Silence can be boring. Trying to pray like Jesus.

Sermon from Septuagesima Sunday, Mark 1:29-39

Today is the feast of Septuagesima, which in the old days was the beginning of Lent – the lesser lent as it was called before Ash Wednesday. You lucky folk have it well off with only forty days of fasting and abstinence, but in the old days it was seventy. Although to be fair, the same traditions which began Lent on Septuagesima also celebrated the season of Christmas right up to Candlemas, with forty days of unremitting joy. And after forty days of unremitting joy, I suspect you would welcome a bit of fasting and abstinence.

But there is a slightly Lentern theme to our Gospel today. Because it is about being less busy. And about spending time alone with God.

“I know you must be busy”. Is a phrase that you come across an awful lot when you’re a priest. “I know you must be busy”.

It’s difficult to know how to respond to that. Do you say “No, not at all” Which makes you sound lazy. Or do you say “Oh yes, frightfully busy” which puts people off talking to you. I’ve always thought that my job was not to be busy, to be the one who had time for people.

I mention that because there is so much business in Mark’s Gospel. I sometimes feel very tired reading it. Everyone is permanently full of energy, Jesus is in full Duracell-bunny mode, inexhaustible, unquenchable, like the cat from the Stevie Smith poem, that likes to gallop about doing good. Or indeed from Isaiah– running and not fainting, walking and not being tired. Even Peter’s mother in law, once healed, immediately gets up and starts serving them. I mean, at least have a cup of tea and a sit down.

Is that what we’re supposed to be like, Christians, full of energy, always busy, living for the service of others, who like to gallop about doing good?

Oh I do hope not.

I’m reminded of that rather catty quotation in the Screwtape letters – “She’s the sort of woman who lives for others. You can tell the others by their hunted expressions”

Churches can sometimes be very busy places. And people can get very tired.

This Gospel reading, like so many parts of our Gospels, is both a comfort and a challenge. Because although Mark’s Gospel is busy and hectic, this is the part of the Gospel where Jesus stops.

Everyone, the whole city has come to Jesus to be healed, have stayed until well into the night. Everyone wants a bit of him, and Jesus is tired. So while it’s still dark, he gets up and goes away by himself. To get some alone time with God, to recharge his batteries. And when his disciples eventually catch up with him, they sound reproving. Everyone’s looking for you. Lots more people to heal, more work to be done. They’re expecting you.

And He says “No. We’re not going back. We’ve moving on.”

I wonder if he felt any guilt at leaving behind those who wanted him to stay and heal them, comfort them, console them, teach them. I know I would. But the reason this gospel passage is a comfort and a challenge, is that it tells us that sometimes we have to stop, and for our own well being spend time alone with God, to renew ourselves. Just us and God.

A number of years ago, my spiritual director asked me why I was working myself into the ground. I rather angrily told him that I had no choice. Two churches to run, so many funerals, so many things to do, so many people wanting me, so much stuff, and after all, we’re supposed to cope aren’t we? To run and not faint, to walk and not be tired.

He prescribed periods of silent prayer. And the real answer to why I was so busy was found only in the terrible, uncomfortable silence. And the silence really was terrible and uncomfortable. And the answer was, of course, like every young priest, I wanted not just to be a person of god, I wanted to be ‘super-priest’, the best priest, and as we all know, good priests, are busy, never let people down. Good priests know everyone by name, their houses were always full of folk – they are extroverts. But also, they are academics, well-read, poetry-quoting, in tune with the church fathers, people of prayer who spend hours in silent contemplation. So they are introverts too. So priests are both extravert and introvert. Or in other words, the ideal priest is a schizophrenic.

It was only in the silence, time spent alone with God, that I began to see things clearly. I was killing myself with work, because I wanted to be the best priest. My virtues of diligence, and industry, had become vices of pride, and guilt at letting people down. I learnt a lot of things in that silence, and one of the things I learnt – perhaps as Jesus learnt in his silence -  was that if we are to be the people that God wants us to be, sometimes we have to let go of what other people want us to be. Sometimes we have to let go of what we want us to be too. If we are to be truly ourselves.

The world we live in seems to be getting busier and busier, more and more frantic, increasingly resembling Screwtape’s Kingdom of Noise. So it is more vital than ever that we give ourselves what Jesus gave himself – time alone with God. Time to ask ourselves what all this business is for.

