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Mothers and Shepherds

Happy Mother’s Day! I guess. Aside from the emotional minefields produced by that greeting, for many it is a wonderful day. As a person almost totally lacking in sentimentality, I would just forget it except for my great kids who want to remember it. My problem with the idea of the Good Shepherd has similar problems.

On Mother’s Day, we forget the terrible mothers, the tragedies in motherhood, the women separated from their children by incarceration or social stigma. Similarly, the picture of the Good Shepherd is usually that of a kindly, white, clean, handsome man, holding clean lambs in his arms. And we see ourselves as those dear little lambs, being kept in safety from accident, or being lost, or perhaps being butchered. 

What if we adjust the lens on these pictures? What if the pictures of mothers we hold up are those of starving Yemeni women struggling to find food for their kids, of Palestinian mums trying to shield others, of black mothers worrying whether or not their sons will come home safely? What if the picture of the Good Shepherd is our broken church struggling to remember that the lambs we are called to protect are the very people we avoid? What if we, like Judas and Peter, are ourselves broken and confused? What if this is the struggle to transform our world not simply with words, or political rhetoric, but with action, with money, with advocacy?

How do we celebrate this day? I think we could begin by agreeing that there are lots of ways of mothering and of being mothered. None of them is easy, but often the reward is in the doing rather than being acknowledged. We are all born within our Mother Earth, the paradise given to us by God. If we are good mothers, we will teach our children not to soil their environment. We will teach justice as the path to peace. We will learn to discriminate not on the basis of class, but of neediness, of solidarity.

As shepherds in the risen body of Christ, we confess our woundedness to each other, so we will be free from judging others. We will know that being a shepherd does not require us to spend time making ourselves look good. Shepherding is a dirty, dangerous business. But the lambs are more important than concern for ourselves. We will see that there is only one flock and its name is humanity, albeit in all the crazy diversity that our Creator seems to love. 

And so let us welcome each other to this day, accepting our narratives as the ground for greater love. Let us mother each other and be mothered into a way of peace. Let us reach out to be rescued, turning to the lamb on the precipice beside us, and dragging them along with us. And so, hand in hand, generation upon generation, we learn how to let our mothering, shepherding God grow in our souls, in our hands and in our minds, so that the world may be re-knit in the loving image in which we were made. 

Category:

christology, Discipleship, Kingdom

The Identity of Jesus Mark 8:27-37

In Mark 8:27-37, we read about the struggles in the early church to place Jesus in some kind of traditional context. There are serious questions to be answered. If Jesus was the son of God, why would that God allow him to die a scandalous death? Who really was his father? Was he actually John the Baptist? If he wasn’t the Messiah, then perhaps he was Elijah, who would precede the Messiah. He certainly didn’t fit any of the expectations of a messiah. He wasn’t a king or a fierce warrior. He seemed to have no interest in insurrection or political leadership. In fact, his teaching and his behaviour were inconsistent with the expectations of a messiah

In this narrative, we “overhear”a conversation between Jesus and Peter. We become the disciples who were listening in. Jesus seems exasperated that Peter cannot understand, and therefore cannot correctly transmit Jesus’ teaching. Jesus is not the anticipated messiah, nor is he anyone else but his own unique self. Raised in the spiritual expression of the Judaism of his era, and in the experience of Roman occupation, Jesus is anointed by the suffering and oppression, initially of his own people. That broadens into an awareness of the potential for human liberation, both spiritually and politically.

That is a historical moment that we will always be reliving as his disciples. We each agree to follow a particular expression of Jesus’ mission and vision. To understand that mission and vision, we must learn the stories about him that shape our faith. And we need each other to test our ideas, to develop our shared understanding, to learn how to live out our faith.

Today, we’re going to baptize Noel into this community, this faith. And how will he learn this faith? Will you show him love, understanding, conviction, action in Jesus’ mission? We are promising today that we will never abandon him, we will be his safe harbour until he can choose Jesus’ path for himself. We will continue to be learners with him. And we will grow in discipleship with him.

Category:

Categorically Random, christology, Discipleship

Good Friday is a Cop Out

But Jesus turned to them and said, “Women of Jerusalem, stop crying for me. Instead, cry for yourselves and for your children.
— Luke 23:28 —

I know the title of this blog is shocking, but I must admit to an impatience with an attitude to Holy Week that is either sentimental or an indulgence in horror.

Although the Anglican Book of Common Prayer says piously, ” full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice,” our liturgies tend to revisit Jesus’ crucifixion in ghastly detail, with an unseemly savouring of its details, including encouraging people to shout out a call for his death. I have always hoped that I would be the person who said, “Don’t.”  It seems to me that Jesus’ horrific death millennia ago, has only one purpose in our memory. That purpose is to remind us that we remain complicit in erecting the cross of horror, shame, brutality, and injustice. We do not need to look to history to see the wounds and passion of Christ all around us, in our streets, in our families, in our own limitations that mask as convictions about truth and social status.

The cross is the potent, albeit dreadful sign of the failure of humanity to let the holiness within prevail upon the earth. As we walk through Holy Week, I think we need to focus on the paths we have taken over the last year, since the previous Holy Week. What have we done for the children of the world? What have we done for the planet and its other creatures? How have we stood against war, poverty, lies? Whom have we helped and why? The veneration of the cross is not about glorifying suffering but about an accusation to the Body of Christ. Have we fed the lambs? Have we brought the children to safe harbour?

