We Don't Know Everything

It was the birthday of the parish priest and the children had come with their birthday greetings and gifts.

The priest took the gift-wrapped parcel from little Mary and said, “Ah! I see you have brought me a book.” (Mary’s father ran a bookstore in town.)

“Yes, how did you know?”

I”I always know,” replied the priest.

And you, Tommy, have brought me a jumper,” said the priest, picking up the parcel Tommy held out to him. (Tommy’s father was a dealer in woolen goods.)

“That’s right. How did you know?” “Ah, I always know,” replied the priest.

And so it went, until the priest lifted Bobby’s box. The wrapping paper was wet (Bobby’s father owned a bottle shop), so the preist said, “I see you have brought me a bottle of scotch and spilled some of it!”

“Wrong,” said Bobby, “it isn’t scotch.”

“Well, a bottle of rum then,” said the priest.

“Wrong again,” said Bobby.

The priest’s fingers were wet. He put one of them in his mouth but that gave him no clue. “Is it gin?” he asked.

“No,” said Bobby. “I’ve brought you a puppy!”

[Anthony de Mello]

When I finished my first degree, I thought I knew some stuff. Then I did an Honours degree, and I thought I even knew more stuff. Then I did a PhD and realized I knew virtually nothing! There is just so much to know! So much. And there is so much that is mystery, and I will never know or understand. That is the danger with a great education: we think we know all we need to know, or that we can work it out ourselves, whether that be as individuals or a human race. Not quite so. At some point we come to the realization that there is always more to know and more that we will not understand. Humbling really.

Buy the Ticket, Stupid!

A devout religious man fell on hard times. So he took to praying in the following fashion: "Lord, remember all the years I served you as best I could, asking for nothing in return. Now that I am old and bankrupt I am going to ask you for a favour for the first time in my life and I am sure you will not say No: allow me to win the lottery."

Days passed. Then weeks and months. But nothing happened. Finally, almost driven to despair, he cried out one night, "Why don't you give me a break, God?"

He suddenly heard the voice of God replying: "Give me a break yourself! Why don't you buy a lottery ticket first?"

(Anthony de Mello)

Paradoxically, we receive everything as gift, yet we have to make it work. Disciplined and costly grace.

A Prayer for Disciplined Grace:

God of life, today we give you thanks that you shower upon us so many gifts, skills and aspirations. Give us the hearts and discipline to use them for your kingdom and the good of all people. We ask this in the name of Jesus, who gave his all for us. Amen.

Selling Seeds

A woman dreamt she walked into a brand new shop in the marketplace and, to her surprise, found God behind the counter.

“What do you sell here?” she asked.

“Everything your heart desires,” said God.

Hardly daring to believe what she was hearing, the woman decided to ask for the best things a human being could wish for. “I want peace of mind and love and happiness and wisdom and freedom from fear,” she said. Than as an after thought, she added, “Not just for me. For everyone on earth.”

God smiled, “I think you’ve got me wrong, my dear. I don’t sell fruits here. Only seeds.” (Anthony de Mello)

Last assembly I talked about how much we don’t know. Which is very important: we are humble in the face of our deficit in knowledge. But let us not denigrate and dishonor what we do know! Because we don’t know everything doesn’t mean we know nothing! In comparison to what there is to know I know very little. But I do know some things.

In comparison to the work there is to do for the good of the world, what I can do seems very little. But I can do some things, and some things well. I might plant a seed only, so small, but someone else will water it. Who knows, when I have long past that little seed might be a great tree.

Finish with Matt 13:31-32

Jesus told them this parable: ‘God’s kingdom is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; ³²it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.’

Missing God's Graciousness

A man was lost in a desert. Later, when describing his ordeal to his friends, he told how, in sheer despair, he had knelt down and cried out to God to help him.

"And did God answer your prayer?" he was asked.

"Oh, no! Before God could, an explorer appeared and showed me the way."

(Anthony de Mello)

It is one of the great spiritual attributes to be able to see God's graciousness in life. It is easy to miss. When things are going well, we take the goodness of life for granted, and forget the giver. When things are going badly, our attention moves (often obsessively so) to the bad, and the good, which remains, is forgotten. To see God's graciousness in the everyday is a real gift, a gift to be nurtured. And to see God's graciousness when life is going well or not, consistently that is, brings true happiness. It means that we have to see everything as gift, of course. And that is humbling, and it makes us slow down a bit.

