I have loved you

To begin as Malachi does:

“I have loved you,” says the LORD.

How do you read that?

How does it land?

“I have loved you,”

“I have loved you,” 

“I have loved you,” 

I can imagine it as Karen O’s devasted refrain in the song Maps:  #they don’t love you like I love you.. Re Josephine’s sermon on Zephania - the role of songs

I have loved you.

Have you ever tried to communicate that to someone? Communicating that with nuance and power. This is the problem I’m solving for.

How could we be a more prophetic community? What would it look like? What would it achieve? What would it require? What is successfully prophetic communication? Specifically for St Marks, What would it look like for us. How can we, as St Marks, be better prophets? To one another. To the world.

Interesting for me to set this in the context of the suggestion that the development at Monty Hall should be prophetic. What do we mean? 

Minor Prophets series

Why are you still coming? Have you listened to these last sermons? Have you changed? Prophecy should change you.

This is the last series in the minor prophets, which has corresponded to a long season of me thinking about prophecy. 

What is prophecy? 

Do you think about prophecy?

What are you meant to do with it? ~ do what the Prophets say?

And how are you meant to do it? ~ do what the Prophets do?

Danger. Do not despise prophecy. Do not idealise past prophecy. You honour the tombs of the prophets.. woe to you. How to look back without nostalgia and apply the right lessons?

We need, not only, and not so much, to look at prophecy that was and to interpolate it’s message to today. We need to consider the gift and the role of the prophet, the eyes to see and the ears to hear, that enabled, empowered that form of communication

Lk11v49-50 Fifty years ago yesterday, Martin Luther King was assassinated. A prophet, an apostle, persecuted and killed. Who killed him? 🙋‍♂ I did.

- Prophets are perennially inconvenient.

- We are perpetually evil.

Jordan Peterson, notedly not a historian, nevertheless makes the valid observation from Browning's Ordinary Men and Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago about who perpetrated evil in history. The honest answer is that I did. Evil is not so much out-there, as it is in-here. My depraved capacity in another context is capable of untold evil. Within me is a selfish monster, vindictive, corrupt, shameless, and Mt5v21-22 - it's all murder.

Prophetic practice as-was and as-is

Contemporary practice

To be prophetic is not just to apply their prophecy to ourselves, it is to consider that the universe is one in which prophecy is possible, normal and necessary

To look at the prophets and believe in prophecy generally and to apply not just their content but their form, not just their message but their medium

Not just a curiosity of predicting Christ then, foreshadowing redemption in first century. It is a pattern for life now as way straightening and Christ anticipating

Different prophets for different seasons and different audiences

Needs an emotional vulnerability. How would you create an effective forum to hear Malachi today? Secure attachment, patient listening 

What is prophecy?

Prophetic category/style - a type of communication?

* Prophecy as asking honest questions

* Prophecy as a tone/attitude

* Prophecy as witty rhetoric

* Prophecy as interpreting the zeitgeist

* Prophecy as predicting the future

Prophecy as intention/reception by prophet from God?

* Prophecy as the action of a prophet

* Prophecy as insight received 

* Prophecy as preaching delivered

* Prophecy as a burden carried

* Prophecy and a imperative obeyed 

Prophecy as effect when declared by prophet to public?

* Prophecy as the action of a prophet’s audience

* Prophecy as effecting internal reform

* Prophecy as public facing counterculture

* Prophecy - re John the Baptist, a paradigm of preparation.

Prophetic as form as not synonymous with good nor with true nor with provocative.

If there can be false prophets, then you have to be prophetic AND good/true. Also it is possible good and communicate things that are not untrue etc, but you nevertheless are not necessarily being prophetic. The danger of christianese lumping together all the virtues to a lowest common denominator. There is something crucial, and critical about prophecy qua prophecy. And pitch that the prophetic-ness of prophecy is beyond true and false and must question effective and ineffective.

What is not prophecy?

In one possible high rendering of prophetic communication, one could have “unprophetic” communication that may not be untrue but it is either abstract/static or anecdotal/incidental.

Prophecy as form as effective communication

 - Prophecy must bridge the chasm between the prophet and the audience. It cannot be dismissed, it must disrupt. It cannot merely be true, or interesting, or theologically “sound”. It should not merely be socially concerned, relevant.. 

How to preach?

Solving a problem together

* Vs i tell you to do x

* Vs inform you about something

Malachian pattern

I’m thinking about this sermon on Malachi, which will be a sermon on prophecy, hopefully a sermon about the felicity conditions for effective prophetic communication, hopefully a prophetic sermon on prophecy calculated to facilitate the felicity conditions for the communication of its communication. 

Felicity conditions for effective minor prophecy:

* Forum and expectation

* Character and language

* Rhythm of confession

What contract between preacher and audience? What permission? 

Lk20v11-12 The servants are prophets. The prophets are rent collectors in Jesus' rendering. As someone who would identify as more prophet than priest or king, how do I feel about the rent-collector mantle? You need to hear grace, but grace abstracted from justice is too easily embezzled. But how to preach justice, how to call people to repentance?

I may well feel that you should tithe more, but none of you has given me that license to invoke an ought, to lay a critique, to command obedience. What would it be for me to be such a mouth piece for such a covenant community?

How to preach about-prophecy? How to preach as-prophecy?

Prophecy as form as effective communication over against disbelief. Prophecy presupposes that it needs to be said. Prophecy assumes a non-neutral audience, prophecy is not preaching to choir, not telling you things you already believe and apply. If prophecy needs to be said, then it is inherently something that doesn’t want to be heard - how do you organise to want what isn’t wanted, to soberly future fix the platforming of words we won’t want to hear?

Mk16v13-14  And they went back and told the rest, but they did not believe them. Afterward he appeared to the eleven themselves as they were reclining at table, and he rebuked them for their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they had not believed those who saw him after he had risen

Disbelief: What do you disbelieve? Who do you disbelieve? Christianity is a story told by story-tellers, fallible story-tellers to fallible story-tellees ~ it is a fraught form. Christianity is not an invitation to credulity, but Christianity is a conviction in an implausible claim. How do you but disbelieve?

Rm10v17 So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.

Believing comes by hearing. But how? How to discern signal from noise? How to unwound calloused ears hardened of hearing unfulfilled saving claims? 

1Th5v19-21 Do not quench the Spirit. Do not despise prophecies, but test everything; hold fast what is good

Ear-protection is easily done, prophecy is easily despised, diffused and held in contempt. 

Prophecy as as form as personally transformative communication

 - Prophecy must get under the skin of its listeners, to the place where transformation happens. Prophecy must transform, it must have teeth. It is not enough for me to stand here and blythely say, this may be of interest to you. Cerebrally. FYI your house is on fire. Reaction against Pharisees who tie heavy weights and don't lift a finger? Or tell what itching ears want to hear? False peace peace? Prophets meant to tell you things you don't want to hear. Preaching Vs not welcome in his own town. Scripture is meant to mature you. To break and remake you. To make you resilient and supple - so it's interpretation to our community via preaching ought to get beneath your skin. Preaching to call upwards. You need this prophetic harrowing. It is a high calling, s difficult task

Prophecy as form as collectively transformative communication

 - Prophecy address a group. The leadership. The system. A problem with individualised ideas around faith, is that we do not constitute as an addressible body, responsible for our constitution. If there is a we who takes responsibility for the integrity, holiness, effectiveness of the we it is stewarding, then the prophet is punching up. If not. The sorts of forms of prophetic communication that excoriate social and systemic woes, land only on the individual, and are a punching down, a laying a supra-personal burden on the individual too heavy to carry.

Prophecy is a call to build the temple, presupposing God is enabling a plausibility structure and is motivated to be so invested. Prophecy as a one-to-the-many act of communication is both downstream and upstream of church churching as a more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts. The temple that we-are. You are being built together.

Also to consider we should hear this as an message to convict ourselves, but not to rest there, we are to be a prophetic presence, a demonstration, to convict a post-christian nation.. Prophets that were - action re Temple. Haggai. What is the temple in your life? Yes, but also what is the temple in our life. 

Prophecy as form as contextual and specific

Prophecy as prophecy must be specific and contextual not merely generic repentance, not merely parallelisms. Prophecy is a calling back, and a calling up and calling forward - and all, in the context of the specific fall of a specific people. Prophecy that rehashes old testament calls, or revisits recent revivals, is indistinguishable from mere nostalgia for golden-age LARPing. Prophecy is a specific call to specific repentance. Who does that? And how? Different prophets for different times

Prophecy as form and Language

I have loved you. 

* How to make this carry

* How to make this stay

How is this not

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

      Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

      And the mome raths outgrabe.

Prophecy as form as argument - the convicting force of Rhetorical Questions

Prophecy as content as argument

Meaning making and argument. Malachi argues for..

Let me show you how

* 1v2 Does God Love? All of a favouring four loves love? How can it be? 

* 2v10 Is he 'Father'? Is there really a creator of all this? 

* 3v17 Is He just? How? - Honest questions, several pints into an evening we reach these. 

They hurt a little. They hurt a lot. Presuppositional foundations in the architecture of reactive unbelief. How is my sense of urgent responsibility to articulate these, even tacitly, to a hurting world? 

Rhetorical questions. Somewhat as Jb38-41, God uses questions as a refining soap/fire v2. We know the answers, we are without excuse, and questions draw out our inconsistencies. Am I listening to Jesus' questioning? Jn21v15

Prophecy as form as teaching memorably - mnemonic force of chiastic structure

[A-B-C-C-B-A - Chaismic structure of God’s greatness and missional ambition - nested in that is the formation of a church practice - nested in that is the intimacy of marital fidelity Historic/Cosmic-Symbollic/Iconic-Practical-Practical-Symbollic-Global]

* See Caroline’s sermon on Zechariah - the role of chiastic structure

Not just a Chiasm-s**t-sandwich

* Mnemonic - Interactive forms of learning beyond recall and the parabolic

* Subjunctive As-if synecdoche recursive - Fractal everything

Form and content. The gateway is election and at the heart of God’s universe is fidelity. Concentric prophecy. A prophecy inside a prophecy inside a prophecy. I consider prophecy widely is rendered in literal spatiality of liturgical architecture, but also in the civic and domestic renderings of architecture built to embody a layered universe. Architecture as mnemonic speaking from memory into memory. Malachi bookends with promises past ~ I have loved you.. and I will send a message and you will skip like lambs.

MALACHI

Malachi in context

Most scholars agree that Malachi was probably a contemporary of Ezra and Nehemiah in the mid-fifth century B.C. This is supported by the implied temple reconstruction c. 516 B.C. and  sins reproved by Malachi and those reproved by Ezra and Nehemiah. 

* corruption of the priesthood (Neh. 13:4–9, 29–31; Mal. 1:6–2:9),

* marriage to idolaters (Ezra 9–10; Neh. 10:30; 13:1–3, 23–27; Mal. 2:10–12), 

* abuse of the disadvantaged (Neh. 5:1–13; Mal. 3:5), 

* failure to pay tithes (Neh. 10:32–39; 13:10–13; Mal. 3:8–10).

ESVSB describes Mal as standing against 'diluting the strenuous demands of proper worship', against 'cynicism' and issuing a call to 'renewed covenant fidelity'. Our response to election should entail a Pauline anguish at nominality Rm9v3 in our lives and our church. One of the organising patterns is an accumulating litany of attitudes and actions that are offensive to God. Another is an expanding portrait of the coming Messiah and the blessings that he will bring. 

Common repeated pattern is as follows: 

* (1) God voices an indictment of his people for bad behavior; 

* (2) the people are pictured as asking God how his charge is true; 

* (3) God replies to the question, in the process of which he expands the charge. God’s indictments are sometimes phrased as rhetorical questions (e.g., 1:6 and 8; 2:10 and 15).

The Hebrew name “Malachi” means “my messenger,” or perhaps “messenger of (the LORD)” A messenger about messaging. The last word in the old testament.

[A 1. Elective love of God. There is responsibility.]

Predestination - Esau/Jacob

It is hard to hear the notion of a capricious prejudicial God. A popular creed of universal generalised love chaffs against the interpretable notion of a racist God who discriminates. We think it hard to espouse a idea that God chooses. But. I would argue, it is much harder to hear and to truly receive - the idea of being chosen. If chosen. You are not a victim, you are not hard done by, you have no license to proceed on the basis of resentment, you are not nothing, you are not an accident of timeXchanceXmatter, you are born into a grave responsibility. You are in charge now.

Selective, comparative love is the biggest love we can offer to illustrate the love of God. If the universe is not indifferent, i need to respond. If the universe is not indifferent, we need to consider how to do the doing of creating a sense of this.

How has God loved me? Dominion and the benefits of Christendom. How has God loved us. Materially but that is not automatic. But meaningfully. We live in a universe that is interrogable. Knowable meaningful justice

vs. Self-pity - collectively - Church in decline. Post evangelical say bekinder. Victim complex of post Evan woe is me & Self pity

vs. Self-pity - personally - Resentment. Last 4 employments dissolved because of toxic combo of Christian naivete and Christian corruption

Why did Christendom choose Europe? What did I do to deserve to live in a country with a health care free at the point if service? We live in the promised land and we are spaffing the privilege up the wall in a left leaning belly aching

* Everyone believes in the kingdom of God just not the king

* Everyone believes in grace just not the cost of the gift

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/podcasts/gospelbound/the-revolution-the-west-wishes-it-could-forget/

 "the things we hold to be self-evident moral truths turn out, on closer examination, to be specific inheritances from Christianity."

“For the normative self-understanding of modernity, Christianity has functioned as more than just a precursor or catalyst. Universalistic egalitarianism, from which sprang the ideals of freedom and a collective life in solidarity, the autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of a continual critical reappropriation and reinterpretation. Up to this very day there is no alternative to it. And in light of the current challenges of a post-national constellation, we must draw sustenance now, as in the past, from this substance. Everything else is idle postmodern talk.”

― Jürgen Habermas - Wizard of the Crow

In our own day Holland finds pervasive Christian influence everywhere he looks in the West. The self-evident truths of the American Declaration of Independence—that all men are created equal and endowed with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—are not remotely self-evident to a student of antiquity or other world religions. But that’s the genius of this Christian revolution, Holland argues. He writes, “The surest way to promote Christian teachings as universal was to portray them as deriving from anything other than Christianity.”

This is why the cross, that ancient implement of torture, remains what it has always been: the fitting symbol of the Christian revolution. It is the audacity of it—the audacity of finding in a twisted and defeated corpse the glory of the creator of the universe—that serves to explain, more surely than anything else, the sheer strangeness of Christianity, and of the civilization to which it gave birth. Today, the power of this strangeness remains as alive as it has ever been. It is manifest in the great surge of conversions that has swept Africa and Asia over the past century; in the conviction of millions upon millions that the breath of the Spirit, like a living fire, still blows upon the world; and, in Europe and North America, in the assumptions of many more millions who would never think to describe themselves as Christian. All are heirs to the same revolution: a revolution that has, at its molten heart, the image of a god dead on a cross.”

― Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

1 The oracle of the word of the LORD to Israel by Malachi.

The Lord's Love for Israel

2 “I have loved you,” says the LORD. But you say,

“How have you loved us?” 

“Is not Esau Jacob's brother?” declares the LORD. “Yet I have loved Jacob 3 but Esau I have hated. I have laid waste his hill country and left his heritage to jackals of the desert.” 4 If Edom says, “We are shattered but we will rebuild the ruins,” the LORD of hosts says, “They may build, but I will tear down, and they will be called ‘the wicked country,’ and ‘the people with whom the LORD is angry forever.’” 5 Your own eyes shall see this, and you shall say, “Great is the LORD beyond the border of Israel!”

[B 2. The pursuit of excellence in leadership/worship. Fatherhood. Phoning it in. Priesthood]

If I am a Father where is my honour..

Turn the hearts of sons to fathers..

Fatherhood needs honour - a respecting the uniform. To be sure, father need to conduct themselves honourably and respectably, but. It is possible to so deconstruct the notion of fatherly authority, to so freeload on the coattails of past patriarchy and eat the seedcorn of nascent fatheriness that is stunts and never comes to full fruit. Parenting, in all forms is a responsible authority and as such deserving of honour. Fatherhood stands against a zeigeist of fullstack buffoonery Homer Simpson Family Guy nihilism where there is nothing honourable in the mantle. There is so great a need for playful affection and reverential fear in the export of successful fathering.

Man, I've got grown men @ing me b******t

You're getting way too old for the timeline

You're getting way too old for a diss

Should've looked after your kids

Get out the booth, go home to your son

It's never too late to commit

It's like man love put my name in a bar

There needs to be advocates of such explicit fathering. There needs to be a higher view of fatherhood in culture generally than the Bumbling Dad Trope. I would argue, you cannot pray “Abba Father..” and throw lazy shade on the patriarchy-as-only-pejorative. Pick a lane. Either you can split hairs about the anthropomorphisation of a gendered God or you can take responsibility for doing the hard work of imaging credible Fatherhood to a fatherless generation. See fallible Stormzy is Abigail's yout but he's gods son. Turning the hearts of sons to their fathers is a cooperative choreography. The solution is intergenerational, it is both-and and it cannot be rehearsed in a monocultural demographically stratified church of 20-somethings-only.

The Priests' Polluted Offerings

6 “A son honors his father, and a servant his master. If then I am a father, where is my honor? And if I am a master, where is my fear? says the LORD of hosts to you, O priests, who despise my name. 

Priests - the Leadership of church should fear God vs de facto embezzlement of grace by leadership phoning it in. This could be a sermon directed at Steve. Yes but. Also we are all priests. We are all tasked with leading others and influencing and instigating. priesthood of all believes

Lame or Sick - What is a blemished animal? What is excellence and worship? Why does it matter? Because a watching world of people can read it, they can interpret, they know the cost of it’s value. They know when a cost is sacrificial, when that which is ventured is at risk and a making-vulnerable - viz Brene Brown on vulnerability - people know when sacrifice is sacrifice. But meat is meat no? Go big or go home. Do not presume to speak for God if your utterance costs you nothing. Individually and collectively.

Sacrifice. Blemished lambs. It is not enough to be minimally moral to be prophetic. There is an aesthetic dimension. That is to speak of God it must be good, and true and beautiful. This is housing that will have god's name on it. Like it or not people will associate this with God with this. You are writing God's name on the Street. the symbolic purpose and so optical organising principle of the church collective was and is the export of the name of God.

2Cor3v2-3 “..You yourselves are our letter of recommendation, written on our hearts, to be known and read by all. And you show that you are a letter from Christ delivered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts..”

But you say, ‘How have we despised your name?’ 7 By offering polluted food upon my altar. But you say, ‘How have we polluted you?’ By saying that the LORD's table may be despised. 8 When you offer blind animals in sacrifice, is that not evil? And when you offer those that are lame or sick, is that not evil? Present that to your governor; will he accept you or show you favor? says the LORD of hosts. 9 And now men treat the favor of God, that he may be gracious to us. With such a gift from your hand, will he show favor to any of you? says the LORD of hosts. 10 Oh that there were one among you who would shut the doors, that you might not kindle fire on my altar in vain! I have no pleasure in you, says the LORD of hosts, and I will not accept an offering from your hand. 11 For from the rising of the sun to its setting my name will be great among the nations, and in every place incense will be offered to my name, and a pure offering. For my name will be great among the nations, says the LORD of hosts. 12 But you profane it when you say that the Lord's table is polluted, and its fruit, that is, its food may be despised. 13 But you say, ‘What a weariness this is,’ and you snort at it, says the LORD of hosts. tYou bring what has been taken by violence or is lame or sick, and this you bring as your offering! Shall I accept that from your hand? says the LORD. 14 Cursed be the cheat who has ua male in his flock, and vvows it, and yet sacrifices to the Lord what is blemished. For wI am a great King, says the LORD of hosts, and my name xwill be feared among the nations.

The Lord Rebukes the Priests

2 “And now, O priests, this command is for you. 2 aIf you will not listen, if you will not take it to heart to give honor to my name, says the LORD of hosts, then I will send the curse upon you and I will curse your blessings. Indeed, I have already cursed them, because you do not lay it to heart. 3 Behold, dI will rebuke your offspring,1 and spread dung on your faces, the fdung of your offerings, and you shall be taken away with it.2 4 So shall you know that I have sent this command to you, that my covenant with Levi may stand, says the LORD of hosts. 5 My covenant with him was one of life and peace, and I gave them to him. It was a covenant of fear, and he feared me. He stood in awe of my name. 6 kTrue instruction was in his mouth, and no wrong was found on his lips. He walked with me in peace and uprightness, and he turned many from iniquity. 7 For the lips of a priest should guard knowledge, and people4 should seek instruction from his mouth, for he is the messenger of the LORD of hosts. 8 But you have turned aside from the way. You have caused many to stumble by your instruction. You have corrupted the covenant of Levi, says the LORD of hosts, 9 and so I make you despised and abased before all the people, inasmuch as you do not keep my ways but show partiality in your instruction.”

[C 3. Imaging faithfulness - proactive multiplication through faithfulness]

Have we not all one father? ~ at the heart of reality is the practice of this union through active covenant or defacto deprecating covenant. Prophetic escalation in an argument against passive omission and syncretism - unfaithfulness by negligence, weakness and our own deliberate fault. I consider my capacity for negligence and accommodation of mediocrity in my zeal. Vs placeholder relationships with mere warm body avatars on traded as fungible assets in a liquid dating market. Vs part-time Long Term, Long Distance, Low Commitment, Casual Girlfriends..

Haven’t we all married the daughter of a foreign god, commiting adultery as an attitude groomed in the diminution of the sort of searing exclusivity, ebbing away my firstlove in the lazy erosion of the true erotic by a blasé porn-brained synthetic sexuality. Not only is this self harm, and spouse harm - it is apostasy. Both literal and metaphorical. You are married to be very married, to display a truth about reconciled radical othering at the heart of the universe. We live in the Song of Songs, we are Hosea, we are already-not-yet in a cosmological wedding feast.

There is a similar sermon for another time on you-are-single-to-be-very-single, and would that I had not so fritterered that season and the testimony it could have offered

Reneging on any covenant is reneging on a covenental God. 

You cover the LORD's altar with tears, with weeping and groaning because he no longer regards the offering or accepts it with favor from your hand. But you say, “Why does he not?” 

1Pt3v7 Likewise, husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel, since they are heirs with you of the grace of life, so that your prayers may not be hindered.

So5v3..6 I had put off my garment; how could I put it on? I had bathed my feet; how could I soil them? .. I opened to my beloved, but my beloved had turned and gone. My soul failed me when he spoke. I sought him, but found him not; I called him, but he gave no answer.

Oscillating bride - What was the one God seeking? Godly offspring. What does this mean?

Union and Communion - Hudson Taylor

Born to Reproduce - Dawson Trotman

Judah Profaned the Covenant

10 Have we not all one Father? Has not sone God created us? Why then are we faithless to one another, profaning the covenant of our fathers? 11 Judah has been faithless, and abomination has been committed in Israel and in Jerusalem. 

For Judah has profaned the sanctuary of the LORD, which he loves, and has married the daughter of a foreign god. 12 May the LORD cut off from the tents of Jacob any descendant of the man who does this, who brings an offering to the LORD of hosts!

13 And this second thing you do. wYou cover the LORD's altar with tears, with weeping and groaning because he no longer regards the offering or accepts it with favor from your hand. 14 But you say, “Why does he not?” Because the LORD ywas witness between you and the wife of your youth, zto whom tyou have been faithless, though she is your companion and your wife by covenant. 15 aDid he not make them one, with a portion of the Spirit in their union?6 

And what was the one God seeking? Godly offspring. So guard yourselves in your spirit, and let none of you be faithless to the wife of your youth. “For the man who does not love his wife but divorces her, says the LORD, the God of Israel, covers his garment with violence, says the LORD of hosts. So guard yourselves in your spirit, and do not be faithless.”

[C 4. Combatting unfaithfulness through reform]

From laissez-faire relativism to reformed personal holiness. How? What is active co-mmission? Where am I actively relativistic? vs Offerings of righteousness are mercy not sacrifice and this is repentance.

 “Everyone who does evil is good in the sight of the LORD, and he delights in them.” Or by asking, “Where is the God of justice?”

offerings in righteousness to the LORD. Then the offering of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to the LORD as in the days of old and as in former years.

The Messenger of the Lord

17 You have wearied the LORD with your words. But you say, “How have we wearied him?” By saying, “Everyone who does evil is good in the sight of the LORD, and he delights in them.” Or by asking, “Where is the God of justice?”

“Behold, I send my messenger, and he will prepare the way before me. And the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple; and the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight, behold, he is coming, says the LORD of hosts. 2 But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner's fire and like fullers' soap. 3 He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, and they will bring offerings in righteousness to the LORD. 4 Then the offering of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to the LORD as in the days of old and as in former years.

5 “Then I will draw near to you for judgment. I will be a swift witness against the sorcerers, against the adulterers, against those who swear falsely, against those who oppress the hired worker in his wages, the widow and the fatherless, against those who thrust aside the sojourner, and do not fear me, says the LORD of hosts.

[B 5. The pursuit of excellence in worship. Tithing.]

Return to me. How to turn back? How to not rob God? How have we robbed you?’ In your tithes. I consider Greta Thunberg’s word to the world is a critique of not-enoughness, insufficiently contrite, insufficiently reformed - Second rate tithing, how dare you?!

We are at the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairytales.. 

You are cursed with a curse, for you are robbing me, the whole nation of you. - We as a nation and as a church are about to be stress-tested. 

 Then all nations will call you blessed, for you will be a land of delight, says the LORD of hosts. - The purpose is to be *for* the nations. We should be exemplary. There was something in the epiphany of Covid’s mutual aid whatsapp groups that grasped the need and discovered our huge skill-deficit.

~ Eppie on Haggai and Temple Building - Yes, the heating project. Consider that we are a body engaged in a task together.

More than merely more relevant than private applications of piety - action that is properly collective is different, not just in degree, but in kind. Eph4v11 suggests it takes a village of voices to assuage the beguiled, witness needs multi-personal meaning makers, an epistemological community. Christ is his own witness, and/but we qua we-as-collective are his body Eph4v12, and qua body are able to discern signal in the wind, the waves, the pouring rain, the paralysed Eph4v14.

The call is to effective altruism, but what is it? How do we as a community know the extent to which we are effective in our altruism? By metrics? By warm fuzzies? By prophecy? By interpretation? The measure of obedience is bespoke to calling - it’s relative, but it’s not completely an epistemological black box. I pine for some sort of regulatory triangulated calibrator of auditing for these things in community, by the five-fold, by co-submission, by miracles and mistakes, iteration and inspiration.

And how do we organise effectively to effectively give? Surely by writing on substack no?

Robbing God

6 “For I the LORD do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed. 7 vFrom the days of your fathers you have turned aside from my statutes and have not kept them. W

Return to me, and I will return to you, says the LORD of hosts. xBut you say, ‘How shall we return?’ 8 

Will man rob God? Yet you are robbing me. But you say, ‘How have we robbed you?’ yIn your tithes and contributions. 9 zYou are cursed with a curse, for you are robbing me, the whole nation of you. 10 aBring the full tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. And thereby bput me to the test, says the LORD of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need. 11 I will rebuke the devourer for you, so that it will not destroy the fruits of your soil, and your vine in the field shall not fail to bear, says the LORD of hosts. 12 Then all nations will call you blessed, for you will be a land of delight, says the LORD of hosts.

[A 6. Elective love of God. There is responsibility. Enduring Promise Coming of Elijah, reconciliation of generations.]

Your words have been hard against me.. - Not-despising-prophecy (1Th5v20) must be a speaking of it, towards a growing in confidence that your intuitions of God's spirit come from a reality outside yourself and influence a reality outside yourself.

The Book of Remembrance - God’s action in the world is not independent of history and memory, both personally and collectively, we proceed on the basis of faithfulness faithfully, we give a testimony of our lives and of the historical Jesus. Christianity is a book of remembrance. Overagainst the slide of relativism, overagainst the nihilist surrealism of spiritualised occasionalism, overagainst my own forgetfulness and widespread amnesia.

Elijah - Elijah comes. Mk9v11-12 Elijah comes. Would you know it if you saw it? Various misapprehensions keep the disciples in the dark. Wrongly venerating Elijah as an Old Greybeard historic character ~ literal, specific, limited, pluperfect (woe to that Mt23v29-31), as if prophecy was. Prophecy is. Elijah comes. Indeed, the perpetuation of prophecy is crucial to Jesus' point, as it is when he speaks a woe in Mt23v29-31. The notion that prophets *were* is what kills the prophets that *are*. Are there contemporary prophets? 

Hearts of fathers to sons.. Sons to fathers - Intergenerational.. If I’ve said it once..

13 g“Your words have been hard against me, says the LORD. hBut you say, ‘How have we spoken against you?’ 14 You have said, i‘It is vain to serve God. jWhat is the profit of our keeping his charge or of walking as in mourning before the LORD of hosts? 15 And now we call kthe arrogant blessed. kEvildoers not only prosper but lthey put God to the test and they escape.’”

The Book of Remembrance

16 Then those who feared the LORD mspoke with one another. The LORD paid attention and heard them, and na book of remembrance was written before him of those who feared the LORD and esteemed his name. 17 “They shall be mine, says the LORD of hosts, oin the day when I make up pmy treasured possession, and I will spare them as a man spares his son who serves him. 18 Then once more you shall qsee the distinction between the righteous and the wicked, between one who serves God and one who does not serve him.

The Great Day of the Lord

4 1“For behold, rthe day is coming, sburning like an oven, when tall the arrogant and tall evildoers uwill be stubble. The day that is coming ushall set them ablaze, says the LORD of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch. 2 But for you vwho fear my name, wthe sun xof righteousness shall rise ywith healing in its wings. You shall go out zleaping like calves from the stall. 3 And you shall tread down the wicked, for they will be ashes under the soles of your feet, aon the day when I act, says the LORD of hosts.

4 b“Remember cthe law of my servant Moses, the statutes and rules2 that I commanded him at Horeb for all Israel.

5 d“Behold, I will send you eElijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the LORD comes. 6 And he will gturn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and hstrike the land with a decree of utter destruction.”3

Prophecy as content

Prophecy as content - about God’s character, and the love of God

By contrast Prophetic communication would be the effective transfer of a true truth which is Infinite and Personal - both more infinitely substantial and more parochially tailored. Prophecy both carries vessels and fills vessels of specific infinity. What should we do at Monty? What should we do at 41? It should be discerned prophetically, so to then be prophetic. By the power of God. There is a need for a transcendent vision to ground the work in a practical response to individualism. True prophecy is communicating God - who he is, what he’s doing now. The ridiculous love of God and the grave responsibility of being submitted to such. How to do this sort of prophecy?

Prophecy as content - warning.

There is a formula of these passages - see Eppie on Haggai: Turn away / Warning / Turn back / Blessing. What if what of not-all-out-idolatry? How to talk in a time of subtle decline? A church of people just phoning it in, sins of omission. Is it useful to say “Do more. Work harder..”?

Prophecy Content - future messenger

Prophecy about prophecy - messaging about messaging - preaching about preaching. How to effectively issue the call to Send a messenger. Vs. Oh that's nice he means John the Baptist ~ see it is referenced..  Elijah comes is perennial. Jesus is perpetually being foreshadowed. Is it more that merely interesting that a 400BC prophet anticipated... Now. What does it look like now? What now? Hearing, Speaking, Organising. Revival via desperate repentance. By leaders who are desperately repentant. We steward a precious thing. Who will message this effectively?

End Intro

St Marks should be more prophetic

[1] Prophecy as a divine message - the content of our speaking could contain more prophecy - Saying/Hearing - to head

[2] Prophecy as a semiotic agreement - our mode of communicating could be more prophetic - Understanding - head to heart

[3] Prophecy as the holistic praxis of a prophetic community - our identity could be more as-prophets - Doing - to body/action

[1] What happened?

* Kings as a tragic mixed bag, how to read the old testament -

* ominous, inevitable - Kings context - sequence of kings, leading to Solomon

* David/Abigail/Nabal - the Old Testament has so much to teach us about who God is and what the world is like. And, it's not so much that the text is difficult or opaque, which it sometimes is, but that there is particular challenge, even with exemplary characters, even with functional typologies of Christ who foreshadow him, in presuming to learn and apply precise wisdom principles from flawed characters cast within a narrative which ends badly.

* The Old Testament is not a prequel spinoff, it is not just backstory, an accessory appendix to your Gideons bible. It's not to be read wistfully as if David&Abigail were a pulp romance. It's not to be read superstitiously or awkwardly – neither that it contains secret codes, nor that it contains specially redactable embarrassment. And, mostly as a note to myself, the Old Testament is not intellectually recreational reading to be engaged with a detached morbid fascination.

* Read it like it is the guts of the universe, the interpretative key to my own pathologies and my precarious place in the cosmos and the patterns which recur. The New Testament is the answer to a question the Old Testament is asking, and without the Old Testament, you lack the vocabulary to fully ask it.

* This development of the story of a nation, from abrahamic roots, then Mosaic exodus and wilderness, into a land and constitution around the poet-king David

* David has unified tribes - expecting messianic king from his line, but none live up to that

* David couldn’t build vs Solomon - given ‘rest’

* Temple - extravagant, move to a more permanent home from it’s boy scout tabernacle form,

* Olympic Opening ceremony, festival of booths, grand hurrah. Competitive multiplication.

* In the coming weeks we’ll see the demise of Solomon - Deut17 - Solomon ends up breaking all rules, looking more like pharoah https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy%2017&version=NIV

* Split / Prophets (Elijah vs Ahab etc) / Exile as unavoidable (Assyria/Babylon)

[2] What is interesting / questions arising

[2.1] Solomon as complicated character

* How to imitate/critique, how to take at face value?

This ambivalence about King-forms of leadership

* On the one hand Israel’s demand for a King seems to have come from sinful motives - 1Sm8 - ‘like all the other nations’ - wrong motive, wrong time

* On the other hand God speaks of kingship in promises to the Patriarchs, and in various ways (Kings will come from you - Gen 17:6 to Abraham; Gen 35:11) even that .

* 2nd Longest Prayer -

* Nehemiah 9 (1213wds);

* 1 Kings 8 (1079wds),

* John 17 - Jesus High Priestly (636wds)

I was reminded..

* Prophet/priest/king

* Priestly - cares and mediates, what has been with what has become

* King - declares what is, ordering the present responsible authority to administrate

* Prophetic - see what is critically, and calls for what could be

These each have a shadow form - that doesn’t even need to be tyrannical.

* Gifted Kings presiding over administrative over-reach and deranged state-building

* Gifted priests smothering with a toxic empathy the uncritical enablement of a corrupt status quo

* Gifted Prophets casting mere critiques, armchair socialists with an adolescent angst

These actions have a bivalence - their meaning/motive always being mixed with their partial grasp of god, their fallen interpretation and execution, and their perpetual potential redemption.

**Brueggeman on Solomonic kingship

* Prophetic imagination vs the Royal Imagination

[2.2] Temple as complicated object

* Physical/Brand/face/representation - but not but not superstitious. The temple is this key vehicle for the narrative of the OT, but also, God is not confined by it and will survive its destruction.

* 27 “But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you; how much less this house that I have built! 28 Yet have regard to the prayer of your servant and to his plea,

* ‘My name shall be there,’

* Expense/worship/ornament - mixed motives, as with all architecture - normatively of abundance. Speaking as someone inclined to a scarcity mindset (sacrifices overflow to middle court, exceeding the altar. Life should be characterised such ~~ spilt perfume

* Solomon's intensity - Compare with David's temple x10 lampstands, the baptism basin laver, becomes this 15000 gallon metal bath dubbed the ‘sea’ - Olympic opening ceremony - Grandiosity -

* Temple as garden of eden, god’s presence - some of this is fore-shadowing

* “Secondary architecture ... is imported and propagandistic ... superimposed by imperial requirements ... pseudo-transcendentalist ... it is a merely imaginary aesthesis ... that exists in vacuo ... its hypothesised population, undifferentiated or stereotyped.” and, “Primary architecture ... is rooted in landscape and vernacular traditions. It exists in perpetuity ... it is reconciled to the accidents of its own material, not offering to ‘defy’ the fallen nature of the world and its inhabitants.”

* Nodal/placed - infinite god in finite objects - how to do that without contradiction - recurring refrain - this matryoshka doll of “..and pray to you toward their land, which you gave to their fathers, the city that you have chosen, and the house that I have built for your name..”

* Worship/memory/tragedy - Like there is a sort of innate megalomania about building like this

* When exile.. “If they sin against you—jfor there is no one who does not sin—and you are angry with them and give them to an enemy, so that they are carried away captive kto the land of the enemy, far off or near, 47 yet lif they turn their heart in the land to which they have been carried captive, and repent and plead with you in the land of their captors,

* “For somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.” Austerlitz WG Sebald (https://phil-blogs.blogspot.com/2009/09/austerlitz-by-wg-sebald.html)

[2.3] Benediction as a complicated practice

- Fidelity of God by contrast with other gods

- Praying the promises

- deference to David, a discretion? - Solomon's discretion re fathers. In your heart to do. David man of war

- Prophecy of future trials

- Longest prayer

[3] What are we?

* Good times, weak people - cain/Abel - Characters Temperament and sequence - liberation theology

* Artefacts and building

* Prayer and performance

* Archetype of kings -

[4] What are good questions for us

* We are the temple, yous are the temple - housing of the Holy Spirit, Christ in you, The aroma of life to life, Incarnation, being in the world

- Architecturally or no, there is a character to God which we are the built form of,

* We have a Place / Nodality - in London, in oval, the peculiar fixation of God’s willingness to use the miniature, the foolish things, the non-global, non-elite

No unsacred places? New covenant. Does not negate this enchantment but extends it. Does not mean that everywhere is blessed but that anywhere can be

* We are called to Action - They were a mixed bag, so do-nothing - vs my own Precautionary approach - there is a lion in the street pr26v13, you are a harsh mt25v24 - vs the gung-ho, faith in faith, doing the doing of building the building

https://medium.com/@philpawlettjackson/the-product-that-church-housing-could-be-%EF%B8%8F-435f9f559c13

[4.1] To then pray this blessing over us-as-Temple?

