Thin Experiences and the Virgin Birth

I remember someone who told me that they had been surprised by gratitude. Not that they were ungrateful before. Perhaps they could be characterised as someone who found meaning without transcendence, without mystery, without anything more than what can be explained by science for example, that is, without God. A flattened reality, but as it turned out, a flat reality haunted by transcendence and mystery. I say that because they realised that they felt grateful. But to whom? It didn’t make sense. Who should they be grateful to when life was good? Maybe it is just luck? (No, hang on, isn’t luck/good fortune originally part of the Greek/Roman pantheon of gods?) If they were to be consistent they would either have to give up being grateful or embrace the truth that we are surrounded by mystery and transcendence. They chose gtatitude. I liked their honesty and consistency. 

 Gratitude is a very common experience. It’s worth thinking about. What does it mean to be grateful? Should it be expelled by telling oneself that it doesn’t make sense in a universe lacking inherent meaning and purpose? Possibly. But then again, maybe there is more to it. Maybe gratitude, the experience of gratitude, is one of those thin places of our lives where the ‘more’ of mystery and transcendence breaks through. 

 When I tried to be an atheist I lost beauty for similar reasons. I could still recognise beauty, of course. But beauty seemed more than skin deep to me. It ran deeper than my appreciation of it, there was ‘more’, another thin place where transcendence breaks through into our lives. The bond between us as people, human compassion and love, for similar reasons are thin places. You can explain our bondedness, compassion, and love if you wish in terms of evolutionary benefit to the species, but we often experience them as thin places where we sense the ‘more ‘ of reality.  And this mystery, this transcendence, this ‘more’, is never against our humanity, never against human experience, it deepens the truly human as we encounter what transcends us. 

 But the ‘more’ isn’t like a thin layer of icing on a cake that you can just peel off and throw away leaving the cake undisturbed. The ‘more’ is not an add-on. We can live as though it is, sure. That is the nature of the ‘more’ that I am talking about. Transcendence – the ‘more’ - suffuses our lives, yet we can live most of the time oblivious to the presence of transcendence. Thin experiences make us aware of the presence of what I am calling transcendence and mystery, the experience that there is a good deal ‘more’ in our lives and in reality, and mystery really is everywhere once we have our eyes opened. This is part of the religious impulse. When I tried to be an atheist I was unable to ignore this ‘more’ no matter how hard I tried. And why would I ignore it? Not just for the sake of consistency, but because more is on offer! 

 And so we come to Christmas. I know that the whole virgin birth thing might be difficult to believe. Or is it? When I read the accounts of the Gospels it seems to me that people experienced Jesus himself as a thin place. A thin place in the flesh, in person. That the mystery that surrounds us, that beckons us to a deeper experience of our humanity and of life, would become manifest personally as a human being, isn’t such an alien idea really. You could think of the virgin birth as another way of saying that mystery came among us, that the mystery surrounding us, that is deep within all reality, came to fruition in the womb of Mary. Those who can’t let anything exist outside of the test tube cannot accept what I am saying. But if you sense, like I do, that there is ‘more’ going on in your life, that you have thin experiences, then faith beckons. The mystery beyond us, yet that also encounters us so often if we have the eyes to see, this mystery, so beautifully matched to our human experience, of course it would become human. Of course. The experience of thin places in my life didn’t make me expect Jesus, but once I encountered Jesus, I understood the thin experiences of life better. Indeed, I understood that mystery and transcendence are embedded in the very fabric of my humanity.

The Surprising Mediator Between God and Humankind

This is right and is acceptable in the sight of God our Saviour, who desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For
there is one God
there is also one mediator
between God and humankind
Christ Jesus, himself human,
who gave himself a ransom for all. (1Timothy 2:3-6)

The baptism by John in the Jordan evokes some of the great moments in Israel's history, of failed covenantal righteousness and renewal offered. Think of the Exodus, liberation from slavery through the waters of the Red Sea. Think of the entrance into the Primised Land through the (temporarily) dry bed of the Jordan River. Followed by centuries of prophetic criticism and hope in a new covenant. 

