Morning Prayer

Luke 11:27,28 (For the Bible verse click here)

Have you ever noticed how we are increasingly living in our heads these days? "Self-image", digital profiles to create an online alter-ego, ideas that "work for me" - all these aspects of modern life are considered by many acceptable, possibly even indispensable. It is very easy to become our own frame of reference and life is so much more simple when we only have ourselves to deal with.

Jesus calls us out of these things back into reality. God calls us to engage for real with who He is.

In these verses, a woman calls out to Jesus from the crowd exclaiming that his mother must be blessed to have borne him. I imagine that she is thinking about how proud she must be seeing her son teaching such wonderful things and being celebrated by so many people. Maybe the woman is thinking about how she would feel to have a famous son, how it would embellish her standing and make her famous by association. Wouldn't it give a whole new dimension to life to have raised someone like Jesus!

But of course, the reality for Jesus and Mary are very different. Mary knows real cost of her calling and the sword that will pierce her heart is always present. She would remember the frightening times of childhood, running away from a mad king who was trying to find her family and kill her son; she would remember the growing self-awareness in Jesus - an understanding of what it was actually going to take for her son, God's Son, to walk the path of obedience, the path to the cross.

Jesus responds to the woman that true blessing only comes from obedience to God and walking in His Way; He is not placing a disciple above Mary, or belittling his mother - exactly the opposite. He is explaining how Mary is truly blessed. Not through the social standing or public pride from the temporary popularity which would pass very soon, but through the deep obedience of walking and living in the path that God has called her to.

The woman in the crowd is called to look deeper to find who she can be in Christ; the same call is made to us today. Only be fully engaging with God and the world around us will find life in its fullness. Only be letting go of the obsession with self-interest and a constructing a make-believe world around ourselves will we be able to embrace and play our part in God's ongoing Creation - so far beyond our own limited imaginings.

Morning Prayer 25th May 2009

1 John 2:18-end (click here for passage)

St. John has a very neat way of dividing people, teachings and actions into opposites. Light and Darkness, Good and Evil, Love and Hate, We and You, Us and Them, Christ and Anti-Christ.

Either one is in or not - there is no middle ground. St. John's measures are very clear too. It is quite simply the anointing of the Holy Spirit that both informs what you believe and guides how you live and therefore places you 'in' or 'out'.

His logic is simple and straightforward. The Holy Spirit is the means be which we understand the Gospel, it is the means by which we recognise and accept Jesus as divine and one with the Father and it is the way that we recognise truth and have our lives our shaped by it.

This is of course not a rational argument but it is rooted in orthodox Christian experience. When the Church comes to make decisions and understand the truth, it absolutely must be led by this same Holy Spirit and remain connected with the apostolic experience and message. We are all connected through this Holy Spirit in a way which is real or not - it is not something that comes and goes - it is the source eternal life and the life starts now.

Antichrists are not strange people who have occult powers to corrupt, they are simply ordinary people who deny Jesus - his divinity and his claim on their lives and thereby denying themselves the presence and work of the Holy Spirit in their lives. The eternal life of the Gospel is something that is always there and there are a thousand antichrist arguments that sound so reasonable, but from St. John's perspective - you either know or you don't. Sometimes, the simplest choices are the hardest and the ones we are keenest to avoid.

Morning Prayer - Monday of Easter Week

Mark 16:1-8 (Click here for text)

I always find Easter Eve a strange time. Having immersed myself in the passion on the Friday and been amazed again at what Jesus went through and how He manages to forgive and retain his hope in humanity, I feel a bit lost on the Saturday. Of course preparations for Sunday kick in and occupy time, it is spiritually an in between place.

In Mark's Gospel we have the only hint at what the disciples were up to. The women, here, had clearly observed the Sabbath following the placing of Jesus' body in the tomb and as soon as they were able they had bought some spices on the Saturday evening to honour Jesus in death at first light. Where were the men? The women must have felt unable to ask them for help in moving the stone - maybe the men were avoiding the soldiers and had heard that a guard had been placed on the temporary tomb. So their main focus is honouring Jesus in death as they no doubt have a horrible night wracked with grief and worry.

So it is in a complete state that they arrive at the first Easter morning. Not with anticipation of Easter Eggs and a more upbeat service than usual under girded by the joy of knowing that Jesus succeeds in making all things new, do they arrive, but with trauma and loss.

The angel they find rightly soothes them with the words, stop being afraid,' but it hardly has any effect. They run away and for a time remain too terrified to speak.

What must have been the impact of this early morning event as they went away? The plans and concerns of the last 36 hours have all been wiped away. There is no body to care for. There is no Jesus to prepare for proper entombment. How did it finally dawn that there this might mean resurrection? When did they dare to believe? Was it Mary's experience? Followed by Peter and Cleopas and Luke?

Just imagine the transformation of perspective! Hope beyond hope! It must have been strange - the certainty of the death and mourning rituals replaced with the uncertainty of of hope in the miraculous. How much evidence would it take? How many appearances? How much explanation until it finally sank in.

But with the joy of the resurrection dawns the understanding of the significance - not just for them, the ones who were mourning and are now rejoicing, but for the world! How long until the responsibility for them begins to take hold and they realise that their testimony is needed for the world to understand what God is doing in Jesus.

Isn't this where our journeys become connected. Once the reality of the resurrection sinks in and we become convicted of its truth, so the responsibility of that understanding dawns too. This is not simply a personal event but a transforming event for all people. And we who believe without seeing first hand have no less a share in that responsibility than those first few who experienced Jesus alive directly before them.

Morning Prayer - Easter Eve

1 John 5.5-12 (Click here for text)

We are being offered new life in Christ every day. This new spiritual (spiritually evolved) human being that each of us is called to be us real, every day. Our role is to live it.

How do we do this?

There is no avoiding that the starting point is faith. While we search and argue and debate (and no doubt we will always do this) we are not necessarily embracing this new life offered. We embrace through believing it - accepting that this the reality. God through Jesus really has bought into being a new way of being a human being and the Holy Spirit enables us to become this. The first step to living this is believing it and embracing that like is often linked symbolically with the water of baptism, not simply a washing away of sin but an act of commitment - saying this is my view of the world.

The second thing we do - and this is very difficult -  is that we begin to die with regard to things of the old way of being. Jesus death on the cross - as well as a physical death - is a death to the old order of being. He will not retaliate, He will not use the sword, He will not flee, He will  have faith that God is bringing in to being the new order. So he forgives; he blesses; he offers peace even to those who hate Him. In this day and age, with an aggressive secular, atheistic streak there is a real temptation to respond in kind. Such a response is a lack of faith. The new order forgives, reaches out, blesses, understands their blindness and reaches out. The blood of Jesus is the symbol of an atoning death that fulfils and removes a previous sacrificial system but it is also a symbol of overcoming the brokenness of the old humanity - of dying to the world - so that the new can grow. This is the blood that we must share in - the cross that we must carry.

And finally we must allow the Holy Spirit to do His work in us. To take the points of tension in our lives and resolve, like a spiritual dissonance into the cadence of the Kingdom. We must allow ourselves to be for others even when they are against us - 'for others' meaning that the hope that they too will embrace this new humanity and allow the Spirit to draw them on too.

We live it primarily through 'becoming' - through being changed in our mind and our desires that our actions will flow from the Kingdom that one day will be fulfilled in Jesus.