Give your entire attention to what God is doing right now

Here's the sermon that I shared this morning at St Catherine’s Wickford:

Who had family to stay for Christmas? Shout out where they came from to establish who came the furthest. Who went away to visit friends or family this year? Again, shout out where, so we can find out who went furthest, and how they got there.

Think about this question. What is the most important part of a journey? The beginning, middle or end? Why we travel, where we travel or how we travel?

At Epiphany we focus on the journey made by the Magi in order to be able to kneel and worship the baby king Jesus (Matthew 2. 1 – 12). In the ancient world, Jupiter was the ‘king star’, and at the time of the birth of Jesus, Jupiter appeared in the night sky very close to Saturn, which represented Israel. If you were reading the sky you’d see ‘new king in Israel’.

That was the starting point for their journey but it didn’t give them exact directions. They didn’t know exactly where they were going on their journey. They knew they were going to find the new king in Israel but they had to trust as they travelled that they would be guided and led to find him. They clearly travelled a great distance and, obviously, didn’t have cars, trains or planes, so they would have probably travelled on camels. But the distance and effort didn’t stop them because meeting the child was so important.

When they arrived, they gave extravagantly to welcome Jesus with gifts, time, effort, the risk of danger, and humility. But their gifts pale next to Jesus coming to earth to show God’s love for us; Jesus came from heaven, eternity and majesty to earth, time and humanity. He went on an even more incredible journey to show us God’s love. After they had found Jesus the journey of the Magi began again as they were guided by God to return home by another route and, as T. S. Eliot makes clear at the end of his great poem about their journey, their lives were forever changed by the experience.

So, their starting point was important but it didn’t tell them how to find their way and when they did finally arrive, their arrival actually meant the beginning of a new journey. All of which means that how we travel may be as important as why or where we travel. In one of my previous Parishes, we used to have a Text for the Year, which on one occasion was about how we travel and was taken from Matthew 6. 34:

“Give your entire attention to what God is doing right now, and don’t get worked up about what may or may not happen tomorrow. God will help you deal with whatever hard things come up when the time comes.”

Simon Small writes in ‘From the Bottom of the Pond’ that: “Our minds find paying full attention to now very difficult. This is because our minds live in time. Our thoughts are preoccupied with past and future, and the present moment is missed.”

But, he says, “Contemplative prayer is the art of paying attention to what is”: “To pay profound attention to reality is prayer, because to enter the depths of this moment is to encounter God. There is always only now. It is the only place that God can be found.”

This is very much what Jesus seems to be saying in Matthew 6. 34 and also in his teaching on worry and anxiety found in Matthew 6. 24 – 34.

When we are preoccupied with what might happen in the future, we are not living fully in the present and may well misunderstand or misinterpret what is actually going on. Jesus encourages us to live fully in the present because, as Simon Small says, that is where we encounter God.

When we genuinely encounter God in the here and now, we know that his love and forgiveness surround us and that his Spirit fills us. As Jesus prayed in John 17, he is in us and we are in him. When we know this in our hearts in the here and now, we can relax because whatever happens to us, we are accepted, forgiven, loved and gifted by the God who created all things and who will bring all things to their rightful end. We are held in the palm of his hands and, as Julian of Norwich put it, “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well”.

Even in the difficult times, we can still know that this is true because, as Matthew 6. 34 puts it, God will help us deal with whatever hard things come up when the time comes.

Jesus is saying that the more we live in the present and the more we encounter God’s love in the here and now, the less we will be anxious or worried. Prayer is able to help us do both things and therefore helps us to reduce our sense of anxiety or worry. Not because we have listed all our worries to God and believe that he will solve them all for us, but instead because, through prayer, we have encountered more of God’s love and, as a result, trust that he will be with us whatever comes our way.

This is important because so much of our sense of dissatisfaction with our lives and the complaining we do about other people stems from our own worries and anxieties rather than what may or may not have happened or what others may or may not have done. Instead of focusing on other people and what we think they should or should not do or have done, we need to begin with ourselves and our relationship with God by giving our entire attention to what God is doing right now, and not getting worked up about what may or may not happen tomorrow. Then God is able to help us deal with whatever comes up, whether hard things or blessings, when the time comes.

We don’t know what 2026 will bring, although we do know that we will be celebrating the 150th Anniversary of this building. We can never confidently and absolutely predict the future and, of course, the future will be different for each of us. But, as Brian Davison reminds us, “if the prospect of what lies ahead seems dark or threatening, remember the words with which King George VI reflected on the closing year in his 1939 Christmas broadcast. “I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year: ‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.’ And he replied: ‘Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.” (Minnie Louise Haskins).