In the Baptist, the offer of renewal is underway: a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins (Lk 3:3) in preparation for the coming of the messiah. (Lk 3:15-17) 

John preached for a response. (Lk 3:7-14) John called the people from their unfaithfulness and from the centres and people of power and importance into the wilderness (Lk 3:1-2), like returning from exile. (Lk 3:4-6)  
But there was a surprise in Jesus, the messiah. Jesus is God's radical turn to the sinner, displayed in a fashion that brought joy to some and opposition from others. In the table-fellowship of Jesus, his absolving of sins and healings, his relationship to the Law and the Temple, his parables and teaching, Jesus ran counter to the expectations of many. (cf Lk 7:18-23)

And this turn to the sinner is deepened in the cross. The rejection of Jesus by all leads to the greatest surprise: forgiveness of sins to those who rejected the offer of grace and forgiveness in the first place! And if that wasn't surprising enough, the one rejected is our acceptance of the offer of renewal. In Christ we are simulataneously forgiven and in his faithfulness, self-sacrifice, and surrender to God the covenant is fulfilled. The Law is written on a human heart. (The heart of Jesus, see Jer 31:31-34.) 

Am Important Detail at Pentecost

Acts 2:1-12 tells the story of the gift of the Holy Spirit to the disciples after the Ascension of Jesus. It is easy to miss the significance of a small detail embedded in the story. It is crucial that the disciples are given diverse tongues rather than the hearers enabled to understand the (single) dialect of the disciples. Imagine if it were around the other way, with the listeners enabled to understand the one language. Christianity would be another religion, a religion in which God's word is uncluttered with the varieties of human culture, indeed of human experience. A religion that perceived variety as an impediment to unity, or should I say, an impediment to uniformity.

    Christianity affirms that humans don't have to be translated into a monoculture.  We don't have to reject who we are, where we come from, how we have learnt to be human, to be Christians. Hence the church's commitment to translating the gospel into the language of the people. Christianity is a religion in which variety is celebrated, and this variety is not an impediment to our unity.  There still remains a gospel to be heard, and this gospel will change us and the languages and cultures in which we express ourselves. While retaining its integrity, the gospel is accommodated to the human family in all of its variety. We don't become who we aren't to be able to hear the good news.

Not that this little detail in the Acts story begins God's accommodation to the variety of the human family and all creation.  The pedigree stretches way back.  Most especially so in the Incarnation, with God becoming human in Jesus so that we can share in God's life as human beings. (John 1:14; 2Corinthians 8:9) 

    And this story is not the only example of Christianity's insight that variety is not the enemy of unity. Christianity likes bringing together that which is usually separated. A doctrinal example is the doctrine of the Incarnation. According to the belief of the church expressed in the creeds,  Jesus is not a mish-mash of divine and human, nor some divinised quasi-human. Think here, for example, of the Creed of Chalcedon, 

... without confusion or change, without division or separation. The distinction between the natures was never abolished by their union but rather the character proper to each of the two natures was preserved as they came together ... 

The union of that which is usually apart - divine and human. This union provides us with a glimpse of our future in God: union with God without our diminishment (or God's).  But if Jesus were in some way not fully human and fully divine the little detail in the Pentecost story would have to be the other way around. And we would have to change St Paul's reflection in 1Corinthians 12 (especially vv 4-7) on the variety of gifts given to the church. So too the Christian insistence that our final fulfilment is not to be dissolved back into some great sea of being, but to be who we are, in Christ united with the Father, through the Holy Spirit. (1Cor 15:20-28.) And we would have to change our doctrine of creation. In Christianity God not only permits 'the other'/creation, but loves creation, providing creation with its own integrity. (Christianity is not pantheism.)

    All of these examples speak of God's sensitivity to our particularity and personhood, and the variety of all creation in which God delights. So, of course, when the Spirit is given the disciples speak in diverse languages rather than the Spirit squeezing the listeners into a cultural straightjacket.

