Do not be afraid!

I was asked the other day what was I afraid of. Now, I hate this sort of question partly because it is usually asked with a serious, pondering tone and partly because it is a matter of degrees. I might be afraid that the coffee won’t be strong enough; I might be afraid of walking down an ill-lit street; I might be afraid of illness, abandonment and death. It might also be about the deep, nameless fear that every human being will touch on at some stage of his or her life.

Of course, the other thing that annoys me about this question is that once I have named some fears (these days I usually lie) the questioner will set about either pitying me or trying to fix me up.

There is a human perfectionism around that sees fear and anxiety as ‘faults’, or as something to be brought to analysis. There is an unspoken sense that to be afraid is to be less than perfect. I am not talking about phobias or illness, I am talking about the normal fears that every human being experiences. The shape of one’s fear changes over time. I can remember being afraid on my first day at school and that paled into insignificance as I launched into my first job interview.

Jesus knew better. We know he experienced fear as he entered into his passion – fear so terrible he sweated blood. The reality is, fear and anxiety are normal human emotions. In fact without fear we may have no sense of danger to ourselves or others, whether that danger be physical, emotional or spiritual. Our fears may be founded or unfounded but whatever their source, fear should be respected as a warning and accepted as part of life.

Fear in fact, is a gateway to trust.

Whatever the cause of our fearfulness, when turned inward to ourselves it becomes paralysing and destructive. However, in taking the fear into the heart of God we find a way to listen to it, transform it, allow God to give us understanding, perspective and peace. To see as God sees.

When Jesus suffered fear in Gethsemane, God sent an angel to comfort him. I wonder what the angel said. Was it, “There, there, it will be all right”? Was it an offer of psychoanalysis? Was it, “Be a man!”? Perhaps the ‘comfort’ was the reminder that God is within every moment bringing forth life whether we feel God’s presence or not.

In our fears, no matter how small or how paralysing and terrifying, the angel of comfort is present strengthening us, leading us to abandon ourselves into the arms of God in blind, loving trust. And when we take our fear and fearfulness into God we grow in maturity and strength. Strength is not about having no fear, rather the strength of faith is to look at the fear while trustingly holding God’s hand.

The great greeting of Jesus and the early church is “Do not be afraid”. It is echoed in the Eucharistic liturgy – “…free from fear and safe from all anxiety we await with joyful hope the coming of our saviour Jesus Christ”.

It is the greeting of life and active hope. It asks for trust. It is a greeting weighted with the Resurrection. It is not trivial. It is the great cry of trust and hope in the God of the Risen Jesus. It is also an affirmation that our human weaknesses, fears and follies can be taken into the heart of God and washed is tenderness and hope.

When I was a small child I played a game with my father. He would stand me on the edge of the table and then step away. He would say, “Jump and I’ll catch you.” Amid much giggling, hesitancy and fear (Will he catch me this time?) I would leap off the table and into his arms. He would always catch me and amid much laughter, I would throw my arms around his neck.

Why should God be any different?

Easter

A friend has taken my last two entries and done creative things with them. Beautiful.

http://www.rhassociates.com.au/Easter_2008/goodfriday.htm

http://www.rhassociates.com.au/Easter_2008/eastersunday.htm

Easter Sunday - "Do not be afraid"

Easter Sunday – “Do not be afraid”

Filled with awe and great joy the women came quickly away from the tomb and ran to tell his disciples. (Mt 28)

The women mourned. They went to the tomb of Jesus early in the morning. Who knows what brought them there? Perhaps the came simply to be close to the body of their beloved rabbi just as we hold on to articles that evoke memories of those we love who have died.

What happened on that morning can only be described in imagery of other visitations of angels in the Jewish scriptures. Whatever biblical analysis makes of the images in the Resurrection accounts, one thing remains – that early group of disciples tried to explain something utterly strange. This was no ghostly encounter. This was real.

Like good Jews they turned to their Scriptures to try to explain their meeting with Jesus, now Risen and vibrant with a life so strange and yet familiar that it changed them forever. The threads through the different Gospel accounts are those of mystery and familiarity; material but different (Thomas, put your fingers in my wounds); intimacy and distance; joy, awe, surprise. This person was the Jesus the knew yet there is something ‘more’ to him now. They rejoice and are in awe.

What happened at the Resurrection of Jesus? The experience of the disciples is that God had raised him to a totally new life. All that made him who he was is now alive in God. In a sense, all theology since then has been, and continues to be an attempt to understand this moment in history. It took the believing community time to articulate that Jesus was so fully human that indeed he was God, it took time for the believing community to understand that because of Jesus divisions of privilege don’t matter (well, perhaps we are still trying to learn that one). Theology, all words will always fall short when trying to understand this moment of inbreaking of God. But we must try.

