SOUL SURMISE

DINING WITH OUR ENEMIES

For years I have been drawn to that little phrase in Psalm 23 where David writes in verse 5:

You prepare a table before me
    in the presence of my enemies.

It might be suggested that this is when one's enemies are all gathered to watch what God is giving you. You get a chance to smirk at them. They didn't get their way. You won in the end.

I don't like this interpretation.

I am thinking that this is about the reconciliation that happens on our journey home to full redemption. In the latter days you will share a banquet with those who opposed you, those who hurt you. Grace will have its outworking. Forgiveness is not just a transaction, it is friendships restored and enjoying the fulness of God's great salvation history together. 

It reminds me too of the 13th century Rumi's poem, Out Beyond Ideas of Wrongdoing and Rightdoing. He writes,

 

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field. I'll meet you there

 

My two friends Martyn Joseph and Martin Wroe used Rumi's idea in their song There Is A Field:

 

There is a field
I'll meet you there

Somewhere bеyond this
Just out of sight
All those we miss
Are hеld in some new light

Lie down in the deep grass
Lie down every soul
In a field where love welcomes you
In a place where we're made whole

 

I first came across this field in Colum McCann’s novel Apeirogon and then found out that it was an idea that the late Northern Irish and Nobel Peace laureate John Hume loved. For them it is a place of reconciliation.

It is where my imagination goes when I think of dining with our enemies. 

If you have been reading my blogs this Lent then you will know that I have been surmising and practicing the idea of praying for people we do not love. We are not long in to Lent but I have already had a moment when I have had almost a Psalm 23 moment. Oh, enemy is too strong a word but someone who has been the face of deep hurt crossed my path. I had been praying for them in Lent, which had softened painful barbs.

We then met. It was all very ordinary but for me very profound. It was a release of enmity. Through the encounter I am convinced that one of God's intentions in his work within us is restored relationships. God wants us to dine with our enemies. He longs for us to meet in that field beyond right and wrong. Shalom really does lie there.

PRAYING FOR YOUR NEMESIS

There are these moments in life when you have to stop and wonder. How on earth can that have happened and what it is it clearly saying to me in a spiritual way. I am always slow and measured when I speak of God speaking to me but yesterday seems to be a moment beyond coincidence. 

If you read my first blog in Lent you will know that I sensed that my Lenten practice was to pray for those that I DO NOT love. From a friend quoting Samuel Moor Shoemaker, I added Luke 6, "pray for those who mistreat you". - (read that blog here)

So... later in the day I am reading Joseph O'Connor's new book The Ghosts Of Rome. It is second in a trilogy of stories based around the,  Escape Line out of the Vatican in Rome, Resistance Against Nazis, during World War 2. 

The leading character in the first book was Fr Hugh O'Flaherty. In this second book he meets up with the main character in it, Contessa Geovanna Landini. Hugh shares with the Contessa a difficult spiritual moment. A spiritual mentor, a Scottish Redemptorist, has brought something to his attention.

Fr Hugh says, "These days my ship is a slaughterhouse where I wrestle with hatred. For our enemies"

The Contessa attempts a way out and our Irish priest tells takes her to Luke 6: 27-28 (you couldn't make it up)

As penance for Fr Hugh's sin the Scottish Redemptorist has asked him to pray for Gestapo Boss, the Escape Line and all of Rome's Nemesis, Paul Hauptmann and his family. 

Hauptmann is after O'Flaherty more than anyone else in Rome. He wants to capture him, torture him and worse.

"Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you,  bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you."

This kind of love and forgiveness is a revolution that can change the world. It doesn't make it easy. Such subversive practice is the hope of the entire world. It doesn't mean that we want to do it. O'Flaherty certainly doesn't.

Yet, Jesus himself while dying in agony on a cross, uttered those words, "Father forgive them". How easy was that in the midst of such pain and public humiliation. Jesus forgave his version of Paul Hauptmann.

I doubt that the call that I feel to pray for those that I don't love will go as far as praying for someone who wants to torture or kill me.

I am not finding it easy but on I go... praying.

