Living Wittily

The risk of that middle ground where mutual respect and shared grace enable gratitude

"But while he is steadily fixed in his religious principles in what he believes to be the truth as it is in Jesus; while he firmly adheres to that worship of God which he judges to be most acceptable in his sight; and while he is united by the tenderest and closest ties to one particular congregation, --his heart is enlarged toward all mankind, those he knows and those he does not; he embraces with strong and cordial affection neighbours and strangers, friends and enemies. This is catholic or universal love. And he that has this is of a catholic spirit. For love alone gives the title to this character: catholic love is a catholic spirit."

That quotation needs a context. It's from a sermon entitled The Catholic Spirit. It was preached by John Wesley probably in 1749, on the text 2 Kings 10.15. That text reads,

"And when he was departed thence, he lighted on Jehonadab the son of Rechab coming to meet him: and he saluted him, and said to him, Is thine heart right, as my heart is with thy heart? And Jehonadab answered, 'It is.' If it be, give me thine hand. And he gave him his hand; and he took him up to him into the chariot."

John Wesley could be a pain. Dogmatic, opinionated, partisan, stubbornly hard to shift from what he believed was the central ground of Christian faith. But that made him neither an exclusive nor a separatist from other Christians. This sermon is about the spirit of welcome, the formation of a settled and consistent predisposition to love and a commitment divinely maintained to make peace, developing a Spirit inspired instinct for unity of heart and practical goodwill towards others.

When John Wesley talked about the Christian calling to live and think and exhibit a catholic spirit he was unmistakable and explicit in his demand that those who professed faith in the God of universal love are called to mirror that love to other Christians, and even to those who make no such claims to faith. Universal love cannot be selective, a catholic spirit refuses to reject, the "ingrasping love of God" does not exclude or disqualify. The love of God, poured into the heart by the Holy Spirit overflows in goodwill, mercy, kindness, forgiveness, conciliation to those who are friends and those who are opponents, even to enemies, and therefore the love of Christ loves without exception and without excusing.

John Wesley got into trouble for his views on Christian Perfection, and for using phrases like universal love, and yes, for encouraging a catholic spirit in a fractious age. The second half of the 18th Century was a time of denominational jealousies, cultural upheavals, theological realignments, and social unrest. But beneath the surface there were also the subterranean disturbances of established authorities, threatened privileges, competivie religiosity, and these inevitably promoted power games as the Established Church felt the threat and impetus of a rising Dissenting churches, of which the rapidly growing Methodists was one of the more worrying examples.

Wesley's Sermon is a defining document of the classic Methodist commitment to unity and fellowship with other churches. The word ecumenical for Wesley was synonymous with catholic, and both required a disposition of openness and vulnerability to the presence and reality of those with whom he, or his Methodist societies, disagreed. And by the way, this isn't your soft, mushy, marshmallow ecumenism where no matter what somebody believes it's ok. The catholic spirit tries to hold the ground between an exclusive dogmatism and an all inclusive indifferentism, and it is a place where those of different Christian traditions, acknowledging the integrity each of the other, exchange the hand of fellowship and mutual gladness in their shared faith in Christ.

"That we may all love one another as Christ loved us", says Wesley. The past tense is crucial, is a crux point; it points to the supreme evidence of Christ's love on the cross. There, beneath the cross of Jesus, Christians from whatever denomination, tradition, culture or time, stand in the place where all hearts are equal in their need of grace and their sense of gratitude. 

From my earliest days as a Christian I have been passionately ecumenical. From my first serious reading of John Wesley now over 30 years ago I have sensed a kindred spirit. This sermon is one of the core documents of Wesleyan spirituality, and of the Methodist way of being the church. I've gone back to it repeatedly, and I recall it frequently when I encounter those whose primary calling seems to be telling every other Christian tradition how wrong it is, or where its deficits lie, or why they could never be the kind of Christian those other people are pretending to be. And I guess it's kind of quaint to want to answer that spirit of "see me, I'm right" by quoting some words about a guy with the weird name Jehonadad son of Rechab!

