Let God Breathe (Epiphany 5B)

12th century Coptic Icon, Christ Pantocrator

  

Let God Breathe
Fifth Sunday after Epiphany (Year B)
5 February 2012: 8 am Spoken Mass and 10:00 am Sung Mass
Homily Delivered at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon

Isaiah 40:21-31; Psalm 147:1-12, 21c; 1 Corinthians 9:16-23; Mark 1:29-29

Jesus left the synagogue at Capernaum, and entered the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John. Now Simon's mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they told him about her at once. He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them.

That evening, at sundown, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons. And the whole city was gathered around the door. And he cured many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons; and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him.

In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed. And Simon and his companions hunted for him. When they found him, they said to him, "Everyone is searching for you." He answered, "Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do." And he went throughout Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out demons. (Mark 1:29-30)

God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

The Hebrew Scriptures readings today deal with the majesty and power of God.  Hearing Second Isaiah, it is hard to think that God is anything but all-powerful and all mysterious:  the inhabitants of the earth look like grasshoppers to him, and even the mightiest of dynasties are mere seedlings he uproots in a second.  The Gospel reading today deals with Jesus making use of that power by healing sick people, including Peter’s mother-in-law.    

 

We often misunderstand these images, and think that somehow God is sitting out there apart from the universe, all-powerful, and, like some divine bureaucrat or mail-order operation, keeping track of prayer requests and making Good things happen for Good people and Bad things for Bad people.

But this is not the world we live in.  Here in this life, often the wicked prosper, bad things happen to good people, and prayers for vindication and health seemingly go unanswered, like those of Job.  

I was raised in a religious community that taught that Almighty God blessed the righteous, punished the wicked, and heard and answered the prayers of the righteous. My wife and I had a major trial in our faith just after we were married while we were still in college and just starting our own family. We had become friends with a young couple that went to Church with us. They were good people. After several years of unsuccessful efforts, they were able to get pregnant and had a beautiful little baby boy. After a month or so, though, it became apparent that sometime was wrong. He had been born with a genetic defect: the upper layers of his skin were not fully connected with the deeper layers. If you touched him slightly on the arm, it quickly would turn into a large blister, would easily burst and become infected. There was little that the doctors could do. Despite two months in intensive care, the baby’s body was covered with what essentially were second-degree burns. He was held suspended in a light net to prevent further damage from the bed. His parents were not allowed to touch him, so they could not even comfort him as he screamed his little life out in agony. During the ordeal, we prayed. Our friends prayed. The Church elders prayed and anointed the baby with healing oil, carefully, on the inch or so of sound skin on the side of his head. The whole community prayed. And the baby suffered and slowly died.

It is not the only time in my life when I wished that the world were as simple as I had been taught in Sunday School: my mother-in-law’s cancer, my father’s Alzheimer’s disease.

Now in fairness let me say this: I have also seen prayers answered in wonderful and miraculous ways, sometimes quickly, sometimes gradually: a deadly disease stopped in its tracks and healed, broken relationships mended and strengthened, mental illness managed.  I know that miracles happen. 

But there are just too many cases where God, if Good, seems absent or impotent, or if Almighty and All-present, seems to be a monster, some cipher far removed from the most basic demands of human goodness, let alone divine goodness.  How do we get our heads around it? 

I cannot today answer the problem of theodicy, or the justice of God in the face of evil in the world.  But let me give a few observations to might help each of us work through this.

 

Rabbi Isaac Luria (1534-1572), also known by the acronym Ari (the Lion) was a key figure in the development of the Jewish mystical Kabbalah tradition.  He was part of the Sephardic Jewish community, expelled from what is now Spain and Portugal in 1492.  Much of his thought was directed to the problem of Evil, trying to make sense of how God could be Good and trustworthy in the face of the sort of evil that had forced thousands of Jews to convert to Christianity at swordpoint, killed countless thousands of others, and finally driven the Iberian Jews into exile.

A key idea in Luria’s teaching is the idea of Divine “Contraction” (tzimtzum).  He tells a story of the universe’s origin where Creation is basically a negative act in which God’s essential self must bring into being an empty space and time in which Creation can occur. The Almighty was all-Good, all-Powerful, and All-Present.  God was everywhere.  God, Goodness Itself, was all there was.   Only by contracting into itself, like a man inhaling in order to let someone pass in a narrow corridor, could God bring into existence an empty space where Creation could occur. Creation begins with a Divine exile.

Luria in part is using an idea that had been around from the 5^th century.  St. Augustine of Hippo made the point clearly that Evil was not an equal active thing standing over against Good, but rather the absence of Good.  What God created, by definition not-God, also by definition would have gaps in the All-Goodness that is God.  For Augustine, God was actively engaged with creation.  The Incarnation of Christ was the best example of this. 

The fact is, God is not a divine Santa-Claus keeping lists of the Good and Bad, deciding thereby whom to shower with gifts.  Neither is He, in the words of C.S. Lewis, some kind of wacky great uncle to whom we only need to reach out and ask for help. 

The problem in part comes from that word “Almighty.”  The Hebrew Bible pictures God as thoroughly over all things.  One of the Hebrew names for God is El Shaddai, translated into Greek as Pantokrator, or the One who holds all things, into Latin as Omnipotens “the all-powerful” and into English as “God Almighty.”

In the Creed we say “we believe in God almighty.”   This is a shallow statement indeed if all it means is ‘we believe that somewhere out there exists an unlimited power that can choose and perform anything it likes, and we need to be on the right side of it.”  “Belief” must be trust, and to be worthy of trust, you must have more than just power. 

The term El Shaddai did not refer so much to autonomy and power as to Mystery or Sustaining Comfort.  In its most ancient meaning it referred to God of the mountaintop or God of nourishing breasts.

So too the mysterious term Pantokrator in the Creed:  the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams writes the following about what it means to call God “The One Who Holds All Things”:

“[N]owhere [is God] absent, powerless, or irrelevant; [in] no situation in the universe [is God] at a loss. … [in] no situation [is God] not to be relied upon...”  For Rowan, to say “Almighty” is not a great wish-fulfillment fantasy, rather it is “a way of saying that God always has the capacity to do something fresh and different, to bring something new out of a situation—because nothing outside of himself can finally frustrate his longing” (p. 16, Tokens of Trust: An Introduction to Christian Belief.)



The image here is not of a God disjoined from and disinterested in creation, but intimately urging it on to its best result.   Instead of a divine clerk taking applications for favors when hearing prayers, putting some petitions into a pile marked “grant” and others into a pile marked “deny,” God here is “more of a steady swell of loving presence, always there at work in the centre of everything that is, opening the door to a future even when we can see no hope.”   

