Reflection for Faure Requiem Service

As I read the prayers and readings for the service tonight, interspersed with translations of the words the choir is singing in the Requiem, two themes strike me. The first is the here and now dimension of eternal life, and the second is the interplay of darkness and light in the experience of grief and loss.

On the back of our service sheets is a quote from Henri Nouwen: “Eternal life is life in and with God and God is where I am, here and now.” Jurgen Moltmann wrote of the “here and now” aspect of eternal life, describing God’s time as non-linear, always here and now, and therefore intersecting at every point with our linear experience of time. Let’s look through the readings in our liturgy for quotes that illuminate an understanding of eternal life in immediate presence with us. Karl Rahner speaks of a calm that we experience when a period of mourning is done. He describes that calm as “a sign that part of us lives now already in eternity, with our loved living dead.” In the passage quoted in the liturgy tonight, Moltmann says that we sense the presence of the dead “whenever we become aware that we are living ‘before God’, and whenever we sense their presence, we feel the divine ‘wide space’ which binds us together.” After my father died, we all had a sense of his closeness to us, almost as if we could reach across a thin place into that other life. His quirky humour somehow accompanied us in our grieving, paradoxical and comforting. Moltmann speaks of the dead as de-restricted, and I believe we felt my father’s joyous sense of release into that wide space, in which the illness that had restricted him was gone and he was free.

Is there anything in our Scripture which supports the intuitive awareness of eternal life here and now expressed by Rahner and Moltmann, these two great theologians of the twentieth century? In the passage from Revelation 21, the mystical vision is of a new heaven and a new earth that seem to replace rather than intersect with the present reality, wiping away all death, grief and pain. However, the voice from the throne speaks in the present tense: “God’s home is now with his people,” and “I am making everything new.” In our gospel passage, we have the contrast between Martha’s understanding that her brother “will rise again in the resurrection on the last day”, contrasted with Jesus’ statement in the present, “I am the resurrection and the life.” The revival of Lazarus and his release from the tomb is a sign of the present availability of new life through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

Yet in the death and revival of Lazarus, the death and resurrection of Jesus, we see the stark interplay of darkness and light in the experience of loss and grief. Jesus who raised Lazarus from the dead had yet to go through his own horrific suffering and death. Later in the story, when Jesus saw Mary and the gathered people weeping, Jesus is disturbed in spirit and deeply moved, and he begins to weep. Were the tears for his own grief that Lazarus has died, or does he weep at the reproach that both Mary and Martha express: “If you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Perhaps he cries in empathy with those who are grieving, or does he weep in part for what he knows he must undergo and what it will do to all associated with him? Jesus’ tears were perhaps for all that and more. In returning to Bethany, Jesus knew he was placing himself within range of those who wanted to kill him. When that decision was made, Thomas said to the other disciples: “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” Even the new life given to Lazarus was threatened, as we see in the next chapter, where the chief priests are plotting to put Lazarus to death as well. Life, death and resurrection are intrinsically interconnected. Loss and grief often seem like the end of life as we know it, yet out of the darkness and pain of mourning, transformation can emerge. I have experienced that personally, when out of my grief for my father’s death, a call to ministry emerged. In the experience of my father’s death, I had the sense of having said “Yes” to God about something, without clearly knowing what, a bit like signing a blank cheque.

This intermingling of darkness and light, of death and loss and transformation is what I see reflected in the imagery of the requiem. There we hear of darkness and the black abyss, fire and judgement on the one hand, and mercy, eternal rest, and perpetual light on the other. Although I can’t relate to the medieval theology of the requiem words, I can relate to these contrasting states as metaphors for our experience as we go through times of tragedy, death, loss, pain and misery. The requiem words are satisfying to sing and hear in their dramatic darkness – in evoking the abyss and the black pit, they represent the depression and disorientation we feel when the bottom drops out of our world. There is something cathartic in the words and music of turmoil, judgement and dread that may help release the anger, self-blame, and fear of our mortality that sometimes accompany grief. Yet the healing power of the music always draws us towards the promise of light, mercy and transformation.

Do you want acceptance or wholeness?

Sermon by Andy Wurm, 18^th Sunday after Pentecost, 13^th October 2019

A woman named Beverly was nearing the completion of her PhD, but the stress of it was taking its toll. Eventually, she wound up in hospital, with her heart racing at over two hundred beats per minute. After all sorts of tests and treatments, a doctor told her she was very sick and could die, but there was every chance they could get her through this and she would be okay again. With that reassuring news, he left her alone in her room. Beverley began to pray, but anxiety took over, until the night shift of the nursing staff came into the room. Here are Beverley’s words, describing what happened:

In the middle of my emotional tsunami, I see a beautiful and peace-bearing black nurse enter my room. After a brief greeting, she tells me that sleeping will help my heart and asks if I think I can sleep. I laughingly respond “that’s easy for you to say”. With great empathy and a gentle voice, she responds “you are in a serious condition. I understand. But a good sleep will help you get stronger”. Then this total stranger said something and did something that I believe changed my life. “I will take my chair and sit here in the doorway. I will be able to hear every change, and I will monitor your condition. I am with you”. Desperately, I search her compassionate eyes. Finally, her eyes tell me I can believe her, and I fall fast asleep.

The next morning somewhere around 5 am, I awake. Through my eyelashes, I am able to see a faint vision that is forever etched in my mind. In the dim lights of the Cardiac Care Unit, I glimpse this warm, compassionate angel of mercy, sitting in a hard-back chair in the doorway of my life and death. The sight of this total stranger sitting with me through this dark night of my soul moves me to uncontrollable tears and profound gratitude. “It looks like we made it” I say in gratitude. “Indeed we did”, she cheerfully responds.

Weeks later, Beverley returned to the hospital with a gift for the nurse who sat with her through that night, giving her faith and courage. Arriving at the nurses’ station, she asked for the name of the nurse who sat with her, but according to her record, no nurse stayed with her through the night. She described the nurse, only to be told there is no nurse fitting that description who works on that ward.

