WE TOO ARE AN ALLOY

WE TOO ARE AN ALLOY

I never thought much about alloys till last week when a friend waxed eloquent about them.  An alloy is a mixture of metals. Pure gold is too soft on its own and so is hardened by the addition of copper or zinc. The word ‘alloy’ (in French ‘alliage’) means bonding, from which comes alliance, which in English is used politically - but in French is used for marriage. You might say what has this got to do with anything?

Well, the idea of something pure being weak and something bonded being strong is interesting, it seems to me! It is as though bonding is built into the material world just as it is in our human, social, world.  We say we need one another, and ‘no man is an island’.  An island can survive on its own. A person cannot.  But it is also true that gold is useless on its own. It is so soft it will soon wear out.

I was thinking about this idea of bonding in connection with Easter.  Jesus appears to his disciples after they have had a hard night out on the lake and caught nothing. ‘Try starboard’, he says as if they had not been trying it all night.  They do.  And then there is this huge catch.  What are we to make of it? We had a similar story in Luke chapter 5 but that time it ended with Peter saying, ‘Leave me!’ This time he jumps into the sea and makes for the shore where Jesus is waiting.  He can’t get there quick enough. He now wants this ‘bonding’.  He cannot do anything without it.

God came to ‘dwell among us’ not just as an immigrant for he took our flesh and became as we are so that we might become as he is. The alliance made with Abraham was renewed and deepened in the desert and with the later prophets we have the words, ‘I will place my law within you, writing it on your heart’. Finally, with the coming of Jesus, he actually became one of us.

I once had a friend who told me he was going to write a book entitled, ‘God is Mixed Up.’ He was a thoughtful man and struggled with questions he couldn’t answer and felt, tongue in cheek, perhaps God couldn’t either!  But in another sense God is mixed up.  He is mixed up with us.  He has bonded himself to us so closely that it is like a vine and its branches.  The fruit of the vine is in its branches.  He is like the leaven in the flour.  Without it nothing happens.

But getting mixed up with us has got God into deep trouble.  He is so bonded with us that he has carried our burdens and taken the consequences of the evil within us.  He came through the whole dreadful, awful, ordeal and appeared, as it were, on the other side.  And where he is now is where he wants us also to be (John 17:24). The early Christians had some idea what this all meant and ‘they stood there dumfounded’ (Luke 24:41).  But they knew now they were part of something much bigger than themselves.  They were not alone.  They were ‘alloyed’ to God through Jesus who ‘was so human he was divine’.

28 April 2019  Easter Sunday 2 C

Acts 5:12-16   Revelation 1: 9 …19   John 20: 19-31     

WHY ARE YOU SO SURPRISED?

25 April 2019, Easter Thursday

WHY ARE YOU SO SURPRISED? (Acts 3:11-26)

Jesus pushes the disciples: ‘You foolish men! So slow to believe the message of the prophets!’  And again, ‘Why are you so agitated? Why these doubts?’  And now we have Peter saying, ‘Why so surprised?’  One might reply, ‘I have every righ to be surprised.  These are amazing events.  Unprecedented’.  Yet these words of Jesus and Peter are what it is all about.  Why be surprised when what was foretold actually happens? It makes us think our expectations are too low.  Our hearts are too closed.  Our horizon too near.  Easter is all about opening up our hearts and minds and accepting that wonder and amazement are the essence of life.  We are not supposed to live in our cramped little world but in the expanse of our imagination.            

BUT OF HIM THEY SAW NOTHING.

23 April 2019, Easter Wednesday

BUT OF HIM THEY SAW NOTHING. (Luke 24:13-35)

Our readings this Easter week, both from the Acts and from the gospels, provide a feast of reflections.  But we have to focus in on particular thoughts if we are not to be confused by the multitude of events. Cleophas gives a long speech about how ‘we had hoped’ he was the one to set Israel free but now he is dead and he ends with a wild word about some of ‘our women going to the tomb and found it empty’. They saw angels but ‘of him they saw nothing’. So they give up and leave for Emmaus. You would think they would have been curious and stayed around investigate further. But for them and all the disciples there was a blanket of numbness.  They were ‘so slow to believe’. Why was that?  Could they not have pondered the signs? And can we ponder the signs today?           

SHE KNEW HIM THEN

22 April 2019, Easter Tuesday

SHE KNEW HIM THEN. (John 20:11-18)

Despite the scepticism of our age, the Church insists each year that after his death Jesus appeared alive to several women and men who were his friends.  They were astonished, shocked, dumfounded.  They could not believe it. The women clasped his feet. Jesus was consoling his people after the terrible trauma they had experienced.  He was like a mother comforting a child who has been hurt.  He was also confirming them on the journey they had started with him in Galilee. What he had done they now would do and with even greater manifest success. When Peter preached thousands were persuaded and came for baptism.  But above all Jesus was sharing his joy with them.  He had succeeded.  He had opened a way for them to a new life they could hardly imagine. He rejoiced to do this and some of his joy fell on them.       

