November 2023 – Notes from a Small Vicar

Watch and Pray with the Prophet of the True Way to Peace

The First Sunday of Advent, 3 December 2023, Eldroth, Clapham

‘O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,’ cries Isaiah to his God. How often do we hear people speaking like this at times of crisis, loss, and despair; and asking, ‘Where is God when it hurts?’, ‘Why won’t God intervene to stop the terror and pain?’

We are living through a series of traumatic events, like so many generations before us, world-changing wars in Europe and the Holy Land, the underlying nuclear threat, and the challenges to life on earth caused by the world’s increasingly-rapid overheating. And we come, each of us, with our own stories of trauma, those bereavements, those personal tragedies which at the time shattered our lives, and from which we daily seek recovery.

The Gospel of Mark was written, and is set, in a time of trauma. We will study it together through this year, and maybe it will help us to make sense of our times. [1]

It is fitting that we begin with the strange passage of Chapter 13; because here Jesus is prophesying the traumatic events that Mark’s community has just lived through.

Many generations of Christians have not been aware of this historical background, and so they have read these words as Jesus talking about the end of the world. He wasn’t; for notice, in verse 30, he said these things will happen ‘within a generation’.

Well, 2000 years later we know that the world didn’t end within a generation. So was Jesus just plan wrong, or were his words just fictions made up by the early church?

It’s important to understand that Jesus was not predicting the literal end of the world. He was using language that the Hebrew prophets commonly used to prophesy about possible world-changing events, traumatic happenings that would change peoples’ worlds forever. They were using picturesque language to describe moments in history that would cause terrible loss and grief and make it seem like the sun had fallen from the sky and wasn’t shining anymore.

It’s important to understand that Jesus wasn’t just predicting the future. He was prophesying. There’s a huge difference. Predicting tends to mean something will happen without a doubt. That there’s nothing one can do to change it. To prophesy is to show someone that they are on a path that will bring likely consequences. Doctors prophesy to us when they tell us that our current bad habits will likely lead to times of illness and poor health. Through their prophesies, they try to get us to make more healthy choices.

We could say that the ghosts in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, are prophets. They are trying to get Scrooge to change the path he is on, a path leading him into a despised life and a lonely death. They are prophesying to him the path he is on, not because it is unchangeable, but precisely because it is. He can choose another path. He can become a different sort of person. He can… and he does.

Jesus has come to his people of Israel, the Jews, to help them see that God has a wholly other path for them in the world. They are to lead by showing others how to serve. They are to be mighty among the nations by showing the other nations how to favour the least: the poor, the sick, the left-out. Above all, they are never to use violence. Those who live by the sword die by the sword. If they choose to go down the path of other nations, seeking greatness and power like them, they will end up as other nations do eventually, when someone bigger and more powerful comes along.

And this is what Jesus is talking about in today’s Gospel lesson. He was prophesying the terrible events which took place for God’s people, the Jews. Beginning in the year 66, about 30 years after Jesus arose at Easter, a majority of Jews launched into a rebellion against Rome. At the time, Rome was in the middle of its own civil war, so the Jews experienced some early victories. But when the civil war was put down, the Romans gave their full attention to the Jews. In the year 70, Rome destroyed and burned Jerusalem with its temple and slaughtered much of the population. This is the terrible reality that is still fresh to Mark, as he writes his Gospel in the aftermath.

So why does Mark’s story about Jesus become the first of its kind to survive and be kept? Why do we have this new kind of document in the world called a Gospel, that we’re still reading 2000 years later?

The first reason is because Jesus was a prophet who, unfortunately, was right. His fellow Jews continued down the same path and were met with the disaster he prophesied. Let’s imagine, for a moment, that 99% of scientists today are correct and that we are heading into a global warming. They warn us of undesirable events that will take place if we don’t change some of our lifestyles. And then let’s imagine that ten, twenty, thirty years down the road, those terrible events are fully upon us and are wreaking havoc in our world. Whose writings might we turn to? Won’t it be those who prophesied correctly about these events and told us what we could do to change the path we’re on?

That’s why we have the Gospel of Mark. Jesus was correct, not just about his own people, but he is correct about what makes for human beings to live in peace at any time and place. Over and over again Mark teaches us that true power and might comes through caring for the weakest among us; that true leadership comes through serving the least among us, not in seeking to be served; and the most important one: that, in Jesus, God is showing us precisely this kind of power and leadership coming true in the world.

How do we know? Because God has shown us the powers of this world doing their worst to Jesus, but then raising him to new life, as the promise that God’s way is the true way to peace. ‘In this world you will have trouble,’ Jesus tells us. ‘But take heart! I have overcome the world.’ [2]

This is so crucial! That we see, even when we fail to heed his prophesies, that God comes to us in our weakness. God comes with forgiveness instead of more vengeance, with the power of life rather than more death. God comes with the power to take the mess we have made and begin to turn it into gracious life.