Rowan uses another idea of St. Augustine and applies it to Jesus’ miracles, which were, he says, “really just natural processes speeded up a bit, ‘fast-forwarded.’”  Thus God’s action is always at work around us, always ‘on hand’, always behind and within the universe, and not bifurcated into ‘nature’ and ‘supernatural or divine intervention.’

“But what if there were times when certain bits of the world’s processes came together in such a way that the whole cluster of happenings became a bit more open to God’s final purposes? What if the world were sometimes a bit more ‘transparent’ to the underlying act of God?” (pp. 44-45)



One of the major parts of Jesus’ ministry was healing, whether of mind or of body. The gospel stories of Jesus healing the sick—like those in today’s Gospel reading from Mark—tell us that the ultimate purpose of God does not include disease, suffering, and death. Jesus’ ministry of announcing the in-breaking of the reign of God focused in large part in healing physical and mental suffering. This tells us that God doesn’t like horror and disappointment for us any more than we do.

God the All-encompassing is always at work, but that work is not always visible. God the All-loving is always at work, but sometimes the world’s processes go with the grain of God’s final purpose and sometimes they resist.  After all, this universe is created, and God had to hold his breath to make space for it. 

But things can come together in the world at this or that moment, and the ‘flow’ of this created world can be eased and more directly linked with God’s final purposes.  On occasion, perhaps a really fervent prayer or a particularly holy life can help the world can open up a bit more to God’s final good purpose so that unexpected things happen.

To use Luria’s image, sometimes God “exhales” a bit and reclaims some of the created world here and now, making his good purposes absolutely clear here and now.  That’s what we call a miracle. 

We’re never going to have a complete picture on how that works.   We don’t see things as God sees them.  But we owe it to God, to God’s creation, and to each other, to think, say and do those things that might give God, as it were, additional space in which he can exhale. 

We must pray, act, and serve in ways that have some chance of shaping situations so that God has more breathing space, can come more directly in the processes we see about us.  This isn’t something we can manipulate; miracles aren’t magic.  The Lord’s Book of Blessings is not a mere Book of Spells. 

It would be very comforting if we knew the formula, but we don’t.  “All we know is that we are called to pray, to trust and to live with integrity before God (to live ‘holy’ lives) in such a way as to leave the door open, to let things come together so that love can come through.” (p. 45)



Jesus showed us the path here.   In emptying himself, and opening himself perfectly to God’s purposes, he got out of the way of God’s final purposes, and ended up able to be an instrument by which these were seen as breaking into everyday life.  This is what the miracle stories in the Gospels are about. 

We should amend our ways when we oppress others, and work to overcome all forms of such abuse of God’s creatures. We should pray, sometimes fast, to give God such breathing room.  Soon we will have Lent, and this is a great opportunity for denying ourselves, confessing our failings, and getting out of God's way. 

May we work to make the world and our lives a little more congruent with what God’s ultimate purposes are. For what the Almighty wants for all of us is good indeed.

In the name of Christ, Amen.

They Laughed at Him (Proper 8 B)

They Laughed at Him
Fourth after Pentecost (Proper 8 B)
28th June 2009
Cathedral Church of St. John the Evangelist, Hong Kong
Lamentations 3. 22 – 33; Psalm 30; 2 Corinthians 8. 7 – end; Mark 5. 21 - 43

God, breathe into us a desire to change— take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

Today’s gospel reading is a sandwich: the main story--the two pieces of bread--is about how Jesus was asked by the synagogue leader Jairus to heal his 12-year old daughter, and how Jesus did that. Embedded in the middle of the bread--the filling, as it were--is the story of Jesus and the woman with a long-standing hemorrhage.

Modern readers usually understand the basic drama of the combined story—Jesus is asked to heal the girl, but on the way is followed by crowds who press in on him. Among the crowd is the woman, desperate for healing after losing all she has to try to remedy her condition. She secretly touches Jesus’ robe and is instantly healed. He, however, notices that something has happened and turns to ask who touched him. After an exchange with the disciples and the woman, he returns on his way to Jairus’ house. But the time it has taken to sort things out in the crowd was too long—the girl has died. Jesus nevertheless proceeds and heals the girl.

There are, however, a couple of matters in the story that are not readily apparent to the modern reader, and these are key to understanding what the story is trying to tell us.

First of all-- the crowds around Jesus are like the crowds of any peasant culture (or any culture that is just one or two generations removed from the life of peasants). They are crowding around him because they want to see something interesting, something worth telling.

Having grown up in North America, I didn’t really understand what was going on in the story until I moved to China and saw crowd behavior there. The Chinese term coù rènao (pile on to the heat and the noise) aptly describes a phenomenon you often see in Mainland China, especially in the provinces. After every traffic accident, or minor altercation or disagreement between people, you see a crowd gather quickly to watch. They press in to get a better view. They start cheering on their favorite or making comments of their own. You see, these people haven’t seen anything interesting in a long time, and the incident provides entertainment and variety to their somewhat monotonous lives. A similar thing on a usually much reduced scale occurs in schools in North America when young students gather around two of their classmates in an argument and they begin chanting “fight, fight.” The people following Jesus are pressing in to get a better view, to get a better chance of hearing what he is saying. Once it becomes clear that he actually is healing people, the crowds increase—we read in Mark 6:56, “And wherever he went—into villages, towns or countryside—they placed the sick in the marketplaces. They begged him to let them touch even the edge of his cloak, and all who touched him were healed.”

So when the woman touches his clothes and he turns and asks who touched him, the disciples are understandably a bit perplexed at why he should even ask such a silly question.

Another item in the story that is more central to its meaning is this: the woman with the issue of blood won’t dare ask Jesus to help her because she is ritually impure. Under the religious laws of the day, she was unclean and conveyed that uncleanness to anyone who touched her or things she had had touched.

The rules to prevent ritual contamination were a central part of the religion that Jesus had been raised in, the varied Judaism of the period of the Second Temple. Just after the rules about dealing with women with unusual flows of blood, we read this in Leviticus 15: “You must keep the Israelites separate from things that make them unclean, so they will not die in their uncleanness for defiling my dwelling place, which is among them.”

The woman is an outcast because of her disability. She wonders how a religious teacher like Jesus could be expected to pay her any attention, let alone touch her to heal her. So she takes things into her own hands and secretly touches his robe. She is cured, but he feels that some power has gone out of him, and he asks who touched him.

It is the woman’s uncleanness that makes her reluctant to ask for help, or even expect a reply.


Similarly, when Jesus finally arrives at the house of Jairus, the question of ritual impurity again intrudes in this complicated sandwich of a story. Coming into close proximity to, or touching, a corpse also transmitted ritual uncleanness. When the crowd tells Jairus that his daughter is dead, Jesus persists in going to try to heal her, and tells him, “Don’t be afraid, just believe.”

