Between 1968 and 1971 the Coca Cola company
worked on a series of advertisements
loosely grouped together as the “Real Thing
Campaign”.
You might be old enough to remember one of them from 1971 – the famous inter-racial song on the hillside: “I’d like
to buy the world a Coke…” which ended
with the refrain “It’s the real thing…”.

Would you know the real thing if it kicked you in
the backside? Would the “Real Thing” fulfil your
expectations or defy them?
Maybe you’ve spent years yearning for something you knew so well that
you could almost taste it. You’d
recognize it a kilometre away - this or that opportunity – this or that perfect
person. You’ll have fleshed out the
desired thing in your imagination during sleepless nights. It will look like this – he or she will be
like that. The imaginary thing or person
or occasion or opportunity has grown quite specific. You could draw a picture of it.

You're waiting, then, for something just like that
to wander into view so that you can hop up and shout “bingo”?

Give it a sec.

You’ve built up in your mind an idea of what the
real thing will look like. You’re the
one supplying its arms and legs, setting out the rules by which it will work,
what it looks like, sounds like and smells like. That might pose a problem for you out there in the real
world.

I suggest that when you finally do encounter a “Real Thing” it will be a
bit strange and it will be strange precisely because it’s
not you. It is not the product of your
imagination. It does not resemble your
own face staring back up at you from the depths of the well.

In our reading from Matthew’s Gospel this
Sunday, John the Baptist has already been put into prison by Herod
Antipas. His days are numbered and he
has time to think. He has time, even, to fret.
He sends his disciples to Jesus to ask him if he’s the real thing or
should they keep on looking. John, you
will remember, has publicly recognized
Jesus as God’s lamb, as the coming Messiah and as one more worthy than
himself. But he is now assailed by a
doubt: something about Jesus’ ministry
has not conformed to what he, John, had imagined. And so he needs to ask.

Jesus words
are that the benefits of his ministry are abundant and obvious. The blind, the deaf, the lepers, the lame and
even the dead will all attest to its power.
Jesus finishes, however, with these words:

“Blessed is he who takes no offense at me”.

Jesus
ministry will not be tamed by the cultivated hopes of either the great or the small of
Israel. You may not control the answer
to your greatest desire. What comes to you from God is not generated or limited by your own imagination. Be encouraged and even delighted by its strangeness. Discomfort
may be the greatest proof that something real has entered the world—there to be
met and known and followed.

Friday, 25 November 2016

A statement.
There is no question mark:You
have enough information
to know that the school bus is coming or that you risk being late for work if
the traffic is heavy. No doubt it’s tax
time somewhere in the world.The mailing limit for Christmas presents is almost here.Don’t
you owe the world a better degree of
attention?

What do folk say in response? Answers
are at the ready:How time flies—where have the years gone—goodness is it that
time already?Time, it seems, is something which
catches up with us like a predator. We present ourselves as victims of time.

A
quick survey of the readings during the four Sundays in Advent reveals that there are lots of
people not payingattention to the movements in the
world and the movements of the Kingdom of God which are happening around them.
A voice cries in the wilderness—a young woman conceives a child in a
provincial backwater—a stump produces a shoot—the thief arrives in the dead of
night. We’re not alone. Plenty of
people are not paying attention.

Which makes you special, then. This Sunday you
are going to be privy to what Jesus said to his disciples :

Keep awake, therefore...

or there amongst the Christians of Rome to whom
Paul wrote:

You
know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep.

You have choices to make and a life to be greeted
with open eyes and clear vision. There
is darkness to put off from us, to cast out from within us and to resist around
us. There is never enough time for those who will not redeem the time they have
been given by being wakeful. God is at work in the world and you are invited to
join him. The time is now—in this mortal life. Now—in
the year which begins this Sunday. Here—in the place where we live and
amongst these people beside us.

If it was the latter, for example, do remember that people emerge from all sorts of things – World Wars, state imposed famines in Russia or China, the Holocaust and the Armenian or the Rwandan Genocide, the fall of the Roman Empire, the Thirty Years War or the War of the Roses.In the midst of the events it will appear to those on the losing end as if the real world or perhaps just the ‘known world’ were ending.If you tacked up a sign or scrawled some graffiti on a wall which captured the beleaguered community’s self-diagnosis or the spirit of that moment it might well read:

“No Exit”.

There’s something quite cold, then, about the archaeologist or historian who treats this or that ten-year or even fifty-year period - as if it were just another chapter in the human story.You want to scream at them as they dig around toppled Corinthian columns or through the layers of bones of an ancient gravesite: “Have you no empathy?Don’t you understand that the world ended here?”