Where is God at a time of trauma? God is right here alongside the struggling, suffering ones, those who have been dealt with the worst, by the powers of this world.

What is God doing in this world of pain? Through Jesus he is sowing the seeds of new life, he is helping to open up to us the promise of the true way of peace.

When Jesus tells his disciples to ‘Keep awake’, ‘Watch and pray’, he’s not telling us to bunker down and wait for the apocalypse. He’s giving us the tools by which we can face the traumas of life with faith, the challenges of the world with hope; by which we can flourish and help others to flourish.

Keep awake to what God is doing in the world around us; watch for signs of his presence in your everyday; and pray, keep praying, for in so doing, you will draw ever closer to the one who walks with you on the true way to peace.

Notes

[1] This talk draws substantially on Paul Nuechterlein, MARK’S GOSPEL AS FULFILLING THE WAY OF PROPHECY, delivered at Prince of Peace Lutheran, Portage, MI, November 30, 2014. Paul’s words, lightly edited, are in italics. Also acknowledging the influence of Paul’s notes in Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary, Advent 1B.

[2] John 16.33.

The parable of the man who liked to dig

Zephaniah 1.7,12-18, Psalm 90.1-12, Matthew 25.14-30

The Second Sunday before Advent, 19 November 2023, Austwick

This is the parable of the man who liked to dig. It’s a simple story because he was a man of simple tastes, who happily lived a modest life. He liked to dig the tiny plot he rented from his master, to grow enough veg to keep him and his wife in simple meals. He enjoyed his herb bed too, and nurturing the flowers and the hedges at the edges of his piece of ground, where he watched the bees and birds and other small creatures enjoying the fruits of his patient labour.

The man who liked to dig had plenty of time to enjoy these simple pleasures, for unlike his neighbours, he was content with what he had. They spent their days wheeling and dealing to raise revenue for their master, a harsh man whose only concern was with getting richer and richer, and who pressured them to find ever more inventive ways to increase his wealth, by reaping where he hadn’t sown, and gathering where he hadn’t scattered seed.

Their reward, such as it was, was to move up higher in his business, to take on more responsibilities with even more pressure to succeed. They had to be competitive, they had to be ‘creative’ with their accounting, they spent their time building houses they’d never live in and planting vineyards whose wine they’d never drink. Their work was to force the peasant tenant farmers to take on more and more extortionate loans to plant their crops, making money from the loans and, in the years when the crops failed, taking possession of the farms when the farmers defaulted on their mortgage payments. [1] It gave them some sense of security, but there was little satisfaction in their work, still a vulnerability, and a gnawing sense of unease at the cut-throat nature of the business they were in.

One day, the man who liked to dig was digging in his plot, collecting carrots for the day’s soup, when one of his master’s many messengers stopped by and said, ‘The master is going away and wants you to take care of this for him.’ He gave him a talent, a weight of gold larger than the man who liked to dig had ever seen before. He took it, turned it over in his hand, and said, ‘Yes, I’ll look after it for him.’ And when the messenger left, you can guess what he did next: he looked after it in the only, and best, way he knew; by digging a hole for it and burying it.

You will have worked out by now that this parable of the man who liked to dig is an upside-down version of the story which usually gets called the Parable of the Talents. It invites us to ask the question, what if this parable is about being happy not to spend your life striving for wealth and prestige?

That’s the question which John Milton posed when he reflected on the parable in his sonnet When I Consider How My Light is Spent. Is God really the cruel and somewhat crooked taskmaster portrayed in the parable, Milton wonders, and concludes ‘that waiting, rather than amassing wealth to prove one’s worth, is the proper way to serve God.’ In the poem, while he worries over his limited accomplishments in life, Patience comes along to remind him that God does not need ‘man’s work or his own gifts’. He observes that those ‘who best / Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best.’ And he famously concludes that

Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’er land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait. [2]

Seen this way, the parable celebrates those who are like the man who liked to dig, engrossed in a gentle way of life, patiently waiting in creation, applying their hearts to the gracious wisdom of the Giver of life, standing ready and open to the Creator.

Seen this way, the parable agrees with the words of the Psalmist which we recited this morning:

The days of our life are three score years and ten,

or if our strength endures, even four score;

yet the sum of them is but labour and sorrow,

for they soon pass away and we are gone….

So teach us to number our days

that we may apply our hearts to wisdom. [3]

And the parable underlines the judgement of the prophet Zephaniah which we also heard today: ‘Neither their silver nor their gold will be able to save them on the day of the Lord’s wrath,’ he said. [4] Better the content man who liked to dig, than the egomaniacal Master, and those entrapped in his cruel business which dehumanised them as they sent others into extreme poverty.