Like the Magi, we can only travel in hope that we will be guided by God. So, “Give your entire attention to what God is doing right now, and don’t get worked up about what may or may not happen tomorrow. God will help you deal with whatever hard things come up when the time comes.” May it be so for each one of us.

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NEEDTOBREATHE - I Am Yours.

Paying Attention: Mystery

Here is the third of addresses from 'Paying Attention', the Silent Retreat at the Retreat House, Pleshey, organised for the communities of St Martin-in-the-Fields and St Stephen Walbrook. We explored ways of paying attention to people, creation, events, emotions, absence and mystery. Earlier, at St Martin's, I had also spoken about paying attention in terms of the Arts.

Paying Attention: Mystery

The singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn sings, “You can't tell me there is no mystery / It's everywhere I turn.”

Andrew Davison has helpfully explained why this is so:

“It is fairly obvious that theology concerns topics beyond our full comprehension. This is illustrated in science by the way our basic picture has to change for time to time: Newton eclipsed Aristotle; quantum mechanics eclipsed Newton. Such shifts are no disaster, unless your only standard for intellectual success is completeness: having things cut and dried, sorted out. Scientific revolutions show us that the world is always beyond our grasp.

Knowledge is always partial because, frankly, the world is rather strange. Human knowledge goes only so far; behind it there is mystery. The development of science over the centuries confirms that mystery rather than denying it. The fact that science is forced to shift, again and again, demonstrates that human knowledge is constitutively incomplete.

I would give the name “faith” to this mixture of knowledge and mystery; we understand in part, as St Paul memorably put it.

Science grasps something of the truth about the world, but it is partial, and it develops. Religion and theology grasp something of the truth about the world and about God — although I would rather say that they touch God than that they grasp him. That is also partial knowledge, and it develops. As Aristotle said, one can take great joy in even a little knowledge of the highest things …

Finally, science knows only in part, just as theology knows only in part. We never fully know what we are talking about; but we can talk about it. Saying that you know in part is not a weakness; it is reason at its strongest and most mature. There is to everything a mysterious depth that eludes us.”

St Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 13. 9 – 12: “For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.”

In thinking about the way scripture speaks to us about God, Stephen Fowl notes that, “When it comes to almost any topic in Christian theology, but particularly to God, we will not get off to a good start if we expect the scriptures to demonstrate a unified, cut-and-dried doctrine of God.

Viewing scripture as a receptacle of doctrines will frustrate us, because on the one hand scripture’s accounts of God are rich and variegated, but on the other these accounts are not systematically organised.”

It is more theologically fruitful, he suggests, to see that scripture recognises this diversity and theologising about how we can organise and account for this variety.

In their book ‘The Abundant Community’, John McKnight and Peter Block suggest:

“A competent community creates space for what is unknowable about life. This is another major distinction from systems. In system life, living with mystery is considered poor planning. Systems are organized around the desire for certainty, science, and measurability. Planning, goals, blueprints are a defense against mystery. Institutions are about eliminating mystery. They are concerned with risk reduction or risk management. Taking uncertainty out of the future …

“Mystery is the answer to the unknown. In actualising its abundance, a community welcomes mystery, for that is a catalyst for creativity. Mystery gives us freedom from the burden of answers. Answers are just a restatement of the past …

Mystery is to the unknown as grief is to sorrow. What do you do when you do not know what is going to happen to you? You name it a mystery. It lets you go. It is a name for things we cannot fully know or control …

“The reason we need art in all its forms is to grasp the mystery in our lives, to recognize the mysteries around us. To get away from the pre-ordained structured way of seeing things. That is why you can listen to a song over and over. You know exactly what is coming, and it still holds an element of wonder. Which may be the primary function of art and why it is so essential to sustaining community.”

One gift that poetry, in particular, has to offer to us “is not an affirmation, but a negation of the power of any formulation.” Malcolm Guite writes that:

“Because poets push language to the limit, they are especially aware that language has its limits. Often a poet’s greatest art is to bring us to the brink of language, and gesture wordlessly beyond it.

This is especially T. S. Eliot’s art in his greatest achievement, Four Quartets. The fifth section of each quartet constantly returns to his theme of words that “strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden . . . Decay with imprecision” (“Burnt Norton”).

Even the radiant spiritual poetry of these quartets has, as it were watermarked into every page, Eliot’s explicit confession of the limitations of language: “only . . . Hints followed by guesses” (“The Dry Salvages”).

All of that is summed up in two lines from “East Coker”:

The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.”