Related generally to the travails of the Israel in the coming years, and maybe specifically - battles/famines and ultimately exile. But also, as 7 categories of administrative dilemma, pertaining to the nature of having a symbolic node giving orientation to a land.

* Sins against neighbour - give justice - condemn guilty / indicate righteous (wisdom, cities of refuge joshua 20, beacon of just/reconciliation 1Cor6 - where paul is remonstrating the church for not being able to resole disputes)

* Defeated in battle - bring them back to land

* Drought - forgive sins, grant rain - heal the land

* Famine / siege - forgive, restore to land - heal the land

https://churchforests.org/

* Foreigner prays in your name - answer so all peoples know you - missional - proactive welcome

* Go out to battle - maintain their cause - proactive

* Sin against you, taken into captivity - maintain, forgive, grant compassion - terminal, but still hopeful. Durable even in worst case.

[1] INTRO - parallel falls / summary

[1.1] How to read the old testament

* How to preach. No shortage of writing on this. Sacrifice is what we put our lives to..  what imperative/encouragement to bring. Am I my brother’s keeper? To try to get inside of this question. The motive forces which drive it as a defence. The ways that we might be grace, subvert and fulfil it 

* Wisdom literature = Life as it is. The true truth of reality, Parables as descriptive, the isness  - In all of the ways you can practically apply this, it is true to life as i understand it. Over against religiouse notional oughtness Vs what should and must be done against the naughtiness here portraye. Over against mere historical  Vs what happened and the fossil records

* Teaching by both Form and Content - the repetition is the point - teaching the pattern of patterns - history rhymes, history repeats. Form is not ‘poetic’ as if flowery or ornamental or in some way. These stories are distilled such that they contain more truth than mere anecdote.

* We can be a bit inured to the familiarity of this story. It is so serious what Cain does. We already know we shouldn’t be like cain - how does this story help? What is not said, allows this to apply paradigmatically. There isn’t a detailed backstory Cain had had a bad day.. Somehow, by entering this as as fundamentally and far-reachingly true, we as a reading community, gain a tool for changing. 

* Literally me. I have found this intuitive to do with Adam - the first man a coward etc. if Adam is our father, Epigenetic inheritance Elemental, quintessential older-brothering - literally me - Cain is a Ryan Gosling / Christian Bale sigma male character.

(Thanking Paul Anleitner - see also long-form podcast)

(Summary with thanks to Alastair Roberts)

Birth, a new start

* Eve says “I have gotten a man with help of Lord” Maybe this is because she believes will be the one to crush the head of the serpent.. 

* Birth is a big theme in the Bible literally and metaphorically - and it’s not just that natality was more of a going concern in antiquity, the Bible loads a lot of its meaning onto the birth event:

* Women struggling in childbirth at the structural moments in the narrative - Sarah, Rachel, Hannah, Elizabeth, Mary.. 

* The birth metaphors of israel leaving egypt - blood on the door posts, waters parting then closing up (Ref)

* To the centrality of the nativity

* Paul’s language of creation groaning in childbirth

* Jesus discussion with Nicodemus and the ongoing language of born-again christians

* Miracle of birth straight after the fall indicates a continuation. Cain being born is New life - Life is going to continue - god is going to still work with his creation and is going to show grace to it. God has not given up. But. Sin.

* Respawn event ~ and we’re back. Restarting the level of this computer game. Once again, from the top. As this serves in its literary format as a kind of rote learning, as a method for life as a kind of progressive iterating, or a kind of morbid circles of hell. Were it merely an eternal return this would be indistinct from karmic cycles of an entropic universe winding down from the the big bang. But for the interference of the Christ event. 

* Second creation, second fall - a perennial pattern.

Parallels

* 2 creation narratives /// 2 fall narratives

* Vertical Sin against father // horizontal Sin against brother

* First tablet of law // Second tablet of law

* Marital sin // Fraternal sin

* Serpent crouching in field / Sin crouching in field

* Delight of face, desire / distress of face, face falls

* Adam/Eve Hiding / Cain must be hidden

* Avoidance of responsibility - blame snake/woman, claim not-keeper

* Cursed is the ground / cursed from the ground

* God clothes Adam/Eve / God marks/protects Cain

* Cast out of Eden / Cast out of God’s presence

Sin as a trajectory

* If you can imagine this as a stop-motion animation of an Ink blot, from a point node. There’s something in the repetition of the story which allows us to apprehend speed and acceleration. 

* The fall as a snap shot - bad things happen. The fall as a series of shots - bad things get out of hand quickly. See Cain’s great grandchild’s offspring Lamech says 70 time 7 revenge

The fall, a chip in the windscreen slowly growing to completely fracture the pane, where the integrity of the pane had consisted in those crucial relationships of us to ultimate reality, us between ourselves and that between us and created order. https://phil-blogs.blogspot.com/2011/10/saving-architecture.html

Sin as a non-linear escalation

📈 Death is exponential. Sin is logarithmic. We are squares in a world of cubic threats. One of the great public health challenges of this pandemic is creating a consciousness of non-linearity. It seems the immanent frame is the only frame in most people’s threat horizon. It seems the linear way we apprehend the speed of incoming peril will not compute acceleration. How do I think about threats to my life and to society? How do I think about trajectory, climate change, compound interest, cumulative consequences? Do I think of death as a static passive end point, or as a prowling lion, a multiplying enemy, a gathering storm? Is sin’s destructive influence in my life a steady drip, or are there multipliers? 

Sin inspires disproportionate responses

“..But the people did not receive him, because his face was set toward Jerusalem. And when his disciples James and John saw it, they said, “Lord, do you want us to tell fire to come down from heaven and consume them?”..” Lk9v53-4

Disgust → Fire David vs Nabal, disciples vs villagers, religiouse vs irreligious, older brother vs younger brother, pharisees vs sinners.. Having previously thought of David vs Nabal in terms of revenge in a conflict of egos, I now read their scorched earth annihilation bids through the lens of Jonathan Haidt's Moral Disgust. There is necessarily a trajectory towards genocide in the religiouse mind, and it stems from disgust. Disgust evolved to help our omnivorous species decide what to eat in a world full of parasites and microbes that spread by physical contact. Disgust stems from a fear of the animal properties of mortality and associated decay. When you find a worm in the apple, mould on the pizza, you throw the whole thing out, a purge is a proportional escalation.

Sin as Religione

* Older brothering and the pharisees

* Yeast

Other Events to note

Cain’s sacrifice rejected

* Maybe because it was not animal so no blood atonement

* Maybe because not the first fruits just average, not sacrificing anything

* By contrast, maybe Abel’s is accepted because so much more he brings symbol of his person and a recognition of the necessity of death

* And, at a stretch, there is a notion that th younger Abel as archetypal priest should have lead the sacrifices ahead of Cain-as-King archetype

Cain is angry

* When gift is thrown back, jilted, spurned, we ourselves are not seen/accepted

* Feels cut out of the loop of relation with god feels threatened by that

* You did this, you destroyed yourself for nothing 

* His face fell - 

* Being found out - emasculated - if masculinity is the use of strength for others, 

* Victim complex that just wants to watch the world burn

* Jealous anger exercised against the one who was accepted

* Bitter anger exercised against the one who cut him out

God acts - challenges his heart before action

* Challenges heart before action

* Sin must be dealt with at root - the garden is within his heart - is he needs to guard that garden

Sin acts - wants to control Cain’s strength

* Parasitic - Unfolds a civilisation, an alternative city

* Because cut out of gift - In rebellion or alternative to the city of god

Outline

* (2 falls)

* 2 sacrifices compared - being different

* 2 sacrifices across time - becoming older/apart

* 2 sacrifices reconciled - unity across gens together

* (god’s grace)

3 In the course of time Cain brought to the Lord an offering of the fruit of the ground, 4 and Abel also brought of the firstborn of his flock and of their fat portions.

[2] SACRIFICE - 2 temperaments

Sacrifice as an orientation, a mindset, a mode of being

[2.1] sacrifice as stewardship

Do something / Do something proportional / See we are differently gifted - Parable of the talents.

Mt25v5 To one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Then he went away. 16 He who had received the five talents went at once and traded with them, and he made five talents more. 17 So also he who had the two talents made two talents more. 18 But he who had received the one talent went and dug in the ground and hid his master’s money. 19 Now after a long time the master of those servants came and settled accounts with them. … ‘Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.’ 24 He also who had received the one talent came forward, saying, ‘Master, I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you scattered no seed, 25 so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground.

[2.2] Sacrifice as worship - as giving to the church

Here we are, aptly, on harvest day - think about what you could be giving, in thanks. 

[2.2.1] What is good sacrifice-as-worship

Widow’s mite

Mk12v41 And he sat down opposite the treasury and watched the people putting money into the offering box. Many rich people put in large sums. 42 And a poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which make a penny.6 43 And he called his disciples to him and said to them, “Truly, I say to you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the offering box. 44 For they all contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.”

Macedonians out their poverty gave

2 Cor 8v1-4 - 1 We want you to know, brothers,a about the grace of God that has been given among the churches of Macedonia, 2 for in a severe test of affliction, their abundance of joy and their extreme poverty have overflowed in a wealth of generosity on their part. 3 For they gave according to their means, as I can testify, and beyond their means, of their own accord, 4 begging us earnestly for the favour of taking part in the relief of the saints— 

Cheerful giver 

2 Corinthians 9:6-7 - 6 The point is this: whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows bountifully[a] will also reap bountifully. 7 Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.

[2.2.2] What is the opposite of sacrifice-as-worship

Ananias and Sapphira - holding something back

Acts 5v1-6 But a man named Ananias, with his wife Sapphira, sold a piece of property, 2 and with his wife’s knowledge he kept back for himself some of the proceeds and brought only a part of it and laid it at the apostles’ feet. 3 But Peter said, “Ananias, why has xSatan filled your heart to lie yto the Holy Spirit and to keep back for yourself part of the proceeds of the land? 4 While it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, was it not at your disposal? Why is it that you have contrived this deed in your heart? You have not lied to man but to God.” 5 When Ananias heard these words, he fell down and breathed his last. And great fear came upon all who heard of it. 6 The young men rose and wrapped him up and carried him out and buried him.

Pharisees - Tithing mint/dill

Mt23v23-24 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others. 24 You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel!

But it’s not just a peculiar religious act of worship

* JBP - sacrifices we make in personal development ~ (caveat not inevitably)

* Bataille/Mauss - sacrifice in society as the sacred bond of gifts ~ (caveat where trauma impedes this)

[2.3] Sacrifice as paying it forward / faith

* Imperative to be a person who gives personally

* Sacrifice as imminent waste

* Individual Maturity

JBP’s evolutionary psychology analysis of sacrifice is interesting, one doesn’t have to settle for it as mere materialism, but there is at least as much meaning to be found in Cain and Abel as he draws out of it.

[2.3.1] Sacrifice as delayed gratification / paying it forward

- short on making sacrifices as a relationship to the infinite.

- long on cain and abel

What are we talking about when we say ’sacrifices’

[2.3.1.1] Making sacrifices at all

* Teaching delayed gratification as an evolutionary psychological meme that is symbolised in these stories to describe and prescribe forms of paying-it-forward. It’s the experiment with a child in the room with a marshmallow - you can eat the one now, or, if you wait ten minutes, you can have two. A tension between the nascent pre-frontal cortex developing to rationalise future reward, with the hypothalmic hunger regulating system 

* It hasn’t been automatic in the course of history, it’s not automatic in the life of any given child. But as a principle - if you make sacrifices, it will go well for you and your offspring in the land. Precursors to modern notion of delay and exchange on which civilisation is built - bargaining with the future. Sacrificing who you are for who you could become

[2.3.1.2] Making the right sacrifices 

* First rate sacrifices are your relationship to the infinite - cain withdraws from the infinite, because he can’t tolerate his own vulnerability.

* Cain is dreadfully unhappy because nothing he ever wants happens - and that’s partially because he doesn’t really want it, because if he really wanted it, he’d make the right sacrifices

* Cain becomes unlimitedly angry, as we do, when it is revealed that I am complicit in my own demise. When this is shown, am I not motivated to destroy the ideal, to destroy the favoured son of god

* Two essential patterns of reaction to the self-conscious vulnerable conditions of existence 

* 1. Humbly approach infinity with a determined attempt to make the appropriate sacrifices.

* 2. Arrogance resentment and the keeping of everything good for oneself, and the degeneration of the soul into something that’s homicidally murderous.

[2.3.2] vs Sacrifice - cause/effect - Sacrifice is not a vending machine, but.

* How to read the bible - how to speak about wisdom literature’s observation of cause/consequence, without allowing it to be received in simplistic ways

* I think Peterson is generally careful to insert caveats. A lot of petersonian stoic self-help bros out there are pushing a wellness routine as a defacto prosperity gospel give-to-get versions of a mechanical universe. 

* Job - God can do what he wants and There are passages to illustrate the question of non-consequence, life’s absurdity

* Judicious sacrifice to proportional reward in aggregate over time, one could testify there is some correlation, but its not a vending machine.

* Forcing a language for dealing responsibly and sacrificially with the things that you can control 

* It’s not saying if you give sacrifices, that life in a complex world won’t continue to be complex. But, regarding stewardship, if you are knowingly not sacrificing - you will face being caught out and the shame of the comeuppance. And that that is where so much anger stems from. 

* A subtle thing, that so easily slides into an - if you have cancer, it’s your fault. But it is possible to say, if life isn’t yet what is should be, you have a primary responsibility to do something about it. It is a difficult thing to do, and a difficult thing to articulate - maybe I haven’t done that well. 

[2.4] Sacrifice’s social vision. 

[2.4.1] Sacrifice without love gains nothing

“If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not LOVE, I gain nothing.” 1Cor13v3

Love is vital to effective appropriate sacrifice

My love language of choice is acts of service. It is also my passive aggressive unlove language. I’m sure Sarah and others can attest that Phil is capable of performing an act of sacrificial service, delivering his body up to be burned at the washing up bowl just so others incur debt I can charge with interest. Sacrifice performed without love is the worst. 

[2.4.2] God desires mercy not sacrifice

 11And when the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” 12But when he heard it, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. 13Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’ For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.”

If sacrifice is a giving, what is it given to, how do you measure its effectiveness. 

Impact vs effort ~ there are some ‘sacrifices’ charitable activities where the optics overwhelm the actual intent, and perversely the poor are left worse off.

[2.4.3] sacrifice as the sacred / collective futurity

Imperative to be a culture that gives/sacrifices, collectively/communally

* Our collective Futurity as a notion of the infinite

* Sacrifice as something given away, for the common good of social progress and economic function. This is not to diminish sacrifice to a mere technique, but rather to temper that it is a larger true truth, observable in the way the world works. Christians don’t have a monopoly on this.

* See Parable of dishonest manager - Luke 16 - has this moment of realising - deliberately provocative he is sparring with the older-brother archetype pharisees in this passage - frames this lazy/timid middle manager, 

* ‘What shall I do, since my master is taking the management away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg.

* This middle manager faces an existential crisis, and has an epiphany to offer discounts to aged debtors to raise cashflow for his master’s business. The parable’s master commends this. And Jesus instructs his disciples to do likewise - so they may “receive you into the eternal dwellings.”

* Waste as the sacred, sacrifices are the symbolic display of a notion of more-than - excess energy, translated into the effervescence of life

According to Bataille's theory of consumption, there is this share that is an excessive and non-recuperable part of the economy which must either be spent luxuriously and knowingly without gain in the arts, in spectacles and sumptuous monuments, OR it is obliviously destined to an outrageous and catastrophic outpouring, in the contemporary age most often in war

Marcel Mauss’s The Gift - He shows that early exchange systems centre around the obligations to give, to receive, and, most importantly, to reciprocate. They occur between groups, not only individuals, and they are a crucial part of “total phenomena” that work to build not just wealth and alliances marked by economic wants but social solidarity because “the gift” pervades all aspects of the society. ~ the potlatch

* Spilt perfume - How you spend it - what you value, what you emphasise. Know what you value by what you spend. By the conversion of a man’s checking book. Know what you hold sacred by what you sacrifice. It is the excessive nature of her sacrifice, which imprints in the mind - what she has done will be told in memory of her

[2.4.4] vs Sacrifice - temperaments and trauma

Some time ago the evening service was looking at Mark and I had the passage on the healing of the paralytic in Mark 12. This gave me to meditate on paralysis, inaction, not doing the doing. And i had then recently been reading Denise Riley’s account of losing a child, Time Lived Without It’s Flow, which captured for me, in my own lesser ambiguous grief, that experience of paralysis. She says:

The prospect of recounting it in a written form stayed, for me, both repugnant and implausible for well over two and a half years after the death. You can’t, it seems take the slightest interested in the activity of writing unless you possess some feeling of futurity. The act of describing would involve some notion of the passage of time. Narrating would imply at least a hint of ‘and then’ and ‘after that’. Any written or spoken sentence would naturally lean forwards towards its development and conclusion, unlike my own paralysed time. 

I could list ways i am ungenerous, but my emphasis here is trying explicate compassionately. Archetypally those younger should be those more Abel and less Cain. But for the anxious generation. I think of those in my life who present as ungenerous in small or large ways. To some extent these reflect an immaturity to be gently invited encouraged educated out of. To some extent the immaturity is a minor-narcissism rooted in trauma - to be healed out of. A myopia, believing not only that other people don’t exist, but that a future doesn’t exist, and so sacrifice is foolish. I get it. But we have to help each other heal. There is a impish and fortressed front that overstates life’s absurdity, that leads to ungenerosity. There is also a traumatised temporality, under-formed notion of futurity.

[2.5] summary of these two postures/temperaments

Happy sacrificer

* Mr Abel with his largesse magnanimity, a vitalism more generally, lavishly possessed of a notion that the world is abundant, dazzling presumption that your life matters, so he finds what to do with his hands and do it with all his might.

Unhappy sacrifice avoider

* Mr Cain, with small minded miserablism, abstemiously swingeing frigid cringe of joyless sacrifice, grasping, clasping, a scarcity mindset phoning it in to his disincarnate life.

It becomes harder and harder to resist being Cain as you become the older brother in various contexts

And the Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, 5 but for Cain and his offering he had no regard. 

So Cain was very angry, and his face fell. 6 The Lord said to Cain, “Why are you angry, and why has your face fallen? 7 If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is contrary to you, but you must rule over it.”

[3] RESENTMENT - 2 seasons/situations - often in sequence, often in juxtaposition

3.1 - Pairing across time - older/younger - how to age well

3.2 - Pairing across relationship - near brothers - how to live together well

The closer it is to home, the more it shows up the difference - a brother is symbolically the identical start point. Resentment linked to undervaluation, being caught out and found a fool. Good money after bad, a losing battle

[3.1] OLDER/YOUNGER - Being different ages, aging, different seasons, transition, time and consequence of sacrifice

* Ronald Rolheiser - Sacred Fire

I’m grateful to L introducing us to this book, it’s seemed really timely in discussions that have arisen in a number of contexts, around how Millennials relate to GenZ, which is captured in an account which speak directly to a spirituality of an adolescent seasons juxtaposed and coincided with a middle-of-life season. 

I would be interested if anyone has recommendations of other approaches to this. Maybe it’s not that profound, Life is not flat, different seasons.. Maiden-Mother-Matriach, Youth-Warrior-Sage, or other taxonomies of distinct seasons

Rolheiser characterises three phases

* Essential discipleship - the struggle to get our lives together

* Mature Discipleship - the struggle to give our lives away

* Radical discipleship  - the struggle to give our deaths away

(a bit like Steve’s account of the 5 sections of the bible - the sections are not gradiented and are not equally spaced) First few years, the massive middle chunk, then, ending well. The break in the continuum struck me - the passions, proclivities, temptations of your teens and twenties are upside-downed as your turn into your 30s. You tilt from your potentiality to your actuality, from the endless possibility of eternal maidenhood to the darkening actuality of your mortal being.

All those grandiose dreams, all that potential, all that energy, and what have we achieved? Most all of us can relate to Henry David Thoreau's famous line: "The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them." And that is a comedown that is not easily digested.

Moreover, once the sheer pulse of life, so strong in us during our youth, begins to be tempered by the weight of our commitments and the grind of the years, more of our sensitivities begin to break through, and we sense more and more how we have been wounded and how life has not been fair to us. New demons then emerge: bitterness, anger, jealousy, and a sense of having been cheated. Disappointment cools the fiery energies of our youth, and our enthusiasm for life begins to be tempered by bitter- ness and anger as we struggle to accept our limits and make peace with a life that now seems too small and unfair. Where we once struggled to properly control our energies, we now struggle to access them. Where we once struggled not to fall apart, we now struggle not to petrify. Where we once struggled with Eros, the god of passion, we now struggle with Lyssa, the goddess of anger. And where our sympathies once were with the prodigal son, they now are more with his older brother. As we age we begin more and more to struggle with God.

Someone once quipped that we spend the first half of our lives struggling with the sixth commandment (Thou shalt not commit adultery) and the second half of our lives struggling with the fifth commandment (Thou shalt not kill). That may be a simplification, but it is a fertile image. Indeed the famous parable of the prodigal son and his older brother can serve as a paradigm for this: the prodigal son, illustrating the first half of life, is very much caught up in the fiery energies of youth and is, metaphorically, struggling with the devil; the older brother, illustrating the second half of life, struggling instead with resentment, anger, and jealousy, is, metaphorically and in reality, wrestling with God.

And he highlights anger and resentment as a characteristic of later life. And this i think is a helpful way to think about Cain as a perpetual possibility as we age. 

My framing for this therefore is not - do be like Abel, don’t be like Cain, but rather to consider that this is perpetually the slider of challenges. You cannot avoid this, like you cannot avoid getting older, but this is what to wrestle with.

There was also this in my passage on Ezra nostalgia and division/tension between generations - they raisd up a bunch of 20-somethings to oversee the build, and it wasn’t as grand as the former, and a bunch of the elder mourn and wail around the site, bringing the whole thing to a premature end.   disappointment / discouragement / nostalgia.

It might seem hard to be the younger, disadvantaged, less capital to sacrifice. But equally there is less at stake, proportionally lower liabilities so in net, often more disposable income, more time, more possibility to wreck it all and still start over, more energy to move fast and break things. 

The older brother position is harder, responsibility for the dependents on the family farm. With age, we drift from sins of the liberal to sins of the conservative. 

Somewhat as the saying goes - If you’re not a socialist before you’re twenty-five, you have no heart; if you are a socialist after twenty-five, you have no head. This feels like a theological substructure to perennial differences. It would be interesting to map the sorts of friction across other dichotomies ~ leave/remain; urban/rural, trad/woke

[3.2] BROTHER - pairing 2 people juxtaposing ages - comparison

Jesus is often speaking to the older-brother temptations

Resentment and religion - key in jesus teaching, a key temptation/subversion of the good which jesus stands to resist

Given difference there can be comparison coexisting. Are the sins of Cain quintessentially older-brother-sins - like there’s inevitably brother dynamics going on in your life, in your family, in your church.. And in any given fraternal dyad there’s a proximity and asymmetry - a gradient of experience/responsibility. 

Prodigal son

Martha

Martha is the poster for the oldest child syndrome. Of the three siblings Martha, Mary and Lazarus, Martha is the oldest. And being the firstborn, she is a perfectionist; she enjoys making other people happy; she is highly motivated to achieve success; she takes on a leadership role; she is responsible; she feels jealous or neglected when younger siblings received attention; she is bossy; she is a rule-keeper; she is detail-oriented; she is highly organized; and, she is determined. And this firstborn status serves her well. https://womeninscripture.com/martha 

[3.3] comparison becomes resentment becoming murderous across 

Intergeneration

Devastating to be out given by a younger member. Becoming resentful. What you are, what trajectory you are on. What is that ossifying with age, what is that dynamic Vs youth renewed.

Not that Cain is a wrong 'un, not that this is a generic metaphor for our fallenness, but that there is a specific temptation to murder, as we get older, related to disappointment, related to sacrifice.

As you get older it would appear you have more resource, but you also have more responsibilities ~ your liabilities outstrip you ability to provide, you are less able to mask your woundedness, less able to compensate the challenge to present as empathic by theatrics

Cain is the default, the factory setting, unless active work is done, this is it

Over time, after the sacrifice, what it is that you are becoming

[3.4] The Process of becoming

Resentment’s anger is open to spiritual capture

Arousal  

Movement - within/without

* You are a door - what you are becoming, what you allow in

* Sin awaiting at the door / Other doors ways

* Proverbs Woman in doorway . 

* Lady wisdom / Lady Folly - pr9

* Jesus at door will come in and eat

* Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me. Rv 3v20

Anger - is the exploit

* In your anger do not sin. Note murder as contempt

* A provoked porousnous as an aroused state

Enemies

* Desire for Cain is desire to capture and control. Overcome by evil

* Progressive capture. Sin crouching at the door? What do you invite in? What takes advantage of you

Guard your heart

* Psalm 51- Don’t give the devil a foothold

* Satan to sift you

* We are all older than some

* We are all brothers in some direction

We have to solve for wide and narrow intergenerationality? What is redemptive brotherhood? How to out do one another in doing good?

8 Cain spoke to Abel his brother. And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel and killed him. 9 Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is Abel your brother?” He said, “I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?”

[4] BROTHERHOOD - fraternal relations - you are your brother’s keeper

We visited this passage about 7 years ago, and Sarah preached this passage, and drew various threads 

[4.1] This is about me

I need you to know how much this is a message to myself. I am the olderest of older brothers. In the battle rap of my daily frisson with the 8 housemates, i am a bum, i do live in a trailer with my mom, I do got a dumb friend named cheddar bob who shoots himself in his own leg with his own gun etc - it’s literally me. This is where we wind up, i just have speedrun the route to this through london-churn’s particular accelerator

[4.2] Conviction and how to call this out?

To slide into the meta. What is the voice that speaks this question - where is your brother? 

* What is it to make utterances

* The danger of cain is very real, and the ways we kill each other 

* I don’t know, i feel like a tentative preacher, merely advisory, so long overdue a coming of age, a license to make utterances: Where are you? What have you done? Where are you hiding?  Where is your brother? How do you say the saying of these things? Driscoll offers his “where are you?’ til voice is hoarse. in a way that was formative of very online evangelical masculinity for a decade, and at some level he is not wrong. But also - God protects Cain

* Problem with preached utterances - they fall in the conscientious and they double down, and the unconscientious are oblivious to the needs anyways

Driscoll Where are you 11:20; Driscoll How dare you 1:07:07

[4.3] What is at stake?

We have brothers who are no longer with us.

And as far as it relates to my preaching, there is the plausible deniability of recreational ministry part time pastoring - i’m literally not the keeper. Unless I am. And where I am, I am as in the church at large - epidemic unseriousness laissez faire lackadaisical shepherding / Harrowing failure metric - the lives you saved / How to save a life? / Literally and figuratively / Not many if you should be older brothers / Who is my neighbour when all neighbourliness is seconded to the nanny state

Am I my “Brother”’s “Keeper’?

What did he mean by this?

Could just be deflection, a rhetorical question - he’s murdered him, this is a look-over-there, kind of whataboutism but, Deeper than mere deflection. The answer here is possibly yes - so render a high account of brotherliness. But how far is it plausible practicable? What is Good-enough brothering? Slight of hand in Cain’s deflection - Am I my brother’s keeper? Where is the answer reasonably yes, but defensibly no.. 

* ‘Keeper’ - what is a Keeper / where am I a Keeper?

* ‘Brother’ - who is my Brother? Extent and practical subsidiarity?

Am i my brother’s keeper?

What alt to shadow brotherliness?

Positive Brotherly Roles?

Who is my brother? Universal or Honorific? God is not dismissive of Cain’s question. Maybe we should treat our brothers in Lord as brother

2 Samuel 1:26 I grieve for you, Jonathan my brother; you were very dear to me. Your love for me was wonderful, more wonderful than that of women.

1Tim5v1-2 - Instructions for the Church - 5 Do not rebuke an older man but encourage him as you would a father, younger men as brothers, 2 older women as mothers, younger women as sisters, in all purity.

Positive Guardian Roles

Cain is responsible for upholding order of garden / When you fail everything fails / Specific duty of older brother to younger / Older brother bear responsibility for younger siblings and for representing father to siblings - Reuben. / Original fall failure of guardianship in lesser and greater realm

Switch from Brotherly to Fatherly

Paul to the Corinthian church guardian lest led astray

2cor 11- Paul and the False Apostles - 1I wish you would bear with me in a little foolishness. Do bear with me! 2For I feel a divine jealousy for you, since I betrothed you to one husband, to present you as a pure virgin to Christ. 

In 1 Thessalonians 2:11-12 Paul writes this: For you know how, like a father with his children, we exhorted each one of you and encouraged you and charged you to walk in a manner worthy of God, who calls you into his own kingdom and glory.

Antidotes to toxic brotherhood in fatherhood and the benign paternal? / Fatherhood of god vs brotherhood of man / Be more dog / Be where the party is at / Generous communication / Computational kindness / Pay it forward / Make a plan to be exploited / Ways that infantilizing infrastructure of the charity sector and welfare state give rise to a banal brotherhood of all, seething with petty bitternesses and resentment / It is material that there is such widespread fatherlessness?

Switching to Father model presents novel Coordination problems

Coordinate to do well - See taking paralytic to jesus / Compete with one another - Out do holiness / In those context where regulation is needed - where a culture is being set? / as analogue for conservative temperament and regulating commons / being different ages on top of one another in intergenerational community / So we have this house, I think about this a lot / Generations developing / Humility vs devoured by bitterness

[4] OUTRO - God’s grace?

15 Then the Lord said to him, “Not so! If anyone kills Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.” And the Lord put a mark on Cain, lest any who found him should attack him. 

Then god comes onto scene / All of life is potential to sacrifice / Over time, what has been paid forward cashes out / Sacrifice is relative - how to calibrate / Relativity revealed over time within you

Was it even a sacrifice - Hudson Taylor or David Livingstone variously quoted as “I never made a sacrifice” https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/i-never-made-a-sacrifice 

~ two little vignettes - preaching to synagogue then to a city

[1] PREACHING ENCOURAGEMENT

Now Paul and his companions set sail from Paphos and came to Perga in Pamphylia. And John left them and returned to Jerusalem, 14 but they went on from Perga and came to Antioch in Pisidia. And on the Sabbath day they went into the synagogue and sat down. 15 After the reading from the Law and the Prophets, the rulers of the synagogue sent a message to them, saying, “Brothers, if you have any word of encouragement for the people, say it.” 16 So Paul stood up, and motioning with his hand said:

~ this is a sermon ~ how should we preach? I think about this so much, so inconclusively. 

~ Words create worlds. 

~ Sermon - An argument / provocation / story - to inspire, convict, comfort, chasten, unify, clarify..  ~ I wonder what the rulers of the synagogue wanted to hear? As there is one rendering which crawls Good teacher.. Oleaginous and sycophantic. Bitter sweet - encouragement ~ gee up the faithful remnant. 

~ Words create worlds. 

What encourages you?

How do you encourage people?

[2] PREACHING HISTORY - GOD CONSTITUTED A PEOPLE

“Men of Israel and you who fear God, listen. 17 The God of this people Israel chose our fathers and made the people great during their stay in the land of Egypt, and with uplifted arm he led them out of it. 18 And for about forty years he put up with them in the wilderness. 19 And after destroying seven nations in the land of Canaan, he gave them their land as an inheritance. 20 All this took about 450 years. And after that he gave them judges until Samuel the prophet. 21 Then they asked for a king, and God gave them Saul the son of Kish, a man of the tribe of Benjamin, for forty years. 22 And when he had removed him, he raised up David to be their king, of whom he testified and said, ‘I have found in David the son of Jesse a man after my heart, who will do all my will.’ 

Read with God emphasised.

Expand:

[2.0] Stages in forming a people - God's agency

~ Chose. Zero to one. Noise to signal. 

~ Made great. One to many.

~ Led out. Out of Empire.

~ Wilderness. Consolidated apart from the world.

~ Land. Rooted. Placed.

~ Judges. Organised / Regulated.

~ Kings (Saul). Person-centred.

~ King (David)

[2.1] History as preaching

~ think on God’s past faithfulness as encouragement

[2.2] Typology as preaching

- incidental recurrence ~ Saul/Paul as the new Saul - why are you persecuting me. Patterns recur. Nominative determinism

But then

[2.3] Speaking to an audience

- frame to people a mutual understanding of who they are

How did you get here? Brought to this place

How did we get here? What is our shared story

[2.4] Pattern book and Story

- Gospel as Culmination 

Creation → Creation of remedial community - Perennially

What would your history / origin story of your community be?

Who is the agent in it?

[3] PREACHING REPENTANCE - GOD SENDS ELIJAHS

23 Of this man’s offspring God has brought to Israel a Saviour, Jesus, as he promised. 24 Before his coming, John had proclaimed a baptism of repentance to all the people of Israel. 25 And as John was finishing his course, he said, ‘What do you suppose that I am? I am not he. No, but behold, after me one is coming, the sandals of whose feet I am not worthy to untie.’

[3.0] John the Baptist: Elijah comes

- Preacher inserts a preacher. As a perennial case in point.  I’m interested in the prophet character - disruptive analyst, truther who is somehow the fuse of the powder keg of history. Pay attention to the Elijahs.

Just after they’ve been up the Mt of Transfiguration: Mt17v10

The disciples asked Him, “Why then do the scribes say that Elijah must come first?” 11Jesus replied, “Elijah does indeed come, and he will restore all things. 12But I tell you that Elijah has already come, and they did not recognize him, but have done to him whatever they wished. In the same way, the Son of Man will suffer at their hands.” 13Then the disciples understood that He was speaking to them about John the Baptist.

Mk9v11-12 Elijah comes. Would you know it if you saw it? Three connected misapprehensions keep the disciples in the Scribe's dark. 

*  Form. Wrongly venerating Elijah as an Old Greybeard historic character ~ literal, specific, limited, pluperfect (woe to that Mt23v29-31), as if prophecy was. Prophecy is. Elijah comes. 

* Function. Wrongly considering Elijah's sufficient Elijian role as completely completing moral reform and political overthrow. A whitewashed and rosy-tinted account of the good-enough prophet will disqualify John-the-Baptist, and we would-be-way-preparers, as not-Elijian-enough. 

* Messianic prerequisites. Wrongly limiting that the Messiah only comes to an already perfected people, that the Saviour comes only when there is nothing more to save us from. Elijah comes and Jesus comes. We participate prophetically in preparing the way and pointing the way, imperfectly, incompletely but supernaturally and substantially.

See Jesus claims: (v11) “Elijah does come.” or “Elijah comes.” Present tense, Indicative Mood, Middle Voice.  Elijah here stands as a Type, the prophetic mode, which is enduring. Constantly speaking of what the spirit of God is doing, constantly relaying the Father's heart, constantly preparing the ground for the Christ-seed, constantly calling the Ahabs and Herods away from their Jezebels and Salomes, constantly speaking the original truths, the timeless, timely and urgent: the jealous love of God, the call to repentance. 

Elijah as the perennial perpetuation of prophecy is crucial to Jesus' point in the Transfiguration chat, as it is when he speaks a woe in Mt23v29-31. The notion that prophets *were* is what kills the prophets that *are*

How do you repent?

How do you preach repentance?

[4] PREACHING GRAVITY - WE KILLED GOD

26 “Brothers, sons of the family of Abraham, and those among you who fear God, to us has been sent the message of this salvation. 27 For those who live in Jerusalem and their rulers, because they did not recognize him nor understand the utterances of the prophets, which are read every Sabbath, fulfilled them by condemning him. 28 And though they found in him no guilt worthy of death, they asked Pilate to have him executed. 29 And when they had carried out all that was written of him, they took him down from the tree and laid him in a tomb. 30 But God raised him from the dead, 31 and for many days he appeared to those who had come up with him from Galilee to Jerusalem, who are now his witnesses to the people. 

[4.1] Jews asked Pilate to have him executed - 

~ in order to not tacitly export anti-semitism from an interpretation of this passage, we must war against the chronological snobbery that assumes that we would be any better, or indeed that we do any better. 

~~  pick and mix orientalism, cosmetic shabbat shalom.

What would it be to be as constituted as the Jews as a nation as an economy as a ritual?  How you be that weird and not collapse into myopia.

[4.2] Even though they read the scripture every sabbath

- Establishment Christianity - Regressed Christians who have settled in a desupernaturalised faith - Zombie form. Run a rescue shop within a yard if he'll

~ limits of understanding

~ fulfilled prophecy despite not understanding

[4.3] What would make you kill a man?

Chosen people as jealous

Existential threat

Always nodal, Always cascades

Perennial challenge of trials of tribalism

Creation → Creation of remedial community - Perennially

How to own that which should be more Jewish about our Christianity?

What would make you kill a man?

[5] PREACHING APOLOGETICS - GOD RAISED

32 And we bring you the good news that what God promised to the fathers, 33 this he has fulfilled to us their children by raising Jesus, as also it is written in the second Psalm,

“‘You are my Son, today I have begotten you.’

34 And as for the fact that he raised him from the dead, no more to return to corruption, he has spoken in this way,

“‘I will give you the holy and sure blessings of David.’

35 Therefore he says also in another psalm,

“‘You will not let your Holy One see corruption.’

36 For David, after he had served the purpose of God in his own generation, fell asleep and was laid with his fathers and saw corruption, 37 but he whom God raised up did not see corruption. 38 Let it be known to you therefore, brothers, that through this man forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you, 39 and by him everyone who believes is freed from everything from which you could not be freed by the law of Moses. 

