn’t make things right with them before death closed a door to that possibility.

Finally, beyond melancholy lies hope. Our business with the dead isn’t finished: that’s at the heart of the meaning of the day of the dead. In some religious traditions, they form a great cloud of encouraging witnesses to the mercies of God; they may also lovingly remind God that we’re in need of forgiveness and renewal. Death is a new beginning as well as a significant end.

But is that hope reasonable or, to use an old-fashioned and loaded word: is it true? I turn to the hope of poets when my own hope burns low. John Donne (1572-1631) was an extraordinarily gifted and also very strange man: a satirist, priest and lawyer, as well as a poet. He became obsessed with death, because he was obsessed with the meaning of life. In his A Nocturnal Upon S. Lucy’s Day, Being the Shortest Day, he wrote what, for me, are some of the most poignant of words:

‘For I am every dead thing,
In whom Love wrought new alchemy’.

When my father died, it was his ‘Death be not proud’ that hastened hope and healing:

DEATH be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think’st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell’st thou then;
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

Growing old gracefully?

It seems impossible to me that I’ll turn 60 next year. Despite all the evidence that confirms it (physical appearance, a growing list of medications, the occasional confusion of my wife’s and daughter’s names, losing things or forgetting where they are, uncertainty about how many cats we have: that sort of thing), I’m amazed.

I’ve been reading Gordon Rupp’s amusing and touching book, The Sixty Plus and Other Sermons, published way back in 1978. Dr. Rupp’s last year as principal of Wesley House seminary (1973-4) was my first year as a student there. I thought he was about a million years old, very wise and very funny. I suppose two out of three isn’t bad: he was, in fact, 63 when we first met, within hailing distance from where I now stand. Things look different from a 21 year old’s perspective.

A more recent book about aging is Joan Chittister’s The Gift of Years. She points out how many more old people are alive now in the USA than in 1900: 10% of the population and climbing, rather than 4%.  And that fact, helped by the title of her book, impressed the (for my sort of religious person) obvious upon me: not only is life one of God’s graces, but (let’s not be too PC) old(er) age is also a grace. In the broad scheme of things, life is given to few. And length of days is given to even fewer.

How then do we approach older age as grace, as a gift?

As I’ve contemplated the gift of, for example, not hearing as acutely as once I did (why do students mumble more than they used to?), I’ve fastened on four things to help me get through the twilight zone, gracefully (or as gracefully as I can manage).

First, better believe the Ancient Greek who said: ‘Know Thyself’. Whatever this gnomic utterance means, I choose to accept as true that it tells us to be realistic about ourselves. I was recently amused to read some wry prayers based on the Myers-Brigg personality test, particularly the one based on my own personality: ‘Lord, help me be less independent, but let me do it my way’. This sentiment isn’t perhaps the best compass with which to chart the golden years! I’ve thought, ruefully: what am I going to do as the coming years unravel? Alongside that, there’s the chilling thought: what has been the point of all that I’ve done? Is there any sum of its parts?

Which leads me to the second thing: defining yourself just by what you do is, at least in my case, to court depression and turn joy into anxiety. So don’t just define yourself by what you do. When I embarked upon this sabbatical, I was fretful about doing nothing. Now I’m discovering how long it takes to do nothing. I’ve supped and fed with colleagues, talked for the first time in ages to old friends, looked at the fall leaves with a kind of wonder (and made a mental note to pay Naomi to clear them up, post-wonder), read books I’d long meant to, gone on a church tour of bits of Chicago with my wife Udho and a pile of people who were, gratifyingly, mostly even more aged than I. There’s more to me than being a professor, I discover. And I like some of that ‘more to me.’

I am somewhat cynical about clichés, so am embarrassed to tell you that my third means of coping with my bad back, etc., is as clichéd a cliché as you will find: count your blessings. I have the time to do so. I talk with my daughter Naomi more, and to her boyfriend. Now that the cats have understood that I’m home more than usual, they climb all over me and, although I moan about it, I’m entranced and moved by the non-verbal (well, Ianto talks for Illinois, but not in English) communication and affection between master and human. And I find myself looking at Udho as we watch television of an evening, or read, and am so thankful.

