Meeting God in the dark night of the soul

Here's the sermon I shared this evening at St Catherine's Wickford:

The book of Job is the record of one man’s dark night of the soul. In the story Job loses everything that gave his life meaning. His family are wiped out, his home, money and possessions are lost, he experiences severe and painful illnesses and is left alone, except for three friends who are more hindrance than help as they offer only platitudes that essentially pin the blame for his condition on Job himself.

Job knows that the diagnosis offered by his friends is wrong. He knows there is nothing he has done to deserve his suffering. He knows that it is not punishment for something he has done and this gives us one of the reasons why this is such a significant book to find within the pages of the scriptures. The book of Job tells us that much suffering in this world is undeserved. There are times in life when we do reap what we sow and bear the consequences of our choices, as Job’s friends assume must be the case for him. But this is not one of those times and the story is told, in part, to warn us against making the assumptions made by Job’s friends. Not all suffering is brought on by our actions, sometimes life simply deals us a bum hand - and that’s the way it is!

Job is understandably angry about this situation. In the section of the poem we heard read today (Job 19:1-27), he says that he has been broken down on every side and that he has been pursued by both his friends and by God. God accepts Job’s arguing with him and affirms him in so doing. In the final chapter of the book, God says that he is angry with Job’s friends because they did not speak the truth about him, the way his servant Job did. So, the friends who said “it’s all your fault and God is right to punish you” were condemned and Job, who argued his case with God is affirmed.

The book of Job is important, therefore, because it tells us that it is ok to argue with God and to complain to him when life seems unfair. That is important because it is not how we have been brought up to think about relationship with God. Most of us instinctively think that submission to the will of God rather than arguing the toss with God is what makes for a good Christian. Job tells us that that is not so. And, in fact, if we read scripture carefully, we will finish that stories are told of all the heroes of the faith - from Abraham through Moses, Jeremiah and Habbakuk to Jesus and Paul - arguing with God. Why? Because it means we are in real relationship with God. Our virtuous mask comes off and we say what we really mean. We are honest with God in a way that we cannot be when we are trying to be righteous. That is real relationship and that is what God wants more than anything.

This is something which has been acknowledged and understood throughout Church history. The phrase which I used of Job at the beginning of this sermon - the dark night of the soul - was coined by St John of the Cross while imprisoned in a tiny prison cell for his attempts to reform the Church. He was a sixteenth-century Spanish mystic who wrote many of his poems on a scroll smuggled to him by one of his guards. After escaping his captors, he wrote the Dark Night of the Soul, a poem about the painful experience that people endure as they seek to grow in spiritual maturity and union with God.

Similarly, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote of “That night, that year / Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.”

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light's delay.
With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.
I am gall, I am heartburn. God's most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.

At the end of the Book of Job, Job says, “I talked about things I did not understand, about marvels too great for me to know.” Through his dark night of the soul, he comes to understand that God is not who or what he had thought him to be. God is more than he had imagined or conceived. Human beings can know God but cannot know God fully because is always more than we can imagine or conceive. Every image or idea we have of God is inadequate because God is always more than any human definition. We can say, for example, that God is Father but to say that cannot fully define God as God can also be understood as Mother and as child and as Spirit (without gender). All these different things are true of God at one and the same time. So, God is both known to us and yet unknowable. In the dark night of the soul, all that we had thought we knew of God is taken away from us and we experience something of the mystery of God.

Summing all this up, what can we say? We need to be careful about the advice we offer to those who are suffering. In particular, not to assume that they have in some way brought their suffering on themselves. God said to Job’s friends, “you did not speak the truth about me, the way my servant Job did.” Then, to understand that we do not have to suffer in silence. To argue or complain to God actually brings us into a deeper relationship with him and is a valid part of prayer. Job says, “I still rebel and complain against God; I cannot keep from groaning.” Finally, we need to be prepared to have our understandings of God brought into question as he challenges us to engage with the mystery of who he is, the One who is always more than we can ever conceive or image. And so, like Job, we say “I talked about things I did not understand, about marvels too great for me to know.” May it be so for each one of us. Amen.

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William Cowper - God Moves In A Mysterious Way.