On Maundy Thursday, in most churches, we are good at showing love for each other, at least superficially, but why are we washing feet that are fat and clean? When Jesus performed this action, it was an act of hospitality, a host, deferring to his guests, the convenor, acting as servant. Food for the journey, sustenance for those who would soon be tested and mostly found wanting. Do we understand that this baptismal act is not so much about cleansing as preparation to walk the way of the cross? To be called to testify to the uncomfortable, unpopular truth about solidarity with the poor and the forsaken? The first eucharist celebrated the presence fo Christ at table with those he loved, whomever they might have been. The last supper in Emmaus reminded the disciples to study, to learn, to act, to pray for God’s reign of peace and justice on earth.

On Good Friday, when we say our prayers, when we remember Jesus’ act of self-offering, we need to remember also that although he has been resurrected, we have not yet taken down his cross, that it still scars our landscape. I started to weep as I saw the young people rallying against violence in the March for Our Lives — not just against them, but as an acceptable idea in this 21st century. I wept for their beauty and for their hope. As the church we have fought against the resurrection, attempting to keep that hideous cross instead of having faith in the resurrection. We, as the church, have been ingenious at maintaining violence of all kinds, of encouraging people to indulge in self-recrimination and shame instead of declaring their freedom in Christ, the freedom of the resurrection, the freedom to be new.

Jesus is risen and has been alive and with us for centuries. When will we believe it and act on it? When will we decide human evil and selfishness has had its day? I long for the Holy Week in which the cross has become a faint outline, a dim memory of what humanity was before we discovered the incarnation running in and through us, the resurrection of hope and possibility.

Please go to church this week, but go not for the memory of Jesus’ death, but to remember the path to resurrection that will call us to lay down the comforts and assumptions and lies that are blotted out by the reality of suffering. Go to weep for the children who are not yet free. Go to testify, to be present to the pain that exists in our world. Go to present yourselves as an offering, an offering to live out your baptismal promises with weeping, but also with the knowledge that the Resurrected One is with you. Go so that you know how to reveal Jesus’ resurrection that walked through passion and love to a life shared in action and faith.

Category:

Categorically Random, christology, Discipleship, good friday, Lent

kenosis?

Kenosis is a theological term that simply means emptying. In Philippians 2, we read:

Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of humanity. Being found in appearance as a human, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

Again, in Hebrews 2, we hear an echo of this idea of Jesus as a divine being, who becomes a creature like other humans are creatures.

Since, therefore, the children share flesh and blood, Jesus himself likewise shared the same things. . . .
Therefore he had to become like his brothers and sisters in every respect, so that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God.

My problem with kenosis as we have traditionally thought of it, is that separates the spiritual and the material, as if the divine were present only in the one. In 21st century consciousness, we have become aware of the problem of dualisms, up/down, over/under. We are aware that we share the DNA of a planet, not just a species. We know that the earth under our feet is a living organism, populated by untold numbers of other organisms from the microscopic to the gigantic. The so-called butterfly effect is simply a matter of obvious reality now.

I wonder how Jesus could possibly divest himself of the divine without simply disappearing. With many others, I experience the divine not only as an external presence, but also as the that which rushes between the atoms in the life of everything and can be seen in both the grandeur and simplicity of all that is. For our minds now, the question of the dual nature of Christ has ceased to have resonance or it is a matter of intellectual indifference. So what do we do with the idea of kenosis now?

In the temptation story, we read about Jesus divesting himself of human ambition, political power, even the authority of status. In the story of his baptism, he bows to the teaching of another. From the women whom encounters, his theology and his mission shifts. Jesus empties himself of the barriers that stand between people in relationship. For Jesus, this is also true of the Holy One. Jesus walks with confidence in the presence of his God. He seems to be free from the ordinary anxiety of being right, or judged, or needy of affirmation. With other people, Jesus is similarly free to associate, to speak, to interact, without the usual nervous hesitation most of us share.

Jesus divests himself of the bruised ego, allowing himself to be open to each experience as if it were new. Because he seems to be very little concerned about himself in these encounters. He sees others clearly, booth in our grace and in our hypocrisy.

Jesus offers us a picture of how that freedom might look. True freedom is neither harsh, nor judgemental, neither grasping, nor self concerned. Not many of us, even with a lot of spiritual direction and/or therapy will find ourselves as whole as Jesus. In our communities, however, we can begin to start thinking in wholistic terms. Instead of acting out of self interest, we can divest ourselves of institutional anxieties and ask instead what we are doing for the vulnerable, for the needy, the hungry, the refugees, and so on. We can begin to think about the earth as the first garden and choose the task of restoration. We can turn from the lure of power and privilege and adopt the kenotic quality of Jesus who counted nothing for himself and everything for the task of healing, of justice, of protection.

Madeleine L’Engle wrote about how it feels to live in the light of Christ.
The kind of unself-consciousness I’m thinking about becomes clearer to me when I turn to a different discipline: for instance, that of playing a Bach fugue at the piano, precisely because I will never be a good enough pianist to play a Bach fugue as it should be played. But when I am actually sitting at the piano, all there is for me is the music. I am wholly in it, unless I fumble so badly that I perforce become self-conscious. Mostly, no matter how inadequate my playing, the music is all that matters: I am outside time, outside self, in play, in joy. When we can play with the unself-conscious concentration of a child, this is: art: prayer: love. (Glimpses of Grace)

Category:

Categorically Random, christology, Discipleship