But Wesley uses that text to dare his hearers into an act of trust, the shaking of hands between strangers, the measuring of the heart of the other, and therefore the risk of that middle ground where mutual respect and shared grace enable gratitude in duplicate, or in multiples of voices. When this sermon was later published in 1770, appended to it was one of Charles Wesley's hymns, "Catholic Love". Here is one of the verses.

Weary of all this wordy strife,

These notions, forms, and modes, and names,

To Thee, the Way, the Truth, the Life,

Whose love my simple heart inflames,

Divinely taught, at last I fly,

With thee and thine to live and die.

Abraham Joshua Heschel: Is there no compassion in the world?

Amongst my many books, and settled on my many shelves, are a number of writers whose work is a balm in Gilead, a tonic for the creeping weariness of spirits jaded by a world too much in our faces.

Isaiah wrote some of his greatest poetry to a people in exile, religiously dislocated, culturally deprived, making the best of alienation and hoping against all odds that one day there might be home for them, or their children, maybe even their grandchildren. So Isaiah the great prophet poet used words like an artist and painted pictures of a desert in blossom, wilderness and parched land ablaze with colour and verdant with foliage, and no mere oasis but springs of living water, streams in the desert, rivers of life flowing freely and irrigating the soul and the spirit and the heart and the mind.

Isaiah is one of those writers who is a balm in Gilead, at least for me. So are several others whose writing and whose thought are like the waters that do not fail the thirsty soul, like the fire that purifies the troubled conscience, the bread that nourishes the stumbling spirit. And amongst those great writers and thinkers whose words and ideas refresh and renew my view of life when I've become jaded by the noise and greed of our culture, or angry at the complacency and selfishness that invade our public and political life, or troubled and unsettled by the divisive rhetoric of power games and image makers and breakers - is Abraham Joshua Heschel.

Even the titles of his books help diagnose our condition in our own country, and wider afield in a Western civilisation which is disintegrating and corroding beneath us: The Insecurity of Freedom: Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity; Man's Quest for God; God in Search of Man; Man is Not Alone; The Sabbath; Who is Man. One of the ironies of our times is that we are unaware of our own lostness, so certain of our cleverness we are blind to our foolishness, so selfish and greedy to possess and consume that we have learned to ignore the destructive impact on the very planet that sustains the life of ourselves and the creatures who share the earth. 

Earlier today I took refuge once more in that small collection of wisdom and wonder that is Heschel's writing. Our contemporary dilemmas aren't so different from the defining issues of the 30 years from the end of the Second World War till Heschel died in 1972. Dishonesty in public discourse, distrust of politics and politicians, war conducted by proxy overseas, the inordinate power of business conglomerates and concentrated finance over the lives of whole populations, the struggle for freedom, civil and human rights and the need to call out injustice, oppression and to call in question the machinery of capital when it is allowed to crush the poor and the vulnerable. 

In a bold and unflinching article published in Jewish Heritage in 1971, a year before he died, Heschel addressed the immorality of the Vietnam War. It is a searing critique of modern warfare and our ability to wage war on others from a distance, with no real sense of the agony, anguish and brutality inflicted on others in our name. And he has no patience with the religiously distorting question, "Where is God in such suffering?" He turns that particular rhetorical subterfuge inside out and declares like the prophet he absolutely was, "God confronts us with the question, "Where are you? Is there no compassion in the world?" The allusion to Genesis is obvious, and the Fall, the hiding away from God in the Garden, and the Divinely articulated question that finds out the moral peril of every attempt to avoid God, hide from God, break free from God, are distilled into this brief essay.

Near the end Heschel moves from essay writing to prayer, and in doing so provides us with a clue as to how people of faith are to confront, resist and seek to overthrow the powers of injustice and all that they unleash on the world. It is these words of Heschel, two brief paragraphs, that once again helped to re-align my own sense of what is important, what my life is about. Reading them I hear gurgling springs in the desert, sense the stirring of new seeds germinating, believe again in the God of hope who enables us to be defiant of despair.

"O Lord we confess our sins, we are ashamed of the inadequacy of our anguish, of how faint and slight is our mercy. We are a generation that has lost the capacity for outrage. We must continue to remind ourselves that in a free society all are involved in what some are doing. Some are guilty, but all are responsible.

Prayer is our greatest privilege. To pray is to stake our very existence, our right to live, on the truth and on the supreme importance of that which we pray for. Prayer, then, is radical commitment, a dangerous involvement in the life of God. In such awareness we pray."

