George Herbert’s ‘Utmost Art’

 

The Dedication

Lord, my first fruits present themselves to thee;

Yet not mine neither: for from thee they came,

And must return. Accept of them and me,

And make us strive, who shall sing best thy name.

Turn their eyes hither, who shall make a gain:

Theirs, who shall hurt themselves or me, refrain.

-Herbert’s dedication for The Temple

 

So through his ‘utmost art’, as an Anglican poet and priest, George Herbert seeks to embody profound truth about humanity’s relationship to God and God’s response to us as creature and servant. For Herbert, expression of this profound human reality demands a definite aesthetic simplicity to attend it if human language itself is to be faithful to that truth. For Herbert, to possess insight into the most profound spiritual realities is to manifest that insight in the simplicity of his words.

Yet at the same time, Herbert is an artist – writing for his earthly audience with its expectations that he fulfill the demands of the accepted conventions or “complexities” of his art. In resolving this tension, Herbert appeals to the nature of spiritual simplify itself. Through the cumulative process of spiritual illumination which the drama of The Temple embodies, he comes to the realization that for him as a poet, with the demands of a dual audience to fulfill, the essence of simplicity lies in order. In art as well as in life, God as ultimate simplicity is the source of a Divine Order of things. Conforming to that Order is the way to ‘simplicitas’ or wholeness for the individual and for those who make up the community of Christ. So the true wholeness of artistic expression is achieved, for a poet/priest like Herbert through a unique ordering of complex poetic elements – an ordering which creates a dynamic fusion of the simplicity and complexity at once demanded of him.  Through a conscious ordering of linguistic elements (poetic convention, imagery, ideas, prosody, syntax, word play) he can at once achieve simplicity in the expression of spiritual truths, and can be faithful to the complexities of his art.

Ultimately the dramatic structure of The Temple as a struggle to define the ideals of art and life for a poet/priest is expressed through four related thematic movements:

1. the discussion of the relationship between life and art which stresses that poetry embodying the image of God comes only from a life conformed to that image (“The Thanksgiving”, “Easter”, “Love I”, “Love II”)

2. the discussion of the ordered life which manifests the image of God as a life of ‘wholeness’ or simplicity (“Sinne I’, “The Temper II”, “Providence”, “Content”, Paradise”, “The Familie”)

3. the discussion of the ordered life of simplicity in aesthetic terms (“The H. Communion”, “Frailtie”, “Dotage”)

4. the discussion of the poetic art in terms of a quest for aesthetic simplicity (“Jordan I”, “The H. Scriptures I”, “The H. Scriptures II”, “Jordan II”, “The Forerunners”, “The Posie”, “A Wreath”).

In this context, consider “A Wreath”.

A Wreath

A Wreathed garland of deserved praise

Of praise deserved, unto thee I give,

I give to thee, who knowest all my wayes,

My crooked winding wayes, wherein I live,

Wherein I die, not live: for life is straight,

Straight as a line, and ever tends to thee,

To thee, who art more farre above deceit,

Then deceit seems above simplicitie.

Give me simplicitie, that I may live,

So live and like, that I may know, thy wayes,

Know them and practise them: then shall I give

For this poore wreath, give thee a crown of praise.

*   *   *

While on its way to being a conventional sonnet, the poem stops at twelve lines instead of carrying on to complete the expected fourteen. Four quatrains with lines ‘hooked’ together as a wreath is woven is the ‘simple’ offering of art and life presented to the Divine. Yet this offering employs poetic artistry while advocating ‘simplicity’. The writer declares it to be “poore”, yet has produced a “crown of praise”. This kind of beautiful and meaningful contradiction appears throughout The Temple and lend the work, as a whole, its rich texture as poet seeks to be poet and priest seeks to be priest simultaneously.

Next we will consider one of the key earlier poems in The Temple, “The Sacrifice” and why it is structured and presented in the way it is. In the meantime, read some of the poems associated with the four themes discussed here.

Rev. Steve Bailey is a deacon at St. Laurence, Coquitlam, and a blog master at New Westminster Anglican Blog. Your comments and observations are welcome. Please consider submitting a piece on one of your favourite Anglican writers. I’d be happy to share it here.