If we are to pay attention to the mystery of God, there are ultimately only three responses we can make. The first is to keep exploring. Eliot writes in ‘Little Gidding,’ “We shall not cease from exploration,” and that is right because if we stop searching, if we stop questioning, then we get stuck and stagnate. We only have to look at nature to see the way in which all growth involves change; the caterpillar and butterfly being one of the most dramatic examples. Our own bodies are constantly changing throughout our lives with many of our cells being replaced as we progress through life. Growth involves constant change and if we apply this same principle to our thought life, our emotional life and our spiritual life then, as Eliot wrote, we must not cease from exploration.

The second is to express our sense of awe and wonder by kneeling in worship. Once again, T. S. Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’ describes this well:

“If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel …”

The answer to our questions is a person, not a fact, and the person who is the answer to our questions turns out to be God himself. Because God is infinite, he cannot be fully known or understood by human beings. With God, there is always more for us to know and understand. Knowing God in this way is exploration; like diving into the ocean and always being able to dive down deeper

The third response is to give gifts. Christina Rossetti expressed the gift we should give in her carol, ‘In the bleak midwinter’:

“What can I give Him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;
If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;
Yet what I can I give Him: give my heart.”

I began by quoting Bruce Cockburn and I’d like to end doing so again. Death is the ultimate mystery for us and here Cockburn pictures it as entering into mystery:

"There you go
Swimming deeper into mystery
Here I remain
Only seeing where you used to be
Stared at the ceiling
'Til my ears filled up with tears
Never got to know you
Suddenly you're out of here

Gone from mystery into mystery
Gone from daylight into night
Another step deeper into darkness
Closer to the light"

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Bruce Cockburn - Mystery.

The importance of how we travel

Think about this question. What is the most important part of a journey? The beginning, middle or end? Why we travel, where we travel or how we travel?

At Epiphany we focus on the journey made by the Magi in order to be able to kneel and worship the baby king Jesus. In the ancient world, Jupiter was the ‘king star’, and at the time of the birth of Jesus, Jupiter appeared in the night sky very close to Saturn, which represented Israel. If you were reading the sky you’d see ‘new king in Israel’.

That was the starting point for their journey but it didn’t give them exact directions. They didn’t know exactly where they were going on their journey. They knew they were going to find the new king in Israel but they had to trust as they travelled that they would be guided and led to find him. They clearly travelled a great distance and, obviously, didn’t have cars, trains or planes, so they would have probably travelled on camels. But the distance and effort didn’t stop them because meeting the child was so important.

When they arrived, they gave extravagantly to welcome Jesus with gifts, time, effort, the risk of danger, and humility. But their gifts pale next to Jesus coming to earth to show God’s love for us; Jesus came from heaven, eternity and majesty to earth, time and humanity. He went on an even more incredible journey to show us God’s love. After they had found Jesus the journey of the Magi began again as they were guided by God to return home by another route and, as T. S. Eliot makes clear at the end of his great poem about their journey, their lives were forever changed by the experience.

So, their starting point was important but it didn’t tell them how to find their way and when they did finally arrive, their arrival actually meant the beginning of a new journey. All of which means that how we travel may be as important as why or where we travel. That at least is what our Text for 2013 at St John's Seven Kings, taken from Matthew 6. 34, seems to say:
 

“Give your entire attention to what God is doing right now, and don’t get worked up about what may or may not happen tomorrow. God will help you deal with whatever hard things come up when the time comes.”

Simon Small writes in ‘From the Bottom of the Pond’ that: “Our minds find paying full attention to now very difficult. This is because our minds live in time. Our thoughts are preoccupied with past and future, and the present moment is missed.”

But, he says, “Contemplative prayer is the art of paying attention to what is”: “To pay profound attention to reality is prayer, because to enter the depths of this moment is to encounter God. There is always only now. It is the only place that God can be found.”

This is very much what Jesus seems to be saying to us in Matthew 6. 34 and in his teaching on worry and anxiety found in Matthew 6. 24 – 34. 

When we are preoccupied with what might happen in the future, we are not living fully in the present and may well misunderstand or misinterpret what is actually going on. Jesus encourages us to live fully in the present because, as Simon Small says, that is where we encounter God.

When we genuinely encounter God in the here and now we know that his love and forgiveness surround us and that his Spirit fills us. As Jesus prayed in John 17, he is in us and we are in him. When we know this in our hearts in the here and now, we can relax because whatever happens to us we are accepted, forgiven, loved and gifted by the God who created all things and who will bring all things to their rightful end. We are held in the palm of his hands and, as Julian of Norwich put it, “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well”.