Sometimes we are busy because we feel we ought to be and need the approval of others. Sometimes we are busy because we can’t find a way of asking for help. Sometimes we are busy because we don’t actually want to spend time alone with God, afraid as we are of what we might find in the silence.

So here’s what I find when I’m being silent, alone with God. The first thing I find is that it can be very boring. After the “oh isn’t this nice and peaceful” feeling has worn off, and after you have thought through your shopping list, and what you’re going to do tomorrow and worked out what you should have said to that person who was a bit rude to you, it gets boring. But boredom is just a cover, a veil, which masks sometimes some unpleasant things.

Sometimes when it’s just you and God, you’re not sure he’s there. And sometimes you’re not sure who you are. Who am I, silent, alone, naked before the throne of God. It’s so much easier to keep busy than go through all of that.

But eventually, through the silence, when we have quieted ourselves enough to let God get a word in edgeways,  there is a something which can only come through silence, because words can’t express it. And that makes it very difficult to speak of.

Mark Lawson was making very heavy weather of an interview with a poet on the radio recently, asking them “so what does this poem mean”. To which the poet could only reply, “if I could tell you that I wouldnt’ have needed to write the poem”. And it is the same with silence. If there was a way of putting it into words, we wouldn’t need to be silent. What comes to me in silence, whatever it is, is not an answer to questions, because questions are formed from words. And if we are to be in silence, then we need to be without words, even words in our heads. When finally we can do that, when we can be in silence without any new thoughts or new words barging their way into our brain, then what comes in response is something – obviously – indescribable through words.

Once we have stopped interrogating God, begging God, demanding of God, what comes to me is that, whoever I am, even if I don’t really know who I am, and whoever God is, even if I don’t know that either, there is something – I don’t know – something which magnifies, something universal, which shows me the depth of my own soul and gives a true notion of the idea of the universal, the numinous. And it’s at those moments where life begins to make some sort of sense.

What I learnt in that silence, is beautiful, but so obvious I’m almost embarrassed to share it.

Which is simply that duty and joy are not two separate things. They are the same thing. Our duty is to be joyful. Our duty to God is not a burden, it is that which gives us life. Our sacrifice is not a life diminished by the cares of the world, it is a sacrifice of life-giving praise. God is with us to renew us, not exhaust us.

For our yolk is easy. And our burden is light.

Amen.

In God we doubt.

And so Jesus said to them, “come follow me and I will make you fishers of men” and immediately they left their nets and followed him.

Gosh, that was easy, wasn’t it? He called them, and they followed.

I don’t mean it was easy for Jesus – he is the Messiah after all, that must give you a certain amount of pulling power. I mean was easy for James and John. They don’t think about it, they don’t struggle with it, they don’t worry about it. Their faith was immediate and complete.

I wish my faith could be like that. Simple, immediate, complete.

Our reading from Jonah doesn’t make me feel any better. Jonah goes to the people of Nineveh, an ungodly and disreputable lot, and says “Yahweh says you have to repent, and amend your ways” and they say “Yes, okay, we’ll do that.” Jonah, who seems to find obedience to God quite difficult, is rather put out. It all seems far too easy.

If that is what faith is, the unquestioning immediate simple faith of James and John and the people ofNineveh, then I’m afraid I am a person of little faith.

My faith has never been unquestioning acceptance. I’m far more fidgety than that. I’m fear if Jesus said “come follow me”, my immediate reaction would be “where, why, and for how long”.

Faith for me used to feel like waiting for a bus. Do you trust that there is a bus coming that will carry you home, or do you put your trust in your own abilities, and walk?

When I was growing up inYorkshire, I lived a fair way from school, and busses were few and far between, especially if one had extra-curricular activity – or as the teachers put it, detention.

On a cold winter’s evening, I would wonder about walking to the next bus stop. That would save me 20p and hypothermia. But if I walked, maybe I would miss the bus? The longer I waited, the more I thought, “If I’d walked, I’d be there now.” But also the longer I waited, the more likely it would be that the bus would come. And so of course what normally happened was I would start walking, and half way in between stops, I would see the bus sailing past, leaving me repeat the process at the next stop.

That was my sort of fidgety faith. I wanted to trust that the bus was coming, but the reality was different. And I wanted to believe in God without doubts, Oh how I wanted that, but I couldn’t. Hoping, but not sure?