(A J Heschel, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, page 231)

 

 

 

 

Thoughts on Election Day: Letting the Bible Get a Word in Edgeways

Recently I have been reflecting on big words. Not multisyllabic latinisms, gnostic jargon, nor bespoke neologisms, but words that are spacious, deep and and wide. Words that can have far reaching effects, whether in their expansiveness out into the world as transformative signals of hope, or in their intense inwardness as words of intellectual and spiritual and moral renewal towards a life more human, hopeful and holy. Indeed these three words would be good examples of what I mean by big words; human, hope, holy. But save them for another time.

This morning I woke up early. Not to my knowledge caused by a guilty conscience, more an honest and difficult to silence anxiety, low grade but persistent, and requiring some thought to accompany that first mug of tea! And as I thought about what was worrying me I went looking for words that might be placed on the other side of the anxiety versus serenity scales. Like most people, I'm weary of the ratcheted, wretched rhetoric of politicians telling us this is the most important General Election in generations. The normalising of exaggerated claims and approval seeking promises, the studied nastiness of personal attack as political tactic, the joyless anger of the power hungry, and the drip drip of dishonest dire predictions if we vote otherwise, have created an inner insomnia for those of us who refuse to allow our consciences to be lulled into sleepy complacency.

So I went looking for some big words to answer those pavlov laced promises, to rebuke the waves of abusive rhetoric, to contradict the urge to fear and anger. One of the benefits of reading the Bible, is knowing where to find the big words. And I mean reading the Bible, not saying we read it; I mean reading the Bible by letting the text get a word in edgeways so that it can speak big words into our small minds and narrow hearts; I mean reading the Bible so that the Word becomes a corrective of all those other words we speak, hear, repeat and throw around in political debate. I knew exactly where to find the big words I needed, to re-align my mind, to reconfigure my conscience, to reorientate my heart.

He has shown you O Man, what is good,

and what does the Lord require of you,

but to act justly,

and to love mercy

and to walk humbly with your God.  (Micah 6.8)

Big words those, justice, mercy and humility. They are far reaching out into the world of people and relationships, politics and economics, culture and identity. And they are deeply penetrating into the mind, conscience and heart of those who will hear them and allow them to do their transformative work, first in inner disposition, then in outward action. Because these words are not abstract concepts to be debated, they are commands of God as to what is required of us human beings.

So on the day of the General Election, awake early by a nagging anxiety, I have taken recourse to some of the big words that come with the force of divine command into our world of human affairs. Together they make an interesting grid to take the measure of all those promises and policies; they are criteria of judgement that quality control the claims and counter claims of those who seek our yes to their right to govern; and they are unashamedly moral in their demands and requirement. These are not words that tolerate the tactics of division, the hurting of the vulnerable, the undervaluing of the poor, the manipulation of power to accumulate more at the expense of others. These are big words, words redolent of holiness, replete with judgement, relentless in their requirement. And for those who read the Bible, and I mean those who read it with the intention of obeying it, they come with an authority that relativises every other. They are the words that sustain the common good. They are either every politician's nightmare, scary in their demands, or their night-light showing where the door to life is.

God of goodness, justice and mercy,

We shouldn't need to ask what is required of us.

Is injustice so hard to see, so easy to live with?

Has the absence of mercy become tolerable?

Is humility a step too far for our pride?

 

Forgive us for tolerating the slippage

from your requirement to our convenience;

the slippage from justice to injustice,

from mercy to couldn't care-lessness,

from humility to self-protective pride.

 

Show us again what is good,

how to act justly, love mercy,

and walk humbly with our God.

Amen

 

 

A Christian Theology of Creation is Embedded in What We Believe About Christ.

This is a wire sculpture which sits above the harbour at Portsoy. The graceful lines of a dolphin leaping towards the sea is a powerful and poignant symbol of life that is wild, untamed, beautiful and utterly natural.

There are many perspectives on the relationship between humans and the biosphere we call earth. My own preference, intellectual, ethical and spiritual, is the Christian calling to a responsible stewardship of the created order. Yes we can talk of "nature", and even personify it with the pronoun she, and the maternal metaphor of "mother nature". These are at least reminders that we endanger other creatures when we see them as commodities, and the earth's resources are exploited as if they were our sole possession, inexhaustible and all the time forgetting our own dependence on them.