[Above is a picture of the late Anthony de Mello.]

The Ten Commandments

There are (at least) two ways of looking at the 'rules' of Christianity, which include those we inherited direct from the Old Testament. Despite all the dangers of legalism, the first is to see them as rules to be obeyed. Now, there is something in this of course. But I am more interested in the alternative. This is to see the 'rules' like the ten commandments as the expressions, very practical expressions at that, of our life together, and of the kind of (Christian) community we wish to be. In the case of the ten commandments, lying and stealing will not lead us into the kind of mutuality that the gospel calls us to. This line of thinking makes context important and does not ignore the place of personal character and virtue. This kind of thinking is compatible with the idea of revelation, but not the kind of theology that thinks the 'rules' just dropped out of heaven.

I am persuaded that this is exactly how the 'rules' function in the church. However, I am a little suspicious all the same. Following this line of thought, it could be a little too easy to dismiss the 'rules' and start again. That is, it would be possible for someone to say that they understand the kind of community we are independent of the existing 'rules'. Under the pretext of changing contexts, they could then rewrite the 'rules' to suit their particular understanding of the Christian community. We should remember, however, that the 'rules' are an expression of the community, so therefore a good way of understanding what it means to be Christian community is to start with the 'rules' and follow them back to the kind of community that produced them in the first place. I think there is a great deal to be said for the latter methodology in becoming Christian, despite my utter abhorrence of legalism.

However, I still think the 'rules' are an expression of the community, and therefore, once members have lived in that community from the inside, and followed the rules backwards (so to speak) to that community, it is possible for the 'rules' to be modified by the community.

The good life is not simply one in which certain rules are kept - this is always at best a shorthand for the results of life together in the Body. The good life is one in which we have learned how to be for each other, and in so being to live fully as ourselves. If lying, killing, adultery, greed and so on are sinful, it is because we couldn't imagine a community , such as the Body of Christ is meant to be, in which things like this went unchallenged. (Rowan Williams, Tokens of Trust, p. 110)

[Pentecost 21(A), Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20]

The Desert

The desert is an arid, scorching, frightening place where everything portends death. But at the same time it is also a place of rest, gentleness and life.

In the desert you find friendliness and hostility, anguish and joy, sorrow and exultation, trial and triumph. The desert is the land of malediction and the land of benediction. The desert can be hard and merciless. You might die of thirst there, but if it rains you could be drowned. In the desert nature manifests itself in its extremes: prodigal fertility and cruel barrenness...

The desert can be tomb and cradle, wasteland and garden, death and resurrection, hell and heaven.

Thus in the desert you will find that God is simultaneously present and absent, proximate and remote, visible and invisible, manifest and hidden. He can receive you with great tenderness and then abandon you on the cross of loneliness. He consoles you and torments you at the same time. He heals you only to wound again. He may speak to you today and ignore you tomorrow.

The desert does not delude and least of all does the desert delude those who accept it in its two-sided reality of life and death, presence and absence. Nor will they be deceived by God who calls them to the desert. God never abandons us.

(Alessandro Pronzato)

All That Is the Size of a Hazelnut

Julian of Norwich is one of the great mystical figures of Christianity, indeed of world religion. On May 8, 1373, between 4:00 and 9:00AM, she received a number of extraordinary visions, Revelations as they are called, of God’s love for us in Jesus Christ.

In this Revelation the Lord showed me something else, a tiny thing, no bigger than a hazelnut, lying in the palm of the hand, and as round as a ball. I looked at it, puzzled, and thought, ‘What is it?’
The answer came: ‘It is everything that is made.’
I wondered how it could survive. It was so small that I expected it to shrivel up and disappear.
Then I was answered, ‘It exists now and always because God loves it.’ Thus I understood that everything exists through the love of God.
In this small thing I saw three truths: first God made it, second God loves it, and third God looks after it. But what he really means to me as Maker, Keeper and Lover, I cannot tell; I shall never know complete rest and true happiness until all that I am is united with the Lord.