THERE, COMING TO MEET THEM, WAS JESUS.

21 April 2019, Easter Monday

THERE, COMING TO MEET THEM, WAS JESUS. (Matthew 28:9)

The friends of Jesus were fearful and confused to see the empty tomb. But they were amazed by the message of the angel.  Filled with awe and great joy they ran to tell the disciples.  And then Jesus himself came to meet them. This really was too much. They fell down and clasped his feet – a sign of love, relief and intense joy. All the resurrection appearances are moments of consolation. Jesus is now at last released from a false understanding of what the Messiah would do.  Now it was clear.  It would involve engagement with the world and all its challenges and empty promises. And it would be ultimately successful.  The people of God everywhere would take up the struggle for justice (right living) and they would achieve their aim - even if they had to die to do so.      

THE HEART OF FRANCE

THE HEART OF FRANCE

It is three days now since Notre Dame de Paris, Our Lady of Paris, was enveloped in flames.  The 850 year old cathedral was the geographical, cultural, religious and national heart of France.  All distances from Paris were measured from a point zero next to it. A photo taken by the River Seine shows a group of French people all gazing in shock in one direction, clearly at the burning building, off camera.

The immediate reaction was to mend.  ‘We will rebuild it’, said the French President, soothing the aching hearts of the French and people all over the world who shared their hurt. ‘And we will donate millions’, said the super- rich partly perhaps out of generosity and partly to hone their image. ‘And we will send experts’, said the Russians not to be left out of the wave of sympathy and the limelight it generated.    

Now that the shock of the first days is subsiding and the ‘we will fix it’ initial reaction has been voiced, reflective voices are quietly being heard. Catherine Oakes, an art historian from Oxford, has written, ‘the burning fireball seemed to so many like a heart wrenched from a body.  The image is apt because, in many ways, a great building is like a living thing.’ The photo referred to bears this out.  It is like people at a funeral.

I visited Notre Dame with some friends some years ago.  It was raining and towards evening. Yet we had to push our way in as there were so many coming and going.  I was immediately struck by a huge notice: SILENCE.  Then, a little further on, the same notice appeared again with a brief explanation that visitors are welcome but are asked to keep quiet or to speak in low voices.  This was a house of prayer.  Notre Dame welcomed the curious with no conscious beliefs as well as the devout who came to pray privately or take part in the community celebration of Vespers, as we did.  I noted at the time that people respected the notices and that the cathedral had found a beautiful way of serving modern France. This ‘living thing’ responded to the yearnings of the people of today; some of whom had never been Christian, others live their Christian lives as fully as they can and again others are ‘post-Christian’ and have moved on to other agendas.

This motherly presence has now received a great wound and there is genuine grief written in the faces of the people in the photo. That all this has happened in Holy Week can be brushed aside as a coincidence.  But it can also be seen as a powerful stimulus to our reflection.  This wounded ‘living thing’, revered by its owners, whatever their beliefs, can be seen for a moment as a sign of our own wounds and our own hopes.  As the flames leapt and the people watched we saw a living drama of our time.  Every piece of material for this magnificent building was drawn there by horse and cart, maybe one or two stones at a time. Every stone was cut and dressed by hand and every wooden fitting was sawn and carved in the same way. No one generation saw the work complete from beginning to end.  It was the work of a people and children and grandchildren took up the work where their parents left off. French blood and tears are mixed with the mortar of the building.

Yes, it is a living thing with a living heart and its wounding is a cause for sorrow but also for hope. Mary, Notre Dame, stood by the cross weeping.  But her tears were turned into joy.

21 April 2019  Easter Sunday

Acts 10:34-43  1 Corinthians 5:6-8      John 20:1-9

18 April 2019, Holy Thursday, Zimbabwe Independence (1980)

I have longed to eat this Passover with you before I suffer. (Luke 22:14)

In Exodus 12, which we read tonight, we see the sign of the lamb, the first Passover, where God in his great love for us promises to lead us out of sin into life with him. The symbolism is truly heightened in the second reading , from 1 Corinthians 11, where Jesus takes some bread and some wine to express this commitment even to the giving of his life; the Lamb of God for us. He has come close to us and, in the third reading from John 13, comes even closer and goes on his knees before us to wash our feet and the feet of all those suffering exclusion and separation.  By this sign he welcomes and gathers us into community with him and one another.     