He is not asking Jairus to sign on to a doctrinal program, or to intellectually assent to a set of propositions about the universe, morals, or society. He is asking Jairus to trust him. Remember that the Latin word credo, "I believe," from which we get the word "creed" originally came from cordem dare, "to give one's heart."

They leave the crowd behind, and come to the house, where professional mourners are already at work, ululating, weeping, and tearing their clothes. Their presence underscores the high social status enjoyed by Jairus. When Jesus announces that the girl is not dead, just asleep, and says he will go and wake her up, the crowd laughs at him.

Some probably laugh at what they see as Jesus’ stubbornness in not listening to their announcement that the girl is dead. Some laugh at his foolishness in thinking that he can 'heal' a dead person. Most are probably laughing, in typical Asian fashion, out of nervousness—this guy is not only going to cause a great scene involving a corpse, but is also going to break, right there in public, a great taboo.

For corpses, too, were a source of ritual contamination. By going to the corpse and touching it, he would become unclean, and then come out and transmit the ritual impurity to all present as well.

Despite the privileged position the little girl had in life as the daughter of a religious leader, in death she is just another corpse, just another source of ritual contamination, like the woman with the flow of blood earlier in the story.

After he puts the onlookers all out, he takes the child's father and mother and his accompanying disciples, and goes in to where the corpse is. He then takes her by the hand and says, “Little girl, get up!” (Talitha qumi! It is recorded in the words he probably actually used in his own native language, Aramaic.)

We read, “Immediately the girl stood up and walked around (she was twelve years old). At this they were completely astonished.”

You see, in both cases, the woman with the flow of blood and Jairus’ young daughter, compassion and service took precedence over a desire to remain pure.

This really marks just how radical Jesus was. The religion of the day declared, with the full authority of scripture literally cited and interpreted through authoritative tradition, that impurity was contagious. It spread from the unclean to the clean. People who want to please God must avoid it if at all possible, lest they commit sacrilege against the Temple of God. If impurity is inadvertently contracted, they need to purge it away through rituals.

As a Jew, Jesus respected the rituals. But he taught that goodness was different from purity, and far more important. In his view, moral goodness was spread to others by compassion and service. And the need for compassion and service trumped the need to avoid contamination at all times.

The theme is a subtext of almost all of Jesus’ public acts and teaching. He practiced open table fellowship with people that his religion labeled as the worst of the worst. And according to the Law, the table where one ate was one of the easiest places to contract impurity. He taught that it was what one said and did, rather than what one ate, that counted. He tended to discount ritual washings as a core issue and said they did not necessarily touch what really mattered—the heart. He told stories of religious men avoiding contamination with what they thought was a corpse in contrast to a heretic and illegitimate man (a Samaritan) who, despite the same religious rules about corpses, still showed compassion and thus made himself the fellow countryman ("the neighbor") of the man who was near death.

In so doing, Jesus was following the very best of the Jewish prophetic tradition, which itself had consistently criticized the religious establishment’s concern with purity rather than justice.

Ultimately, it would be Jesus’ uncompromising insistence on this that so alienated the religious authorities that they conspired to turn him over to the hated Roman occupiers.

We need never think that our uncleanness or impurity is a barrier keeping us from Jesus. We need not fear that a disability we may have can keep us from the love of Jesus. Jesus loves us regardless, and wants to heal us and help us understand that we are forgiven all.

What keeps us from Jesus is our fear itself. Our fear may make us so nervous that we , like the professional mourners outside Jairus' house, end up laughing at God. But the woman with the flow of blood was so desperate that she overcame her fear. Taking things into her own hands she reaches out to touch his robes. We too need to reach out to touch his robes.

When Jairus learns his daughter is dead, Jesus tells him "Don't be afraid, just trust in me."

Jesus is saying this today, to each of us, "Don't be afraid. Just trust in me."

In the name of God, Amen.

God of the Storm (Proper 7 B)

God of the Storm
Third Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 7)
21th June 2009
Morrison Chapel, Macau
10:00 a.m. Eucharist with reserved sacrament
Job 38:1-11, 16-18; Psalm 107:1-3, 23-32; 2 Corinthians 5:14-21; Mark 4:35-41

God, breathe into us a desire to change— take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

Thank you all for welcoming me once again to Morrison Chapel.

In the north transept of St. John’s cathedral in Hong Kong, there is a beautiful stained glass window of Jesus calming the seas, the story we read today in the Gospel. Beside the portrayal of Jesus in the small boat with his disciples in the middle of Lake Tiberias, you find other figures: on one side is an English seaman, complete with navy blue peacoat, dufflebag, and pipe, looking as if at a shipping vessel preparing to load at the dock. On the other is a Southern Chinese woman in traditional clothing and woven grass rain hat looking to mend nets for fishing. The point is clear—here along the South China coast where sea faring is such a part of the economy and where risking one’s life by plying one’s trade out on the waters is a part of many people’s daily life, Jesus as a savior who can calm rough waters is truly important.


The story of Jesus calming the storm is more than just a recitation of a miraculous act of Jesus that demonstrates his authority. It is a story underscoring that Jesus is compassionate, and wholly worthy of trust and being relied on when we are in trouble.


The writers of the Gospel stories about Jesus calming the storm probably had in mind the description of the God who calls the storms and then calms them which we chanted today from Psalm 107. In Churches and parishes in port towns and in military chaplaincies for the Navy, we often hear the section of this Psalm that we chanted today, the part about “those who go down to the sea in ships.”

But what is interesting to me is this—Psalm 107 is not just about sailors. It has several different sections describing people in many different extreme situations, where they need to rely on God. The whole Psalm could be entitled, “God, the Savior of People in Distress.”

Part (vv. 4-9) talks about people who get lost in the desert and run out of water. God there leads them back to an oasis.

Another part (vv. 10-16) describes prisoners in a dark dungeon. God leads them from darkness to light, from bondage to freedom.

Yet another (vv. 17-22) talks about people suffering from horrible illness, as the Psalmist says, “because of their wicked ways.” They are near the gates of death because they cannot eat food anymore, because it has become so distasteful to them in their illness. One wonders whether whether the Psalmist has venereal disease, alcoholism or drug addiction, or some other ailment in mind, but the bit about not wanting to eat any nourishing food brings all these to mind. In the Psalmist's era, people thought disease came as punishment from God rather than from infection microbes. God heals these people when they call on him.

Finally, we see the part about those who go out upon the sea and get caught in a storm (vv. 23-32). Again, God calms the storm when they call on him. The psalm ends (vv. 33-41) by saying that God can change a river into a desert, and rich springs into dusty and arid ground. He can turn fruitful land into a salt marsh, and a desert into pools of water. The point is that God is a reliable savior in any hardship.