Now my Grandmother, who like many of her peers would happily stand chatting at a bus stop for hours, she literally could not understand the idea of doubting the existence of God. She had absolute faith – In god, and in the West Yorkshire bus timetabling system. She was like James and John. God called, she followed. No doubt.

I yearned for a faith like then when I was growing up, and for a while I even tried to fake a faith like that, in the hope that it might just come. But it never did.

And you know, that’s all right. It’s alright. For a long time I thought it wasn’t, but it is. I thought I should be like James and John and the people of Nineveh, I felt they had been given a gift which I didn’t have, and indeed they had been given a gift I didn’t have. But in later years, I realised that I had been given a gift they had not. Which was the gift of doubt.

I am how God made me, and the way God made me is inquisitive, questioning, doubting, sceptical. And the point where I stopped feeling that my faith was inadequate was the point where I stopped yearning for the gifts that God had given to others, and instead accepted the gifts that God had given to me. If God made me this way, and God loves me this way, then maybe it’s all right. That was the point that I started being me, and stopped trying to be an Apostle.

But what can faith mean in this context? If it is not the simple anc complete acceptance of James and John, what it faith?

I suppose a lesser faith leaves the door open for a sort of agnosticism, where we declare an open mind on the subject of God. It’s good to have an open mind. But not so open that your brains fall out. Paul warns us against such equivocation in our second reading. The appointed time, he says, is growing short. Or in other words, make up your mind. That’s the problem with agnosticism, sympathetic as I am to it – it’s just delaying making a decision. You’re neither waiting for the bus nor walking home. You get no-where.

So what is this faith of doubters? Well it is for example, the faith of Thomas Aquinas, one of our greatest theologians. At nearly the end of his life, Thomas had a revelation of God, and said,  “everything I have written seems like so much straw to me.”

But that straw, those intellectual endeavours, saved the church from superstition, from the Goddess worship of Mary, they gave the church a rigorous intellectual justification for faith. Without Aquinas’ doubts, his honesty, his lack of simple faith, the church would be a sorrier, sillier, more fanciful, weaker place.

The faith of doubters, is an act of will, not a gift from God. We choose to commit, despite not receiving the reassurance of revelation. That sort of faith requires trust, and hope, but more than that honesty, courage, rigour, and staying power. It is a faith which will challenge the church, and it’s notions of God – which is necessary, because sometimes the church needs challenging. Our doubt and our commitment means that we will be honest with ourselves and with God and with the people around us. And that indeed is a gift worth celebrating.

So let me leave you with that famous quote from Simone Weil, the French theologian and philosopher.

If ever there is a seeming disparity between God and the truth, then we must always pick the truth. Because in the long run, disloyalty to the truth will always be disloyalty to God.

May we have the courage to seek the truth, to question, to doubt. That the church and the world may be the richer for it.

Amen.

Act of Worship

I hope this doesn’t sound like blowing my own trumpet or anything, but here it a link for the Act of Worship broadcast I did – available for seven days normally. Act of Worship is the same, more or less, as Daily Service, only instead of being in a cold damp church with a live choir, you are in a nice cosy broom cupboard with some CDs.

Interesting process (and a bit nerve-wracking for me, who has not done much live stuff other than Evensong). But one question, friends. Why ON EARTH did no-one tell my how camp I sound?

Act of Worship can be found about half way down the page.

Led Zep were wrong – Nothing, even the song, remains the same. My last sermon to St Peter’s and St Columba’s

Bilbo’s last song…

This is an incredibly difficult sermon to write. It feels part sermon, part goodbye, part end of term report, part I don’t know what. What do you say to people you love when you have to leave them? Maybe I should take Ruth’s advice, and say I love you and then sob for a bit?

 

Well I certainly I want to say that, although sobbing isn’t really my thing. But I also want to say something to you about God, for that is my purpose here. And on this New Year’s day, my final day, the thing that comes to me, is that God makes all things new. Because love is always new. And love is not always safe.

I was talking with some people from another church not long ago about evangelism. Many churches are medium sized,  middle of the road in terms of worship, few children, that sort of thing, and are keen to grow. I said to one person, in the hope of encouraging them, after they had described their church, “so that’s your church, a church with 30 people in it. What would a church with 100 people look like? What would be different?” And they said, “there would be more people in it”.