For Beverley, this “presence” of the black nurse had been an experience of liminality. Liminality involves being in an ‘in-between’ space or circumstance. In fact, the word liminality comes from the Latin word for “doorway” or “threshold”. It can be the point at which we’re in the midst of a transition into something new. For the ancient Greeks, the god Hermes was a symbolic means of representing these in-between “spaces”. The liminal might last the whole period of adolescence, or the microsecond it takes for two people to decide if they’re going to kiss each other. For Beverley, the emotional turmoil accompanying her illness was a liminal space, which enabled her to go into her psychological and spiritual depths in a very creative manner, and that then awakened her once more to the ever-caring presence of God in her life. That was the most profound healing for her out of the whole experience. [in Beverley Musgrave & Neil McGettigan (eds.) Spiritual & Psychological Aspects of Illness]

Beverley is like the Samaritan in today’s gospel story, who came back to thank Jesus after he was healed of his leprosy. Ten people were made clean, but only the Samaritan came back to Jesus. The other nine went to show themselves to the priests, because the priests would declare them clean and so they would be allowed back into the community once more. That’s nice, but it’s a limited blessing, for two reasons – (1) it’s a return to where they were before, so they’re only back to their old life, and (2) it’s a conditional acceptance back into society – they’re only allowed back in, they only have their place in the world again, because the priests have granted it to them. And what is given like that, can always be taken away, for the same reason, or for other reasons. In contrast, the Samaritan goes in a new direction – he doesn’t return to his previous life, he goes to Jesus – to the One who gives him a place in the world that has no conditions placed upon it, and will never be taken away. In other words, the nine whose return to society was granted by the temple priests are accepted (i.e. loved) conditionally, whereas the Samaritan is accepted (i.e. loved) unconditionally. The lives of the nine are entwined in and bound by the conditional acceptance which society places on its members. The life of the Samaritan is different. He can make of it what he wants – for Jesus says ‘go on your way’ – your way, not the priest’s way, or the way society dictates, but the way God made you to go – the person God made you to be. That is for him to determine.

In Luke’s gospel, leprosy is a metaphor for the fallen human condition – in which we are lost and need healing. Notice the nine who went to show themselves to the priest were not made well, which means healed, they were made clean, which means acceptable in society. That is the difference we are being directed to here, that we might be able to discern, not how to be restored to fitting in to how the world says we should live and what the world says we should be, but how we can receive back our humanity.

Our fallen humanity can take many forms. Maybe we are eaten up with resentment or consumed with complaining. Maybe we’re bitter with dissatisfaction and being overly critical. Maybe we are gnawed by self-doubt, shame or insecurity. Maybe our life is undermined because we are riddled with worry and fear. Maybe our mind is distorted by pride, obsessed with being in charge and in control. A simple “litmus test” of our spiritual wellbeing is to ask ourselves how we feel when we are criticised. If it bothers us, then it shows we don’t fully accept God’s love for us, which means we are not really living by grace, but maintaining our independence from God. Saying God loves us may sound like a warm fuzzy, pious idea, but it is actually makes all the difference. If God loves us, if God approves of us, if our worth comes from God, then we don’t need it from anyone or anything else. We are free from any need for approval. Imagine yourself at a large public gathering that is being televised worldwide. Someone goes to the microphone and proceeds to tear your reputation to shreds, not by telling lies about you, but by revealing the truth about your weaknesses. If you really accepted God’s love for you, would you not listen with interest and possibly even thank the critic for his contribution to the truth, with no feeling of hurt or anger at all. That’s probably too much to expect, but it does raise the question of who or what we let decide our worth?

When we have lost something of our humanity, or our humanity is broken, the truth about ourselves is revealed in the way we react to events which threaten what we consider to be the core of our being, or what we perceive to be our ultimate security. (Gerard Hughes) So we’re like the ten lepers in the gospel story, and we have moments when we can choose to be made clean or whole (healed) because the healing God is always coming to us in some form or another. Whether we choose merely to go back to what we were before, fitting in to what we’re told to be and to do, or whether we choose the freedom of becoming more and giving more, depends on how much we let our “leprosy”, that is, our lostness or brokenness, reveal the truth about ourselves to ourselves, and thus show us what we really need. So Beverley allowed her obsession with achieving her PhD that drove her heart into overdrive to reveal how pride-driven she had become, and that allowed her to see how much she needed to let herself be loved by God, in whose embrace she was free from the burden of achieving perfection. The deepest healing is letting God love us, which enables us to be most human.

Feast of St Francis of Assisi, 2019

Elise Silson OFS, BA (Theol), BA Hons (English Studies), PhD candidate

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Friday was the Feast of Saint Francis of Assisi, and as a member of the third order of Saint Francis, I asked Andy if it would be okay for me to preach this weekend. I usually worship at Crafers.

The fourth of October is also the anniversary of the death of Saint Teresa of Avila… Both Saint Francis and Saint Teresa have been very important teachers for me.

Saint Francis is probably most widely known as the patron saint of animals and the environment, but he is also the patron of the poor, lepers, and the forgotten. To me, he is the saint of invisible things; things that the world proclaims to be without value: yes, he is the saint of creation, of birds and pretty things, but he is also the patron saint of biting bugs and slums. He is saint of the substrate of tiny, broken fragments that has settled as a layer below the rest of society, saint of those crushed by the weight of it, unable to get up on their own. Francis is the patron saint of the unwashed difficulty of human existence. He met Christ in this space. I love that our animals, and nature around us, are so often our refuge and comfort when we are most downtrodden: there is a real unity to Franciscan spirituality, within, this.

So, I’ll be speaking about both Saint Francis and Saint Teresa of Avila today.

I recently got back from a trip to New Zealand, where I spoke at an academic conference about my PhD research. My paper was about Teresa of Avila and Thomas Aquinas in George Eliot’s novel, Middlemarch. So I’m speaking today about a cluster of considerations that have impacted me around these historical figures, but I’ll be speaking more out of a sense of personal journey than academic considerations… I’ve learnt over time that it’s considerate to give people a choice about whether they really want to experience both barrels of academic considerations, especially when it comes to nineteenth century Hegelian theology and histories of religion, power, and politics. You’re welcome.

But anyway, the central consideration for my research paper was Saint Teresa’s teaching about holiness as friendship with God, and how George Eliot contrasts this with Thomas Aquinas’s proclamations. In particular, Aquinas wrote that it is obedience to tradition and reason that define Christian life. Aquinas felt so strongly about this that he also said that the best thing for both heretics and for society, was for those “heretics” to be executed. Heretic is code for people who didn’t submit to tradition and his systematic, hyper-rationalistic statements about God.

So in Middlemarch, Teresa of Avila is an analogue for Dorothea Brooke, and Thomas Aquinas represents her overbearing and alienated husband, Edward Casaubon. What George Eliot doesn’t explicitly point out in Middlemarch, is that historically, Teresa of Avila was subjected to quite extreme treatment from the Spanish Inquisition, and that it was Thomas Aquinas’s theology that was used to justify the Spanish Inquisition.