 

George Herbert and the Dilemma of a Dual Audience (Part Two of a series on Anglican Poets and Writers)

As an Anglican poet, Herbert sensed very real tensions about the nature and function of his art as he searches for an ideal art to offer both God and a community of human readers. Like Sidney and Daniels, he wrestles with the role of the artifice of language in addressing his dual audience. The question becomes, “what is an ideal poetic art in terms of simplicity and complexity which will meet the expectations of a distinct and radically different dual audience”?

Fortunately a look at specific poems in The Temple in their dramatic context – the individual journeying to God through art – provides insight into Herbert’s solution to his artistic dilemma. Herbert invites us to journey with him in his search for “simplicity” as he seeks to resolve his own artistic and spiritual quest focussed on perfecting both life and art in the image of God.

A good place for us to start this journey with George Herbert is to observe the quest for “simplicity” that is basic to his religious and artistic experience and expressed in the dramatic structure of The Temple itself. We can readily identify the significance of “simplicity” as a spiritual ideal, and then trace Herbert’s transferring of that ideal to his conception of his art. Such an appreciation of The Temple opens up distinct thematic patterns that emerge at different times and ultimately come together to resolve the problem of simplicity and art with which one of our chief Anglican poets concerns himself.

As a spiritual ideal, a state of “simplicity of heart” came to be, in late Renaissance devotional writing, equated with a heightened, and at times even mystical awareness of God in the individual soul. An individual, through “practicing the presence of God,” could be finally united to God, and be made “simple” in the likeness of God. The image of God was conceived of, to a large extent, in terms of an ultimate simplicity which expressed the unity, or oneness and perfection of the Divine Godhead. The great 15th Catholic theologian and devotional writer Savonarola (now a TV star thundering down the wrath of God on the Borgia papacy of Alexander VI) wrote in his treatise De Simplicitate Christianae Vitae:

“Simplicity of heart requires purgation from earthly affections, in order that the whole spirit and the whole soul should may be directed toward God, and may become like unto God, that the whole man may be made simple (unified, whole) in the likeness of God….For the contemplation of Divine things requires the greatest tranquillity of heart: and therefore he who wishes to enjoy Divine illuminations must remove himself as far as possible from the clamour of this world (ie. the ‘complexity’ or ‘enmity with God’) which separates creature from creator….Therefore the more each man shall strive to achieve simplicity in his proper degree, the greater consolations he shall receive from Christ.” (Book 2, Conclusion I, De Simplicitate).

Forgiving, I hope, Savonarola’s obvious sexism here, we can see a key devotional concept  still popular and much written about and practiced in Herbert’s 17th century Anglican world. For Herbert, then, the desire for an ideal simplicity in life and art gives birth to one of the most powerful and significant thematic movements in The Temple : the poet/persona’s search for his own “utmost art” in terms of the whole journey of the spirit which The Temple portrays:

Praise. (II)

King of Glorie, King of Peace,

I will love thee:

And that love may never cease,

I will move thee.

Thou hast granted my request,

Thou hast heard me:

Thou didst note my working breast,

Thou hast spar’d me.

Wherefore with my utmost art

I will sing thee,

And the cream of all my heart

I will bring thee.

Thou my sinnes against me cried,

Thou didst cleare me;

And alone, when they replied,

Thou didst heare me.

Sev’n whole days, not one in seven,

I will praise thee.

In my heart, though not in heaven,

I can raise thee.

Thou grew’st soft and moist with tears,

Thou relentedst:

And when Justice call’d for fears,

Thou disentedst.

Small it is, in this poor sort

To enroll thee:

Ev’n enternitie is to short

To extoll thee.

God, as the ultimate image of simplicity or uncomplicated unity, wholeness or integrity responds to humanity out of that simplicity of being; the implication is that one must ultimately respond in similar terms to God through both life and art as one seeks to embrace the infinite love of God.

There is definitely something very contemporary about that approach to one’s relationship to the “mission” of God that reaches, often dramatically, outside the established religious institutions so often not trusted by, in particular, western post modernism. In terms of contemporary ideas on ‘simplicity of being’, consider a look at Sallie McFague’s new book, A New Climate for Theology: God, the World and Global Warming. 

