Made complete in everything good

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

The writer to the Hebrews ends his letter with a Benediction: Now may the God of peace, who brought back from the dead our Lord Jesus, the great shepherd of the sheep, by the blood of the eternal covenant, make you complete in everything good so that you may do his will, working among us that which is pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be the glory for ever and ever. Amen. (Hebrews 13: 16-21)

What does it mean, I wonder, for us to be made complete? Following the feeding of the five thousand (John 6.1-14), Jesus asked his disciples to gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost. So they gathered them up, and from the fragments of the five barley loaves, left by those who had eaten, they filled twelve baskets. Similarly, through our offering of ourselves to God, Jesus provides a means by which what is disparate and fragmented within our lives can gathered up, unified and completed.

That was certainly my experience in offering for ordained ministry. In my working life I had experience of partnership working to create employment opportunities, with a particular focus on assisting disabled people in finding and keeping work. In my church life I had involvement in setting up a church-based day care business and a detached youth work project reaching out to disaffected young people. In my personal life I was writing and painting and finding a limited range of opportunities to share my creative work.

I realised, as I went through the selection process for ordination and then my ministerial training, that ordained ministry could hold and utilise all these disparate experiences and, as a result, could provide a frame within which all these disparate fragments of my life could be gathered up, held together and unified. And so it has proved, as each context for my ministry to date has provided unique opportunities to make connections between faith, work, art and social action through partnerships and projects. That has, of course, been even more the case since discovering the HeartEdge mission model which integrates congregation, culture, commerce and compassion.

Through HeartEdge, I have also experienced the way in which mission and ministry in, from and outside the church provides a framework, forum or context in which all of our skills, experiences, interests and failures can be gathered up, integrated and used for God’s glory and in God’s service. My personal experience of that reality has been in relation to ordained ministry but, again, the HeartEdge model of mission is clear that this gathering up of all that we offer applies to us all, whether lay or ordained.

Later in John 6, Jesus gives a cosmic or eschatological twist to this phrase we are considering when he says it ‘is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day’ (John 6. 37 – 40). These words come in the middle of Jesus’ teaching about being the Bread of Life which followed the feeding of the 5,000. When Jesus gave thanks over the bread, the word used is ‘eucharistesas’, the word which gives us ‘Eucharist’. Jesus shared the bread around in communion, then, when everyone was satisfied, he instructed his disciples to pick up the fragments using that same phrase, ‘so that nothing may be lost.’ Just as none of this ‘eucharisticized’ bread was lost after the feeding, so, because ‘Jesus is the bread of life, [those who] see and believe in him … receive eternal life [and] become a fragment which he will gather up on the last day.’ (John, Richard Burridge, BRF 1998)

Christ’s was a once-for-all action that is then re-presented and re-membered in and through the Eucharist. The Eucharist being our most significant and meaningful form of Remembrance. We bring the broken fragments of our lives to the one whose own body was broken on the cross but who endured that experience out of love for us to bring us through brokenness into reconciliation and resurrection. In return we receive his body and blood into our lives through a fragment of bread and a sip of wine. Our life is joined to his. The broken fragments of our lives are gathered up and incorporated into the story of God’s saving work with humanity. The fragments of our lives are accepted – overaccepted – and unified or completed as we are brought together to form a new body - the body of Christ – in which all things find their place and where all shall be well and all manner of thing be well.

God takes us and our offerings and places them in a far larger story than we ever could have imagined by giving them a sacred story and making them sacred actions. As we retell and re-enact what Jesus did at the Last Supper, we also remember what God did to Israel in ‘taking one special people, blessing them, then breaking them in the Exile before giving them as a light to the nations to bring the Gentiles to God.’ ‘In the telling of those stories and the performance of those actions we are transformed into God’s holy people.’ That’s what the regular celebration of the Eucharist is about. When the Eucharist is served, each of us offers all that we uniquely are at the altar and we receive from God everything we need to follow him by being a blessing to others in our daily lives.

This teaching also tallies with the use made elsewhere of Harvest imagery for the Last Judgement – a sense that all can be safely gathered in - and is reinforced for us in the Letter to the Colossians where it is stated that in Christ all things hold together, as through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross. Christ came to gather up and reconcile to God all the disparate fragments of our lives that none should be lost, even through death. That is why he gave us parables of lost things being found. It is why he states that there is room for all – many rooms - in his Father’s house and that he goes there to prepare places for us. It is also why St Paul teaches in 1 Corinthians 13 that faith, hope and love remain. The word he used for remain hints that such actions continue beyond the grave into eternity i.e. that we can take something with us when we die, that the fruit or acts of faith, hope and love grown in this life continue into, and continue to bear fruit in, the next. In other words, our deeds of faith, hope and love are not lost with our death in this life but continue into eternity where they are completed.