Moving on to the last point: I have more time to …: well, I’m not sure quite what it is that I’m doing. I would use the word ‘pray’, except that I’ve never been excellent at doing what that word conjures up in the minds of many people. I love the aside in Luke’s gospel when he notes that Jesus’s ‘mother kept all these sayings in her heart.’ I look at people and things more than I did, keep them in my heart, and ponder them, acknowledging mystery and hope. I’ve never been much of a fellow for long-winded extempore prayers. We should approach mystery, and let it approach us, with care and wonder and meekness. For some reason, I’ve recently been much stirred by Cardinal Newman’s prayer:

Oh Lord
support us all day long
of this troublous life until
the shades lengthen and
the busy world is hushed
the fever of life is over and
our work is done

Then Lord in thy great mercy
grant us safe lodging a holy
rest and peace at last, through
Christ Our Lord. Amen

Mustn’t Grumble; or: Being Indebted to Kindness

Exodus 16.2-15

²The whole congregation of the Israelites complained against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. ³The Israelites said to them, ‘If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.’

4 Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘I am going to rain bread from heaven for you, and each day the people shall go out and gather enough for that day. In that way I will test them, whether they will follow my instruction or not. ⁵On the sixth day, when they prepare what they bring in, it will be twice as much as they gather on other days.’ ⁶So Moses and Aaron said to all the Israelites, ‘In the evening you shall know that it was the Lord who brought you out of the land of Egypt, ⁷and in the morning you shall see the glory of the Lord, because he has heard your complaining against the Lord. For what are we, that you complain against us?’ ⁸And Moses said, ‘When the Lord gives you meat to eat in the evening and your fill of bread in the morning, because the Lord has heard the complaining that you utter against him—what are we? Your complaining is not against us but against the Lord.’

9 Then Moses said to Aaron, ‘Say to the whole congregation of the Israelites, “Draw near to the Lord, for he has heard your complaining.” ’¹⁰And as Aaron spoke to the whole congregation of the Israelites, they looked towards the wilderness, and the glory of the Lord appeared in the cloud. ¹¹The Lord spoke to Moses and said, ¹²‘I have heard the complaining of the Israelites; say to them, “At twilight you shall eat meat, and in the morning you shall have your fill of bread; then you shall know that I am the Lord your God.” ’

13 In the evening quails came up and covered the camp; and in the morning there was a layer of dew around the camp. ¹⁴When the layer of dew lifted, there on the surface of the wilderness was a fine flaky substance, as fine as frost on the ground. ¹⁵When the Israelites saw it, they said to one another, ‘What is it?’^* For they did not know what it was. Moses said to them, ‘It is the bread that the Lord has given you to eat.

Matthew 20.1-16

 ‘For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire labourers for his vineyard. ²After agreeing with the labourers for the usual daily wage,^* he sent them into his vineyard. ³When he went out about nine o’clock, he saw others standing idle in the market-place; ⁴and he said to them, “You also go into the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.” So they went. ⁵When he went out again about noon and about three o’clock, he did the same.⁶And about five o’clock he went out and found others standing around; and he said to them, “Why are you standing here idle all day?” ⁷They said to him, “Because no one has hired us.” He said to them, “You also go into the vineyard.” ⁸When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, “Call the labourers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first.” ⁹When those hired about five o’clock came, each of them received the usual daily wage.^*10Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of them also received the usual daily wage.^* 11And when they received it, they grumbled against the landowner, ¹²saying, “These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.” ¹³But he replied to one of them, “Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage?^* 14Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. ¹⁵Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?”^* 16So the last will be first, and the first will be last.

 

Many years ago, the American travel writer, Bill Bryson, made a wonderful TV program about the English, based on his book: Notes From a Small Island. For me, the most touching part was when he interviewed two elderly women from the north of England. They lived in a smoky, sooty town dedicated to declining industries; cotton maybe, or coal. They and their husbands were often out of work. They lived in back to back housing, which is to say that they had adjoining neighbors on one or both sides and also at the front or the back. Bryson had these old dears reminisce about sending their fathers and brothers and boyfriends to fight against Hitler, about the rationing of food and clothing, about their varicose veins. Their only bathroom was at the end of the yard, ideal on a cold December at 2am, when they woke up and had to go. It was a hard life. Finally, one game old girl said to another, in a rather endearing north of England sort of way: ‘Still, dear, mustn’t grumble’. All the more touching because, of course, they had been grumbling, though in a stoical, humorous, accepting sort of way.