However a theological imperative arises out of the Christian doctrine of creation, and its associated doctrine of humanity. To speak of creation means that the natural world is held within a framework of purpose, value and care. Stewardship as a Christian responsibility is therefore a call to responsible obedience, not to a free for all plundering as if there was no tomorrow. Indeed, the mechanised plundering and unrestrained consumption of the earth's resources may well mean a foreshortening of the number of tomorrows humanity can still count on. The Creator calls the creature to care for creation. A Christian theology of creation is deeply embedded in what we believe about Christ. Here are just two texts which are sufficient in themselves to silence the voices that look on the earth as our property, our unregulated superstore where we can take and do and use to our heart's content:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was with God in the beginning.  Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. (John 1.1-2)

The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. (Col 1.15-17)

So stewardship is an attitude of responsibility, respect, even reverence for that which is the Creator's. Indeed to confess Christ as Lord, is to acknowledge that Lordship over creation. And to believe in the cosmic reach of the cross as renewing, reconciling and redeeming the creation is to hear the deep heart cry of Paul's words as a call to participate in the creative purposes of a God who does not give up on all the He has made. "The whole creation groans in travail, awaiting its redemption...." Romans 8.22

The genesis creation accounts are themselves replete with divine purpose and human blessing. God spoke and it came to be and it was good. God calls all things into being, and gives them to human beings to enjoy, and as the context of their own flourishing. That is why stewardship lies at the centre of the Genesis story, with the good creation entrusted to the care and enjoyment of human beings. Whatever else the story of the Fall brings to our attention, it is clear that the greed for power, the grasp for knowledge of good and evil, the hunger for life and for self-fulfilment was followed by a growing disorder. Toil and struggle, jealousy and violence, theft and murder, guilt and fear, alienation and hate, all took hold in the human heart like the weeds and thorns and thistles that turned fertile ground into wilderness and desert. Cain murders Abel, and the closest human ties are torn. It's no coincidence he wanders in the desert, and suffers the loneliness

We have our own stories today about what the world is, what we each are as human beings, and the relations between ourselves and the earth on which we walk, the environment in which we live and move and have our being. There is the green story, the sustainable development story, the consumerist capital story, the globalisation story, the climate change story and variations and admixtures of these and other ways of looking at the world. It is one of the tasks of Christian theology today to offer for Christians a way of looking at this fragile miracle of a planet that is congruent with our vision of a world that is God created, God loved and into which we are sent as light and salt.

The decision of the United States to renege on the Paris Accord, and that as an act of economic self-interest uninformed by the wider consequences for the rest of the world, is one of the stories that collides with a Christian theology of creation care, stewardship and human behaviour modelled on the image of God. But such reluctance to make any economic sacrifices, and appeals to so-called fairness and national self interest, along with denials of the realities of climate change, are not unique to the current US administration.

My point in this post is ridiculously, and seriously, simple. Christians are not in a position that is neutral when it comes to care for creation. Reckless disregard for the health of this planet is an offence to deep principles of Christian theology. To wreck the work of the Creator, to pollute a creation which is called into being by the Eternal Word, who entered that creation and was crucified and risen as an assertion of life over death, to take whatever we want in a destructive free for all for our own generation - each of these admittedly stark statements offends against the primary doctrines of the Father who is Creator, the Son who is Redeemer, and the Spirit who is Sustainer.

And no, I am not saying this is the only way to view the world; nor the only way that Christian theology brings a different perspective on climate change, resource depletion and planetary pollution. But I am saying that Christians are not in a position to be uninformed, neutral, or hostile to those initiatives and strategies which safeguard, and where possible replenish the health of the environment on which all life depends. At the very least, we are answerable to the Creator, whose greatest command upon us is not to defend our particular exegetical corner on the Creation texts in Genesis. The Creator's imperative, and therefore our obligation, is to care for the creation we believe is created by a God whose purpose is life not death, whose gift is to be enjoyed by generous sharing not by possessive greed, whose will is that humans be blessed and be a blessing to each other.