OF BREXIT AND BLACK HOLES

OF BREXIT AND BLACK HOLES

I expected the BBC to kick off its evening news with the gathering of the nations of Europe to discuss how to respond to the latest twist in the Brexit saga. But no, perhaps making a subtle joke about Brexit, they started with a report on the first ever photo of a black hole. The photo cost $50 million to take and involved 25 years of preparation with 200 scientists coordinating 8 telescope cameras positioned across the globe – one at the South Pole.  The hole is 500 million trillion km away and is 40 billion km in diameter.  The whole operation was a bit more complicated than Brexit.  It seems the BBC got its priorities right.

Well, maybe not! The taking of that photo involved setting in motion a series of algorithms, ‘processes or sets of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations, especially by a computer’.  One just has to wait until all the calculations have been done!  Einstein proposed there were ‘black holes’ as a result of the calculations of his own brilliant mind but he could not prove it.  Now it has been proved.  There is euphoria among the scientists involved.  But there is no algorithm for Brexit.  It is less a matter of calculation; more a matter of judgement.  And no set of legislators have been able to convince a sufficiently large number of other legislators of their judgement. So there has been an impasse for months.  Wisely, they have come to the decision not to make a decision.  They will wait until a consensus emerges.

Some conclusions are reached by scientific evidence; others by painstaking judgement. But others, and this is where we are in Holy Week, are reached by prejudice and blind adherence to fixed ideas. For Jesus to say, ‘Before Abraham ever was I am’, struck some of his hearers as blasphemy and ‘they took up stones to throw at him’.  From his words and signs one could surely conclude that Jesus’ claim ‘that I am he’ had merit and was worth exploring, as Nicodemus did.  But most of the Jewish leaders – and all those they represent in every age – did not and do not.  One of the saddest qualities of being human is the ability to close down our mind and build a wall around it that seems impenetrable.  How we develop this ability is a mystery but it is real.  And closed minds perpetuate injustice, oppression and death.

‘And yet ours were the sufferings he bore, ours the sorrows he carried’.

14 April 2019    Palm Sunday   Isaiah 50:4-7   Philippians 2:6-11     Luke 22:14-23:56

ORIGINALS AND PHOTOCOPIES

ORIGINALS AND PHOTOCOPIES

This week Pope Francis issued his letter setting out what was learnt at the recent synod in Rome on young people.  He cited Carlo Acutis, who died in 2006 aged 15, ‘as being well aware that the whole apparatus of communications, advertising and social networking can be used to lull us and make us addicted to consumerism … Carlo saw that many young people, wanting to be different, really end up being like everyone else, running after whatever the powerful set before them with the mechanisms of consumerism and distraction. In this way they do not bring forth the gifts the Lord has given each of them. “Everyone is born as an original”, Carlo said, “but many end up dying as photocopies”. (Christ is Alive # 105).

There is in each of us a fear of being ‘an original’.  It is far safer to hide in the crowd and ‘do what everyone else does’.  After all the ‘herd instinct’ is what preserves the life of animals in the wild.  Maybe it is written into our genes too?  But we know that is not true.  We know that we are happiest when we are able to ‘be ourselves’ and develop our own gifts and abilities.  There are times when we stop for a moment and realise ‘I am unique’.  There is no one – and never has been or will be – exactly like me.  There are billions of us but each of us is an original.

When the woman in John, chapter 8, is caught in the ‘very act of committing adultery’ she is brought by the scribes and Pharisees to Jesus for his comment. They form a group full of self-righteousness based on their interpretation of the ancient laws of Israel.  Jesus said nothing but bent down and wrote on the ground.  They pressed him and he straightened up and said, ‘Let the one among you who is without sin cast the first stone’.  And he bent down again and continued writing.  Now they were no longer a group.  Jesus’ word had separated them into individuals: each one had to make a decision, ‘shall I be the one to cast the first stone?’  Caught off guard they went away ‘one by one’.

Nicodemus was probably not there. By this time he was learning to distance himself from his group. We know how he struggled to be the ‘original’ he was.  He felt the pressure of the group and it was hard for him to assert what he felt in his own heart.  In the end we know he succeeded.  We all feel that pressure and it is even harder today when the media is able to saturate us with messages telling us what is best for us. The call to really be the original we are remains.

7 April 2019                Lent Sunday 5 C

Isaiah 43:16-21           Philippians 3:8-14       John 8:1-11  

WE KNOW WHERE HE COMES FROM

5 April 2019

WE KNOW WHERE HE COMES FROM (John 7:1…30)

As confrontation mounts between the Jews and Jesus they cling to what they know of him and stop searching.  They settle for something less because it is more comfortable and does not demand much from them. So, ‘we know where he comes from: Nazareth in Galilee’.  And they end there. But Jesus comes from the Father and he has come to lead them and all people back to the Father who is the source of life.  They don’t want to struggle with this message.  It is too threatening to them.  So they settle for something less and miss out on the ‘fullness of life’ (John 10:10).