Living Wittily

When Wild Geese Force You to Look at the World Less Unseeingly

Living in the North East of Scotland the sight and sound of migrating geese is a regular experience of nature at its most beautiful, haunting and heart lifting. A mile or two beyond where I live is Loch Skene, one of the most important staging posts for migration and a place where thousands of geese winter before heading North again.

What is it, though, about the sight and sound of those voyagers from the North that unfailingly lifts the affections towards hopefulness and renewal of spirits? Flying in formation, honking their perseverance, hundreds of ink marks flowing on a blue sky, at times strung together in chevrons drawn with a care for geometry, they proclaim both freedom and discipline.

A flock of geese takes off in an apparent chaos, and almost immediately, without a conductor,  orchestrate their movements into the most economical dynamics for birds their size and weight. Survival is by cooperation; shared workload prevents exhaustion; and somewhere inside those aerodynamic heads, a compass more accurate than most human technologies. Geese in migration intimate a change of season, they announce that life doesn't stay the same, they demonstrate that travel and the journey are as important in life as routine and a stability that can easily become stuckness. 

 Late on this February afternoon, while engaged in the routines of making life work, a thousand geese passed overhead, give or take a few. I'd spent much of the day in a reflective and lowered mood, for various reasons. Part of it the continuing work of grieving and rebuilding in a time of loss.

 Sometimes stuckness isn't what you seek, it's what happens, routines are safe, change requires energy, imagination and the strength to take off and fly. Then this happens to pull you out of your own head; a thousand geese haul you out of your own head, lift up your heart, and force you to look at the world less unseeingly. Or to put it more positively, those aviators from elsewhere, now heading somewhere else, have seduced you into seeing the world again in its rawness, its beauty, its unending possibilities, and it sheer magnificence as a place to be alive.

Being a Christian is itself a way of seeing the world, a worldview. And amongst the more stringent demands of trying to live the life of faith is to hold on to the view that this world is God-loved, because God-created. We will all have our moments of revelation, epiphany, those gifts in time when we become aware of our belonging on earth, and of our longing for more than we can say. Those overhead and overheard geese, honking their encouragement to each other, compel us to look beyond where we are, creating that strange feeling of contentment that is hard to distinguish from a form of discontent that urges us outward, upward, forward.

Contentment cannot be permanent; there comes a time to move, change, and trust to the power of the One who calls us to newness, and out of the routine, the familiar, the comfortable and if we are honest, the stuckness of life that has settled for what it already has. I think the birth of such trust is called hope, and it is one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Standing in a car park, looking at the sky, watching geese on the move, hearing their wild cries, somewhere inside bolts click back and doors open, curtains are pulled back and light spills inward, and God has spoken through the ancient migratory patterns of creatures who know their way home.     

 

 

 

"Distrust every claim for truth where you do not see truth united with love..."

Now here's the kind of thinking we could do with more of. This is Paul Tillich preaching in a University Chapel on the text "What is Truth?" He finishes with these words:

"Distrust every claim for truth where you do not see truth united with love; and be certain that you are of the truth and that the truth has taken hold of you only when love has taken hold of you and has started to make you free from yourselves."

Imagine being told that as you come to the end of a worship service. That you can get a handle on who you are and what your life is about if you take seriously the connection between truth and love. How does that work? Well here's Tillich earlier in the same sermon:

"If you seriously ask the question, 'Am I of the truth?', you are of the truth. If you do not ask it seriously, you do not really want, and you do not deserve, and you cannot get, an answer! He who asks  seriously the question of the truth that liberates is already on the way to liberation."

Of course Tillich is talking about more than factual truth, establishing what is verifiable by investigation. He certainly includes that. But he is after the deeper levels and originating sources of truthfulness that we might call integrity of character, authenticity in behaviour, consistency in values and ethical choices, an absence of cynicism, an aversion to lies whether spoken, implied or by self-deceit. All of these grow out of the deep subsoil of the soul, the accumulation over time of mistakes and missteps, of good decisions and unselfish choices, those moments of self-discovery, self-awareness and self-correction which are the often hidden work of the Holy Spirit in the conscience and at the well-springs of motive and self-knowing.

Tillich in this sermon exposes our capacity for self-deceit, and our innate tendency to give a body swerve to whatever challenges our distorted notions of who we are, our perfections, importance and carefully constructed self-image. That's why he is careful to distinguish between our desire to grasp the truth, and our willingness to be grasped by the truth. Those who wish to control truth, to be the final arbiter of what is true, right, real for me, are unlikely to listen when even the truth addresses them, contradicts them, and judges them.