A Longer Reflection on Forgiveness

 

Forgiveness is important,  as is its lack. But before we talk about forgiveness there are useful spiritual disciplines to mention first. 

So, let us say that we believe/feel we have been wronged. Perhaps we are angry. Here is a discipline that, under some but not all circumstances, may help as we head to forgiveness (or not), and grow into the full stature of Christ.

1. So, who is the person who has done this? I mean really, who are they? Questions to ask: I wonder how they have come to be this person? What have they been through, how have they grown past the difficulties of their life, whether these difficulties are self-inflicted or inherited? Continue with these and other explorations about the person and the incident(s), and what has led to this alienation between you that you are experiencing. Call this increasing our sympathy or empathy for the one you believe has wronged you.

2. How about me? Where am I in all of this? Think about the lead up to 'the incident(s)'. What can I learn about myself? Am I ready to 'die' to whatever has brought me to be so angry or offended? (E.g. pride, self-importance, or perhaps my anger reveals a part of me that I am actually uncomfortable with, a discomfort that has led to my angry reaction and feelings.) This is not a call to attack oneself, but rather, an invitation to self-understanding, or you could call it sympathy for our own particularity as human beings.

I find that this discipline leads to insight about myself and others, and can let me give up some of what is driving my alienation from the other person. Sometimes, because of this discipline, I can forget and move on. 

Not all feelings, not all actions, not every alienation from someone, will yield to the above discipline. Sometimes there is a remainder: I understand something of why they did this, and yet ...

 Indeed, plenty of human history will never and should never yield to the above discipline. No matter how much we understand what lays behind or led up to the incident(s), there is no simple forgetting, no easy moving on as though it 'doesn't matter'. (The discipline above can lead us, in some situations, to say exactly that, "It doesn't matter." And this can be real and genuine. To say "It doesn't matter" is to say I've grown, and it - the incident, action, and the alienation I felt - doesn't matter like it did formerly.)

But when there is a remainder, or when understanding, sympathy, empathy, do not cover the sin, we have entered the realm of forgiveness.

The first thing to say about forgiveness must be its asymmetry. Forgiveness is not deserved, it is not earned, it is not a reciprocal coming down off our mutual high-horses and meeting somewhere in the middle. It is full of grace, if you like. 

Forgiveness costs us. We venture into alienation, and bringing reconciliation where there is human alienation is neither easy nor cheap. Grace is always costly.

Jesus is, if you like, God's spiritual discipline as outlined above. In Jesus God becomes one of us, one with the human condition. God knows human sin (in need of forgiveness) from the inside, as a victim of it, to the point of betrayal, desertion, torture and execution. God knows us and our sin. God understands us and sin. But the Incarnation (God becoming human in Jesus), death, and resurrection of Jesus are more than (to use my metaphor above) a spiritual discipline. In Jesus God overcomes the alienation of sin. This is God and God's way: God becoming what is not God (in this case sin, godforsakenness, and alienation, see 2Corinthians 5:21 and Mark 15:34) and in this complete embrace of what is not divine bringing reconciliation with what was formerly alienated (us). 

And then there is the resurrection. Of course, we should not separate the two, cross and resurrection. The forgiveness that is brought about through God's embrace of godforsakenness (see Mark 15:34) is the resurrected Jesus. The forgiving victim of sin offers forgiveness and sends his disciples out to proclaim repentance and the forgiveness of sins.

There is freedom in this. God's freedom in embracing human sin, and in this freedom carrying our freedom (misused in sin) so that we can grow into our true freedom as children of God.

And there is grace in all this. Undeserved forgiveness (there is no other kind) that is utterly asymmetrical. Forgiveness is always ahead of us; in Christ forgiveness never catches up to us, but we catch up to forgiveness. That is, even though we seek forgiveness through repentance, and hear the word of grace and absolution after, it is forgiveness that arrived first at that place, and we were drawn to it.