They were wanting everything to remain the same, only with fewer financial worries, and more people to share out the work. Come and join our church, because we want your money and your time. That sounds like a fun church, doesn’t it? Milton Jones my favourite comedian, said that churches are like helicopters. No-one stands too close for fear of getting sucked into the rotas. Because there is a name for people who do work that you want them to do. Employees. What that person didn’t want was new people wanting to do new things. What they didn’t want, was change.

But it is the essential nature of God, the essential nature of love, is  to be willing to be changed, which means doing new things. To make space for other people, not to tell them where their space is. Not to fight our own corner, but to fight someone else’s. To focus on the love of people, not things. When we all do that, then everyone feels safe.

I know, I know. God is unchangeable, right? Well, yes and no. God is beyond time, which frankly is a concept beyond us. Augustine said that God lives in the eternal present – all things are in a moment, and one moment contains all things. But it seems that the manifestation of that unchangeable eternal present moment, is in dynamism, in eternal newness.

Sometimes we want the church to feel safe, because the rest of the world seems unsafe. Because we are afraid of the future. A whole year stretches ahead of us, and a year after that, and we’re afraid of that future sometimes. It’s all so new. Unwritten, to our eyes, coming towards us out of the unknown. We want the church to shield us from that, and I’m afraid that just won’t happen, not if God has anything to do with it. We want God to shape the future in patterns which are familiar to us, as though it were the past. Safe and known. And God won’t do that. We know that, we’ve seen it. God won’t let us hide away, permanently children, permanently insulated from the world.

The stable, the virgin birth, the flight to Egypt, everything about our Christmas story is unsafe. Everything about Jesus’ life is unsafe. There is nothing cosy, nothing insulated about the raw, new real life of Jesus.

The old order changeth, yielding place to new, and God fulfils himself in many ways, wrote Tennyson, and in the life of Jesus we see the breathless, energy of the universe which is always tumbling into birth and regeneration and new life. The old prayer book collect for Christmas speaks of humanity as “regenerate”. Made new. Old hopes of controlling the world, holding the world back, will be dashed, but despair, disappointment, loss, they too will all be swallowed up in the fierce love which carries us into the newness of God.

I’ve always envied those who can seemingly to the Apostolic thing, leaving comfort and certainty for the unknown, the explorers and evangelists. They were never afraid, they never clung to their choral tradition, their liturgies, their way of doing things. They had something which sometimes I grasp, oftenI fail to grasp.

Which is that churches feel safe because we find God in them. But churches should not be just that. They should be where we can find God, but they should also equip us to find God in ourselves, in each other. So the church isn’t our only safe place, we are the safe place, because God lives in us.

Because then, and this is the really hard bit – there is nothing to be afraid of. Nothing. If god is with us, there is nothing to be afraid of. There is no room for fear in love, for perfect love casts out fear.

God does not leave us alone, like frightened children. God is with us, as our Christmas story tells us. We are the safe place, we are the place of love, of joy, of truth, of beauty. When we feel like that, we are kind people, generous people, open and warm. Because that is what God is. That is when churches grow – when the church itself becomes less important, and the people, and the God within them, becomes all.

We should remember that. God is with us. We should remember the joy of that, when things change, when people move on, when we are confronted by newness. We should remember it when loved ones die, when the old order changeth. God is with us, to help into the new.

I have been with you nearly six years. It doesn’t feel long, and yet I have learnt so much. So I want to thank you for what I have learnt, gained.

And I just want to leave you with one thing that I have gained. I thought that I had gifts which I could share – preaching, liturgy, teaching, scholarship, friendship, prayer. I thought those things were important. But what you have thought me, what I now know is far far more important than all those things, is to be kind. To be gentle. To forgive. To be open. That is a lesson which you can teach all your clergy, and the church and the world will be better for it.

For that, and for so very much more, my heartfelt thanks.

Amen.

God has no plan. Sermon for Christmas.

 

And so here we are at the beginning of the season which is officially called “Incarnation”.

Incarnation. A funny word. “St. John unfolds the mystery of the incarnation” is the traditional introduction to the Gospel. Never “explains” but unfolds the mystery. Incarnation is a mysterious word. What does it mean?

It’s a church word, really, you don’t hear it used anywhere else. So people tend to think that it is a theological term, a term beyond them. But it really isn’t. I want to say to you tonight that if you want to know what incarnation is all about, what this Christmas story is all about, come round to our house.