Even Pilate, who uttered that question, "What is truth?", and looked into the face of the truth of all things, knew somewhere deep down in a conscience hardened by military law and arbitrary power, that he could not master the truth. He could flog it half to death, he could crucify it and bury it. But truth will out. And the resurrection of Jesus became the truth that judges all other truth claims. Love, not hate, is true; life, not death, is true; hope, not despair, is true; light, not darkness shines with truth; reconciliation, not enmity, is built on truth. Pilate asked, "What is truth?" Angels answered him three days later, "He is risen."

The ending of Tillich's sermon is about that risen life and its transformative power: "be certain that you are of the truth and that the truth has taken hold of you only when love has taken hold of you and has started to make you free from yourselves." The words echo much of the teaching in the First Epistle of John; but they are themselves paraphrased, albeit unwittingly, by the last verse of Stuart Townend's excellent Easter praise song:

One with the Father, Ancient of Days,
Through the Spirit who clothes faith with certainty.
Honour and blessing, glory and praise
To the King crowned with pow'r and authority!
And we are raised with Him,
Death is dead, love has won, Christ has conquered;
And we shall reign with Him,
For He lives: Christ is risen from the dead!

This kind of truth is not a truth we grasp, but one that grasps us. The "Spirit clothes faith with certainty", but it isn't the empty certitudes of those who think they can win all the arguments, and impose their version of truth. It is the assurance of those who know that truth unites with love, and both unite with life, and these are found in Jesus Christ, incarnate, crucified and risen.

Using Tillich's italicised emphasis, truth is found by those who seriously seek truth, those who are open to truth, not as a power to impose on others, but as a way of being which is expressed in the love of God and lived out in loving action for Christ's sake. When love and truth take hold of us, only then can we answer what is truth, and discover as Jesus said all along, "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free." John 8.32   

Bonhoeffer: "Your 'yes' to God requires your 'no' to all injustice, to all evil, to all lies..."

The life and thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer persists as an essential and critical voice even seventy five years after his death. There are so many reasons to pay attention to the occasional writings and speakings of Bonhoeffer; but in our time of fractious politics, slow and sometimes blatant power grabs, growing support for right wing populism and uncritical adulation of the strong leader, it is the radically uncompromising call and cost of discipleship in following Jesus that challenges Christian communities to decide where ultimate allegiance lies. This is Bonhoeffer the pastor, preaching a Confirmation sermon in 1938. The date is essential context, and the words are explosive in their political as well as theological and spiritual reverberations:   

"You have only one master now...But with this 'yes' to God belongs just as clear a 'no.' Your 'yes' to God requires your 'no' to all injustice, to all evil, to all lies, to all oppression and violation of the weak and poor, to all ungodliness, and to all mockery of what is holy. Your 'yes' to God requires a 'no' to everything that tries to interfere with your serving God alone, even if that is your job, your possessions, your home, or your honour in the world. Belief means decision."

Preached to young Christians facing what we now know as life in one of the most violent, lethal and merciless regimes in European history. The use of the word "master" is likewise laden with intentional contrast, and implies an either-or from which there can be no compromising third choice. One master. Who is it to be? Yes to God means 'no' to all other powers demanding final loyalty of mind, heart, soul and body. Belief means decision, not only one single decision after which it is business as usual; but a confirming decision that means all other decisions take their direction from that living and central commitment to Jesus Christ.

What makes Bonhoeffer such a necessary discomfort to those who are at ease in Zion is his reiteration of the radical, risk-laden demands of the Gospel of Christ. Earlier translations of his book on discipleship were titled, The Cost of Discipleship.The critical edition is more accurate in the technical sense of the one word title: Discipleship. However commendable that title, it remains the case that Bonhoeffer's relentless emphasis on the nature of Christian following of Jesus focused on the cost of discipleship. That cost was inevitable and the sine qua non of faithfulness to God, and the authenticating hallmark of a life following the way of Jesus Christ, bearing a cross and headed for Calvary.

The words from the confirmation sermon were not intended as comfortable invitation to convenient respectability, but as warning and call to a lifestyle and inner orientation at odds with all that is at odds with the way of Jesus. In other words this ongoing 'yes' compels a recurring 'no' to all that demands a different loyalty to alternative values and competing life goals. The life goal of the disciple is to be faithful to Christ, the values are rooted in the commitment of God in Christ to a reconciled world, and that 'Yes' carries within it a lifelong capacity for saying no; and Bonhoeffer is explicit in what is to be contradicted.

"God requires your 'no' to all injustice, to all evil, to all lies, to all oppression and violation of the weak and poor, to all ungodliness, and to all mockery of what is holy."

Those words are freighted with responsibility for the way we live our lives in the 2020 world of political and social divisions. One of the more easily overlooked features of contemporary life is the mockery of what is holy. That isn't new either, it was a social toxin flowing through the veins of National Socialism and its effect was the weakening of the immune system, making minds and wills less receptive and increasingly resistant to moral values of human worth, dignity and fundamental rights. 