Our Poverty Implies God's Fullness.

We are incomplete. As humans. It is our nature.

We see this clearly, as the poet says:

On the Mystery of the Incarnation 

It's when we face for a moment
the worst our kind can do, and shudder to know
the taint in our own selves, that awe
cracks the mind's shell and enters the heart:

not to a flower, not to a dolphin,
to no innocent form
but to this creature vainly sure
it and no other is god-like, God
(out of compassion for our ugly
failure to evolve) entrusts,
as guest, as brother,
the Word.      (Denise Levertov)

There is a 'taint' in our own selves. The poet recalls for us the terrible things we humans do to each other, from truly horrific violence to all kinds of mundane emotional cruelty. But, she says, this incompletion is the way in which our hearts and minds can be transformed, converted. (“…that awe cracks the mind’s shell and enters the heart…”)

There is plenty more evidence for this lack in us, this incompleteness. Not just incorrigible human failure like ethnic violence, family and generational violence, but also the more mundane distress we have all felt in our families of origin, in our own families. Parents see themselves in their children, good and not so desirable, and wonder how the not-so-good happened despite our best efforts! It’s common. 

Utopianism is further evidence, if it is needed. We are currently in the power of all sorts of extreme utopianisms. Utopianism is a kind of denial of our incompleteness. A kind of ‘she doth protest too much’, an over-insistence to cover the fear, to protest against, and to reject of the lack in us.

Our tendency to monument building is another sign of this incompleteness. We don’t last, We are like the grass of the field, as scripture says. So, let’s build a monument to ourselves, our family, our culture. Nothing necessarily wrong with monument building, it’s just that it sometimes can be, once again, a protest, against our evanescence: we age, we fade, we disappear.

Or again, the self-help industry. It’s good, why not try to help yourself? But, again, it is an acknowledgement of our incompleteness, there is more to us than what we are now. So we try all sorts of methods to change and grow, all kinds of methods, philosophies, and irrationalities.

We are told to embrace honestly, or at least, to accept this incompleteness in the myriad ways it shows itself. To change what needs to be changed, to grow, to accept.. Of course.

But there is something missing in that account. The Christian account, while accepting what I have just said, thinks there is something more. It’s not just to accept and or change, as good as these are. It is to acknowledge our poverty, our spiritual poverty. The incompleteness doesn't mean that we just have to learn new methods of self-enquiry or a helpful technique to grow psychologically.  We are poor, but to acknowledge this is to acknowledge God’s loving fullness waiting to be poured into our hearts. Christianity doesn’t say we are poor; it says God is rich and wishes to share God’s richness with us in our poverty. We are made incomplete to be filled by God’s Spirit, to take us to a new depth of loving that we ourselves cannot bring about. And this fullness doesn’t just complete us, it brings healing. The very signs of our incompleteness can be transformed and healed in God’s fullness. Anger, hate, malice, fear, anxiety, violence and revenge, alienation and the fear of death, all can be healed and we can be taken where we were made to go.

This is Christmas. God comes as a human being, the beginning of a new humanity filled by God’s Spirit. The weak, helpless baby a sign of God’s desire to stoop down to us and take us to where God is. Not just the birth, of course. There is to come Jesus’ ministry, rejection, crucifixion, and resurrection. But God has done in Jesus what we are made not to be able to do on our own: to be a complete humanity, in the image of that same Christ. 

Incomprehensibility and the Image of God

In theory, could human beings come to know everything about the universe? Putting aside the kind of human arrogance that thinks all is possible because they think they are God, is it at least theoretically possible to know and understand, to comprehend, the universe?

It’s too big. OK, agreed, probably a bit big. But, in theory, what would be encountered on the other side of the universe, could such phenomena be investigated and understood?

No, it is too complex. OK, but if we did have the right tools and equipment, the right technology, would it be possible? In theory, yes. Our intelligence seems mapped to understanding the reality around us. (If it were not so, it would be difficult to understand how and why the Western scientific method has been so successful.