Moses’s Hebrews, 2300 years before, were also grumbling. In this case, however, the humor was in the storyteller’s way of telling the story, not in the characters themselves. They were far from accepting their situation and soldiering on. Admittedly, it was bad. They were in the desert, hot by day, cold at night, short of food and water, and still far from a land flowing with milk and honey. The whole bunch of them were Olympic gold medal grumblers. They could easily be mistaken for teenage girls: ‘If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.’ In other words: it’s not fair! God isn’t doing right by us. A wonderful memory loss there, eh? What about laboring dawn to dusk to construct Pharaoh’s slave cities? What about the attempt to kill off first-born Hebrew boy-babies, which had almost spelled the end of Moses’s career before it began?

If, for just a moment, they’d climbed out of the pool of self-pity that they wallowed in, they’d have found God in a mood to be nice. As they grumbled, he was preparing to do this neat little trick of producing manna from heaven each day for them. Except for the weekend, when he took a day off but provided extra to cover. Good stuff, too. It tasted like wafers flavored with honey. You might say: more like croissants and bacon dripping with butter, than plain matzah. But the people continued to grumble and be suspicious of God’s motives. Many gathered up too much manna, even though God told them they’d no need to: there’d be constant deliveries and, anyway, it had a short shelf life. There’s a wonderfully wry, Jewish self-mockery in the telling of the tale. Oy vey: can we ever trust the boss to be: well, as Jesus would later say, father-like, tender and caring?

It’s hard to take God’s kindness on trust. Much easier to look at the past and the present with one eye shut, and to grumble that things aren’t idealistically perfect.

The gospel reading set for today’s lectionary, which I was going to avoid talking about and then found that I couldn’t, is that extraordinary parable in which God is compared to the owner of a vineyard who hires workers at dawn, noon and dusk to pick grapes, and then gives all of them the same wage. ‘It’s not fair’, cry out the workers who’ve been there the whole or at least a large part of the day. ‘Who’s talking fairness’, says the owner. ‘It’s my money. I can do what I damned well like with it’.

There’s a place for justice and fairness in human relations. Of course there is. A large place. But that’s not really what either story is about. Whether it’s Hebrews grumbling in the desert about the injustice of their sad plight, or the 7am shift moaning about fair pay for a day’s work: the major issue isn’t about whether God is just. It’s about why God is supremely, endlessly, joyfully, unreasonably: kind.

The American poet T.S. Eliot, much improved by living in England, told us that humankind cannot bear too much reality. We don’t like truth very much, when it gets in the way of our strongly held opinions. And, oddly, and even worse, many of us don’t like being indebted to kindness. Especially that’s true of religious people. We don’t like to believe the truth that God has no favorites: that his love is for all. And, when she’s been nice to us, we often resent it, because it makes it difficult for us to moan about her goodness to undeserving others.

American religion is extraordinarily divers and complex. But the religious people who most capture attention are the nasties who make God in their own unkind image. We get all sorts of important debates spitefully skewed, so that religion and God seem to be grouchy and mean-spirited at best, or even vindictive and cruel.

For example: when I arrived in the USA in 2001, I was taken aback by this American religious obsession with abortion. Especially as most religions discussed and settled its basic outlines (usually in favor of the mother) centuries ago. Of course, only a fool could think that abortion is a good thing. But, in the name of God, what’s wrong with those who would deny a raped sixteen-year old girl control over her violated body. How is making her carry the fruit of that violation, a witness to a compassionate and generous God? God bless her if she chooses to, of course. But: if God provides wafers in the wilderness or, more important, forgiveness and hope and meaning to a disordered life, how come he gets tough with a wounded young girl in the biggest mess of her life? Why would he not be kind? And, as to the fetus: well, if God’s truly God and able to bring forth life and healing and hope, surely nothing is truly lost.

And why do such religious people often think that God’s the boss of the bedroom police? When, at the age of seventeen, I started taking an interested in the things of faith, the pastor to whom I spoke said nothing of ethical stances towards the cold war, or Vietnam, or the civil rights movement, or even how to be nice to grandma and the cat. He told me to keep myself pure for my wedding day. The fact that I stayed in the church suggests that the age of miracles isn’t yet dead. Or that I’m as much of a fool as he was. Or that I’ve always had a highly developed sense of the ridiculous, and a sort of weary compassion for human foolishness and foibles.

Why are people suspicious of a good and kind God? I don’t understand the psychology of those who prefer to make God in their own ornery image rather than bathe in everlasting grace. There are many biblical explanations for this human perversity. But I don’t want to go there.

To me, a much more interesting and important issue is: how do we discover and enjoy God’s inclusive kindness in a world where many of his self-identifying spokespeople are excessively unkind and exclusive?

