Living Wittily

President Jimmy Carter Rocks, and Builds Houses!

While reading the Sermon on the Mount every other day, a kind of C25K for the heart, I'm keeping my eyes open for examples of people doing the Word as well as hearing it.

Jimmy Carter has a long standing and well known Christian commitment that has included teaching Bible Class before and after his Presidency.

More recently he has affirmed his commitment to the ministry and leadership of women in the church, even when that has created tensions between him and the Baptist denomination which has been his spiritual home all his life.

In these late harvest years he is still busy building the Kingdom by getting his hands dirty and living out his commitment to Jesus and to the poor.

It is mere coincidence that his initials are JC. But in another sense those same initials are like a hallmark stamp on much of his life, lifestyle and service to the community. I remember reading one of the early biographies of Jimmy Carter, published by Collins, and before later biographies became partisan and agenda driven, whether villifying him as a failure and much else, or hagiography making him into the saint he denies he could ever be.

He is undoubtedly a man of deep and life-changing Christian conviction. Flawed but faithful, a conviction politician of a past era, highly respected amongst those who care about global issues of ecology, social justice and racial harmony and peace amongst the major faiths, he remains for me, an example of a good man trying to do good in a world of clashing vested interests, global power plays by politicians, states, institutions and corporations. And he builds houses. My guess is, going back to the Sermon on the Mount, he is building the house of his life on the Rock.

The Sermon on the Mount : self-portrait of "the complete and virtuous human and the true king".

This reading of the Sermon on the Mount every other day, it's a time consuming commitment. I mean it takes 4 minutes, that's four minutes, to read Matthew chapter 5, and 3 minutes each for chapters 6 and 7. And that's not reading slowly. So around 10 minutes spent just reading the same thing I read two days ago. Ten minutes is nothing to the time I spend checking out Facebook, or checking and answering email, or listening to the News headlines several times a day.

Interestingly time has that mysterious quality of variable speed depending on whether we are bored or fascinated, depending on whether we think what we are doing is important or optional, productive or a waste of time. Thing is, if I read the Sermon on the Mount for a month, the three chapters every second day so 15 times, I'll spend two and a half hours reading this same text. I already know chunks of it by heart. It might be better to read three chapters of Matthew and get through the whole Gospel in an hour and a half hours

And that is where Jonathan Pennington's approach to the Sermon on the Mount reins in the impatience and obsession with efficiency that thinks of reading broadly and quantitively rather than deeply and qualitiatively. The ancient practice of Lectio Divina was a call to slowed down, repetitive, reflective, contemplative assimilation of a text until the text begins to form and give shape to what and how we think. It is a reading that takes to heart, a rumination both purposeful and nourishing, a repetitive reiteration of that which is significantly formative.

Go back to those early centuries, urges Pennington. The Sermon was not a problematic text too hard to achieve; rather it was a paradigmatic text "foundational to an understanding of Christianity itself." Those words of Jesus deeply sourced in the story of Israel and especially its wisdom tradition, were spoken into a new community that emerged within a Jewish and Greco-Roman matrix. And both cultural traditions posed and sought to answer the deep and enduring question of what makes for human flourishing, and answered in terms of the virtuous life. The Sermon is about the virtuous Christian life, what it looks like when it is embodied in the life of a community and in the heart and practices of the individual. The Sermon is about character formation, growth in the virtues of the Kingdom of God, foundation practices that are rooted and grounded in the person, the ministry and the Lordship of the one who "sat down....and opened his mouth to teach his disciples".

I remember the first time I came across the word "aretegenic", reading a book by Ellen Charry entitled, By the Renewing of Your Mind. Fortunately it was clearly explained in that book, because much of the point and argument depended on knowing what it means. Derived from the Greek word arete, it means "for the purpose of forming character or virtue". This is the word that Pennington wants to use as a description of the nature and purpose of the Sermon on the Mount; the Sermon is aretegenic, formative and transformative of character, by the development of virtuous dispositions and habits. 

"Thus our reading of the Sermon, which is clearly focused on providing a vision for a way of being in the world, should naturally and rightly be focused on reading for the purpose of being trandsformed. All other readings, as beneficial as they can be - historical, literary, dogmatic, political, postcolonial, grammatical, linguistic, text critical - are at best steps toward the highest form of reading, reading for personal transformation." (15-16)

That kind of reading is obviously unconcerned about efficiency as such. The only productivity issue has to do with virtue, character growth, inner transformation towards formative practices of Christian behaviour and ethics. Pennington's focus does the Sermon the unusual courtesy of taking it seriously on its own terms. This is the teaching of Jesus, a person who is simultaneously the fulfillment and incarnation of both virtue leading to human flourishing, and of the Kingdom of God. "He is the complete and virtuous human and the true king." (15)

So a week into this reading discipline, into week 2 of a C25K training regime of reading and praying the Sermon on the Mount, I am being helpfully reminded of what the Sermon is for. Reading for reflection, and such reflection issuing in practice, and practice building towards habits of the heart and virtues of character, and all of this is an intentional commitment to formation of inner life and outward practice, towards the One who first sat down, opened his mouth and uttered these words to disciples. 