I am reminded of J.R.R. Tolkien’s words to C.S. Lewis who was undergoing a faith crisis. Tolkien said that it was a lack of imagination rather than a lack of faith that was the problem. I think that applies when we try to understand what happened in this moment of Resurrection.

Jesus’ Resurrection was not only something that happened to him. It also happened to those followers. They were changed and their change continues to change us today. The intuition of those early disciples was that he was now abidingly with them in a way never before experienced. That he was with them in such a way that he was in them and they were in him. This is not some quasi-identification but something more profound.

I think that one of the most consistent and profound intuitions of humankind is that we are connected to each other and to all creation in a way that is beyond the functional and superficial. Societies that have suppressed this intuition and called it ‘primitive’ become destructive, as we are learning to our cost. Even the early concept of human and then animal sacrifice is founded on this intuition that one is able to represent the many because we are connected in a profound way. The theology of vicarious suffering and the Hebrew Go’el who redeemed one enslaved are grounded in this web of creation.

The Resurrection of Jesus must not be seen then as God’s reward to him after a job well done. God raised Jesus as the first fruits of the healed and redeemed humanity, and all creation. In the risen human body of Jesus that web of life is taken to a new moment. Jesus is now in creation with an intensity and intentionality that we only previously knew darkly. Now, because of this he is in us and we in him we are connected to each other in a manner that is both material and spiritual and real.

If this is so, what we celebrate today is a reality that is sometimes hard to imagine, yet we believe. However the bond between Jesus risen and we who share that life means that we continue, in him, the life of forgiveness, compassion and making visible by our lives what those women saw on that first day of the week.

We share in the great awe and joy of the women at the tomb as we celebrate with all creation and make visible the new life that pulses through all creation.

So, the Resurrection greeting, “Do not be afraid”.

“Do not be afraid – of this Risen life.”

Good Friday "...and he breathed forth his spirit'

Good Friday – ‘…. and he breathed forth his spirit’

Today we celebrate the crucifixion of Jesus. We are able to do this because we know he rose from the dead.

However, we need to step back a little and remember that Jesus died, really, absolutely died. He did not appear to die. He did not go into his trial, torture and execution with the thought ‘It will all be o.k. because I will rise again’.

Jesus died.

He died just as truly as every living being died and will die.

We must not forget this.

If we forget this, then his whole life and his Rising will be gutted of its power and deep meaning.

Neither must we allow our knowledge of his Rising let us stray from the fact that he did what we will all do – he died.

Think of Jesus: a man in his prime, abounding in vitality, seized by his calling, afire with God, strong in love, passionate and tender. Everything to live for. Jesus was not someone with a death wish. The gospels tell us that he would leave a place because of death threats such as happened at Nazareth when the townsfolk wanted to harm him.

Jesus would have known that powerful people wanted him silenced. His own predictions of the passion, while partly the work of the evangelists, seem to me to be grounded in Jesus own sense that this is how his life and ministry may end.

When the final betrayal came, there was something more important for Jesus than saving his own life. That was the consistency of his conduct with the truth of God that he embodied. He was faithful.

Jesus’ attitude to his death was no philosophically detached resignation. He grieved for his impending death; he grieved for those he would leave; he grieved that people did not understand. He begged God to relieve him of this…. this ending. In the end he went to betrayal, incarceration, torture and death in the darkness of faith that holds on when all outward signs have gone, when everything appears lost.

As we will all do one day he surrendered himself to the final detachment – he surrendered all who he was, all he had done, all he loved into the hands of God.

His life dimmed, went out.

Jesus died.

To the world, it was an end. To be rejoiced over or to be grieved over depending on which ‘side’ you were on.

The friends and family who had abided with him, the women who had watched with him and an emboldened secret follower did what was necessary for decent burial. Others fled in bewildered fear.

We know, and they were to know soon that something happened, something so outside their experience that we have been trying to understand it ever since. To say that Jesus rose from the dead does not in any way take away the very human and real fact that he died.

Jesus remains dead.

He lives now, not as we do, but in a completely new reality, more intimate with and in creation than the limitations of a human body could previously allow. If Jesus’ human body is not alive in this new dimension, then nothing about him is.

