April 6, 2014

Lenten series by John Bluck

Part II

Our Aotearoa Christian history is full of haunting stories but none more so than that of The Revd Hare Maehe Ruarangi. He was an Anglican chaplain who chose to stay with the smallpox victims in Hopu Hopu outside Hamilton during the epidemic in 1913. His ministry with these dying people, and his refusal to leave them, led to his own death from the disease. Hare Maehe’s sacrifice is marked by a small gravestone under the trees alongside the main road south. The trucks and cars on the expressway rumble by oblivious to this simple memorial (so simple his name is misspelt and no one has bothered to correct it), testimony to a modest man of God whose self emptying love still sets a benchmark for us.

There are plenty of other such stories from the saints and martyrs of our New Zealand and Pacific church. Charles Fox is another of my inspirations. He was a very slight and short man of indifferent health, growing up in Waipawa in central Hawkes Bay, he joined the Melanesian Mission in the Solomon Islands and served there for the rest of his life, as a teacher, scholar, labourer, linguist, translator. As a very small boy, I met him at my grandmother’s house while he was home on leave, and I still remember the feeling of being in the presence of someone very special. During the Second World War, during the Japanese invasion, Charles remained in the island in great personal danger, working undercover as a coast watcher, and continuing his missionary work. His memory in the Solomons is legendary even today, where he’s buried at Tambalia, alongside the other martyrs of that brotherhood, legendary because of his complete disregard for his own importance and self interest.

These are important stories for our understanding of the Farewell Discourses because they point us to the core of what Jesus demonstrates on his walk to Jerusalem and Golgotha, and the quality that’s needed of us if we are to enjoy this entwining and indwelling of the human and the divine.

The Greek word for it is kenosis, literally the emptying of self. And on the face of it’s an impossible ask. What’s more, it is deeply offensive to the individualistic, me first consumer culture we swim in; a culture driven by meeting personal needs and wants; proving, fulfilling, affirming, realising, satisfying ourselves, and maybe making it one day into the society photo page in the back of the New Zealand Herald, with a squiffy smile and a glass of chardonnay. Kenosis is about letting all that go, giving away, stripping back every shred of self importance, self justification, self advancement, burrowing down into that core of our being which we think is so essential and precious but might in fact be an empty space.

The Trappist monk and mystic Thomas Merton, son of a New Zealand artist, once wrote these incredible words about that interior space:

At the centre of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalising of our own will.

This little point of nothingness and absolute poverty is the pure glory of God within us, as our poverty, our indigenity, as our sonship.

It is like a pure diamond blazing with the visible light of heaven. It is in everybody. And if we could see it we would see billions of points of light coming together in the face and the blaze of the sun which would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish forever. I have no programme for this scene. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere. By this light we shall see the light.

If God really is in us and between us, as we say in our liturgy, if the very source of our life is the Spirit of God, rather than some personally copyrighted, privately owned essence, then self emptying is no longer impossible. It becomes more about reconnecting with the source of light and love that we each carry as the sons and daughters of the One in whose image we are made, the Holy One in whom we find out who we really are and where we really belong.

The life style Jesus models on the journey through Lent depends on trusting this to be true. Without that trust, the walk is impossible to make. The heroic lives of a Fox and a Ruarangi and a Merton only happened because they somehow knew that what they had to do really would lead them into the heart of God. Somehow they had that confidence. And what others saw as their self emptying, risk taking, selfless sacrifice, they saw as simply the job that had to be done.

The job was the work of love, staying where they were needed and useful, keeping faith with the people around them. That’s the kind of love Jesus commends to his friends around this table of the last meal together. Not love as a feeling or an option to choose from a menu of religious qualities, but love as a commandment - steady, sustained, respectful even of the people you don’t like, looking out for each other through good times and bad, in an out of season, because that’s what we do as Christians, that’s our core business, and by this the world knows we are disciples, because we love one another.