Well, by looking at things with a wry humor, for a start. Whether it’s the stoicism of Edith and Ethel, up north in England, refusing to take their situation so seriously that they give in to its grimness and indignities. Whether it’s the Jewish storyteller of Moses’s life and times, commenting on his people’s faithlessness and foibles.  Whether it’s you and me, looking at our own lives and wondering what went wrong, refusing to blame others and soldiering on.

We could, of course, blame God. I myself have every intention of making full use of the complaints box when I get to St. Peter’s pearly gates. But often our complaints are self-serving whines. We look at the mystery of human suffering (wars, famine, natural disasters, all that sort of thing) and then, to give a very recent example: I drop my keys in Priscos store at the end of a difficult day and then sit in an immoveable car, fuming at life, the universe, the vegetable section, family, friends, bosses at work, and God. Everyone, except that dumb old klutz: me. And then, when a very nice young man comes out of the store bearing said keys, I startle him by saying: ‘Thank you, God’. Without, of course, wondering why God would take time out from cholera in Haiti, genocide in Syria, and hell on earth in North Korea, in order to scoop up my keys for me in Aurora, Illinois.

A sense of humor gives us a sense of proportion. We aren’t the center of the world’s attention, entitled to whatever we want, whenever we want it. And yet, sometimes, we hear an echo of Jesus’s humorous observation that every hair on our head is counted by God and think: ‘Is it so? Does God care? Even for me?’ Will he sometimes meet my needs, not out of a quantifiable sense of justice or fair play, but simply because he’s kind.

Preachers don’t talk much of kindness. They use, maybe overuse and abuse, the big words: love, justice, grace, sin – those sort of words. Me?: I’m OK with kindness. And, if God can be extraordinarily kind, it seems clear to me that we glimpse her in the kindness of others. In a town in Pakistan one day, I got thoroughly lost. Two young Muslim lads smiled at me, beckoned me over, put me on the back of their bullock cart, and the bullocks slowly and gravely took me to my hotel. It was out of the boys’ way, and they took no money for it. Not knowing that I knew their language, they did, however, tell standers-by along our route that I was an absent-minded old whitie whom my wife would do well never to let out of her sight. It was the time of the first Gulf War, so God had little time left over to deal with the consequences of my inability to read maps. Yet, when the boys dropped me at my hotel, hugged me and left my life for good, I felt: touched by holiness, immeasurably indebted to undeserved kindness.

Hang on there: how does momentary kindness sit alongside, say, the fact of cancer? So, here’s my cop out: we can sort out the philosophical and theological entail of these ruminations another day.

For the moment, I just want to tell you a sure fact. Many of the parables of Jesus, echoing biblical stories, picture God rather as a much later hymn writer did, when he wrote: ‘the heart of the Eternal, is most wonderfully kind’. And so, as an inference from that fact, we shall find glimpses of God, not necessarily among his voluble spokespersons, but more often in unlikely places – from illiterate, impolite, poor and excessively kind young Muslim boys, for example.

Pat Robertson, you may have heard, has graced us with another of his keen, compassionate insights. We can divorce our spouses with Alzheimer’s, in order to take up with another partner, so long as we provide them with suitable medical care. They are, after all, so he tells us, for all practical purposes: dead. This pastoral gem joins a string of others that have delighted our lives over many years. My personal favorite is his comment, in the wake of his failure to close a deal between his own bank and the Bank of Scotland, that: ‘Scotland is a dark land, overrun with homosexuals’. That caused me to phone many of my Scottish friends, asking why they had kept this from me.

Well, maybe Pat should try being kind. You never know: God might touch his life, thereby.

When you find God to be unreasonably kind, don’t grumble. And don’t take it for granted. And don’t resent her kindness to others. Just have the joy of it.

Remind me who you are – a Methodist Christian sermon

That night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two maidservants and his eleven sons and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. After he had sent them across the stream, he sent over all his possessions. So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak. When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob’s hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. Then the man said, “Let me go, for it is daybreak.”
But Jacob replied, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”
The man asked him, “What is your name?”
“Jacob,” he answered.
Then the man said, “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, which means “God strives’, because you have struggled with God and with men and have overcome.”
Jacob said, “Please tell me your name.” But he replied, “Why do you ask my name?” Then he blessed him there.
So Jacob called the place Peniel, God’s face, saying, “It is because I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared.”
The sun rose above him as he passed Peniel, and he was limping because of his hip. Therefore to this day the Israelites do not eat the tendon attached to the socket of the hip, because the socket of Jacob’s hip was touched near the tendon.

Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” And they said, “Some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” And Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” Then he sternly ordered the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.

Long, long ago, the English orchestral conductor, Sir Thomas Beecham, was at a party, when a large, bejeweled and very grand lady bore down upon him. ‘How delightful to see you again, Sir Thomas’, she said. He hadn’t the first idea who she was. ‘Likewise, dear Lady’, he replied, and was horrified to discover that instead of moving on to another victim, she stayed put and seemed intent upon further conversation that would inevitably uncover his complete ignorance of her. Beecham had the faintest stirring in his mind that he knew a relative of hers; was it her brother? So he said: ‘Madam, how is your brother?’ ‘Very well, Sir Thomas’. So that didn’t help him out. He tried again: ‘And what is your brother doing these days?’ She replied: ‘He’s still the King of England’.

Today’s Bible readings are about who someone is. In the second, Jesus asks his disciples who he is. Or rather: ‘Who do people say that the Son of Man is?’ That may seem a rather odd thing to ask. But then, Jesus was a rather odd sort of person. He healed the sick, exorcised demons, raised the dead, was a master story-teller, and was obsessed with God. So it isn’t surprising that lots of people found themselves asking who he was and, as a large part of that query, how he was able to do all the amazing stuff that he did.

In distant times and in many cultures, naming someone was a clue to knowing about them, including what they did. Take my last name: Forward. It has nothing to do with movement in a frontal direction. It was two words put together: ‘for’ meaning pigs; ‘ward’, keeper or protector: ‘keeper of pigs’. So, my distant ancestors kept pigs. We can surmise that they weren’t Jews or Muslims, for whom pigs are forbidden animals. They must have settled in England in invasions from Germany after the fall of the Roman Empire, because the words are Anglo-Saxon. They were working people, providing sausages, chops and bacon for the community. They weren’t nobility, but they were probably a step up socially from people who just labored on the land and had nothing but their hands with which to make a living. So, there you are. You now know quite a lot about my long ago ancestors just from one word: my last name. And so can you about yours, if your name is Taylor, or Smith, or Jailbird. Now, about Dunham: it’s an early English word, also Anglo-Saxon, like Forward. Actually, it’s two words: ‘dun’ is a hill; and ‘ham’ is a village. So the Dunhams lived in a village on a hill. You can imagine, can’t you, two people having coffee together in 9^th century Londinium, with one saying to the other: ‘You know old Joe, don’t you? The crazy old coot who lives in that village on top of the hill. Nobody ever goes to visit with him. Too damned tiring to get up there.’

In our culture, we’ve lost the power of names and naming, as our now meaningless first names often indicate. Though once, they meant rather a lot and indicated what parent coveted for their newborn child. My parents called me Martin, which means: ‘little warrior’: a fine sort of name for a 6’ 3” coward like me. They also named my sister: Janet; which means ‘gift from God’, another palpable miss, or so I thought when she was 6 and I was 5.

The generations of Jacob and Jesus hadn’t lost the power of names and naming. Jesus’s first name, Jesus or Joshua, meant ‘Yahweh saves’, spot on for a God-intoxicated preacher and healer. What is interesting and unusual, though, is Jesus forcing his followers to think deeper about the meaning of naming him. Is he ‘Son of Man’, or ‘Son of God’ or ‘Messiah’ , or what?

Many Christians today seem to think that God saves us when we choose the right name or names for Jesus. If we believe that Jesus is the Son of God, heaven awaits us. If we don’t, then we’re in the hot seat, and will get a good and very long roasting. This is more than a tad trivial. Jesus doesn’t want us to find the definitive answer about him but to ask the right sort of questions. Is he messiah, a divine figure who’ll bring about good times by getting rid of the Roman occupiers, violently? Or is he a suffering son of man, like Adam, of the flesh, fleshly, a man born to die, yet alive with the healing power of God.  In forcing his disciples to assess who he is, Jesus isn’t like some egocentric, delusional politician from Minnesota or Alaska, one sandwich short of a picnic, out of her depth and willing to sacrifice truth for image, and money, and power rather than authority. Rather, he’s making his followers ask about themselves, what sort of people they are: what they value; whether they can see to the heart of things, or just slide about on the surface of what truly matters.