So the next time we hear the story about Jesus calming the storm, let’s not just think about Jesus helping mariners only.

Think about the drug addicts and alcoholics who have been helped by Jesus when they call upon him and surrender to him. And that, whatever name they might use to call Jesus, or image they might have of their “higher power.”

Think about the physically ill who have found healing and comfort in Jesus.

Think about how his message can help those lost in mental illness, or harmful ego.

Think about the poor that Jesus calls us to serve and assist.

Think about how he helps those lost in sin and self-deception, ourselves included, and lost in exploitation and deception of others.

“Master, don’t you care that we are perishing?” the disciples in the boat cry when they find him sleeping in the storm.

Before replying, Jesus calms the storm. Then he asks, “Why are you terrified? Where’s your trust in God? Where’s your faith?”

When I heard this story as a young boy, I heard this line and thought that Jesus here was condemning the disciples. "Oh ye of little faith." "If only you had faith, Peter, you could not only walk on water but also calm the sea itself." "If you have faith the size of a tiny mustard seed, you could not only move mountains, but calm the oceans too." All this conspired to make me want to say, "I'm unworthy, unworthy."

But that is not what the story is trying to say. Remember that this is the Jesus who spent his days with drunkards and prostitutes, and when criticized for this replied, "sick people need a doctor, not healthy ones." It is the same Jesus who told the story of the Pharisee and the tax collector.

The point is this--if we are forced by our circumstances to think we need God, then we should realize that it is God that we are in need of. God is trustworthy. God, in the idea of the Psalm we chanted today, is the savior of all in distress. Relying on God leaves little room for fear. Regardless of how things turn out, we know that, in the words of the prayer, God "is doing for us more that we can ask or imagine."

That's why Jesus calms the sea before he asks his disciples why they were afraid. He sympathizes and understands them, but wants to turn their rough fear and general sense of needing into a directed desire for the help of the One who is wholly trustworthy.

Jesus cares, and can help. We need to trust him.

In the name of God, Amen.

The Book of Signs (John 6)

The Book of Signs

Fourth Sunday of Easter (Daily Office Year 2)
3rd May 2009
Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist, Hong Kong
Evening Prayer 6:00 p.m.
Readings: Exodus 16, 4-15 ; John 6. 30-40
Eucharistic Readings Year B: Acts 4.5-12; Psalm 23; 1 John 3.16-24; John 10.11-18

God, breathe into us a desire to change— take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

In the Gospel of Matthew, we read, “Then some of the scribes and Pharisees said to him, “Teacher, we wish to see a sign from you.” He said to them in reply, "An evil and unfaithful generation seeks a sign, but no sign will be given it except the sign of Jonah the prophet. Just as Jonah was in the belly of the whale three days and three nights, so will the Son of Man be in the heart of the earth three days and three nights” (Matt 12:38-40.) The original point of this saying was probably something like this: if you insist on some proof from God—some marvelous act or deed of power, some miracle—before you will follow him or believe his word, the only proof God will give you is the silence and meaninglessness of death and the tomb. In the context of Matthew’s Gospel, this becomes an implicit prediction of Jesus’ death and resurrection.

It is because of this text that the term “sign-seeker” is generally seen as describing a bad thing. The term has come to mean someone with little or no faith, a crass and selfish doubter with the attitude, “show me and then I’ll believe.”

On the other hand, in traditional catechisms, one of the reliable warrants for the reasonableness of the Christian faith is the presence of what are called “miracles” in the life of Christ and the apostles. This is a Latin word for things so unusual that we just have to marvel at them. These “miracles” provide the grounds for the faithful to believe and trust in God, in contradistinction to the “signs” that the faithless seek after and will never find.

In one common form of this view made popular by Western, especially Roman Catholic, catechisms in the 19th and early 20th century, God’s call and revelation to us is validated by miracles. These are understood as examples where natural laws are suspended by an act of the revealing God in order to provide the faithful with sufficient cause to accept God’s messenger and message. In this view, God has made things so plain that only the truly wicked can reject the authority of God, since to do so they have to deny what is right in front of their faces.

Sign-seekers in this view demand more evidence from God than the abundant evidence he has already given. Through their desire for more examples of the miraculous before they will believe, they number themselves among the wicked who reject what God has set forth plainly enough for all fair-minded and honest people.

So it comes a bit of a shock when people find out that the Gospel of John uses the word “signs” to describe Jesus’ marvelous deeds, and says that these signs lead to Jesus. Tonight’s Gospel reading is one such example.

Of the four Gospels in the New Testament, John is the latest, written during the third generation of Christians, though parts of its tradition go back to the life of Jesus. The author tells a story very different from those found in the other three Gospels, Mark, Matthew, and Luke.

More than the other three Gospels, John tells the story of Jesus wholly from the point of view of his disciples after they had seen him die and then once more fully alive after Easter. John puts the insights revealed by later development of the post-Easter faith right onto the lips of Jesus in his Gospel story.

The author of John is very up front in telling us his purpose: "...these things are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through faith in him you may have life” (John 20:31).

The Johannine Jesus is revealed to the reader through a series of acts that we would call miracles: turning water to wine, healing the paralytic, multiply the loaves and fishes, walking on the sea, curing the man born blind, raising Lazarus from the dead. John does not call these things miracles. He calls them signs, or pointers to the true meaning of Jesus. The word he uses is semeia—the word where we get the word semantics, or the study of meanings.

John sees these acts of power not just as evidence that Jesus is God’s chosen one, God’s Son. Rather, for him they indicate—they point to, they serve as symbols for—the mystery that John sees as the reality of God in Christ.

This is not an effort at biographic history. This is an effort to point the reader to Christ, the risen Lord, the Eternal Word of God come down from heaven and now returned there, as experienced by believers now.

At times in the narrative the signs give Jesus a chance to give a discourse—at other times, a chance to engage in dialogue—on aspects of Jesus as Eternal Word of God and Son of the Father.

Today’s reading introduces what is called the Discourse on the Bread of Life.

In the previous chapter, Jesus has taken a few loaves of bread and fish and turned them into more than enough to feed the crowds flocking after him, and to spare. Jesus and the disciples have escaped the crowds who want to make Jesus King because of his sign of multiplying the loaves and fishes.

Jesus goes off to be alone in meditation and prayer while the disciples escape by boat; he catches up with them in the night by walking on the water to the boat.

When the crowds find them the next morning, they ask Jesus, “Rabbi, when did you come here?” (John 6:25). They saw the others depart on the boat and know Jesus was not aboard. They want to know where he came from and how he got there.

But as in so many other places in the Gospel of John, the crowd is asking the wrong question—instead of asking how he got there over night and where he came from, they should be asking where he ultimately came from (John’s answer is, “from above, from the Father’s bosom”).