That primary point established, there are two crucial words that Pennington takes a chapter each to explore. They are makarios and teleios. The received and common translations are "blessed" and "perfect" respectively - in the next two posts we will consider Pennington's careful reconsideration of both words, which happen to be hinge words in the Gospel of Matthew.

The painting is by David Hockney, The Sermon on the Mount.

The Sermon on the Mount and C25K for the Soul.

Now not everyone knows what C25K stands for. So for the uninitiated, it refers to a training programme to get people from the couch to running 5K in a 9 week, 3 times per week timetable. It starts with a modest alternation between walking and running, so in the first week there's a five minute warm up, then you alternate 60 seconds of running, with 90 seconds of walking, for a total of 20 minutes. Each week the effort increases in small increments until by week 9 a 5 minute warm up is followed by 30 minutes running. I know a number of folk who have done this, and some of them would never have called themselves runners. The secret is in being realistic, determined, disciplined and sticking with it.

The Sermon on the Mount can also seem to be beyond any sense of realistic achievement. It's even harder than changing from Couch to running 5K in 9 weeks! Turning the other cheek, going a second mile, not being dangerously angry, not worrying about food, clothes, money and the other necessities of life. It all seems a bit beyond most of us. In fact it's an interesting question how often any of us have ever taken time to read the Sermon on the Mount all the way through; or to read all or some of it with any regularity, attentiveness, aspiration, or even intention of allowing it to quality check who we are, and what we are about, and what matters most. Even Christians, perhaps especially Christians, tend to look on the Sermon on the Mount as an Everest scale ideal, something to be aimed at but without any real hopes of achievement, an inaccessible mountain, shrouded in mist and mystery, both inviting and forbidding.

I wonder what might happen if the C25K principle was applied to the Sermon on the Mount. Might it feel like a kind of aerobic exercise for the heart, soul, conscience, and mind? Supposing the Sermon was to be read every other day for 9 weeks. The first week read only a few verses, think about them, read a few more, maybe take 5 minutes to write down what's important, and a minute or two to pray. By week 3 we are starting to get the hang of this, and ready to ask what has any of this got to do with us, who we are, how we act, what we think?

Six weeks in and we are reading the whole Sermon on the Mount now, every other day. The words are familiar, the rhythm of the sentences is comfortable, but the content and the meaning is beginning to register. This isn't a game, or a mere exercise in self-development. This is starting to develop intellectual muscle, moral stamina, and our mood is now interrogative as questions clarify, and we are examined. Next our mood becomes indicative as we see exactly what these disruptively creative texts are saying to us, and begin to realise climbing this mountain will change us forever.

But finally as we reach week 9 and beyond, the text takes control and we hear a quite different tone, mood and spirit. It is the imperative. These are the commands of the King for those who seek the Kingdom of God and his righteousness. These are the promises to those who are Blessed. These are the invitations and the warnings, the prayers and the promises, the desires and the disciplines of those who are called to be disciples and who say they will follow. 

So for the next 9 weeks I'm going to do this. The C25K training programme adapted to learning to walk in the ways of the Sermon on the Mount. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, time set apart to read and pause, read and think, read and pray, read and write, and to allow these texts to take effect on my inner climate. Alongside careful and regular reading of the text, I'll work through Pennington's The Sermon on the Mount and Human Flourishing. I'll post here and share whatever comes out of this. Of course it will be very particular to me, specific to my circumstances and inner responses, and in that sense subjective and personal - but why not? Goodness! All over Facebook good folk post their progress in C25K. My own reporting and writing here won't be about progress but insight, not about personal achievement so much as making time and space for transformative texts to do their work, and being available to the grace that comes with the demand.

I have always been impressed, and made to think harder, by Jesus words, "Take my yoke upon you and learn of me." The burden of obedience, the discipline of listening, the freedom of being constrained to purpose and guided by the Voice of the one who speaks the wisdom of God. In these words of the Sermon on the Mount, I hear what Joachim Jeremias called the "ipsissima vox" of Jesus, the very voice, the essential tone, the unmistakably particular voice of Jesus.

On Not Censoring or Silencing Those Who Think Differently - They Might Be Prophets.

I remember, in the years before Amazon and one click book-buying, ordering a book on Micah from a theologically conservative bookshop. It was local and I wanted to support it.

There was some breathing in through teeth, and shaking of the head, and I was asked if I really wanted to have a book by that particular publisher, and that even more particular writer.

The inward hissing breath and the melancholic headshake reminded me of the dodgy car mechanic preparing to deliver bad news about the repair estimate for that hard to trace rattle that only happened going round a corner.

"Yes", I said. "Is there a problem?" I asked mildly, despite being mildly irritated.

"Well we don't ususally order from them, but if you're sure,", spoken with the heavy pastoral concern of a parent anxious not to curb the child's development, or expose them to too much risk, and so heavily hinting at what would be the wise choice.

