Month: February 2015

“Then was Jesus led up by the Spirit into the wilderness,
to be tempted by the devil”

Two phone calls, back to back; the one about the baptism of an eight-month old child, the other about the dying of a ninety-five year old lady – Helen Gibson. Birth and death, rebirth and the hope of the resurrection. “As dying and behold, we live,” as Paul puts it this morning (2 Cor.6.9). It is remarkable sometimes how the meaning of our lives is wonderfully concentrated and clarified in such seemingly serendipitous moments.

There is something wonderfully clarifying about the clear air of wilderness places, even about the air of the wilderness winters of February that have so beset us this year. “Jesus,” we are told, “was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness, to be tempted by the devil.” Mark is even more emphatic. He tells us that the Spirit drove him, literally threw him out, into the wilderness. “He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by satan.”

The whole marvel of the stories of the temptation of Christ is partly about the significance of the wilderness. It is an important biblical concept found in the Scriptures time and time again: from the Fall to Moses; from Joshua to the Babylonian captivity, itself a kind of wilderness; from the prophets in exile to the ministry of John the Baptist. “What went ye out into the wilderness for to see?” Jesus asks the followers of John about John. Now Jesus is in the wilderness and so must we. There is something intriguing and complex about the wilderness both for the ancients and for us as moderns. That intriguing complexity and ambiguity about the theme of the wilderness is captured in the story of the temptations of Christ.

Somehow in the wilderness of human life we learn about the nature of our life with God, about life and death, rebirth and renewal.

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“Make me a clean heart, O God, / and renew a right spirit within me”

And so it begins, the great ‘make-over’ which is the purpose of the pageant of Lent. Once again we are being challenged that life does not have to be just the ‘same old, same old’. Lent is the pilgrimage of love, the divine love which seeks the redemption of our human loves which are in such sad and sorry disarray.

And so it begins with dust and ashes recalling us to creation and repentance and challenging us about our hearts and minds. “Cleanse your hands, ye sinners; and purify your hearts, ye double-minded,” James exhorts us. “Lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven” and “not upon earth where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal… For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also,” Jesus tells us. Where are our hearts? What do we treasure? Somehow this is critical to the whole project of transformation captured in the great Penitential Psalm of Lent and this day we call Ash Wednesday.

What does it mean to ask God to “make me a clean heart” and to “renew a right spirit within me”? Only that we know ourselves to be incomplete, fallen, and wounded, unhappy and sad, miserable and, perhaps, even in despair, and yet somehow desiring something more in spite of ourselves.

The poet ,T.S. Eliot, begins his poem called Ash Wednesday with the sense of despair and uncertainty that calls into question the whole idea and purpose of any kind of journey that might make us clean and new, as if this journey, the journey of Lent, were far more folly than even the Epiphany journey of the magi. “’A cold coming we had of it,/ Just the worst time of the year/ For a journey, and such a long journey: / The ways deep and the weather sharp, / The very dead of winter’,” Eliot says, quoting a nativity sermon of Lancelot Andrewes, and imagining the thoughts of the magi-kings about the hardness and the uselessness of the journey, “with the voices singing in our ears, saying / That this was all folly.” And yet the journey to Bethlehem concludes with the journey from Bethlehem whereby they are changed by virtue of what they had been given to see, “no longer at ease” in the ‘same old, same old’. Lent begins with Ash Wednesday and for us here in the Valley it might seem all folly, too, and, certainly, “just the worst time of the year/ For a journey”, “the ways deep” with mountains of snow, “the weather sharp” and cold, “the very dead of winter”.

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“If I have not charity, I am nothing”

Charity – Love. Love is in the air. I know, so is the snow, indeed, snow upon snow, but also love upon love! Quinquagesima Sunday is commonly known as Love Sunday because of St. Paul’s great hymn of love in 1^st Corinthians 13. This year it follows upon Valentine’s Day, the great Hallmark festival of commercialized romance and sentiment. But love, to be sure, is in the air. But what is love? That is the great question that connects St. Paul’s great hymn to the great ethical turn in philosophy to the good life and, more specifically, to Plato’s great treatise on love, The Symposium.

Plato’s word is eros; Paul’s is agape, the Latin translation of which is caritas which has carried over into English as charity. The word is used eight times in what is one of the greatest passages of English prose, poetic prose, I would add, in the King James Version of the Scriptures which became the text for the epistles and gospels in The Book of Common Prayer in 1662 and contributed to the enormous influence of the King James Version on the many, many different forms of the English language right down to our own day.

Much ink has been spilt in trying to draw a large distinction between the Platonic Eros and the Pauline Agape. I prefer to see them in a more complementary way. For both Plato and Paul, love is about the good, about the good life and never simply about self-love. The question, ‘what is love?’ is a question for both and for us and both Plato and Paul offer, I suggest, a way of seeing how divine love ultimately gathers up all of the forms of love into the highest love, the love of God. Plato, to be sure, emphasizes love not as a god but as desire, the passionate desire to know which always entails truth and beauty. Such insights cannot be ignored. To say that “God is love” is not the same as to say love is a god. Paul emphasizes in a more direct way the divine love which seeks the perfection of our human loves without which our human loves, as Augustine saw so clearly, are not only incomplete but empty and end in despair.

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