 

PRAYING FOR THOSE THAT I DON'T LOVE

Lent has begun with a banger or two from God. With Janice's birthday falling on Lent's first day, we had taken our eyes off our Ashing and to be honest I wasn't really ready for it. Then I woke up the morning after...

First of all, we woke up to the most amazing view out of our hotel window. It is becoming a familiar view to us but it will never get old to look out across Marble Hill Beach in Donegal towards Downings across the inlet. Beautiful. The inspiration and creativity of God is always under the spotlight in Donegal. Banger after banger.

The second banger was not so much a caress as a collide. Glancing down the morning's Instagram messages, one friend's caught my eye. Her posts often do. 

She was sharing a quotation from a book of Celtic prayers. She was caught by a quotation by Samuel Moor Shoemaker. It seems that Shoemaker was taking part in a retreat of silent guided prayer. The Rector asked them to pray for those that they loved... and then... for those whom they did not love.

It was like a punch in the gut of my soul. I am often quoting Jesus, "But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you,  bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you." (Luke 6: 27-28)

Through those verses I am always pointing fingers at those who haven't reached out across our religious, political and cultural divisions here in Northern Ireland. It is a raison d'être for my peace making.

Yet, this morning three fingers pointed back at me. Am I praying for those closer to me who have hurt me, who I am at enmity with? 

I actually have a moment coming up in my life during Lent where I have to decide if I face someone who I have felt has opposed me and hurt me down many years. For weeks I have been wrestling with what I do?

Shoemaker goes on in my friend's Instagram post - "those people have been wrong but my wrong is to be resentful and unforgiving." Praying for those I do not love, forgiving those who hurt me, will always be for my own healing, salvation.

This morning I find myself on a beach in Donegal praying for that person, for them and their life and vocation and family. 

That's a banger. It is what God has told us to do. It is what he has shouted at me in the dawning of Lent. Have I 40 people that I could pray for. Sadly, if I look deep enough and close enough and far enough back I probably have. That makes an interesting Lent for me. 

 

NEITHER POVERTY NOR RICHES - LIVING WITH ENOUGH

We have lost the meaning of the word enough. We live in a world where actually it is hard to find any driving forces in our society that acknowledge the value of enough. Everyone who is getting more wants even more and everyone selling them more wants to sell even more.

Enough is almost a bad word in the unrestrained consumerist culture of our western world. The problem of course is that when we reach our level of enough, and pass it with the regularity and distance that we do, then the balances of world shalom are so tilted that other human beings have to live in abject poverty because of our dissatisfaction with enough.

The Bible makes a couple of strong pointers to God’s ideal of enough. In the wilderness when God supplied the Children Of Israel with food, they were sent out to collect enough for one day and were not allowed to gather anymore than was enough for that one day.

In the New Testament Jesus teaches us to pray in The Lord’s Prayer that we would have daily bread in the same kind of way; no more, no less, just enough!

In a sermon, some time ago in Fitzroy, I was comparing and contrasting Jesus encounters with the Rich Young Ruler and Blind Bartimaeus and how difficult the rich find it to follow Jesus. I was also suggesting that this is perhaps why Jesus said that the poor were blessed though that is not an excuse to stop campaigning for the eradication of poverty. 

Before I preached one of my elders, Old Testament lecturer and commentator Desi Alexander, used Proverbs 30 v 7-9 in his prayer of intercession. I was struck in a whole new way by those verses in the context of my sermon on Mark 10 and these two very different encounters with Jesus. They became definitive verses on our modern dilemma of poverty and wealth –

 7 "Two things I ask of you, O LORD;
   do not refuse me before I die:

 8 Keep falsehood and lies far from me;
   give me neither poverty nor riches,
   but give me only my daily bread.

 9 Otherwise, I may have too much and disown you
   and say, 'Who is the LORD ?'
   Or I may become poor and steal,
   and so dishonor the name of my God.

The book of Proverbs is indeed wisdom and here is prophetic wisdom for this generation. From this Old Testament world of Proverbs that could never have imagined the extent of wealth that we enjoy in the twenty first century the understanding of the temptations of poverty and wealth are spot on. I have lived at both sides of the balance.