The Passion story describes just how far Jesus is prepared to go on this steady path of self emptying love. At the table surrounded by frightened friends who are about to let him down, then later in front of the zealous high priests and the cynical governor and the hostile crowds, then finally hanging on the cross between two thieves, Jesus takes this kenotic creed all the way. He puts himself onto the ground zero of all that is evil and corrupt and deadly and he is only able to stand there because he knows what he promised the disciples would enjoy he already is experiencing, Namely “ I am in God and God is in me.”.

 Enjoy is a funny word to use in a setting as grim as this. Yet joy is what Jesus ends up talking about in these Farewell Discourse.

It’s the sort of joy that Martin Luther King talked about days before his assassination, when he said I’ve been to the mountain top and I’ve seen the promised land. It’s the joy that flows from having walked the walk and obeyed the commandment to love as best you could. You have kept faith with this difficult child, you’ve done all you can for this friend in trouble, you’ve kept fighting for rights and recognition for this group whose suffering is no longer noticed or known. And out of the frustration and the setbacks and the exhaustion of your efforts, against all the evidence, you glimpse and taste something of how the world might be when God has finished working through us.

It is like the pain of childbirth, Jesus tells his disciples, there is anguish and then there will be delight. Mothers know about that joy and men can only watch and wonder. My Auntie Edie never bore children but she knew about this delight I’m trying to talk about. Edie was a First War nurse, who worked in appalling conditions in Cairo and Alexandria. She never married, her boyfriend we never talked about was a soldier killed in action. After the war she came back to Napier and served the rest of her life as a Plunket nurse, then caring for elderly members of the family, and sometimes kids like me, though not often enough. Edie was inclined to give you sweets and treats you shouldn’t have and whisk you off to the movies. I loved that quality at the time but but even more enduring as I’ve thought about her life was her selfless giving. She embodied that spirit of public service that teachers and police officers, public servants and nurses especially lived out back then in this country, for little money or personal advancement, but took great pride and pleasure in. Love might have been too big a word to use, was not their word, but serving others in and out of season, and finding real delight in doing so, that was coming close.

For some of us, there’s a bit of watching and wondering going on as we read these farewell discourses and ask ourselves whether we could ever love so selflessly and generously, whether we could find the courage to stand in the ground zero places of suffering and despair. And there are plenty of them to choose from right now. With the families who waited for Flight 370 to land, who wait for their houses to be repaired in Christchurch, who wait for surgery, and jobs and food for their children.

The most remarkable promise of all the expectations offered in this passage is the promise of delight that will come when we put ourselves out there where we’re needed most and give ourselves over to others in the service of love.

Does that really happen? How can we know?

Well, only by watching others who love selflessly and generously, beyond all measure like God does. Never as completely as God, only in hints and glimpses which is all we’ll ever get in this life, but that is more than enough to be going on with. And when we catch a glimpse of that sort of self giving love in our heroes and our aunties and whoever else, our lives are never left the same and the standards we reach for are somehow lifted higher.

One of the books that changed my life is called “The Savage and Beautiful Country”, the author McGlashan’s title for this territory of delight.

Delight is a secret. And the secret is this; to grow quiet and listen, to stop thinking stop moving, almost stop breathing; to create an inner stillness in which like mice in a deserted house, capacities and awarenesses too wayward and fugitive for everyday use may delicately emerge. O welcome them home, for they are the long lost children of the human mind.. delight springs from this awareness of the translucent quality of things

The promise of these farewell discourses is that a self giving life of loving and serving others before we serve ourselves does bring delight and joy. Not because of some sort of cosmic payback reward scheme, but simply because delight is what you experience when you’re in the close company of those who inspire and enliven your love. If we’re lucky we’ve had a taste of such delight from lovers and children and friends. And the logic of love extends endlessly outward and inward from that, in the words of the prophet Isaiah where he describes God’s steadfast love: “For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return till they have watered the earth, so shall my word be that comes out of my mouth; it shall not return to me empty.”

If we live in God and God lives in us, in the very core of who we are, and we learn to listen to that presence and trust that awareness, elusive as it is, then delight will follow as surely as night follows day, and as Jesus promises, “our joy may be complete”.