So Jesus does not answer “how did you get here?” by telling them of yet another sign, the walking on water. He sees that they are so focused on the acts of power themselves that they do not realize what they actually mean. They are misunderstanding the signs. While the signs point in one direction to one meaning, the crowds think they point somewhere entirely different, to another meaning.

So Jesus says, “You are seeking me not because you have seen signs, but because I filled your bellies with bread.” He adds, “Don’t work for food that eventually will rot and go bad. Work for food that will last forever and give you life forever.” The bread the crowd is demanding that Jesus again make for them appear out of nowhere, he says, will mold, get wormy, and go bad if not eaten. Jesus says the bread he multiplied the day before is not just a meal, or “mighty act of God” to prove his authority. It is not merely perishable nourishment. It points to nourishment that will always be there, and will always give life.

He says: raise your sights above passing things, but to ever-present, unchanging ones, to what “I, the Son of Man will give you” (v. 27).

It is not the giving of perishable bread that establishes the authority of Jesus; it is not such a miracle or “work of God” that validates his message, he says. “The Father has shown for you my authenticity (“set his seal upon me”) because I am the one who will give you bread that lasts forever.”

This is not a theology of evidence of authority. This is a theology of trust, engagement, and mystery, of letting God lead where he will.

But the crowd continues to miss the point. “If you can do such wonderful things—such works of God—then why don’t you teach us how to as well?” (v. 28). They think Jesus has performed a magic trick, and they want him to teach them how to do it as well.

He replies, “There is only one work of God that ultimately matters—trust in God, have faith in the One who sent me” (v. 29)

It is at this point in the story that tonight’s reading begins. Again, the crowd misunderstands. They return to the issue of finding a warrant for belief.

They ask, “What marvelous deed will you perform for us to see now so that we can have a proof that we should have faith in you?” (v. 30). They point to a marvelous act of God in the traditional story of their people—the people of God fed on manna in the desert—as an example of one of the warrants they use for their accepting the authority of Moses as God’s prophet. “And this wasn’t just ordinary bread, what you call perishable, but bread from heaven. Give us some similar proof,” they ask. (Note that they are forgetting a key detail in the Old Testament story—if a family did not trust God but wanted instead to hoard the manna or save it for a later time, by sunset it would rot and go wormy.)

Jesus replies by saying that 1) it was God, not Moses who gave the manna, 2) the Father gives bread now, and 3) manna met the physical needs of God’s people but “true bread” is more than that.

Then Jesus says this: my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world." (v. 33).

The crowd replies, "Sir, give us this bread always" (v. 34), thinking he still is talking about foodstuffs.

And Jesus replies,
“ I am the bread of life;
whoever comes to me will never hunger,
whoever has faith in me will never thirst” (v. 35).

Jesus calling himself here the bread from heaven that gives life is the start of long discourse on spiritual sustenance, Jesus as bread in the Eucharist, and the universal will of the Father and the Son to save all.

“I am the bread that gives life.” This phrase has echoes in other symbols, signs, and statements in John’s Gospel.

At the wedding banquet in Cana in chapter 2, in his first sign, Jesus makes wine from water. Later, in his last discourse, he says “I am the true vine.”

Meeting the Samaritan woman at the well of Jacob in chapter 4, Jesus says “whoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst; the water I shall give will become in him a spring of water welling up.” Like the crowds misunderstanding the bread who ask “give us this bread,” the Samaritan woman initially misunderstands and says “give me this water.” In chapter 7, on the last day of the feast of Tabernacles, he says, “Let anyone who thirsts come to me and drink. Whoever has faith in me, as scripture says: ‘Rivers of living water will flow from within him.’”

At the Feast of Hannukah in chapter 8, when the candles of the Feast are being lit, and again in chapter 9 just before he cures the man born blind, Jesus says, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”

In chapter 10, he says, “I am the gate for the sheep. . . . I am the gate. Whoever enters through me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture.. And since this is Good Shepherd Sunday, I note that he later says in the same chapter, “I am the good shepherd. A good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.”

In the final sign of Gospel before the passion, just before Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead, he says in chapter 11, “I am the resurrection and the life; whoever has faith in me, even if he dies, will live, and everyone who lives and has faith in me will never die.”

During the Last supper in chapter 14, he tells his disciples “Where (I) am going you know the way.” Thomas replies, “Master, we do not know where you are going; how can we know the way?” Jesus replies “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, then you also know my Father.”

And, as I noted above, in his final discourse before the passion, Jesus in chapter 15 says that he is the source of God’s wine: “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vine grower. . . . Remain in me, as I remain in you. Just as a branch cannot bear fruit on its own unless it remains on the vine, so neither can you unless you remain in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit, because without me you can do nothing.”

The signs, symbols, and images are rich and varied, but all point to one reality, one truth: Jesus as the Eternal Word of God, the Son of the Father Eternal.

There is a story from Southern Chinese Chan Buddhism (or Zen). A Zen Master points to the moon and asks his student, “What is that?” The disciple answers, “the moon.” The Master says, "No, it is my finger.” The point is that the pointer should never be confused with the thing it points at.
In today’s Gospel, John is telling us that the signs, the symbols, the miracles—these are not the point. The point is Jesus Christ himself.

Our doctrines, our systems, our historical research—these are not the point.
Our liturgies, our good works, our service and labor for others—these are not the point.
Our prayers, how we feel, what we desire—these are not the point.
The point is Jesus Christ himself.

He is the way, the truth, the life. He is the nourishment and refreshment that lasts forever. He is life itself, hope, and love.

John argues that in Jesus, we find all that we need. Now that is not to belittle other real needs. To say Jesus is the bread of life is not to say that we have no need to work to earn our daily bread, or to help feed the hungry with real bread. It is simply saying something like Jesus says in Matthew, quoting the Book of Deuteronomy, “A human being does not live by bread alone, but by every word of God.”

In this story and discourse in the Gospel of John, miracles and “the works of God” are seen to be good things only if we let them teach us about God and let them lead us where they will. They are things that can distract us from God if we focus on them alone as solace or reassurance, as “proofs” of some authority or examples of some theological argument.

That’s because focusing on the pointing hand and not the moon it points distracts us from the moon.

That’s because talking about God in the third person and God’s acts as proofs lets us continue to keep God at a distance, observable and observed, contained and constrained.

That’s because focusing on what God did once, long ago, perhaps to feed the children of Israel in the desert, may keep us from seeing God’s hand offered out to us here, and now, if we close our hearts to him.