[5.1] ~ better than David who died

- resurrection over death

Historicity. Crucifixion/Resurrection foolishness to greeks and stumbling block to jews 

[5.2] ~ better than the law

- freedom through the power to fulfil the law apart from ourselves - forgiveness over works

[6] PREACHING URGENCY - WE DISBELIEVE GOD

40 Beware, therefore, lest what is said in the Prophets should come about: 

41  “‘Look, you scoffers, be astounded and perish; for I am doing a work in your days, a work that you will not believe, even if one tells it to you.’”

42 As they went out, the people begged that these things might be told them the next Sabbath. 43 And after the meeting of the synagogue broke up, many Jews and devout converts to Judaism followed Paul and Barnabas, who, as they spoke with them, urged them to continue in the grace of God.

[6.1] ~ Altar call is about the severity of a need for understanding

~ ? what does astounded and perish translate

[7] PREACHING DIVISION 

44 The next Sabbath almost the whole city gathered to hear the word of the Lord. 45 But when the Jews saw the crowds, they were filled with jealousy and began to contradict what was spoken by Paul, reviling him. 

46 And Paul and Barnabas spoke out boldly, saying, “It was necessary that the word of God be spoken first to you. Since you thrust it aside and judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life, behold, we are turning to the Gentiles. 47 For so the Lord has commanded us, saying,

“‘I have made you a light for the Gentiles, that you may bring salvation to the ends of the earth.’”

48 And when the Gentiles heard this, they began rejoicing and glorifying the word of the Lord, and as many as were appointed to eternal life believed. 49 And the word of the Lord was spreading throughout the whole region. 

50 But the Jews incited the devout women of high standing and the leading men of the city, stirred up persecution against Paul and Barnabas, and drove them out of their district. 

51 But they shook off the dust from their feet against them and went to Iconium. 52 And the disciples were filled with joy and with the Holy Spirit.

[7.1] Jealousy

Mere jealousy - Self righteousness will fundamentally unmake you

Collectivity’s Fear/disgust - Where does that come from? 

[7.2] First to the Jews

~ first to the Jews - light to the gentiles

~ Paul doubles down

~ divisive claims

Heart for those confessing the God of Abraham, but who’ve desiccated it. 

[7.3] Preaching as contested

 Incite devout women

~ ways false teachers leverage the vulnerable

~ diabolical agents use of the virtues of the vulnerable

~ coopting the empathetic to addle power

The Plot to Kill Jesus

It was now two days before the Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread. And the chief priests and the scribes were seeking how to arrest him by stealth and kill him, 2 for they said, “Not during the feast, lest there be an uproar from the people.”

Jesus Anointed at Bethany

3 And while he was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he was reclining at table, a woman came with an alabaster flask of ointment of pure nard, very costly, and she broke the flask and poured it over his head. 4 There were some who said to themselves indignantly, “Why was the ointment wasted like that? 5 For this ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii and given to the poor.” And they scolded her. 6 But Jesus said, “Leave her alone. Why do you trouble her? She has done a beautiful thing to me. 7 For you always have the poor with you, and whenever you want, you can do good for them. But you will not always have me. 8 She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for burial. 9 And truly, I say to you, wherever the gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her.”

Judas to Betray Jesus

10 Then Judas Iscariot, who was one of the twelve, went to the chief priests in order to betray him to them. 11 And when they heard it, they were glad and promised to give him money. And he sought an opportunity to betray him.

[0] INTRO

Familiar passage - a similar pouring out of ointment is recounted in each of the gospels. I am, if anything, over-familiar and overly comfortable with this as a parable about “worship” and “giving”, as a metaphor for making art. 

In the last few weeks of sitting inside this passage, and chatting with housemates, I’ve been struck by three rough themes that have perhaps more challenging and more urgent meaning. 

* The Context of the passion narrative ~ I’ve tended to think of this passage as a free floating aromatic vignette merely adjacent to the crucifixion that follow. But I want to explore ways the perfume does considerable work to up the ante in the violent melodrama and political turmoil that Jesus is stirring up.

* Is to consider face value Smell taken literally. I have never had this passage unpacked with a view to modifying the actual odour or aroma of the congregation. What would that even be? We think about Christian music, and Christian art and architecture. What would calculated olfactory curation involve in our life of faith?

* Is to calibrate Waste as a political and economic tool or strategy. I’ve tended to reduce the ‘woman’ here to a non-player-character expending monopoly money in fairytale fable where the anodyne metaphorical moral of the story is that it’s nice to be nice ~ without attention to the aggressive severity of the destruction of resource that her act involves. 

I’m going to try to unpack these, to try to persuade you and to persuade me, there is more going on, these aspects of this woman’s action here demand an answer, demand an application. 

* [1] Urgent Context

* [2] Literal Smell 

* [3] Provocative Waste

Through it all, I’m interested for you to ask:

* [Q1] What is your perfume? 

* [Q2] How should we smell? 

[1] CONTEXT

Jesus context is our context, to a certain extent. We are also contextuated, we have a context, there are forces and politics in play - Jesus operates in a way that is sympathetic to that context an milieu, Jesus operates in a way that subverts that milieu. When we take our cross to follow Jesus, we do not do so in a vacuum. The need to study Jesus as a spiritual tactician remains. The need to be girded against spiritual opposition remains. The need to be wiley political agents remains. 

Looking at the perfume passage in context 

* [1.1]  Recurrence, and the way it is immediately positioned in the narrative, bookended by 

* [1.2] Opposition and 

* [1.3] Betrayal

[1.1] CONTEXT - RECURRENCE

Jesus ministry happens across time, and he’s anointed like this with perfume, by a woman, three times, because three is a magic number ~ the three body lotions, the beginning middle and end of something -- there is a trajectory in Jesus ministry, and there is a trajectory in your life. Three anointings give us. emphasis, nuance and escalation.

1.1.1 Emphasis through repetition

* One could synthesise these accounts as referring to one occasion. But why? Better that this happened multiple times. Spaced repetition and memory, establishing a musical refrain, forging a trope.

* The same thing can happen several times for a reason, (Ian Fleming - Goldfinger)

* Once is happenstance,

* Twice is a coincidence

* Three times is enemy action..

* Akin to trope of bras thrown on the stage of a rock band on tour emblematic of adulation - this is different but there’s something slightly inappropriate about what’s happening here, and it keeps happening. What means?

* I would keep in mind A high view of Jesus authorial agency, inviting these events. High view of the gospel authors intending us to understand these as repeated events - Why be precise about 2 days or 6 days if wrong ~ better Judas re “another one?”

1.1.2 Nuance through Difference (prophet, priest, king)

in defense of two dinners at bethany during jesus' last week in jerusalem 

* Do you think about ways you meaningfully repeat yourself.  ~~ feels a bit like minority report - differential analysis of similar events. Changes over time/season/context

* Luke

*  Early in Jesus' ministry an unnamed sinful woman at the home of the Simon, a wealthy Pharisee, anointed His feet with ointment and wiped His feet with her hair (Lk 7:36-38).

* PROPHET (appointed to convict sin and call repentance)

* “If he were a prophet..” - Jesus at the fringes, touching the marginalised, and inviting repentance. 

* Also particularly about Jesus relationship with women in public. Scandalous. Worship as a liberal unboundaried propriety scandal Vs the behaviour of women in public. Whereas the forgiven persons response of excessive hospitality as having an equivalent to or directly erotic dimension. 

* John

* Mary of Bethany anointed Jesus' feet and wiped His feet with her hair on Saturday, 6 days before the passover - the day the sacrificial lambs or kids were to be chosen (Exodus 12:3), Jesus rode into Jerusalem-the sacrificial Lamb of God (Jn 12:1-3).

* PRIEST (mediating atonement)

* Jesus as sacrificial lamb

* Mark/Matt

* An unnamed woman anointed Jesus' head at the home of Simon the Leper in Bethany two days before the Passover. (Mt 26:1-16: Mk 14:1-11)

* KING (defeat enemies, freeing captives, ruling a domain)

* Annoints the head. 

* Wherever the evangelion is preached - political valence, a come at me bro. 

* An inscription that heralds the supposedly benevolent reign of Caesar Augustus (27 BC-AD 14) reads: “…the birthday of the god [Augustus] was the beginning of the good news that came through him to the world.”https://www.nae.org/theology-behind-euangelion/ 

* The English word gospel is derived from the Anglo-Saxon godspell (“good story”). The classical Greek word euangelion means “a reward for bringing of good news” or the “good news” itself. In the emperor cult particularly, in which the Roman emperor was venerated as the spirit and protector of the empire, the term took on a religious meaning: the announcement of the appearance or accession to the throne of the ruler. In contemporary Greek it denoted a weighty, authoritative, royal, and official message.https://www.britannica.com/topic/biblical-literature/New-Testament-literature#ref598075

1.1.3 Escalation through progression

1.1.3.1 - This time it’s different - Timing and crescendo

* Where as John’s account 6 days before, Matt/Mark’s account 2 days before.. 

* Count down timer - ‘His time had come..’

* In Time - Justin Timberlake In Time Clip - 'Natural Selection' 

* Do you think about ways time is short. 

* Spending time without reserve

* Chronos time vs kairos time

* Wedding photographer in the dressing room

1.1.3.2 - This time it’s different - This time it is terminal - no more anointings - breaks the bottle, breaks the pattern - the end of the beginning

* Intractable - breaks the jar, there will be no encore. She breaks the bottle, can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. Narrative Hinge point, seals the deal

1.1.3.3 - This time it’s different - This time it is the climax of the melodrama - Judas turns, The straw the breaks the camel’s back, breaks Judas - beginning of the end

Like clockwork (Clockwork Orange, or Zoolander..) - The wound up machine now, like the row of dominoes falling, not a coincidence, pushing Judas to breaking point

* Before foreshadowing - the dimming of the lights (v1-2)

* ??happening at night

* ??reclining at table

* Cat and mouse -

* Low-lit, darkened room, Other senses are heightened

* passover and fever pitch

* During - the sound of the breaking of the bottle

* After the lingering after smell - she has anointed me for burial (vs John’s let her alone that she may keep it for the day of my burial)

* Jesus is agent, he could have opted out

[1.2] CONTEXT - OPPOSITION (14v1-2)

It was now two days before the Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread. And the chief priests and the scribes were seeking how to arrest him by stealth and kill him, for they said, “Not during the feast, lest there be an uproar from the people.”

Placing this act of perfuming in between its bookend passages

1.2.1 - There is an unseen opposition

* Stealth and opposition - Would we be better Christians if we considered Christianity as a true conspiracy theory?

* Jerusalem, opposition, pre-Passion, stealth

* There is another side on the field. A conscious, intentional calculating opposition, waiting. Over against a naive sense of Jesus ministry, and a naive sense of your own ministry

1.2.1.1 - Opposition: Waiting - timing

* Forces arrayed against you are Waiting, Seeking, Biding-their-time - waiting for vulnerable moment vs fair weather christianity

* Ambiguous waiting, waiting for an opportune time. 

* Waiting til you are Hungry Angry Lonely Tired - four horsemen 

* Holy moments, Kairos, - not all times are the same, not all moments have the same power, the same valence, - seasons and the signs of the times, his time had not yet come - time is not flat

1.2.1.2 - Opposition: Mustering - the mischief of a committee

* Moments of change are anticipated by the mustering of forces, the polarisation of politics. 

* Collective opposition, mob, 

* Luke17v37 “..the corpse.. ..there vultures will gather..”

* Mustering - coalescing a perfect storm, temptations compound 

* Pride, Lust, Gluttony wait in the wings. 

* A co-belligerent alliance of conservatives & liberals, in this case, a freedom fighter & the putative establishment

* You will know where the battle line lies, just follow the smell of death, and so follow those species who are most attuned to death’s odour as 2Co2v16. 

1.2.1.3 - Opposition: Unseen - by stealth

* By Stealth

* Waiting to pick up a scent

* Fee fi fo fum - i smell the blood of an english man

* Great white shark

* Smell and the unseen - the gathering vultures around the carrion

1.2.2 There is a signal - you have a tracker planted in you, 

* There are dark forces which are arrayed against you. Overstating the case, but one could say, if you are not provoking the establishment to violence against you, you are not trying hard enough. How much do you have at stake, especially as 20-somethings, especially in this Disneyland. Jesus kicking the hornet’s nest. What is your perfume, how should we smell - if we’re taking up our cross there is an olfactory preamble..

1.2.2.1 - Signal: Smell as a lab leak, smell as harbinger of contagion - goes before you, lingers after you. Smell spreads to others

* You do smell ~ it is the nascent latent graduated brownian percolation osmosing a concentration - the coming of the kingdom is imperceptible as a slowly boiling frog. 

* Jesus is patient zero - The walking dead

* v37 _”..where the corpse is.. ..there vultures will gather”_ around a particular locus.. Changes sparks from a node, the hinge crux fulcrum that bends history toward justice. The seed’s spring point. 

1.2.2.2 - Signal: Smell as a tell-tale, smell as a give away - give yourself away. Be found out. Take up your cross ~ intentionally, make yourself a target, be conspicuous. Smell leads others to you.

* You should smell ~ intentionally, up to and including, provoking opposition.

* **The scent in Attack the Block - the pheromones that will lead the enemy to him. - Moses - Douse me in it. Come at me bro.

* Gradual spread from a node, Circling a source, tightening a noose

* He that smelt it dealt it, smell a rat, smells fishy, sniff out a mole

* Vs the deer stalking 

* Ominous - like bleeding into the water when Jaws is about

* In your typical pandemic fiction, a disease outbreak begins with a single, dramatic moment: A vial of infected blood breaks, a sickly monkey escapes a lab, an alien satellite falls from the sky.

* “..not in ways that can be observed..” Change* is a’happening beneath the surface, it can’t be observed because it is hiding in plain sight in the very midst of you. 

The Coming of the Kingdom

Being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, he answered them, “The kingdom of God vis not coming in ways that can be observed, nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There!’ for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you.”

[1.3] CONTEXT - SIDES ~ BETRAYAL - (Mk14v9-10)

10 Then Judas Iscariot, who was one of the twelve, went to the chief priests in order to betray him to them. 11 And when they heard it, they were glad and promised to give him money. And he sought an opportunity to betray him.

* So then v10, the smell, it seems, was the last straw, conspicuous and impractical and costly - offensive in every way to anyone with a sense of justice or decency. I rather imagine Judas gets to the chief priests' lair still smelling pungent and multivalent.

* How prophets should speak to priests - viz Nehemiah and how should prophets speak to Kings.

* How to argue for risk over against care

1.3.1 Priests, Compassion and how to achieve care

* The Chief Priests - exceptional treatment by the Romans, and these priests were held responsible for maintaining very fragile peace. 

* I think it is unproductive to read the Pharisees as mere pantomime baddies, I wonder what that conversation was like, was there a debate, who proposes such a motion, what recent terrorist attacks loomed large in the mind of this parliament of priests and scribes, and who rallied opposition rebels at the eleventh hour with the spectre of revolution and what greater-good was presented as just cause for just war? 

* I plot minor violences, how do I vote with my feet and by default to serve a status quo and obscure collateral damage by veiled cryptic ethical language. My responsibilities to my dependents are clear, the moral case for drone strikes against this Galilean threat to my city’s peace is vital - my position has nothing to do with organised jealousy, risk-averse self-reliance, politickal pride, faith in the tradition of the nation state nor affection for the comforts of the market economy.. Sometimes murder is just the most responsible thing to do. While I enjoy the comforts of a nuclear armed country that  

1.3.2 Judas - Switching sides and how to achieve change

* One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. Are we the bad guys?

* Speaking to myself, venturing nothing

* Anti utilitarian - Over throw the bourgeois

1.3.3 Judas & Priests - Smell divides opinion - Multivalent

* Disgust and co-belligerence.

* Ambiguous meaning - To one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life. (2Co2v16) 

* How subtle the notion of sides is - are we the bad guys?

[Q1] What is your perfume? 

[Q2] How should we smell? 

[2] SMELL & THE BODY IN PRACTICE OF COMMUNAL FAITH LIFE

I want to provoke you to think about smell, about perfume, about the act of consciously augmenting the air we breathe. I don’t generally do it or think about it much, but I should, you might and you could if I can find words.  

Preaching about smell, is like dancing about architecture. I’ll try. 

Smell is interesting to me, because of its absence today. 

My aim, beyond recreational contrarianism, is more serious. The bible uses smell extensively and it is not enough to relegate this to metaphor - as people in the past smelt so that we could spend our time on more the important matters of a theory of mind and the problem of access. 

The bible uses smell extensively and I want to nudge you and me beyond smell as a nice to have that will generally be value-engineered out… to arrive at a justified imperative regarding smell?

How do you setup such a question as a question worth your time? 

What is it to smell smell? Do we, should we and how?

ways of thinking about smell

* 2.1 What opposes smell? (in me, in church and in the world)

* 2.2 What benefits of attention to smell?

2.1 What opposes smell? (in me, in church and in the world)

SMELL VS 

You become like what you worship: _“Their idols are silver and gold, the work of human hands. They have mouths, but do not speak; eyes, but do not see.  They have ears, but do not hear; noses, but do not smell. They have hands, but do not feel; feet, but do not walk; and they do not make a sound in their throat. Those who make them become like them; so do all who trust in them.”_ Ps115v4-8

I would observe a spice deficit in modernity’s life hygienic generally and in the tawdry banality of low protestant faith at large and in my life in particular, and so, to riff on a theme, and to ask, how should we then smell?

Rarified high-art homeopathic minimalism and austerity’s bleach bath medicalised asceticism both strip out the smell of life. Why? Great labour is expended achieved smell-free places. Why? In church too, we are still cost engineering prophetic perfume performance in the low churches to spite our nose. Why?

Modernity

* 2.1.1 neutrality

* 2.1.2 impersonal

* 2.1.3 disembodied

2.2.1 Smell vs modern neutrality 

In modern life, nothing tastes. Bothersome Man captures a universe in which a preeminent virtue is made of laboratory sterility, the blank canvas, the white box. Perfect fungibility finds no aroma, follows no scent and leaves no trace. Arriving in our motel reality, the homogenised clientele are served by no single smell better than no smell at all, no association better than no association at all, we are suspicious of everything except infinite neutrality. The generic and the universal commodified commodity must be sanitised, antiseptic  and deodorised, for we sell to cyborgs dreaming of electric sheep. 

Agent Smith interrogating Morpheus - he despises the smell, if there is such a thing..

Smell as airborne and pervasive vs hygiene

* Disgust at boundaries disgust at lack of boundaries

* Unseemly and inappropriate

* Open plan modernity - the spread of smell

* Christianity controlled by notions of what is appropriate

Carnival of rich become poor

Neutral and universal

One size fits all

2.2.2 Smell as essence/identity - personalism vs modernity 

* You have an essence and perceive essences

* Unique signature vs mere fungible parts

* Having a smell and being a smeller are constituent to subject formation - who you are.

* Dogs picking up a scent - the trace of a thing - locator by its parts

“Somewhere between proust and the psychogeographers - Given the proven importance of smell to our subject formation, then, we ought to be suspicious of these tenacious efforts to deodorise the spaces we live in: chemical air fresheners, odourless materials, and rigorous hygiene regulations are nothing less than an attack on our most precious memories and collective cultural identities. wholesale deodorization, he warns us. The American motel bathroom, sanitized for your protection, is the antiseptic symbol of sensuous death..”

Witold van Ratingen

You are in many ways the sum of your memories

When everything is masked, everything is sanitised for your protection.. 

Smell is a true truth - clearing demons - empty house

* Smell is a true truth - an inevitability in an organic world. Nothing smells of nothing for very long. A church that persists to avoid the consciously proactive aromatic, will invariably become musty, stale, stultified, as faintly the bleached and synthetic air mingles with spilt ribena and peeled varnish from the warped parquet floor.

What is it to value or not value smell?

* Disbelief in the power/effect of smell

* By contrast - Lush/Subway

* Devaluation of benefit, cannot justify risk/cost

* By contrast - aromatherapies/perfume

* Diminution of the priority of the salience

* By contrast - smellovision and the need to tell memorable stories

Smell as organic vs Neutral synthetic smell

* Air freshener that displaces one smell with another

* Smell as a covering over, smell as a compensation

2.2.3 - Smell as breath-work vs disembodiment

We’ve all spent 3 years on zoom calls, behind masks, at precisely a distance to prevent that same airborne transfer of virus and smell. We have become, inthis way, thorough modern

Smell is old fashioned, a brownian pervasion, something in the air of the elevator.. Consider Lynx’s fishman

  - what an embarrassment of biology we are, what a danger embodiment is, what an impediment to your self-actualisation this sweating husk of a frame is.

If we are not bodies, if we have not bodies, if we consider our true self to exist in a disembodied form then better to double down on the cyborg version of ourselves - that avatar of true being. We want to believe in ot aloof detached brain-in-vat sovereignty of self made self-hood. But smell, perhaps more than any of the senses gives the lie to this. 

Atmospheric spice: God is Spirit* Charlie Cleverly cite’s Coco Chanel in his Song of Songs commentary, 

“[Perfume] is the unseen, unforgettable, ultimate accessory of fashion that heralds your arrival, and prolongs your departure..”

Coco Chanel

She identifies something vital about the behaviour of fragrance, which is not incidental to its use in scripture. In fragrance we are perceiving the pervasive and invasive noumenal, that pneuma that rushes ahead of you. If we are to be the aroma of Christ we must approach the world with sensitivity to atmosphere, of breath, ruach:

(n/a) What does that smell like? 

* Pete Grieg - He breathes out we breathe in

* What is within you

* Lungful

* COVID and aerobic being

2.2 What benefits of attention to smell?

2.2.1 connecting with the body

Incarnation - right and positive use of the body, entering the real

Wisdom is a body theology Rm12v1 

Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship

The body is a primitive shame, and smell is a pre-conceptual acknowledgement of that embodiment. Smell bypasses language to access memory and association - and as such is, perhaps it is wise to be cautious with a potent tool for manipulation. 

Smell is like the gift of tongues, it has a sprawling way of seeping through your armour. 

Smell is embodied cognition

* 2.2 Embedded Cognition

* 2.3 Extended Cognition

* 2.4 Enactive Cognition

Smell - being in a body - you move through air

Smell - being in an environment - air moves through you

2.2.2 language/memory

SMELL AS LANGUAGE

*Signifier signified* So then, spice as a metaphor and smell as an allegory. I think, it is only effective to enrich language, if we are actively participating in the semantic signified. What good are the prayers-of-the-saints-like-sweet-smelling-incense Ps141v2 if there is no incense to smell _like._ 

Cheap hollow metaphors appealing that the world should taste-and-see the aroma-of-Christ.. these should not be played recklessly by dour disembodied ones, unwilling to pay the price to do the labour of furnishing metaphors with felt and received meaning. 

Mt2v11-12 (2) 'Frankincense' and smell memory. Wisdom recognises aroma 2Cor2v15 and its power to convey truth Mk14v9 to your memory. 

Smell as language & memory

* 2.2.2.1 - intentional taking smells

* 2.2.2.2 - intentional making smells

2.2.2.1 - intentional taking smells - life examined, attention economy

* Memory - smell is.

* History and memory, personal and collective

* What we preserve from past as conservatives Vs what we share

* Nostalgia - smell can be

* Conjuring a past smell  being Vs entropy Former glory 

* smell and memory

* ritual

* dementia

* early deep engrained memories 

* muscle memories

* musical memories

* **aromatherapy

I remember I had friend who was acutely attentive to smell, discerning who owned a scarf and where it had been. What would it be to be mindfully attentive of the pheromonal spirit of the age. I consider that all of life could be wine-tasting, all of life could be discerning the bouquet of wet-saddle, cat’s-pee, nutty musk, cherry soil and cardamom toffee. Ours should be a life examined, a connoisseurial comportment to every inch of God’s creation.

2.2.2.2 - intentional making smells - we make and remake culture

* Memorial - smell should be 

* Smell as memorial Conjuring a future memory

* Tombs of the prophets and the embalmed faith of a dead teacher

* The instinct to spice, Extravagant, excessive

* Cloying Scratch and sniff sentimentality

* Smell as language & affect

* The role of smell in associative communication

* Smell as ceremony / annointing

* king

* priest

* prophet

* Smell in the ceremony of the dead

* *Smells concern death* To acknowledge embodiment is to acknowledge decay, a flaking dissipation into the air, to concede we are mortal frames ebbing towards death, subject to unseen forces, ultimately overcome by the bacterial breakdown and a return to dust. Over and against this, given resurrection, we are empowered to boldly smell, with a full-bodied funk, with an oak-aged well-steeped substance of somatic totality. 

Meditation on Smell Memories

Calm Sleep Stories | Stephen Fry's 'Blue Gold' 

🌸 Again, on the balcony this morning, the crystal air presses into the foreground as next door’s dawn warmed jasmine perfumes a thickness to the air-as-air. I mean no gooey mindful oneness by dwelling on this presence, but a note to self, against my own future forgetfulness of air. In peace time as well as this current crisis, we steward what we put into the air - we individually, and as a church, have a responsibility for the olfactory emanation that hangs in our wake.

Mk14v5-6 It's the smell, if there is such a thing. We are still cost engineering prophetic perfume performance in the low churches to spite our nose. Fragrances, odours, smell is a shortcut to body memory (v9), and body memory is how we habituate the gospel. Man dwells aromatically. We are in Christ and Christ is in you, by the lungfull, as if stood at the tea factory's furnace, saturated with a potent inimitable preconceptual description of salvation.

2.2.3 Smell as skill/power - beauty/cost

2.2.3.1 - Smell as power/skill

* Pheromones and intuition - Smell in nature/culture?

* Desire and disgust - Smell in nature/culture?

Smell as a skill - what is virtuoso?

* We deskilled and so vulnerable - We no longer need to ask what is safe to eat. We are no longer immersed in integral smells - all is noise of mass produced synthetic smells and deoderised plastic environments. A such, we are vulnerable to misplaced disgust, vulnerable as manipulable. How should we then smell well?

* Consider Tykwer’s film, Perfume and the genius of creating smellscapes

* Consider Tykwer’s film, Perfume and the oblivion of having no smell

* Perfume captures old-fashioned worlds of fish markets and open sewers, a carnal and so criminal world. Of old fashionedness, but re liturgical practice - why is incense in contemporary church so inevitably uncontemporary? It has a Latin creeds feel to it, a larping historical reconstruction feel to it? Even Emergent bleeding edge prophetic innovators lack unselfconscious abandon with what invariably feels like primitivist cultural appropriation. Incense is visited as a kitschy New Age hand-me-down. What would a new-song in this domain be?

* *Smell is old fashioned.* Literally, you can only smell that which has passed, and you can only associate to a smell from your past, smell must be an acquired taste. Smell is a function of memory and association. You cannot smell the future. Smell is a lingering half-life, a teleport in time - and as such is condemned as nostalgia. Smell is alchemy, preconceptual mystery and so is condemned as superstition. 

Smell as manufacture, industry, curation and design

* Distillation

* Storage

hard to digitise - more unique

? receptors in the nose

like performance, fire works display

2.2.3.2 - Smell as a beautiful thing / theatre / time

* Subjective

* Ephemeral 

Smell as beauty at cost

The broken jar - Specific to mark - Writing off security £37k or average salary - 1 denarii per day

* alabaster from egypt

* nard from himalayas

*Smell costs* As with the alabaster flask of ointment Mk14, this impulse to worship via smell, and to grieve via smell, is alien to me, and it is anathema to every mode of churching I have experienced - with the exception of brief and peripheral Catholic encounters. 

The flavour of evangelicalism that I have experienced and proliferated is one of avowed mediocrity, sanctimoniously bland. We are still cost engineering prophetic perfume performance in the low churches to spite our nose. 

Exuberant spice: God is flavour and saviour In Mt23v23 Jesus critiques the Pharisees for tithing spices ~ mint and dill and cumin. This is contrasted with weightier things.. Is Jesus uninterested in our spices? No. Just as he is actually not uninterested in our crossing land and sea - contra an over-reading of Mt23v15. There is something in the weightless lack of exuberance in so spicing that seems the more salient application of a critic of mint-tithing. But, then who does this? Spice, like the salt of the earth Mt5v13 is both a flavour and a preservative.

Smell as art / story telling

* how we derive meaning from art via narrative and temporality - tell a story with a smell - perfumes are curated as tryptyche - beginning/middle/end front/middle/back of a lingering or layered smell

* human smell true/authentic - over against unreal smell

* good smell bad smell - like good film bad film - aesthetic but also truthiness dimension

* curating smells  vs smell snobbery - architecture can have beauty and decency, and the abscence of x or y

Smell as beauty in the bible

* Song of songs

* Aroma death/life

* Prayers of the saints

Attractional nature of Antiphonal  Pheromonal 

cost/benefit - vs aromatherapy and vague pleasure

[Q1] What is your perfume?

* What is your perfume what is it to spill it

* As testimony as art - Ecstatic over flow

[Q2] How should we smell?

[3] WASTE & EXCESS IN THE POLITICAL ECONOMY

Expenditure without reserve

Irreversibly burning that rainy day fund, Liquifying Liquidity, the finalisation of fungibility, extending the shelf life by the abandon to sell all. Not so flippant as merely an abundance mindset. 

* Sentiment Vs sentimentality

* Irrational Vs arational

3.1 - Waste as testimony

* How you spend it - what you value, what you emphasise. Know what you value by what you spend. By the conversion of a man’s checking book. Know what you hold sacred by what you sacrifice.

* Waste time with Jesus - not so much how to do you curate your utility for Christ, but rather how do you shape your leisure for Christ - the fun, the pleasure, the excess. Waste as worship as declaration of abundance

* She is a weirdo - making public waste - people notice waste, as a justice issue. It is a rational response to ask what would it take to do the same with.

* pearl of great price - has an application

[Q1] What is your perfume? 

* Non-trivial, nest egg, pension pot - not saying to give it to the church so much as to, perhaps, burn it.

[Q2] How should we smell? 

* Why/how should the church care? - calibrate what we organise against vs tutting utilitarianism. We in the low churches, cutting off our noses to spite our face 

3.2 - Waste as protest - subversive waste

* Who has permission to waste - over against utilitarianism?

* Who has the motive to waste - eg - protesting a system of empire?

* Waste vs modern utility and effective altruism

* Categorical imperative hiding behind utilitarianism - like duty or honour

* How to break the power of money over you? Give it away

3.2.1 Waste as economic protest 

Michael Landy's Break Down involved all his possessions being destroyed. https://www.artangel.org.uk/project/break-down/ 

Documentary: Breaking Down 

~ buy nothing day vs planned obsolescence 

3.2.2 Waste as political protest

3.3 - Waste as revolution through community

* Waste creates sacred bonds 

* a bit like a gift economy - but with a frivolous, flamboyance for the commons. Abominate philanthropy that by miserly calculation presumes to dole out what they deserve, rather, Jesus invites the profligacy of transgressive giving

* Who wastes?

* Who polices who gets to waste? Who is the waster? Who gets to waste?Deserving vs undeserving poor? Taboo - you need permission to be irresponsible - don’t you know there’s a war on. The sovereign and the trickster

* Worship as waste esp re burial and memory. Worship as as social justice scandal - Vs charity for the poor. Late Capitalism we live a such a circus of perpetual excess, but homogenous, generic, marketised slop where we’re all workers as cogs identical. in getting rid of money, your purge your generic networth and reveal your distinct worth, in an heterogeneous reality.

* Waste as creation of the sacred

* Incandescent joy of Bataille’s tricksters - transgressive giving to forge outlaw spaces for the derangement of the senses.

* Against waste - top-down / bottom-up

* True freedom is the ability to waste over against being under an empire create value. We are servants to a system we don't understand, interpretting only market signals from economic rationality. True sovereignty must engage in profligacy and must abominate tawdry committee run faith forms must pursue the carnival’s subversive deep play.

* The institutions are congealed egregores, demonic suprapersonal forces, we are egregore neurons by our economic activity, we are complicit or we resist.

“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will recognise them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? So, every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit. A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus you will recognize them by their fruits. “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’ Mt7v15-23

[Dekalog - The second commandment is about sanctity of speech, where names are fundamental to identity and moral choice, and the importance of one's word in human life.]  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekalog

INTRO

[1] NAME - What is God’s name? How do we take it / carry it?

[2] VAIN - How do we do that in vain?

[3] PAIN - What is at stake?

[4] GAIN - What is the Solution?

Talking about talking

I don’t think of this interaction as preaching, it is an invitation to conversation. I have no mandate to preach, 

* How you introduce the idea, progressively/incrementally

* What do you want to learn?

* Where do you want to lead

OT as

OT as law

* A frame work of absolutes

* A checklist of do nots  ~ leads to religiosity

OT as wisdom

* Difficult because it is unattainable

* Which touched on with Abigail’s ‘wisdom’ Tragic again

OT as a grace

* offering a good Pattern vs OT as Impossible prompting to seek a saviour

* Prototype leads to Despair points us to Christ A reverent fear, harrowing

* OT as an impossible code, Vs a sliding scale of recommended 

OT’s law as marriage covenant 

* Law as gift after slavery ~ by contrast with the life in Egypt, this is a life they get to live, one of service and not slavery, clarifying their freedom-for, vs just freedom-from

* Law as a marriage covenant

* Law as promise of a future

* Law as permission not to

[1] NAME

[1.1] Using the name - daring to speak it “God is …”

Argument over against what?

* What is it to carry God’s name, not-in-vain?

* SAYING GOD’S NAME - hallowed be your name

* What is the right and proper use of God’s name, his brand, his reputation, his power in the world?

* How does the law bring freedom?

* God has a name Over against no mere defacto relativity, but 

* Thinghood, anchored Vs real randomness and instability - eg. Dogma film swopping naming

Name vs no name

Temple to an unknown God.

So Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, said: “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription: ‘To the unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. Ac17v22

Over against nameless dread.

* Vs the God hypothesis, an arbitrary transcendental, merely the divine spark in all things - yes he is infinite but he is also personal he is also a this, which is not a that do not trivialise the weirdness of God

* Gods: I’m a divine spark in all things

* YHWH: I’m in her DMs. We are not the same. 

* Ferocious personalism of Christianity bears repeating

What is in a name?

* God by any other name would smell as sweet?

* Naming and personhood, God and idiosyncracy

* It is not nothing that God has revealed his personal person’s personality to us. 

* Mention my name in your tweets

* Name dropping - the power of association (like bus adverts)

Brand - Branding and signification

* This and not that

* Name above all names

* God Bloggs

The need for words

* Preach the gospel, use words if you have to. You have to.

* Naming conventions, disambiguation

* How do we agree what words mean - semiotics of signifiers. You are imaging God. You are what God means. You are the enfleshment acting as conduit for the meaning of the word God

Words create worlds

* Language and order - the need for naming in structure and hierarchy 

* Let your yes be yes - synthesis and antithesis - the need for naming in linguistic integrity

* God is this, and not-that - Doxxing the Doxological - the need for naming in Authenticate utterances of “God” ~ You have to use words, you have to name God. Coining terminology with which to speak of the divine.

* God is not-that, he is this - Don’t call a thing which is not-God, God. Keeping the outside out and Keeping the inside in. Purity vs muddying the signal. Stewards of language, of iconography.

* Naming no names - the need for naming anon. It is not nothing to bespeak the personhood of a personal universe

* Let your words be few - Over against banter - How terrible language is - How serious a business we are in

Doing things and saying things in God’s name 

* God told me this

* I sense God’s call for this

* I’m going to seek God’s will for this

[1.2] Publishing the name

DOING GOD’S WORK

Are we beginning to commend ourselves again? Or do we need, as some do, letters of recommendation to you, or from you? You yourselves are our letter of recommendation, written on our hearts, to be known and read by all. And you show that you are a letter from Christ delivered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts. 2Cor3

You are a living word. You are my epistles

* Optics of image bearing - Operating under it “A man of God, a people of God, visibly”

* Roles individually as Ambassadors

* Role of the Church collectively - we are a word to the world

Professional People of God

* Preaching, explaining, defining, making explicit claims. 

* Thus sayeth the lord,

[1.3] Being given the name - you are branded by God 

BEING GOD’S PEOPLE

Ambassador of his name

* “the invisible branding of his people, the ultimate identity under it all”

* Identity - who you are

Non-professional people of God

* Baptisms in vain / Benedictions in vain

* He gave us his name. Like a bag with a name in it - Don't leave it unattended

* Aaron branded with the name of the people

[2] VAIN

take up (viz. upon the lips, as Exodus 23:1, Psalm 15:3; Psalm 16:4) … for unreality (Di. ‘zur Nichtigkeit’)—i.e. make use of it for any idle, trivial, or insincere purpose.

* False

* untrue, unreal

* Poison masquerading as medicine

* Phoney

* insincere

* Placebo masquerading as medicine ~ Diluted medicine

* Frivolous

* trivial

* Popcorn masquerading as medicine

* Fruitless

* unproductive, Nothingy and inconsequential, wasteful, embezzled, misrepresentative

* The pill masquerading as medicine

[2.1] Vainly SPEAKING the naming God - generic vanity of de-godding language at large in God’s world.

[2.2] Vainly BEING Christian - the individual corruption of your own personal de-godded faith as one of God’s people.

[2.3] Vainly DOING Church - the formal and organised vanity of unserious church cultures manifesting distortions collectively in Gods church.

[2.1] Vainly SPEAKING the naming God

Language Misuse

* Weighty as shallow

* Yes be yes

* copyright lawyer Flip flops with an apple logo and a nike logo on it

* False, phony, frivolous Christianese

* Good words for good things

Bad words for bad things

Trivialisation

* Progressively diluted and we are complicit in watering it down - most of us received such a weak squash version.

* Yes there is pagan world making images and worshipping idols. But more so, the deracinated church offering thin gruel of mere palliative when there is a cure

Naming

* God’s name is for something - the notion that God is actively involved in the world. There is an urgent purpose to his self-revelation

* Everyone believes in God of some sort, everyone has a placeholder answer to those questions which you answer “god” 

* ~ what caused the world to come into being ~ time+chance+matter

* ~ where do our values comes from, - teleological utilitarianism?

* We’re fumbling about in general revelation, believing that we can keep the idea of God and its benefits, without the name of God.