In Middlemarch, Edward Casaubon is constantly absent; he isolates himself within a whole lot of symbols of scholarly respectability, while Dorothea, his young wife, reflects internally on how she can be a better human, and what is going on in the lives of the people around her, so that she can help them. Which again, is pretty similar to Aquinas and Teresa of Avila, in that Aquinas left a legacy that was pretty markedly on the spritz, while Teresa of Avila encouraged people to know God inside themselves, via the process of also understanding the truth of who they are.

And perhaps this rings a bell, for you. Perhaps you’ve come across people who want to speak over your internal experience of what is right, and good, and sacred, with their own opinions and systems. Perhaps you’ve also done that yourself: perhaps you’ve spoken over others with your own sense of what they should experience of God, and your own sense of what their conclusions about God should be.

Teresa of Avila wrote quite a bit. Her most influential work is The Interior Castle, which describes exactly that. The outer rooms of the castle are the spaces she reached first: the cognitive modes that she employed in order to try to come closer to God. But all of these attempts were really just outer shells; they looked good but they were veneers that didn’t attend to the deep truths of selfhood, for Teresa. But as God called to her, she was able to spend time with the things in herself that she initially thought were separate from God; things that she thought couldn’t be included in where Christ had come to meet her.

Ultimately, she found that there was no part of her self that was not fully loved in Christ, and her accounts of this union with divine love are very beautiful.

Historical accounts say that she really got the attention of the Inquisition when these prayer experiences started causing her to levitate. That’s difficult to evaluate historically, but what definitely happened was that she enabled the nuns of her order and the surrounding communities to understand that they could know, for themselves, the full depth of sacred connection. They didn’t need permission, or scripting, or control.

As this realisation spread, it fundamentally disrupted the Spanish Inquisition as part of the Catholic counter reformation of the sixteenth century. Teresa is now also referred to as Saint Teresa of Spain. Arguably, Middlemarch reignited awareness of her contribution, because within eight years of its publication, there was a very broad popularisation of Teresa of Avila that culminated in her being named a Doctor of the Church in 1970: the first female one, alongside Saint Catherine of Sienna.

My Franciscan journey has had a lot of correlation with the experiences that Teresa of Avila describes, although there hasn’t been any levitation, and I’m not at liberty to comment on the current state of the Inquisition in this context. But there were a whole lot of parts of me that I thought needed to be partitioned off from my experience of God… My interior castle had a bunch of really awkward clutter in the back rooms, and it wasn’t the kind of space where you could bring guests.

But I could hear God calling me, and I asked God to please call more clearly and more loudly so that I could understand where to look for God. What I expected was an escapist solution; a kind of anaesthetic and drawing away and out from me, into another place, where God would be. But instead, God started to call me into those rooms… rooms filled with memories of poverty, and homelessness, and some quite violent experiences. Rooms where I never felt loved, just damaged. Things that I thought it was best to just keep packed up. And it took a long time. And it took some very wise and skilled companions in that process.

When I first met my husband, Michael, things weren’t very good. I had quite severe PTSD. I’d get so startled when he’d sneeze that I’d start shaking and burst into tears. I’m quite attached to my dignity. I didn’t like being this way.

These days, I’m working towards ordination, and on Friday I had the last of nine hours of psych assessments in that process. And on the Feast of Saint Francis, a clinical psychologist sat across from me and told me that their nine hours of rummaging through my interior castle led them to be quite sure that I don’t have PTSD anymore. And this is, indeed, the case.

The Franciscan relevance of this is that the same Christ I meet in my deepest self, also delights to reside in each of us.

Our Old Testament reading and our Psalm today make it very clear that when vulnerable people cry out to God, God hears, and responds. And within that, God asks us to hear and respond, also. This sacred compassion is at the core of us, and we can abide there.

I’d like to finish by returning to our Gospel reading for today:

At that time Jesus said, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, beause you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will. All things have been handed to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him.

Come to me, all you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.’

May our Lord of grace abide with you in your very depths, and may you be at peace in the full awareness that you are fully loved, in your very deepest truth.

And may we, the communion of saints, enfold you in wisdom and gentleness in that deepest truth: the truth that reveals the soothing warmth of holy friendship.

Amen.

Angels as the unseen powers in our lives

Sermon by Andy Wurm, for St. Michael and All Angels, 29^th September 2019

Angels are one of those things that you can get really different reactions to. Some people love them, while others say they’re nonsense. Some people even say believing in things like that is dangerous, because it allows people to give up responsibility for their actions, especially when they say it was some kind of spiritual being that led them to do something. The devil would be the best example of that.

For some people angels can be a way of having the divine present in their life, but in a way that’s just warm and fuzzy, but not necessarily demanding, because you can sort of make what you want of them.

My interest is whether or not Christians can believe in angels in a way that is consistent with the bible, our major beliefs, but also our experience and how we understand the rest of the world. I think we can and that it’s helpful to our faith and enriches our understanding of life. Talk of angels and other spiritual entities can be problematic though, because some Christians give them way more significance than they should. And, as I’ve already alluded to, people have used talk of the devil, for example, to manipulate others, especially through fear. So I reckon a majority of Christians these days, at least in mainline denominations, would see angels as nice figures from the past, but not something they really believe in now.

Having said that though, lots of people have experienced miraculous events in their lives, which they explain an intervention of guardian angels. The problem with believing in the intervention of guardian angels is why they only seem to help on some occasion and not others? And why do they only help particular people and not others? These challenges don’t take way the fact that people have these so-called miraculous encounters or experiences though. My belief is that what happens when people feel they’ve experienced miraculous activity they ascribe to a guardian angel, is that for a moment, they have for some reason, been open to information or connection to a person or place, in a way that goes beyond the usual. Our culture tends see people as individual islands to themselves, so when we are abnormally open to others and better able to sense things between us, it seems supernatural.

Probably the next most popular way people might think of angels is as messengers, and that is what the word literally means in the bible. So is it reasonable for us to believe in angels in that sense? Yes, I think it is. In fact, as we can’t always be perfectly sure whether God is communicating directly or indirectly with us. The angel is a good way of representing that. When you walk in a forest and get a sense of inner calm, is that God giving you that, or it is coming from God through the trees, or through what we might call the spirit of the place? When we use the symbol of an angel in this way, we are doing what the ancients did, i.e. they didn’t invent the idea of angels to explain things they could understand because they weren’t as clever as we are with our modern scientific knowledge, they weren’t even explaining things, they were describing them. They used symbolic figures to represent ‘out there’ what was experienced ‘in here’ – just like Freud spoke about the ego: it’s not something you can hold in your hands, photograph or weigh, but it’s real, in that it corresponds to something real in a person. And acknowledging and taking into account its existence is a helpful. Similarly, the ancients knew that acknowledging and taking into account the influence of angels and other spiritual phenomena, is helpful.