Rev. Steve Bailey is a deacon at St. Laurence, Coquitlam, and a blogmaster for New Westminster Anglican Blog. You are invited to contribute to this series by submitting some thoughts about a favourite Anglican writer. The series on George Herbert will continue. Herbert lovers are encouraged to comment.

George Herbert and the Post Modern Anglican Context – Part One

Note: NW Anglican blog is embarking on a celebration of Anglican poets and writers. If you have a particular favourite you would like to present here, let us know. We’ll be happy to include her or him. It’s kind of a ‘dancing saints’ presentation – a verbal version of  the wonderful dancing saints painted on the walls  of St. Gregory of Nyssa in San Francisco. Our first poetically dancing saint is George Herbert (1593-1633).

George Herbert, 17th century Anglican thinker and poet who chose the humble life of a rural parish priest rather than court preferment, has proven to be an Anglican writer for all times and places.

Once viewed as “quaint” and “unsophisticated”, Herbert enjoyed a revival of interest with Anglican poet TS Eliot’s investigation of the ‘Metaphysical Poets’ in the early 20th century. Even after Eliot, however, Herbert’s work was considered to be of somewhat lesser significance than that of another great Anglican priest-poet of the time, John Donne.

Not the case, I would venture. Herbert’s art as a poet is quite different from Donne’s – and both stand in the centre of Anglican poetry for different reasons. So focussing on Herbert for the time being, what is it that suggests he speaks strongly to the post modern Anglican context that we find ourselves in?

Post modern Anglicans tend to see their life in Jesus Christ through the metaphor of “journey”. That journey, whether supported by use of a labyrinth, a specific set of spiritual exercises and practices or the development of intentional community, stresses relationship with God and the world over dogma and propositional statements about God. Herbert’s 17th century poetic art – both in its form and content – speaks to the futility of fixing God in dogma or doctrinal pronouncement. It speaks directly to the appreciation of wholeness achieved by living in the Divine Presence and connecting to others through the Mission of God of which we are all a part. Herbert loves the questions rather than the answers. His desire is to achieve spiritual as well as artistic ‘simplicity’ which gets straight to the heart of a living relationship with God and clearly focuses on the primacy of mission and ministry.

Herbert’s great sequence of lyric poems, The Temple, represents a journeying, self-reflecting, questioning individual. Indeed, The Temple is a poetic journal reflection of the most personal kind expressing the journey to wholeness in Christ in life and in art. Here is a major difference between Herbert and Donne; for the latter does not consciously engage in such a journey or quest through purposeful moulding of a lyrical sequence.

As a whole, then, The Temple embodies in  a definite context of seventeenth century Anglican devotion –  the story of an unfolding awareness of the Divine Presence in the life of the individual, and of the ultimate participation of the soul in that divine harmony which emanates from union with its creator and perpetual mover. From this journey flows participation in the Mission of God. So it is interesting to look at Herbert’s awareness of himself in relation to his spirituality and his art in a way that is guided by the dramatic development which the poems of The Temple clearly embody.

In forging the expression of these essential relationships with God and the world in Herbert’s own life, Herbert creates a new combination some cultural traditions of his time including the use of a dramatic lyric sequence best expressed in Herbert’s time by Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586) in his Astrophel and Stella sonnet sequence, and the spiritual meditative Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556), founder of the Jesuits. Like some post-modern Christians, Herbert, in his age, ‘ransacked’ (as TS Eliot might say) older traditions and combined them in new ways.

Herbert’s  echoes of Loyola, then, represent the ideal of ‘simplicitas’ as a spiritual goal expressed through Sidney’s quest for ‘simplicitas’ as an artistic ideal fit to express the heart’s deepest thoughts. Consider Sonnet 28 of Astrophel and Stella:

You that with allegory’s curious frame

Of others’ children changeling use to make,

With me those pains for God’s sake do not take:

I list not dig so deep for brazen fame.

When I say “Stella,” I do mean the same

Princess of beauty, for whose only sake

The reins of Love I love, though never slake,

And Joy therein, though nations count it shame.

I beg no subject to use eloquence,

Nor in hid ways to guide Philosophy:

Look at my hands for no such quintessence;

But know that I in pure simplicity

Breathe out the flames which burn within my heart

Love only reading unto me this art.