Announcing the Inaugural Adelaide Anglican Blog Conference

I am pleased to announce the inaugural Annual Adelaide Anglican Blog Conference. It will be held in March 2009 and hosted on this blog. The topic is subsection 2 in The Jerusalem Declaration produced by GAFCON. The contributors are Revd Dr David Willsher, Very Revd Dr Steven Ogden, Dr Lucy Larkin, Revd Dr Phillip Tolliday, Revd Barbara Messner, Right Revd Dr Stephen Pickard, and Revd Dr Warren Huffa. Each contributor's post will be published over the two weeks beginning Friday, February 27. This will allow each contribution to be read over two days as we build a comprehensive picture of some of the issues around Scripture, and Scripture and the Anglican Communion. In addition to this, each post will be published with a prepared response. Comments will also be welcome.

Titles of each post will follow soon, but among the topics to be discussed will be inspiration and inerrancy, Scripture as the living word, and the plain meaning of Scripture.

Two Natures, One Person and the Non-Competitive Divine Nature

Christianity claims that, in Jesus, a divine person has assumed a human life without diminution of either divine or human natures, and that this assumed person is without human personhood (ontologically speaking), and is only a single divine person. (Two natures, one person.)

A few observations will, I hope, help. First, it is best not to think of God's nature as defined, like ours, as exclusive of other kinds. That is, God is transcendent, beyond simple contrasts, because, remember, God is not in an ontologically competitive relationship with us. God is, as Phillip reminded us, just not on another plane of being; God is somehow else. (God is not a being, literally does not have being as such.) Thus, because of God's non-competitive transcendence God can share God's goodness and not be diminished, and can unite without diminution (of either God or human being). This also means that God does not have to be more like us to be united with us; God can be God, totally other than us and still be intimately united with us. And this is part of God's creativeness: in creating God comes near and establishes difference and existence. (Indeed, they are co-terminus.) Of course, this is all paralleled in the doctrine of the Trinity. The Father as fount of Godhead, begets a Son who is entirely other than the Father, but who is utterly united in love with the Father. The more the Father is Father the more the Son is Son, 'naturally' related but distinct.

Apply this to the doctrine of the Incarnation. The Son can assume a human nature without change because the Son's nature is not defined by exclusion from others. (Because of non-competitiveness) That is, the Word is not restricted by its own nature, because divine nature is not defined over-and-against other kinds. This is not speculation but entirely soteriological: this is our salvation, and the doctrines are partly the end result of working backwards from this salvation won in Christ.

[If you are interested in the picture, see here.]

The Mother of All Biblical Metaphors!

The Exodus with its elements of slavery, passover and redemption, and following this, the narrative of desert, covenant, rebellion and promised land, is one of the dominant interpretive lenses of the Bible. An immense amount of Scripture is refracted through this narrative. Not only this, it is the pivot on which the whole of the biblical story moves. Prior to it we have Genesis 1-11, outlining to us the universal predicament of human kind. God's response to this predicament is to bring redemption, and this begins with the call of Abraham and Sarah, leading (eventually) to the slavery of the people of Israel in Egypt. And then, after the Exodus and entry into the promised land, we have the settlement leading to the Exile and the Return, with the latter seen as a new Exodus in Isaiah 40-55. And let's not forget the theme of rebellion and pedagogy in the desert (Hos 11:1-4), or the flight of Elijah to the mount of God. (1Kings 19). And then there is Jesus. Think of the links between their stories: the Holy Innocents (Matt 2:16-18), his call out of Egypt (Matt 2:15), his temptations in the desert (Matt 4:1-11), the transfiguration (Lk 9:28-36), the death of Jesus at Passover (Jn 19:14) and his identity as 'the lamb of God" (Jn 1:36). And then there is the beautiful litany over the water in A Prayer Book for Australia, including,

"We give you thanks that through the waters of the Red Sea you led your people out of slavery into freedom, and brought them through the river Jordan to new life in the land of promise."

And I could think of all this without trying - just shows how much there is. And consider the influence of the Exodus on Western culture generally, with our proclivity toward freedom from slavery, and all the liberation movements sprung from the basic metaphor of the movement from slavery to liberation and life in the promised land. Not to mention the Jewish/Christian insight that the voice of the victim is the voice of God, pre-eminently shown in the crucifixion, but also in the Exodus.