A week or two later I had a phone call that my book had arrived. When I went to collect it my pastorally burdened bookseller, suggested another title I might want to buy to counteract the potential hazards of reading this slippery slope, liberal taking liberty with the text stuff. I declined!

The book I ordered was Micah the Prophet, by Hans Walter Wolff. Yes indeed, a first class critical scholar, whose whole academic life was immersed in the Hebrew Bible, and whose critical commentaries on the prophets are amongst the intellectual high points of historical and form criticism. But the thing about this particular volume was, it is a potent exposition of what it sounds like when the prophet Micah is allowed to speak into the chaos, uncertainties, moral confusions and economic realities of each age and every age, and in particular our own age.

Out of deep scholarly study, and the intellectual wrestling required to listen to a text with the whole self, Wolff wrote a book aimed at addressing what he called the cul-de-sacs of our ailing culture, grasping and unjust, oppressive and extravagant, delusional of its own longevity and careless to the point of dismissive of the fundamentals that are the foundations of healthy human community. The last part of the book is three evenings of Bible Study on Micah, conducted in 1977, the year of Baader-Meinhoff threats, atrocities and on October 18th suicides in Stammheim Prison. This is how to do Bible Study - text in hand, television on, the words of the prophet competing with the news announcer, the first speaking words of life and words of judgement, the second struggling to speak such hard to live by words as mercy, justice and humble compassion.

I have a lot of books. Amongst them, books which have significance and value beyond the price paid for them. Wolff's theological and ethical exposition of Micah has been an important companion on the way when I have needed conversation with someone who loved and soaked in the text of the Hebrew Prophets. Immersion in those great oracles of "Thus saith the Lord..." is one of the required antidotes in our own age when mercy, justice and compassion and walking humbly are absent from the political lexicon, and from many a preacher's thesaurus of frequently used words.

The Sermon on the Mount. Words Redolent of Risk and New Possibility.

When I left College in 1976 and settled in pastoral ministry, I had to decide what I would do for my probationary studies. Quite rightly, the denominational policy was to encourage lifelong learning, and for the first three years there were set assignments ranging from book reviews to a couple of essays. I've never needed much encouragement to read, study and write. It is one of the perils of being a minister that there are so many words to read, write and speak. I guess the skill is in learning to read in the right places, to write well, and to speak only what's worth other people's trouble to hear.

Early on in my probationary studies, I decided I was going to make my major project a study of the Sermon on the Mount. I still have the typewritten manuscript; a long study of the background and structure, and a verse by verse exegesis using several standard commentaries and monographs. That study, over those years, shaped my approach to the Bible for the rest of my life. I have retained an interest in the Sermon on the Mount, exploring the history of its interpretation, being both inspired and perplexed about how it applies to personal, social and community life. I've tried too, to participate in the ongoing exegetical mining operation that is essential when excavating truth that is so deep, radical and transformative.

Study of the text and its background is one thing; living it as the blueprint of the Kingdom of God is something else again. Knowing the text thoroughly can only ever be the first stage in a transformational encounter with a text that today, as much as ever, cuts across some of the most unquestioned and life-shaping values of our culture. So I was keen to get my hands on the most recent exposition: The Sermon on the Mount and Human Flourishing, by Jonathan Pennington.

That a text so old and counter cultural, should have contemporary purchase on how we live; that a vision of life so inimical of late globalised capitalism and consumer driven materialism, might be the salvation of all of us in a world exploited to exhaustion; that words that sound like a manifesto for the Naive and Otherworldly Party, might instead be the words of hard wisdom, and tough talking, and direction-changing discipline we all need to hear, and heed. That this might be so.

That these might each be a possibility; lives of counter cultural persuasiveness lived as intentional critique and compassionate gift; lifestyles that nurture and nourish our world rather than rip up and tear apart the very fabric of our planetary home; that words, ideas and actions might spring from life giving principles and visions of humane community, and begin to heal divisions, cure our propensity to conflict, teach us again the ways of trust, compassion and hope; that all this is possible is part of the burden and the blessing, the risk and the promise, of the Sermon on the Mount.

Make no mistake. These are words of life, and their negation is perilous.

When Jesus says "Blessed" he speaks a word redolent of risk and new possibility.

When Jesus says, "You have heard that it was said...but I say unto you" he is challenging every status quo we've ever stood on.

When Jesus says, "Consider the birds...look at the flowers...do not be anxious" he contradicts the most powerful drives of our money obsessed, image addicted, and deliberately discontented culture.

And when Jesus warns about the intentional foolishness of building our lives on sand, we go ahead anyway, because the waves will crash on someone else's shore.

So I'm back into the Sermon on the Mount. Over the next while I'll post on Pennington's book, and his take on one of the most destabilising texts our complacent culture can encounter. But that encounter will only happen when there are communities for whom those words of Jesus are embraced as the risky possibility and the counter-cultural critique that is the Kingdom of God.