The poet-lover symbolically renounces aspiration to “brazen fame” through disassociating himself from the accepted complexities of his art, and dedicating himself to the creation of praise more pleasing to his lady. Samuel Daniel (1562-1619) expresses a similar sentiment in his sonnet sequence, Delia:

Let others sing of Knights and Palladines,

In aged accents, and untimely words:

Paint shadowes in imaginary lines,

Which well the reach of their high wits records;

But I must sing of thee and those faire eyes,

Authentique shall my verse in time to come,

When yet th’ unborne shall say, loe where she lyes,

Whose beautie made him speak that els was dombe.

There are the Arkes the Tropheis I erect,

That fortify thy name against old age,

And these thy sacred verities must protect,

Against the Darke and times consuming rage.

Though th’ error of my youth they shall discover,

Suffice they shed I liv’d and was thy lover.

(Samuel Daniel, Delia, Sonnet XLVI)

Both Sidney and Daniel protest the adequacy – and indeed the supremacy of their ‘simplified’ art as against learned rhetoric and lyric complexities which may fail to convey sincerity:

Let dainty wits cry on the Sisters nine,

That bravely mask’d their fancies may be told:

Or, Pindar’s apes, flaunt they in phrases fine,

Enam’ling with pied flowers their thoughts of gold.

Or else let them in statelier glory shine,

Ennobling new found tropes with problems old,

Or with strange similes enrich each line,

Of herbs or beasts which Inde or Afric hold.

For me in sooth, no Muse but one I know:

Phrases and problems from my reach do grow,

And strange things cost too dear for my poor sprites.

How then? Even thus: in Stella’s face I read

What love and beauty be, then all my deed

But copying is, what in her Nature writes.

(Astrophel and Stella, Sonnet III)

The artistic irony in all this for Sidney is this: For Stella, Sidney-Astrophel creates the impression of unvarnished plainness and simplicity; for the reader, however, he includes a larger perspective which at once is able to share Stella’s position and yet go beyond it to share the real complexity of the poet’s rhetoric and lyric craftsmanship.

Herbert does the same applying it to creating a self-reflective spiritual journey.  More of that in Part Two.

Steve Bailey is a deacon at St.Laurence, Coquitlam and one of the blogmasters of New Westminster Anglican Blog. He has been a serious reader of George Herbert for many years. Your comments and responses are always welcome.

What is the “Living Wage for Families Campaign” and why should Anglicans care?

We Anglicans are motivated by a sense of social justice and radical equality that is deeply rooted in the Scriptures and in our commitment to the Gospel of Jesus. The Diocese of New Westminster is engaged in numerous social justice and outreach initiatives, some of which are aimed at affirming the individual and collective worth of people who daily struggle with the effects of economic poverty – a poverty that produces in its wake social poverty, intellectual poverty and various kinds of family poverty. The following observation sums up a critical situation right in our own back yard:

“Families who work for low wages face impossible choices – buy food or heat the house, feed the children or pay the rent. The result can be spiraling debt, constant anxiety and long-term health problems. In many cases it means that the adults in the family are working long hours, often at two or three jobs, just to pay for basic necessities. They have little time to spend with their family, much less to help their children with school work or participate in community activities. The frustration of working harder only to fall further behind is one many BC residents can relate to.”

The Living Wage for Families Campaign, March 15, 2012

The Living Wage for Families Campaign is alive and well in Vancouver. Living wage movements have been gaining steam in the UK, across the US and in a number of Canadian cities. Organizations and businesses in Britain, for example, are signing on to agreements stipulating that all direct and contract staff are paid no less than a ‘living wage’ as defined by local economic realities, are eligible for 20 days paid holiday plus statutory holidays and eligible for 10 days full sick pay per year.

As people of faith and as Anglicans, we affirm the family unit. “The living wage is first and foremost a call to public and private sector employers (primarily larger ones) to sustain families. This can be achieved through wages, or a combination of wages and benefits (such as health benefits, coverage of MSP premiums, transit passes, etc.).” (Working for a Living Wage: 2011 Update, page 7) 

Of course, government policies and programs also have a direct impact on our standard of living. Presently, most government transfers and subsidies are reduced or eliminated once a family reaches an income level that is still well below a realistic living wage. And that is a serious problem in our province –  the jurisdiction with the highest child poverty rate in Canada.