Abraham - The Legacy

Tonight I had the pleasure of giving the final reflection in the Lent Study Programme at St Martin-in-the-Fields. In this year's course we studied Meg Warner's book Abraham: A Journey Through Lent, where the final chapter considered 'Abraham - The Legacy':

Meg Warner writes in the final chapter of our Lent book that with Abraham's death, we are in a position to explore his legacy. Abraham grew during his life, both in maturity and in faithfulness to God. Over time he seems to have 'become' the special person God chose him to be. His obedience has long-term consequences which apply not just to Abraham and his immediate descendants but to the whole world. That is his legacy, and I want to briefly explore three aspects of that legacy now.

First, that the maturing of Abraham’s relationship with God included learning to be in conversation, in dialogue, in debate and in argument with God, in order that Abraham could find God for himself and actually embody God’s characteristics and interests. We see this most dramatically in Genesis 18. 16-33 where Abraham argues and negotiates with God in relation to saving people who live in Sodom. God chose Abraham to “direct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just”. Abraham throws that phrase, “what is right and just” back in God’s face in the course of their argument – “Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?” - “Shall the Judge of all the earth not do justice?". Through their debate, God teaches Abraham to argue passionately for what is right and what is just. As he learns to do so, Abraham becomes more able to do what is right and just with his children and household.

The former Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, says that the legacy of this is that there then began that ‘dialogue between Heaven and Earth which has not ceased in 4,000 years’; a dialogue in which God and human beings find one another. Only thus, he suggests, ‘can we understand the great dialogues [found in Scripture] between God and Abraham and Moses and Jeremiah and Job.’ As with those key figures in scripture, arguing or debating with God in prayer can also be a vital and vitalizing part of the maturing of our relationship with God.

A second part of Abraham’s legacy relates to the story of the sacrifice of Isaac. Here the key to understanding its legacy is the realisation that child sacrifice was the norm in the religions of the day and that the reason Abraham obeys God so unquestioningly may have been because, horrific and distasteful as it seems to us, there was nothing at that time unusual about the idea that the gods required human sacrifices in order to be appeased. The stories in Genesis about Abraham are foundational stories for the People of Israel. Imagine for a moment that you want to create a foundational story for a group of people that will change their understanding of sacrifice from the understanding with which they have grown up to one which is completely different from the religious practices of all the people that surround them. What kind of story might you tell? It may be that you would tell a story in which the person founding this new nation is taken all the way to the brink of child sacrifice and then dramatically and suddenly pulled back from taking that step.

The legacy of the story of the sacrifice of Isaac, the philosopher and anthropologist René Girard has suggested, is that Israel developed a system of animal sacrifice that continued until shortly after the crucifixion of Jesus. Jesus’ crucifixion, Girard suggests, was both about God identifying himself with all the victims – the scapegoats – who have been sacrificed down through the centuries and also, because in Jesus God himself was scapegoated and sacrificed, the ultimate demonstration of the reality that, as Hosea first stated and Jesus then repeated, God requires mercy, not sacrifice.

The final area of legacy that I want to briefly explore is in relation to the common origins of Jewish, Christian and Muslim peoples; all descended, as Meg Warner reminds us, from one ancestor, Abraham. In his book Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence Jonathan Sacks examines our common origins in the story of Abraham, Ishmael and Isaac and gives us a reading of these stories which ‘is an ingenious and often moving turning upside down of a rhetoric of “chosenness.”’

Sacks notes ‘the extraordinary length to which the text goes to insist that Ishmael will be blessed by God.’ He notes too that because of the way the story is written ‘our imaginative sympathies are with Hagar and her child’. ‘That is what gives the story its counter-intuitive depth’. Further, he notes that Isaac spends time at Beer Lahai Roi, the place of Hagar in the desert, and that Ishmael and Isaac are together when Abraham is buried. Finally, he makes us aware of a Rabbinic tradition based on these aspects of the story to the effect that Keturah, who Abraham marries after the death of Sarah, is actually Hagar returned to Abraham by Isaac as his wife.

Sacks concludes his chapter on the story of Ishmael and Isaac by saying this: ‘On the surface, the story of Isaac and Ishmael is about sibling rivalry and the displacement of the elder by the younger. Beneath the surface, however, the sages, heard a counter-narrative telling the opposite story: the birth of Isaac does not displace Ishmael. To be sure he will have a different destiny. But he too is a beloved son of Abraham, blessed by his father and by God.’