And then, there is mystery. Mystery, in the Christian schema, is not the currently unknown, but that could be known under the right circumstances. In Christianity, mystery refers to the incomprehensible, beyond our understanding, even in theory. We can’t slice mystery into manageable bits, and we can’t wrestle it into shape and compare it to what we do know to therefore grasp it, at least partially. I’m talking about God. God can reveal Godself, in all God’s glorious incomprehension. God can become human in Jesus, but that does not mean we comprehend God. Jesus reveals the incomprehensible God, who remains incomprehensible. That is, God is not our plaything, and cannot be put to our use as we do with everything else we understand (even partially understand). When people of faith try to control God terrible consequences follow. Hence, the prohibition against idols and misusing God’s name embedded in the Ten Commandments.

And we are made in the image of this incomprehensible God. Attempts to identify the image in us with certain attributes or capacities abound. And whatever the benefits of such approaches, we should never think that somehow, we have made the image comprehensible. That would be to break the second commandment. Reductionism has its place in the study of our humanity, but the irreducible remains. Kathryn Tanner sees an imitation of God’s incomprehensibility in the plasticity of our nature. In comparison to other species, we are born with little hard wired in us. We grow, learn, change, exponentially so. Our nature is “in a sense unlimited, unbounded by a clearly delimited nature, in virtue, in the human case, of an expansive openness and initial indefiniteness.” This natural openness is a negative imitation in that God’s incomprehensibility is from complete fullness, whereas our imitation is a “lack, through an initial failure of predetermination, not by being anything in particular in any very concrete way to start.” (Christ the Key, p. 53)

If God is beyond our understanding, incomprehensible, what is an appropriate response to God? Awe, joy, bliss. Prayer, thanksgiving, faith.

Sinner: Changing How We see God, Ourselves, and Others.

Someone recently commented that, in the Victorian Stage 4 lockdown,  churches and brothels fall into the same category of activity and therefore restriction. Someone else quipped that both accept sinners! (Here.)I like that. Although it is a bit too easy to say compared to its practice. Contemporary society, allegedly, has moved beyond 'sinner' and the judgementalism that follows. However, using the word 'sinner' isn't necessarily judgemental. If you think it is necessarily judgemental then read on because I suggest you might still be stuck in the tight little circle of judgementalism that you are trying to leave. Scared that it might be true, we reject it. Protesting too much, so to speak.

These last few Sundays we have been reading the stories from Genesis about Abraham and Sarah and their descendants. The stories are about their schemes to make God's promise to them come true. (For the original promise, reiterated over and over throughout Genesis, see Genesis 12:1-3.) God doesn't need their schemes to bring about the promise, although God is free to use the schemes. (For example God doesn't need the scheming that brings about Abraham's firstborn son, Ishmael. See Genesis 17:15-22. But God uses the scheming of Joseph's brothers to ensure the survival of the people of Israel during the great famine. See Genesis 37-46:7.) The stories show us a God who is accommodating of all kinds of human shenanigans and failures. The fulfilment of God's promise to Abraham and Sarah, fulfilled in Jesus, is no cause for human pride. God's plan is not accomplished by human (self-)righteousness. It is God who brings about what God promises. But this is more than God just putting a brave face on a hidden resentment toward us. This is not the God of projected human self-righteousness and self-criticism. This is the God who can teach us how to relate to human failure (sin), both our own and the inadequacy and failure of others. This is what God is really like, through and through. God is with the people in promise and fulfilment, in covenant and law, with them, carrying them, loving them, making space for them, and ultimately saving us.

We see this in Jesus, intensely in his crucifixion and resurrection. God with us. Victim of human sin, literally carrying the instrument (symbol) of human sin, a cross. And from within the experience of bearing that sin bringing life and forgiveness. It is this God, with us (Matt 1:22-23; 28:16-20) truly walking our human life with us in the flesh: the life and death of Jesus, the God who makes space for sinners because God is love, it is this God to whom we relate as sinners. But that is not how most people think of the term 'sinner'. James Alison (here) says our language has a different tone than what people might think. (Words like God commands, desire, will, law. And, as I am saying here, a word like sinner.)