In 2005 I lived for a few months on the west side of Vancouver and witnessed a class of community who had so much wealth that they really had no need for God anymore; in fact God would have been a real hindrance to the lavish lifestyle they enjoyed.

It was actually a poverty of soul caused by riches. I have on the other hand spent a lot of time in poor communities in north west Uganda and township communities on South Africa’s Western Cape. In these places I was a witness to an environment of poverty that caused crime to be rife not because those folk were any less human than my friends in West Van but because the tragic consequences of their wretched poverty drove them to it to survive.

The prayer in Proverbs to have neither poverty nor wealth suggests that we need to come to terms with the word enough and live our lives so that everyone has enough. Settling for the blessing of enough will the key to shalom and God’s Kingdom coming to earth as it is in heaven!

LIVE MUCH IN THE SMILES OF GOD

“Learn much of the Lord Jesus. For every look at yourself, take ten looks at Christ. He is altogether lovely. Such infinite majesty, and yet such meekness and grace, and all for sinners, even the chief! Live much in the smiles of God. Bask in his beams.”

 

In the mid 80s as a student at Union Theological College I had a few heroes. Bono had already become a musical companion. Bob Geldof had also grabbed my imagination with Band Aid and Live Aid and his memoir Is That It? 

There was somebody else. A little left field. A Scottish preacher called Robert Murray McCheyne caught my attention. He was a young man on fire for God. He passed away at 29 years of age. He was a writer and orator who was so easily quotable. 

Recently I was researching for Fitzroy’s 150th anniversary of being in our current building. At the time the church moved from Alfred Street to Fitzroy Avenue the minister was Rev George Shaw. 

What a thrill to discover that Shaw had been in correspondence was Robert Murray McCheyne. McCheyne actually wrote to the minister of Fitzroy, one of my predecessors. Not only that but I have since discovered that the quotation at the top of the blog was written to George and has been used by a plethora of blog sites. 

It is quite a quotation: -

For every look at yourself, take ten looks at Christ. He is altogether lovely.

What great advice. Often times we look at ourselves we can often feel low, unworthy and helpless. McCheyne tells us to look at Jesus. He loves us, reminds us that we are precious, offers us a new start and promised the Holy Spirit is our companion and counsellor. 

McCheyne goes on to tell us about this Jesus:

“He is altogether lovely. Such infinite majesty, and yet such meekness and grace and all for sinners, even the chief!”

Here is the God beyond us. Majestic. Holy. Yet, at the same time, he is meek and full of grace. This is an incredible God. This is a God who reigns in glory but comes down to see us and is born a baby and laid in a manger. He grows up to wash his disciples feet and become the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

As almost a benediction McCheyne then adds:

Live much in the smiles of God. Bask in his beams.”

Wow! It’s like a pop song chorus. Imagine living in the smile of God. It’s grace filled again. God’s welcome and warmth. God smiling over us. Like a summers day we should lie back and bask in the beams of a majestic yet humble God who loves us lavishly, beyond words. Lord, shine on me!

ROME AS BOOK ENDS OF THE GOSPEL - MY REVELATION

Rome is a 360 degree bombardment of visual stimuli. In the morning Janice and I came out of our cottage at the Irish College and in front of us were statues on the roof of the St. John Lateran Basilica. If we turned down the hill towards an abundance restaurants there was the Colosseum at its end. The Colosseum for goodness sake.

There are seven big Basilicas. It’s enough for any city. Then you walk down a street, a seeming side street and there is another huge church or four amazing statutes on each corner of a cross roads or the Spanish steps or the Trevi Fountain or… There are buildings that no one is spending any attention too that would grace any other city in the world!

After seeing all that needed to be seen, Janice and I walked back across the city to the Irish College on a sunny Sunday afternoon. We found ourselves on the Via die Fori Imperiali with live music pumping out and crowds mingling. There were fascinating ruins each side of us and as we walked I turned and there was a statue of Caesar Augustus. 

I was taken aback… but of course. Augustus would have called for that census that sent Jospeh and Mary scuttling off to Bethlehem from here in Rome. Up until this moment, for me Rome as a city is only reached at the end of the Acts of the Apostles. Yet, Luke who wrote Acts, has us in Rome right at the outset of his Gospel account. He bookends his two books in Rome. I am reading them from a different perspective.