In the Book of Job we’re given a picture of how the ancients thought of angels. Each one of them is

assigned a portfolio of earthly activity to manage. The angels gathered around God’s heavenly throne for staff meetings to report what’s going on in their area of responsibility and were held accountable by God. The Book of Daniel features angels whose portfolios are particular nations. The angel responsible for Persia was called the Angel of Persia, the Angel of Israel was called Michael. This is a symbolic means of connecting earthly things, such as nations, with God. So the angel of a nation is responsible for channelling God’s love to its nation and reminding it what its divinely-given purpose is, while at the same time, the angel represents the nation to God as its character. The angel’s job is to serve God, which means its nations’ job is to serve God. If the nation was self-serving, so too was its angel, which mean it was a fallen angel.

Nations, however, are not the only corporate human bodies or collectives which are in relationship with God. Just like the nations of the world, so too are business corporations, clubs, organisations, churches, schools, states, governments, and so on. Each of them can be considered to have their angel, bearing their character, but also holding their true purpose. So, for example, the true (God-given) purpose a nation exists is to serve its people and contribute to the good of humanity as a whole, however, it may have fallen from its purpose, and become self-serving. In an extreme sense that could involve conquering other nations and plundering their resources and people for itself, or in a less extreme way of just looking after its own interests with little concern for the wellbeing of other nations. Similar things may be said about a company. It may serve only the interests of its shareholders, at the expense of its workers, or the people in whose country it carries out its business. In these cases, their angels need to find their way back to their true purpose.

In our prayer book, during the eucharistic prayer, we pray that we worship ‘with angels and archangels and the whole company of heaven’. In doing so, we symbolically place ourselves around God’s heavenly throne (God doesn’t have a literal heavenly throne) WITH the spiritual representatives of corporate entities. In other words, we gather with the angel of BHP, the angel of McDonalds, the angel of the Department of Human Services, the angel of the Tax Office and so on. Like us, the angels have a calling, a vocation to serve others, to serve the common good. None of us exists to serve ourselves, or serve anything other than God, for that is idolatry. Whenever we fall from our true purpose, the church’s mission is to call us back to it, and the same goes in regard to fallen angels. In other words, the church must call corporate bodies back to their true purpose.

The New Testament is full of concern with how power is exercised in the world, whether it be spiritual, cultural, economic, military, political, religious, psychological and even the sort that physics deals with. The umbrella term for all these forms of power is the Principalities and Powers, or the Powers That Be. Included among them are some of the beings mentioned in the first hymn: dominions, princedoms, powers, angels. They are not beings that float around the place, they are specific, actual forms of power in the world. Think of the power of cultural norms, for example, or the power of law, or the power of economic drivers. These are forms of power that influence our lives in a very real way. Often we feel at their mercy, for example, could anything be done to stop car manufacturing closing down in Australia? Could our governments do anything? Could we do anything, or the unions? The power of market forces, the industrial power of other countries and other forces at work, meant we were powerless. So often we feel powerless and hopeless, because the ‘Powers That Be’, that is the powers, the forces which run the world are so powerful. But remember the Powers That Be, like the angels, which are part of them, exist to serve God and ultimately must be subservient to God. I’d like to finish off with the final word on angels and other spiritual powers, coming from St Paul.

St Paul says ‘I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God’, he is saying that no form of power can separate us from God. So, our culture may pressure us to give up our faith; our church might say you are the wrong gender or sexual persuasion to hold office; our economic system may tell us we only matter if we make lots of money, our moral code might tell us we are worthless if we commit a crime, our fellow citizens might reject us if we hold this or that view about climate change; we may even internalise cultural judgements which tell us we are inferior if we are less abled than others, or not as good looking as the parish priest for example, but NOTHING can separate us from the love of God. Nothing can take that away from us, because every form of power is created and therefore temporary and not as strong as God. No form of power has the authority to tell you whether you matter or not, no form of power has the authority to define your place in the world, in the way that God does, and so you must not listen to them, let them persuade you or lead you. We must not cooperate with them when they try to, and God’s Spirit will help us to do so.

It is important that we acknowledge the existence of angels and all the spiritual powers, because they are always trying to take over from God and run the world, but so are we. They are also good, and often serve God by serving the common good, and so do we.

Holding different cosmologies together

Sermon by Andy Wurm, Cosmos Sunday, Season of Creation, 22^nd September 2019

Today is Cosmos Sunday. The word cosmos comes from the Greek word kosmos, meaning ‘the world’, ‘order’ and ‘harmony’. So it’s more than just considering all there is; it includes a belief that everything kind of holds together as one. Different cosmologies provide different ideas about what the world is. They help us understand the world and possibly find meaning in it, and also can help us decide what matters most.

As a Christian, I look to the cosmology of the Bible, but also to the evolutionary view of science in order to understand the world, work out what matters, what the purpose of my life is, and then how to live. Some people struggle to hold together the world views of the Bible and science, so for the rest of this sermon, I’m going to look at various worldviews or cosmologies, ending with the one that works for me.

I’ll start with scientific materialism, because it’s the prevailing worldview of our society, shaping how we see the world, how we “know” things, and it shapes our values. Scientific materialism is not the same as science, rather, it’s the view that only matter is real, and that only those things which are tangible and can be measured, seen, touched or tasted, are real. It also assumes that scientific method is the only valid means of attaining knowledge. When we find it hard to take spiritual matters seriously, it’s often because of the influence of scientific materialism upon our thinking. Next week we’re celebrating the existence of angels -try fitting that into the scientific-materialistic worldview!

Scientific method has been a great gift to our world. One of its principal means of gaining knowledge is by reducing things down to their constituent parts and analysing those parts in order to grasp the whole, e.g. by dissecting the cell, we know about DNA and that genetic flaws cause diseases. But is the scientific method the only way of attaining knowledge, or even the best way of attaining knowledge? That’s a fairly arrogant assumption. It means, for example, that what a traditional aboriginal person calls “knowledge” can be considered to contain as much knowledge as a nursery rhyme. And yet, those stories have enabled them to live permanently in an environment in which we would only last a couple of days, with our so-called superior knowledge. To believe that knowledge gained through the scientific method is the only real way to understand the world, is like suggesting that all the cultures of the world have merely been part of the journey towards our way of seeing the world. It’s like we’re at the top of an escalator, the pinnacle of intelligence. No wonder western cultures saw no reason to respect other cultures. What could we learn from them?