But not just our language changes. We are changed. "Sinner" isn't a term to demean, but when uttered in the Christian context, by a God who knows us and loves us, who truly empathises with us in Jesus, sinner becomes a term of grace. Sinner: I don't need to be perfect, I don't need to save myself, I am loved, known even in my human failure. There is nowhere left to fall away from God in Christ. 

Doctrinal Purity and the Pre-Eminence of Love

It is easy to wonder why the church has stuck so doggedly to its claim that Jesus is pre-eminent.  According to the traditional line of belief, Jesus is God in the flesh, with no one and nothing above him. This kind of claim can be seen as arrogant, divisive, and exclusive. (It certainly is the latter.) If Jesus is pre-eminent, then there is no other Messiah to expect, no other figure equal, no other religion to merge with Christianity or replace it. An unfashionable belief in our (allegedly) relativistic age. So why not be more open to changing our beliefs? Why not give up the doctrine and believe in ‘love’ or ‘inclusion’ instead of Jesus? The reason is that, if Jesus is pre-eminent, without equal and not to be superseded in any way, then self-sacrificing love, compassion, mercy, communion (etc.) are pre-eminent. And not just a bloodless, hypothetical form of love, but an enfleshed love that shows us the way to love and be loved. Subtract the belief in Jesus and how would the pre-eminence of love hold? Add the traditional belief back and we see that Jesus is not just the exemplar of love but the guarantee of love’s pre-eminence.

It seems to me that this is the practical effect of holding to the traditional doctrinal purity of the church’s belief in Jesus. Rather than diminishing love, compassion, mercy, and self-sacrifice, the traditional belief intensifies them. Love displayed and lived on a cross. This is the very nature of God! There can be nothing more primordial or nothing more important. And this provides a way for us to bring together (as good Christology – theology about the Christ – always does) that which we have torn apart in the church. Often it seems that Christians divide into two camps: those who hold to doctrinal purity and those who stand for justice and peace. The two are meant to go together.

Holiness is About Relationship First

It is easy to jump to thinking morality when we think holiness. But first, we should think about a relationship with God. My latest Post can be found on the St Barnabas College Blog here.

Sex and Transcendence

It is said that the dispute about the place of gays and lesbians in ordained ministry is about the authority of Scripture. I think not. The continuing break-up of the churches across the globe because of disputes about sexuality is more an example of using Scripture against itself by perpetuating the victim mechanism. The disputes also attest to the power of desire and sex. At stake in the debate are our beliefs about the transcendent and the material, and their union (or separation), and the relationship between desire for the material and its interlacing with desire for the transcendent (and vice-versa). As  Peter Leithart says (see below), "Doesn’t sex itself hint at a meaning different from the sexual meaning?" Perhaps we might say "in addition to the sexual meaning", although this also is inadequate because it suggests that the extra meaning is permanently separable from the sexual meaning itself. The transcendent meaning should not be collapsed back into the sexual meaning, but neither should sexual and transcendent meaning be separated. We could quote Chalcedon's description of Christ ("without confusion or separation ...") and apply it to the union of physical and transcendent sexual meaning in each human person and lover.

Peter Leithart has been discussing the Song of Songs and has touched on a number of relevant issues. This post is good on the transcendence of sex. Here is an extract.

Peter Leithart

"What assumptions about sex are behind the common opinion that the Song (of Songs) is only an erotic poem, only a celebration of human sexuality and marriage, full stop?  (Tremper Longman: “There is absolutely nothing in the Song of Songs itself that hints of a meaning different from the sexual meaning.”)  When commentators express such opinions, are they already implicitly assuming a materialist view of sexuality?  Are they coming to the text with a presupposition that sex has no inherent transcendent meaning?  To put it the other way round: Doesn’t sex itself hint at a meaning different from the sexual meaning?"

