Youth and Age

I've taken two funerals in the last two weeks. One for someone who died tragically young and the other for someone who lived a long life. This post combines my reflections on age from both services:

‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.’ Those are words first spoken by one who was in his thirties and who would die aged 33. He lived a short life as an obscure itinerant preacher in an obscure part of the Roman Empire, yet his words are remembered today, millions have followed in his footsteps, and his actions have opened relationship with God to all who do so.

Lives don’t need to be long to have impact when those who die young have been those that have loved family, friends and life itself deeply in the time that they have been with us.

X is one of those whose life has been short yet whose impact on our lives has been deep and wide and therefore will be long lasting. That is because of three reasons. The first of those was character. He was central to his group of friends and to his family because of the love that was apparent in his character. We have all experienced that and have heard examples of it in the tributes and eulogy given today. The Beatitudes is a reading about character; about those who practice meekness, righteousness, mercy, purity, peacemaking, and endurance in the face of suffering. Those who do so practice love and live love because their focus is on others, rather than themselves.

The second reason was his endurance in the face of suffering. Like all those with sickle cell he experienced periods of excruciating pain; pain of which those of us who are not sicklers do not know. He rode out the periods of pain that he suffered just like those who endure persecution for righteousness’ sake. They could do so because they knew that there was a better future – the kingdom of heaven – ahead. He knew that he could look forward to pain-free periods in which to enjoy and appreciate life to the full if he could ride out the periods of pain.

The third reason was his appreciation of life’s changes and his determination to live life deeply and fully in the periods when he was free of pain. That is the attitude that we see set out in the passage read from Ecclesiastes. Life is bittersweet in its mix of joys and traumas. We need to accept and understand that that is so in order to appreciate the times of laughter, dancing, embracing, healing, planting and keeping.

We can honour his memory best by following in his footsteps, adopting his attitudes, and mirroring his character. Lives don’t need to be long to have impact when those who die young have been those that have loved family, friends and life itself deeply in the time that they have been with us. We will have honoured X’s memory best if those things are what is said about us after we have died, however long or short our lives.

What does it mean to live well? Life can’t be measured in years alone, although X lived a long life, but perhaps life is measured by the legacy we leave for others; primarily the love we have shown and shared.

St Paul’s classic description of love is often shared at weddings and therefore serves often as a foundation to the forming of family life which is the principal forum in which love is learnt, shared, tested and developed. This description of love is one that it is very appropriate to use as we look back on a long life well lived. It's often only as we look back that we appreciate with fresh insight the love we received at an earlier stage in our lives as at that earlier stage such love was simply what normal life felt like. So, children can now say that they appreciate just how lucky they were to grow up with their parents.

St Paul’s description of love is somewhat generic but we have heard today stories of love expressed in specific ways. We can therefore rewrite 1 Corinthians 13 for your actual experience of family life together. Love is the sharing of interests and enthusiasms - of cycling, ballet and opera, love is the memory of a first kiss, love is dawn bike rides as a family to time trials, love is being taught to swim, pitch a tent and play chess, love is gifts of sticky buds, catkins and pussy willow, love is whole house renovations, love is unblocking drains, maintaining boilers, cleaning and repairing a local church, love is leading the project to redevelop and renovate that church building. Love is also the devotion and care shown by one partner to the other that meant they were able to spend their remaining years of marriage at home together.

There are many stories about X because of his caring character and because he had a long life in which to express that care. Methuselah is a well-known Bible character because of the length of his life. Interestingly those, like Methuselah, who are listed in Genesis as having lived long lives are listed there because their lives were shorter than those supposed to have been lived by kings of the tribes surrounding them. Long lives were claimed for those kings as a signs of their supposed divinity. So the lists included in Genesis were to demonstrate that Israel’s ancestors were ordinary working people like shepherds and not semi-divine kings. From what I know of X he would have been happy to stand with the likes of Methuselah on that basis.

Memories and stories are what we need to tell today because they remind us of all the ways in which X impacted our lives. As we do so, we realize that our lives have been richer for knowing him and that it is only because he was part of our lives and brought so much into our lives that we mourn him as much as we do today. And so it is that, as we remember all the good that we received from him, we focus on giving thanks that he was a part of our lives.

Our Bible reading also speaks of another way in which X lives today, as it speaks of the Christian hope for the future. Life is like looking through a grubby pane of glass. That’s essentially what St Paul said in 1 Corinthians 13. When we look out through a dirty window we can see but we can’t see clearly. That, he says, is our experience in this life.

Why? Because none of us are perfect and therefore we don’t love others as we should. We don’t fully love in the way that he describes in this passage. Are we always long-suffering, kind, unenvying, unself-seeking, not puffed up and not easily provoked? Do we always think no evil, bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, and endure all things? The short and honest answer is no. We do not experience perfection in this world and therefore do not see love perfected.