Immediately Rome became a keeper. This wasn’t just a fascinating city of Basilicas, paintings and sculptures for Catholics. For us to get a handle on Jesus life in Bethlehem, we need to see him in the shadow of Rome. Rome is maybe the ideal place to get a handle on the social and political circumstances that the church was born in. I am home considering how to put a potent trip together between Luke's bookends.

I am thinking of the obvious like The Colosseum that gives clues to the bloody violence. I am then also thinking of the little apartments as they have found on the bottom level of the San Clemente Basilica or the Appian Way the ancient road on which Paul walked into Rome in chains.

As I stood in front of the altar at St Paul’s Outside the Walls Basilica, looking at the kind of chains that Paul would have worn on that Appian way I was challenged. I suddenly realised that most of us wonder what we might have to do to have to face persecution but that Paul chose persecution first. He was prepared become a prisoner of a brutal military regime in order to take the Gsoepl Of Jesus to Rome. Respect!

GRATEFUL AND CHALLENGED OUT ON THE APPIAN WAY (ROME)

Today we took a bus out from the centre of Rome to the Catacombs of San Sebastián and then walked a little further out the Appian Way.

The Catacombs are a fascinating trip. The early Christians, to protect their family’s bodies after death, buried them in quarries outside the city walls. Hundreds of years later they were excavated and the bones of the burying places opened were re-buried elsewhere in Rome. 

Our guide today told us that the stories of the Christians hiding in the catacombs were not true. They were only burial grounds. As someone who brought his daughters up watching Story Keepers this was disappointing but understandable.

I guess today as we walked the narrow corridors well under the ground I was pondering these early Christians. These were the guys in those first few centuries who took the persecution and held courageously to the faith. 

In the claustrophobia as I walked past where bodes still lay and seeing the places others once were I was grateful. Grateful that through their bravery I was able to find Jesus nearly 2000 years after they had met to worship pretty much in secret to escape a violent Empire.

I was just as grateful walking on the Appian Way, just down from the catacombs. This is the road that Paul would have led along in chains, walking into Rome for the first time. Today it has walkers on afternoon strolls and it might remind you a little of the Camino. There were cyclists too.

Paul’s walk along it was a different kind of thing altogether. His was no Saturday dander in the trees. He was on a mission at whatever the cost. Realising he could get to Rome best as a prisoner he withstood a few things including a recent shipwreck off Malta, in order to get to Rome.

Standing on that Appian Way with the green grass and the trees, little glimpses of it could have been the 1st Century. Then these cobble stones. Then an imagining of a man in chains, struggling with tiredness and sore feet, surrounded by Roman soldiers on horses throwing out oppressive power. People by the side of the road abusing him and those other prisoners he was sharing his fate with.

Again I became thankful. Here was an apostle who saw the strategic need to take Jesus to the centre of the Empire where if he could share the Good News Of Jesus he might spread the name of Jesus and The Way out from here across the world… to me, 1900 years later. 

Following Paul’s footsteps, reminded me of the footsteps of the one who carried the cross. This is who Paul followed and we dare to claim that we do too. Really? 

Then Jesus said to his disciples:

“Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”

Paul wrote to the Philippians, most possibly from Rome:

As a result, it has become clear throughout the whole palace guard[b] and to everyone else that I am in chains for Christ.

Grateful and very challenged. That was my day out on the Appian Way. 

PRAY THAT THEY DON'T HAVE TO BURY THEIR CHILD

In Peter's Basilica in Rome today we started with my favourite pondering - The Pieta. It wasn't actually the real thing. It was a replica as they are working on the real one.

My friend, Rab, had spoken to me about it a few years ago. Rab would describe himself as “relatively agnostic but interested in many aspects across religions” so when he shared with me how taken he was with the Pieta I took note and cannot thank him enough.

His wife was investigating the Basilica and Rab kind of drifted over and caught sight of the Pieta. It is the work of Michelangelo. A beautiful 15th century sculpture in marble, the Pieta depicts Mary holding her dead son, Jesus, in her arms. It moved Rab to tears. 