We are complex, multi-layered beings, and the whole-hearted embrace of our physicality is a joyous and fearsome thing, for carried out faithfully it leads to encounter with the resurrected Christ. And that takes us way beyond ordinary religion's use of the resurrection to merely talk about an individual's personal existence after death.

Hildegard of Bingen

"... and through the sublimity of the Father, who sent the Word with sweet fruitfulness into the womb of the Virgin, from which He soaked up flesh, just as honey is surrounded by the honeycomb." (Hildegard of Bingen)

Friends of God

At a recent chapel cycle at St John's I made three points about friendship.

First, I used a picture (side) to remind us that Jesus was actually betrayed by a close friend. The pain Jesus must have felt by this betrayal is easily overlooked from our position of hindsight. The pain of betrayal by a friend is because we give something of ourselves to our friends. So I asked the question: how you going respecting that piece your friends have given you?

Second, I pointed out that Jesus was known as a friend of those everyone else hated (sinners and tax collectors). The usual practice is to befriend those similar to us or we like, or who might benefit us. Not Jesus. I spelt the implication out in chapel.

Third, to be a friend of Jesus is to be a friend of God. and remember, friends give something of themselves to those they befriend. So when God becomes our friend through Christ, God gives something of Godself to us. (Doctrinally, this is the same as saying that in the Incarnation and the giving of the Spirit God communicates Godself to us.)

See here for a great sandart video about friendship.

Love God and Love Neighbour

If we listen to current debate in the church (clearly a debate we have been having since the time of Jesus) it seems it is easy to lose Jesus' dual focus of loving God and loving our neighbour. Of course, everyone says they are being faithful to the command of Jesus, but the liberal left have the tendency so to unite the two that Christianity ends up social work/peace & justice work with a veneer of God, whereas the conservative right have a tendency to separate the two, and then subordinate love of neighbour to love of God. Although Jesus does indeed put the two in that order (Mk 12:29-31), if hierarchicalized in this way the bald statement of the two greatest commandments as a summary of the whole law is not an adequate basis on which to build our practice of the two greatest commandments. The Johannine corpus makes it clear that loving God cannot be divorced from loving neighbour. (1Jn 4:7-21) This unity of love is also at the heart of the washing of the feet. Jesus' command, after showing his love for the disciples by washing their feet, is not to command a pietistic love of himself (i.e. of Jesus), but a command for them to wash one another's feet. (Jn 13:14) St Paul is explicit on this point when he says that the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, "You shall love your neighbour as yourself." (Gal 5:14; Rom 13:8-10). And James is following Jesus when he says that our faith is shown through our love of neighbour. (Jas 2:8-26).

How to hold the two together? The answer is Jesus of course, and specifically thinking here of his dual unity of person in two natures. As in so many things Christian, we hold together that which might otherwise be torn asunder. The doctrine of the Incarnation is the greatest expression of this, and is now our guiding principle in application of a theology of union. In the case of uniting love of God and love of neighbour, we should remember that the divinity of Jesus is inferred from the kind and quality of his human life. But this does not mean that his humanity is merely a cipher for his divinity (a problem with the Christian right) or that we can, in practical terms, ignore his divinity (a problem for the christian left). In a parallel fashion, we cannot love God apart from our human neighbour, yet in loving our neighbour wed should not ignore God.

A practical result is to be found in the Eucharist. The Eucharist makes no sense without our neighbour (why a priest cannot preside at the Eucharist alone), and not just the neighbour in the pew next to us. We bring our love of neighbour practised during the week to the liturgical expression of our love of God. (Not just the other way around.) When we do this bloodless piety is transformed into a genuine thanksgiving for what God's enfleshment in Jesus and his death and resurrection has won for us. We are able to love God's flesh and our neighbour's flesh, and vice-versa.

God With Us!

Here is a great quote from Karl Barth. I have cut this from an extended quote here.