Our house has been a mess for the last few weeks. And so, to a certain extent, are our emotions. Our first Christmas with our boy, who we adopted ten months ago now, but moving house at the same time… Everything that I need is in boxes, and everything that I don’t need is all over the place. I have bidden a tearful farewell to my blissful plan of sorting things out, producing order, careful alphabetising of CDs. My world is in a certain amount of chaos. And in the middle of that chaos we have an extraordinarily excited five year old, spending his first Christmas with his new Mum and Dad, and not really caring about presents and toys and Santa, but just loving being part of a family.

So if you want to know what the Incarnation is, what this crib scene is, it’s our house. A hell of a mess, emotions all over the place, and an enormous amount of love. That’s what Christmas, incarnation  is about. A hell of a mess, and a shocking amount of love.

We talk a lot about Jesus coming among us as a vulnerable child. A helpless baby. I’ve preached about that in the past. And in some ways that’s a helpful description, because it says something about the vulnerability of love. But the reality is, babies are the most powerful beings in the world. Anyone would do anything for a baby. Who would refuse a small child needing help? Who would not move heaven and earth to save a child from danger or sadness? The only people who would walk by would be those who were incapable of emotion, the pathological. Every well human being is affected by a helpless child, and will help a child in a way that they would help no-one else.

What is it about children that make us so willing to help? Some might say simply evolution, and of course that plays its part. But I think it is because we see very clearly in children, honest and genuine needs. We are suspicious of adults, but with a child we see their need. We help because they need help. And if we an adult’s need as clearly, we help them too.

Their helplessness stirs the desire to help. Their need for love and care produces love and care in us. And that is incarnation. Communion. The God in us reaching out to the God in them. I don’t care, frankly whether you call it evolutionary instinct, or altruism or whatever, but the fact is that  Children are all powerful not because of their own power, but because of the love that is in us.

And when we are moved with compassion, when love is drawn out of us like that, our world becomes chaotic. Our lives, our plans, our hopes, everything takes a back seat. Everything changes, as our priorities change. If I’ve learnt nothing this year, I’ve learnt that. Katie and I had lots of plans. Building a eco-house, writing, travelling. And they have all gone now that we have Gavin. And I don’t miss them one bit.

If there is one thing that our birth story tells me it is that Love is chaotic. People talk about God’s plan! Well if God had a plan for his son, it was a really weird one. Jesus’ entire life was chaotic. There was no order, no inevitability. He just went where love followed him, and that led eventually to the cross.

Love doesn’t have a plan. Love’s only plan is to love. Love makes no more demands than that.

The two great feasts of the Christian church are not ones where we worship an all-powerful God. Christmas and Easter are where we are moved by compassion by what we see, feasts of love,  warmth towards God. Our God, here in the stable, is someone we want to look after.

The Christ who was born this night does not grow in power in his life, his life is a constant giving away of power. Is a constant re-commitment to vulnerability and helplessness.

When we respond to the Christ child, to the cry of the vulnerable, to the calling of the poor, the bereaved, the sick, the anxious. When we share in the joy of the joyful, when we respond with love to those in need of love, then the God within us meets the Christ in them. And somewhere within that, in that fuzzy and mysterious mess that is love, God is present. And that is incarnation.

Love and chaos. The two so often go together hand in hand. We love to have plans, we love to have things ordered, be it moving house or marriage or life. If we are to truly celebrate Christmas, let us embrace the messiness, the fuzzines, the instability of love. Let us allow the mystery of the incarnation to unfold in all it’s strangeness. Because where God is present, like in the stable, like in our lives, there is a hell of a lot of mess, and a shocking amount of love.

Amen.

How to keep sane and Christmassy over the rigours of the season.

How to cope with the musical rigours of the season.

At this time of year, I get a bit tired of the standard carols.

Or to put that a more truthful way, I find a corner to rock back and forth in, and through clenched teeth vow that the next person to sing “Hark the Herald” will suffocate on a mince pie.

But I still want to feel Christmassy, I really do. So I provided myself with my own compliation tape of other carols which sort of helps.

The carols are carols in the traditional sense (on the whole) – things that were singable by crowds, not polyphony or any of my other joys, but they are ones which have either (shamefully) dropped out of the ever-narrowing popular selection, or are just less well known.

So here is my list of Things You Can Easily Download To Keep You Sane.