The futures of the two brothers diverge, ‘but there is no conflict between them, nor do they compete for God’s affection, which encompasses them both.’ ‘This reading becomes all the more powerful when, in the Midrash, it is extended to the relationship between Judaism and Islam.’ ‘Brothers can live together in peace’ this counter-narrative implies and Sacks notes that it perhaps ‘needed the twenty-first century, with its ethic and religious conflicts, to sensitise our ear to the texts’ inflections and innuendoes’ and to then grasp this aspect of Abraham’s legacy.

Through this Lent Course and Meg Warner’s book, we have seen Abraham undertake a significant journey. The whole way along the journey he struggled with his faith in the God who had chosen him so unexpectedly. At the same time as all of those struggles, Abraham appeared to grow in his responsibilities and in his relationship with God, so that by the end of the journey he had become the person God chose him to be – a true patriarch, whose faith and obedience had consequences for everybody around him. In a similar way, we can benefit from struggling with these three aspects of Abraham's legacy, as they constantly need claiming and reclaiming, both in our individual lives and our world, particularly because of the ways in which populism and nationalism are currently being used to shape politics and social structures.

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T. Bone Burnett - Every Time I Feel The Shift.

Paying Attention: Emotions

Here is my second address from our Silent Retreat:

Paying Attention: Emotions

Many of the great figures in the Bible seem to have viewed prayer as being more like a constant conversation with God than they did a scheduled time for making requests. In some ways there seems to be a greater understanding of this in Judaism than in Christianity. I’ve been helped and challenged by some of what Jonathan Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi, has said about this understanding of prayer in a fascinating lecture called Judaism, Justice and Tragedy - Confronting the problem of evil.

He sees Abraham as being the starting point in scripture for this kind of dialogue between God and human beings and said that “there begins a dialogue between Heaven and Earth which has not ceased in 4,000 years”. He calls it the dialogue in which God and Man find one another and says that the mood of these dialogues between the prophets and God has been a never-ending feature in Judaism.

Have a look at the conversation between God and Abraham in Genesis 18. 16-33 and see what goes on there. The first thing to see in verse 17 is that God invites the conversation. He could have hidden his thoughts and plans from Abraham but he chooses not to. Instead he shares with Abraham and invites not just conversation but challenge from Abraham. Because that is what Abraham does in this conversation – he challenges God. What Abraham says to God, recorded for is in verse 25, is stunning - "God forbid that You should do such a thing! To kill the righteous with the wicked so that the righteous should have the same fate as the wicked, God forbid! Shall the Judge of all the earth not do justice?" It sounds blasphemous that a human being, who as Abraham says of himself in verse 27 is “nothing but dust and ashes”, should speak in this way to his creator. It sounds blasphemous until we remember that God chose to initiate this conversation and this challenge.

What is God doing then through this conversation? Let’s go back to what God said about Abraham before beginning this conversation. In verse 19, God says that Abraham has been chosen to “direct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just”. Remember that phrase, “what is right and just” because it the phrase that Abraham throws back in God’s face – “Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?” - “Shall the Judge of all the earth not do justice?". Through their conversation, God is teaching Abraham to argue passionately for what is right and what is just. As Abraham learns to do this he becomes more able to righteousness and justice to his children and household.

In the same way, God wants us to be in conversation, in dialogue, in debate, in arguments with him so that we can find him for ourselves and actually embody his characteristics and interests ourselves. He wants us to learn to do right through discussion rather than by rote. If all we do as Christians is to learn a set of rules then we will never be able to apply those rules to real life. Because in order to do right we need to apply the Spirit of the Law, not the letter of the Law. Jesus did this constantly and his application of the Spirit of the Law continually brought him into conflict with the religious leaders of his day who were concerned with the letter of the Law. A good example is the story of the woman caught in adultery in John 8. 1-11.

We can see this acted out for us by the people of Israel at Mount Sinai. Let’s look quickly at Exodus 19. In verse 6 we read of God saying that the Israelites “will be for him a kingdom of priests and a holy nation”. Priests in Israel were the people who went into the holy place, into God’s presence. So God is saying that he wants all the people of Israel to come into his presence and to speak with him face-to-face. But turn over the page to Chapter 20.19 and you’ll find the people of Israel saying to Moses, “Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die”. In other words, they are saying we’ll obey God’s rules but we won’t speak with him face to face. They appoint Moses to be their mediator, to go into God’s presence on their behalf.