The disciples don’t do well in response to Jesus’s question. Professors of Religion would give them a poor D, if they were feeling generous. They say to Jesus: ‘Well, some people say you’re a bit like this guy; others say, no: more like that one’. Impatient, Jesus says: ‘But you guys, what about you. Any fool can hedge their bets and say what others think. You, you’ve seen me heal, heard my stories, I’ve walked on water for you. What do you think? And why?’

We don’t like being put on the spot. I spend my academic life helping students make their own religious and spiritual decisions, not mine. You should weigh this, you might that into consideration, have you thought of…” And I hate when they say: ‘So what do you think…?’

Occasionally, you get one interesting student, not always the brightest but with something about her, who goes for broke. Among Jesus’s students, it’s Simon who, characteristically, cuts to the chase, ‘You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God’. Jesus honors his insight by renaming him, thereby telling us something about him. He becomes Peter, the rock, upon whose faith the church, a group of people who meet together to do God-intoxicated things, can rest secure. Of course, being Peter, he immediately blusters, overplays his hand, and the rock of faith crumbles. But Jesus never takes away his new name. Simon Peter didn’t always live up to the best of who he was. But sometimes, he did, and thereby was a rock for others to rest on and hope in.

Peter called Jesus Messiah and Son of God. Good choices, but not, perhaps, the best one to hand. Jesus had dropped his disciples a hint about who he was when he said: ‘Who do people say that the Son of Man is?’ The Son of Man was, I think, Jesus’s preferred way of describing himself. Not Messiah. Not Son of God. But he didn’t insist on his own choice. I guess he thought that, as long as humans wrestle with questions about the authority and the presence of God, with whatever terms are handy to do so, that’s fine.

Talking of wrestling, I’m sure that the story of wrestling Jacob was in Jesus’s mind when he asked his disciples about people’s, and their, perceptions of him. Jacob, the shady huckster and wheeler-dealer, who wrestles with a man whom he discovers to be God, and then wants power over God by knowing his name. And God tells him: ‘it’s not about me, it’s about you. Are you just Jacob, cheat, crook, mama’s boy. Or can you also be Israel, God strives, and so embody what it means to wrestle with issues of integrity and wholeness and meaning in God’s world?

In this wrestling with God, there’s no instant answer to the meaning of life and death. Of itself, simply saying: ‘Jesus saves’ or ‘Jesus is Messiah and Son of God’, or anything, won’t do. Only in the wrestling with deep questions about how God is God for us and for all, will we reach those provisional answers that keep some of us in faith and hope and love.

I said that Jesus’s favorite description of himself was ‘Son of Man’. Characteristically, this designation points in different ways. Jesus could be saying: it is as a son of Adam, a man born to die, that I’m able to do all that God wants me to. If you read the biblical psalms about what it means to be ‘son of man’, that’s what you would take away. There, human beings are frail and mortal, and yet capable of wondrous things. But, if you read the biblical book of Daniel, the son of man there is a superhuman figure who, like Captain America, helps the goodies by defeating the baddies. Which of these did Jesus mean? Do we have to make a choice? Can he be both?

When Jesus asks his followers about himself, he’s really asking us about ourselves and the impact of God in our lives. But we can’t quite get away from asking: ‘Who on earth, who the hell, who in heaven is Jesus?’

Who is Jesus? If we want to know, we should listen to those who have really wrestled with God, and come out with something to say. The greatest hymn in the English language is by Charles Wesley, the brother of John who founded Methodism, and it’s about the story of wrestling Jacob. Wesley’s contemporary, the famous hymn writer Isaac Watts, by and large a greater poet and theologian than Wesley, once said that it was worth ‘all of my hymns combined.’ I end with three verses from it. You’ll be delighted to know that I won’t sing them but will instead read them to you. Jacob is everyone, you and me, and says, as he wrestles with the meaning of the Christlike God:

Come, O thou Traveller unknown,
Whom still I hold, but cannot see;
My company before is gone,
And I am left alone with thee;
With thee all night I mean to stay,
And wrestle till the break of day.

I need not tell thee who I am;
My sin and misery declare;
Thyself hast called me by my name;
Look on thy hands, and read it there;
But who, I ask thee, who art thou?
Tell me thy name, and tell me now.

‘T is Love! ‘t is Love! Thou diedst for me;
I hear thy whisper in my heart;
The morning breaks, the shadows flee;
Pure, universal Love thou art;
To me, to all, thy mercies move;
Thy nature and thy name is Love.