[2.2] Vainly BEING Christian

This is less a call that Christians be generically more Christian, and it doesn’t intend to be a blunt critique of a half-formed thing as we are all yet in progress. But rather, an admission of my own specific brand of name-in-vain vanity, that allows a such an unfinished presentation to be credited prematurely as the real deal, as sufficient.

Infantilisation as a grave danger in buffered, privileged, subsidised faith contexts - the sentimentalisation of undisciplined disorder, the spiritualisation of lacadaisicality, the rash of timid, translucent, androgynous, cyborg christians tangled up in intramural spats waiting for heaven cozy charmless compassion’s toxic positivity and empathic excess venerated over difficult truth-in-truths of a world beyond.

Ascribing things to God which aren’t

* Aren’t his character

* Aren’t his blessing

* Aren’t his word / calling

* Aren’t the whole story

Not many of you should be teachers

A church is not functioning as a body because its leaders are content to take his name in vain, to draw a salary for mere maintenance of a church bureaucracy but offer no suffering hope for the world. Be angry at those Christians before us who missold unfatherly fathers, unpastoral pastors, an unjust judiciary who desecrated by disenchanting and disordering the world with self-serving ministries of therapeutic moralistic deism, valorising mere busy-ness and managerialism, church bureaucracy maintenance while the world burns. Abominate the joyless joy, hopeless hope, faithless faith, loveless love that lampoons a surrogate of the pastorate with loveless love. Not many of you should be teachers, that is, give up, go home, salt the earth’s scorched ground. Mediocre teachers hope only that no one got hurt, no one noticed, as dealer diluting the product, cutting grams of purest gospel white, with the splenda/aspartame of middle class propriety.

* Teachers can achieve this by passive default, embodying the notion

* Christianity is not more than just the teacher’s gifting - tempted to worship men as angels, tempted to build the model of a whole body around the temperament of the platformed individual

* Christianity is not more than just your depravity - tempted to define against the shadow instance of one toxic individual

Middle class imports into Christianity that augment the product - the great danger that lackluster Christianing is not diluted Christianity, it is a lie. See Monmouth coffee vets the espresso setup of those coffee shops who serve their coffee. God is jealous for God’s name, God’s glory. What is interesting, and unclear to me, is regulating principles for the shepherds of that brand, the stewards of the naming conventions of a given multi-personal body.

Teacher’s to be judged on what they teach and don’t teach - what surrogate Christianity they allow to proliferate unconfronted. Terrible the con evo culture of performative earnestness, terrible more that a culture of its teachers would solidify a conviction that the culture unable to change, unwilling to risk, because the teaching culture is only grift, only PMC, permeated throughout by a self-fulfilling insecurity conflating genuine concern with mere self sabotage, conflating humility with a lack of ambition, permitting presenteeism’s fruitless feckless portraits of vain vanity. I speak for myself.

[2.3] Vainly DOING church

There is something distinct about the civic call to the church to be God’s infrastructure - not merely as a coagulation of incidental Christians, but as a organised collective, an all-things-in-common counter culture, sufficiently organised to make the name of God legible and sufficiently organised to plausibly function as an economy over-against empires, etc.

There is something in the teacher’s role in not-vain churching, with a big enough vision for churching, that it would allow and require a hugely more serious seriousness about the civic function of teaching

Vs a call to 

* Holiness / purity

* Energy / zeal

* Set apartness / distinction

[3] PAIN

“for the LORD will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain.”

A law with a veiled threat - Why did this need to be said?

* You can passively take God’s name in vain

* You can invisibly take God’s name in vain

* And, we will tend to hold that him (him being myself, or indeed others in an enabling codependent permissive conspiracy) guiltless on a no harm no foul basis.

Over against accommodating name-in-vain by passive default, this conclusion / rejoinder that states consequences is a call to severity. The answer to severity is despair. The answer to despair, surely a drive relentless repentance and thanksgiving?That to say, not to make an excuse for it, but to seek grace for it, to seek the resource to heal and be other. The world needs God and so needs contrite Christians daily needing God vs smug Christians.

You have been missold so further missold by reselling guiltlesslessness. There is pain in not-taking the name not-in-vain - there is a doing to do. Sometimes i consider the peace of I didn’t do nothing wrong.. but I failed at basic integrity and stewardship. I didn’t crash the ambulance because I didn’t drive the ambulance.

Unforgivable sins

Matthew 12:31-32, Mark 3:28-29, and Luke 12:10.

[4] GAIN

What motivates you to take God’s name in vain, and what would motivate not-in-vain taking of God’s name?

Healing, security, purpose, freedom

* Naming is world making, but the world is already made. There is freedom in being called to exercise not-ultimate power. There is freedom in being given not-ultimate responsibility

* God has gifted us himself, 

* God has already given us his name.

/End

15 “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. 16 You will recognize them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? 17 So, every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit. 18 A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit. 19 Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 20 Thus you will recognize them by their fruits.

21 “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. 22 On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ 23 And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’

Matthew 7:15-23

VANITY measured by FRUIT

Mt7v17-18 If ever there was a picture of the natural overflow of the essence of an organism, fruit is it. Trees can't plan a marketing campaign, they can't exam cram, there's no voting amongst the leaves, can't hire substitutes, there's no mental striving in this fruitfulness, they cannot but make like a tree. but. There are preconditions to fruitfulness ps1v3 being planted by living water, Mt13v8 in good soil, from good seed. Are you? Am I? Not naturally, we ate bad fruit from a bad tree and put bad seed into a heart of stone, and accordingly death reigned in us from Adam and how can a tree change its nature? 1Cor15v22 It can. And this makes Mt7v18 awesome. 'We are the firstfruits..' 'We are the light of the world..' 'He who began a good work in you will complete it..' 'He will give you the desires of your heart..' Ridiculous. Now, 'You are a good tree, you cannot bear bad fruit!' .. Love God, do what you want.

HOW TO REGULATE VANITY

Mt7v21-22 What is the secret to defeating my terrifying ability to simulate faith, to imitate Christianity, even to manufacture mighty works in my own strength? First, what is the incentive to such self-deception? What is its reward? (1) There is an externally rewarded false-disciplehood: people-pleasing, motivated by the praise of man in rice-christian rituals of performing to Richborne Terrace's tenancy agreement. So, nip that in the bud and ensure that certain faith practices are ninja. For the sake of your own soul find ways to meet God in a secret secret place, don't close your curtains for your quiet time, go underground and leave no trace. (2) Is there also an entirely internal force for self-deception, so to avoid the reality of total-christianity and a holy God, I try to construct categories of 'semi-christian' as if it were valid to be half-married or half-pregnant.. Christianity is not a pick-n-mix moral code, nor merely a subjectively dependent experience of temperamental warm fuzzies, Christianity is not a static state, the image of a thing, a retrospectively projected veneer. Christianity is deeply and actively the difference between 'I never knew you' and Jn21v17 'you know that I love you' Know and Love, be Known and Beloved.

1But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. 2For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, 3heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, 4treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, 5having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people. 6For among them are those who creep into households and capture weak women, burdened with sins and led astray by various passions, 7always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth. 8Just as Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses, so these men also oppose the truth, men corrupted in mind and disqualified regarding the faith. 9But they will not get very far, for their folly will be plain to all, as was that of those two men.

2Tim3v5 https://biblehub.com/2_timothy/3-5.htm 

1Now I would remind you, brothers,a of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, 2and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you—unless you believed in vain.

1Cor15v2 https://biblehub.com/1_corinthians/15-2.htm 

Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. 2For we all stumble in many ways. And if anyone does not stumble in what he says, he is a perfect man, able also to bridle his whole body. 3If we put bits into the mouths of horses so that they obey us, we guide their whole bodies as well. 4Look at the ships also: though they are so large and are driven by strong winds, they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs. 5So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great things.

How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire! 6And the tongue is a fire, a world of unrighteousness. The tongue is set among our members, staining the whole body, setting on fire the entire course of life,a and set on fire by hell.b 7For every kind of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by mankind, 8but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. 9With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God. 10From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers,c these things ought not to be so. 11Does a spring pour forth from the same opening both fresh and salt water? 12Can a fig tree, my brothers, bear olives, or a grapevine produce figs? Neither can a salt pond yield fresh water.

Jm3v1 https://biblehub.com/james/3-1.htm 

7But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to his baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? 8Bear fruit in keeping with repentance. 9And do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father,’ for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham. 10Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees. Every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.

Mt3v8 https://biblehub.com/matthew/3-8.htm 

~ also Lk3v8 https://biblehub.com/luke/3-8.htm 

HOW TO HEAR CRITIQUE OF BAD FRUIT

Mt3v7-8 Harsh? It is possible to become hung up on the eternal destination of characters like, eg Judas, and miss the cautionary tale that is urgently relevant to our own lives. Becoming Pharisaical is so easily done, indulging my own bad character, comforting myself with religion, measuring my own works and ultimately plotting against Jesus.. If you catch me in the act of any of these, I will not consider it simplistic or judgemental if you 'you-brood-of-vipers!' me. This Word, profitable for rebuking 2Ti3v16, is needed to correct bad brooding. And who is my brood, my gaggle, my parliament, my pride? What pathological modes of fellowship do I adopt to hear what I want to hear from well-educated, well-intentioned sympathisers? As the Judas discussion, the aim is no mere remorse, but fruitful repentance, which looks like Jn21v17 feeding his sheep.

13“But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. For you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in.d 15Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of helle as yourselves.

Mt23v15 

HOW TO REGULATE FAUX FAITH

Mt23v15-16 'Ye compass land and sea' has less to do with internationality per se, rather, it denotes any energetic intentionality producing the export of your kingdom's worldview. What Resolutions am I making? What will I thus export? 'Sons of Hell' There's nothing like misdirected missionary zeal to innoculate children from the kingdom of heaven.. so, be less zealous? Seek less evangelism? Risk less, speak less, travel less? By. No. Means. What then? 

In v14 the Pharisees lock people out the Kingdom of Heaven, this is because in v15 they lock people into a Kingdom of self-relation. Belockedness is found in self-relation of the for-itself. First, in v15's critique of missionaryism - when 'crossing land and sea' becomes honorific it is an idol exporting idols. 

Second, in v16, when language becomes self-related, it becomes but nuanced nonsense: the export of superstitious powerplay. Oh Phil, beware christianese, beware the small talk that leads to destruction. .. I want to be zealous against my pride - to be drawn out of my self-relation, by Jesus, through prayer, especially prayer with others and for others. 

42“Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin,g it would be better for him if a great millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea. 

Mk9v42 https://biblehub.com/mark/9-42.htm 

Mk9v43-44 Serious, like 127 Hours serious. So visceral is this image of savage self-surgery it is apt to obscure the worldview Jesus is lampooning. While it is true that Jesus' hyperbole functions at the level: sin-is-grave, like amputation-is-grave;~ I would argue he is being more targeted than that: sin-involves-detachment, precisely like amputation-involves-detachment. "If your body causes you to sin.." is only utterable if your you is alienated from your body. Canet's Little White Lies, a many layered meditation on a community of total dishonesty and disengenuity, includes the encouragement to adultery by one character with the expression 'your body will thank you for it..' A whole world of sin follows from the duplicity of the dichotomy of body+soul. There are manifold other ways I achieve a form of cyborg sinlessness, compartmentalising sin-causes: my genes caused me to sin, my upbringing caused me to sin, some secondary or circumstantial scapegoat is surely to blame for the mess I have made with my depraved heart and corrupted will. Cut it out, Phil.

1And he said to his disciples, “Temptations to sina are sure to come, but woe to the one through whom they come! 2It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were cast into the sea than that he should cause one of these little ones to sin.b 3Pay attention to yourselves! If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him, 4and if he sins against you seven times in the day, and turns to you seven times, saying, ‘I repent,’ you must forgive him.”

Lk17v2 https://biblehub.com/luke/17-2.htm 

REPENT/REBUKE as antidote to false teaching

Lk17v3-4 https://ifttt.com

This is your API for the moral universe.

If they sin, rebuke. [awkward]

If they repent, forgive. [costly]

If they repeat, repeat. [relentless]

👀 "Pay attention to yourselves!" ~ this links the millstone-for-temptation-indictment with mulberry-tree-uprooting faith. It starts with you. You are the node of faith which upside-downs what the world would otherwise do. You are the point of friction. This verse is the pivot: The money mismanagement approbation of prior verses is easily deflected towards the richer-thans. Pay attention to yourselves! And this feels like a crescendo. v10 "to Jerusalem" looms imminent. As D-Day bears down on you, pay attention to your critical and gracious capacity to be brothers: rebuking, forgiving and repeating. Rebuking, forgiving and repeating.

5“Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me, 6but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin,a it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.

Mt 18v6 https://biblehub.com/matthew/18-6.htm 

COME AS CHILDREN as antidote to false teaching

Mt18v3-4 What is a child? A 'turning', a 'becoming', an 'entering'. Turn: as orientation you choose, same (Gk) as Ac7v39 'turned back to Egypt' or Jn12v40 'turn to me and be healed'. To turn is to repent Ac3v16, repent and re-turn. .. Become: an ontology you receive, childlikeness is an unselfconscious subtraction, that is, children don't humble themselves, they are humble. But childlikeness here cannot mean innocence/goodness Ps51v5, and should not mean naivete Eph4v14, nor immaturity Hb6v1. What then is a child? I forget. I held a baby on Sunday and I'm already forgetting those tiniest of tiny fingers, the eminently dropable fragility, the simple utter dependence. Oh, have kids, seek them our, beg borrow and steal them, lest you forget, the irreducible quality of child-being. .. Enter: a domain you have access to. 'Child' here is a 'child-of', a begotteness. When I know I'm beloved-by the King, I can do all things.

Mt18v7-8 Woe to the world because of dem tings: repentable things. Woe to the man by whom the offence comes: culpable persons. There is a reason that Things and Persons are philosophically unpopular. Real things have consequences, real persons have responsibilities. You! Phil! Get your things in order! .. Amputees. I ought to walk with a limp. Leaving facebook is as nailclipping by comparison to the real work needed to cut me from the sources of pride, lust, procrastination, jealousy, self-pity in my life and lifestyle choices. .. N serves St Marks by forbidding that we be vague in metaphors untethered from the horror of amputation. .. the difference in gravity here is between euphemising with Di Franco's Both Hands and Piper calling us to Make War: “..there is a mean streak to authentic self-control..” So be guerilla metaphysicians, desperate, willing to forego 1Ti2v8 and Ec9v10, if only we might see Jesus.

 14If you are insulted for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the Spirit of gloryb and of God rests upon you. 15But let none of you suffer as a murderer or a thief or an evildoer or as a meddler. 16Yet if anyone suffers as a Christian, let him not be ashamed, but let him glorify God in that name. 17For it is time for judgment to begin at the household of God; and if it begins with us, what will be the outcome for those who do not obey the gospel of God? 18And

“If the righteous is scarcely saved,

what will become of the ungodly and the sinner?”c

19Therefore let those who suffer according to God’s will entrust their souls to a faithful Creator while doing good.

1Pt4v17 https://biblehub.com/1_peter/4-17.htm 

Peace peace when there is no peace

33“Again you have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not swear falsely, but shall perform to the Lord what you have sworn.’ 34But I say to you, Do not take an oath at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, 35or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. 36And do not take an oath by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. 37Let what you say be simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything more than this comes from evil.

Mt5v37 https://biblehub.com/matthew/5-37.htm  

9Do not grumble against one another, brothers, so that you may not be judged; behold, the Judge is standing at the door. 10As an example of suffering and patience, brothers, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord. 11Behold, we consider those blessed who remained steadfast. You have heard of the steadfastness of Job, and you have seen the purpose of the Lord, how the Lord is compassionate and merciful. 12But above all, my brothers, do not swear, either by heaven or by earth or by any other oath, but let your “yes” be yes and your “no” be no, so that you may not fall under condemnation.

Jm5v12 https://biblehub.com/james/5-12.htm 

Mt5v35-36 I've got a world-wide warrantee, satisfaction guarantee, if you ain't happy, then just send it right back to me.. .. Oaths, guarantees, promises, are a curious phenomenon. And, at a certain level their 'evil' is unrelated to the truth value of that which is promised (v37). Anything trying to leverage more truth than truth into a “Yes” is trying too hard, is taking power-over, is necessarily introducing dishonesty? .. Of 'swearing by the city', does this apply to branding? Eg. Rimmel vs Rimmel London.. Reasons why we are in London include gaining the power to have our CV 'swear' by London? Beloved, know that you are sufficient, your portfolio can speak for itself, you don't need Babel's seal of approval. .. Of swearing by you head. Your are not your own to offer as collateral, risking your head to 'guarantee' your word, risking your family to show commitment to your job is dangerous and dishonest.

Recap Luke.

0.1 Jesus is the Christ

To be Christian, as many of us here are, is to make the claim that Jesus is the Christ. That is, Jesus saves. Jesus is the answer to the problem of sin in the world.

0.2 Words a bit empty

A bit like Peter, I don't necessarily know what I'm saying when I say that. Jesus is the Christ. I am chronically misconstruing this idea, mangling it, underselling it, allowing it to become mere words, tired and hackneyed expressions for the vaguely good stuff, redemptive and reparative stuff. He is a solution to a problem, a saviour from a given situation. Medicinal, remedial, reactive: Jesus is the Christ. He's the Lord and King and Saviour and he brings peace and love and joy.. and these words all mean about the same thing. Jesus is the Christ vaguely.

0.3 Words loaded with the wrong meaning

I have come to the recognition, the intellectual assent, the earnest conviction, that Jesus is the Christ. Some evangelical individual in my life played the two ways to live card and I conceded checkmate. Jesus is the Christ. And I go boldly forth to then make that Christ in my own image.

As Peter does. He labours to manufacture a non-suffering Christ. You are the Christ, the Kung-fu Christ, the guns-blazing, Romans-defeating , magic Christ. In Mark's account of the Transfiguration, Peter's confession that Jesus is the Christ is then proceeded by Peter seeking to dismantle the plan for suffering.

Mk8v29 And Jesus asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the Christ.” And he strictly charged them to tell no one about him. And he began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again. And he said this plainly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and seeing his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.”

Jesus to be the Christ wrongly ~ I have a wrong-footed notion of what a Christ is.

0.4 Worldview of empty/wrong words

So, by empty words and misdefined words, I have faith in a reduced Christ. And from that I live in a reductive universe, with a dessicated worldview, functionalistic, populated by mundane urgencies, busied clutter of social action and minor moral outrage and the pursuit of global justice with some help from my Christ.

The Christ of that faith is a moral compass for navigating the tricky decisions, and a resource, an occasional motive force, and it does anchor my intellectual framework, but, if I was to sum that faith up, Christ is not so much a light which I have seen directly, but a light which I see by, a torch I shine on other things at an oblique angle on my own terms, and it illuminates them but in a cold light.

0.5 the substance of Christ's glory

The Christ that saves me, the Christ who illuminates my world, is the same cosmic Christ who brought the universe into being.

Christ himself is the object of the Christian worldview, the very substance, the core and it's extents, front and centre, beginning and end.

Christ is the Infinite personal. Infinite. Personal. Infinite - extension without end, platonic geometry, perfect rigour. And yet personal. Discrete and idiosyncratic, named and faced.

Holding those notions in tension scrambles one's brain. Consider what a curious thing it would be to speak to light, to encounter light personified.. weird.

We are finite beings grasping at infinite notions. It is in a flight from that, that I arrive at my more conservative Christ-as-tidy saviour version. It is in fear of those mystic sects at the fringes of Christianity's spectrum whose loopy and superstitious preoccupation with the Transfiguration that means I settle for a neither-nor version of Christ ~ a little less infinite, a little less personal.

The appearance of Christ glowing in a cloud. There is nothing pragmatic about that, there is no tidy three points of application to go home from that. The incomprehensibly vast God appears in unapproachable light. Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.

Luke's account structures a reading of the transfiguration through the Exodus, to make it comprehensible.

1. LIGHT CLOUD TERROR GLORY

1.1 - God uses visual language to reveal truth about himself, an argument from wonder, the interpretation of phenomena: LIGHT - light and cloud as poems-about (application – you are the light of the world)

1.1.1 Glory / Angel of Lord Theophany

they saw his glory and the two men who stood with him.

How to explain what is happening here?

Jesus has set aside glory – kavod of God, his weightiness, his infinity, that which makes him dangerously God, precisely these radiant effects of his radioactive divinity.

So, here on the mountain top is a Glory foretaste – as Moses had a foretaste of the glory that would fill the tabernacle, so the disciples get a glimpse of Jesus post-resurrection restored to glory.

Appearances of God in these terrestrial form take on two types:

1.1.2 Angel of the Lord

Genesis - ~ wrestle with jacob pellial; Abrham at mamre; hagar ~ appears in human form, angel of the lord, messenger of covenant - associated with secone person of trinity

Send angel ahead into promised land, and appear to commander of the army of the lord to joshua

1.1.3 Glory Cloud

Glory cloud, pillar of cloud/fire

Thick darkness comes with fire lightning thunder and burning radiance of sinai

1.1.4 LIGHT and CLOUD

And as he was praying, the appearance of his face was altered, and his clothing became dazzling white.

The primary sensation I get from this meteological encounter with God, this sublime sound and light show rendered in extreme natural phenomena. The primary sensation I get is thick radiance.

God. The force at the centre of reality, the universe . What would it be to encounter such a being, the author of all things, the conductor of the astral chorus, furnace of the engine that keeps that planets in orbit, utterly undomesticated. Imagine we peel back the veil and see the raw divinity, what is at the centre of universe, inside the blast radius of the radioactive core of the workings of the universe, unapproachable, searing heat of light.

1.1.5 GOD IS LIGHT

The main verse on this would be

“This is the message we have heard from Him and announce to you, that God is Light, and in Him there is no darkness at all.” 1Jn1v5

Ezekiel, Habakkuk, the Psalms make similar comparisons and statements about the glory of God as luminous

Paul's Damascus road experience is perhaps the most vivid account of an encounter with God-as-Light:

“At midday, I saw on the way a light from heaven, brighter than the sun, that shone around me and those who journeyed with me” Ac26v12

Ponder light's lightness.

Light. God is Light. A point source, an energy, a wave, a particle, a spectrum, a speed, a mere metaphor? This is the problem of light ~ what is light?

Light: emitted, transmitted, reflected and absorbed. From the rectilinear propagation of an evangelion, to living in the light's warming glow and nuanced colour, to the casting of light and shadow onto the relief of a textured universe.

Light as a handle to my faith, never gets old, never bottoms out, never ceases to draw my imagination to the nooks of new possibility. And, God chooses to reveal himself as a light bright cloud. Why?

Consider the way a cloud's droplets crystalise light's infinite extension into a momentarily bodied presence. Consider the luminous precipitate, the diffuse substantial, fluorescent suspension.

Not an incidental happy coincidence, that God's qualities a little bit like light. God call light into being, for the purpose of making himself known. When you see light, it is viscerally speaking of God. God is Light.

1.1.6 vs disenchanted universe,

How does the culture understand light?

On the one hand, Light is mundane.

Light: a utility along with gas and electric, mere light to be twiddled to mood lighting. Such is our saturation with cheap light, we talk of light pollution – the neon adorned urban epicentres of which, ironically correlate with the pitch black gloomth of their sense of hope and joy.

On the other hand, Light still holds a fascination, a mysterious something which answers a hunger we have for

Avatar – intimate scene beneath a glowing tree, as they walk their footsteps cause the ground to glow, in cinematic short hand for a mysterious divine.

Michael Jackson's Billie Jean video, likewise, he flicks a coin into the homeless guy's pot and it lights up, as the paving slabs light up. This notion that light can be kindled, imparted..

Or Katy Perry's Firework video, resonates with the idea that light is more than light.

~ maybe these are trivial in their depth of understanding, but there is a longing for the light, and humans will find it wherever they can get it.

- Diller&Scofidio's Blur building

- Anthony Gormley's Blind Light – at the Haywood, the thicness of atmospheric prescence.

- But most of all James Turrell whose large scale light art works he speaks of thus “We generally use light to illuminate things, but I was interested in the thingness of light, as a physicality … I want to have a work that is light so that you are looking at light, not something light illuminates. Light itself becomes the revelation.”

God is light. What is Light?

light as energy conductable, storable:

context of Moses face and Glow

the reverse entropy of Jesus pouring contagious light into the system, so, what of clothes as conduits?

LIGHT IS CONTAGIOUS

which leads to the second observation from this passage

OBJECTS CAN CARRY LIGHT

1.2 - God transforms artefacts as a parable about reality, the idea that inter matter can be a conduit for glory.

(application - We are being transformed from glory to glory)

And as he was praying, the appearance of his face was altered, and his clothing became dazzling white.

CLOTHES & CHANGE

Transfiguration, change in substance and effects

~ literal transfiguration, and application

~ a spooky universe of substances

Poetic of changing clothes

spooky eastern traditions

transfigure - in usual language

~ greek word here for transfiguration is metamorphosis

~ as a butterfly changes

graphic images

face shine like sun

clothes white -

illumined and warmed by sun

cannot look at sun lest damage eyes

- always keep the sun at an angle to our vision

make this comprehensible

CLOTHES

Going back to my notes I wrote on this two years ago, I’d just been at Greenbelt and had been chewing over Katherine Maxwell Rose’s talk about clothing justice. She is absolutely right, clothes shouldn't be slave-made, blood bought, disposably cheap, and chemically toxic.. but the clothes in view here.. och.

The bible's view of artefacts such as clothing is way spookier. Consider the bleeding woman touches Jesus' cloak Lk8 and the sick are cured by Paul's handkerchief Ac19.

“And God was doing extraordinary miracles by the hands of Paul, so that even handkerchiefs or aprons that had touched his skin were carried away to the sick, and their diseases left them and the evil spirits came out of them.”

This is the Catholocism your mother warned you about. It is a vital and more enchanted universe – not pantheism, as if we were to give spiritual agency to these artefacts, but the bible is unafraid to consider that physical objects can be embued with very significant poetic meaning and so carry power of a spiritual nature.

Considering clothing in this way draws us up and beyond Katherine's ethical emphasis on important injustice-limitation

- And, beyond Mt6's faith for provision in not worrying about clothes, considering the lillies

- And beyond 1Pt3's idol-limitation don't let your adorning be in gold jewelry.

- toward a transfigurational understanding of the clothes we wear, the world as you know it has the capacity to be a conduit for Light.

An 20th century architect of Dutch monasteries Hans van der Laan considers “architecture is liturgical insofar as it transfigures ordinary material.”

The Christian life of culture-making relentlessly is to transform the ordinary as water-to-wine, we anticipate the coming wedding, and so, like Mt22 seek to dress the world accordingly in wedding garments.

2. OLD TESTAMENT READING OF THIS EVENT:

- THE NEW EXODUS

- THE FULFILMENT OF LAW AND PROPHETS

And behold, two men were talking with him, Moses and Elijah, who appeared in glory and spoke of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.

Moses and Elijah, one the founder law-giver concerned with the beginnings of the chosen people, and one the foremost reformer prophet concerned with the endings and eschaton of the chosen people. Two Old Testament characters noted for their mountaintop encounters with God and their mysterious disappearances.

This is not David Beckham endorsing a product, celebrities coming to turn on the Christmas lights. Moses and Elijah are towering symbols of everything that has come before, because everything comes to a head in this moment. The Old Testament is the powder keg and Jesus is the spark.

All law and prophecy are a longing, and Jesus is the longed-for, but, while the longing for a saviour is generic, everybody is looking for something, the saviour himself is specific and his specificity is rehearsed/patterned by the Exodus, and his specificity is given articulation via The Law and The Prophets.

The Transfiguration was and is and is meant to be mind blowing. Encounter God as Light, glimpsing infinity, should leave you struggling to make a coherent sermon on it. But, exactly for the reason, Luke focuses on this narative parallel to Exodus, not merely as a literary wink, but as the key to why glory comes.

The Exodus is perennial, it is the key narrative, Jesus calls a people to himself, again and again, he does so as a new and better Moses, he does so perfectly, .

The Law and the Prophets are perpetual. Permanently relevant, constantly reinvented as harbingers of Christ in new cultures speaking of Christ still today..

2.1 EXODUS

- Exodus is the narrative key, the practice by which we are carried by God from A to B, from all slaveries to all freedoms. The Christian life is a journey, further up, further in, it is ecstatic, it is on mission.

~ Luke slightly more than the other evangelists sets up his narrative to draw attention to the Exodus parallel, with Jesus as the new Moses:

- Mt Sinai and Mount of Transfiguration

~ Feeding 5k in groups of 50s, out of egypt in 50s, into promised land in 50s

~ fed by manna in desert, miraculous bread

~ Moses takes up companions - ex 24 - joshua and others goes up on the mountain

~ Jesus takes three up with him

~ they are up/away for 6 days (Luke counts inclusive Roman days, Mark's 6)

~ This is my beloved son, hear him.

Similar said of moses “hear him”

- Jesus face glows, Moses face glows

~ Moses comes down to immediate rejection disobedience and chaos and a golden calf, so Jesus too returns to his disciples in village

~ Jesus comes down mountain and finds chaos, his disciples failing to cast a demon out of a boy, a demon who 'shatters' the boy.

~ And he says, oh faithless and peverse generation - language taken from moses

~ then immediately follows Jesus sends out the 72 as Moses likewise after Sinai 70+2 )

This is the bigger Exodus. Jesus discusses his departure with Moses and Elijah. Literally “his Exodus” in the greek. This is massive, its going to be a bigger Exodus.

2.2 LAW AND PROPHETS

- The Law and the Prophets, paradigms of interpreting God, structures for displaying God. Moses represents the Law. Elijah represents the Prophetic.

The are the archetypal, the quintessential, the textbook form of Law and Prophet. That is why they, rather than any other OT celebrity are there on the mountain.

Jesus says on the road to Emmaus - Lk24v27 that the Law and the Prophets are concerned, centrally, with Jesus.

And Jesus claims in Mt5v17 “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.”

What is the Law?

What is the Prophets?

Immediately, they refer to certain chunks of the Hebrew scripture, which create moral categories, and which anticipate a servant King in Bethelem. But more essentially, and more broadly, Law and Prophecy are categories of human experience which are crystallised in Jesus, find their perfection in him.

But beyond that, I think we need to wrestle with the

Indeed, the perpetuation of prophecy is crucial to Jesus' point here, as it is when he speaks a woe in Mt23v29-31. The notion that prophets *were* is what kills the prophets that *are*.

Jesus claims: (v11) “Elijah does come.” or “Elijah comes.” Present tense, Indicative Mood, Middle Voice. Elijah here stands as a Type, the prophetic mode, which is enduring.

Constantly speaking of what the spirit of God is doing, constantly relaying the Father's heart, constantly preparing the ground for the Christ-seed, constantly calling the Ahabs and Herods away from their Jezebels and Salomes, constantly speaking the original truths, the timeless, timely and urgent: the jealous love of God.

Non-exhaustively, and by way of provocation, I suggest some ways of painting these two aspects which find their fulfilment, their harmony, their answer and exemplar in Christ. Hear me lightly, but, can we say:

Law describes what should be done objectively. Prophecy interprets what God is doing idiosyncratically.

Law is timeless. Prophecy is timely.

Law is the legal precedent constituted in the past. Prophecy is the vision which forges the trajectory of the future.

Law is the thou-shalt-not. Prophecy is the what-if-when?

Law is the establishment. Prophecy is reform.

Law is truth. Prophecy is Grace.

Law is form. Prophecy is content.

Law is fact. Prophecy is meaning.

Law is prose. Prophecy is poetry.

Law is concrete. Prophecy is allusive.

Law orders the creation now. Prophecy anticipate the eschaton to come.

Human life exists in the now, looking towards the not yet. Law and Prophecy are means of grace by which navigate the world in communion with God.

Perpetual prophecy.

Perennial Exodus

when the law and the prophets are personified, what do they want to talk about - the route to jerusalem, a tactitical discussion

Spoke of his exodus?

3.1. BELOVED AND EMBATTLED

RECAP

- Who is Jesus? The Christ.

- Go up Mountain and encounter GOD-AS-LIGHT – this unprotected welding arc of hih voltage current

- Witnessing and explaining this event are LAW and PROPHECY.

Then out of the cloud comes this voice: This I my son, my chosen one. Listen to him. -

What's Jesus doing here?

Jesus does this for the joy, he with draws in prayer to commune with the father. This is his source. In prayer. Going to the father. Drawing on his beloved identity to face the task.

Very basically, this fits us back into the two stages of Jesus ministry and aligns this moment with the Baptism, whish began the first stage of Jesus ministry.

What's Peter doing here?

Losing his mind.

3.2. PETER's RESPONSE

Peter's response was the wrong response. Why?

3.2.1 lets get busy. lets make something i can control. A sheltered indoor space.

peter's utilitarian response

shelters – no departures, No Exodus.

shelters – all equal no distinction for Jesus

build a tabernacle?

this is the place

Peter and the architect's impulse: with an insatiable pre-emptive nostalgia, he seeks the preservation of the necessarily transient, he seeks the domus-tication of the divine, and so gets lost in the presence-to-hand of this Kodak moment.

What do you do with your Holy Moments? Go and tell? Give it away? Or sit on it, abstract it, frame it, pickle it, holy-huddle it.

Jesus seeks to transfigure us by also dis-figuring us of our idols. Peter has glimpsed a glimmer, but, before a church is built on this rock, a certain stripping away of camping-trip images must occur. Saunders scathingly critiques Alexander as having a taste only for easy-going, leisureable, recreational, vacational architectures. Certainly this is the danger, to wish all of life was Iwerne, as if we could stay at L'Abri forever, as if it were Christmas every day. Don't you know there's a war on.

3.2.2 lets create a perfrct communuty group. Just us, you me and Moses. A virtual church inside my headphones

Our high points become our snare, exactly as Peter in Mk9v5 hopes to stay there, with that bunch, away from the complicated crowds downstairs.

But you are filled to be poured out, you are called to Speak, so you should be given to giving yourself away. Come down the mountain, don't band together committees of good intentions, but rather go out, go down, to the mess below. Because God does, his going out is as sure as the dawn.

Ephemeral messaging vs kodak moment

certainty, assurance, Peter's comment on "more precious"

5. OUR RESPONSE

Who do you see yourself in, in this passage.

5.1 “Listen to him” "looked up and saw only jesus" - Grasp who Jesus is.

2Cor3v18 And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.

2Pt1v16 “..we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For when he received honour and glory from God the Father, and the voice was borne to him by the Majestic Glory, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased,” we ourselves heard this very voice borne from heaven, for we were with him on the holy mountain. And we have the prophetic word more fully confirmed, to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place,

Seeing Jesus changed, different, anew. The transfiguration mountain top is like the point at which the curtain ripped, a glimpse of John's second sight: Rev1v13-18. This is the point of meditating on Christ himself. This is the purpose of meditating on Christ himself, to see him a fraction more clearly, more as he really is. Transfigure mine eyes, oh Lord.

peter fell facee down

so will we

5.2 Go transfigure

There is an aesthetic of heaven, this passage has been acutely visual. The task of communicating this is not limited to professional Christian artists, we are all tasked to participate in the image of God. We all live out an exodus, a leaving slavery, a journey to freedom. And in even the small things, we live subjunctively, allegorically, we are poems-about, analogies for, diagrams about eternity. And the Light of etenity, I would posit is more harrowing that Thomas Kinkade tends to paint. There is a need for art as pyromanic as Steve. Health and safety be damned colour party. We transfigure. Stripping old images. Making new. Water to wine and the alchmy of christian art

So, there is the doing of Light, drawing diagramatic and poetic transfigurations, as pictures of the Exodus.

5.3 Go and be Light

But most totally and for everyone, we are called to be Light.

You are the light of the world Mt 5

We too are children of light

Jn12v36 you have the light

1Th5v5 the light has you

Paul (as Katy Perry in Firework) tells the Philippians to Shine like stars Ph2v15

A light is lit, actively, intentionally. From nothing to something. Into your great darkness is spoken a "let there be Light.." You were lit for a purpose. You were sparked at a price. The gospel in you is an ignition bringing to blaze all the fuel God put in you, an uncontainable fire hazard.

And light lights, the rectilinear propagation of that which is nowin you cannot but bring a richness of colour and texture to visibility in the room and along the street and across the sky.

Concluding thoughts

infinite God, incarnation, short circuit,

the bizarre

the elegance of God's plan

how would you design it?

- Jesus is God is Light

- God has been Light and will be Light

- That light is the power to overcome.

- We've beheld it and not understood.

- Gains its coherence in being contexted in Exodus

- Propels an application in so transfiguring.

The sin problem, incarnation,

broken hearted hunger

Transfig experience vs biblical text suffciency

prophetic art anticipates heaven

~ The Jews, that is, the church qua existing covenant community, has a *light-for-glory*. Light from within, Christ the filament gloriously emitting light outwards from the bulb of the church. Christ's coming into the world is light-for-glory, your glory, Christian. Christ-In-You-the-[luminous]-Hope-of-Glory.

~ The Gentiles, that is, the world, your colleagues, your family, your housemates, have *light-for-revelation*. From this moment, they can now see their hand in front of their face. Radiant light transmitted through the ether from the lit-for-glory saved-ones, casts a world brighter and more shapely, coherent and navigable. Light-for-revelation is task lighting, lamps-unto-paths, neon signage.

_# I will hold the Christ-light for you_

_in the night-time of your fear;_

spontaneous human combustion

beyond the consumer level

back up stream to the main board, raw energy

so luminous

effervescent

harrowing perfect light

turn off the lights, and i'll glow. - vanilla ice

I do not simply want to pad around theological tidbits

woo you, and compell you, to a conviction that Jesus is not merely, in all probability, a superlative human being in a class of his own.

1. Ponder the event

2. Read it through the OT

3. Live like such.

How do we make sense of glory?