While the scientific method enables us to learn much about something, does it reveal all there is to know, and all that matters about that entity? The eastern philosophy of Taoism teaches us that often what matters most about something is often what cannot be seen. For example, you cannot see the space in a room, but it makes all the difference if it’s there or not, because if there is no space, it’s not a room, it’s a solid cube. Also, as Christianity has always held, and Quantum physics seems to assert, relationships between things can be more significant than the things in their own right.

Science challenged the church’s claim that the sun revolved around the earth, which reinforced the belief that the world was made for our benefit. Early scientists such as Galileo challenged that view and said that it was actually the earth that rotated around the sun. Developing this knowledge further, science has shown that not only are we not the centre of the world, but we are only a minute presence in the universe. That is a massively different understanding of our place in the scheme of things. Ironically, the discovery that the world doesn’t exist for us alone, has led us to treat it as if it does. At least in the past, people thought the world had value of its own, and it was only with respect to that God-given value, that we could know our place.

In the conflicts between Galileo and the church, the church was reinforcing its power to control the way people thought. But as well as that, it was trying to uphold the value of the intangible. In other words, it is not true that only what can be seen, touched, tasted, and measured, is real. Matter is not the only thing that is real. (Some held the view – and even now also, that other things were at most, real in a secondary sense. That included things such as feelings. They weren’t real in themselves, but were only the product of chemical reactions in the body.) The church saw great dangers in that, and wanted to assert that things such as feelings and love are real. We can’t measure them, but they are just as significant in what makes a human being, as are bones and muscles. The danger of saying that love is not real, is that it removes the greatest impetus for treating others fairly. As a result, we have an economic system that treats people as units to produce things, or to consume things.

Another worldview is the Spiritualistic worldview. This is the opposite of scientific materialism. In this worldview, only the spiritual is considered real. The physical world is an illusion, or temporary. Even considering the spiritual to be superior is a leaning towards a spiritualistic worldview. An example is the view that life on earth is a temporary state, before which we move into a spiritual existence, which is what really counts. The weakness of the spiritualistic worldview is that it doesn’t take matter seriously.

Christianity challenges this worldview by its assertion that both spirit and matter count, in fact by God becoming matter, in Christ, we’re reminded that matter is as real and as valued by God as spirit is.

Then there is the theological worldview, which was invented by theologians to avoid conflict between science and religion. The proposal is that science deals with how the world is and religion deals with why. The two areas do not conflict because they are not concerned with the same thing. A product of this thinking is the view that religion and politics don’t mix. The flaw in the theological worldview is that it fails to take seriously the interaction between spirit and matter. The human being is an example of that. We are spirit and matter. We know that the state of the spirit can influence the state of the body.

Another worldview is the ancient worldview. It is the worldview of the bible, and of many ancient cultures. In this worldview, the world is divided into up and down. Up is heaven, where God is. Down is earth, where we and other creatures are. This view made sense in its time, because things which humans could not control came from above, such as the weather, and people experienced life as depending on what came from above. There was a correspondence between what happened in the upper and lower realms. Hence, in the bible, while nations below fight, there’s a corresponding war in heaven.

The last worldview I want to look at is called the integral worldview. The integral worldview is the emerging way of seeing the world in which spirit and matter both have a place. They are like two sides of the one coin. Two sides to reality. Like the other worldviews, there are degrees to which people hold to it. For example, some say that spirit only emerges at a certain level of consciousness, so therefore humans have spirit, but a snail or a rock does not. Others say that spirit exists at every level of being, although it may not manifest itself in the same way. So a tree has spirit, but not like the spirit of a human being, for example.

The integral worldview allows us to read the bible in a new way. All we have to do is replace upper for inner, and below for outer. The realm above, heaven, therefore, is the interior of the world, the inner, or spiritual dimension, while the realm below, the earth is the outer, or physical dimension. God in heaven is therefore not God above us, but God within us, and within the world.

The tangible and the intangible, each corresponding to, but not the same as the other. So (as Catholic theologian Karl Rahner put it:) the body is not something added to the spirit. It is the concrete existence of the spirit in space and time. Because within the integral worldview the inner spiritual and the outer physical are two sides of the one reality, there is virtually nothing in the world that is pure spirit or pure matter. Everything has both a physical and spiritual manifestation. Except God, of course, because God created it all.

I hope then, that I have given you some ways to assess various cosmologies, or worldviews, pointing out their strengths and weaknesses, but most of all to show you how the integral worldview provides a reasonable way of holding Christian cosmology and a scientific perspective together.

This description of 5 worldviews I have used is taken from Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination.

Sermon by Andy Wurm, for St Mary Magdalene, 21^st July 2019

Easter has no significance in itself. Jesus can only be raised to life because he died. New life comes from brokenness. There is another story of brokenness which we are all familiar with. It goes like this: Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men, couldn’t put Humpty together again.

What would be a Christian version of this? Would it be an additional line stating ‘but God was able to put Humpty together again’? No, I think it would more likely be something like ‘so God made the king scrambled egg for breakfast’. From Humpty Dumpty’s point of view that’s seems like a bad outcome, but he’s only an egg, so there’s no problem. A Christian version of this story would have something good come out of a bad situation.

There is, of course, the question of why Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall. If he hadn’t, we never would have heard of him, because an egg sitting on a wall doesn’t attract our attention. The falling off part is what we relate to. You probably can’t remember back far enough, but I wonder if, when you first heard about Humpty’s fall, you were not surprised. That’s because as children we’re used to falling off things. It’s a natural part of life. When we become adults though, we expect not to fall any more. And I don’t mean that just literally, but also metaphorically. In other words, we expect life to go smoothly, as planned by ourselves, or according to a plan handed to us. In the Bible though, we are reminded that is not the way life is, which is a really important lesson, and that it never was meant to be the way things are, which is another really important lesson. God creates the world and it’s not long before things fall apart and there’s chaos, – that’s the myth of the Fall in the Garden of Eden. Prior to that, we’re told that God even created the world out of chaos. From one perspective, the story of the Fall seems like something has gone wrong, but it’s not saying that, rather, we are being told that this is the way life evolves, the way God creates, or you could say recreates.

It is no coincidence then, that in John’s Gospel, Jesus’ tomb is placed in a garden. Mary Magdalene mistakes Jesus for the gardener, which he’s not actually. Instead, he created the one in the garden. He’s God and now, calling her by name, the Creator in the form of Jesus is recreating Mary. He has given her new life out of her past, a past which no longer served her.

We too live in a time when the past no longer serves us. For example, the church is not what it used to be, so we face an uncertain future and aren’t sure what to do. If we lift our heads above our own situation though, we see that it’s a metaphor for life. The church isn’t the only body of people having to cope with change either. Many businesses are finding that the old way of doing business doesn’t work, or isn’t going to work for much longer. As we shift from an economy based around manufacturing, people’s jobs are under threat. We’re heading into a bit of chaos there. They’re just some examples of the sorts of chaos resulting from changes in our society and on a global scale.