As the basic metaphor of the Christian life, the story of the Exodus should be taken seriously.
For example, everyone wants to go to the promised land, but rarely do we think that we should go there via the desert. And even when we do go via the desert, we seem to think we have left there before we really have. Life in Christ does not allow us to avoid the basic structure of the movement from liberation to the promised land. This is one of the basic insights from the desert tradition of the church with its discipline and asceticism. (Literally, for many of them, in the desert. See inset, St Catherine's Monastery at the foot of one possible site for Sinai.) The desert is where we learn to rely on God, and where our desires for the 'fleshpots of Egypt' can be purged. Here we will hear the voice of God, live into the convenant and hear the call of God wooing us and preparing us for entry into the promised land.

Isn't this so much our experience now? While we have whiffs of the promised land, our life now is to be thought more a preparation for the promised land, a land we have not yet reached. (Rowan Williams spends some time on this idea of the church as preparatory for heaven in Tokens of Trust, Chapter 6, focussing on the idea of becoming familiar with the truth so that, on the day of judgment, our experience is not quite so terrifying! On the theme of not yet reaching the promised land, see Heb 11:39-40) It is important to realise this, as it can prevent misunderstanding our experience, as though because we are not continually experiencing complete and unhindered intimacy with God we are somehow losing our faith, or worse, think that there isn't really a God! Or because we question and complain at times we are somehow alien to the Christian experience. None of this is true. The desert can be hard, we can hanker after Egypt, wonder where God is, yet in the midst of this have a deep sense of God's care for us and guidance toward the promised land. And even, at some point, realise the way in which God provided for us through the desert.

[Pentecost 20(A), September 28, 2008]

Reading Scripture: Not Always as Easy As We Might Like it To Be

We all know that we are meant to "believe" everything in the Bible. And that we should eschew those complex readings that seem to make the Bible say exactly the opposite to what a simple reading suggests. But maybe reading the Bible isn't quite as simple as it sounds. Try this:

"So, therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions." (Lk 14:33)

The plain meaning of the text is clear; discipleship of Jesus demands a practical renunciation of all one's possessions. Some have read this kind of passage that way, and I think here in particular of St Anthony and, in the twentieth century, Dorothy Day. But most of us would not take this verse as something to be believed and followed literally. We might try and categorise it as hyperbole, or we might look to its wider context in the Bible, including the Gospel of Luke, the rest of the New Testament and the whole Bible. We might discover that in Luke, although he has the first generation of disciples give up everything (e.g. compare Mk 1:20 & Lk 5:11), there are plenty of indications that this response is not necessarily required of every disciple since.

Let's try another one; the bizarre story of Jephthah and his nameless daughter. (Judges 11:34-40) He makes a vow to God to ensure victory against his foes, to sacrifice what/whoever first meets him when he arrives home. Unfortunately (particularly for her), it is his daughter, and so she is offered up as a burnt offering. (No alternative victim sent by God in this story. Cf Gen 22) What are we meant to make of that? Is his behaviour to be lauded (or at least vindicated because he did, at least, fulfill his vow, even if it was a stupid one) or condemned? The last few verses about the tradition of mourning might be a mild (although ambiguous at best) critique of his oath and actions. And in the wider context of Judges, he fits the flawed character of many of the judge protagonists. And in the wider context of the OT and its disapproval of human sacrifice, it is inconceivable that this story now functions in the Bible as a recommendation for faithfulness, no matter how it was understood when written. I suspect that is how most of us would see it.

But it gets more complicated. Hebrews 11:32 cites Jephthah as a model of faith. (Although exactly what is being remembered is not stated.) And didn't the father sacrifice the Son (Jesus)? Many take this to be literally true, which would then mean Jephthah's actions could at least be vindicated. A straight reading of the text is perhaps not as easy as some might claim.

Resurrection: Leaving Nothing Behind

"The belief in resurrection tells us that what God wants to hold in everlasting life isn't some shadowy fragment of ourselves but the person we have become, body and soul." (Rowan Williams)