What, then, is a living wage? The living wage is calculated as the hourly rate at which a household can meet its basic needs, once government transfers have been added to a family’s income and deductions have been subtracted. In Vancouver, for example, living wages have been calculated, taking a number of factors into consideration:

• two-parent, two-child family: $18.81 per hour (an increase of 3.5% over 2010)

Single parent, one-child family: $18.59 per hour.

 Child care costs continue to rise, transportation costs are soaring, and MSP premiums have increased. A look at the FamWorking for a Living Wage: Making Paid Work Meet Basic  Family Needs in Metro Vancouver – 2011 Update provides a full break down ‘bare-bones’ budget for 18.81 per hour, or $34,234 annually for two parents working full-time. (see livingwageforfamilies.ca). It’s an eye-opener.

“Living Wage” is a way for Anglicans to add our collective voice to an important social justice and community poverty issue, joining with other community, business, municipal and faith partner groups. As the 2011 Update states, “The living wage is one of the most powerful tools available to address this troubling state of poverty amid plenty in BC. It allows us to get serious about reducing child poverty, and ensures that families who are working hard get what they deserve – a fair shake, and a life that’s about more than a constant struggle to get by.” (page 2)

An information meeting on Living Wage is being planned specifically for Anglicans. The Coalition is eager to expand the involvement of faith communities in its work and to partner with those who live out similar values. Watch for more details and consider attending.

Rev. Steve Bailey is a deacon at St. Laurence, Coquitlam and one of the blog masters at New Westminster Anglican blog. Your comments and contributions are always welcome. 

The Other Jesus by Greg Garrett – A Good Read to pass along to stimulate dialogue about Jesus and What it means to be a Christian

I picked up Greg Garrett’s The Other Jesus: Rejecting a Religion of Fear for the God of Love on a recent visit to Seattle’s Episcopal Book Store. It’s what may be termed, along with Sara Miles’ take this bread, ‘narrative theology’ - something more than spiritual autobiography in that books like these present an engaging exploration of the struggle to get to the essence of meaningful, relevant Christian faith. Both are excellent reads which I’m currently using to supplement my Lenten series on Marcus Borg’s Speaking Christian.

Garrett is a professor of English at Baylor University and writer-in-residence at the Episcopal Seminary of the Southwest. His other works include We Get to Carry Each Other: The Gospel According to U2, The Gospel according to Hollywood, and Holy Superheroes! Exploring the Sacred in Comics, Graphic Novels, and Film. In things spiritual, he works in the emerging (no pun intended!) direction of Christian thought represented by writers like Brian McLaren, Phyllis Tickle, Barbara Brown Taylor, Diana Butler Bass and Marcus Borg. He expresses a healthy appreciation for some great contemporary Christian thinkers such as Walter Brueggemann and NT Wright. I appreciate the breadth of the sources from which he draws.

Why is this a good book for sharing with those who are looking at Christian faith again or for the first time? Garrett presents a consistent case for the beauty of the Gospel in understandable terms and avoids simplistic answers. He begins with an analysis of the problem of contemporary American Christianity and suggests what a thoughtful twenty-first-century Christianity might look like:

“When, after twenty-five years of wondering, I came back to church, I finally encountered the Other Jesus. I discovered an authentic message of love and acceptance, the one that the Other Jesus seems to be exemplifying in the Christian Testament….I discovered believers who were trying to live lives that reflected the change this Other Jesus had wrought in them. I discovered people who practiced faith as well as preached it.” (pg. 8)

Rejecting what Orthodox poet Scott Cairns calls, in one of his poems, “The Spiteful Jesus”, Garrett affirms that “this way of following Christ is not concerned with an array of commandments or simply with holding the right beliefs….it is centred on loving each other and loving God, what Augustine called the twofold commandment of love that is at the heart of Christian faith. This love is where the rubber meets the road, where faith meets the world”. (pg 9) By the way, I’ll forgive him the cliche!