- past and present

- exodus

- law and prophets

~ towards action.

baby-lord-jesus. Ricky Bobby ra

Spooky glowing orb at centre of univrrse

This aspect outsifr my experience

Reformation jesus lesd open to superstitions

And the word, conjures semantically a lack of substance – bud-lite, muller-light, pepsi-lite, the sugar-free, fat-free version of a product..

Elijah comes. Would you know it if you saw it? Three connected misapprehensions keep the disciples in the Scribe's dark.

1. Form. Wrongly venerating Elijah as an Old Greybeard historic character ~ literal, specific, limited, pluperfect (woe to that Mt23v29-31), as if prophecy was. Prophecy is. Elijah comes.

2. Function. Wrongly considering Elijah's sufficient Elijian role as completely completing moral reform and political overthrow. A whitewashed and rosy-tinted account of the good-enough prophet will disqualify John-the-Baptist, and we would-be-way-preparers, as not-Elijian-enough.

3. Messianic prerequisites. Wrongly limiting that the Messiah only comes to an already perfected people, that the Saviour comes only when there is nothing more to save us from. Elijah comes and Jesus comes. We participate prophetically in preparing the way and pointing the way, imperfectly, incompletely but supernaturally and substantially.

And a voice came out of the cloud, saying, “This is my Son, my Chosen One; listen to him!”

~ “with whom I am well please”

- baptism and transfiguration - section breaks ahead of challenging ministry, two sections of jesus ministry

- soaking in a beloved identity

We encounter God in the wilderness, establish identity of belovedness

Just as jtb bore witness, now we have a greater set of witnesses, beginning of ministry leading up to

~ Structure of Luke,

second stage of ministry

exodus

~ Demonic opposition

patterns in gospel

- baptism of jesus and transfig

- 2 stages gallilean vs judean

- both preceded by witness and question/speculation about identity

~ who is jesus, followed by witness.

- precede a new stage of ministry

- followed by demonic

- transfiguration glory - more so than baptism

ministry in two key stages - face set towards jerusalem, and emphasis on departure discussion

8 Now in the second year after their coming to the house of God at Jerusalem, in the second month, Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel and Jeshua the son of Jozadak made a beginning, together with the rest of their kinsmen, the priests and the Levites and all who had come to Jerusalem from the captivity. They appointed the Levites, from twenty years old and upward, to supervise the work of the house of the LORD. 9 And Jeshua with his sons and his brothers, and Kadmiel and his sons, the sons of Judah, together supervised the workmen in the house of God, along with the sons of Henadad and the Levites, their sons and brothers.

10 And when the builders laid the foundation of the temple of the LORD, the priests in their vestments came forward with trumpets, and the Levites, the sons of Asaph, with cymbals, to praise the LORD, according to the directions of David king of Israel. 11 And they sang responsively, praising and giving thanks to the LORD,

“For he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever toward Israel.”

And all the people shouted with a great shout when they praised the LORD, because the foundation of the house of the LORD was laid. 12 But many of the priests and Levites and heads of fathers’ houses, old men who had seen the first house, wept with a loud voice when they saw the foundation of this house being laid, though many shouted aloud for joy, 13 so that the people could not distinguish the sound of the joyful shout from the sound of the people’s weeping, for the people shouted with a great shout, and the sound was heard far away.

Adversaries Oppose the Rebuilding

Now when the adversaries of Judah and Benjamin heard that the returned exiles were building a temple to the LORD, the God of Israel, 2 they approached Zerubbabel and the heads of fathers’ houses and said to them, “Let us build with you, for we worship your God as you do, and we have been sacrificing to him ever since the days of Esarhaddon king of Assyria who brought us here.” 

3 But Zerubbabel, Jeshua, and the rest of the heads of fathers’ houses in Israel said to them, “You have nothing to do with us in building a house to our God; but we alone will build to the LORD, the God of Israel, las King Cyrus the king of Persia has commanded us.”

4 Then the people of the land discouraged the people of Judah and made them afraid to build 5 and bribed counselors against them to frustrate their purpose, all the days of Cyrus king of Persia, even until the reign of Darius king of Persia.

6 And in the reign of Ahasuerus, in the beginning of his reign, they wrote an accusation against the inhabitants of Judah and Jerusalem.

The Letter to King Artaxerxes

7 In the days of Artaxerxes, Bishlam and Mithredath and Tabeel and the rest of their associates wrote to Artaxerxes king of Persia. The letter was written in Aramaic and translated. 8 Rehum the commander and Shimshai the scribe wrote a letter against Jerusalem to Artaxerxes the king as follows: 9 Rehum the commander, Shimshai the scribe, and the rest of their associates, the judges, the governors, the officials, the Persians, the men of Erech, the Babylonians, the men of Susa, that is, the Elamites, 10 and the rest of the nations whom the great and noble Osnappar deported and settled in the cities of Samaria and in the rest of the province Beyond the River. 11 (This is a copy of the letter that they sent.) 

“To Artaxerxes the king: Your servants, the men of the province Beyond the River, send greeting. And now 12 be it known to the king that the Jews who came up from you to us have gone to Jerusalem. They are rebuilding that rebellious and wicked city. They are finishing the walls and repairing the foundations. 13 Now be it known to the king that if this city is rebuilt and the walls finished, they will not pay tribute, custom, or toll, and the royal revenue will be impaired. 

14 Now because we eat the salt of the palace and it is not fitting for us to witness the king’s dishonor, therefore we send and inform the king, 15 in order that search may be made in the book of the records of your fathers. You will find in the book of the records and learn that this city is a rebellious city, hurtful to kings and provinces, and that sedition was stirred up in it from of old. That was why this city was laid waste. 16 We make known to the king that if this city is rebuilt and its walls finished, you will then have no possession in the province Beyond the River.”

The King Orders the Work to Cease

17 The king sent an answer: “To Rehum the commander and Shimshai the scribe and the rest of their associates who live in Samaria and in the rest of the province Beyond the River, greeting. And now 18 the letter that you sent to us has been plainly read before me. 19 And I made a decree, and search has been made, and it has been found that this city from of old has risen against kings, and that rebellion and sedition have been made in it. 20 And mighty kings have been over Jerusalem, who ruled over the whole province Beyond the River, to whom tribute, custom, and toll were paid. 21 Therefore make a decree that these men be made to cease, and that this city be not rebuilt, until a decree is made by me. 22 And take care not to be slack in this matter. Why should damage grow to the hurt of the king?”

23 Then, when the copy of King Artaxerxes’ letter was read before Rehum and Shimshai the scribe and their associates, they went in haste to the Jews at Jerusalem and by force and power made them cease. 24 Then the work on the house of God that is in Jerusalem stopped, and it ceased until the second year of the reign of Darius king of Persia.

Ezra 4 - intro

Between the Trump assassination attempt and the Euros 2024 final - we have no small pool of conceptual reference for a cosmos in which conflict is played out, and yet, I rarely foreground this theological apprehension.

* [1] Vision - God is doing a new thing.

* God is starting a new thing, a second chance, a city rebuilt. 

* Who is building this Temple/City? What is it to do a thing? Singularity of purpose, purity, vision..

* [2] Opposition - ways it is opposed

* How was it stopped?

* What stops us doing the thing?

* Who is defining what we are against, what agency - merely to acknowledge there are two sides on the pitch

* [3] Culpability / complicity - ways we oppose it

* Are we the baddies?

* How do we do it?

[1] Ezra Context / Intro

1.1 OT overall - salvation history prototype and realism

* We should be a people marked by our well-callibrated grasp of the forces in play in the practical, spiritual, political, ecclesiological world we conduct our lives at home/work/play 

* Realism - Steeped in realism - fallen world, ideals, and enemies

* No bed of roses, 

* This is the way things are, the recurring patterns, the long yearning for a sufficient saviour, casting towards the way things should be

* Realism - Cautionary - ways in which We are the baddies - we are the older brother, the persecutor, the pharisee

* Realism - God is in charge, promises are faithful

* God influencing the arc of history, 

* Reset / second chances / it’s not over til its over

* Over against decline - but as powerless people, we face the need to reform, away from idolatry

* People fail, but god’s promises don’t fail

* Not a text book, no easy answers.

* Filter, not so simple as be-like-ezra, 

* Still the case - world fallen, we capable of mischief, God in charge, planning salvation

1.2 Pre-ezra and the run-up - Empire

* Nebuchadnezzar into Babylon 586 BC ~ Daniel and co

* 70yrs exile

* Cyrus the great - game changer in Babylon. Cyrus sending people bac variously - not just Israelites 559 - 530 

* Ez 1-6 - 536BC

* Ez 7-10 - 458BC

* Nehemiah 445-432 bc

1.3 Ezra 1-3 recap - Second chances

Chapter 1 - Prep

[1] In order to fulfil the word of God, Jeremiah prophesied a 70year exile, that time is up, now God is doing something new - you have to know God is in charge. Even though they didn’t see it, god had been doing something all along. 

[2] These big cogs, beyond us. God has used these wider circumstances - both as the incidental context and the direct content, is using these.. Cyrus was a fill in the blanks guy

[3]  Participate - we need to expect to materially support what he is doing in your life. If you are able go, otherwise support. Giving campaign, matched and lead - active support comes from leaders. God’s stuff

Chapter 2 - Assemble a team - SPJ

Priest would be good to have with you

Verifiable

* Nehemiah - different numbers as some people dropped out

* Intercessors - priests

* Examples - levites

* Worship leaders, lifters

* Supporters - Temple servants - people who love you despite who you are

v64 etc

Some people aren’t qualified / Wrong people in leadership

Hard to go from patter of life from dark to light Vs “broken britain”

Takes an entire team

Chapter 3 - Steve

* Doing this as one - 3v1

* Do it by the book - national values 3v2

* Altar Zerubbabel and Joshua

* Daily sacrifice - faithful, biblical, literal

* Do productivity and fecundity

When moving forward, enemy pays attention

Chapter 4 - Adversaries

As we then tip in chapter 4, we meet adversaries

What is your theology of enemies? i practically tend to live with a naive no-enemies approach, as if all friction is merely material affordances of the world of rust, entropy and incompletion. A theology of enemies feels an Alien notion to me - vs Peaceable toleration, there are no dynamics of competition, we live after the end of history, suspicious of the notion that there are enemies - that would seem to be the problematic. Culpably naive. Perpetual. Not after the end of history. Not that we need a post-911 renaissance of violence.

No enemies

[1] No enemies, only sub-par?

* Good as the enemy of the best, Enemies including triviality

* Mild mannered as the enemy of the actually redemptive

[2] No enemies: not doing something that is Ambitious and so precarious

Identify with city building being goal oriented

This notion seems clear-ish in marriage - - Ambitious project with a purity dimension, Exclusivism; Singularity of purpose; Thinghood, this and not that; Clarity of focus; Be very very what you are. Distinction, antitheses. Conscious that we we are doing is this and not that. The what-it-is-ness of what we are doing. Selectivity and exclusivity  

* Practical

* Symbolic

What are we as we opposed in? vs The danger of being unserious

[3] No enemies: not doing something that requires nuanced and explicit cooperation 

Generalised holiness, but also specific architecture, for a specific place. Denizens of a privatised christendom, 

* Who you worship

* Who you Allie with

* Boundary of our us-ness, what we bond ourselves to

* Club that exists for the benefit of its non members

Friend / Enemy?

* High and necessary view of forms of covenant friendship.

* A realistic view that there are two sides on the pitch.

Drama, the sportsball - contest happens over there, conflict tension targets, ambition, doing the doing of a life over-against. Naive religiousness will save you. Naive that it is not urgent. Tin foil hat vs Screw tape

Enemies:

* Identify it vs create it

* Helpful agonism vs exacerbated antagonism

* Dichotomy is necessary, To then subvert

* What is the alternative? - naivete, a self-righteous pacifism, Laissez faire, nothing to live or die for, Broad morass of other others, Mere collectives, Columns in a generalised bureaucracy, Passionless, Managerialism, Synthetic silt of bland 

Friends

* What does the friendship of common cause involve?

* Paying tribute and the relationship of the christian project to the state

* Vested interests

* Paul and the evil spirit cast out

Useful categories - Friendship enmity

* Co-occuring in one person

* Symbolic, not necessarily ad hominem

* De facto, without needing to seek out or make enemies, 

* Conflict over finite resource

Implications

* What can we cooperate in building and what not

* Not unequally yoked

* Not against us is for us

* People of peace

* Opsec wise as serpents

[2] Chapter 3-4 - Attacks

What would be attacked and how?

* Derail it, 

* Disrupt the team

* Diluted

* Discouragement

* Deception

* Distraction

* Disinformation

[1] Nostalgia

“..old men who had seen the first house, wept with a loud voice when they saw the foundation of this house being laid..”

* Old guard vs a bunch of 20-somethings

* 3v8 20years old to supervise

* 3v12 old men who had seen the former house

Old guard weeping - disappointment / discouragement / nostalgia. Despising the day of small things (after this delay, in ez6, Darius decrees this is built to scale). Impatience and nostalgia. First attack was self-inflicted. They didn’t look in the faces of the young, they looked in the stones of the old - hearts dedicated to get in started. I think this is salient - I check out in melacholia.

Loud melancholy attracts the attention, blood in the water.

* Herod in Matthew 2 - All of Jerusalem with him

* Cinematic melodramatic - zoom out - like Ross “my sandwich”

[2] Deception

4v2 “Let us build with you, for we worship your God as you do, and we have been sacrificing to him ever since the days of Esarhaddon king of Assyria who brought us here.” 

* To the young untested leaders + The discouraged elders - they don’t care what we think.. 

* the allure of scaling through compromised partnership - risk of a generalised project - stay small and precise

 “You have nothing to do with us in building a house to our God; but we alone will build to the LORD”

[3] Discouragement / Distraction

V4 “..the people of the land discouraged the people of Judah..”

* V4 - distraction, merepeem - relaxed them.. Mə-rap-pîm lackadaisicality

* The role of courage and encouragement

[4] The use of fear

“..made them afraid to build..”

https://sacredtexting.substack.com/i/55191092/courage-for-sadness

What are you afraid of? Bluster boogie man

Types of Fear / Core Anxieties for those prone to general anxiety, 

* 1) fear of abandonment 

* 2) loss of identity 

* 3) loss of meaning 

* 4) loss of purpose 

* 5) fear of death, including the fear of sickness and pain

The role of fear individually vs the role of fear as a collective

[5] Subsidy

“..and bribed counsellors against them to frustrate their purpose..”

* The allocation of resources

* The creation of incentives 

[6] Speculation / deception

“..rebuilding that rebellious and wicked city. They are finishing the walls and repairing the foundations. 13 Now be it known to the king that if this city is rebuilt and the walls finished, they will not pay tribute, custom, or toll, and the royal revenue will be impaired..”

* Projection (they won’t send tax revenue)

* Selective view of history - true, but not the whole story

* Whataboutism

[3] Are we the baddies & how I oppose the work of God

* Locating dynamics of enmity

* Locating motives, economic vested interests - Petty jealousies and threats

* Intramural qualms, factions, shades of difference

[4] Post-script - opposing Jesus and the enneagram

For another time, but I would be interested to explore enneagramatic enemisation - that is, ways in which 9 temperamental archetypes loosely structured around 9 besetting sins, would give rise to specific enmities.

* Dynamics of opposition - individually, but also corporately

* Jealousy, fear, disgust - but that he represents an embarrassment of human potential, and casts into stark relief 

9 Types

* inconvenience of his truth telling and the purity of his black-and-whiting (1)

* embarrassment of his superior help (2)

* jealousy of his popular image (3)

* the potency of his accurate melancholy dirge in the marketplace - like the suppression of Sadness in Inside Out (4)

* the threat of his knowledge, his ability to out-think (5)

* the resilient fortitude of his passionate loyalty (6) 

* the irreligious gregariousness of his wine (7)

* qua spearhead of the kingdom, for turning over the tables, for calling out the hypocrisy. (8)

* transgressive empathy (9)

* WHAT / CONTEXT: Arc of the Narrative - Build Back Better

* Rebuilding Jerusalem - what is Jerusalem?

* Jerusalem as Physical

* Jerusalem as Problematic

* Jerusalem as Destroyed

* Scattered and gathered / Post Christendom / Post Covid

* Rebuilding Jerusalem - what is rebuilding? 

* Rebuilding as Infrastructure - Project Management, Discerning, Planning, Executing, a coordination problem

* Rebuilding as Advocacy vs Opposition

* Rebuilding as Influence - minority / exile position

* SO WHAT / PASSAGE: King-Prophet relationship

* Relationship of Prophet to State 

* Relationship of Prophet to Church (people and leader and place)

* The Person of the King

* Cipher

* Power Peace

* Questions

* The Person of Nehemiah

* Being Prophetic - hearing / discerning privately

* COURAGE FOR SADNESS

* Feelings

* Prayer

* Being Prophetic - speaking / acting publicly

* COURAGE FOR ACTION

* Favour and Asking

* Wisdom and Organising

* NOW WHAT / APPLY: Being Prophetic now

* Hearing, Praying, Planning, Acting

* Internally and Politically

* How to influence 

* How to put yourself in the way of influencers

* How to speak publicly 

INTRO

Looking ahead, the next few weeks, we’re going to have a sequence of evening service sermons looking long at a construction project involving a complex group of people rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem, and the incumbent external trials and internal conflict and the ensuing revival of a faithful covenant people.

They’ve been in exile, they’ve returned and now sit under conditions of Babylonian and Persian military occupation - the identity of a people group imperilled with extinction. We are looking at them at the kind of almost at the end of the Old Testament. In terms of the chronology where they've had various seasons of the Israelite people and here they are imperilled with extinction ~ they seem to be perpetually imperilled to the extinction, but here the remnant left in this shell of Jerusalem and the people far flung are in all whittled down to a remnant eeking out a living on the fringe of empire.

What does this mean for us? What could this as a book mean for us? How do we live into this? How does this speak to us? How is God offering us good news. How is he offering us a pattern book? What can we take away in our personal individual lives? And what can we take away from this in our life together that we could maybe practise and apply in the world and for the world so to enter into the real real and advance the cause of true truth.

There's a sort of low res analogy that we are also a “remnant people” and we are also “under occupation” but I wonder that there's more going on here.

We are rebuilding, we have things to build as Monty Hall, there is this church building, there are these literal built artefacts that we are the stewards of we can think of it in those terms.

We are rebuilding, proverbially, relationally, post-pandemically. The evening service has just been looking at Ephesians and what it is to be a unity, to revive and rebuild a unity - so now, housing that in a world and contending with a world where there are buildings and the need for practical facilities for ministry and the architectural display of God in the world,

Previously. We've read through Nehemiah receiving terrible news, Nehemiah going away and weeping for four months. And so now here we are at the point at which Nehemiah comes back into world-facing mode.

He is in my rubric a prophet, and wearing this hat we see him here speaking to a King, I think this is the junction in the narrative that springboards the whole - all the actions, all that unfolds in Jerusalem, all the rebuilding, all the conflicts, all sprung from this moment. This is the moment where it could all go wrong, it could never happen. Everything that we now take for granted in the entire Christ history of salvation. Just so, we're perpetually at d-day junctions, forks in the decision tree of life, high stakes gambles on outcomes for risk ventured. This perhaps more than many but perhaps in the tension you can relate your life to the question: how should prophets speak to kings?

[1] CONTEXT - Exile/Captivity - Then and Now

587 BC with the sacking of Jerusalem. During the time of Nehemiah, the Persian Empire had reached its greatest extent, engulfing nearly the entire Near East. In 539 B.C. the Persians under Cyrus the Great defeated the Babylonians and absorbed the lands of Israel and Judah (known as Beyond the River) into his empire. 

Ezra 1–6 537–515 B.C.Ezra 7–Nehemiah 13 458–433 B.C.

The next year he allowed the people of Judah (now called Jews) to return home and rebuild the temple of the Lord.  Several waves of returning Jews continued to resettle in Judea, and Nehemiah was granted permission to rebuild Jerusalem’s ruined walls around 445 B.C.

But what is what is Jerusalem in this? There's a physical geography/urbanism to Jerusalem and as such it's interesting that it's practical. Further, it's symbolic and further, it's destroyed.

1.1.1 Israel/Jerusalem - physical geography - pragmatic

We live in cities. We have some sense of the physical, practical facilities by which we do our life.

let's start like applicate and less about geography, even there is geographical thing because God was about the way he has manifested himself to his people and their enemies.

At that time there was a sort of geographicity and now we are geographically distributed but there's still a witness.

And I think sometimes maybe we don't go, and we sort of take that for granted, there's a sort of vulnerability to like being a displaced. People, you no longer have the, the affordances of, a, of a physical home, of shelter of, doing the doing of, of life. And so, one thing that Nehemiah is is doing is sort of humanitarian, it's pragmatic.

~ interesting to think about Jerusalem more as a kit of parts in future weeks

if it's to say the church isn't like there's there's some artefact that's material that he is concerned about and I don't think we have in the new covenant entirely released from material existence and materials. Containing symbolism and kind of meaning like it is still a legitimate. Hopefully, all belongings, totally new, covenant Christians to have a emotional and urgent sense of just specific fixation around restoring, right? 

Speak to your text like I calls presence with his people, etc. See it. Say it. But I think that's a, that's an uncomfortable thing to go hard for like in a, in a like, it.

It would seem like the more a more sanitised and more easily received application of any sermon or whatever would be to say, it is within your heart. Like God wants to restore something in, you kind of thing, rather than saying the, the fabric of the Church of England, which is in ruins, let us literally rebuild it because it literally is God's dwelling place.

And it is symbolically like infrastructurally within our kind of very practical embodiment. As a multi-personal group, how we have oversentries and could for centuries more? Do the doing of be a gods presence in conjunction with the physical walls. Bricks, mortar towers temples etc of of the doing all embodying and impresence in God in communities.

Vs you’ll own nothing and be happy, disembodied, virtualised faith

Maybe there is a case for zionism around actual jerusalem, but much much more urgent relevant and applicable - are the thousands of tiny jerusalems that we would establish sanctuaries, anchors of cultural production, displays of our hope, sharing of our abundance.

What land are we responsible for stewarding? Not just for an idea, but where are we responsible for a place. When would you petition for the restoration of a place. 

Jerusalem as symbolic geography - problematic

As nexus of meaning, vessel, framing device, 

A lens, a lightning rod

A banner

A signpost

Jerusalem as a touchy subject

first as news of a personal blow, not as a political issue. At whatever stage in the conversation the city, the place of my fathers’ sepulchres

~ personal is political

~ euphemising Christendom, depoliticising

~ vs culture war blocs and 

What symbolic signage are we responsible for stewarding?

Where, by creating a domain that we control, are we able to display God?

Jerusalem as destroyed

The peace of liberal western hegemony is waning. More widely, disaster capitalism is itself in crisis.  The barbarians are at the gate, the barbarians have breached the gate. The car’s on fire, there’s no driver at the wheel, the machine is bleeding to death. The end is not near, its here. The apocalypse has already happened

Society at large Zombieform people living on their devices; Fatherless geldings with no fertility

The church is destroyed - Balkanised by its own schismatic factions. Sanballat and Tobiah reign on an anglican internet of beefs. 

Jerusalem-as-Destroyed - Destruction (before Rebuilding)

Long destroyed - Promised restoration.

141 years as a paradigm comparison - 1881

1881 Natural History Museum, London - Wikipedia 

1887 Redcross Cottages 

Israel-as-captive by enemies

Underdog slave religion heroism

Apprehend the what is devastation. What was lost in the fire? How bad things will get? In the coming dark age - Who will emerge to contend 

Interesting to think in terms of where are we in this story? 

What is our walls-of-Jerusalem?

What was broken down long ago?  How did it happen? Who can help?

[2] King-Prophet relationship

How should prophets speak to kings?

Why did king respond? 

Why does the king let Nehemiah go? 

Why does the King help? 

[2.1] Who is the King? - Being a King, being under a king

* Cipher for national interest

* Understanding the world as powers, and God’s providence within that

* Centurian - in authority/under authority 

* A person of peace - humane example of a archetype

The Chosen scene: John 3:16 Caiaphas speaking with Jesus

The Chosen Season One: Episodes 7 & 8 Caiaphas hiding (1:30:35)  

Archetype of King - Cipher national interest

Power and the nation state

Not all power is only tyrannical - it is cathartic, when one lacks power to think of power reductively as-mere-tyranny, but I don’t think it is conducive to productive reform and certainly not to productive reconciliation. King as personal instantiation of the total political process and imperial machinery. How should we relate to our leaders, politicians, bosses, elders.. 

I consider that asymmetric disparities in power are inevitable. To him that has, more will be given. 80:20 principle. Pareto principle. Now, I believe that more stable and resilient forms of life can be achieved if and where we can reduce wage gaps and gini coefficients, but there will never not be hierarchy even a perfectly just society will have domain specific status hierarchies.. I believe the question for us, as socially/politically concerned Christians to solve for is how you make the radical goodness of serving the least and last plausible to an elite. An aside maybe. 

How should we defer to Kings?

Positions toward authority

* Reject and overthrow it - revolutionary

* Reject and wait it out - anabaptist

* Accept and assimilate - syncretism

* Accept and operate to create subversive mutual benefit from under it

Nehemiah in context

We understand Nehemiah returns in the twentieth year of Artaxerxes I - Artaxerxes I in 445 B.C - he was the fifth King of Kings of the Achaemenid Empire, from 465 to 424 BC. Artaxerxes had serious problems when he ascended to the throne. There was a revolt of his brother, Hystaspes, in Bactria at the beginning of his reign. In Egypt a nationalistic revolt under Inarus broke out in 460 B.C. This uprising was supported by the Athenians, but it was put down in 455 B.C. In 448 B.C. Megabyzus, the satrap of Trans-Euphrates, rebelled. He was reconciled later to the Persian king. This historical process of revolts shows the instability of the Persian empire at that time, and especially its instability in the neighbourhood of Egypt. Judah and Jerusalem formed part of the province Trans-Euphrates. Judah was situated close to Egypt and was therefore an important buffer state. From a political viewpoint it is clear that friendly relations between the Persian king and the Jews were expedient. In the light of this political situation the attitude of Artaxerxes toward Nehemiah must be understood.

Buffer state

The situation - in very low resolution - is perhaps made vivid by considering the parallel with Ukraine. Nehemiah here as Zelensky before European leaders, asking for defensive armament at the fringe of the European empire, against rogue states causing instability at the periphery.

The macro political parallel here is stark although lifestyle application on that basis is far from clear to me.

Ditto, in life generally - the King here represents the sort of co-belligerent that Christians might engage with - not only for our mutual benefit, but towards causes of stable stewardship for the benefit of a wider world. 

How should we engage Kings in mutually beneficial projects of peace making?

Archetype of King - Persons of peace - Humane via Questions

How could Kings speak to prophets?

Can we think King as an actual character rather than mere NPC foil for Nehemiah’s faith journey. The King as agentic, and beneficent also - wise, humane.

The king has made a threefold inquiry about Nehemiah’s health, namely, an inner experience which is reflected in the outward appearance; illness of his body; and sadness of heart; in other words, unhappiness about something. 

It shows that Artaxerxes was a keen observer. It also indicates that the king took an interest in the disposition of his servant, a reflection of his humane character.

Lk10v6 - And if a son of peace is there, your peace will rest upon him. But if not, it will return to you. 

King asks three questions

* Why sad?

* What do you want?

* How long will it take?

Jesus Heals Bartimaeus - Mk10v46-52

Next, they came to Jericho. And as Jesus and His disciples were leaving Jericho with a large crowd, a blind beggar named Bartimaeus, the son of Timaeus, was sitting beside the road. When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to cry out, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”

Many people admonished him to be silent, but he cried out all the louder, “Son of David, have mercy on me!”

Jesus stopped and said, “Call him.”

So they called the blind man. “Take courage!” they said. “Get up! He is calling for you.”

Throwing off his cloak, Bartimaeus jumped up and came to Jesus.

“What do you want Me to do for you?” Jesus asked.

“Rabboni,” said the blind man, “let me see again.”

“Go,” said Jesus, “your faith has healed you.” And immediately he received his sight and followed Jesus along the road.

The Request of James and John - Mk10v35-38

Then James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came to Jesus and declared, “Teacher, we want You to do for us whatever we ask.”

“What do you want Me to do for you?” He inquired.

They answered, “Grant that one of us may sit at Your right hand and the other at Your left in Your glory.”

“You do not know what you are asking,” Jesus replied. “Can you drink the cup I will drink, or be baptised with the baptism I will undergo?”

How should behave as Kings in those roles where we have worldly power?

What is it to be attentive to and to care for those over whom you rule? 

What questions do you ask to/of those under your care/rule?

What questions achieve clarity of ruler-ruled relationship positively and quickly?

[2.2] The Person of Nehemiah

How should prophets speak to kings?

Why did Nehemiah do this? 

Why then? 

Why rebuilding? 

Why like this? 

Why Jerusalem?

* [2.2.1] Being Prophetic - hearing / discerning privately

* COURAGE FOR SADNESS

* Feelings

* Patience and Prayer

* [2.2.2] Being Prophetic - speaking / acting publicly

* COURAGE FOR ACTION

* Vs Fear

* Skills - Diplomacy, decisive, Wisdom and Organising

* Favour and Asking

[2.2.1] COURAGE FOR SADNESS

Now I had not been sad in his presence. And the king said to me, “Why is your face sad, seeing you are not sick? This is nothing but sadness of the heart.”

How should prophets speak to kings?

I am struck that Nehemiah feels. 

1 - Private Sadness - vs apathy / numbing

The bible has said, hope deferred makes the heart sick. Have you known this? When waiting on the Lord becomes just waiting for the heartaches to come. When bleak calls to bleak. When you get what you want but not what you need. 

I spend a great deal of my private time actively not-feeling, distracting myself, numbing. So I preach to myself, that Nehemiah, exemplary, feels. He feels at length and at depth. He feels privately and publicly. 

When do you allow yourself to feel sad? You as Nehemiah, what moves you?

2 - Public Sadness - vs gagging / over-realised

Nehemiah sadness is noticed because it is a breach of etiquette—for a servant’s private feelings are usually best kept to themself, the court of the King is a happy place. So too the work place today - shiny happy people living their best life. 

I spend a great deal of my public time actively not-feeling, presenting a face, preferring impersonal chat about the obscure meta phenomenon of grief. Rather than to allow you in to the granularity of my pain. 

Sorrow is so widely impermissible in church contexts. Struggle needs to be spoken in the pluperfect tense, my messy life needs to be aestheticised for tumblr - we have all had our moments, but now, we. are. ok. Real paralysing sorrow is known to be contagious and so euphemised. It is still paralysis if bedaubed with the faux religious drapery of charismatic enthusiasm - sorrow gagged by sorrow is still sorrow. I consider people I have known, externally effusive, but internally static and emotionally opaque, leading their meat robot through the motions of a puppeteer faith - paralysed from making actual choices and taking actual risk because they have fallen outside of time. 

vs everything-is-awesome’s over realised eschatology

like Inside Out’s sadness contribution

what can sadness do that joy cannot

knowing things are not as they should be

doing that in public

when are we allowed to be sad

When do you allow others to feel sad? You as someone who sets a culture in your household etc, where do you invite vulnerability? 

send me to Judah, to the city of my fathers’ graves, that I may rebuild it.” 

3 - Sadness - with an answer defined by hope/desire

Courage defines a difference between grieving that things are not as they should be and the gnawing sense that there is no should-be. It would not be unproductive to consider - always be ready to give an answer for the sadness that is in you. 

* Can you articulate the hope, the desire, the passion that is in you? 

* Can you similarly articulate the sadness?

This is not to pragmatise all melancholy, but to think about how we steward emotions for our own good and for public good. hope that we are going somewhere - in a comedic universe that things are getting better, that this ends well, presumes that things now are not as they will be then. There is a controversial sense in which we are not living our best life, 

Isaiah 61

They will be called oaks of righteousness,    a planting of the Lord    for the display of his splendour.

4 They will rebuild the ancient ruins    and restore the places long devastated;they will renew the ruined cities    that have been devastated for generations.

I observe that all of Nehemiah that will follow has come from a springboard of sadness engaged. I say this super cautiously - notallsadness.. Some sadness is a prophetic word that sees the unseen, that sees the world as it could be and asks why not. Some sadness is a call to culpable agency, a summons to prophetic doing.

There are some feelings that you should go to discuss with your therapist.

There are some feeling that you should, upon 4 months reflection, go to discuss with your King. 

The word to be, is first to unnumb feelings, and then, by prayer to consider which feelings I should take to the King?

[2.2.2] COURAGE FOR ACTION

How should prophets speak to kings?

* Courage that moves through Fear not around it

* Courage that pays the cost for Wisdom

* Courage that extends God’s Favour

[2.2.2.1] Courage for action - through the FEAR (not around it)

Then I was very much afraid. 

Types of Fear

Core Anxieties for those prone to general anxiety, 

* 1) fear of abandonment 2) loss of identity 3) loss of meaning 4) loss of purpose 5) fear of death, including the fear of sickness and pain

Those don’t feel like Nehemiah is elsewhere characterised by fear, this feels like a contextual amplification of the d day point distinct from generalised anxiety, crypto FUD, a phobia of spiders

What is going on here, 

* Fear of death - punished by the Persian tradition of court etiquette.Fear maybe that he would die by picking the wrong moment with a Capricious king. 

* Fear of shame - saving face / embarrassment, being caught out. Fear in a sort of performance anxiety - vomit on his sweater already sort of anxiety.

* Fear of failure - to achieve Jerusalem. Linked to a prophetic sense of the unseen possible. 

Fear as symptom of how much this matters

Fear as a right and visceral reverence

* Proceed anyways, but chastened

Fear apprehends the real - not a foregone conclusion

Having framed the possible strategic good of arming/securing/enfranchising Israel as a buffer state against instability at the fringes of the Persian empire - it is notable that there is nevertheless fear. It is not a foregone conclusion. There is a blythe Christian faith that presumes that the security in God excludes that electric adventure of venture. 

It is a severe thing to contend in the real. Every day is d day, the day of judgement, fear is the right response to the gravity of a situation, awe and reverence for what is not a tame lion

I often feel that fear and retreat - as if fear means I’m doing something wrong

Vs Nehemiah feels that fear and prays and perseveres - as if the fear means he’s doing something right. 

When do you feel that fear? 

Where is the edge of your comfort zone - pushing the envelop, trusting God into the unknown?

Qua prophecy - what sense of the possible, the not yet, of the future?

[2.2.2.2] Courage for action - SKILLS/WISDOM

Wisdom as the costly substance and future fruit of applied courage

* Prepared and so Decisive

* Plausible - as Embedded

* Wise in Diplomacy

The cupbearer (the same word as the ‘butler’ of the Joseph story, Gen. 40:2ff.) was a high official in the royal household, whose basic duty of choosing and tasting the wine to demonstrate that it was not poisoned, and of presenting it to the king, gave him frequent access to the king’s presence and made him potentially a man of influence. Myers draws attention to a statement of Herodotus on the honour in which the Persians held this office, and to the portrayal in Tobit 1:22 of Ahikar as not only the cupbearer but the chief minister of the Assyrian king Esarhaddon.

The courage of costly prep / Wisdom and Organising

“If it pleases the king, let letters be given me to the governors of the province Beyond the River, that they may let me pass through until I come to Judah, and a letter to Asaph, the keeper of the king’s forest, that he may give me timber to make beams for the gates of the fortress of the temple, and for the wall of the city, and for the house that I shall occupy.” 

Courage as non-spontaneous - long pre-courage

Courageous in the ring, because of being first courageous in the gym

Courage - in season and out of season

This sermon is Quick thoughts

Are you ready at a weeks notice for preaching to give an answer for the sadness that is in you?

Discernment and decisions

Serenity prayer

Wisdom to know the difference

Vs prophetic what never was

I wish more was said in the text about how Nehemiah did what he did, what did it feel like to desire xxxx, what was involved in the research to put forward so detailed a vision. We see later that he undertakes extensive surveys, we see later that he coordinates and all-hands lay-person building-crew. But before that, in the feasibility study stage. What did Nehemiah do to prepare, what did it cost him, what skills and knowledge did it need? I say this from a place of pain, because I had thought I knew this, and I had thought I had faith for this. But I was naive. What did Nehemiah do? 

Qua prophecy - anticipating the not yet, paying it forward. Medium to long term contingency planning.

The courage for the cost of plausibility

Nehemiah-as-cupbearer - Somewhere between Woodhouse’s Jeeves, Shakespeare’s court fools and Richard Madden in Body Guard

Prophet as plausible influence and credible jesters - how do you inhabit that role if you find yourself there, adjacent to the c-suite, a civil servant serving

don't want safety delegate's mind to wander.

Intimacy - It is notable that it is noticed - you have to have a known resting happy face for sadness to carry the meaning of relevant/proportional sadness

* You steward your face. Signal to noise

The King had to know 

* Nehemiah’s normal face vs sad face

* Nehemiah’s threshold for such 

* Nehemiah’s 

Trust - he must be a trusted person - joseph and daniel, 

eunuch option - has precedent, suggested by the presence of the queen and access to this likely private domestic hearing

how does a prophet become a trusted person- risking his life for the King

In authority and under authority

How to conduct yourself as an underdog without self pity

How to give them the win in a win win

Credibility - He must have been a contextually credible person

necessity of a theology of alcohol

If jesus has been the caricature of jesus, 

master of ceremonies and the character of plausible prophecy

Jesus drank with tax collectors and sinners

It is no small thing to have a fluency to be the drinking buddy of bankers and prostitutes, 

One does not simply walk into mordor

Where are you, or where could we, be situating ourselves in the long game - fluent in being credibly where you are? 

Skill in diplomacy - the honed craft of speaking to Kings

It is not as if there is no craft in how you say a thing - as if bare gospel truthing trumps empathy and etiquette. I preach to myself. 

Diplomacy - Jerusalem euphemised / tell a story sideways

Some scholars regard this as a masterstroke of diplomacy. The name Jerusalem could have reminded the king of his earlier inquiry into the history of that city (Ezra 4:8–23). But it must be asked, Was the king not aware that Nehemiah referred to Jerusalem? It would have been indeed strange that the king would send his cupbearer to rebuild an unknown city in an unknown country. But at the beginning of Nehemiah’s negotiations it would obviously have been expedient not to mention the name of the city.