Moses learns to mirror God from his conversations and debates with God. So much so, that his face begins to shine with the reflection of God’s glory. But the people never really learn what God is like because they will not speak with him face to face. They keep him at arms length by using Moses as the mediator and by trying to keep rules which they know but don’t understand. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 3.18 that we, like Moses, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are to be transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. That transformation comes as we dialogue, debate, argue and converse with God.

Other people in the Bible who have these kind of conversations with God include: Jacob; Samuel; Job; Jeremiah; Jonah; Habakkuk; Jesus and Paul. The Psalms though are where most of the conversations between people and God are recorded. Virtually all the Psalms are conversations where it is assumed that the hearer is either God or the people of Israel. Some of the Psalms are actually written as conversations though e.g. Psalm 12. In verses 1-4 the Psalmist cries out to God for help, in verses 5-6 God answers and in verses 7-8 the Psalmist responds by expressing confidence in God. Psalm 77 is the record of a similar conversation with God. In verses 1-6 the Psalmist tells us how he cried out to God, in verses 7-9 he tells what he cried out, in verses 10-12 he tells us how God answered his cry, and in verses 13-20 he tells us of his response to God’s answer.

This approach to prayer is one that a number of Christian poets have picked up and used over the centuries:

•             Dialogue – George Herbert

•             Love III – George Herbert

•             Bittersweet – George Herbert

•             Thou art indeed just, Lord – Gerard Manley Hopkins

The conversations with God that are recorded for us in the Psalms are one’s that involve a whole range of different emotions. You might like to read through some Psalms and identify what is the emotion being expressed. Once you’ve done that then choose three of these different emotions that connect with you and think, if you were to have a conversation with God which involved that emotion, what you would be talking about with him and what you would be wanting to say to him. 

We are often quite restrained in our relationship with God and in our praying. Therefore, we often praise God and say that we will obey or follow him but we rarely argue, protest, complain or question him, at least not publicly. Would today be a good opportunity to start including some of these more difficult emotions in your prayer life?

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Mark Heard - Strong Hand Of Love.

No significant inroads to arresting Church decline

There is an interesting online debate currently underway about the tone of debate between conservative and liberal Christians and the extent to which either is having significant impact. The main articles in this debate can be read here, here and here.

Martin Saunders argues that:

"A 'compelling' voice isn't just wise, radical and intellectually or emotionally stimulating. It's also kind and compassionate. It comes from a place of love, and is characterised by that. Those who argue from a more 'liberal' theological perspective (again, sorry to create 'sides', but it's impossible not to) tend to be good at this. Big ideas, expressed with kindness, have real currency in the modern world.

However, when we turn to the more conservative voices, there's often a very different tone. The big ideas are still there, but the kindness has evaporated, to be replaced with anything from over-confident condescension to discourteous rudeness. John Piper's infamous tweet is one example. David Robertson's article attacking Steve Chalke on this website is, I'm afraid, another. This isn't how you win arguments – it's just how you help both 'sides' become more entrenched in their positions."

David Robertson counters that:

"Biblical Christianity is winning the war because as Jesus says "heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away" (Matthew 24:35). That is why all over the UK there are churches that are growing and developing as the Word of God is proclaimed in the love, joy, power and assurance of the Spirit. Not 'conservative' churches. But radical, Bible-believing, contemporary, Spirit-filled churches of whatever denomination. The battle belongs to the Lord and so victory is his. My call is not to compromise with Christ's enemies, but to win them for Him."

The reality, however, is, as the latest set of Statistics for Mission from the Church of England illustrate, that overall the Church in the UK is consistently declining in numbers. None of the positive developments in either the conservative or liberal, Protestant, Catholic or Orthodox, traditional, emerging or alternative strands of the Church that I have seen over my lifetime have actually made significant inroads to arresting that decline, and this remains the case despite the above debates and assertions. There is much that is of God and of great value in the UK's churches as a whole but it is foolish to kid ourselves that those initiatives and movements of God are currently making a significant impact in terms of Church growth. For that to occur at present something altogether different from what we are doing now seems to be required.

For an alternative view on the significance of the latest set of Statistics for Mission, see Giles Fraser's latest column for The Guardian.

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Barry McGuire - Eve Of Destruction.