On a more personal level though, in the normal course of events, we experience chaos as we find ourselves in the gaps between the significant places in life where we have let go, or lost, what we had before, but don’t yet have a worthy replacement. Those gaps include being caught between things such a house full of children and experiencing an empty nest; or being caught between living in prime-of-life action and living in stay-at-home retirement; or being caught between being self-sufficient and being dependent; or caught in the gap between being in a committed relationship and being alone again because of bereavement or divorce; or being between leaving school and finding a job; or being between feeling great and having to live with accident, illness or physical diminishment; or being in the gap between pursuing dreams and experiencing disillusionment. (From Margaret Silf The Other Side of Chaos, p.20) So much of life is lived within these gaps and experiencing the chaos that comes with that.

The temptation here is to try and escape the chaos of the gap by returning to the past, or grasping at an immediate way forward to the next space. The trouble with returning to the past is it doesn’t exist anymore, so there’s nowhere to go. The trouble with grasping for an immediate way forward is that we’re not always in the best frame of mind to judge what is best. An example is the person who jumps into a committed relationship with someone, to overcome the loss of a previous one.

The clue to surviving the chaos which comes with being in a gap between significant places is remembering that new life emerges out of chaos. Mostly, it seems that God creates out of chaos: not by first putting the chaos aside, but out of it, out of what has collapsed, finished, come to an end, been exhausted, had its day, or died. New life then, will emerge, or be generated, from amidst our experience of loss and grief. It means it will come while we are in the dark and struggling. That’s what we’re being shown in the story of Mary Magdalene at Jesus’ tomb. Resurrection coming out of the chaos of her of loss.

Mary has lost the one whom she loved so much, in fact, the One who brought her out of death to life. Jesus’ love for Mary enabled her to transform the chaos of her past (her ‘seven demons’ is code for overwhelming dysfunctionality) into a life with meaning and direction. When Jesus was crucified, Mary lost what was most dear to her. She doesn’t try and return to her past though, and neither does she try and jump to some new future in which everything will be alright again. Instead, she goes to the tomb (the outward expression of her inner state), in grief, because it is from within the chaos of her grief, that her future will emerge.

Early in John’s Gospel, the writer poses the question of what it is that people desire most in life. Jesus asks two men what they’re looking for. Now at the end of the gospel, we are given the answer to that question in the garden, when Jesus asks Mary what she is looking for. She says she is looking for him, but he corrects her by saying her name, which is at the same time an embrace and the answer to what she is looking for. Yes she is looking for Jesus, but the Jesus of the past has gone, died. Now there is only the risen Jesus and he is within her. She must not hold on to the Jesus of the past, who gave her so much affirmation, because he is within her (ascending to God and being within Mary are the same thing). She no longer needs the ‘old Jesus’. With this union with Jesus, out of the chaos of losing the One who loved her, she has discovered that same love within herself. The resurrection of Jesus and Mary Magdalene are the same thing. What she has been looking for all her life is how God is manifest within her, for how she lives that out is her meaning and purpose.

Going to Jesus’ tomb was for Mary an act of faith. In other words, facing and embracing her loss and grief was an act of faith. Faith is not a degree of certainty that something is true, or something will happen. Faith involves acting, stepping out, (or diving in) as if that’s the case. The resurrection of Jesus is not meant to give us the certainty we need to move forward. It’s to encourage us, when we’re in the gap between significant places, that we’re in the right place from which new life of some sort will be generated. If we accept that, then rather than pining for what we have lost, or grasping at or trying to anticipate our future, we simply need to open ourselves to what God is bringing to life where we are.

We choose who to help

Sermon by Andy Wurm, Pentecost 5, 14^th July 2019

At the moment there are millions of displaced persons around the world. People ask who should we help? We’re told we shouldn’t be helping people who just want to come here to get a better life. Behind that is the question of who deserves our help.

A lawyer asks Jesus what he should do to inherit eternal life. Jesus responds in the way of a lawyer, and asks him what the law says. The lawyer responds with ‘Love God and love your neighbour’, which Jesus says is the correct answer. But the lawyer wants clarity about who his neighbour is – who should he care for? Who deserves his help? Who does he have a responsibility towards?

In response to the lawyer’s question, Jesus tells a story about a man beaten by robbers and left for dead by the side of the road. As expected, the priest and Levite walk by on the other side of the road, avoiding the ritual impurity which would come if they touched him. But a Samaritan stopped and helped the wounded man. Samaritans lived in the north of Israel. They were considered inferior, not proper Jews, people you wouldn’t really want to associate with.

After telling his story, Jesus asked the lawyer ‘which of the three men was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?’ Notice that Jesus changed the lawyer’s question? The lawyer’s question was ‘who is my neighbour?’ Jesus was telling him he was asking the wrong question. In other words, ‘who is the right person I should help, or whose relationship with me requires me to help them?’, is the wrong question. Instead, Jesus is saying, we should ask ‘shall I be a neighbour to others?’, in other words, ‘shall I help others?’ Jesus is saying this is about you, not them.

The issue is not who deserves my help, but whom will I choose to help? If someone is in trouble because they have got themselves into a mess, it’s easy to say they brought it upon themselves, and so I have no obligation to help them, yet Jesus says the important thing is not what sort of person they are, but what sort of person you are.

There is more to the story though. In changing the lawyer’s question, Jesus is inviting the lawyer to think about helping people, in a profoundly new way. And he does that by getting him to put himself in the story. Remember Jesus’ question: ‘who acted as neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?’ The answer is: the Samaritan acted as a neighbour. Now go back to the lawyer’s question right at the start: ‘who is my neighbour?’ MY neighbour. If his neighbour is the Samaritan, then who is he? The lawyer is the wounded man. He’s the man who was beaten up by robbers. The point of the lawyer’s question was who he, the helper, should help. Jesus now tells him that you, the helper, are wounded. What Jesus is telling us in this is that out of our woundedness, we can help others.

This can be disturbing, because it touches our vulnerability. Before they got into deep discussion, the lawyer quoted from the Ten Commandments: love God and your neighbour. That basically means help people in need. If you have resources and can help others who don’t, well, share them. It’s that simple. As Australians, we at least say we believe in this – that we should always help a mate out, or a sheila. And we do like to help others (except sometimes people who wear strange clothes, speak strangely etc..), but especially men. We love feeling helpful. One day I was in a car park and saw a woman crying because she had her baby in the car and couldn’t get out of the car park. The car park boom gate wouldn’t open, because the machine wouldn’t accept her credit card. There were cars lined up behind her, and she was panicking. I was able to help her by calmly connecting her with the little man who lives inside the machine which controls the boom gate, and he raised the boom gate and she could drive home. I felt so good helping her, that I was almost moved to tears by my own helpfulness.