1) Masters in this Hall – words written by William Morris (the textile designer) in the 19^th Century, but the tune is (reportedly) by Marin Marais, the subject of one of the most moving films, “Tous les Matins du Monde” And is a corker.

There are hundreds of versions: here are two as a flavour: Maddy Prior and A David Wilcocks arrangement.

2) I Wonder as I wander – Like so many of our Christmas songs and hymns, of American origin. People claim that Christmas was either invented by the Germans or by Dickens, but the Americans really took the baton and ran with it. This was an Appalacian folksong collected by John Jacob Niles.He wrote of its collection courtesy of a girl called Annie Morgan:

A girl had stepped out to the edge of the little platform attached to the automobile. She began to sing. Her clothes were unbelievable dirty and ragged, and she, too, was unwashed. Her ash-blond hair hung down in long skeins…. But, best of all, she was beautiful, and in her untutored way, she could sing. She smiled as she sang, smiled rather sadly, and sang only a single line of a song.

 

3) The Lord at first did Adam Make

I can’t for the life of me find the tune I have on line, but it’s a jolly site better than this one!

 

 

4) Joy to the world is a carol I have always not particularly liked, until John Rutter decided it was written by Handel. It works rather splendidly.

 

5) Bethlehem Down – Written in a drunken haze by Peter Warlock, and Bruce Blunt, the poetry and wine critic of the Times – he took both aspects of his work very seriously. They got blazing drunk, according to Warlock, and wrote this for the Daily Telegraph’s Carol Competition. Sadly, winning the competition meant they got the prize money but no royalties from what became a very popular carol – which was why Warlock wrote as many different versions as possible. Blunt did not write much poetry, but this is just beautiful.

 

6) Tomorrow shall be my dancing day

A lovely new tune to go with an old favourite, it is impossible not to have fun with this.

http://grooveshark.com/#/s/Tomorrow+Shall+Be+My+Dancing+Day/3FHeht?src=5

 

7) Hely HutchinsonCarol Symphony (2^nd Mvt) It’s that bit with the Box of Delights theme in. Say no more.

 

8 ) Remember O Thou Man

Written by Thomas Ravenscroft, or at least collected by him. Ravenscroft was probably a chorister atSt Paul’s Cathedral sometime in the early Seventeenth Century, and has the dubious distinction of giving us “three blind mice” amongst others.

Thomas Hardy mentions this carol as a beautiful and moving one in “Under the Greenwood Tree” which is more or less a fond farewell to the West Gallery Musicians, the amateur orchestras and choir who were largely replaced by the Kist o’ whistles.

A more beardy version here:

 

9) There is no rose

A traditional carol, the harmonies of which send you right back to a time before hygene or Christmas rush.

This is my favourite version, preceeded by a similar and related piece: Gabriel from heavene came. Lie back and let Christmas come to you, rather than chasing it.

 

10 See amid the winter’s snow

Shameless plug here, the only recording I can find of this is one I sang in. It is not the “normal” tune, but a shamelessly soupy choir anthem by Victorian composer John West (no tuna/tuning jokes please). It was found by a dear friend, now gone, who wrote his dissertation on it. It’s a gloopy mince pie of a piece.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/See-Amid-Winters-Snow/dp/B001HSCT5S/ref=sr_1_39?ie=UTF8&s=dmusic&qid=1324550858&sr=1-39

 

11) Et Er Un Ros Utsprungen

A fabulous version of the trad German hymn by Jan Sandtrom. Brilliant and serene.

 

12) Finally, this is where Advent turns into Christmas for me. Josquin Desprez was a composer head and shoulders above his contemporaries. This piece speaks of God coming to earth, starts in the bowels of the earth, and lift us to the heavens. It’s powerful and beautiful and mysterious. I’m going over the top aren’t I? Nevermind, this is best listened to alone, lying on the floor, after a significant amount of gin, in the dark.

Anyhow, that’s how I keep my head over the Christmas season. All versions are available on MP3 download, and I can assure you it is the only way I keep sane. Hope it works for you too.

Blessings on your work and worship over the next few days.

Some random bibley stuff about Mark’s Gospel. Possibly interesting only to me.

This year we are following Mark’s Gospel in the Revised Common Lectionary, so I thought I’d write a few thoughts about it. The Revised Common Lectionary, which many churches of all denominations and none often use, is a rather lovely idea – that churches throughout the land and the world are all reading the same Gospel every Sunday.