Garrett’s concise treatment of an array of relevant questions is reflected in chapter titles like “Faith and Belief”, “The Bible and Theology”, “Sacramental Faith”, “Spiritual Practice”, “The Kingdom of God”, “The End of Things”, and “Friends or Rivals: Living in a Multifaith World”. Each chapter is accompanied by discussion questions for individual thought or group dialogue.

Garrett’s central discussion centres in his presentation of an alternative to understanding the life and work of Jesus through the idea of ‘substitutionary atonement’. He presents Greek Orthodox understandings, as well as drawing wisdom from Brian McLaren, Rowan Williams and NT Wright. His useful distinction between ‘Christianity 1.0′ and ‘Christianity 2.0′ itself makes the book worth a read.

With Sara Miles, Garrett reminds us, in the words of U2′s Bono, that the God incarnated in the Other Jesus, is deeply involved in the life of the world and that we too must take up the struggle to live out God’s mission among us:

“But the one things on which we can all agree, among all faiths and ideologies, is that God is with the vulnerable and the poor. God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house. God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives. God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war. God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them.”

-Bono, President’s Prayer Breakfast, Washington D.C.

The Other Jesus (2011) is published by Westminster John Knox Press; ISBN 978-0-664-23404-1

Steve Bailey is a deacon at St.Laurence, Coquitlam, and a blog master at New Westminster Anglican Blog. Your comments and contributions are always welcome.

Some Thoughts for Lent 2: Empire and Jesus as Hero

One of the things that makes the Good News of Jesus so starkly dramatic in its powerful and transformational simplicity is the state of the world into which Jesus was born. The power of Empire stands in such stark contrast to the presence of Jesus in the world that Jesus turns the values of Empire – power dominance, subjugation of the weak, exploitation, human inequality – completely upside down.

Look for a moment at the world into which Jesus was born. Jesus came into the world of Augustan Rome, an empire consolidated under the power of the conqueror Octavian who became Augustus Caesar, wielding the power of a growing political and economic machine from some thirty years before Jesus’ birth until Jesus was a teenager. The situation of Empire only devolves from there. The emperor Tiberius who ruled from the common era year 14 until 34 – the latter date being around the time of Jesus’ crucifixion, was noted for his autocratic behaviour and sheer unbridled cruelty and disrespect of anything resembling positive human values. From his fortress on the island of Capri he arbitrarily took life in the most cruel and inhumane ways. The power of inhuman empire knew very little bounds.

His protege was Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, nicknamed Caligula “the one in little boots” because as the ultimate spoiled child, he lorded it over everyone from the time he was quite young. Learning at the feet of the depraved tiberius, Caligula was a figure of total depravity who wielded blood lust power for his own personal satisfaction from year 37 to year 41. If you’ve seen the “I Claudius” television series about Caligula’s uncle and successor Emperor Claudius, he was capable and not as cruel, a reprieve. But his rule was followed by Nero, whose reputation we know and during whose reign from 54-68, the Judean uprising began in year 66. Nero’s reign is known for intense Christian persecution, persecution of a way of life and human relationship that denounced everything that Empire stood for.

Into this world comes the challenge of Jesus’ message to redefine “life” as embracing “life” in the new age of God’s reign. The values of Empire promoted the hero as a conqueror, the taking of the weak by the strong. Jesus, in speaking of “life” in its broadest meaning that his hearers would her, tells Peter and the other disciples that true heroism is losing one’s life – yes losing- and journeying toward or “becoming” in a way that sees God transform the loss of self and self interest into new possibilities. Here is the heart of our Lenten journey.

In the Genesis account of Abraham and Sarah entering into a loss of self and entrance into new possibilities in embracing a new way – a journey with God – their very names change. Abraham and Sarah struggled to embrace this uncertain journey, but as Paul emphasizes in Romans, they hoped and believed – belief in the sense of “beloving” or embracing what God hints at for them. They had no theology to argue about, no statement of faith propositions to ascent to, but they embraced God. Thus, says Paul, Abraham was “accounted righteous” – or, we might say, in ‘right relationship’ with God. Sarah and Abraham let go of one kind of life in order to find “life” – journeying or “becoming” in its fullest Biblical meaning.