“But it didn’t”, she says to you over the top of her horn-rimmed specs, and points with her yardstick at the layers of civilization to be found above the burnt brick and the rubble.“Here – here and here”, she says, shrugs her shoulders and then looks at you as if you were some sort of pillock.

In the small “apocalyptic” section of Luke’s Gospel, which we are reading this Sunday, Jesus uses three imperative verbs for his followers who will live in “interesting times” – outlining the things they are to do or not do:

Verse 8: “Watch”. From the fact that Jesus needs to say this to folks who are obviously already looking around and observing, we must conclude that the word contains some sense that discernment is more than just observation.Open your eyes and cultivate an eagerness to see something beyond the mere facts of victory, loss and change.

Verse 14: “Decide now that you will not make up your mind ahead of time about what to say” in your defence or in the defence of your party or your ideals.

Verse 19: “In your endurance (or patience) acquire/possess/gain your soul”.Most English translations of the New Testament cast this as a future verb (“In your endurance you will gain your soul”) but the verb is an imperative in the original Greek text. An imperative is an instruction. There is very little which is automatic about the process.You must choose to follow it.Waiting can just be waiting - a fruitless exercise.But you, the faithful follower of Jesus, have taken the first two imperatives seriously, which makes such patience a fruitful exercise.

Discerning rather than merely watching (v.8), and refusing to cloud that discernment by anticipating every evil outcome ahead of time (v.14), you open the door to the full possession of your own self, in its novelty and openness to God and to the world (v.19). What could be better? What could be more necessary right now?

Friday, 14 October 2016

“…because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.”

We’ve all known somebody like this widow – a person who will not take no for an answer.If we find ourselves in a difference of opinion with such a man or woman we muse to ourselves that it won’t be a question of ifshe (or he) wins the battle but merely a question of when.Jesus exercises a sense of humour when he pits this widow against a corrupt judge and the scene ends with the judge on his front doorstep in slippers and housecoat rewriting his judgement there and then in the widow’s favour just to be rid of the woman.

A few commentators note that English Bibles usually soften the widow’s fearsomeness in saying that the judge worries about being “worn down” by the constant complaints of the widow.The Greek verb comes from the world of boxing and refers to a darkening of the face.The judge is worried about getting a black eye one of these days.Crooked judges are not immune to the persistence of nagging plaintiffs, says Jesus, so why would your heavenly father (who, after all, is not an unjust judge) be deaf to the constant and persistent prayer of his children?Now, you might pray for the wrong thing.You could pray for things which you may not or cannot and, ultimately, do not receive.God is not a soda machine which distributes the desired product when the button is pressed.

But...

What you must abandon foreveris the thought that once you ask politely on asingle occasion you must, from then on, hold your piece at the risk of being rude.Before prayer is a concise request for a particular thing it is a conversation in space and over time and a relationship between you and your maker. Your words and your feelings are a key component to it. Prayer should make room for strong language.It allows for a heated comparison of the promises of God with the way things have actually turned out.It will beneficially contain elements of your anger, sorrow and outrage.

The unrighteous judge says to himself:Here she comes again in high dudgeon, with her papers and her affidavits and her high pitched voice.He looks forward to the encounter with dread and wishes it over.

Your heavenly father sees you coming as well. He knows what you want and he knows what you need.Heanticipates the fruits your conversation will bear and does not, in fact, want rid of you.

Friday, 30 September 2016

The Lord replied, "If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you
could say to this mulberry tree, `Be uprooted and planted in the sea,' and it
would obey you.

Similar
sayings of Jesus in Mark’s and in Matthew’s Gospels juxtapose mustard seeds
with mountains instead of mulberry trees. The phrase “faith that moves mountains”
has found a home in our language as a figure of speech.

I’d
say “You
get the drift” except I’m not sure you and I always do get the drift.

We
might assume that the apostles are asking for the faith necessary to perform
unthinkable miracles: to strike their
enemies dumb, to heal the one-legged at tent meetings or to teleport mountains
and mulberry trees through air and water.
Are ordinary people here asking (and should we be asking, therefore) to
be given superhuman powers?

The
apostles ask Jesus to increase their faith.
I hear echoes of the father in the 9th chapter of Mark whose
child has a convulsing spirit. This
father is asked whether he believes Jesus can heal his son. He cries
out “I
do believe, help my unbelief”

It
might profit us to consider the request which these people make (“increase
our faith” - “help my unbelief”) rather than Jesus’ more memorable
answer.

What
do these people believe they are lacking?