It divides itself into a three year cycle, following the synoptics, Matthew, Mark and Luke. They give John a miss as he tends to have a hell of a lot of teaching and not many fun stories, but John gets his fair share of Christmas, Holy week and the bits where Mark is too short to last a full year.

Because Mark is really very short. You could read it in an afternoon. It also happens to be the first Gospel, and Matthew and Luke make heavy use of him about 70% of Mark ends up without any change in Matthew and Luke.

It’s a very simple Gospel. There are very nuanced thoughts in it, but I’m not sure that thinking is all Mark’s. There are lots of theological variations within it, and I have a feeling he was reporting a lot of earlier stories and traditions which came to him verbatim, or as well as he could remember them.

Mark’s Gospel is in roughly two halves. The first half, Jesus wanders around Israel healing everyone, preaching and teaching and getting up the noses of those in charge. Then the Transfiguration is the mountain-top event in the middle where Jesus is touched by God. After then it is all prediction of the passion, and then down into the hell of trial and Crucifixion. And – this is the bit we often miss – there is no happy ending. The resurrection is not a happy ending. Mark’s original ending leaves us with an empty tomb, frightened women and a feeling that everything has gone a bit strange. It’s as though he didn’t really know what to make of it all. It’s like reality melts, like a Salvador Dali painting.

Mark’s Gospel was finished shortly after 70AD – the scholars like to suggest between 65 and 85AD, but my own contention is that it was written quickly after 70AD, for reasons I’ll give later. There are parts of Mark’s Gospel which are obviously earlier, but that was when Mark put all the existing pieces together.

The reason you won’t find much of Mark in the rest of Christmas readings is because Mark has no stories about Jesus’ youth or childhood or birth. It leaps straight in with John the Baptist. It’s a hectic Gospel, short and almost reckless in how quickly it moves from one story to the other. It feels as though it was written in a hurry. And I believe it was.

There are two things that we need to understand about the early Christians that Mark was writing for. Firstly, they were all either Jews, or affiliated with Judaism. They didn’t all live in Jerusalem, and they weren’t all strictly observant like the Pharisees. Much of the laws of ritual purity were not moral codes at the time, they only related to being close to the Temple. A man could live for years in a state of ritual impurity and it would not matter, until he made a pilgrimage to visit the Temple. Some of them may have led lives almost indistinguishable from other Roman Citizens. But the distinguishing feature of all Jews and affiliates, they all worshipped the one God, rather than the many God’s of the Roman Empire.

Those who were not Jews were often known as “God fearers” – those who were interested in Judaism but not quite ready to fully commit. Whether that was because of the idea of adult circumcision, or whether it was to do with the idea of monotheism impinging on duties within the Roman world, we can never be sure. But there were a significant number of people who were attracted to the idea of monotheism at the time, but, whilst attending synagogue, they weren’t fully committed to becoming Jews.

At the time of Mark’s writing there were those in Christianity who insisted everyone should be circumcised, the “circumcision party” as Paul called them. Not the sort of party I would ever want to go to myself, but it does show that Christianity was at least partly a denomination of Judaism at the time.

So Christianity’s constituent was in reality Judaism, and those attracted to Judaism.. And the Jews all believed one thing, which is the second thing we need to understand about this era. The Temple of Jerusalem was where God lived. Physically. In the holy of Holies, in the Inner Sanctum, God lived. Over the years as the Temple was built up, Judaism had become more and more a place-centred religion. The years where God walked in the cool of the evening with Adam, spoke to Moses in the burning bush, called our to the wandering Arameans, those days had gone in favour of the land and the Temple, where God was almost trapped by the priests, letting no-one in and guarding all access to God.

Now in 70AD something catastrophic happened to Judaism which changed it for ever. There were a number of uprisings from the Jews, partly driven by “false messiahs” and partly on the actions of the Romans. One is believed to be mentioned in Mark’s Gospel: In Chapter 13, Mark says “when you see the desolating sacrilege standing where it ought not (let the reader understand)” etc. “Let the reader understand” is a whispered aside to us, “you get this bit don’t you?” The desolating sacrilege was believed to be the Romans putting up their banners, bearing the image of their Gods, in the Temple. This (purported) outrage led to the siege of Jerusalem and the eventual destruction of the Temple.