The parable is quite explicit about the effects of this dehumanising business world: it’s a world in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, or as the master in the story puts it, ‘to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.’ It’s the ancient world, and it’s our world today.

The man who liked to dig had found a way to thrive outside this exploitive system. And that so upset and challenged the master whose whole being was wrapped up in that way of life, that he had the man who liked to dig ‘thrown into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth’. The man who liked to dig may have only whistled at the birds out in his little plot of land, but he had unwittingly become a sort of whistle-blower, who by burying his master’s talent in the ground had taken it out of circulation so that it couldn’t be used ‘to dispossess more peasants from their land through its dispersion in the form of usurious loans’.

In doing so he had innocently unmasked the so-called ‘joy of the master’ for what it was – the profits of exploitation squandered in wasteful excess. Hence, the man who liked to dig is punished for revealing the truth, rather than for failing to make a profit. [5]

As punishment he was removed from his little plot of land, had his modest livelihood taken away. But, I like to think that he kept his sense of dignity, his self-respect, his self-worth. We have every reason to believe that he would, this contented man who had always applied his heart to the gentle wisdom of creation.

Was he imprisoned for his crime against the system, as so many debtors are? If so, then I like to imagine the man who liked to dig, at the end, finding his place again, tending the prison garden, nurturing fruit and vegetables for his fellow-inmates to enjoy, growing herbs to enhance their meals, growing flowers for the prisoners to appreciate, and for the bees and birds and the other small creatures within the prison yard, to also benefit from the fruits of his patient labour.

Notes

Thanks to the author of Talents—Another Parable Misunderstood by American Christians, 15 November 2020, posted on the Messy Inspirations blog.

[1] William R. Herzog II, Parables as Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed, p.159-162.

[2] Wikipedia: When I Consider How My Light is Spent.

[3] Psalm 90.10.

[4] Zephaniah 1.18.

[5] Wikipedia: Parable of the Talents: As social critique, citing William R. Herzog II, Parables as Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed, Chapter 9, The Vulnerability of the Whistle-blower: The Parable of the Talents, p.150-168.

In a world of conflict, be prepared for love

Wisdom of Solomon 6.12-20, Matthew 25.1-13

Remembrance Sunday, 12 November 2023

Austwick, Clapham, Keasden

If you were ever a member of the Scouts or Guides then you’ll know very well the motto, Be Prepared. In Scouting for Boys, Baden-Powell explained that it means ‘you are always in a state of readiness in mind and body to do your duty… having disciplined yourself to be obedient to every order, by giving forethought to any situation that might occur, and by making yourself strong and active; so that you are ready and able to do the right thing at the right moment.’ [1]

Now, Lieut. Gen. Baden Powell C.B., of course, got his ideas about preparedness from his military experience. Scouting for Boys included sections on stalking, tracking, signalling and camping, and these also featured in the Girl Guiding manual, which Baden Powell co-wrote with his sister Agnes, and which was called How Girls Can Help to Build Up the Empire. [2]

So the ideas which the Scouting movement taught us about being prepared were rooted in a distinctly military frame of mind. Many of us grew up, simultaneously, with a set of directions from another source altogether. Whereas the Baden-Powells taught us to face the world prepared for combat, our Christianity presented us with Jesus, who taught us to face the world prepared to love.

Jesus’ parable of the bridesmaids was his lesson in being prepared. It is not about preparing for a war but for a wedding; its intention is not to teach us to approach life as a military campaign, but to approach life as a marriage. Jesus was teaching us to be prepared… to love.

These two strands of our lives intertwine, and surface together at Remembrance, in different ways for different people. We may see Remembrance as a celebration of our love for our country and its people, our love for a way of life we value and affirm. Those whose names we memorialise epitomise a self-giving love for all that represents. We may see Remembrance as a statement of our love for all of suffering humanity, for all victims of violence and war. Many uphold Remembrance out of love for someone personally known to us, who fought in a World War, but who we recall and value as a grandparent, a tradesman, a neighbour, a school friend.

Our love – our loves – are forged in a world of conflict. There are disagreements and enmity. Our societies are well-acquainted with the ways of hatred and distrust. Every day we hear stories which can cause us to fear ‘the other’. We’ve been well-disciplined to separate ourselves from people we don’t understand, to be prepared to defend ourselves against all kinds of undefined alien threats.

In the face of all this, the challenge to every Christian is how to face the world prepared to love. For Jesus has, very unambiguously, taught us this: ‘You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven’. [3]

Any person determined to live in peace in this world must work out how to be ready in mind and body to act peaceably in every situation: to be prepared to develop the self-discipline to obey peaceful instincts over aggressive ones, to be ready to do the thing which unites, not divides; to be able to do the thing which generates love, not fear. All this requires a firmness of mind and heart, an absolute commitment of time and effort and energy: a strength of character which challenges the lazy criticism that pacifism is a form of weakness. Far from it.