The
apostles, like the father from Mark 9, stand on the edge of a world which shows
itself to be the Kingdom when Jesus speaks and acts in it. We had grown used to seeing the world as a fixed place where the wheels turn as they must and where one thing leads inexorably to the next. Random chance might be our best hope in seeing our fortunes change. Jesus asks his followers to jump in with him and to
see the world as the place where the sick son can be well again, as a place where
we not only should but indeed can forgive our brother when he sins
against us seven times and where we are now free to forswear the things which
cause us and others to stumble.

The old world still grips us in its claws but you, like these
characters from the Gospels, are gathered at Jesus feet and have obeyed the
summons into his presence. This is true
whether you are a character in the Gospels or a contemporary man or woman who
presents yourself in prayer and corporate worship to your living Lord. Are we
to believe that faith, the quantity of which might even best be described as something
the size of a mustard seed, is missing from us?

Or
has it simply not yet been used? It may not yet a normal tool in the conduct of your lives, in the facing down of
conflicts, in your striving for justice in your place of work and in the hammering
out of your path in life? This is the threshold upon which we stand - not the possession of faith but our willingness to use it. We have the
seed in our hands. It needs to be
planted in the ground upon which we live and work.

Thursday, 8 September 2016

At the outset of this week’s Gospel reading, the scribes and the Pharisees expressed unhappiness about all the "low-life" to be found among the followers of Jesus:

“This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them”.

Listen to what Jesus says at the end of the reading:

“I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels

of God over one sinner who repents.”

If all we had were these two ends – the opening and the conclusion – we might conclude that some sinners work hard at this whole business of repentance and can overcome the stigma of their past behavior with a rigourous and athletic turnaround. These “deserving sinners” get cheered on by angels in heaven as they cross the finish line and join the righteous on the other side.

In fact, the intervening two mini-parables (the Lost Sheep and the Lost Coin) are no testament whatsoever to the ability of the lost sheep to climb out of a deep chasm and work its way out of the heather and return to the sheepfold or of a coin to hoist its own shiny edge up between the floorboards and catch the woman’s attention in order to get itself found.

God, says Jesus, is a shepherd. He will go to great lengths to find the one who is well and truly lost.

God, says Jesus, is a poor widow. She will sweep the lengths of her house repeatedly until she finds the thing she has set out to find.

The nature of the Good News that Jesus preaches is not that there now exists a novel way for men and women to work their way along the narrow path into the favor of heaven. The Good News is that God is at work looking for his children, energetically and relentlessly. The redeemed sinner is the handiwork of God and the fruits of God’s labour.

Thursday, 7 July 2016

Jesus
asks a lawyer to summarize the Law and the man obliges: We are to love God
and we are to love our neighbour, he says.

Jesus
commends the lawyer for having come up with the right answer. The man then asks Jesus: “So who is my neighbour?”

Our
lawyer is not merely being difficult. This
matters rather a lot. Luke tells us the
story of their exchange in the Greek language and the word used for neighbour (plesios)
merely describes “One who is near”. In a
similar fashion, when St Jerome translated the Bible into Latin from Greek the
word he chose to use here in this passage was proximus (“the one beside
me”). Luther’s German New Testament uses
the word nächster (as in “the nearest"). Our inclination, however, is to love those who
are attached to us by blood, affection, background or common purpose. We will go out of our way to find some
biblical warrant for it. So when the
Greek Old Testament uses the word neighbour (plesios) to translate a
Hebrew word, the word is most often a Hebrew word (re’a) best translated as
“compatriot”. That’s better. Instead
of referring to whoever happens to be standing next to me or living in the
house next door the earlier word seems to refer to “One with whom one has something to do”

You shall not take vengeance
or bear any grudge against the sons of your own people but you shall love your neighbour (re’a) as yourself.

Leviticus 19:18

We
might conclude that the Greek language here is the odd man out and ill equipped
to express the natural loyalty I feel towards those who are like me - towards the sons and daughters of my own people. This might have been the case except that
Jesus then proceeds to tell a story which indicates that natural loyalty itself
is the problem he wants to address.

A
Jewish man was set upon by thieves. Those with a natural kinship to him gave
him a wide berth and left him lying wounded in the road while an ethnic enemy –
the Samaritan for whom the parable is named – dressed the man’s wounds and paid
for his lodging. Who then, asks Jesus, was
neighbour to this man?

I
don’t need to tell anybody reading this that the events dominating our news
media for the past few weeks in Britain, America and around the world are all
wrapped up with the very question which the lawyer poses to Jesus: Who is my neighbour? Who am I connected to? Who can live in the place where I live? To whom do I owe love, protection and the
assurance of their wellbeing. While I would
not presume to oversimplify questions of migration, national identity or
religious pluralism as they apply to the countries of our birth, I can’t help
pointing out that Jesus goes out of his way to say that this natural
inclination towards those who are most like us is wholly insufficient.

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