Another significant renaming is the new identity Jesus sees taking shape in Simon bar Jonah, whom he nicknames “Rocky”. Peter’s journey with Jesus was indeed a rocky one, never easy, but Jesus knew that eventually Peter would ‘get it’, even though in the 8th chapter of Mark we see a Peter who still sees the relationship of Jesus and the world in Empire terms – terms of conquest. Jesus lets him know in no uncertain terms that such thinking is a sidetracking hindrance to his mission – a ‘satan’ – a distraction and a delusion. Jesus knows in his own denunciation of Empire and its values that his own death would be inevitable. So again he extends the invitation to orient Godward – to be lost in changing the world – to make our lives count – to take on the new identity, as Abraham and Sarah did, and as Simon bar Jonah would grow into. In this, Jesus invites us all to drink the new wine of the Reign of God as we seek justice and human dignity for all – embracing the way of God over the way of Empire.

Historian Eamon Duffy points out that by the time of Peter’s death, his colleague Paul was groping his way towards a theology that spelled out the identification of the Creator God of Israel  with the wandering rabbi Jesus, with whom Peter had walked the roads of Palestine, and whom he had loved, and denied, and loved again. The location of the great depths of human reality and potential that opposed the ways of Empire within a single human life, vividly recorded in the Gospels and profoundly reflected  by thinkers like Paul, was a idea whose moment was come.

And that moment still comes to us today, as we embrace, particularly during our Lenten journey, the way of the cross, the way of losing life to gain life in all its fulness – as we Christians redefine and renew human relationships through a renewed and powerful new identity in God through Jesus.

Thanks be to God.

Reference: Eamon Duffy, Ten Popes Who Shook the World. Yale University Press, 2011.

Steve Bailey is a deacon at St. Laurence, Coquitlam, and one of the blogmasters of New Westminster Anglican Blog. Your comments and contributions are always welcome.

 

Speaking Christian: A Relational Journey of Reaffirmation: Faith Questions and Perspectives

The Lenten study based on Speaking Christian: Why Christian Words Have Lost Their Meaning and Power and How They Can Be Restored by Marcus Borg begins on Wednesday, February 29th at 7:30 at St. Laurence, Coquitlam.

Here is the series outline. Anyone is welcome to join this time of Lenten learning and reflection.

Note: Copies of the Borg book are available at St. Laurence. You do not have to have read the book to attend or benefit from the discussion times.

February 29: Lent: A Relational Journey of Reaffirmation: Considering some Important Questions and Perspectives About our Inherited Christian Language (chapters:Introduction, 1,2)

March 7: Reaffirming Scripture – How to Read the Bible in its Historical and Metaphorical Fulness (chapters 3,4,11,12,13,14)

March 14: How Christian Language Became Limited in its Meanings: The Dangers of a Narrow Literalism –  A Trip Down Memory Lane (chapters 5,6,10)

March 21: Jesus and the Journey of Reaffirmation (chapters 7,8,9,15,16,17)

March 28: Reaffirming a Biblically Informed Past, Present and Future (chapters 18,19,20,21,22,23,25,25)

Some key issues for study and discussion during the discussion times:

1. What’s wrong with a “sin-and-salvation-for-me” view of Christian faith and language?

2. Consider words like salvation, sacrifice, redemption, righteousness, repentance and mercy. How would you define each? How do you think Christians usually define these words? How are words like these best ‘redeemed’?

3. Has Biblical literalism affected you? Do you think the movement toward literalization has distorted the meaning of the Bible? If so, how?

4. How does a historical approach act as an accountability structure for reading the Bible? What are the implications of a “historical-metaphorical” approach to the Bible?

5. What are your earliest memories associated with Jesus? Have your views changed? If so, in what ways?

6. How do our perceptions of Jesus shape our Lenten as well as our on-going life journeys?

7. What does it mean to “believe” or to “have hope” as followers of Jesus?

8. The ‘Jesus of history’ became the “Christ of faith’. What are the implications for the relationship of Christian faith to other belief and faith systems? What about the historic Christian Creeds?

How can we best understand the Bible’s teaching on “the last things”?

 

Rev. Steve Bailey is one of the blogmasters at New Westminster Anglican Blog. Your participation, comments and thoughts are always welcome. Join the conversation.