It is impossible to overstate how devastating which was to the millions of Jews all over the world. The place where God lived, where God physically existed, had been destroyed. Where was God? Had he been killed? Had he abandoned them?

Judaism was in crisis, rocked to the core. And it is in this context that I believe Mark’s Gospel was written – written in a hurry, written to a group of people who were in the midst of desolation and grief. Mark’s frankly uneven and restless Gospel was written to say simply –God had left the building.

There is much talk in Mark’s gospel about “not one stone being laid upon another” etc, to prepare people for the destruction. But in Chapter 13, the Apocalyptic, which talks of the future for the sake of the present, we have Jesus saying “when you hear wars, and rumours of wars, then do not be afraid, for these are just the birth pangs”. Mark’s Gospel was a message of comfort to the Jews at a time of great tribulation.

To Mark, the Pharisees had got it wrong – the Messiah had come along and they had crucified him for blasphemy. There was a certain irony in the fact that calling oneself the Messiah almost implicitly meant that you were blaspheming. Therefore, by definition, the actual Messiah would also be accused of blasphemy and strung up.

To Mark, the Pharisees were tied and shackled by their traditions and old ways of seeing God. They had limited their vision to what they knew. And so God had decided that he needed to escape their limiting religion.

The crucial phrase in Mark for me is in Chapter CH15:38. “And the veil of the Temple was ripped in two, from the top to the bottom” That’s an extraordinary phrase in a Jewish text. The veil was what separated God from even the priests. The Temple had the court of the Gentiles, the court of the women, the court of the priests, and finally the Holy of Holies, where only the High Priest was allowed, the place where God lived. For years, God was kept apart, the priests acting as guards and bouncers, insisting that everything that God came into contact with was clean and perfect.

What image of God do we have as a result of those ideas? When we ourselves restrict communion to people, to children even, when we feel that they are not correct enough to receive God’s grace? It sounds to me like the sort of precautions that you make before going to visit a sick old person, someone for whom a tiny cold would kill.

The Pharisees treated God as though he was a sick old man, not robust enough to be in the presence of the great unwashed. And at the crucifixion, God escaped. The veil was ripped open. He was no longer in one time and one place, but he was, as we celebrate at Christmas, incarnate in the world.

It is often the way of religion that we limit God. We shrink in our vision of God to one form of revelation, one tradition, one practice, one liturgy one expression, one theological understanding. It is in these moments, when our faithfulness is to a religion or a theology or a tradition, that God slips through our fingers.

IN the “mini apocalypse” of Chapter 13, Mark follows traditions by using predictions of the future to talk about the present – that is what apocalyptic literature does – speak of the future to talk about the present. Mark said “there will be wars, and rumours of wars” but he assured his fellow Jews that it would be alright, that this was not the end, this was the beginning of something new, the “birth pangs”.

It is worth remembering, when we go thought the torture that the Anglican communion likes to put itself through. It is worth remembering when we despair about the state of our churches and the state of the world. It is in these times when we need to look up and raise our heads. For it is in the big picture, the great world of God’s creating, that salvation is to be found, not in a narrow and cosy tradition. It is in different theologies and different ideas that God can be found by different people in different ways. It is not ours to say “we are right” – there are plenty of religions which seek to do that – it is simply for us to say that God has given us a path where we can find him, and encourage others to find their path too.

Mark’s hectic, hasty, keen Gospel, is, I think, there to tell us as it told it’s first readers that seeming disaster is simply the beginning of something new; that the the times when we feel God has abandoned us, are in reality the times when we refuse to look for God in new places. He calls us to see wider, and look deeper, to find God better.

For one thing we can be assured. Tower and Temple will fall to dust; things will change, expressions will change, theologies and understandings will change, because God is always making things new. Often irritating, sometimes frightening, occasionally, if we see it as such, beautiful.

Then loudly cried the bold Sir Bedivere:
“Ah! my Lord Arthur, whither shall I go?
Where shall I hide my forehead and my eyes?
For now I see the true old times are dead,
When every morning brought a noble chance,
And every chance brought out a noble knight.
Such times have been not since the light that led
The holy Elders with the gift of myrrh.
But now the whole Round Table is dissolv’d
Which was an image of the mighty world,
And I, the last, go forth companionless,
And the days darken round me, and the years,
Among new men, strange faces, other minds.”

And slowly answer’d Arthur from the barge:
“The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfils himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.

(from Tennyson, “the Idylls of the King”)