But, as we have reflected, we do see love in part; particularly in our close family relationships. As we reflect on X’s life today, we are remembering the ways in which he loved and in which we received love from him. He knew love and gave love in his life. But whatever he knew and gave of love in this life has now been exceeded in the next. Now he sees love perfected because he sees Jesus face to face. What was partial has been left behind and what is perfect is now his experience.

More than this, Paul says that faith, hope and love abide or remain. He seems to be saying that we can take something with us when we die. That all our acts of faith, hope and love from this life continue and are perfected in our future life. And this means that funerals are important times for us to reflect on our own lives. Are we modelling our lives on what we know of Jesus? Are our lives characterised by acts that are full of faith, hope and love? If not, then we will enter eternity with very little. But what a joy there is when someone can take much that was of love into their future life together with God.

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Sufjan Stevens - Mystery Of Love.

Conversation that will transform creation for good

Here's the reflection that I shared during today's lunchtime Eucharist for St Martin-in-the-Fields:

The book of Job is told as a series of conversation – conversations between God and Satan, between Job and his friends, and between Job and God - because being in conversation with God is what the book is all about. At the end of the book Job says to God, “In the past I knew only what others had told me, but now I have seen you with my own eyes” and this is perhaps the key statement to understanding what is going on in this book.

The book of Job is concerned with the problem of pain; why does suffering occur and why do good people suffer? But the book does not provide answers to these questions. Job’s friends try to tell him that because he is suffering then he must be at fault in some way. But Job knows that that is not the case and this is confirmed at the end of the book when God is angry with Job’s friends because they did not speak the truth about him as Job did. Instead of accepting the advice of his friends and saying that he is at fault, Job decides to state his case to God and by doing so starts a conversation with God in which he begins to see God with his own eyes instead of hearing about God from what others had to tell him. The important thing that happens in this book; the thing that changes Job and his situation is that he begins this conversation.

It is part of this conversation with God that we have heard read today (Job 38:1, 12-21, 40:3-5) and what we have heard is mainly God’s contribution to the conversation. One of the most obvious things to jump out at us from what God says is that he doesn’t provide any answers to Job’s questions. Instead, he asks a series of other questions which give Job a sense of the awesome nature of God as creator and sustainer of life. It is God who created and ordered the world and who understands its patterns and cycles of life: the times of birth for mountain goats and wild deer; the freedom of wild donkeys; the strength of wild oxen and horses; the speed of the ostrich; the flight of the hawk and the nesting of the eagle. All of these and more God created and understands their pattern of life and their place in the tapestry of nature and circle of life. All of these and more God understands while Job does not.

It is easy to read these passages and think that what God wants to do is to belittle Job by making him realise just how insignificant he is as a human being and therefore that he should simply respond by accepting what God does and says. Job seems to feel like that too because when God challenges him to answer his questions Job throws up his hands and says, “I spoke foolishly, Lord. What can I answer? I will not try to say anything else. I have already said more than I should.” Often people read the book of Job as though that is the answer to the problem of suffering; it is all in God’s hands, we can’t understand and therefore we should just trust him.

But that isn’t what God wants at all. Instead, God goes on to say, “Stand up like a man, and answer my questions.” God challenges Job to give an answer to his questions and says that it is in the nature of his humanity that Job should answer these questions. God wants to be in a conversation with human beings where we take responsibility for our lives and our world. Where we find answers to the questions that God poses to human beings but where we find those answers in conversation with God.

When we are out of conversation with God or only have knowledge of God through others, then we are not working in partnership with God for the benefit of the world in which we live. That is the situation in which humanity finds itself in relation to the questions that God asked of Job: Do you know when mountain goats are born? Do you know how long wild deer carry their young? Will the wild ox work for you? Human beings now know the answers to these and many of the other questions that God asked of Job. That is not wrong. God wanted us to be able to explore his creation and find answers to those questions. But he wanted humanity to do that together with him, in conversation with him. Instead for most of human history, we have ignored God and explored his creation on our terms and in our way exploiting creation for our own gain. We know now where that has got us; that we stand in danger of destroying God’s creation and ourselves along with it. We have a desperate and urgent need as human beings to be talking to God about the answers to the questions he posed to Job.

God wants us to be in conversation with him and when we are, as Job found, it transforms our understanding of ourselves and our world. Throughout history God has been seeking people who will be in conversation with him and who through that conversation will transform his creation for good and not for ill. Because of our selfish exploitation of the world and its resources it seems that we stand on the precipice of an ecological disaster. Will that realisation be sufficient to bring our generation back into conversation with God just as the destruction of his world propelled Job into his challenge to God which opened a life-changing conversation through which he saw God with his own eyes? 

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Marvin Gaye - What's Going On?

Confusion & childbirth

Here is my sermon from today's Eucharist at St Stephen Walbrook:

I’m going to talk about confusion and childbirth. Neither are easy topics for a sermon as we prefer to talk about certainty rather than confusion when it comes to faith and when men talk about childbirth it is always on the basis of a lack lived experience, even when you were present at the birth of both your children.