The mockery of what is holy is a theological version of the cliche 'nothing is sacred anymore'. But when that which one group in society reveres and holds as of essential value to their lives is mocked, ignored, or treated as trivial, the result is a dangerous diminishing of human capital and ethical safeguards. Bonhoeffer saw that happening over the years before the 1938 sermon. The mockery of what a society has deemed to be holy, pushes back boundaries and rewrites in coarser and less humane language what is acceptable, decent and for the common good. Eventually people themselves, those who hold on to what is holy and to be respected by consensus, are themselves mocked, diminished, and devalued.

At that point Bonhoeffer could see with prophetic clarity, the fundamental Yes to God which orients the whole of life, demanded a faithful No to all in life that contradicts justice, goodness, truth, freedom, care for the weak and poor, and reverence for the holy. Yes implies No. You cannot serve God wholeheartedly and something else at the same time. The criterion for the Christian is the cross of Christ, a dying to all other claims on our will, conscience, heart, mind and body.

I find these words of Bonhoeffer so uncomfortably apt in 2020 Britain and beyond. But I know of no other way to be faithful to the fundamental Yes I've said to God as a Christian, than to say with continuing conviction, and with relentless faithfulness, No. No to words that are lies; No to policies which humiliate and threaten the poor; No to policies of injustice and callous disregard for refugees and immigrants; No to hostile environments, to racism and antisemitism; No to the abuses of power when it is used to remove the very levers put in place to hold power accountable; No to the rhetoric of division; No to the deifying of capital, money, wealth, stuff and its consequent global inequity; and No to the laying waste of the only planet we have, in pursuit of all the above.

And in all those sayings of No, those who follow Jesus faithfully in the 21st Century do so fully  recognising that the cost of discipleship is stated very plainly. Say Yes to God, and you say No to much else that is taken for granted as the way the world works. 

(The sermon 'The Gift of Faith', was preached on April 9, 1938. See The Collected Sermons of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, (ed) Isabel Best, (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2012, pp. 201-206)   

Prayer of Intercession Following Brexit.

Prayer of Intercession Following Brexit.

(The refrain of Seek ye first the Kingdom of God can be used as response as indicated)

Our Father, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven. You have called us to seek first the Kingdom of God and your righteousness. We pray for our country, this place where we live, and where so much that is important in our shared life will now change in ways we cannot predict. 

Brexit has made many stressed and angry, afraid and divided. We have strong opinions and not enough understanding; we take sides, point fingers of blame, refuse to listen to others and shout louder ourselves.

We pray for our Parliament, and all those we have elected and appointed to represent the interests of our country and our people. Father that is one of our greatest fears – we are starting to choose who are our people. We use words like LEAVE and REMAIN as slogans and insults. We have each used used phrases like ‘enemies of the people’, ‘no surrender’, ‘disaster capitalism’ ‘do or die’ as if we are at war with ourselves.

We pray that you will give wisdom and humility to those who have power; undermine the pride and arrogance that often closes off good ways forward; enable those who speak for us to do so with truth and integrity, and to refuse acceptance of lies as if the truth doesn’t matter.

God of the nations, our country must now make far reaching decisions. Guide and direct us into the paths of peace; stem the flow of invective and hostility; bring minds together to find understanding and a way ahead that enables justice, the common good, and care for each other. Our continent has known terrible wars, and these past 75 years we have lived peaceably and constructively. Whatever the outcomes of these next weeks, may we find ways of living in friendship as partners rather than as competitors and rivals.

*SEEK YE FIRST THE KINGDOM OF GOD

Father, in times of crisis and anxiety your prophets spoke words of comfort and truth. May we hear and obey their words, and make those words our prayers in these next weeks:

Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever rolling stream.

 But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare

He has shown every one of you what is good, and what does the Lord require of you but to act justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.

Teach us and enable us to go on being a nation which is a place of welcome and refuge for others; lead us as a people to a new understanding of our place among the nations; bring us to repentance and changed ways; to be less selfish and more generous; to be less afraid of others and more welcoming; to be less angry and more peaceable; to turn down the volume of our own shouting and listen more carefully to what others say, and think, and feel; to be impatient with lies and defenders of truth.

As your church we pray you will forgive our own part in the divisiveness, by ways we speak, how we treat others, or when we refuse to listen to those we disagree with; forgive the faintness of our light and the lost savour of our salt; make us peacemakers and seekers of justice; fill us with passion for a society where people are safe, where compassion is on the increase, where we learn again the joy of kindness, and in which we walk the way of Jesus with arms open in welcome to the stranger, hands reaching out to the hurting, and feet walking in the narrow ways of loving God and neighbour for Jesus’ sake

SEEK YOU FIRST THE KINGDOM OF GOD