Theologies that imagine the Resurrection as a collective experience of the disciples or as ‘inspiration’ or in some way diminish the physical reality of Jesus Risen, to me miss the whole point. Jesus, in the passing over of his death has drawn together creation that poured forth from the heart of God at the very beginning, and carried it with him into the heart of God. There is now something new within creation. And that is Jesus, more intimate, more present, more subversive.

In the end, our words fall short of the mystery of Jesus’ death and rising. I think it is no coincidence that one of the most frequent images associated with Jesus’ life is the pietà. This image resonates with our human experience of grief and loss. We mourn, we grieve, we remember, we do all those loving human things that cherish the person who had died.

So today, with the liturgy let us gaze upon Jesus. He had to die, as we all will die. Let us not diminish the enormity of this. Yet it is precisely here, in Jesus final act of surrender, that God is most fully shown as unfailingly faithful, life giving, cherishing creation.

As Jesus' death was consistent with his living, so will our death be.

We know now that death is not the end.

Australia Day – A Festival of Identity

Well, today we celebrate a festival – Australia Day. In my last entry I wrote that

Festival times are periods that take us away from the normal passing of time. To celebrate well means that we take time from our ‘useful’ activities. We mark the time in different ways – with food, dress, gifts, songs, symbols, with friends and family and with worship.

Today, many Australians at home or abroad will celebrate this festival. What in fact, do we celebrate? For days even weeks, in the lead up to today the media has talked/written of cockroach races, barbecues, thong-throwing competitions, beach parties – all the activities that are supposed to epitomise Australians. Pity about those Aussies who don’t identify with any of those activities.

On the more serious side we have the Australia Day awards and citizenship ceremonies.

With the Australia Day awards we recognise Australians who have made outstanding contributions to society. Theoretically they are not political and theoretically they celebrate commitments to society over and above what we accept as the norm. Perhaps we don’t always get it right and it is these times that make me really think about what is, or should be the criteria for such awards.

I wonder what God’s Australia Day awards would be. What criteria would God use? If the acknowledged saints and martyrs are anything to go by, some of the criteria would be very different. Some of God’s gongs may go to the oddest people if the criteria of the Gospels are any indication. Take Matthew 5-8, the ‘Sermon on the Mount’: Jesus tells his listeners that those who are poor in spirit are blessed, those who are sorrowing, those who hunger and thirst for holiness, those who show mercy, the single-hearted and the peacemakers. Blessed too are those persecuted, ridiculed and insulted for Jesus’ sake. Jesus asks us to forgive, to be utterly faithful sexually, to keep to our word, to relinquish revenge, in fact to love our enemies, to pray with filial trust, to know where our true riches lie, to be satisfied with enough, to ‘Treat others as you would have them treat you’. To respect others as my very self.

Finally, lest all this sounds a little like the 60’s hippy ‘all you need is love’ stuff, Jesus tells us to watch out for the liars, to develop an inbuilt charlatan-detector. ‘Be on your guard against false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but underneath are wolves on the prowl.’ This is tough stuff. It gets even tougher. Those who will receive God’s gong will be those who take these ‘criteria’ and strive to live them out day by day by day. These are the ones Jesus calls wise.

Now, I have no doubt that many who have received the civil awards today have lived out many of these qualities. However, there are many people who will never be recognised because they discomfort us or their service is unobtrusive or their triumphs are inner – the triumph of survival over destruction, of sanity over insanity. We pray to see the world as God sees it – not as we have learned to see it. I think we will be in for a very big surprise when we see God face to face.

This brings me to Citizenship. Today we welcome people into full participation in the life of our country and they accept the rights and obligations that go with that. Culture is an ever changing thing and each new citizen will bring something new to Australian culture and in turn Australian society will change them. Our citizenship is one of God’s gifts to us. It is part of our identity and the shape of our place in humankind.

It interests (and irks) me that in the press we (Aussies) are regularly defined as ‘taxpayers’. In doing this, the economy has become the new criteria for defining people. The economy has been exalted to almost religious status and people are really only of importance when we contribute to the economy and are not a drain on the economy. Well the economy is important, but it is important in a context of what it means to be a citizen, of how we participate in our society, of what sort of a society we want to live in.

This brings me back to the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus tells us here what is asked of us as ‘Citizens of Heaven’. I don’t think it is really too different from the sort of society in which we would like to have citizenship. Forgiveness, compassion, generosity, honesty are probably good qualities for a society, however they don’t just happen. We make them happen. Each one of us.

The early Spanish explorers called this part of the globe ‘The Great South Land of the Holy Spirit’. As Australians we are a facet of God’s face in creation. So, today, let’s us celebrate, rejoice, repent and give thanks for Australia – our land and our people. Citizens.