“Jesus rejected hatred” – not because he lacked “strength” or “vitality” or even “incentive,” but because “he saw that hatred meant death to the mind, death to the spirit, death to communion with his Father.” Hatred is ultimately “the great denial” of life; Jesus “affirmed life.” Jesus calls us to love our enemies – not just our personal enemies, not just opponents within our in-group, but enemies that are to us as the Romans were to Jesus. We are to “Take the initiative in seeing ways by which you can have the experience of a common sharing of mutual worth and value. It may be hazardous, but you must do it.’” [4]

Jesus taught and lived in the tradition of Isaiah, whose vision of a world renewed by God spoke of people ‘beating their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks’, where ‘Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore.’ [5]

Imagine this world where instead of training for war, we train for peace. Imagine our putting all the enormous resources of time and money which we currently expend on arms, into health, welfare and community-building. When people start to imagine it, then this world begins to emerge. Look at what has been achieved in our lifetimes, in Northern Ireland, in South Africa, where people have risked talking to their enemies, and shrewd nonviolent diplomacy has overcome armed conflict.

In Berlin, Ben David, an Israeli who spent his teenage years in a West Bank settlement, and Jalil Dabit, a Palestinian Arab from central Israel, together run a restaurant called Kanaan, whose menu melds the best of both cultures to serve up dishes such as shakshuka lasagne and hummus ragout. Imagine for a moment the process these men must have gone through before deciding to start this business together: the risks they must have considered, of how very possibly opposition to their project could have cost them a place in their families, or friendships, or attracted the worst sort of society’s critics – those who oppose peace-building initiatives by force of violence.

Now, hear Ben David describe his first reaction to the news on 7 October, of the Hamas attacks which killed more than 1,400 people. He said he ‘reeled’, and swiftly shut down the restaurant.

“I was overwhelmed,” he said. He lashed out angrily at Hamas, telling Dabit: “I wish that we will destroy Gaza.” He was shocked by the way that Jalil Dabit responded. “I was full of hate, full of anger, and he hugged me,” said Ben David. “He had faith in me and I had fear in me.” Dabit said he understood his friend’s anger at what Hamas had done. “I felt the same,” he said. “How could they do something like this? You’re not fighting for the Palestinians, you’re making a problem for the Palestinian people.”

Consider now, what it must have taken for the two men to decide to reopen the restaurant, during the following days in which Germany saw a rise in attacks on Muslims and Jews. Remembering that their opening party in 2015 had been met with protests and threats, Ben David said, “Of course we were scared. We didn’t really know that nothing would happen.”

The alternative, however, was to continue living in fear. “We need to give a place for the fear, to respect it but still be brave enough to cross through it,” said Ben David. “We’re taking those walls down.” People have since poured through the restaurant’s doors, embracing it as a safe space, said Ben David. “People are coming because they’re looking for an island of peace. A lot of people are getting lost in the violence of both sides at the moment,” he said. “It’s very scary to be scared. And you hear it from both sides.” [6]

Consider also this statement made to a Christian Aid partner in Israel last week, by an Israeli civilian who was eyewitness to the Hamas attacks:

“I saw [a family member] being taken on a motorcycle toward Gaza and then I saw [another] surrounded by four or five Hamas guys. I hope we can come together, so that together we can think about what is best for us and also for them. They are suffering, too; they are being battered, too.” [7]

Now, pause to ask where such an astonishing statement of empathy might come from, in that person: astonishing in this moment of fear and terror. It sounds to me like it must surely be founded on that person having given years of disciplined, deep, consideration of how love has to overcome hate in their society.

The song Make me a channel of your peace is disliked by some who regard it as a dull dirge expressing good intentions which we are impotent to fulfil in a world of conflict. But it needn’t be that: if we feel that we have it within us, and with God’s help, to develop the self-discipline to obey peaceful instincts over aggressive ones, to be ready to do the thing which unites, not divides; to be able to do the thing which generates love, not fear; if we think that we can train for peace … if we have this faith, then we can sing this song as a confident prayer.

I’d like to invite you to stand with me and sing it now; and as you do, to decide what meaning you will put into it, and what intentions you will draw from it.

Make me a channel of your peace:

Where there is hatred let me bring your love;

where there is injury, your healing, Lord,

and where there’s doubt, true faith in you.

O Master, grant that I may never seek

so much to be consoled as to console,

to be understood as to understand,

to be loved as to love with all my soul.

Make me a channel of your peace:

where there’s despair in life let me bring hope;

Where there is darkness, only light,

and where there’s sadness, ever joy.