As I have written before the theologically squeamish might shout, “It is not in the Bible.” No, it is not. That does not mean that between the cross where Mary stood watching her son die and the tomb he was laid in that she didn’t cradle his body.

However, fact is not the point. This is not theological. This is artistic. Whatever the facts, Mary did watch her soon die. She went through her valley of the shadow. She experienced that trauma. Michelangelo expresses that experience of Mary’s; beautifully, poignantly, painfully.

One friend, who lost a young daughter, once said to me that at weddings I should pray that the couple never have to bury their child.  The grief never leaves.  Other  friends  who experienced the loss of a son said that they could have held him forever. Michelangelo captured this heartache. It is so poignant that it drives you to tears and prayer.

For me it also highlights the reality of Jesus death. People, especially his mother had to go through those days. This humble God was fully human and the feeling around his death were not just theological. Indeed at the time they were simply harrowing.  The love and sorrow that mingled around Christ's cross are made vividly alive in The Pieta. There is something of the Gospel story right here that understands our humanity and our brokenness. 

DON'T SELF SAVE...

If Roman Basilicas were soccer teams then San Clemente would be my team. It is not as glamorous as all the others but is much more fascinating.

The reason is that about 150 years ago they discovered other levels under the floor. Excavation has meant that on the bottom floor we are pretty much in the Rome that the apostle Paul walked around. 

It is a balance of its history and art that has grabbed my attention. As I walked around it my mind was racing with thoughts of Paul, theology, church history and more importantly the contextualisation of all of that. There will not doubt be more blogs.

For this blog though I want to bring us to an insight that Fr Eddie O’Donnell shared with Janice the last time we were in Rome. I was distracted by a phone call home about my father’s health so missed the visit to San Clemente.

Janice was beside Fr. Eddie as they stood in front of a painting known as the harrowing of hell from Ephesians 3 where Jesus descends into hell. Jesus is pictured dragging Adam out of hell, with a demon at Adams heal, surely a reflection on Genesis 3.

Fr. Eddie asked Janice to notice where Jesus was holding Adam. He was not holding his hand. He was grabbing his wrist. Fr Eddie pointed out that if you are holding hands you can help pull yourself up. Holding the wrist showed how our salvation is all about Jesus. Christ alone.

When I preached recently on John Mark Comer’s book Practicing The Way I quoted Comer writing “Our job isn’t to self save, it’s to surrender”. 

I love that. Not holding Jesus hand but raising our hands in surrender. 

We cannot save ourselves BUT we need to surrender to God for God to work his wonders in the fruit and gifts of the Spirit in our lives. As Paul wrote in Ephesians 2, our salvation is God’s work and we are his workmanship.

For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— 9 not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” (Ephesians 2:8-10)

“Our job isn’t to self save, it’s to surrender”

JESUS' YES FACE AGAINST THE PHARISEES NO FACES

In his book Grace Awakening, Charles Swindoll has another way of looking at the legalists who as religious leaders grind us down with guilt and long lists of dos and don’ts.

“Their God is too small, their world is too rigid, and therefore their faces shout “NO”!”

No faces. We know who they are. They discourage us. They burden us. They make us feel guilty. 

The Pharisees had NO faces.

Jesus, on the other hand, had a YES face. 

I had never seen it, in all the times I have preached it. John’s Prologue to his account of Jesus life -  “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

I have always used this as a theological text to incarnation. Yet Swindoll opened it afresh to be. “Grace and truth” is also the posture that Jesus carries into his ministry.

Always a YES face. At that wedding in Cana. Welcoming Nicodemus at night. Inviting a Samaritan woman in the heat of day into conversation. Jesus was drawing people to him with his YES face.

I know the story of the Parable Son was fiction but surely we can read into it that the Father had such a YES face that the Prodigal felt that he could go home. When he stepped onto the lane back to the farm that YES face was running down the road to throw his arms around him.  

Be assured that by his grace through faith that it is a YES face that looks at you today…

 

LISTEN TO THE ENTIRE SERMON HERE