On Putting Away the Christmas Decorations

Today we celebrate the Baptism of Jesus, a feast that marks the end of the Christmas liturgical season.

Each year at some mid point in Advent I put up the Christmas decorations and bring in the potted Daintree pine (which has very courteously, not died off on me during the year). It is always a joyful ritual for me as it marks the heightening expectation of Advent and another moment in the unfolding of the liturgical season of Advent-Christmas-Epiphany-Baptism – the time of festival. It also marks the time to honour friends God gives me.

My Christmas decorations usually come down after Epiphany. In the past, taking down the decorations seemed to be a chore. Take them down, tidy the house, back to normal. Putting away the decorations was something that had to be done in order to move onto the next part of the year.

However, this year as I began the task, suddenly my attitude was transformed. In that instant the task became a contemplative moment opening out to understanding and insight. I carefully, even reverently cleaned each star, bauble, rope, angel and spangle, wrapped each one in tissue and packed it away. It became a ritual, a transition moment that took me into the meaning not only of the Christmas festival, but of all Festivals.

The truth is, that this year as Christmas drew near I did not ‘feel’ festive. Several sad and anxious things had happened to me prior to Christmas and I was feeling out of step with the joyful anticipation expressed in the liturgy and in the social life around me. Yet as I brought these experiences and feelings to the feast, I saw that the great festivals take us beyond ourselves. One of the functions of Festival is to give our ordinary lives a context of meaning.

In the liturgy of the Christmas cycle, the extraordinary poetry of the Scripture juxtaposed an image of God who makes the crooked ways straight and moves mountains with that of a child born to an insignificant family in the vast Roman empire. God and humanity meet; God and humanity are revealed.

If the manner of this birth tells us anything, it is that God works within the human. That our human contradictions, our deaths and births, our coping with disorder, our lack of mathematical certainty about our lives, our giftedness and our striving for goodness are the very place that Incarnation happens for us. We collaborate with God and God conspires with us.

Glory in the Ordinary, the Every Day. However for us to live this out in ever greater honesty, we need Festival.

Festival times are periods that take us away from the normal passing of time. To celebrate well means that we take time from our ‘useful’ activities. We mark the time in different ways – with food, dress, gifts, songs, symbols, with friends and family and with worship. No matter how materialistic a culture becomes, how distorted our sense of celebration becomes, the need to mark times that are special and different will always be part of our human hearts. These times help us understand who we are and importantly, who we can be.

This holds for both the great religious festivals as well as our national festivals and our personal celebrations. For example, Australia Day helps us remember and celebrate what makes us all Australians – our privileges and responsibilities. Birthdays, anniversaries, weddings take our individual stories and place them in the midst of family and community. No matter how personal our festival may be, it will always evoke a wider context. Festival, in its deepest sense evokes the sacred in our midst and reminds us that we are always greater than we think we are.

However, we are not meant to live in festival mode every day. It is impossible. We must return to the ordinary, the every day. If we have allowed the festival to transform our minds, hearts, relationships and deeds, then the every day becomes more profound. It is here that we live out the conversions, insights and joys that were given during the festival. It is in the ordinary that we experience the sacred as abiding.

Conversely, without commitment to the ordinary, that every day commitment to love which is sometimes humdrum, sometimes demanding, sometimes delightful, Festival time that allows for that contemplative, joyful affirmation of our deepest meaning will never be heartfelt.

The commercialisation of Christmas in our culture tends to obliterate the process of Festival, let alone the meaning of the celebration. For many of us, the lead up to Christmas as well as the celebration itself is busy and stressful for one reason or another. However, if this time of Festival is to work its unique power, we have to make choices about how we celebrate – what is of value to us, the quality of our celebration and relationships etc. etc.

My Christmas decorations remind me of this. That we need times of festival to celebrate God who is abidingly and passionately in our lives, to gaze upon this mystery in order to take it into ourselves, to understand with mind and heart and to be transformed into God bearers.

In the end, it did not matter that I did not ‘feel’ festive. What mattered was that the truth of what was happening around and to me was drawn into the mystery of this festival and so became filled with meaning, acceptance and hope which I carry into my every day.

So, as I put away the Christmas decorations for another year, they will lie hidden in a cupboard. They must be put away – just as the festival must end in time – in order for the festival of the heart, those hidden treasures of love, commitment, generosity, forgiveness, transformation and insight to be nurtured and acted upon in the world of the Ordinary where we have the gift of bringing Jesus to birth by our acts.