This is why John’s Jesus says the sole work of God is to trust or have faith in Him. Saint Luke makes the same point in his story of Mary and Martha (Luke 10). Jesus there says, “Martha, Martha. You are worried about doing many things. But only one thing is needful, listening to me.” If you have trust and faith, all else will grow from this. If you work on any number of things without trust and faith, you are only going through the actions.

The first commandment is not, “Thou shalt assent to the proposition that there is a God.” It is not “Thou shall argue convincingly that there is a God.” The first commandment is “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, might mind, and strength.”

The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, or Sarah, Leah, and Rachel, is the living God, not the categorized, defined, and codified God. He is the great I AM, not the great HE WAS.
Unless we approach God, as Martin Buber says, as “thou” rather than “he” or “it,” we are approaching a dead idol. And idols do not have the power to save.

The manna in the Exodus story would spoil and turn bad within a day, and could not be hoarded for future use. Jesus points to this short shelf life of manna as a sign of the deficiency of miracles, or the works of God, seen solely as proofs. He says that He, the true bread come down from Heaven, does not go bad.

And though Jesus as the Bread that gives Life never goes bad, our acceptance of Jesus, our faith in him, our trust in him, and our connection to him, must be renewed and cultivated every day, just as the children of Israel needed to gather manna each day.

George MacDonald wrote,

“With every morn my life afresh must break
The crust of self, gathered about me fresh.
..In holy things may be unholy greed.
Thou giv’st a glimpse of many a lovely thing,
Not to be stored for future use in any mind,
But only for the present spiritual need.
The holiest bread, if hoarded, soon will breed
The mammon-moth, the having pride.”

Pathetic creatures that we are, we can turn even God’s gift of Himself to the world into a proof, into a story of things long ago. Or we can turn the call for an act of trust in God into a doctrine of salvation through faith alone, turning the faith act into a work itself, reducing the Gospel to a Gospel of works. Where Jesus’ contemporaries talked about Moses and Manna, and the need for more miraculous evidence as a way of distracting themselves from what Jesus was calling them to, we talk about the doctrine of salvation through grace by faith alone, or we talk about the proofs of God offered by the miracles in the Holy Scriptures.

In many ways we today find ourselves in the situation Jesus’ contemporaries found themselves in regard to the stories of God’s saving acts long ago. That is one of the reasons the catechisms I mentioned earlier, with their insistence on intellectual assent and the provability of the Faith lost their appeal.

How can miracles recounted in the Bible prove the existence of God when you doubt that the miracles actually took place? How can you gain salvation through grace when you are relying on a declaration and confession of faith as a type of work with which to bribe God, or to reassure yourself?

To all of this, to them and to us, Jesus says this: There is only one thing needed. I am the Bread of Life. I am the Living Water. I am the Wine of God. I am the Way, the Truth, the Life, the Resurrection, and the Light of the World. Trust me. Have faith in me.

May we so live, and that each day.

In the name of God, Amen.

God Wants Us Whole (Morrison Chapel)

Morrison Chapel, Macau, once the chapel of the British East India Company in the territory, and now an Anglican chapel. Robert Morrison, the Presbyterian minister who worked as a translator for the British East India Company to support his mission to China and his work in producing the first published translation of the Bible into Chinese, is buried in the protestant cemetery in the chapel's churchyard.

[The following are notes from an extemporaneous homily I delivered Feb. 15 at Morrison Chapel in Macau. The officiating priest was delayed by heavy fog, which had closed the port and shut down ferries entering the territory from Hong Kong. My wife and I were visiting for the weekend. Congregants asked me to assist, and the priest asked me by phone to officiate until he arrived. We proceeded with liturgy of the word, hoping for liturgy of the table when the priest arrived. As it turned out, the delay was longer than the service. Since there was no reserved sacrament available, we finished the liturgy of the word as if it had been Morning Prayer. The congregation at Morrison Chapel is small, very diverse, and extremely warm and welcoming. For blog readers, sorry for the repeated paras from a couple of other recent sermons--but this was extemporaneous, after all. -T]

Morrison Chapel Stained Glass Window with Chinese "In the beginning was the Word."

God Wants Us Whole
Sixth Sunday after Epiphany (HKSKH/TEC year B)
15th February 2009 10:00 a.m. Liturgy of the Word
Homily delivered at Morrison Chapel, Macau
Readings: 2 Kings 5:1-15, 1 Corinthians 9:24-27, Mark 1:40-45, Psalm 42

God, let us not accept the judgment that this is what we are. . . . Inflame our hearts with the desire to change—with hope and faith that we all can change. Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen. (adapted from Dorothy Day)

The Old Testament reading today and the Gospel reading deal with healings of lepers.

First a word on leprosy in the Bible: it is probably not Hansen’s disease, the highly communicable and, until antibiotics were discovered, hopeless progressive disease that gradually disfigures and then kills—the disease we call leprosy. What the Bible calls leprosy is almost certainly a fungal or viral disease of the skin like ringworm or athlete’s foot. The disease was highly polluting in terms of ritual impurity under the Law of Moses, and was to be avoided at all costs for this reason. It was seen as a source of “dirt” or disgusting filth, and this ritual pollution was highly contagious and contaminating.

Jesus, a practicing Jew, believed that mercy and humanity was more important than purity. He was what we would call a moderately liberal Pharisee in his halakic (ritual legal) interpretation.

Jesus always looks to the person before him and asks how his legal interpretation will affect her or him. He replies to stingy images of God with parables. He points to the weather and says that God gives his rain and sunshine to both good and bad people alike (Matt. 5:45). He says this tells us about God’s love for all and should be a model for us in how we treat others. Jesus points to families and notes that when children ask for bread to eat, parents do not give them stones, or when they ask for an egg to eat, do not give them a scorpion. “If even average parents try to give their children good things, how much more generous will God be?” (Matt. 7:9-10; Luke 11:11-13)

Jesus’ actions matched his words. He regularly ate and drank with people that his religion told him would make him unclean. He had dinner parties with drunkards and prostitutes, much to the horror of Jesus’ “righteous” opponents. “It is the sick who need a doctor,” he would say, “not healthy people.” (Matt. 9:12) It is almost as if Jesus went out of his way to encounter the unclean, though he knew that in so doing he was incurring uncleanness in the eyes of the Law. He reserved his deepest anger for people who put heavy burdens of the law on others, people he accused of “refusing to enter God’s door, and also barring the way to others” (Matt 23:13).

One of the major parts of Jesus’ ministry was healing, whether of mind or of body. In the story of Jesus healing the leper, we see him pursuing this call even as he approaches and engages the ritually unclean. The gospel stories of Jesus healing the sick—like those in today’s gospel reading from Mark—tell us that the ultimate purpose of God does not include disease, suffering, and death. Jesus’ ministry of announcing the in-breaking of the reign of God focused in large part in healing physical and mental suffering. This tells us that God doesn’t like horror and disappointment for us any more than we do.