Like telling a story sideways on 

~ Nathan confronts David about his sin - 2Sm12

~ Esther/Mordecai - playing by the rules of the court

~ solomon dividing baby

~ jesus draws in the sand.. him without sin cast first stone

Subtext

How should prophets speak to Kings? ~ obliquely, skilful in that code. 

[2.2.2.3] Courage for action - FAVOUR

Favour and Asking Audaciously

Vs squeamish about ambition

What do you want - jesus etc

Do you want to be healed

Ask and you will receive (vs christianised defeatism) 

Wise as serpents Mt10v16

Parable of the unjust steward - make friends for yourselves.. Lk16v9

Favour - King as Cobeligerent sympathetic collaborator Vs enemies

The difficulty of facing opposition - sanballot etc - But what about facing support. The difficult pro-movement

The word for friendly unbelievers - people of peace

Like jonah when people actually repent

The fear of getting what you prayed for. 

Vs too heavenly minded

Why - Nehemiah as a decisive leader but how? How do you decide?

n: The true truth of how power works

Influence people. Use the power you have for good, for symbolism,

n: For nation building?

How should prophets speak to Kings? ~ audaciously - with a sense of God’s abundance and the potential to find win-wins. 

[3] Being Prophetic now - Prophets speak to kings

How do we apply this?

Imitate Nehemiah, yes, in your private life

Those with the gift, inclination/call etc to prophesy

Those with the strengths, position/mandate to be king

* FEELING - Hearing, Praying, Planning, Acting

* ACTION - Internally and Politically

* How to influence 

* How to put yourself in the way of influencers

* How to speak publicly 

There’s not a formula, but I wonder, in reverse, ways we can prevent prophesy

1Th5v20 -  Do not despise prophecies

~ as if, prophecy is happening, don’t not do it

Ways to avoid being Nehemiah

Never do xx

Never outside if my comfort zone

Never at risk

Never undistracted

Not truly alive to my emotions

Not hearing, 

Not doing 

That the walls hadn’t been rebuilt - why did it matter?

Vs fatalism - it is inevitable

Vs rationalisation - cost/benefit - other options to solve for

Modes of Prophecy - Prophetic as seeing the unseen

Seeing into the unseen detail - 3-legged pregnant woman

Seeing in the unseen in salience - hiding in plain site

Seeing into the unseen abstraction - themes and trends

Seeing the unseen in time unseen temporally - you will meet a dark stranger

Seeing the unseen specificity of potential - right option of many good options

to see that which isn’t 

to see that which could be

to see things being other than they are

Some people see the world as it is and ask why, some dream things that never were and ask why not? 

Lamentation - why?

Prophecy - why not?

Prophecy as move from Private-to-Public

Prophecy as Sadness - calibrated to a cosmic fall - spoken frankly because of hope, vs worldy sorrow sentimental affect

Prophecy as Critique - effective lamentation with repentance for our complicity vs bitter nihilist critique or mere crocodile tears and pearl clutching

Prophecy as Hope - plan public infrastructure in secret 

Prophecy as action by Prophets

Prophecy as Bravery

Joshua after Moses.

Following a patriarch and fear

Boldness and Nehemiah

Vs cowardice of cynical status quo timidity.

How to go elsewhere than you are. To innovate other than you are

Contrast with apathy

Not honing a hope

* Situation

* Person / Motive

* Because Nehemiah asks

* Because Nehemiah is credible

* Because Nehemiah is publicly sad

* Because Nehemiah has god’s favour

* Because a risk is a compelling story

* Because it benefits the King somehow re buffer state

* Could be magic - change of heart

* Could be sympathy - it feels good to give to charity

* Could be justice - i owe this person something

* Could be trust - i like this person

CONDITIONS FOR EFFECTIVE PROPHECY

what is to be productively prophetic

Steps in Nehemiah's Action

?Three constitutent parts:

??? Is there a verse for prayer in each of those three

* not just being strategic / planning

* not just having a feeling / intuition

* not just having favour / circumstance

Nehemiah has

* Feelings

* A plan

* Favour

* the instinct to pray under pressure

* the skill to hear god’s voice in the moment, the motive, the sense of rightness, the intuition to intuit

* he knows how to speak to the king

* Role of the queen, eunuch, esther, abigail, herod’s wife - john the baptist

* Role of ceremonial role, party MC and alcohol vs sadness

* Role of character, trust, planning king-facing language API

How should Prophets speak to Kings

what does the king represent?

we know what babylon represents

who is the equivalent personal character

allowing emotions at work

sensing feeling intuitive types need to know how to cast a vision for a program that can be costed by teh regulating authorities

being unfiltered

different prophetic languages

How to hear God

he is not passive

having the jewish people on his heart

wept privately

How to look sad before the king

when the king say, why are you looking sad?

prepare what to say

prayer

How to speak a timely word

- partly having the gift of that insight in that moment

- partly having the formation before the moment

- partly being sensitive to the

What is the phenomenology of prophetic inspiration

Analogous to artistic inspiration?

feeling it in  your bowels, in your gut instinct, fire in your bones

in your sensing being is attuned to 

in some pre-rational way

of 10 good options

refining the sensitivity to a leading

there are different languages

some prophetic stuff -you see things a certain way

a sense of coalescing order

like a river running down a channel

an oughtness

things should gravitate to order

the sense of the which has not yet happened in imminent to my imaginative sensitivity - the glass is falling

Phenomenology is feelings - you have to feel feelings.

Whilst not being controlled by them. 

Allergic to sentimentality, contemptuous of forms of hysteria,

nehemiah’s phenomenology- is sadness

to the extent that i numb sadness

if i don’t sit down and weep

the provocation and

excellence of response

excellence of reception

We don’t live 

boundary could be cowardice around action

boundary could be un-tuned reception

in babylon

risky to speak

problem to solve for 

why not just redeem the lack of jewish community and identity within the culture

why does he need to go far away

weird zionistic preoccupation with a patch of ground in the middle east

how things could be - can it be redeemed where we are

geographic specificity - now distributed

there is still a weirdness

there is some artefact

that is material

that he is concerned about

i don’t think in the new covenant that we have been entirely released from material existnce and materials containing symbolism 

have an emotional and urgent specific fiation around restoring materials icon of his presence with his people

but that is an uncomfortable thing to go hard for

a more sanitised and more easily recieved Nh2 sermon would be to say, it is in your heart

Ephesians as a whole - unity as an arc from theory into practice - and travels Theory into Practice. There is a danger in isolating these practical endnotes of Ephesians as private pieties detached from the superabundant cosmology of a God who is unity and detached from the thrust of Ephesians encouraging a holistic ecclesiology of radical unity. 

Ephesians Recap

Unity is the theme, and I consider that this reaches its zenith in ‘Submit to one another’ - but to recap the trajectory:

1v1-14 (Sam) God’s plan, which was a mystery for long ages.. v10 - is to unite all things in creation - Sam considered that it is care for others, more than self-care which should define late pandemic repair. Unity considered in this move outwards and otherwards.

1v15-23 The passage is on God as Jehovah’s varied abundant gifts, including wisdom which (Cherie) weaved with parallel themes from Corinthians - of growth to maturity as a growth done together as different parts of Christ’s body coordinating those different gifts towards wisdom.

2v1-10 (The business-class upgraded Alastair) whose shirt was blue - spoke repetitively about how we are saved, saved, saved into Christ, into Christ.. There is thinly a sense that we-as-we are saved and so made alive together in this - but unity isn’t so much the question until the second half of chapter 2

2v11-22 (Caroline) had us meditate on [Household, Outsider, Peace] bringing these together in art - Donald Rodney’s piece In the House of My Father - illustrating the complex reconfigurations of what we have inherited, and what home is. The passage starts v11 "Remember.." You used to be a disunity, a dis-integrated, disparate fractious factional dispersity: alienated… v13 But now. V14 he has made the two one.. v19 considers unity as citizenship v20-21 a building metaphor - we are a deliberate coordination of diverse construction components, no longer planks and bricks in the yard, we are the structural integrity of a solid whole, reciprocally dependent, mortared in place, to stand for a long time as a monument to stark one-ness.

3v1-13 (Samuel) We’ve been made fellow heirs, members of the same body - with unity for the purpose, the purpose is the display of God.

3v14-20 (Sebastian) Considered with the poignancy of Arcade Fire that we used wait, we used to write letters, we used to sign our name. Paul’s letter here is particularly a prayer prayed together with all the saints, for all families, all generations

4v1-16 (Steve) If the kids are united they’ll never be defeated. Considered the idea of unity and indeed solidarity with Ukraine. Considered how we are bonded by a common experience of forgiveness, and how there is no I in TEAM. Pauls runs a unity cascade: There is ONE body, ONE spirit, ONE hope, ONE Lord, ONE faith, ONE baptism, ONE God and Father of all. Seven counts - a unity of unities. Ephesians then shifts into practice, considering the ready to hand body metaphor of those diverse persons who make up a one body. 

4v17-32 (Sam) Spoke about atomic habits - and how our various temptations to anger/stealing etc can be contrasted with positive contributions to the whole

5v1-20 (Sarah) if unity, then living body, so be awake, and so use words because you have to, to coordinate activity amongst the active unity - so then consider language amongst yourselves - imitation as how we mirror one another and words as how create our shared worlds.

5v17-33 Today, this hinge, takes those atomic habit contrasts and makes it total: don’t get drunk with wine, but be filled with the Spirit with a cascade of participles.. Singing, thanking, submitting to one another. 

6v1-17 (Gilly) will consider further cases of complex unity-via-submitting of parents+children and masters+slaves - and how the armour of God serves to defend that singular united body.

6v18-24 (Sam) will close us with praying at all times for all the saints.

So unity is throughout, and it is interesting to see this particular hinge through to the practical, via the ecstatic. 

Eph5v18 - do not get drunk with wine

There is wine variously in the bible. And here it is, foreshadowing the promised spirit. Jesus’ first miracle at the Wedding at Cana, turned water into wine, as one of The Signs that he is the promised messiah. Signifying He is the wine-bringing one, who fulfils the promises of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Joel, Amos - who all use wine in their prophesied salvation. Not only wine, but better wine, the best wine, saved til last.. 

This rarified version of wine however still presumes a thoughtful appreciation of wine’s artisanal transfiguration of grapes into the bouquet of a fine merlot, somewhere between Paul encouraging Timothy to take a little wine, and Psalm 104’s wine to gladden the heart.. You should all carry on wine snobbing if that is within your conscience, but that is not precisely what is in view here. 

At Pentecost, external observers thought the disciples were drunk. Now, you all may never have been drunk, so let me tell you about it. It’s a great feeling. A stimulant and a sedative in one drink. In vino veritas: beer goggles for dutch courage, disinhibited to espouse unconditional love for all mankind. I have a gregarious self-forgetfulness, I have the heroism to lift heavy things and I can access a broad emotional register. And, saliently to this, I believe I can sing tuneful and harmonic, to the chagrin of those around me, I can ascend the octaves of Michael Jackson or Bon Iver.

Don’t get drunk with wine - it’s not real and its not worth it. Instead, be filled with the spirit which is to say, get drunk on God. 

The swop of wine for the spirit is not naughtiness generically for piety generically - it makes sense to me in this context rather that there is a transformative, satisfying and electrifying parallel of wine and spirit, intended in a if-the-lesser-then-the greater form of argument - seen in pentecost and available now. 

Being filled by the spirit is not merely warm fuzzies, or spiritual hysteria, but at this hinge in Paul’s letter, he positions it as substantial experiential fuel that powers worship, and a material and tangible downpayment that enables Christians to then give themselves away in submission to one another.

Eph5v19 - singing

After saying be filled with the Spirit, Paul qualifies with five participle verbs, the last of which is submitting to one another, the preceding four are:  addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart, giving thanks always 

Like Alastair and his blue shirt, Paul belabours a point here. Why? Partly from a place of his usual irrepressible enthusiasm, partly, I venture, because emphasis maybe needed, strength of emphasis to give license to those who think maybe this in an option reserved for extroverts, pentecostals, Disney princesses and seashanty tiktok. And maybe it is, and I’ll carry on being stiff upper British. 

Psalms and Hymns and Spiritual Songs ~ are you? Commentaries seem to suggest that the difference is slight and relatively intuitive in the translation. Psalms are psalms, hymns as we know them, and Spiritual songs are those more free form odes, choruses and so forth tiddly pom. 

There are four surface emphases presenting:

* Being a varied diet, also for varied contexts. Notable in a letter on unity, that it is diversity which is foregrounded and made imperative. 

* Then that we should do it with our heart. Singing is holistic, whole-self engaged mode that is emotional and embodied There is a physiology to rejoicing, you sing with your whole body poised and alive to a rhythm and tone. The trained diaphragm that instrumentalises the chest cavity as a tool tuned for the task of a life harmonic in vocal range and reach suited for broadcast. There is poetry to singing, the articulation of words and signs, universes of complexity, structures of argument and nuance layered through vocabularies of reference and emotion and meaning. Songs describe realities and declare realities, bringing worlds into being. You sing with your whole mind. There is an experiential springboard to singing related to memory. You sing with your whole past. The long run up into a song's burst, latent melodies released in the momentary event space that brought pen to page and now bow to string. 

* Another emphasis being that it should be addressed at one another - that is to say, sing at me bro. More could be made of antiphony. God is good - All the time. The spirit hovers in that space that is held in the air between us, whenever two or three are gathered. Music, like no other, carries the magic of synchronicity and harmony of diverse voices singing together ~ and all that was eroded by covid embargoes. 

* Lastly that this thanksgiving should be perpetual.

Then, in the same breath, the final participle verb: submitting to one another. It is assumed that submitting is part of this same effervescent euphoric ecstatic activity of singing etc. So, with submit, Paul’s intention is not strivers LARPing as tradwives amongst the egirls of twitter. I consider the hope for Ephesians is a people filled with the spirit then hedonistically exploring how they can be more than the sum of their parts.

Into Household Codes

So, to recap, under the broad rubric of “Be United”, Paul has primed the pump with “being filled with the spirit” and this segues into household codes, I’m arguing as an overflow and response to that abundance. The headline and theme is “submit to one another”

Why did it need to be said: submit? Presumably because it was not otherwise being done. Speculations on why not? 

* Ignorance - it’s not self-evident as a mode of community governance. As well as ignorance, there is forgetfulness and hubris and resting on the laurels of the common good and social welfare we have inherited.

* Laziness - submitting to one another has the appearance it being a difficult thing, complicated, bureaucratic..

* High risk of a high cost? It’s a prisoner’s dilemma with a considerable first-mover disadvantage which needs visionary leadership and accountable consensus to overcome a tragedy of the commons, freeloading and exploitation. 

* Peculiar spiritual/social opposition? Given that submission is suggested as climatic as a theophany of God’s self-giving being, it is likely to come under spiritual attack, and so is likely to need encouragement.

* Doubting the potential for unlimited improvement and virtuoso excellence - that is, it’s always possible to go further up and further in establishing a governance structure of managed self-giving. Don’t stop at an MVP, keep on submitting. Turn it up to 11.

So somewhere in this shift, it seemed to Paul, the right and necessary emphasis was ‘submit’ and the domains to focus on were these three relationships [husbands:wives, masters:slaves, parents:children] as domains to think through how to submit to one another. Why?

* At that time, those three relationships which were already commonly treated in common household codes as a typology of legal document in the Graeco-Roman world. So to some extent Paul is remixing that, maybe subverting, but minimally clarifying tactically and conceptually what modifications seem wise and orderly and sustainable in its liberation versus what would be chaotically libertarian and harmfully anarchic in the context of this novel spirit-empowered shift from the austerity might-is-right imperialist paterfamilia to somewhat undefined we’re-all-brothers-and-sisters-in-Christ. 

* These three pairings also exemplify three of the starkest asymmetries within universal typologies of relationship: Money, Sex and Power. There is some sense in solving for the hardest problem first. The call to the Ephesians is for peaceful unity across cosmetic and historic diversities of Jew and Gentile, slave and free - but the real challenge to unity is where these must be negotiated across shared and intimate domains, where two unalike parties needs must contribute and derive asymmetric costs/benefits from a partnership. 

So Paul says, Submit to one another. Why and indeed how might it need to be said again? Is this a word for St Marks? 

Submit to one another - is close to the bone, vulnerably touching my particular strain of theological idealism that has kindled a passion for Montgomery Hall, for crypto, for MW, for 41, for the PJs: Church maximalism, church-as-infrastructure, and a they-had-all-things-in-common mode of spirituality. The evening service preaching rota sorting hat clearly wanted my, ehem, sanctification. The question of submit to one another is more than an abstract theological speculation - and I enjoy abstract theological speculation. It is a question of what am I doing re church, what are we doing - what is churching ~ singing, making melodies, and submitting to one another? What then is good enough churching? And nested within that, forcefully on the question of submission, is husbanding, partly, the ongoing culturewar quandary of what is it to be a man generally, but particularly what is it to be a good man for Sarah. And how do you talk about that? And how do you talk about talking about that? And is it helpful, unfinished as I am, to speak from the pulpit about this? 

Gilly, I believe is going to work through the second half of the household code section of Ephesians next week. So we have two weeks. I invite all within the sound of my voice to send me answers on a postcard. I implore you to rekindle small groups. I invite you for cheese after the service.

I’m winding my way toward husbands/wives - which I maintain is but a subset of the larger and more challenging appeal to submit to one another as a church. But in this, the gender etc question does present peculiar challenges to chat we might have.

Then I have too short a thread on the challenges to and opportunities of submission in households generally. 

Then I’ll try to touch husbands and wives.

Householding: a conflict of submissions

It is salient that Paul positions his call to submission as a logical extension of being filled by the Spirit, and that he concludes “This mystery is profound”. The counter cultural household code he was commending to them was supernaturally predicated then, and cannot be other than supernaturally predicated now. 

Today, there are various aspects of our social and familial life which rest heavily on the peace made plausible by our spiritual forefathers - we are still riding on fraying coat tails Tom Holland's Dominion’s Christendom. The humane quality of a human, interdependent households until recently has been one of those inheritances.

The contemporary shift is not so much away from God per se, but towards an infatuation with the giantism of consumerism’s empire and the security of totalitarian technology in a trajectory that wars against the particularism and personalism of the humane household.

Unregulated, technology optimises for abstraction and fungibility, rewarding conformity to its own imperial logic. Today the household is rendered subservient and precariously the imperialist logic of the therapeutic state aided by the market’s logic of hyper financialisaton - atomising the domestic as only dormitory pods - consolidating all other welfare as a specialised service provision. Modernity’s businesses, schools, asylums, factories have supplanted the household, as the place for nurture, formation, belonging, learning, labour etc. 

By contrast, for Paul, households were dehumanised by Graeco-Roman imperialism’s abstraction and exploitation locating its control precisely within the household as an extension of empire. 

In both cases gender is involved, however, as then, so now, I would argue gender is far secondary to the political egregore of empire and exploitation. In both cases what is needed, and what the spirit enables, is cultivating entities, cooperations, covenants at the intermediate scale - individuals freed from submission to empire, freed to submit to one another and commit to a locality. 

Submit to one another ~ refs

The choices is not submit to one another or submit to nothing. The choice is submit to one another or submit to empire, to the powers, to the ideologies. 

I found Rachel Held Evans essay on Interpretative Pitfalls around NT Household Codes, concisely frames the quite formal arrangement of householding enmeshed as an agent of the state - with the conflict Christian freedom would bring to the 

Peter and Paul’s version of the household codes as a sort of radical Christian remix of familiar Greco-Roman philosophy regarding household structure. Central to the prevailing philosophy of the day was the idea that a free man ruled over his household as a sovereign, exercising unilateral authority over his subordinate wives, children, and slaves. Preserving this household structure was thought to be critical to preserving society as a whole. Many Roman officials believed the household codes to be such an important part of Pax Romana that they passed laws ensuring its protection. In fact, Christians were finding themselves at odds with some of these laws

Which Cynthia Long Westfall’s Paul & Gender makes more broad that the imperial influence was not monolithically one gender. 

The hierarchical relationships of gender were embedded in a system far more complex than is generally recognized in biblical studies, which usually seems to assume a nuclear household and fails to recognize the mother’s authority in the Greco-Roman family. Authority in the household and society did not invariably follow lines of gender, since a woman could be a head of a household (materfamilias), a mother of sons, a patron of men, a master of male slaves, and a supervisor of male servants.

Christianity radical freedom, far more fundamental disrupts membership of monolithic governance. The Greeks have only a nascent sense of the person as valuable and agentic apart from centralised order. I think of this as a revolution similar to Napster disrupting the record industry, or Web3 doing the same. 

I have gained much from Emmanuel Mounier’s writing on Personalism, which I love an excuse to squeeze in. He captures something of what being filled with the spirit does, to a shocking ability to exit ~ suggesting in some part why Paul would need to offer a restabilisation. 

The man of antiquity is absorbed in the city and the family, subservient to a destiny that is blind, nameless and stronger than the gods themselves. … The philosophers value only impersonal thought and its static order, which is the order of nature as well as of ideas. To them the singular appears as a blemish, whether in nature or in consciousness. …  It is Christianity that, first of all, imports into these gropings a decisive notion of the person. We can hardly comprehend today what a complete scandal this was to the thought and sensibility of the Greeks. Whilst for them, multiplicity was an evil inadmissible to the spirit, Christianity made it into an absolute, by affirming the creation ex nihilo, and the eternal destiny, of each and every person. The supreme Being which through love brings them into existence no longer makes the world a unity through the abstraction of the idea, but by an infinite capacity for the indefinite multiplication of these separate acts of love. Far from being an imperfection, this multiplicity, proceeding from super-abundance, bears that superabundance in itself as an illimitable interchange of love. Long was this scandal of the multiplicity of souls to vex whatever survived of the sensibility of the ancient world

Westfall goes on highlight how, while suboptimal, there was some semblance of self-regulation, wherever men were in authority, by nature of the corporate structure, they were also under authority. It is a great addlement to our contemporary application, that we lack even this, so well intended complementarians wreak havoc for not having cultivated extended networks of wider  co-submission.

Pauline corpus has historically been incorrectly interpreted as positively supporting the hierarchy and power of the imperial government and adopting, reinforcing, and pragmatically extending the hierarchical authority and power structure of men over women in the Christian community. Meanwhile, the influence of Christianity on Western political and social systems eventually diminished hierarchical authority between men and moved toward shared power and away from class systems, … since men were no longer under a comparable hierarchical authority either in government, society, or family, the hierarchical structure based on gender was changed and transferred to the nuclear family, which was more isolated from societal and political structures… male authority in the household came to be applied to every man and husband in a way that was far more absolute than it was either in the Roman Empire or particularly in Pauls household codes, and that authority has lacked checks and balances in the churches and religious traditions that continue to advocate it.

Lastly, on vignettes of households, I have much love for Poet and Essayist, Wendall Berry, whose account in is book What Are People For? paints this de facto contemporary household code, the norming of a form of detached and consumerist domestic arrangement which is disenfranchised and subordinate to the market, which he contrasts  with a more holistic form that seems inaccessible to most of us. 

Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate “relationship” involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided. During their understandably temporary association, the “married” couple will typically consume a large quantity of merchandise and a large portion of each other.

The modern household is the place where the consumptive couple do their consuming. Nothing productive is done there. Such work as is done there is done at the expense of the resident couple or family, and to the profit of suppliers of energy and household technology. For entertainment, the inmates consume television or purchase other consumable diversion elsewhere.

There are, however, still some married couples who understand themselves as belonging to their marriage, to each other, and to their children. What they have they have in common, and so, to them, helping each other does not seem merely to damage their ability to compete against each other. To them, “mine” is not so powerful or necessary a pronoun as “ours.” This sort of marriage usually has at its heart a household that is to some extent productive. The couple, that is, makes around itself a household economy that involves the work of both wife and husband, that gives them a measure of economic independence and self-employment, a measure of freedom, as well as a common ground and a common satisfaction.

The Opportunity of Submission

Paul addresses the collective to conspire together to be a counter culture. He addresses, as explored just now, not so much the nuclear family, not so much the individual. Paul, is speaking to the church-as-church about it’s governance within and between households. If he is speaking to us, he is speaking to a presumed entity which isn’t there to apply.

I have a vision of church as submitted to one another, a church within a zeal to heal the land. Church as a household of households. Church as a mutual aid group. Church as an incubator, as stem and branch, as trellis. Church as fractal infrastructure - the small patterning the large. Church as collective risk mitigation and the creation of opportunities otherwise impossible to the atomic individual.

What would it look like for church as a body to consider it the responsibility of the more-than-sum that we constitute, to create the felicity conditions for total joined-up diverse unity. I am terrible at making sermons practical. 

* Submit as a random practice

I consider there are uncomfortable exercises of a shared life we could spring. Submit your bank statement to a small group member. Submit your web history to a housemate. Submit your calendar as bookable to others. 

* Submit as a coordinated practice

I know 41 isn’t a readily reproducible pattern book, for all sorts of reasons, but in the smallest ways there is a submission to one another. 10 millennials have found it within their benefit to submit their Monday nights to synchronise - to the exclusion of all other options. Barring a couple of Christmas Days, we done this every Monday for five years. There is a economic pragmatism and practical necessity for our doing so but could there not also be for church? So many small group suffer churn, entropy, mission creep, devolution - 

* Submit by persons according to role

Such as church is personalistic, it is not submissiveness in general or as a system, but the gift of deference by individuals discerning according the hat they wear, the roles they adopt, the choreography of our interdependent life.

So, husbands, love your wives. If we have time. ~ then Gilly will perhaps explore other personas within a rubric of co-submitted types.

Husbands, love your wives

So, to look at the specific opportunity of submission within marriage. I would be interested to discuss Love as a subset of submit - it is here in context the magnanimity of the party with greater strength and privilege. 

Husbands love your wives -  Theologically under-problematised and so under-emphasised as a part of our household code.

Do I love Sarah? Yes. Am I loving Sarah? Well, I’m not not loving Sarah. On a scale of 1 to 10. Love is ineffable. No, it’s effing not. But, what then are we talking about when we talk about love like this? I think we’re theologically fuzzy on ‘love’

Love has not been constructed as a well defined problem to solve. Apart from really egregious failure points Love’s minima isn’t defined and Love’s extremes or excellences aren’t signposted. Marital love, in church, is taken to be self-evident, or subjective, or secondary. 

Evangelicalism has been midwife and handmaiden to unlimited  and unaccountable blandness in advocating mild mannered middle class masculinity and mild mannered middle class marriages. I think, by privatising marriage for sensitivity and discretion, and elevating  “judge not that you be not judged” and we eschew excellence and so lacklustre love is legitimised. I speak for myself. 

Difficult as the one-size-fits-all forum of the weekly homily as sole vehicle for content distribution is ill suited for the nuanced and intimate appeal to love your wives. Making much of marriage to a diverse, under-married, suffering cosmopolitan audience feels either callous (you’re welcome) or needs be convolutedly over-caveated (you’re welcome). 

From church I inherited a sort of Babette’s Feast awkwardness about romance - stilted and anachronistic and present at hand. Where as, loving your wives is a very embodied thing, it has an inherent carnality that makes it easy minimally to deprecate as a secondary issue if not actually castigate as unclean. And this is quite apart from our theology of sex which is incoherent and deracinated by purity culture ~ more generally as church we hugely neglect the broader notion that durable marital affection is difficult and worth prioritising as a missionally primary question. A swathe of the dechurched have drifted with legitimate complaint that they have tasted and seen mediocre marriages espoused and normatised from the pulpit - in a case of Jeremiah 31’s our fathers having eaten  sour grapes but now our teeth are set on edge [Jer31v29]. Man hands misery on to man. 

Rather. I want to believe that a church can invigorate its language for talking about love, we can celebrate embodiment and can signpost excellence in romantic relationships without naive romanticisation. 

Paul says Husbands love your wives - why did it need to be said? Because it is not being done. 

Why we don’t love

I’d say there are pull factors and push factors. 

It’s notable that in Revelation’s letter to the church in Ephesus, John says this: “But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first.” (commentaries suggest this refers both-and to love-for-christ, and love-for-one-another) (Mk12v29–31; 1Jn4v20)

By contrast with submit, where the active commission of insubordination seems visible. Husbands’ failure to love is more typically omission, a dialling down, a slinking away, an investing elsewhere. 

The bible is full of don’t stop maxims - as don’t grow weary of doing good; don’t give up meeting together; don’t deprive one another for reasons other than prayer; don’t give the devil a foothold; don’t believe yourself to be forgiven little and so love little, love much; don’t become lukewarm or I will spit you out of my mouth

Don’t become lukewarm, but I do. This my unlove of gradual absenteeism, I sin against Sarah predominantly by negligence, I embezzle her value by silence and defame her glory by underpricing and so underpaying, I don't show up for her, I withhold the constancy she deserves, and so I dehumanise her, I unlove through passivity.

Why? My fallenness and the path of least resistance. But there are other threads worth unpicking

Notable in Mt24’s observation that in later days the love of many will grow cold, it says, “because lawlessness is increased” - The causal direction is that way round. When faced with antipathy to order and authority,  the tendency of many is to grow cold in love. That resonated with me - more could be said.

If you are a young Christian man in a central London church just now, there be some favourable ratios. If you want to be an indecisive millennial prevaricating indefinitely, wasting her youth. It is a buyers market. A more grumpy version of myself would say, love your wives - marry them in a timely manner. 

There are also push factors. The task of loving your wife is costly and risky, the costs and risks are volatile and unpredictable. It seems pretty hairy to venture this - there would be reciprocal caution to the difficulty of submitting to a husband - where have all the good men gone etc. The landscape of gender relations right now is starkly antagonistic, that is the water we swim in, that is the tide against which Paul is saying love. 

Husbands love your wives: Paul offers: sanctify her, cleanse her, wash her, nourish her, cherish her. Partly this is remixing rituals at Ephesus’ Cult of Artemis. Partly I think it is to be taken at face value. Wash her. Nourish her. How? How do we cultivate husbands who are brave to, let alone competent? Husbands gracious to take it in the face as the local chapter of a patriarchy you didn’t vote for. Gracious to discover all available chivalry is patronising. Gracious and not glib to a feminism that has overplayed its hand. Proactive to pay the price, unflapped, gentle, resilient, competent to love.

Love has found difficult and left untried, and the ensuing husbanding that doesn’t wrestle with love’s difficulty is a parody of itself, kafkaesque managerialism phoning it in, simps for a waifus, capricious diffident dabbling, hedging, ghosting, boys who can shave, men without chests, still born adults without means or motive to come of age, immasculete yawning jailers of the tawdry prison of a love dimmed. I speak for myself. 

Now, the line here is not, Man up and love your wives. It is, be filled  by the spirit and on that basis alone, love your wives, excessively.

How Love should be

I’ll riff on a theme, at risk of stating the obvious, familiar and self-evident. What is this love? At what cost, to what benefit should we budget this love? Without vision the people perish. The vision is to turn it up to 11. The vision is to make love less vanilla. To love-as-Christ-loved is not sentimentality turned up to 11, it is severity turned up to 11. 

Christ-as-husband is, in many senses, the zenith of our cosmology.

Marriage feast of the lamb, for the bride of Christ, we are absolutely betting the farm if this metaphor. There is also no neutral marriage.  You do not choose to make your marriage a picture of your cosmology. It is. Your marriage is a picture of your cosmology, your cosmology is a picture of your marriage. And, specifically, your husbanding is your Christology. Accordingly we sing Jesus-is-my-girlfriend worship songs because we are in a casual dating relationship in a flat universe pursuing optionality as purveyors of moralistic therapeutic deism - maybe. 

* Husbands Love as missional

Your marriage is a picture of your total worldview, performed before a watching world. As the wedding day is calculated as a public display, so too your marriage on going, orchestrate it to be an answer for the hope that is in you. Do it for the joy. Be conspicuous. Use words because you have to. You are God’s work, created for work, living stones, living words, moving pictures, literal metaphors, the responsibility is to live with severity, to live acutely subjunctive lives, symbolise something legibly. Do your loving calibrated to the notion that it is not nothing, Not automatic not familiar. Love is not a private acts between two consenting adults, it is infrastructure. It is patterning a cosmology, proving a hypothesis, feeding the parts and the whole, resourcing the constitution of a household and all that it bears.

* Husbands Love as selective of chosen people demonstrated with a chosen person

Love like Christ is not a general and vague benevolence to all things. It is something which particularises its objects. How does Christ love me? With infinite, selective love. Jesus loves you but I am his favourite. Should be offensive.As such polygamy by finite lovers is a heresy of presumption - we can only image infinite love by infinite selectivity. So be exclusive. So be a visible diagram of exclusivity. So burn your boats. 

* Husbands Love as positive hedonism a new being

Not enough is said of being one body. Loving your wife is loving yourself. Euphemise that. I’m not exactly sure what to say on this point that is not truistic or completely esoteric. What by the relative solipsism of yoga and somatic bodywork, you are now to do as a co-somatic singularity - in all of life. The notion of the pleasure body, should be antidotal to a any puritanical prurience and austerity regarding sensate and embodied existence. 

* Husbands Love as excessive abundance

The nature of Christ’s love for us is more-than-enough. And the implication of Paul’s cascade up to this point is that this excess is ours now, by his spirit. In whatever your peculiar gifts are, and whatever her peculiar love language is. Write a blank cheque. Make a plan to be exploitable. Design for unlimited freeloading. 

* Husbands Love as if it is the precondition for submission - not vice versa

The preconditions for inviting submission are that it is meaningful, and not exorbitantly risky. Make it so. Design the choreography of a marriage such that it is inherently accountable and inherently weight bearing. I am an unbeliever in the nuclear family. The notion that it takes a village to raise a child, is the abridge version that we are in fact contingent beings who should be imbedded supporting and supported - because we are trying to do a difficult thing. 

* Husbands Love as spiritual warfare

Love, being mindful of what stands against it - world/flesh/devil. So, on the one hand, be so extremely married that it would be opposed in the spiritual realm, and then, be so extremely married that it would be robust to resist. Takes seriously that you are not married in isolation for isolation, but rather your union participates in church as church.

End

All to say, I would love to chat, on a scale of 1-10 how householded are you? It is nobody's fault. Except everybody's, we all bear responsibility to work towards vibrant house churches, intergenerational family vitality, utility of activated domestic giving employment and hope

I have no qualms being marriage maximalist as if this were exclusionary. Everyone should be in households - at whatever capacity you are able, and those households, most effectively have a rooted covenant at the centre of it, and if that’s not a marriage, I an also be convinced by monastic forms of community, who are submitted to place and covenanted to each other. 

Again, by accident of circumstance we’re doing this at 41 -  trying to, imperfectly, be marriage maximalists, by incorporating singles and married with high dignity and purpose  in a common cause submitted to one another. 

This richness of submitted life, I would wish for what we build at Montgomery Hall, under some banner as - every home a vicarage. Or such. I’m riffing. 

Be filled with the spirit, singing, giving thanks and submitting to one another.  

The choice is submit to one another or submit to empire, to the powers, to the ideologies. 

You are one in Christ now, so be united and stand firm in him. 

[1] “Wisdom” and the Old Testament

The passage raises some questions for me which are still questions. But to start with what I am certain of.

There is a God, who is engaged in our lives and in my life, and he is working out his Kingdom in the world, that grand climactic project of a peaceful flourishing humanity, I see it, I experience it, God, through Christ, drawing imperfect people as me, into counter-intuitive harmonies with such as you, and I long for more people to have more of it.

To this end, the Old Testament has so much to teach us about who God is and what the world is like. And, it's not so much that the text is difficult or opaque, which it sometimes is, but that there is particular challenge, even with exemplary characters, even with functional typologies of Christ who foreshadow him, in presuming to learn and apply precise wisdom principles from flawed characters cast within a narrative which ends badly.

In Abigail's case, in facing death to atone for Nabal's sin, and petitioning for mercy, she is a Type of Christ. But the story, which plays as one young lady's poly awakening - a journey out of a bad marriage and into a harem, seems a fairly moot out-of-the-frying-pan-and-into-the-fire sort of transformation, where her 'wisdom' is a coping mechanism for surviving between the rock-and-a-hard-place of two toxic masculinities: David's graceless aggression and Nabal's negligent cowardice.

In between that, there are wisdom principles we could distil:

* Bringing people food will make them more amenable – write that down, practice it this week, that's true, even to the point of bribery.

* Or, less flippantly, if you trust in the axiomatic goodness of God, then good things will happen to you – and that's true in an ultimate sense, trust in Jesus, go to Heaven, and it's true in an everyday sense, even to the point of a prosperity gospel.

That to say, it's difficult to render her actions as instructable techniques.

This evening, I want to:

* celebrate Abigail's wisdom without pietising the pragmatic way she manipulates a situation, and without undermining the principle of monogamy by justifying her wisdom through over-stating her survival as a romantic happily-ever-after.

* juxtapose Abigail's wisdom with David's descent into tyrannical cliché without obscuring that he is largely doing a brave and difficult thing in a God-fearing way.

* justapose Abigail's wisdom with Nabal's folly without glee that Nabal gets his comeuppance, and without reducing him to a caricature. As, in all, be under no illusion – I am Nabal.

[1.1] Text, Kingdom, Characters

So, I've been challenged about how I read the Old Testament generally. I'd love St Marks to more often be creating more contexts where more wrestling with the TEXT is more foreground: to encourage us to interrogate it, problematise it, reconcile it, apply it with a sense of the holistic purpose and so to be a church noted for its resilient realism, because we have faced fully and unflinchingly the tragedy of the Old Testament.

So, the text is tragic, which I have made peace with by reading it as the formation of a prototype KINGDOM. Christians participate in a Kingdom under Christ's constitution, but before that was plausible or even conceivable, God worked through the Old Testament, a prototypical society structured around a hierarchy that is subjected to stress testing to the point of failure so to illustrate the human problem rather than to be itself the solution.