"God with us! That is too strong a contradiction, not only over against our sins and sufferings but also against the nature of our existence down to the very deepest depths of its roots. God with us! That conflicts too much, not only with our unrighteousness, but more yet, with our righteousness; not only with the atrocities of history, but more yet with history's supposed progress and achievements; not only with the misery on earth, butmore yet, with the supposed happiness and saisfaction on earth. God with us! That subjects our total human nature to a judgment, to a No, that will leave nothing left of us, and will bow us under a grace, a Yes, that we cannot comprehend. God with us!

Sex

Some basic affirmations that need to be said explicitly.

1. The Christian faith is holistic, therefore it makes no sense to separate permanently body and soul. Without the body, soul makes no sense, and vice-versa. Our relationship with God makes no sense without our body, and this applies to salvation.

2. Thus the body is both the locale of experiencing God's love now and reflecting God's glory now and in the future. (Discipleship and resurrection) Sexuality, as a facet of our bodiliness, are to reflect the glory of God.

3. Sex is body and soul. When we reduce sex to only body or soul we are escaping from the closeness of reality and the depths and complexity of being human.

4. Heterosexual sex can lead to pregnancy and children. This is to be carefully considered when having sex.

5. Sex can help intimacy and the self-giving and receiving of intimate relationship. It is legalistic to think that sex is only permissible once a couple have been formally married.

6. Sex is about pleasure not just popping out babies.

7. Both salvation and sin swirl around the human experience of sex. Because sex is tied up with desire, intimacy, pleasure, joy and 'nakedness', it can also have devastating results in our lives. However, for these same reasons it is a sacrament of God's love and salvation. Sex is also one of the most important images to think of our relationship with God and salvation. (E.g. union)


Commentary

The Song of Songs is an explicit love song, with symbolic sexual language within it. It has been spiritualized in the Christian tradition. It is easy to imagine this was done by some because of discomfort with the physicality of the content. The physicality of our existence, our relationship with God and our salvation has been, and continues to be, problematic for many Christians. Christian discomfort with the Incarnation has the same root as discomfort with sex: it is about real human life in all its reality, messiness, sweat, blood, tears and complexity. However, the intuition that has interpreted our relationship with God in terms of the physical relationship between two lovers is correct and utterly orthodox, traditional Christianity. Human bodiliness and God go together.

These days we rarely meet the obvious rejection of our physicality and bodiliness in the church. (An exception is the rejection of the resurrection of the body, but I have posted on this before, many times.) The rejection of our physicality and the ultimate union of creation and God in Christ is masked these days. One of the masks used is the rejection of promiscuity. Of course we are critical of promiscuity: Christianity takes our bodiliness seriously, a bodiliness that includes all our ways of relating faithfully. Promiscuity undoes faithful relationships and can lead to great hurt. And when it doesn't but retains a casual, meaningless character, we are critical of that meaninglessness in something so profoundly intimate. It just isn't right. But, our criticism of promiscuity is not an excuse to import any lingering discomfort about our physicality and sex. And that is what happens, and it happens a lot.

For example, the new orthodoxy required by all Australian Anglicans that says sex can only happen between those who are formally married. So I cannot have on parish council someone who is in a sexual relationship who is not formally married. So you can be in a defacto marriage, have grandchildren from the relationship, and sorry, don't bother applying for any ministry position. Ridiculous, but that's typical of those still uncomfortable with their physicality and its messiness and complexity.

If people are sharing their lives and growing in intimacy, with the intention of continuing in that growth in intimacy faithfully, sex should not be legalistically prohibited. The legalists just can't bear the idea that people are moral beings and that in the complexity of human growth in intimacy legalisms don't hold. As in all legalisms, people are driven 'underground', and those in authority (except for the maniacal and ideological legalists) turn a blind eye at some point. Corruption, corruption ... Better to be sensible in our acknowledgement of our bodiliness and in our regulation of sexual relations.

Finally, because soul and body go together sexual relations are one of the important metaphors for our relationship with God, the act of redemption and our eventual salvation in Christ. I mean the metaphor of union. It's sexual through and through.