But does this mean that we have an easy out with them? That all we have to do is pray and have faith, and we too will automatically have healings? No it does not. That is not the world we live in.

I was raised in a religious community that taught that God blessed the righteous, punished the wicked, and heard and answered the prayers of the righteous. My wife and I had a major trial in our faith just after we were married while we were still in college and just starting our own family. We had become friends with a young couple that went to Church with us. They were good people. After several years of unsuccessful efforts, they were able to get pregnant and had a beautiful little baby boy. After a month or so, though, it became apparent that sometime was wrong. He had been born with a genetic defect: the upper layers of his skin were not fully connected with the deeper layers of his skin. If you touched him slightly on the arm, it quickly would turn into a large blister, would easily burst and become infected. There was little that the doctors could do. Despite two months in intensive care, the baby’s body was covered with what essentially were second-degree burns. He was held suspended in a light net to prevent further damage from the bed. His parents were not allowed to touch him, so they could not even comfort him as he screamed his little life out in agony. During the ordeal, we prayed. Our friends prayed. The Church elders prayed and anointed the baby with healing oil, carefully, on the inch or so of sound skin on the side of his head. The whole community prayed. And the baby suffered and slowly died.

It is not the only time in my life when I wished that the world were as simple as I had been taught in Sunday School: my wife’s mother’s cancer, my father’s Alzheimer’s disease.

Yet I have also seen prayers answered in wonderful and miraculous ways, sometimes quickly, sometimes gradually: a deadly disease stopped in its tracks and healed, broken relationships mended and strengthened, mental illness managed. I am sure that most of you have had similar experience where we have seen or suffered great pain, but also seen miraculous alleviation of pain. But it is not a simple mathematical formula.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, talks about this in his book Tokens of Trust: An Introduction to Christian Belief (Louisville / London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007). I found what he has to say on this subject very helpful. It coheres with my experience both of prays answered and prayers seemingly rejected.

Rowan says that though God’s ultimate purpose does not include disease, insanity, and death, unfortunately the world as it is currently constituted does include these things that are against God’s ultimate purpose. Citing St. Augustine, he notes that the miracles of the Bible are most often simply the natural processes sped up a bit. Jesus turns water into wine—but this recapitulates a natural process where water, sunshine, grape vines, given enough time, produce grapes, then juice, then wine. Miracles are inbreakings of God’s ultimate intentions in the current time frame. We cannot force this, or expect it as a matter of course—we are talking about miracles here, not magic. But we can perhaps do things that make it just a little easier for God’s ultimate purposes to have their way now.

“God is always at work, but that work is not always visible. God is always at work, but sometimes the world’s processes go with the grain of his final purpose and sometimes they resist. But if certain things came together in the world at this or that moment, the ‘flow’ would be easier and more direct. Perhaps a really intense prayer or a really holy life can open the world up that bit more to God’s purpose so that unexpected things happen. We’re never going to have a complete picture on how that works, because we don’t have God’s perspective on it all. But we can say that there are some things we can think, say or do that seem to give God that extra ‘freedom of manoeuvre’ in our universe. And whether we fully understand what’s going on or not, we know that it’s incumbent on us to do what we can to let this happen. We pray, we act in ways that have some chance of shaping a situation so that God can come more directly in. It isn’t a process we can manipulate; miracles aren’t magic, and we could never have a comprehensive manual of techniques for securing what we pray for. It would be very comforting if we knew the formula for success, but we don’t. All we know is that we are called to pray, to trust and to live with integrity before God (to live ‘holy’ lives) in such a way as to leave the door open, to let things come together so that love can come through.” (p. 45)

The fact is, Jesus showed us the path here. We need to reach out to others and see the people in front of us first and foremost, as people. We need not fear contamination or condemnation. We should amend our ways when we oppress others, and work to overcome all forms of such abuse of God’s creatures. We should pray, sometimes fast, and work to make the world and our lives a little more congruent with what God’s ultimate purposes are. For what God wants for all of us is good indeed.

In the name of God, Amen.

Entrance to the cemetery just behind the chapel.

The cemetery. Morrison's grave is at the right back corner.

The gravestone; behind it is a Chinese memorial plaque erected on Morrison centenary.

The gravestone inscription.

We Do Not Lose Heart
Third Sunday before Lent (CoE Year B)
8th February 2009 6:00 p.m. Healing Eucharist
Homily delivered at St. John’s Cathedral, Hong Kong
Readings: Mark 1:29-39; 2 Corinthians 4:6-5:5

God, let us not accept the judgment that this is what we are. . . . Inflame our hearts with the desire to change—with hope and faith that we all can change. Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen. (adapted from Dorothy Day)

Saint Paul Writing his Epistles (1620), oil,
Valentin de Boulogne (ca 1594-1632) or Nicolas Tournier (1590-1638),
Blaffer Foundation Collection, Houston, TX.

St. Paul in 2 Corinthians says that despite all sorts of horrors, disappointments, and difficulties, “we do not lose heart.” He says the light of the gospel is a treasure kept in pottery jars, easily broken, and says that our lives are those jars. He is no rosy-lensed optimist: he details many of the disappointments and trials he himself had experienced over the years. Yet, he says, “we do not lose heart.”

I was raised in a religious community that taught that God blessed the righteous, punished the wicked, and heard and answered the prayers of the righteous. My wife and I had a major trial in our faith just after we were married while we were still in college and just starting our own family. We had become friends with a young couple that went to Church with us. They were good people. After several years of unsuccessful efforts, they were able to get pregnant and had a beautiful little baby boy. After a month or so, though, it became apparent that sometime was wrong. He had been born with a genetic defect: the upper layers of his skin were not fully connected with the deeper layers. If you touched him slightly on the arm, it quickly would turn into a large blister, would easily burst and become infected. There was little that the doctors could do. Despite two months in intensive care, the baby’s body was covered with what essentially were second-degree burns. He was held suspended in a light net to prevent further damage from the bed. His parents were not allowed to touch him, so they could not even comfort him as he screamed his little life out in agony. During the ordeal, we prayed. Our friends prayed. The Church elders prayed and anointed the baby with healing oil, carefully, on the inch or so of sound skin on the side of his head. The whole community prayed. And the baby suffered and slowly died.

It is not the only time in my life when I wished that the world were as simple as I had been taught in Sunday School: my wife’s mother’s cancer, my father’s Alzheimer’s disease.

Yet I have also seen prayers answered in wonderful and miraculous ways, sometimes quickly, sometimes gradually: a deadly disease stopped in its tracks and healed, broken relationships mended and strengthened, mental illness managed.