I am fooling myself, though, to think there was really anything great about what I did. Sure, it was helpful for that woman, but it’s really about being civil, like shaking hands with someone when you meet them. In case we get too puffed up about how wonderful we are in helping people like that, there is a saying by St Vincent de Paul, who said (paraphrased) ‘the poor will forgive you for the help you give them, only by the love you show them’. The reason is, it’s hard to accept help. It can be demeaning. It reinforces the power imbalance. It is good to help people in need, but we would much rather be the one helping, than the one in need, because it means we are stronger, we are more secure. We are the one who gets to feel good. That’s why we must always help others, but with love, not a sense of superiority, or being owed anything. I don’t want to discredit the value of offering help in the way of resources or other practical assistance, but just to make clear that sometimes helping others is about us feeling good.

Back to Jesus and the lawyer, and us, because we are the lawyer too. Having put aside practical assistance to others, the most profound way we can help others, flows out of our woundedness. That is, from where we are powerless. From where we have no resources, no answers, no comfort, where we are out of our depth. If you want a picture of that, it’s Jesus on the cross, for that is exactly what he is there. Absolute powerlessness, and yet we call him the world’s helper. Our God, our help in ages past.

What do we want when things are really bad? Do we want answers? Do we want an explanation as to why we’re suffering, – a theological explanation perhaps (why this is happening, where God is)? Do we want someone to smother our pain? We might, for awhile, because we briefly engage in the fantasy that someone can take it away, or fix it, but then we know that’s not true. The most helpful person is the one who has nothing to give us, but is willing to just be with us in our suffering.

A woman once told me that in a time of really deep grief, the most helpful person she met was a woman who was dying, and had nothing to give her, except that gift of nothing, the woundedness that comes with having no control and letting go, and letting be. From the space, the emptiness, that we share with people like that, comes help. The help that we really need.

St Lawrence was a deacon in the church in Rome, when the emperor, assuming the church had a great fortune hidden away, demanded he bring out the treasure to him. Lawrence said give me three days, and in that time assembled all the poor and sick, who the church was helping at that time. Then he said to the emperor ‘here are the treasures of the church’. As church, the community of the crucified Christ, the wounded healer, our true treasure is our wounds – the wounds we carry from the difficult experiences of our lives. Out of the emptiness and powerlessness there, we can provide an encounter with the crucified Christ, in the form of our brokenness. In Jesus’ story, the person who does that for the wounded man is the Samaritan. He can do that because he’s a wounded man. He’s on the outer, he’s a reject, so he knows what it is to be powerless and unable to help yourself. We can do that too. In fact, Jesus calls us to do that, to be that, but it requires us to not hide our wounds from each other.

[image: Bourges Cathedral, The Saint-Lawrence Window Scenes www.stanparryphotography.com]

Reflection for Evensong 23 June – Rev’d Barb

The readings from Malachi and Philippians lead us into the Holy Day for the Birth of John the Baptist. According to Luke, Mary’s cousin Elizabeth was six months pregnant when the angel came to Mary saying “Surprise! Surprise!” Hence we have this birthday date for John the Baptist at the mid-point of the year. Being in the middle of time periods was part of the lonely role of John the Baptist, set down in history between the time in which Hebrew Scripture was written, and the time in which Jesus began his teaching described in the New Testament. So John the Baptist is the prophet of transition, of that liminal space in which a profound shift of viewpoint is beginning to emerge. In fact John the Baptist saw himself as the catalyst for that shift. John understood that his call was to be the messenger sent by God to prepare the way of the Lord as described in Isaiah chapter 40 and in the first verse of chapter 3 of the Book of Malachi, which directly precedes the New Testament in many of our Bibles.

OK enough Biblical background, what’s it matter to us? Well it seems to me that our age is an age of transition, from modern and post-modern views of life and meaning to something profoundly different, not yet fully revealed. It’s a lonely and unsettling time for people of faith, when traditional communities are diminishing, and we sense we need to change but we are not sure how. In many areas, religion and spirituality are undergoing a paradigm shift similar to that occurring in the sciences, and the direction of both seems drawn toward a mystical view of the mystery of the universe, and a contemplative view of the unity of everything. Perhaps the John the Baptist figures of our age are writers like Richard Rohr, Joan Chittister and Ken Wilbur, and in Australia, Leunig, David Tacy, and Val Webb, all catalysts toward a profound shift of understanding of ourselves and the divine. It’s a liminal time, a wilderness full of dangers, temptations and potential insight. There are prophetic voices like John the Baptist calling out to us to turn around and find new life, while the Satanic voices still urge us to focus on security, fame and power. Like Jesus driven out into the wilderness by the Spirit, we are hungry and thirsty to explore who we are and who God is, and where we go from here. As the psalms today say: “As a deer longs for the running brooks: so my soul longs for you, O God. My soul is thirsty for God, thirsty for the living God….”O send out your light and your truth, and let them lead me.”

What light or truth do we get from the readings that might lead us towards a more connected and wholesome life? The Malachi reading tells us of the symbolic importance of the refiner’s fire, which separates the dross from the precious metal. There is this need to be stripped back to the essentials, which the contemplatives call our True Self in God. To me this relates to Richard Rohr’s writing on how necessary suffering can bring us into the wisdom and humility of the second half of life, where we are stripped of our competitive ego needs, and opened up to non-dualistic thinking, with its greater inclusiveness and capacity for love. The reading from Paul’s letter to the Philippians has a similar message: all that he once regarded as gains in his religious and cultural life, the exclusiveness of his status as a Hebrew and a Pharisee, he now regards as loss because of Christ. Paul says: “I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” That knowing is not conceptual theology, although that may follow, but personal experience of a relationship with the incarnate God, which transforms us into what we are meant to be, just as Paul was so radically transformed from a persecutor of the church into its foremost evangelist to a multicultural world. The failure to be open to such transforming experience is what leads our society into the sort of selfish and exploitative behaviour which Malachi speaks out against on behalf of the Lord: “against those who oppress the hired workers in their wages, the widow and the orphan, against those who thrust aside the alien, and do not fear me, says the Lord of Hosts.” What then of Australian policy to thrust aside the alien, in our treatment of boat people and refugees? What selfish, competitive and oppressive behaviour do we need to repent of in our society? John the Baptist fiercely called on people to turn from such behaviours and be washed clean, ready for the new life which the Messiah will bring. He fearlessly confronted even people in the highest places and lost his life for the sake of the integrity of his prophetic voice.

