A Space of possibility

Last month, as we considered resilience, I suggested that the strength implied by resilience; strength which is likely to be enduring, is a flexible strength. We considered that stories can demonstrate such flexibility while principles, doctrines and even values, howsoever ‘strong’, can seem brittle by comparison. You may remember that I spoke about parables and the enduring teachings which are discovered through story and myth, how Mark described Jesus as speaking always in parable and never teaching except by parable; and you may even remember me pointing out that in this Jesus perfectly reflected his own tradition – that the Hebrew scriptures and the Rabbinic tradition of Judaism uses story to convey its vision of the divine and sacred.

There are just two things I want to say about this today:

First : that the Hebrew scriptures are an account from below of failure, enslavement, imprisonment and bewilderment (lostness). Their inescapable verdict, from the great books of the Torah to the holy prophets who interpreted the laws therein, is that humanity is fallible and only God can be our hope and guide.

This is the Fransican writer Richard Rohr speaking on the subject:

“One of the few subversive texts in history, believe it or not, is the Bible! The Bible is most extraordinary because it repeatedly and invariably legitimizes the people on the bottom, and not the people on the top. The rejected son, the barren woman, the sinner, the leper, or the outsider is always the one chosen of God! Please do not take my word on this, check it out. It is rather obvious, but for some reason the obvious needs to be pointed out to us. In every case, we are presented with some form of powerlessness–and from that situation God creates a new kind of power. This is the constant pattern, hidden in plain sight.” “The Bible is Biased”

Secondly and connected to this is the insight that the scriptures relay this message via the medium of poetry and not prose. Remember those words of the theologian-poet RS Thomas who said the Bible is metaphor, Christ was a poet and when I preach Christianity I am preaching poetry. Instead of a book of literal instructions to be taken at face value and revered as such the Bible is instead a book of parables and poems intended to be the trigger for discourse and discussion, debate even.

A book of poetry which legitimises power from below and validates many sided interpretation, poetry which is liberationist, and pluralist.

A few weeks ago I asked people to bring in their favourite parables from the Bible and understandably both parables we heard were parables of Jesus; The wise and foolish builders (Matt 7: 24-27) and the Parable of the Sower (Mk 4 ). One of my own favourites is the one we heard today from the book of Judges. In this strange passage the trees decide to chose a king for themselves and each candidate in turn refuses the honour. They value too highly the material wealth they have to offer and at last they ask the thorn bush. This turns out to be something of a mistake because the bush answers with the kind of ferocity which is in the true sense of the word, awful, awe inspiring. ‘Do you really want to anoint me as king over you? If you do, come and rest in my shade. But if you don’t, I will destroy you! Fire will come out of me and burn up the cedar trees of Lebanon!’

If you do make me king you will have to lower yourselves, step down from your pedestals of pride and property;  and if you don’t I’ll destroy you anyway. By fire.

Immediately we remember the burning bush which spoke to Moses; the thorn that burns with unquenchable fire; the dwelling place of exiled Yahweh in Exodus.

But we might think also of humbler things.

As we discover more about the terrible ecological damage we’ve done to the world one delightfully hopeful thing we’ve discovered is that in the process of re-forestation, the humble bramble is the first form of plant life which emerges on bare hillsides. The bramble colonises the burned out woodlands or exhausted hillsides and first begins to bring cover, and then in it’s season provides birds with food from its fruit. Those birds contribute droppings to the mulch for the soil, which accumulate under the bramble’s branching roofs along with the leaves it sheds in Autumn, and as seasons pass the seeds in the bird droppings germinate, and grow – bringing flowers and other plants – and the developing thornbush cover provides a foothold for the bigger woody plants, and at last after a few seasons the first hawthorns and silver birches carried by winds and birds and visiting rodents begin to take root. The bramble provides this all this space of growth, the humble thorn bush, which grows in networks along the ground.

The thorn which was chosen to be the crown.

The lowest becomes highest after all.

We stand on the brink of Lent and lent is a time of the spiritual year where we may begin to consider the deep things of God, by relinquishing the hold of trivial concerns, letting go of the superficial and the everyday (this is the action which we remember in our  fasting during this period), we come to terms with where we are in our relationship with the ultimate things of life (which some of us term God and others of us allow to go by other names).

The theme of his month’s services is Wisdom. Next week we will consider and celebrate International Women’s day, and I hope that we’ll also look with the eyes of wisdom, who we heard in her femine form earlier today, (Wisdom 7) to the state of our wider world. We will have many calls upon our spiritual consideration in this period not least because we will continue to misruled by the puppet government of Global finance and either brink over the Brexit sell by date or delay it.

And in all and any of these considerations I hope we ‘ll carry at heart St David’s instruction Gwnewch y pethau bychain mewn bywyd” “Do ye the little things in life”;

Perhaps we’ll be able to take time to listen to hear the gossip of flowing water in streams, and perhaps hear the conversation of pebbles as they’re displaced in the flow, hear the laughing rills of rivers, or even the chatter of litter as it sweeps along gutters, listen to the confidential trees whisper and watch cascades of light as they flicker motion pictures through leaves, hear all the patterned voices of creation …

hear “the very stones cry out”…

against violence, against oppression and the greed of our misanthropic and anti-theistic system. Against our totalitarian globalism which at every turn suppresses the small voices of love and hope and the hidden faces of peace and life.

Maybe then we’ll hear Jesus voice again as recorded in Thomas: Lift up a stone and I am there, split a piece of wood and I am there… (Th. saying 30)