The gospel stories of Jesus healing the sick—like those in tonight’s gospel reading from Mark—tell us that the ultimate purpose of God does not include disease, suffering, and death. Jesus’ ministry of announcing the in-breaking of the reign of God focused in large part in healing physical and mental suffering. This tells us that God doesn’t like horror and disappointment for his creatures any more than we do.

But how do we make sense of this?

Perhaps we cannot, but still are called to pray.

Archibishop Rowan Williams (Photo Eleanor Bentall)

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, talks about this in his book Tokens of Trust: An Introduction to Christian Belief (Louisville / London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007). I found what he has to say on this subject very helpful. It coheres with my experience both of prayers answered and prayers seemingly rejected.

Instead of giving you my own thoughts tonight, I thought I would follow a time-honored Anglican tradition of reading you a homily prepared by one of my betters. Here is what Rowan says:

“Aren’t Christians supposed to believe in miracles? Doesn’t the Bible give us a clear picture of a God who can impose his will on creation when it suits him? And if the Bible is right, then surely there is justification for the agonized cry that sometimes goes up, ‘Why does God intervene there and not here? Why are some prayers apparently answered and some not?’ I remember a vivid example from years back, when someone who had been involved in a very upbeat and confident charismatic prayer group asked why God should be thanked for finding parking spaces for members of the prayer group when he couldn’t be bothered to sort out the conflict in Northern Ireland. It’s a very good question indeed. I we are to answer it all, we’ll need to [remember the different ideas there are about the almightiness of God, and what faith in God means.]” (pp. 43-44)

“[What do we Christians mean when we talk about ‘God almighty’?] It has always been tempting to think of it in terms of what we would like so as to overcome our limitations—the ability to get whatever we desire, to resolve our own and everyone’s difficulties by a flick of the wrist. . . . If ‘I believe in God the Father almighty’ means ‘I believe that there is somewhere an unlimited power that can choose and perform anything it likes, and I need to be on the right side of it,’ that doesn’t sound as though it had much to do with trust; an almighty power like that, a huge arbitrary will, would be unsettling indeed.” (p. 15)

“The word translated ‘almighty’ in fact in the Greek [pantokrator] means ‘ruler of everything’ or even something like ‘holder of everything’; and this suggests a slightly different approach. It means that there is nowhere God is absent, powerless, or irrelevant; no situation in the universe in the face of which God is at a loss. Which is much the same as saying that there is no situation in which God is not to be relied upon. The freedom of his love . . . implies that his love never exhausts it resources, whatever happens in the universe in general or in my life in particular. . . . [W]e can get the idea of the ‘almightiness’ a bit wrong by thinking of it in terms of a great wish-fulfilment fantasy instead of seeing it as a way of saying that God always has the capacity to do something fresh and different, to bring something new out of a situation—because nothing outside of himself can finally frustrate his longing. So almightiness in this sense becomes another reason for trust.” (p. 16)

“What the Bible puts before us is not a record of a God who is always triumphantly getting his way by doing miracles . . . , but a God who gets his way by patiently struggling to make himself clear to human beings, to make his love real to them, especially when they seem not to want to know or to want to avoid him and retreat into their own fantasies about him. And typically, the Bible sometimes does this by a very bold method—by telling a certain kind of story from the human point of view, as if God needed to be persuaded to be faithful to his people. Someone like Abraham or Moses, someone who has good reason to know something about what God is really like, is faced with a crisis. Things are going badly; surely God is going to give up and blast people into oblivion. So Abraham and Moses argue with God until they have persuaded him to be merciful. These writers knew exactly what they were doing. They didn’t believe in a bad-tempered, capricious God who needed to be calmed down by sensible human beings. They knew that the most vivid way of expressing what they understood about God was to show Abraham and Moses appealing to the deepest and most true thing about God as they pray to him.” (p. 17)

“I have been trying to suggest the picture of a God whose almighty power is more of a steady swell of loving presence, always there at work in the centre of everything that is, opening the door to a future even when we can see no hope. So hoe might that apply to the question of miracles? Well, one thing that tells us is that we can’t be doing with the sort of notion of miracles that some seem to have, as if God hearing our prayers were like someone receiving applications. He ticks some and puts a cross on others and hands the forms back for action by some angelic civil service. There is a hint of a slightly more sensible approach in an idea put forward by St. Augustine in the fifth century—that miracles were really just natural processes speeded up a bit, ‘fast-forwarded’. This may be a bit too simple; but Augustine had got hold of something that many thinkers of the Middle Ages followed through in different ways. If God’s action is always at work around us, if it’s always ‘on hand’, so to speak, we shouldn’t be thinking of God’s action and the processes of the world as two opposing sorts of thing, jostling for space. But what if there were times when certain bits of the world’s processes came together in such a way that the whole cluster of happenings became a bit more open to God’s final purposes? What if the world were sometimes a bit more ‘transparent’ to the underlying act of God?” (pp. 44-45)

“God is always at work, but that work is not always visible. God is always at work, but sometimes the world’s processes go with the grain of his final purpose and sometimes they resist. But if certain things came together in the world at this or that moment, the ‘flow’ would be easier and more direct. Perhaps a really intense prayer or a really holy life can open the world up that bit more to God’s purpose so that unexpected things happen. We’re never going to have a complete picture on how that works, because we don’t have God’s perspective on it all. But we can say that there are some things we can think, say or do that seem to give God that extra ‘freedom of manoeuvre’ in our universe. And whether we fully understand what’s going on or not, we know that it’s incumbent on us to do what we can to let this happen. We pray, we act in ways that have some chance of shaping a situation so that God can come more directly in. It isn’t a process we can manipulate; miracles aren’t magic, and we could never have a comprehensive manual of techniques for securing what we pray for. It would be very comforting if we knew the formula for success, but we don’t. All we know is that we are called to pray, to trust and to live with integrity before God (to live ‘holy’ lives) in such a way as to leave the door open, to let things come together so that love can come through.” (p. 45)

This faith described by the Archbishop of Canterbury, this trust in God who is ever there, and ever loving, sustains us and keeps us from “losing heart.”

Teilhard de Chardin

Let me close with a prayer that the great Jesuit anthropologist Teilhard de Chardin wrote at the onset of the illness that would eventually kill him:

When the signs of age begin to mark my body
(and still more when they touch my mind);

when the ill that is to diminish me or carry me off
strikes from without or is born within me;

when the painful moment comes
in which I suddenly awaken
to the fact that I am ill or growing old;

and above all at that last moment
when I feel I am losing hold of myself
and am absolutely passive within the hands
of the great unknown forces that have formed me;

in all those dark moments, O God,
grant that I may understand that it is you
(provided only my faith is strong enough)
who are painfully parting the fibres of my being
in order to penetrate to the very marrow
of my substance and bear me away within yourself.

In the name of God, Amen.