As a result, we have, I think, a basis for saying with Walt Whitman that: ‘Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost, / No birth, identity, form — no object of the world, / Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing; / Appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere / confuse thy brain. / Ample are time and space — ample the field and / nature. / The body, sluggish, aged, cold — the embers left / from earlier fires, / The light in the eye grown dim shall duly flame / again; / The sun now low in the west rises for mornings / and for noons continual; / To frozen clods ever the spring's invisible land / returns, / With grass and flowers and summer fruits and / corn.’

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Walt Whitman - Continuities.

Bob Dylan: Inspiration and identity

Bob Dylan's Rough and Rowdy Ways is a late masterpiece with the opening track I Contain Multitudes providing one key - no doubt broken off - to its preoccupations.

I Contain Multitudes concerns human complexity; our changeability, our contradictions, the long and winding roads of our life experiences, and the cultural references into which we were born and which we absorbed as we developed. In these respects, each of us contain multitudes as we are the sum of our parts.

Several of the tracks on Rough and Rowdy Ways, including Mother of Muses and Murder Most Foul, are list songs or part-list songs where the lists are primarily those of cultural references. In Murder Most Foul the latter half of the song is a lengthy list of artists that the protagonist wants to see featuring in Wolfman Jack's radio show. Among the multitudes we each contain, listening to the music that Wolfman Jack plays in the wake of the assassination of John F. Kennedy may be a means of escaping from the foul nature of reality or the way in which those who have grown up with popular culture process emotion or both together in tension. In Mother of Muses we are told that the source of artistic inspiration and identity is to be found in the songs and stories of those who have gone before. The artist is one with a mind that roams our cultural heritage until death brings rest from such cultural rambling. As Dylan said in 2012 'I’m working within my art form. It’s that simple ... It’s called songwriting. It has to do with melody and rhythm, and then after that, anything goes. You make everything yours. We all do it.'

Dylan emerged into public consciousness as one appropriating the folk tradition within which the 'borrowing of ideas has always been an integral part.' That occurs through the sense of a tradition from which musicians take and adapt, 'giving their work added depth and imbuing it with a sense of timelessness.'

The phrase that has come to sum up this approach is 'Good artists copy; great artists steal.' This is an aphorism that seems to have reversed what may have been its original use in an article by W. H. Davenport Adams published in 1892. The reversal being made by T. S. Eliot in an essay published in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism.

In The Waste Land Eliot used fragments of literature drawn from across tradition to map out the place of "stony rubbish" and of:

'A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water'

which is the waste land.

The Waste Land, as a poem, does not accept the waste land that it describes. The narrative movement of the poem is towards escape, the finding of the water that will renew life. Eliot's intention was to 'shore up' fragments against the ruins; in other words, to the extent to which he was able, to reconstruct. His seemingly disparate fragments include the Bible, the Grail legend, the Golden Bough, Tarot cards, Shakespeare, Dante, Buddha's Fire Sermon and many more. All are linked, all are reconciled, in the structure and content of a poem whose narrative thread articulates a rejection of and movement away from the sterility of twentieth century life.

The same impulse can be found in the poetry and paintings of David Jones. Jones said that he regarded his poem, The Anathemata: 'as a series of fragments, fragmented bits, chance scraps really, of records of things, vestiges of sorts and kinds of disciplinae, that have come my way by this channel or that influence. Pieces of stuffs that happen to mean something to me and which I see as perhaps making a kind of coat of many colours, such as belonged to 'that dreamer' in the Hebrew myth'.

Jones believed that objects, images and words accrue meanings over the years that are more than the object as object or image as image. Therefore all things are signs re-presenting something else in another form. Recessive signs which re-present multiple signification are what Jones aims to create in works such as The Anathemata and Aphrodite in Aulis. Jacques Maritain suggested that such multiple signification is what creates joy or delight in a work of art as 'the more the work of art is laden with significance … the vaster and the richer and the higher will be the possibility of joy and beauty'.

This is the source of the added depth and sense of timelessness found in the folk tradition but it is, as Eliot, argues what all great artists do. Dylan clearly agrees but notes too that this is the means by which we all construct our identity; in a way that makes us the sum of our parts because we all contain multitudes. In this sense we are all artists. Most of us, though, are simply good artists as we primarily and relatively unconsciously copy the ideas of others rather than doing what the great artists do, which is to appropriate ideas that are in the cultural commons for their own ends.