Even in the difficult times, we can still know that this is true because, as our Text for 2013 puts it, God will help us deal with whatever hard things come up when the time comes.

Jesus is saying that the more we live in the present and the more we encounter God’s love in the here and now, the less we will be anxious or worried. Prayer is able to help us do both things and therefore helps us to reduce our sense of anxiety or worry. Not because we have listed all our worries to God and believe that he will solve them all for us, but instead because, through prayer, we have encountered more of God’s love and, as a result, trust that he will be with us whatever comes our way. 

 

This is important because so much of our sense of dissatisfaction with our lives and the complaining we do about other people stems from our own worries and anxieties rather than what may or may not have happened or what others may or may not have done. Instead of focusing on other people and what we think they should or should not do or have done, we need to begin with ourselves and our relationship with God by giving our entire attention to what God is doing right now, and not getting worked up about what may or may not happen tomorrow. Then God is able to help us deal with whatever comes up, whether hard things or blessings, when the time comes.

We don’t know what 2013 will bring. Some predict an upturn in the economy, others a worsening. We can’t be sure and, of course, the future will be different for each of us. But, as Brian Davison reminds us in the current edition of the ‘Ilford Recorder’, “if the prospect of what lies ahead seems dark or threatening, remember the words with which King George VI reflected on the closing year in his 1939 Christmas broadcast. “I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year: ‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.’ And he replied: ‘Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.” (Minnie Louise Haskins).

Like the Magi, we can only travel in hope that we will be guided by God. So, “Give your entire attention to what God is doing right now, and don’t get worked up about what may or may not happen tomorrow. God will help you deal with whatever hard things come up when the time comes.”

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Julie Miller - By Way Of Sorrow.

Exciting new artists & designers

On Wednesday before going to the FRF dinner I spent a fascinating afternoon negotiating the labyrinthine corridors of the Chelsea College of Art & Design, opposite Tate Britain.

The Chelsea had billed their Degree Show 2007 as an “opportunity to see work of some of the most exciting new artists and designers.” They weren't wrong as there was some excellent work on show including much that showed a real fascination with philosophical and religious questions. These were the Show's highlights for me:

• Karl-Oskar Olsson located a film, in which a suited male spoke of his guilt at his middle-class privileged student existence, behind walls that can only be climbed, one at a time, by ladders. Is this not what many of us do with the feelings of guilt that nag away at our privileged Western existence?
• Jessica Paz Zamora-Turner’s installation sought to provide an opportunity for action by creating a distribution centre for unwanted goods and offering visitors the opportunity to distribute goods as they chose.
  Paul Day’s titles – Tomorrow belongs to no one; How meaningless is your life; and I came from nowhere, and you should go there, among others – seemed to sum up the general sense of existential angst.
• One of the most effective existential pieces was also the simplest. Umut Yalim used a marker pen on flipchart paper to create a series of works that questioned our perceptions of the work and the world by continually changing aspects of a repeating annotated diagram.
• Michael Cassidy’s Painting in Green (Green Dimension) was technically complex using painting on two walls plus a camera to create an on screen illusion by which viewers were able to walk into and onto the art.
• Emma Dalby’s CFO6 attempted to record the changing nature of reality through multiple photos of groups of people at an Archway Bus Shelter taken between 8 and 9 am every weekday over a six month period.
• Rose Jenner toyed with the existentialism of the black painting but on her canvases, depending on your viewing angle, eerie landscapes of standing stones and forests emerged in dark tones.
  Martin Earle’s video artwork, West of Shannon, featured lovingly shot, meditative black and white images of sea/skyscapes and still lifes set to a soundtrack composed by Fr. Dominic White O.P. Ordinary views and objects made beautiful through sustained attention.
• Tsuin So focussed on children's faces in her beautiful paintings which are evocative and atmospheric.
• Amy ONeill structured whitewashed cartons into a descending cityscape with unpainted words picked out on each carton to form a statement about the nature of a work of art: “… our natural and artificial environment is cultivated both by the way we ultize material and by each decision we make in our daily practice …”
• Helen J. Davison hung 84 sheets of white A4 paper in a regular rectangle using two pins per sheet to create What a Mistkae. Each sheet contained a short piece of typed text raising the question of how to read the work; was it a fragmented or linear narrative? On reflection, it seemed to be like a series of cancelled beginnings; a comment on the difficulty of beginning a work from a blank sheet of paper.

Degree Show 2007, Chelsea College of Art & Design, 16 – 21 June 2007