So, a text marked by the realism of its tragedy, into which a Kingdom is being prototyped. Within this moment of its progression, we have three CHARACTERS. A meditation on all three, individually, and as they interact, is a source of wisdom. David, Nabal and Abigail are descriptive of the world as it is, they reflect us as we are:

🥷 David

* The necessity of heroism

* The trajectory towards disgust in the religious impulse

* The problem of grief in this life

🤷‍♂️ Nabal

* The monster of wealth

* Our motives for inaction

* The allure of alcohol

👩‍🍳 Abigail

* We see general wisdom insofar as she behaves intelligently and honourably, and radical wisdom as she fears God in so doing. But she is of note where she exercises prophetic wisdom – she has the eyes to see, and risks something peculiar sacrificially – which I would distinguish from a more universal wisdom as conceived as technique.

* Suggests effective prophetic ways to potentially confront authority

* And a convicting portrait of the weaponised domestic ~ Hospitality as a political act.

[1.2] Reading the Old Testament

So, the text as reality and tragedy. I want for myself and for St Marks to live free with a sense of urgent wonder, with a Christ-centred sense of humble but purposive purpose, to be and do church courageously on the basis of this book

The Old Testament is not a prequel spinoff, it is not just backstory, an accessory appendix to your Gideons bible. It's not to be read wistfully as if David&Abigail were a pulp romance. It's not to be read superstitiously or awkwardly – neither that it contains secret codes, nor that it contains specially redactable embarrassment. And, mostly as a note to myself, the Old Testament is not intellectually recreational reading to be engaged with a detached morbid fascination.

Rather, read it like it is the guts of the universe, the interpretative key to my own pathologies and my precarious place in the cosmos and the patterns which recur. The New Testament is the answer to a question the Old Testament is asking, and without the Old Testament, you lack the vocabulary to fully ask it.

I read the OT as reality. It is not merely or incidentally realistic, it captures frankly and fundamentally how the moral universe functions. Reality, as opposed to an idealised mythology ~ and for being so real, it is a tragedy.

[1.3] Old Testament as REALITY

I read to learn about reality and what to expect, and how to engage:

* 🌍 The world as it actually is

* 🙋‍♂️ Myself as I actually am

* 🌬️ The God who is really there.

* ⛪ But also, we, as we, read the bible together, [get in a small group] we read the bible together to reveal who we as a we are. and allow it to shape our churching a model of being a multi-personal entity journeying a journey together, a journey that has happened to others before – a journey out of chaos into a Christ encounter, out of tribalism into a Kingdom, out of addiction into healing, out of antagonism into harmony.

The Old Testament as Reality is an accurate account of the world as we find it. Not an ideality, not merely a laboratory, nor merely an ideological hypothesis.

* 🌍 I find the world reflected in the Old Testament - rendered as consistent with our contemporary psychological and political realities – a familiarity with which patterns recur should keep us from naivety.

* 🙋‍♂️ I find myself reflected in the humans of the Old Testament, in their heroism and depravity, as victims and perpetrators of considerable malevolence.

* 🌬️ I find God not vaguely but purposively, actively and specifically at work drawing cathedrals out of chaos.

* ⛪ I find a diagram of a structure, the formation of a cosmic monarchy, a dress rehearsal for church.

The Old Testament describes a total worldview that is not self-evident, it needs to be said, it needs to be read, wholesale.

* 🌍 A World that is broken – not self evident.

* 🙋‍♂️ The value of the individual as harbingers of Jesus, distinct, definite, valuable, purposive – not self-evident.

* 🌬️ The God who is there – not self evident.

* ⛪ And God’s plan for a Kingdom, a prototype of the church, as a tribe that exists for the benefit of its non-members, as a device to unbreak the world – this is not self-evident, and even in the Old Testament it is a speculative conjecture, which only finds its plausibility in Jesus.

And in Samuel specifically, we have an account of Israel's history that is in some ways Davidistic – hinging on his personality and his agency; and in significant ways it is Yahwehistic, which Hannah's magnificat in 1Sm1 declares and elsewhere: God is sovereign, God will reverse human fortunes, God will establish Kingship. Yet in this and throughout in its account of the context, Samuel is Realistic in its account of Israel's progress in the context of political powers, social pressures, technological possibilities.

So, the ignobility of the text, with all of its power, seduction and brutality, is reassuring, invigorating, even healing, it relates to a world as it really is, and so anticipates the world as it really will be, as, like a well polished mirror, the accurate and proportional representation of the condition should imbue psychological health, spiritual effectiveness, and resilient social formation. Does it?

On its own, the Old Testament, I don't think it does.

[1.4] Old Testament as TRAGEDY

🏚️. The Old Testament is Tragedy. Not merely the therapeutic tragedy of literature rendered to purge those emotions of pity and fear. But actual tragedy, the tragedy we find ourselves in, that should culpably convict us of our predicament and urgently drive us to seek a saviour.

😶. The Old Testament concluding in Malachi, ends in silence. With a few flashes of heroic brilliance, the book is very well organised being towards death-only, a journey shared with other yearning bitter mortals vainly constructing elaborate architectures of ironic decay mitigation, working religiously only to retard life's long diminuendo.

🕳️. The main character is the nation of Israel, emerging from the creation narrative, they fall, then there is a flood, a new start, then they fall again, Noah drunk naked in a tent, fratricide, genocide, even with God on their side, with manifold testimonies of God's goodness, the OT is a freefall through unfaithfulness and corruption, they have a law that they can't keep, Kings who can't lead, prophets who promise a saviour who never comes, and the book ends in silence, unresolved, ichabod – the God who has left us alone.

🤴 The Old Testament is replete with characters who promised much but end badly. David being exemplary, Abigail being accessory to that. If we zoom in to David's season in this narrative, just before David we have Saul who promised much but ends a textbook of violence and resentment. Eli who precedes Samuel as priest and prophet dies blind fat and lazy as he and his feckless sons have the ark of the covenant plundered. David himself maybe reconciles the murder and adultery of his life, but overall he has too much blood guilt to build the temple. Following David, Absalom starts well but dies a traitor hanging from a tree. Solomon wise temple builder unifies the Kingdom, self-destructs the same Kingdom by his preoccupation with women, money and military power.

🤕 And this is life, it is properly hard, the suffering is thorough, and your complicity in it is mortifying. The Old Testament exists to temper your sense of the world, to invite me wrestle with my own darkness. I am more of a mess than I even know, and unless I really grasp that, I will spend a lifetime moving the pieces of pride and despair around as a displacement activity, a game of distraction, to obscure the pointlessness of it all.

The New Testament is the answer to that lament, but that's not what we're reading this evening.

[2] What happens in 1 Samuel 25

Just to restate what happened in this passage - it is easy to miss the key points. We've been following David's adventures and misadventures through Samuel. Samuel sits between Judges and Kings, in the Chronology of Israel developing from an amorphous unstable tribal group into a thung thing, a monarchy - and we're viewing some of the teething problems of any emerging community or organisation - exacerbated, in this context by external threats.

🗿 If you've seen the animated film Early Man, which pitches a stone age tribe against the coming bronze age, the Israelites face something of this peril. The Philistines are a sophisticated iron age enemy, with a sophisticated material culture with well-planned urban centres.

Into this we are presented with obscure shepherd boy David who has been anointed by Samuel the prophet, somewhat mysteriously, and then circumstances play out whereby his ability with a sling sees him the providential hero of a battle, and his musical ability positions him in a key role in the royal household, and then married to the King Saul's daughter. This series of good fortune happens concurrently of Saul's mental and political decline. David has the purity of an accidental hero but is framed by Saul obsessively as a threat to the current order. David flees Saul's various outbreaks of violence, and gathers around himself group of the dispossessed, they exist in this difficult and not very diplomatic impasse with the established rule.

During this hunt for David, he has the opportunity to kill Saul, as he goes into a cave to relieve himself. David doesn't and Saul acknowledges briefly that David will be his successor. Samuel dies, as if his work his done. David flees back to the wilderness, as the danger remains. At this time the territory they are in is the wild west, and David's armed band of men are able to serve shepherds in the wilderness by guarding against Philistine or other random raids who would steal livestock.

David has been doing this for a wealthy landowner named Nabal and it seems justifiable that some favour would be returned, and asking politely, out of a place of acute need. David has previously asked for help from the priests at Nob, who were then brutally slaughtered by Saul's thugs. Nabal chooses deniability, and will not be held to ransom, but he pushes David's men away is a culturally rude manner.

David is justifiably aggrieved by this slight and arms himself to go and exact justice with grossly disproportionate force. Abigail (Nabal's wife – a sort of Princess Leia to Jabba the Hutt analogy works at several levels) hears of this and gathers a load of fig rolls and wine and goes to plead for mercy. She is clearly sympathetic to David's rebel alliance and argues a case appealing to David's integrity as future King, and by so doing she assuages the violence.

Returning home she finds Nabal drunk, waiting til morning she explains what has happened, and he has a heart-attack and dies. David gets word of this and sends for Abigail to become one of his wives.

The story hangs on a fascinating triangle of relations David-Nabal-Abigail – and I think it is these behaviours in these roles which inform our application – as much as a look at the characters in the abstract which I'll go on to via the key relationship/contrasts.

[2.1] David vs Nabal

* Haves vs have-nots. Most basically, Nabal is a have, and David is a have-not. Our sympathies lie with David in this sense – although the hungry state of David is countered with his military might.

* Establishment vs reformer. Nabal embodies a corrupt economic establishment, and David is a reform movement, a new sort of leadership that is compassionate for its outcasts – a vision that seems to fail at the first hurdle, rendering a corrupt establishment challenged by a corruptible reformer.

* Righteous vs unrighteous / Pharisee vs sinner / Older Brother vs younger. This is the lens I have found particularly interesting to read the passage through. David is God's elect, the chosen one – if he's going to err into a sin, it is more likely to be prissy self-rightouesness, pride and entitlement. Nabal is worldly, fleshly, associated with money and agriculture, the banker tax collector unclean types, the younger brother who enjoys a good time, whose sins are somehow more glamorous and sticky.

* Active vs Passive pathologies. It is interesting to consider that gendered archetypes lend themselves to peculiar sins of commission vs sins of omission: David doing what he shouldn't do; whereas Nabal not doing what he should do. David's hyperactive, oppressive and overbearing action contrasts with Nabal's escapist and cowardly inaction.

[2.2] David vs Abigail

* Hero vs Divine helper. David the heroic archetype is met on his quest, in his time of need, by this divine helper

* Prophet vs Hubristic State ~ Critic vs Power Critiqued. Abigail is a voice from the outside, to David the emerging State, a nascent State that is just forming itself and establishing its character. Abigail sees with insight the danger for an emerging leader if he continues down a vengeful path.

* Justice vs Mercy ~ Scarcity vs Abundance David is in the right. A worker should be paid his due, culturally to deny hospitality was doubly an affront but his is justice out of a presupposition of scarcity. Abigail is Mercy, insofar as David doesn't have the right to be so disproportionately angry, Abigail gives him what he doesn't deserve at a cost to herself on the basis of abundance.

[2.3] Abigail vs Nabal

* Archetypal Fool vs Proverb's own Lady Wisdom. I'll try to explore in a moment why I don't find it terribly easy to paint it as don't-be-like-Nabal, do be-like-Abigail, but clearly Nabal makes some self-destructive decisions and Abigail makes some judicious decisions in the course of the passage.

* The problem drinker vs surrendered wife. Ab & Nab are also illustrative of a complicated marriage dynamic which I haven't fully worked out. Nabal is entirely culpable for the damage he causes, but, if you were to meet this couple qua partnership, what would you counsel them in the distribution and mediation of blame? How does one intervene in the trajectory of one’s own, or another’s, marriage where it is not possible to simplistically prescribe correction to one member of the party?

And maybe that touches on what I'm saying in all this. How did they - any of them -become what they became? We're given relatively few keys in the text, as to the psychological and spiritual roots of their dysfunction, but that is the question to myself as I consider these three characters separately.

[3] I AM DAVID

David flawed heroism

* 💪 3.1 The necessity of heroism (Gift, Character, Flawed Kinging, How to King)

* 🤢 3.2 The trajectory towards disgust in the religiouse impulse

* 😢 3.3 The problem of grief

[3.1] HEROISM

[3.1.1] Heroism as Gift

💪 David is intended as a portrait of leadership - he is a hero in the story of God, and has a great many conspicuous gifts which make him hard one to compare myself to, a boy's own hero, from humble origins, he is a deft fighter, exuding the skills and experience for battle and for endurance in the wilderness, he yet also combines this with emotional depth, a familiarity with suffering, wit, musical creativity, romantic literacy and sexual prowess. So he is gifted. And this giftedness of mind and body is not nothing. I am interested (and unconcluded) about the role of the body in the embodiment of my faith.

“..And when they had performed everything according to the Law of the Lord, they returned into Galilee, to their own town of Nazareth. And the child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom. And the favour of God was upon him..” Lk2v39-40

💪 Luke describes Jesus as growing not only in wisdom, and in favour with God and man, but growing strong. There is popular construction of an abridged Jesus in a body-optional mode of his embodiment which offers very little to provoke we the reedy, cybernetic and metrosexual towards a muscular Christianity. Jesus grew strong. Christian! Become strong, increase in vigour, contend with a physical world. Do Hard Things!

I would caveat, obviously, that bodies become frail in all manner of ways in a complex and fallen world. I'd caveat also, that what I'm driving towards is a focus on his character quite apart from his gifts, because gifts do not on their own qualify a King and quite precisely because gifts misapplied by warped character do untold damage. It is nevertheless a question that occurs to my mind in reading David: what do you do with the weaponised and exceptional bodies of biblical Heroes? Esther is another one, for another day. What is your body for? [See also here and here]

[3.1.2] Heroism as Character

In the application of those gifts, the what-you-do-with-what-you've-got, David's character is frequently revealed to be attractive: zeal, bravery, decisive leadership with archetypally benevolent masculine energy, contending with the world, vigorously, risking offence to do a something, being willing to be disagreeable with a righteous anger, contending for justice to provide for his people, David answers God's call, David takes responsibility.

The world with all of it's nihilism is crying out for more such charactered characters, society needs the emergence of the heroic personal person, the divine individual, in this way it is a Christian thing to be brave and to stand for something, vigorously, for others. Which David does. ~ We must be kings. We are heirs of God Rm8. We will judge angels 1Cor6

But. David goes awry. Now, I'm sympathetic to pacifism but not to anarchism, and not to any mode of being which blames and dissolves personhood. I believe non-violence is more deeply true and more enduringly effective, so, for this reason, it is so important to be precise about where David goes awry. It is not wrong to be ferociously strong, there is no shame in being gifted, it is appropriate to contend vigorously for the good and to structure a social world around a hierarchy of competence. But.

[3.1.3] Heroism Awry

At what point in this story does he go wrong? Was this the first failure of character – or maybe lying to the priests about his being on the run? David in his Bonnie Prince Charlie season of life, leader of rebel alliance, commander over a brotherhood of 400 distressed and bitter debtors ~ social outcasts (1Sm22)

The not-yet King. We witness David’s character arc at a moment of transition. Samuel has died, closing that chapter and Saul has conceded, albeit briefly that David will be King, but not yet. So we’re in a hiatus, awaiting the promised coming. Just as adolsecence is tumultuous, as we each go through various impetuous seasons of in-between, the waiting for the not-yet, the dating-and-engagement season, the delayed gratification - Abraham awaiting an heir, the prodigal son awaiting his inheritance. Heroism, like true love, waits.

The second King. A peculiar position, only one king previously ever in the history of Israel to compare himself to, and to learn from, and to disambiguate is brand against. Ultimately Saul and David have been drinking from the same streams, the same references, the same context. David’s kingship is the difficult second album, the compare and contrast individuation, what is a fluke, what is endemic, what is incidental, what is constitutive, what is kingship qua kingship?

Rogue Warrior Kingship. All these bumps along the way to monarchical governance offer hints at what sort of King David is becoming, which hints at the tragic arc of all human kingship, and my human efforts at leadership, that labours to rule without Christ's resource:

* Vigilante justice. Final justice depends on David and this unaccountable governance structure is open to idiosyncratic bitter resentful deceitful arrogant vengeful vindictive extortion. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. If unstuck from God the resulting self-authored justice makes arbitrary the distinction between guarding the sheep and eating the goats. Tribal justice rather than cosmic justice, the vigilante settles for miniaturism of a parochial potentate.

* Impulsive disproportionate force. We see David as a quick-to-anger bully, Picking on a civilian vs ‘saving’ Saul. We see David as a child prodigy who believes his own hype. Untethered from God the nimble genius growling tyrannical as the elect entitled, brashly self-righteous impatiently callous, flexing in his own strength, drawing from scarcity, borrowing from the dark side of belligerent hyper-masculinity.

* Taxation. A pattern of exacting money in a protection racket, God’s kingdom becomes a police state under a mafia don taking what he doesn't deserve. The tendency of fragile governance to tend toward centralised extortion and bureaucracy is here in its smallest form.

* Insecure Identity. The thin-skinned precarity of David posturing in a dominance hierarchy. Noting that the devil tempts Jesus in the devil precisely on the point of identity because is the identity can be fractured even as a hairline crack, then the kingdom built on it will be vulnerable. Insecure leaders are a liability, and the only secure identity is in God, as revealed in the bible's promises, as enacted and guaranteed by Christ.

* Illegitimate force. David breaks the rules of the game, using inauthentic means leads to inauthentic leadership. By using violence he is becoming the wrong sort of King, a tyrannical power who is only merely strong. David ends up with too much war and bloodshed to build the temple, too much blood guilt, too much violence-begets-violence debt against the moral universe. As an emerging leader, there is a temptation to use violence against those above you in a revolutionary undermining of the historic order, and there is a temptation to use violence against those beneath, stepping on the organic domain which would be the authentic base of support. David must decide what sort of King, from what sort of power, to what sort of end, he wants to become.

[3.1.4] Heroism how-to

We must be kings. A king must govern. What then is Kingship? So then Christianity – what is Kingdom? A short speculative foray here, not really The much-talked-of in charismatic evangelical circles “Kingdom” is not a foregone conclusion, we are a long way from being able to say in anything like shorthand – what a Servant King is. Kingship, when it is not tyrannical, is responsibility. Benevolent kings and princes could be deeply attractive. Heroism conforms to such a system of government.

* Cosmic justice. A heroism that would sacrifice itself i the service of a balance of fairness and a longer arc of moral rebalancing is predicated on

* Proportionate and legitimate force. A heroism that is sensitive to the vulnerabilities under its care, and the plausible use of given strength to create a context of secure containment that cultivates abundance that overflows from that pot to its non-members.

* Household economy. Heroism of the household is a political act, rendered as a national scale would be an efficiency engine that would supplant both capitalism and socialism.

* Secure Identity. Heroism is an identity that knows the sufficiency of its gift and call, the purpose of its opportunity in a context, and a wider for-others-ness of the heroic calling to which they are called to serve and die-for.

[3.2] DISGUST

“..God do so to the enemies of David and more also, if by morning I leave so much as one male of all who belong to him ... unless you had hurried and come to meet me, truly by morning there had not been left to Nabal so much as one male..”

What David was minded to do was genocidal, scorched earth, ethnic cleansing. This is disproportionate, and it could be explained as the role of disgust in the formation of a man-made nation.

🤢 Disgust → Fire David vs Nabal, disciples vs villagers, religiouse vs irreligious, older brother vs younger brother, pharisees vs sinners.. Having previously thought of David vs Nabal in terms of revenge in a conflict of egos, I now read their scorched earth annihilation bids through the lens of Jonathan Haidt's Moral Disgust.

There is necessarily a trajectory towards genocide in the religiouse mind, and it stems from disgust. Disgust evolved to help our omnivorous species decide what to eat in a world full of parasites and microbes that spread by physical contact. Disgust stems from a fear of the animal properties of mortality and associated decay. When you find a worm in the apple, mould on the pizza, you throw the whole thing out, a purge is a proportional escalation.

Whereas you run or freeze in the face of Fear, in the case of Disgust you have to destroy or expel the infection, swat the cockroaches and, at a collective level, drown the witches. Disgust has been an evolutionary advantageous intuition to the herd/tribe against pathogens from the outside but it is a disposition which should be held-in-tension or counter-balanced by others in a tribe who have more of trait-openness. Death can come from two sides, and the primary peril to the tribe is felt differently by different dispositions:

* the unboundaried leading to death - the liberal, loose, open wound unhygienically susceptible to infection, chaotic and accident prone, toddler on the cliff edge..

* the overboundaried leading to death - the conservative stolid static status quo gagged immobile, rigid as rigor mortis, the stiff branch snapped by a gust of wind, the moribund and unadaptive, rusting and unalive, slow and zombie form..

“..But the people did not receive him, because his face was set toward Jerusalem. And when his disciples James and John saw it, they said, “Lord, do you want us to tell fire to come down from heaven and consume them?”..” Lk9v53-4

🔥 Political Fire. If we can extend calling down fire beyond mere personal vendetta, into the realm of a socio-political disgust-motivated purification, does Jesus/Abigail help us live wisely in the context of disgust-motivated protectionism and polarisation from Left and Right in contemporary politics?

* The Left's no-platforming, siloed safe-spacing, pronoun-coercing, witch-hunting such as James Damore?

* The Right's Brexit and other exits, draining swamps, building walls, the witch-hunting of such as Hilary?

The King is tasked with nation-building, feeble he is responsible for this vast but imperilled thing, and as such pollution is not worth the risk, so he is not bothered by the collateral. The King is tasked with nation-building - of making a thing a thing. Creating that Kingdom, where everything is in its right place, there is peace and accord between all the parts ~ this is a task ultimately that only God can do. When we attempt justice, peace and purity creation on the basis of scarcity rather than abundance we have to carve out a manageable domain over which we can effect the image of perfection. David’s DIY justice in his own strength is a technique he learnt from Saul, so too we - what Kingdom are you responsible for, how are you achieving peace there, what techniques have you inherited?

🔥 Personal Fire. If we can extend calling down fire beyond mere personal vendetta, into our own disgusted lives, how does this exchange inform my own life and my attitude to others? Without Christ we are older brother or younger brother living respectively in in pride or despair. The evil that you do, it has to go somewhere: resentment and bitterness, simmer to malevolence and genocide. David was a younger brother, but in being the anointed one, he is prone to the foibles of both. So, as older brother, as pharisee, just as we are princes in the Kingdom, we are the smug elect, the Chosen-One tropes. I comport myself to Weinstein, as to Nabal, as to sinners Lk18v11: "Thank God I'm not like one of those.." It is not untrue, but it is a selective truth, because I deserve fire doubly for my prissy self-righteousness, for my embezzling the gospel, and neglecting the calling I had. Who do you judge? Who are you disgusted by? Who do you scapegoat? Who is the fly in the ointment of your Kingdom?

[3.3] GRIEF

Samuel dies. As Saul acknowledges that David will be King (1Sm24v21) Samuel’s prophetic work is done. Samuel fades into background but in dying leaves David no longer rooted and no longer accountable. It is interesting to think about the formation of leaders, the role of mentors, and the inevitability of death with the baton transfer of dynastic continuity.

The content and form of processing the death of a mentor.

* Unmentored. What does it mean that we have such little content in the intergenerational exchange?

* Ungrieved. What does it mean that we so few ritual forms useful for closure in dying?

Unmentored. It is not nothing that David is now Samuel-less. He is on his own now. He loses his connection to the past. He no longer has Obi-wan, no longer has Yoda, to guide him in the pathway between the dark and the light.

Star Wars: The Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. In his scholarly review of world mythology, Campbell outlines the role of the mentor figure, saying that the role of the archetypal teacher grew out of that of a “supernatural helper,” who guides the hero through dangerous territory (sometimes through the underworld.) Campbell divides these figures into several classifications, including “helpful crone/fairy godmother” and “supernatural helper.” [Ref lost - see more here]

Chat about discipleship seldom strays far from the individualistic script of culture. Abetted by anecdotes of heavy shepherding, cautious Christianity dabbles only in the shallow waters of iron-sharpens-iron formational relationships. We are not bound up in the lives of others in a properly consequential way, we are not mentored, we are not apprenticed, we are self-made pietistics recreationally involved in transactional spiritual partnerships.

* Unmentoring is pulled towards the alluring magic of the pulled-up-by-own-bootstraps celebrity celebrating flash-in-the-pan piety of spot-lit leaders.

* Unmentoring is pushed back from the rhetoric of toxic patriarchy, the shame associated with such a myth has raised the intergenerational drawbridge, couping boomers inside property-owning ghettoes of unstoried disinheritance.

More could be explored about the relative unheroism of contemporary Christianity and the aversion to risky immersive mentoring.

Ungrieved. As explored a bit in Spiritual Paralyses (Sermon here on Mark 2v1-12 "~ note: Heritable paralysis in a family) There is an inheritance. Man hands misery on to man OR the faithfulness of the forefathers blesses a thousand generations (Dt5v10). Effective leadership raises leaders who will lead effectively after you’re gone.

Unstages of grief. Grief would find vent for all of Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. We find David in an instance, at a moment, in a process. But I am more interested to speculate that we, stiff upper-lipped evangelicals are Davidic in the ways we are stunted by ungrief, lacking in the tools, vocabulary and opportunity to grieve the Samuels we lost.

Evangelicalism’s shadow carries the ungrieved body trauma of under-attached formation courtesy of Iwerne-etc’s institutionally institutionalised theology of child psychological development. We can understand public schools as the equipment of empire in Davidic sense - raising Christian soldiers for an East Indian Trading Company form of leadership which is politically pliable for being unemotional. I’m all for summer camps and aristo-meritocratic centres of wholistic excellence and the unsentimental worlding of adolescents etc. But. I would see it burnt to the ground for the emotionally stunted soldier-forms who have not grieved and cannot grieve and are so raised as toxic Kings who will not build cathedrals.

[4] I AM NABAL

🤷‍♂️ Nabal is written as a pantomime baddie, a pustulant tawdry monster. However convenient it might be for my conscience to leave him there as a caricature in a fable, I must allow myself to be unsettled by the prospect that I am Nabal.

What do you do with these characters? Like Herod etc. How are you going to not become this? You're made of the same stuff, you're capable of this. I am Nabal, with the same capacity for selfish self-destructive malevolence. Nabal is illustrative, to me, of three predicaments:

* The monster of wealth

* The inclination for inaction

* The allure of alcohol

[4.1] Wealth

💰 Are you wealthy? I mean, we are in a historic sense, we are in a global sense, but it is a peculiar identifier, slippery, relative and comparative. I would distinguish wealth from greed, but Nabal and I are both both. [See more on Wealth here]

🤑 Wealth is a severe predicament, wealth is making us obese, lonely, depressed and environmentally speaking, vulnerable. Psychologist Oliver James speaks of Affluenza a psychological malaise symptoms of which include a lack of motivation, feelings of guilt, and a sense of isolation.

🤑 Wealthy people I've known are correlated with unhappy people I've known. The rich young man went away from Jesus, sad. I am a rich young man, I wallow in the illgotten fullness of petrol-fed beef and slave-sewn brogues. Veins clogged with the banal detritus of bland entitlement, stodgy status quo status symbols, treacly tawdry normed wealth calibrated against tv's confected fantasy and the filtered flickering glitz of other people's newsfeeds. In a debate about the housing crisis, Grayson Perry observed that 'rich people on the whole don't create culture..', am I that rich?

🤑 Stuff leads to blindness. The bible speaks of the "deceitfulness of riches". Nothing is merely stuff, stuff speaks to you, and it speaks to others, it works on your conscience, it debates with your entitlement. Until the narrow Kingdom way feels often like a needle's eye for me, perhaps I am too enured to wealth's lies to imagine this other way, perhaps because I'm carrying too much stuff

“there was a man, the man had a business, the man was very rich, he had thousands of sheep and goats... the man's name was Nabal.”

🤑 Stuff becomes wealth as a mentality. Having stuff becomes wealth in the blink of a definition. By default, no one who has wealth does not trust it to save them, unless they have reclassified their wealth-ownership as gift-couriership. Nabal is a portrait of this some way down the road in that definition of wealth-as-identity, it has become his primary identifier - the text emphasises that Nabal's possessions precede his person, ~ being-wealthy is a mental state, an attitude or orientation, more than it is a quantity of cash in a bank account.

🤑 Wealth as identity and security is aggressively self-reinforcing. We know it can't buy me love, we know it doesn't make us happy. But it is addictive because with wealth comes the exponential increase in the availability of substitute saviours, premature happy endings, creature comforts. The wealthy are to be pitied.

🤑 Greed is different from wealth. Greed is anxiety leading to embezzlement of God's gifts which manifests itself in a lack of generosity. Nabal couldn't share, but he could feast himself. Wealth should move through veins of the Kingdom between organs. Individualism clogs the arteries, and a mindset of scarcity bloats bigger barn tumours stock piling inert wealth.

Greed is the willed exacerbation of that, a sort of madness

* Individually, greed's acquisition of wealth at root substitutes for a Cross in the past and for regeneration in the future, and this leads to a shrivelled life.

* Collectively, the greed in view in this passage is an assault to the gift economy which is the basis of a functioning society, which David will be responsible for.

💸 But, you don't have to, there is a solution, you can disarm wealth by giving it away. The church would serve its parishioners individually and society collectively by more often facilitating people to part with their wealth into a compassionate commons.

💸 We know it is more blessed to give, more fun, more meaningful, more rewarding, so, give your wealth away. At all costs to flee from wealth's trappings, be ware the tendrils of entitlement, the poppy field of mild-mannered privilege, the slippery slope of creature comfort. Those fallen parts of me are quick to debate for my exceptions rather than calibrating the principle of the matter, I'm quick to caricature ascetics, to bogeyman iconoclasts, to paint as irrational and unsustainable those who advocate abstemious Christianity. Mine own comeuppance is coming. Wealth is its own comeuppance. I am robbing myself of adventure in the now, the good life in the now, the buzz of the downhill slalom of faith, the nimbly unburdened and balletically uncluttered life. If I am not to become Nabal, slowly but surely, I must learn to give my wealth away, more often, more freely.

[4.2] Apathy & Doing Nothing

🙅 I'm struck that Nabal is condemned for what he doesn't do. Where as, by contrast, David is repremanded for doing what he shouldn't, Nabal is wrong for not doing what he should. As mentioned in the thought on David's disgust, Nabal, like the villagers responds by non-response.

"the people did not receive him.." Lk9v53

"Who is David? .. Shall I take my bread and my water and my meat that I have killed for my shearers and give it to men who come from I do not know where?"

🙅 Both candidates for the fire are guilty of a refusal to offer hospitality. Rudeness which vandalises the gift economy, it is an affront to the dignity of the person, but most interestingly, inhospitality is a passive sins of neglect or omission. Nabal didn't do anything, the villagers didn't do anything. So me and my absenteeism, my lack of adventure, sins of cowardice and silence, rightly deserve fire from heaven.

🙅 Negligence is its own sort of tyranny, I didn't honour the favours that were given to me, I didn't spend myself for those under your care, in these subtle ways I am a waster, a law abiding religious waster. Why do nothing?

The text says explicitly, "the people did not receive him, because his face was set toward Jerusalem."

🙅 We know. We already know. We are without excuse. Life is suffering, the Christian life is suffering, it gladly pays the exorbitant cost of discipleship, which is suffering, which is Jerusalem - the nexus of personal and political utter suffering. Luke goes on in that chapter to lay out the costs of discipleship. For Nabal the cost was trivial, barely taxing his considerable wealth, and yet even then, he chose inhospitality, as I do, out of pride. And it's so silly. It is so healing to take responsibility, it is so much more blessed to give than receive, it is more fun. I forget sometimes.

[4.3] Addiction, Alcohol, Entitlement

🍺 Tragic Israel in the grip of a tyrant and a would-be tyrant vying for power. It's interesting that Nabal is drunk, drunk is a great state to be in when the world is collapsing, a comfortable and consistent nihilism, a chemically reinforced helplessness. I read his drunkenness more as consistent with and symptomatic of Nabal's compromised life, lived against God that has given up on itself and fallen in to itself.

😵 He is found drunk at the end, but that he is a problem drinker is suggested by the way it is affecting his relationships, and that it is sufficiently a pattern that Abigail would know how to manage it and him in that condition. By small extrapolation we could speculate that bad decisions he is making are intertwined with this and by further extrapolation, the impact of this on his health could be a contributory factor in his final demise.

⛓️ I have compassion for Nabal. I'm institutionally raised and under-attached, a live wire highly-addictable, escapist and frequently self-destructive myself, albeit in more sanitised ways, escaping to more socially acceptable augmented realities.

😍 Jesus found often at dinner with sinners that he was labelled a drunk, there's something there, in what Nabal's hedonism so narrowly misses, and the call to us to be sufficiently close to drinking cultures that we are able to help.

🫂 One rendering of the aim of working through AA's 12 steps intends to replace self-centeredness with a growing moral consciousness and a willingness for self-sacrifice and unselfish constructive action. It is in this way that quitting alcohol aligns with the project of benign Kingdom building which David is engaged in, and which we get to join God in doing.

[5] I AM ABIGAIL

[5.1] What is wisdom?

Is wisdom's y-axis merely a capacity to project a greater number of chess moves?

Wisdom is the very structural glue of truth itself, integrity's lively task force, the substance of sustainability, the blossom, leaf and root of flourishing. Wisdom, as the character of God, is the active personal weighty essence of holistic-being personified, an agile agent of the good, the true and the beautiful.

I think my struggle with defining the wisdom of Abigail is that we call wise both:

* 📜 Those principles which apply in all cases, maxims which are a universal guide to life. Which I would call Wisdom-Codified. This is natural revelation, common grace, but it is from God nevertheless, and it is exemplified in Abigail: It is always wise to speak to people respectfully, for example.

* 🧝‍♀️ I would contrast this with dynamically prudent navigation in complex contexts in the pursuit of God's excellence. Wisdom-Personified. Which I would emphasise or distinguish as the prophetic wisdom of special revelation. There is a wisdom which is active, which whispers words, as distinct from, but not in conflict with, the static proverbial truisms of codified wisdom.

[5.2] How is Abigail Wise?

She is wise insofar as she behaves intelligently, humbly and honourably. She is wise in that she has a plan. But I'm cautious to codify her actions beyond that as wisdom. She is of note where she is prophetic, and risks something sacrificially. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and that fear is constituted in attending to his activity, his plan, his character that he is working out in a given context. What is wisdom? What is distillable as a praxis to pursue, so to know wisdom, live wisely and be wise?

The contrast between a wisdom of techniques, lifehacks, epithets, formulae and that state of being which ‘is’ wise and out of an abundance of that spirit then acts wise-ly, is captured in Octavia Hill’s aggressive disparagement of the inclination to imitate her model, in favour of commending a way of seeing. She said of her life's work in a late speech:

“When I am gone, I hope my friends will not try to carry out any special system, or to follow blindly in the track which I have trodden. ... what we care for most to leave them is not any tangible thing, however great, not any memory, however good, but the quick eye to see, the true soul to measure, the large hope to grasp the mighty issues of the new and better days to come – greater ideals, hope and patience to realise them both.”

What would be for us to become those eyes to those hearts? How might we set our hearts on a sage gravitas, slowly earned, long fermented and hard tested. There is a practice of wisdoming for wisdom and towards wisdom which wars for true truth, against constructions of reality based on unrelational knowledge and disembodied being.

Wisdom has a contextual aspect and a big-picture aspect. It is relative, but also, we know it when we see it.

* Effective ways to confront authority, to speak truth to power~ patriarchy, insofar as it exists, will eat itself.

* Hospitality and the weaponised domestic ~ we cannot take this for granted

[5.2.1] She speaks truth to power in non-violent resistance of an individual

Abigail engages as a critic of the powerful, wise as serpent, innocent as dove – in her tone and content. And ingenious that she manages to combat two oppressors in one manoeuvre. However, this high-risk act of voluntary sacrifice is not a universal maxim, as if to say, always go looking for a hill to die on. But it is a far reaching pattern – David's Kingdom, as God's Kingdom, springs from an act of sin-atoning self-sacrifice.

Acknowledge the sin-guilt, offer to absorb the cost, pay-forward a token of the cost, sell a vision of the greater good, frame their choice as a free option to be heroic. And in all this, trust God, as the source of both parties and as the judge over both parties.

“..On me alone, my lord, be the guilt. Please let your servant speak in your ears, and hear the words of your servant. Let not my lord regard this worthless fellow, Nabal, for as his name is, so is he. Nabal is his name, and folly is with him. But I your servant did not see the young men of my lord, whom you sent. Now then, my lord, as the LORD lives, and as your soul lives, because the LORD has restrained you from bloodguilt and from saving with your own hand..”

Solving conflict by benediction: “God is on your side, this ends well, God will avenge..” We are not to resist an evil person, says Jesus, we are to lead a quiet life says Paul. Resistance, when the opportunity presents itself to go the second mile, to heap burning coals of kindness. Like Jessica Chastain gave two grand to a troll's crowdfunder this week.

[5.2.2] She displays God's pattern redemption for a kingdom as a whole

The bringing of abundance is symbolic of a form of leadership that comes from a place of overflow, grace and nurture. So the gift of food as gift is emblematic of the reform needed in the corrupt trajectory of David’s kingship which is bound towards vengance on the basis of scarcity.

She speaks truth to power in a person-to-person sense, in a turn-the-other-cheek sense of conflict management. But qua confronting David-as-future-King she is inserting a treatise of political reform. Over against a political regime that would become the hubristic state that would forget its duty to orphans and widows, Abigail brings reform, a returning to the abundance of the covenant with Yahweh.

* Who is that prophet for St Marks?

* What is St Marks organised around?

* Where are we formed as a defensive nation state?

* What does the bringing of abundance offer to the leadership of a community house?