Let’s start with confusion, which for all our focus on certainty in the Christian faith, is actually an encouraging topic to address because it shows the realism and honesty of the Gospels. The Gospels could have been written as a hagiography of Jesus’ disciples but instead is a warts and all account. The disciples were fallible human beings, just as we are, yet were mightly used by God; and that is hugely encouraging for us, as it says that we can experience the same.

The confusion that the disciples experience here is in relation to Jesus’ teaching (John 16. 16 - 22). He says, ‘You won’t see me then you will.’ ‘You will grieve and be in pain and then you will rejoice.’ ‘I am going to the Father and then the Advocate will come to you.’ These were the messages Jesus was giving to his disciples just before the events of his Passion. With hindsight we understand what he was saying but we can understand, too, that at the time it was confusing and, as is clear from our Gospel reading, they didn’t really understand.

Jesus was trying to prepare them for his crucifixion – when they would no longer see them as he would have died and been buried – and for his resurrection – when joyfully and miraculously they would see him again. But these events were so far outside their frame of reference that they struggled to understand.

With hindsight we can see that Jesus was talking to them about his death and resurrection. Although we can see that in a way that the disciples could not at that time, there is still much that we don’t understand about the work of God in the world – questions, for example, about suffering, free will and our human propensity to evil – which mean that we will often feel as confused as the disciples felt at that time.

Later, they were able to see that Jesus knew what he was talking about and what he was doing, so they learnt to trust the work of God in the world even when they didn’t always understand what was going on. We need to learn to do the same and trust that, although we often don’t understand how, God is working his purpose out as year succeeds to year. In addition, Jesus wants us to understand that the pattern of his death and resurrection is also our natural and normal experience as human beings which we should expect to see worked out in our lives too. This is partly why he equates his experience of death and resurrection with childbirth.

He says to his disciples, ‘You are going to go through an experience that is very like that of childbirth. There will be a time when I am no longer with you and you will grieve and be in pain. That time will be like the pain that is experienced in labour. Then I will return to you through the resurrection and you will feel immense joy, the kind of joy that a mother feels when she first receives her new born baby in her arms; the kind of joy that overwhelms and over shadows the pain that was felt earlier.

Because he equates his unusual personal mission with an experience that is natural and normative for large numbers of the population in every generation, Jesus is suggesting to us that this pattern of death and resurrection, pain before birth, grief and joy, is one that will characterise our experience as Christians, so that whenever we are in a place of pain, grief or have the sense that death is occurring in some way in our lives, we should not despair because we can trust that resurrection, rebirth or new life is actually just around the corner and will be our experience in the future.

When we are in the midst of confusion, pain or grief, it is, of course, very hard to believe this and to trust that change will come. That is why Jesus wants to prepare us, as he tried to prepare his disciples, and wants us to understand that this will be our experience throughout our lives; that we will all move through periods of pain and grief before then experiencing new life and resurrection. His crucifixion and resurrection provide us with an understanding that the disciples did not possess before his Passion. The question is whether we will use that greater knowledge and understanding to prepare ourselves for the cycles of death and rebirth that remain to be experienced in the remainder of our time here on earth.         

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Déodat de Séverac -Tantum Ergo.

Julian Meditation 2

Here is the second collage of words from Julian of Norwich which I have compiled as part of reflecting on the her writings, particularly as used in the DVD featuring Alan Oldfield's paintings. They are intended to put Julian's words in new combinations while retaining her overall meaning:

There were times when I wanted to look away from the Cross, but I dared not.

The huge, hard, hurtful nails pulled the wounds wide open

The body sagged with the weight of its long hanging

Fair skin was driven deep into the tender flesh

Harsh striking all over the sweet body

The nails wrenched it as the weight of the body pulled against it

Shaken in sorrow and anguish and tribulation

As a cloth is shaken in the wind

The weeping and wailing of the soul

Bearing the loss of every kind of comfort except the deep, quiet keeping of God

I knew that while I gazed on the Cross I was safe and sound.

The holy joining made in heaven. God's son fell with Adam

Adam's old shirt - narrow, threadbare and short - our mortal flesh that God's son took upon him

So joined in love that the greatness of our love caused the greatness of his grief

The shame, the despising, the utter stripping he accepted

All the bodily and spiritual pains and passions of his creatures

Our Lord Jesus made nothing for us and we made nothing with him

In our joining together in love lies the life of all who shall be saved

In falling and rising again we are held close in one love

For our falling does not stop him loving us

I dared not look away. I was not willingly going to imperil my soul.

Flee to our Lord and we shall be comforted. Touch him and we shall be made clean.

Cling to him and we shall be safe and sound from every kind of danger.

For our courteous Lord wills that we should be at home with him

as heart may think or soul may desire .

Our soul rests in God its true peace, our soul stands in God its true strength,

and is deep-rooted in God for endless love.

He did not say 'You shall not be tempest-tossed, you shall not be work-weary,

you shall not be discomforted'.

But he did say, 'You shall not be overcome.'

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Indelible Grace - All Must Be Well.