In Greek myth the mother of the Muses is Mnemosyne (Memory), who is said to know everything, past, present, and future. Memory is the basis of all life and creativity, as Eliot and Dylan also argue. They want us to recover what used to be in our collective memory so the muses can forge our identity 'from the inside out'.Similarly, forgetting the true order and origin of things is often tantamount to death. That dilemma - what it means to be or not to be - is addressed by Dylan in My Own Version Of You where the protagonist attempts to shape the life of another rather than his own; a wrong remembering and a distraction from our true task.

Ross Horton notes that 'Bob Dylan appears, with each passing year, to have digested more of the very fabric of human history than any prophet or sage before him.' Dylan is returning the culture he absorbed as a child and young adult to our collective memory lest we lose it. He is using epic poetry in order to do so, which is why he's falling for Calliope. He wants us to drink deeply from the river of memory.  

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Bob Dylan - Mother Of Muses. 

So that nothing may be lost

Here is the reflection I shared in the lunchtime Eucharist for St Martin-in-the-Fields:

In my previous parish we used to begin our Evening Communion services with a call to worship from the Wild Goose Resource Group that began with 'Gather us in' and went on to describe the diversity of all those gathered in. It connects with our Gospel reading today (John 6.35-40) in that Jesus said the will of God the Father, who sent him into the world, is that Jesus should lose nothing of all that God the Father has given to him and raise it up on the last day.

Earlier in this same chapter we have been given an example of this in the feeding of the 5,000 where, at the end of the meal, all the fragments of bread were gathered up so that nothing may be lost. Jesus then gives this story of meeting basic needs a cosmic or eschatological twist when he later says it ‘is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day’.

These words come in the middle of Jesus’ teaching about being the Bread of Life, which followed the feeding of the 5,000. When Jesus gave thanks over the bread, the word used is ‘eucharistesas’, the word which gives us ‘Eucharist’. Jesus shared the bread around in communion, then, when everyone was satisfied, he instructed his disciples to pick up the fragments using that same phrase, ‘so that nothing may be lost.’ Just as none of this ‘eucharisticized’ bread was lost after the feeding, so, because ‘Jesus is the bread of life, [those who] see and believe in him … receive eternal life [and] become a fragment which he will gather up on the last day.’ (John, Richard Burridge, BRF 1998)

This is the reason why Christ came, which he revealed both here and in the parables he told about things that were lost; the lost sheep and coin. The shepherd and woman in those two stories are exactly the same; because of their concern for the sheep and coin which are lost, they will not give up searching until these have been found. The sheep and the coin are loved and this love is revealed or proved through the search.

The point of those parables is for us to know that we are similarly loved by God because he also searches for us until we are found. That search is the story told in the Gospels; that Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he laid down his own life for us becoming obedient to the point of death — even death on a cross – in order that all might be safely gathered in as those who are gathered in rise with him and return to God. Christ went on that search to seek and save those who are lost and thereby to ensure that none shall be lost and all shall be safely gathered in. We are loved by God so much that his Son left all he had in heaven to become a human being and die to gather us in. Jesus, the Good Shepherd, searches for all souls with God’s attentive love, looking and listening, finding and carrying; carrying us home, like a sheep on the shoulders, from the cliff edges of our lives.

Those who are lost almost universally consider themselves worthless but these parables and this story of the fragments gathered up specifically deny that assumption. What is lost is actually the most precious thing or person of all; the person or thing for which everything else will be given up or set aside. What is lost and found, discarded but then gathered up, is us. We are the ones for whom Christ searches at the expense of all that he has, including, in the end, his own life. We are the most precious lost person for whom he searches, the discarded fragment that will not be overlooked and will not be wasted. We are precious, we are loved.

Christ came to gather up and reconcile to God all the disparate fragments of our lives that none should be lost, even through death. This is why he speaks of the kingdom of God as being a banquet to which all, especially all who have experienced exclusion, are invited. It is why he states that there is room for all – many rooms - in his Father’s house and that he goes there to prepare places for us. He also calls us to respond in this same way to others and to the resources he provides for us in the world he created.

As a result, we have, I think, a basis for saying with the poet Walt Whitman that: ‘Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost, / No birth, identity, form — no object of the world, / Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing.’ And so we pray, ‘Gather us in, from corner or limelight, from mansion or campsite, from fears and obsession, from tears and depression, from untold excesses, from treasured successes, to meet, to eat, be given a seat, be joined to the vine, be offered new wine, become like the least, be found at the feast.’

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Steve Scott - The Resurrection Of The Body.