In conclusion, there are two challenging questions I ask us all to take away to reflect on: Do we as Christians have the courage to speak out as voices in the wilderness? Can we believe or hope that we might be messengers preparing the way of the Lord?

Free of rivalry, we can do extraordinary things

Sermon by Andy Wurm, 4^th Sunday after Pentecost, 7^th July 2019

As Christians, we are familiar with the cross being our central symbol, yet to outsiders, it may seem strange that we focus so much on an instrument of death. People who don’t understand Christianity may think we believe that Jesus’ death on the cross represents a transaction to appease God, for humanity, which, through sin, has made itself into God’s rival, and thereby requires a sacrificial payment for its sin. The notion of God needing to be appeased, or requiring payment, would mean that God and humanity are kind of on opposing sides. With the way we talk about Jesus’ death, that interpretation fits, but it is wrong.

Any idea of God opposing humanity or needing to be appeased makes God into a competitor with us, – a rival. It is true that God and humanity are, in a way, at odds, because God is always loving and humanity is not, but to say that means God and humanity are kind of on opposite sides therefore, or that God has to be appeased for that, is a projection of human attitudes onto God.

Rivalry, or competition, is the main problem between God and humanity, but it is all located within humanity. The point of Jesus’ death on the cross is not to save us from God’s anger, but to save us from our own rivalry.

In order for that to occur, we had to be first shown the extent of rivalry within ourselves. When we compete with each other, the effects are obvious – poverty and war, along with exploitation of the earth. That’s the big picture. On a smaller scale, we’ve all had experiences of being ignored, excluded, or overridden. As a society, we are much more sensitive to issues around interpersonal violence, whether in the form of bullying, sexual abuse, child abuse or domestic violence. All of those are versions of rivalry. And often the suggested means of dealing with them are just another form of rivalry, for example, if, as a child, you were bullied at school, what did you want to see for the child who had bullied you? Most likely, some form of suffering – that they would get in trouble, or someone would punch them in the face. As adults, we just engage in more sophisticated versions of the same thing. How this relates to Jesus’ death on the cross, is that his death is the result of rivalry. What he is showing us in that, is that that is where it all ends – in suffering and death. He is saying – this is what you are doing, this is what you bring about for yourselves and each other – and the earth. Only when we begin to see how much we are caught up in that way of behaving, can we begin to let go of it. Rivalry is what is traditionally called original sin. We don’t do it because we’re rotten. We do it because we’re born into a world where it’s normal.

When we begin to let go of rivalry, then something new can replace rivalry as the driving force of our thinking and behaving. What Jesus offers for that, is his perspective on life, which is love. It starts with knowing we are loved (given life and unconditionally accepted as we are) and then discovering in ourselves a joy in sharing ourselves with the world (which includes compassion and care for others). When we allow that perspective of Jesus (seeing as he does and acting as he does) to be the driving force of our lives, that is also allowing the Holy Spirit to enliven us. In that state, we experience God’s peace, which is a foundation for life, absolutely free of rivalry. That peace is what we symbolically share with each other during the eucharist.

Christianity provides a unique insight into human rivalry, but is not alone in that, in fact, in the ancient

Hebrew scriptures, we see, over time, an increasing awareness of rivalry and its negative impact in the world. Today, our Old Testament story about Naaman, with his leprosy, highlights the frequency of rivalry. Right from the start we are alerted to rivalry as we are introduced to Naaman as one who fought against the king of Israel. That king’s ego had stupidly driven him into battle in order to take what belonged to others. Prior to that, he had killed one of his own people and taken his land. Later, when Naaman’s own king sent a letter to the king of Israel, asking for help for Naaman, the king of Israel had interpreted it as picking a fight. Suspicion is a form of rivalry. Later, Naaman engages in rivalrous behaviour when he is indignant that the prophet offering him healing, fails to recognise the superiority of the rivers he could have washed in back home. Ranking things or people above or below each other is a form of rivalry. In contrast, those who do not engage in rivalry include Naaman’s wife’s servant-girl, who was kidnapped in battle and you would expect to treat Naaman as her rival, but instead, offers to help him, and his own servants, who tell him to pull his head in and humble himself enough to get the help he needs. This story is a remarkable critique of rivalry, considering it even critiques the king of those who told it – in a time when that was not fashionable. For us though, stories like that are safe, but subversive stories, in that they allow us to see ourselves in the story, how sometimes we behave like the characters in the story, but also, that our behaviour, when like that, is called into question.

When the writer of Luke’s Gospel wrote a mission statement for the church, he said what we have to do is take God’s peace into the world. That means to go out and be with others in a non-competitive way. Be with others, but free from rivalry. He warns that we will come into conflict with others though, because we are challenging the way they value themselves. Some people see their value coming from how many others they can climb over, how much power they acquire, or just how much they achieve in comparison to others. He suggests if you come across people who reject non-rivalry, don’t fight against them. That would be going against the very thing you stand for. On the other hand, there are people out there who already get the whole non-rivalry thing. They already live that peace to some degree or other. What that means is the peace or non-rivalry, which is the perspective of Jesus, is already at work in the world, before we go out to share it. It goes before us. That’s represented in bible stories, by Jesus always going ahead of his disciples, in their journeys. Our mission, as Christians then, is to open our hearts to the Holy Spirit, or the perspective of Jesus, already at work in the world, but we can only do that if we are already letting go of rivalry and allowing that perspective of Jesus to be the spirit which drives us.

When the Holy Spirit drives you, you are freed up from rivalry, and so less judgemental, more compassionate and forgiving, and find greater joy in helping others. But you also develop an extraordinary capacity for creativity. If we go to the story of Jesus’ resurrection, we get Jesus, having taken on the rivalry of the world, but then raised to life again, which means he is then humanity free of rivalry. He is humanity, free of any of the restrictions, or oppression, that comes with rivalry. We get a taste of what that’s like in our relationships with those who are dear to us. We can do so much, create so much, when we feel loved and are free to be ourselves, and find pleasure in allowing others to be themselves. Imagine what we can do as community. There is no blueprint for that, however. No plan. Jesus just said that we would be even more creative than he was. The only thing that is clear, is what the cross and resurrection have given us, which is the edge of rivalry – where rivalry stops and we can begin to live another way. The personal significance of that, is that if we go to the place in our own lives where we manifest rivalry most of all, by accepting that darkness for what it is, as Jesus did with human rivalry in general, there we shall find within ourselves, a capacity for extraordinary things.