Endings and Beginnings

We make sense of our life not in the things we always do, whether difficult or easy, joyful or depressing. We become the people we truly are at transformative times, when we have to dig deep into our resources to uncover new possibilities and answer novel challenges. If like me, you’re a person of faith, you think of these as occasions when God helps you to be more than you ever knew you could be.

This last academic year has been a transformative time for me. The new premises of the Wackerlin Center for Faith and Action made possible all sorts of innovative and exciting work. To take advantage of this, I drew upon resources that had sustained me in the past: rootedness in the Methodist version of Christian faith; a gift for a directing new organizations that bring together people of different faith and ideologies (this has been the fourth such one, I think!); a desire to be inclusive; good humor; a sense of proportion and self-mockery; a capacity to inspire and be liked by people; an ability to relate to teenagers and young people (and even to older people, though I find there to be fewer older people around these days!); and, last but not least, culinary skills, for such organizations can’t be in any sense faith-full if they aren’t hospitable.

In one sense, it was the fulfilment of various strands of my past life. But this wasn’t just business as usual.  I also had to ask new  questions that are deep, troubling and searching . How do we run such a center in Aurora IL, which also makes meaning in and of a much wider world, where roots matter and yet where differences need to be handled courteously and generously? How can we best enable many voices to be heard with respect and goodwill, not just the one we speak? How, in other words, are we faithful both to the past, what we have been, and to the future, what we shall become, amid the demands of the present age?

Since universities are about students, who are often (though by no means always) young people, old fogies like me have another set of questions and challenges. How do we challenge and also learn from students?: this early riser learned that, by and large, breakfast meetings won’t cut it, but that 9.30pm meetings could; and I also learned that, though some students are fully paid up members of the Me generation, many more do remarkable acts of service that I never did at their age.

Here’s the hardest question of all: how can faith and hope and love find common coinage in a university like AU? Some would think they can’t or aren’t appropriate in an institution centered on academic excellence. And, if they can, we return to the issue that these superlative virtues  aren’t refracted simply through one religion or ideology: hence the need to be inclusive, open-minded and generous of heart and spirit. 

Well, it’s been a learning experience for me, for which I’m glad and grateful: I tend to believe Confucius’s conviction that you only stop learning when they put the coffin lid over you (and maybe not even then). I haven’t always got things right, but I hope I’ve got them more often right than otherwise.

I couldn’t have played my part this last year without the active and dedicated help of others, without students, staff, faculty, and others who’ve been willing to try out what we’ve offered at the far south-western corner of the campus. To these colleagues, I’m grateful.

I’ve unexpectedly been given a year’s sabbatical for the 2011-12 academic year. When I return, it will be to teaching duties, outside the Wackerlin Center. The university’s Vice-President for Advancement, Ted Parge, becomes its interim director.

I’ve been so grateful for the past year. Few people get the chance to do what they really want to do and can do excellently well, and I consider myself one of these fortunate ones. I’ve had a wonderful year. As for the sabbatical? Well, I shall read, cook (and slim down!), reflect, play with the cats, and enjoy the company of family and friends. And I might write the occasional blog post.

What sort of God, is God?

An interesting discussion in my Christian Bible class today. We had the usual agonizing over divine control of events and/or human freewill. Which led us to depict God as analogous to, say, the founder and/or head of a large organization.

Is God hands off, preferring to let others run the show that he began, either because God has other ideas to have and things to do, or because God’s not a details deity? Or is God the CEO, as well as the founder, who lets area-experts get on with doing their thing, and intervenes only to remind them of the larger picture and the greater good of the institution? Or is God a control freak, who always knows better than the experts, and prefers second-raters over experts, because their views can easily be challenged and actions overruled by God? Were Abraham, Moses, Naomi, Jeremiah and Jesus pushovers who just did as they were told; or were they -co-creators with God, of a better world and deeper hopes.

My class and l will no doubt return to this subject next week, when we look at the parable of the prodigal son and the gospel of John’s theology of the word. But, assuming that God is, what do you think and hope for in God?

God’s love and human mentoring

I was telling my bible class that there are different New Testament words for love, to denote various facets of that catch-all concept: a word for friendship, another for sexual desire, and so forth. The first Christians employed a particular word, αγάπη, to denote God’s love for humanity. It was used for that purpose in the earlier Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint, where it also had other shades of meaning. Christians saw that divine love embodied in the sacrifice of Jesus, and believed that they were impelled and empowered to live by its light.

Good enough for them, good enough for us, perhaps?  Some of what it tells us about how God treats us must surely inspire how we treat others. Certainly, I’ve had reason to ponder the word this last year, as I’ve related as a mentor to students. For example: to be committed to what they do – turning out in all weathers to see them play soccer; giving encouragement; dropping hints about what they’re good at, and what they’re not good at; laughing with (not at) them; offering time and food. Such things, it seems to me, mirror, however obliquely and partially, God’s commitment to us, his patience, his tactfulness, his delight in seeing us grow into all we can be, not by following his check list but, as the mystics might say, by enjoying his hospitality.

Love doesn’t coerce. It plays the long game, and hopes. And it’s always there, for others, when it’s needed.

Naomi and Ruth

I’m attempting to teach the Bible to students over five summer Saturdays. You might think it a hapless task, but the students are good and, every time I read bits from it, I wonder why we often leave the Bible to the mad, the sad, and the bad. It’s too good for such a trivial fate.

The book of Ruth has long haunted my imaginal worlds. My daughter’s called Naomi, and I’m convinced that the book should be named after her (the biblical Naomi, that is; not my offspring). Two desperate women, Naomi and her widowed daughter-in-law, venture out together into public space, which is where men belong, and where women shouldn’t go unless they’re accompanied by a male relative, or in large groups of other women, or are whores. Or desperate. Desperate enough to leave one country for another, without expectation of making good or even surviving!

All ends well, of course. They find security within the confines of a man’s world. Boaz takes care of them. But, in the telling of the story, so much conventional wisdom is overturned, despite its conventional ending. For a start, the story’s about two women: men play walk on parts in it, even Boaz. The women survive by taking risks and hoping that God will honor those risks and, out of their life’s pain, bring security and hope. God does.

The most moving part of the story isn’t that Ruth, a foreign woman, is revealed to be the ancestor of David, Israel’s greatest king. It’s when Ruth’s firstborn son is laid in Naomi’s arms, and the women say to her: ‘Your daughter-in-law who loves you, who is more to you than seven sons, has borne him’. Too true; and thereby conventional attitudes about mothers-in-law and where love may most be found are shown up for the charades they can be.

This small book is, for me, a man who through it peeks into a woman’s world, a challenge, a comfort and a joy. It tells of where hope may be found, in a risky engagement with God and a trust in his (her?) abiding care for us,  for those who, as a Jewish healer and teacher once said, have ears to hear.

Mending the Word

I came late to Jewish-Christian dialogue, long years after I had lived among, liked and learned about Hindus and Muslims. In 1995, I was asked to lecture on Jewish-Christian relations in Cambridge University’s Faculty of Divinity and, never being one to dodge a challenge, I embarked on serious reading and reflection so as to be able to do this.

Serendipitously, or providentially, at that time I met up with a new doctoral student, Edward Kessler, now Executive Director of the Woolf Institute at Cambridge, which resources people to study the complex relations between Judaism, Christianity and Islam. And, through friendship and collegiality with Ed, I was drawn further into the particular and special relationship between Jews and Christians.

Not so long ago, one of my students wrote on Facebook about his Jewish nose and another referred to his careful monetary habits as Jewish. These are lovely kids, humorous and warm, and they’d be appalled if I told them that such attempts at bravado betray a long and appalling history of antisemitism in the western and Christian imaginations. That history sometimes turned violent, and negative language about and vile depictions of Jews were used to dehumanize them which, of course, made it easier to justify killing them as vermin.

I’ve taught a course here at Aurora University on Jewish and Christian Responses to the Holocaust, which always attracts thoughtful and intelliegent students. They’re thoughtful and intelligent enough not to romanticize Jewish-Christian dialogue. They’re keenly aware that some Jews use that compromised history to deflect any criticism of Israel as antisemitic. They’re also aware that many Christians talk about good relations that they don’t observe in practice.

My colleague, Jonathan Dean, who was taught the Cambridge course by me long ago, takes over this course next year, and hopes to widen our involvement at Aurora University in Jewish-Christian relations. It’s always good to pass on a worthy task to someone who’ll do it even better.

But that reference to Jewish noses and cheap Jews still troubles me. Much political correctness in human relations is dumb, counter-productive and superficial. But that doesn’t mean to say that we shouldn’t mind our language. ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me’: I was taught this long ago, and it isn’t true. Words can lead to deeds; sometimes, vile deeds.