[5.2.3] She restrains evil

Abigail as a prophet is restraining evil. This is a combative intervention. This prophetic act is costly and risky - a pointed insight, a timely and urgent imperative from the outside to prevent evil. Like a burnt offering for guilt, Abigail offers a propitiation for Nabal’s folly.

* How far would you go to prevent a David from sinning?

* How far would you go to cover the cost of deflecting the comeuppance of a Nabal’s folly?

* What bravery and what humility would that need?

[5.2.4] She marshals a household as a political act.

Abigail's mastery of the domestic is precisely a contending for God deftly over-and-against a world characterised by conflict. Just as the Pr31 woman works, makes, trades goods, helps the poor, as an agent of formidable force from/through the weaponised domestic. Food is power, and in Abigail we see a virtuoso application domestic influencing a nation.

* What is a Christian theology of the domestic sphere? What is it now ~ ambiguated as it is by unlimited technology, antagonised as it is now by feminist histories of injustice?

* What is a home and pantry for?

This idea seems irrelevantly niche, and even cruel to encourage the homeless and private-renting precariat of the evening service to cast a vision for home economics and radical hospitality as a means of political action. But I will. There is an injustice upstream that dictates that we cannot afford the forms of dwelling that would make this sort of hospitality possible.

The PJs serve to facilitate a community house, because God has gifted it to us, and because I see the domestic sphere as the context for building the integrity of a locality, as the vicarage achieves by default, as homegroups achieve but briefly. The durable home and its hospitable equipment is the most effect and resilient base to effect holistic healing to the whole person. We are all called rebuild streets with houses to live in, we are called to plant trees and eat their fruit, we are called to do this in order to seek the good of the city.

More on the household as a political entity provocatively explored by C R Wiley in this quite American full-trad full-republican take that is tantilising while it feels also terrifying and unrealistic:

[5.3] In Conclusion

The Old Testament rewards reading by giving a revelation of your self and the world as it is, because it gives an unflinchingly realistic account of the complexity of life in a corrupt world.

* I need to know that I am Nabal at his worst and David at his worst.

* If I am to follow Abigail, it is peculiarly the prophetic wisdom, which is needed, that is, the eyes to see, and the resource to risk.

* The Old Testament paints a picture of a Kingdom in prototype which is now actually possible in Christ.

[6] Post Script - Links & Questions

[6.1] Abigail’s self-interest as feminine wisdom

“..my lord shall have no cause of grief or pangs of conscience for having shed blood without cause or for my lord taking vengeance himself. And when the Lord has dealt well with my lord, then remember your servant.”..” 1Sm25v31

“..And she rose and bowed with her face to the ground and said, “Behold, your handmaid is a servant to wash the feet of the servants of my lord.” And Abigail hurried and rose and mounted a donkey, and her five young women attended her. She followed the messengers of David and became his wife. David also took Ahinoam of Jezreel, and both of them became his wives..” 1Sm25v41-43

More could be said about Abigail's position.

* How do we understand her-in-context and how do we understand ourselves-in-context? What can be applied in terms of achieving equivalent sustainable net-good prophetic outcomes today?

* Nabal was not yet dead. How to do likewise interpret and apply her flirtatious wink of “remember your handmaid..” without sanitising and pietising this? Is this exemplary of inter-gender negotiation - Abigail holding her own with David? Is this paradigmatic jiujitsu femininity? Is this descriptive of prudence? Is this prescriptive of commendable marital behaviour?

* What is the status of becoming but one of David’s wives? Surely this is not a commendation of polygamy generally, but is it license for polygamy exceptionally?

* Surely God can redeem all things, and surely the OT actors had only partial revelation, but what are we responsible for in the light of our own partial revelation?

* To what extent is self-interest a benign and practical regulating principle in making ethical decisions, such as that faced by Abigail?

[6.2] Abigail’s protest as feminine wisdom

The SNL parody of the Kendall Jenner Pepsi Ad speaks to a common modality of flawed biblical exegesis. Previous modes of protest are appropriated as a lifestyle choice for a sanitised version of fair-weather consumer Christianity. How should we do otherwise?

It would be possible to caricature an application of Abigail’s actions as a #metoo protest against her abusive relationship. Borrowing from this, we could all leave bad marriages, and pass Pepsi’s from an entitled SJW frontline to create a appropriated synthetic harmony of cake&circuses spectacle?

[6.3] Abigail’s Submission as feminine wisdom

It would be possible to caricature an application of Abigail’s actions as a Surrendered Wife tactic to manipulate her future sugar daddy to ordain to include her in his trophy cabinet as a cynical win-win of mutual coercion and mutual parasitism wherein a shrew partners with toxic-masculinity in a dance of symbiotic codependence. A bleak but realistic theology of marriage in a fallen world. Is that it?

[6.4] Abigail’s economic agency as feminine wisdom

As with Joanna and Susanna and Priscilla etc - there is not a shortage of biblical precedent to offer Proverbs 31 boss babe women as wealthy sponsors of the early church etc. And these are rolled out as “forgotten” ~ outraged that Joanna was masculinised etc. And periodically in the church culture wars its seems necessary to combat a theology of gender that has degenerated to list of do-nots. Don't speak, don't lead, don't uncover your hair, do be different, don't do anything. Tedious gender roles in which men teach and women do something undefined. But. It’s pretty low resolution, and the data points of entrepreneurial women in the bible don’t generate much signal to the noise ratio, in a legitimate effort to discern the normal, and identify a plurality of femininities and their diverse excellences,

* How do we talk about gender as a thung thing without quashing dispositional difference by monolithically simplistic archetypes and without the untennable blur of complete relativism?

* How do we commend economic agency in a way that is critical also about the relegation of the household economy and realistic about what we can resist?

Righteous/Unrighteous Rich/Poor Stewards

Righteous rich stewards include Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Job, Joseph of Arimathea, Lydia, and Dorcas

Righteous poor stewards include Ruth and Naomi, Jesus Christ, the widow who gave her mite, the Macedonian church, and Paul, who often knew want and hunger.

Unrighteous rich stewards include Laban, Esau, Nabal, Haman, the rich young ruler, and Judas Iscariot.

Unrighteous poor stewards – Biblical examples of unrighteous poor stewards include the sluggard and the fool, who are repeatedly renounced throughout the book of Proverbs.

http://theresurgencereport.com/resurgence/2010/03/23/the-theology-of-rich-and-poor

Two Hospitalities

“..Wisdom has built her house; she has hewn her seven pillars. She has slaughtered her beasts; she has mixed her wine; she has also set her table. She has sent out her young women to call from the highest places in the town, “Whoever is simple, let him turn in here!” To him who lacks sense she says, “Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed. Leave your simple ways, and live, and walk in the way of insight..” Pr9v1-5

“..The woman Folly is loud; she is seductive and knows nothing. She sits at the door of her house; she takes a seat on the highest places of the town, calling to those who pass by, who are going straight on their way, “Whoever is simple, let him turn in here!” And to him who lacks sense she says, “Stolen water is sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant.” But he does not know that the dead are there, that her guests are in the depths of Sheol..” Pr9v13-18

Both Wisdom and Folly offer hospitality. Hospitality, we learn, is by no means a guaranteed good. Looking for guidance here in becoming lifely not deathly, churchic not cultic, self-giving not self-related:

* v17 Transparency or atleast non-secrecy?

* (2) v5 The involved economics of the production of bread and wine? (vs stolen)

* (3) v3 Going to them, and sending others Mt22v9? Acticly outward bound, rather than sitting v14, in doorways v14.

* (4) v1 Preparing a 'good sized' (ESVSB) house?

* (5) v6 Inviting people to change, loving them as they are, leading them out of simplistic ways, so to be a wayside wise way for wayward wayfarers.

http://phil-blogs.blogspot.com/2012/02/texting-proverbs.html

Wisdom as Woman

The bible is full of men. Male authors, male kings, male God pronouns, male Jesus, male disciples, male apostles. Why is wisdom a woman? And not is not vague association with precious objectification. Why is wisdom characterised as a woman?

I find the parabolic limitlessly fascinating: God's metaphors, the Word’s words, the Maker’s sense-making. Why is salt salty, why is light light. God made these things to speak of him, and to guide the wise structuring of his Kingdom by his Kingdom's members. Become acquainted with salt, with light, with sheep, and with wisdom which is personified as a woman.

This is not to make the stark dichotonomy that women are wise and men are unwise – for surely men carry feminine traits and women carry masculine traits in extensive and significant ways. But. Why is the character of wisdom a woman?

Theology of the Domestic Sphere

“..And she had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord's feet and listened to his teaching. But Martha was distracted with much serving. And she went up to him and said, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her then to help me.”..” Lk10v39-40

The PJs serve to facilitate a community house I see the domestic sphere as the context of the integrity of a locality, as the vicarage – wielding a household as the primary instrument for healing. What is a household?

What is a Christian theology of the domestic sphere, ambiguated as it is now by unlimited technology, antagonised as it is now by feminist histories of injustice?

In the old days Abigail's mastery of the domestic 1Sm25v18 was precisely a contending for God deftly over-and-against a world of male-male conflict, in the persons of David/Nabal. Just as the Pr31 woman works, makes, trades goods, helps the poor, as an agent of formidable force from/through the weaponised domestic.

Submission to archetypal asymmetry conjured distinctive realms for relevant contextual heroism, profound and unabstractable heroism. Men were to explorationally form the world, women were to invitationally fill a world. Encultured and apprenticed to a family-resemblance achieving excellence through codes of duty and instrumentalised domains.

But now, Mary's dissident discipleship is a lesson in a new liberation, a new Kingdom in which there is no male or female Gal3v28, where home and work are perfectly androgynised, and heroism is found in the singular task of sitting at Jesus feet? If so, how so? If not, how not?

http://phil-blogs.blogspot.com/2018/03/texting-luke-ten.html

Good evening St Marks. This is the third in a series on Mark’s gospel, we reach the healing of the paralytic. As ever I preach to myself and about myself and this is a sermon about spiritual paralysis, and is an especially draft-y sermon, i’m fumbling for a jigsaw piece to make it click into place. A sermon about helplessness through helplessness. 

Steve’s preached the last couple of weeks, setting us in a pacey narrative illustrating the dynamic of following Jesus. Here, the opening credits having barely faded, Jesus faces opposition - and the next few week will take us through a series of encounters with the establishment resisting Jesus' ministry. 

Steve invited us to put ourselves into the boots of the fishermen in the story. Here. I can relate to the paralytic. I can relate to the Pharisees. I can see my need for Jesus’s healing forgiveness and the need for stretcher bearers to carry such invalids to a hole in the roof. 

Last time I was preaching was Joshua back in February, and it was also about impediments to movement - the river Thames as a body of water keeping us from the promised land of life after Covid. This time again, topological peculiarity, broaching boundaries, getting God’s people from A to B requires architectural transgression. I preach to myself, the call to courage, to motive to move, over against the stuckness, unfreedom, and paralysis. 

I preach to myself as paralytic. The compound tragedies of the last few years curdled in the ventless slow cooker of lockdown’s tyranny of breathless days and sorrow without purpose. I have felt paralysed, a dilute inaccessible immobilised version of myself. What would it look like to be healed? What would it look like to experience freedom and forgiveness as antidote to paralysis?

I read this episode as a small layered theatre - it is a story about healing, set within a story about carrying, set within a portrait of opposition. At each of those levels we could apply a question:

* What paralysed you?

* Who carries who to Jesus?

* Where do I oppose healing/forgiveness?

Now, Jesus actually healed a medically paralysed man here, but I am most interested to take this idea for a walk. As we do with episodes in the gospels featuring blindness and leprosy and huge hauls of fish.. we speak almost automatically of Jesus metaphorically opening the eyes of our heart, reaching out to touch the proverbially unclean and in affecting those conditions in which we likewise would be fishers of men - almost to the exclusion of literal fish. 

Sightwise as analogy. Christianity is a true truth aimed at the restoration of the real real over against untruth and unreality - access is via restored sight. This is often framed in terms - thinking of John Carpenter’s film They Live - wherein alien creatures move amongst us as destructive agents, but only with a special pair of glasses is the protagonist Nada able to see the unseen - to see what is really there. So road to Emmaus their eyes were opened, so Paul’s conversion is a blindness to sight etc. 

So mobility, it’s not merely unfortunate that the paralytic is paralysed, but emblematic. I am interested in the nature of true movement as a spiritual condition. 

Conscious that paralysis is also a nervous conditions affecting a loss of sensitivity, as well as moving. Partly that’s not always the case, partly it’s not the salient impediment in view in the suffer’s reaching Jesus, and partly those themes are scratched so much more often in the blindness/deadness qua sensitivity. 

[2]  This Metaphor of Paralysis

What is going on in paralysis? In the simplest sense, in breaking your back or neck you sever the connection from head to body via the spine. It’s a communication or coordination issue - like the broadband being cut off. So in a stroke, the brain is damaged in its ability to speak to the body. So too in polio, the virus attacks the motor nerves as they come out from the spine rendering the sufferer immobilised. So too motor neurone disease - the degeneration of those cells which control movement. Who can say 

The presenting issue is a lack of movement, the diagnosis is that internally there has been a breakdown in the communication and coordination organ system. Things not working as they should is bad, but why? People should move. 

* There is a practical imperative to it - for the avoidance of hazards, for the moving of food from plate to mouth. 

* There is an aesthetic imperative the goodness of movement, celebrated in dwelling balletically, but also in all ways the loves of a sensate and personal universe magnetise and propel us through space from and towards, attractionally and vitally.

* There is a moral imperative to it, the bible makes much in its critique of the sluggard - as a door on it’s hinges, as one quivering indoors at an imaginary lion in the street, as the buried talent, as Gideon hiding in the winepress etc. Contrasted with leaping for joy with a God who makes my feet like the deer etc etc.

* But more than that, there is a reality function and truth imperative. With velocity equal to distance divided by time - access to God’s reality of a good physical and temporal reality is addled by immobility. 

* This seems obscure, but our technological efforts to extend life and diminish distance through hypersonic travel have had a deleterious effect on the environment and on our grasp of reality. 

* Whilst likewise, the working-from-home Zoom-based ontology that has us immobilised but spread over distances have similarly wrecked out health and relationships. 

* Godspeed, has a peculiarly pedestrian velocity, but more on that story later.

Movement is crucial for our access to the real. It is through movement that we access temporality and consequence. We do not live in an occasionalist universe, of random snapshots and disconnected instances beamed in through a zero-gravity tilt-a-whirl. Life is not uncaused and causeless, history is going somewhere, over distance, through time. But it can happen in all sorts of ways that we become paralysed. We drop out of activity into a stiffening dysfunction, but perhaps more profoundly we drop out of time. 

Last year I read Time Lived Without its Flow - I commend this book unreservedly, a poetic account of loss by Denise Riley. I resonated with its account of the paralysis of grief - I’ll see if I can quote from it at greater length later - so Riley lost a son and reflects in the months and years after on the experience of this. “a child’s time is “quietly uncoiling inside your own”, so when the child’s life stops, “the purely cognitive violence of it” freezes the parent’s time, too. She cannot “move on” because “there is no medium through which to move any more”. 

She cannot “move on” because “there is no medium through which to move any more”. 

This happens personally, and has also happened collectively through Covid. Not simply that time slowed or stopped, but that we drift temporally, unanchored individually, unsynchronised collectively. 

I’m interested in paralysis as experienced in this way of atemporality. I observe my own paralyses and consider some of that is just a blip, some of that and Enneagram 5 would do, retreat to a cave to escape overwhelm, step out of the flow of time because of all things time is short and Type 5s fear scarcity. Some of this experience of paralysis may be more universal, and in which case, perhaps we could explore healing together. 

[3] What Paralysed You?

[3.1] Personal Paralysis

As I say, I found a searing resonance in Time Lived without Its Flow. Resonant precisely in the way that it decentres melancholy or pathology of trauma per se and gave attention to the experience of time, inside of which was a set of complex emotions, I’ll quote Riley at length, and then touch of sorrow, fear and fatigue as agents of the paralyses I have known. 

I’ll not be writing about death, but about an altered condition of life. The experience that not only preoccupied but occupied me was of living in suddenly arrested time. That acute sensation of being cut off from any temporal flow… 

While hoping not to lapse into melodrama or self-regarding memoir, I’ll try to convey that extraordinary feeling of a-temporality. But how could such a striking condition ever be voiced? It runs wildly counter to everything that I’d thought we could safely assume about lived time. So this ‘arrested time’ is also a questions about what is describable; about the linguistic limits of what can be conveyed. I’m not keen on conceding to any such limits. Yet it seems that the possibilities for describing and the kinds of temporality that you inhabit, may be intimately allied. For there do turn out to be ‘kinds’ in the plural. 

The prospect of recounting it in a written form stayed, for me, bother repugnant and implausible for well over two and a half years after the death. You can’t, it seems take the slightest interest in the activity of writing unless you possess some feeling of futurity. The act of describing would involve some notion of the passage of time. Narrating would imply at least a hint of ‘and then’ and ‘after that’. Any written or spoken sentence would naturally lean forwards towards its development and conclusion, unlike my own paralysed time. 

so intricate and singular a living thing can’t just vanish from the surface of life: that would run counter to all your accumulated experience. The day after his death, studiously wiping away what you realise are the last tangible traces: tiniest bits of his hair from the edge of the washbasin. This solid persistence of things. So then, the puzzle of what ‘animation’ is; of exactly what it is that’s been crushed.

...a sudden death, for the one left behind, does such violence to the experienced ‘flow’ of time that it stops, and then slowly wells up into a large pool. Instead of the old line of forward time, now something like a globe holds you. You live inside a great circle with no rim. In the past, the future lay in front of mean as if I could lean into it gently like a finger of land, a promontory feelings its way into the sea. But now I’ve no sense of any onward temporal opening, but stay lodged in the present, wandering over some vast saucer-like incline of land, some dreary wide plain like the blanks of the river lethe, I suppose. 

The thought behind I strove to joinUnto the thought beforeBut sequence ravelled out of soundlike balls upon a floor

~ sequence ravelled out of sound - indeed, one note no longer implies another’s coming. You watch water cascading from the tap to splash into the basin. Yet noting small events and their effects doesn’t revive your former impression of moving inside time. The tap turns, water pours. You can observe sequence. Nothing, though, follows from this observation to propel you, too, onward into the old world of consequences. Not that your sense of time is ‘distorted’. what’s changed is more radical than that. Simply, you are no longer in time. Only from your freshly removed perspective can you fully understand how our habitual intuition of time are not without their limits, and can falter. To tell someone in grief, ‘You should move on,’ is doubly thoughtless, because there’s no medium left through which to move anywhere. We were drifting though our former time like underwater creatures furnished with gills that they didn’t notice they had, until they were fished up out of their element and their breathing apparatus failed. 

Sorrow

The bible has said, hope deferred makes the heart sick. Have you known this? When waiting on the Lord becomes just waiting for the heartaches to come. When bleak calls to bleak. When you get what you want but not what you need. Have you known such paralytics? It is not the mere psychochemical addlement of negative emotions, but the accurate apprehension of the end of a thing - the cartoon koala bear quivering on a tree stump. I return periodically to Gideon Koppel’s film Sleep Furiously which is an elegiac portrait of a Welsh village fading. "It is only when I sense the end of things that I find the courage to speak. The courage, but not the words." I often fumble for words, and I am often without courage. Therein is a paralysis I would be healed of.

Sorrow is so widely impermissible in church contexts. Struggle needs to be spoken in the pluperfect tense, my messy life needs to be aestheticised for tumblr - we have all had our moments, but now, we. are. ok. Real paralysing sorrow is known to be contagious and so euphemised. It is still paralysis if bedaubed with the faux religious drapery of charismatic enthusiasm - sorrow gagged by sorrow is still sorrow. I consider people I have known, externally effusive, but internally static and emotionally opaque, leading their meat robot through the motions of a puppeteer faith - paralysed from making actual choices and taking actual risk because, as Riley, they have fallen outside of time. 

Fear

I have known a paralysis born of fear. Faced with danger one’s animal instinct is to fight flight or freeze - petrified as rabbit in headlights. And. Petrified long after the car has driven off, the gecko drops from the wall, the body keeps the score, holds a reverberating past trauma long after the danger has passed. Have you known this paralysis? Latent, resurgent. Who broke your heart that it is now so defended? How came I by this armour now rusting stolid and far too heavy. See David demurs Saul’s armour when facing Goliath - as lacking agility to fight the fight, to do the doing of doing undefended. 

Fatigue

I think of the Londoners I have known - the long term long haul ministers of any form of creditialled of prosaic lay ministry, and I think of compassion fatigue. Different slightly from burnout, slower perhaps, and less the calamitous rupture, but a rising self-pity, gradually more desensitised, a hardened heart calloused by friends drifting away in an unrelenting bleed. Baz Luhrmann offers in his 1999 Sunscreen that you should live in New York City once but leave before it makes hard. And they have, and it has. And I am no longer the supple social butterfly, but a conservative nimby cliqued with a nostalgic remnant ruing the change, holding the new in suspicion. Because it hurts, the churn of London hurts, and so I retreat from the lively snick-a-snack into a protectionist paralysis. 

Dickens observed the same trajectory towards paralysis as the London condition in his 1836 Sketches by Boz

It is strange with how little notice, good, bad, or indifferent, a man may live and die in London. He awakens no sympathy in the breast of any single person; his existence is a matter of interest to no one save himself; he cannot be said to be forgotten when he dies, for no one remembered him when he was alive. There is a numerous class of people in this great metropolis who seem not to possess a single friend, and whom nobody appears to care for. Urged by imperative necessity in the first instance, they have resorted to London in search of employment, and the means of subsistence. It is hard, we know, to break the ties which bind us to our homes and friends, and harder still to efface the thousand recollections of happy days and old times, which have been slumbering in our bosoms for years, and only rush upon the mind, to bring before it associations connected with the friends we have left, the scenes we have beheld too probably for the last time, and the hopes we once cherished, but may entertain no more. These men, however, happily for themselves, have long forgotten such thoughts. Old country friends have died or emigrated; former correspondents have become lost, like themselves, in the crowd and turmoil of some busy city; and they have gradually settled down into mere passive creatures of habit and endurance.

So, sorrow, fear and fatigue. Paralyses I have known. Paralyses which stall time and render me impotent for the task of well-loving. Paralyses which need healing, and which need for God’s superabundant, prevenient grace. Sin is a complex thing, and doubtless I am capable of conspiring with my own victimhood in these tragedies visid on my, but prevailingly, these are domains for healing. 

I consider there are also paralyses in my life which are not born of ignorance or weakness, but for which my own deliberate fault is culpable. I consider those paralyses in my life of shame, guilt, addiction and immaturity. 

In reading around for this I stumbled upon one of CS Lewis’ Screwtape Letters which adroitly diagnoses “spiritual paralysis” in a format which, by lampooning active evil, makes it the more salient. An older demon speaks to a younger demon about how to tempt exactly such as me.

I offer this (chapter 12) to you wholesale, as it captured for me exactly the way that Hell is a form of paralysis - a banal escape from a more authentic life. 

MY DEAR WORMWOOD,

Obviously you are making excellent progress. My only fear is lest in attempting to hurry the patient you awaken him to a sense of his real position. For you and I, who see that position as it really is, must never forget how totally different it ought to appear to him. We know that we have introduced a change of direction in his course which is already carrying him out of his orbit around the Enemy (the Devil’s name for God); but he must be made to imagine that all the choices which have effected this change of course are trivial and revocable. He must not be allowed to suspect that he is now, however slowly, heading right away from the sun on a line which will carry him into the cold and dark of utmost space.

For this reason I am almost glad to hear that he is still a churchgoer and a communicant. I know there are dangers in this; but anything is better than that he should realise the break it has made with the first months of his Christian life. As long as he retains externally the habits of a Christian he can still be made to think of himself as one who has adopted a few new friends and amusements but whose spiritual state is much the same as it was six weeks ago. And while he thinks that, we do not have to contend with the explicit repentance of a definite, fully recognised, sin, but only with his vague, though uneasy, feeling that he hasn't been doing very well lately. 

This dim uneasiness needs careful handling. If it gets too strong it may wake him up and spoil the whole game. On the other hand, if you suppress it entirely — which, by the by, the Enemy will probably not allow you to do — we lose an element in the situation which can be turned to good account. If such a feeling is allowed to live, but not allowed to become irresistible and flower into real repentance, it has one invaluable tendency. It increases the patient's reluctance to think about the Enemy. All humans at nearly all times have some such reluctance; but when thinking of Him involves facing and intensifying a whole vague cloud of half-conscious guilt, this reluctance is increased tenfold. They hate every idea that suggests Him, just as men in financial embarrassment hate the very sight of a pass-book. In this state your patient will not omit, but he will increasingly dislike, his religious duties. He will think about them as little as he feels he decently can beforehand, and forget them as soon as possible when they are over. A few weeks ago you had to tempt him to unreality and inattention in his prayers: but now you will find him opening his arms to you and almost begging you to distract his purpose and benumb his heart. He will want his prayers to be unreal, for he will dread nothing so much as effective contact with the Enemy. His aim will be to let sleeping worms lie. 

As this condition becomes more fully established, you will be gradually freed from the tiresome business of providing Pleasures as temptations. As the uneasiness and his reluctance to face it cut him off more and more from all real happiness, and as habit renders the pleasures of vanity and excitement and flippancy at once less pleasant and harder to forgo (for that is what habit fortunately does to a pleasure) you will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention. You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday's paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in 26 conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. 

All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, “I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked”. The Christians describe the Enemy as one “without whom Nothing is strong”. And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man's best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.

You will say that these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts

Your affectionate uncle

SCREWTAPE

What paralysed you. What paralysed me? Guilt, Addiction and Immaturity. There is a complex web of causality, intention and sin, but I have been an agent in these.

Guilt and Shame.

I’m not going to dissect a taxonomy of the difference between guilt and shame. I see this functional bundle in myself, I see this in others. When I briefly helped with CAP, there was a trope, that debt provokes a shut-in architecture , defensive against the bailiffs, and behind which door there is a stack of red-printed unopened letters. Life is complex and debt happens for any number of reasons beyond one’s control. But, nevertheless, that architectural vignette it is such a vivid picture of me and Sarah, when I’ve sinned against her, I know my emotional debt, I lock myself in, the proverbial letters pile up. I drown a graceless death of interest accrued  in the midst of her available grace. When God comes into the garden after the fall, he asks Adam, where are you? He was locked in. Why did I not call, why did i not persevere with the Zoom calls, the hard conversations, the 1-to-1s. A paralysing shame which gives a fragility of venture. I am so ashamed of failures to complete, failures to achieve, failures to deliver commensurate ROI for those who have invested in me. And so I live paralysed, in suspended animation. This needs forgiveness, this paralysis needs healing. 

Addiction.

Paul talks in Rm7 that “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.” Those pesky parts, wandering eyes prone to wander, they are a law unto themselves. Twitchy, like the devil makes work for idle hands, a restless Tourette's of juggernaut carnality, an unstoppable cacophony of wriggly mischief, a sickly tic tangled in habituated entitled slothful bravado, all waging smutty war against my better self, holding me to ransom. Wretched man that I am, damned in my body, but damned if I disembody. Danger is everywhere. Would that I were addicted to porn as a paralysis, but no. Rather the riskless numbing ennui of anything but, - the idle lofi dopamine of twitter spats captured perfectly in CS Lewis’ “watching a dead fire in a cold room.” Paralysis as immobility - what is it that keeps Paul from doing the good that he wants to do? I want to do the good that I want to do. Who will deliver me from this body of death? 

Immaturity.

There is everywhere a normalisation of extended adolescence, and the paralysis of that is hard to mitigate - it is different from helicopter parented snowflakes (who may or may not exist as a statistical group), but rather the widespread and christianised ambiguation of rites of passage into the doing of adulthood. Paralysis surfaces as perfectionism, a hesitance and uncommitment, a one foot in sea and one on shore dilettantism. There are all about me stunted ones, trapped by the housing crisis, living provisionally, subsisting in the gig economy, but all as excuses for a fundamental risk-aversity. There is a paralysis that never made escape velocity into adulthood - and it goes unchallenged, unassisted and so unforgiven. 

[3.2] Community of Paralysis

To press this paralysis analogy further, I consider that we are a body. We are a body, a vine etc. Other sermons I’ve attempted here, During lockdown 1 on John15 extrapolating love-one-anothering in the organic unity of being one vine. And some time previous to that on Ephesians as a whole I have been trying to externalise some thinking on being-a-church with some form of collective responsibility for the strengthening and shielding of the whole. If an individual can be spiritually paralysed, by extension, we could speak of a body’s dysfunction through the lens of paralysis. 

Collective inaction as a church.

We as a body are paralysed - dysfunctional systems create a failure of communication that has the effect of disabling the whole. Paralysis is a nervous condition, the disjunction of head from body, the disconnect of feeling from doing, a failure of internal communication leading to the immobility of the whole. How did something like Zaccarias or Fletcher or Smythe happen? Bad actors, yes. But glaringly and perhaps more troublingly, sclerotic governance. A stale top-heavy cargo-cult conservative ecclesiology that is constitutionally formed of  talking heads appended to a wasting body - the nervous pathways that would transmit such have been wasted away by a tawdry augmented theology and degenerative bitterness cauterised by apathy and unprocessed unhealed grief. When Jesus speaks of the religious leaders, he compares them to white washed tombs - a paralytic immobile and static emblem - inertia so monumental he choses an inert monument to symbolise it. This too needs healing in the church at large. Could you lower a church body through a hole in the roof? What would need to be forgiven?

Heritable paralysis in a family.

I consider ways particularly in families and the ways a generation passes on their peculiar misery to its offspring. And ways that manifests particularly in not-doing-the-good-you-want-to-do qua paralysis. And also in the existing atemporally being an exacerbating factor in not grasping the consequentiality of your paralysis. 

This is a bit of a half-finished metaphor - there is something in paralysis which is not just awkward low EQ. But something jammed in time, like a stuck brake impeding the continuum and functional exchange of meanings between members.

And I mean this as not special criticism of my own family, rather that, if we had a notion of healing corporate paralyses, we might press into this.

So, paralyses in a range of inherited cannots. Fragile children of divorce who cannot commit. Aloof children of privilege who cannot care less. Disembodied children of evangelicalism who cannot express desire. You lay a seed in someone, and the sins of the forefathers visited onto the third and fourth generation - and this happens in our community house to, spill over of influence casting a shadow of inaction. Spiritual paralysis passes on its passivity unless it is healed. The answer is not reactive hyperactivity, it is healing.

[3.3] Culture of Paralysis

To zoom out further, from the relational community that might manifest paralysis as a body, to a wider zeitgeist and the notion of paralysis within that. 

I consider we live paralysed. To the extent that we live these strange augmented lives through tiny black boxes, we live paralysed. This is not so much a commentary on the sedentary nature of our work. But of the atemporality and unreality of the image and simulation - consumption is consuming. You are the product. Somewhat as Heidegger says the ever increasing speed of technology does not bring real nearness. So the ever more high resolution zoetrope we’re gazing into has the effect of destroying the distance and the time that would constitute movement. 

Narcissus wasted away by the pool. Instagram as an ossuary of the ossified as static as the eggs they froze to purchase perpetual maidenhood in the privileged echelons of the new managerial bourgeois. So too Vauxhall Nine Elms is paralytic, whose gigantic stasis is built with a Piranesian eye to its future existence as ruins - it is protospective nostalgia, it is not possessed of any  feeling of futurity that you might write the story of our journey towards - in Denise Riley’s sense of this - there is no movement through time by which we arrive at that future, there is nothing generative or perpetual that accrues life it is a frozen slowly tarnishing lacquer of urbanism. Our culture’s paralysis is seen in this atemporal stasis - the total disenchantment of a materialist universe as Icy as White Witch’s menagerie in the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. 

[4] Against Paralysis

So, we have asked what paralysed you? We’ve considered various ways Phil experiences himself as paralysed by sorrow, fear and fatigue, by guilt, addiction and immaturity. And within scales of collective paralysis.

What then? 

What is the opposite of paralysis?

Getting up, going home, and in Luke’s extended account “glorifying God”. So Worship? Animation? Like s spring coiled - so the equal and opposite reaction is not-not moving. 

Faith leads to movement. I consider all the imperatives to go in the Bible ~ Go forth and multiply, Go make disciples of all men baptising them. And running as a response: When the two disciples on the road to emmaus see Jesus break bread - what do they do? When the prodigal son’s father spies him from the rooftop what does he do? When the Mary Magdelen discovers the empty what does she do? When she tells Peter, what does he do? Eric Liddle feels God pleasure when he..  A church planting movement by a move of the spirit to move you by the spirit moves with a centrifugal force from jerusalem, judea, the ends of the earth

And so we should move. But I don’t think that is the point, or even a point. 

There is a danger of falling into a peculiar preening ~ a look at how not-paralysed I am, which then indirectly spreads a perverse theology of action-for-its-own-sake and action-in-my-own-strength, competitive hyperactivity, the metricisation of practical achievement. Jesus-is-coming-look-busy. 

Once you can move, it is a self-evident good. A more appropriate use of the gift that recognises it as an underserved gift is to seek to give it away, to reach those without it, who may not even know they lack it. 

How? I think about this at 41, what regulating principle would allow us to intervene in love in the lives of those who had normatised a pathological paralysis, without inculcating a culture of judgement?

Even in this sermon, how does one diagnose the ill of paralysis, individually and in culture, without by default, creating over-realised expectations of not-yet realities. Without creating shame around those ways we still live unhealed this side of heaven?

I consider two activities that can be undertaken, in response to the identification of spiritual paralysis and the prospect of its possible healing.

[4.1] Collective action - Carriers

The paralytic was carried by four men - evidently, on this point ones unparalysed and ones acquainted with Jesus power to heal. Prayer, here, is shown to be a cooperative endeavour.  I wonder about this group of four. There is something precisely in their multi-personal collective that offers a plausibility structure. What was their group dynamic? Who instigated, who led, who was the first follower? How did they discuss it? Who convinced whom that this bonkers idea was legit? 1Tm2v8 wants men everywhere to raise up holy hands, and this is prayer, but it is practical and demands coordination if we’re going to crowd surf the afflicted to Jesus..

Who is carrying you? Who are your people? Who takes a corner of your stretcher? Would you let them? 

Who are you carrying? Are you a stretcher bearer? Do you ever see the mountain rescue teams rehearsing with a mannequin? Do you? Who are your fellow stretcher bearers? How is it balanced? How is the load spread?

Reflecting back to the fatigued paralytics of London’s rat race. What would it be for St Marks to operate a mercy mission for those. People come to London for the same two archetypal reasons we have ever sought Jerusalem or Babel - as a refuge from terror or as a springboard to wealth - in both cases London is a means and not an ends. Then there are a handful who come by accident of birth and fewer still who come on a mission to minister to London’s broken humans.Friends of ours have ambitions to form a community based on a picture of groynes - those barrier walls that go out from the coastline to prevent erosion, that create the secure basis of settled stability. It will take superhuman strength to endure without bitterness. 

[4.2] Collective action - Creative destruction

The second application is Creative destruction. So, as well as gathering to move the paralytic, you also need to address barriers. You might need to smash the reliquary that entombs your faith. You might need to change something.

Barriers, hurdles, obfustications, churchianity, christianese, the inertia of the liturgical status quo, the strongholds of well-intended inflexible Christian culture which present such impermeable container to the gospel within. Permeate it. Perforate it, go in to our Oval Office, right now, and turn what ever ain't tied down, upside down :P The person of Jesus is a summons to architectural transgression, flying in the face of Secure by Design, we leave the side door open, we let the rain come in, we set about re-roofing and spacemaxising like the palsy depends on it, switch enclosure for disclosure, -  disclosure that the world's illness is to be actively resisted, and disclosure that Jesus heals. Take a corner of my friend’s mat for me this morning.

[5] [Forgiveness > Healing] = Opposition

Finally, it’s interesting to set this up for the following weeks of this series. Jesus taunts the Pharisees - Which is easier healing or forgiveness? The Pharisee (in me) ponders Jesus’ rhetorical question literally. Which is easier for those angels balancing on the heads of pins juggling the rocks God made too heavy for him to lift? Jesus' question mocks my theorising, in the hope of doubly freeing me, both from my original sins and from my subsequent self-justifying. Which is easier, healing or forgiveness? Silly. Jesus has no difficulty marking my papers, I have sinned and Rm3v23 fallen short of the pass mark of 1, my failure is total and terminal, there are no shades of ease in the remedy. Yet. Offensively, Jesus does remedy it. Making a mockery  on my accountancy. Jesus gives us all the same blank cheque of grace to cover it all, regardless of how long I think I've worked Mt20v12 or how far they think I've fallen Lk15v30. 

It is interesting to consider in what ways Healing and Forgiveness are organically connected. Both in the sense of the role of forgiveness and forgiveness in your holistic health. But also in the sense Jesus’ healing miracles as sacraments of forgiveness. 

More interesting still is Jesus ministry to the Pharisees and through the Pharisees. I say interesting. This sort of baiting in a culture war was fraught for Jesus ~ he could have done this in a less public, less aggressive way. There is a sense in which Jesus’ ministry of healing is part of his provocation.

"Pharisees and teachers of the law were sitting there, [having] come from every village.." The boa constrictor tightens its grip. Jesus is the pawn sacrifice, he sacrifices himself, it is his initiative, his will, his glory Jn10v18 "No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord." And this message of the cross is foolishness 1Co1v18? 

And we should do likewise? A similar holy madness, battling an unseen enemy, trusting in unseen help, losing our life to gain it Mt10v39, laying down our life for another Jn15v13, offering our bodies as living sacrifices Rm12v1.

I’ll leave that to the subsequent weeks to answer how we should live to provoke Pharisees like Jesus.

To end, consider.  What has Paralysed you?

Here we are at the end of this book, the last few paragraphs, and Paul declares, “Finally..” How do you read that?

* Is this an incidental postscript? PS I love you. PPS. Don't forget to feed the cat.

* Is this chronological, merely the last in a list of innumerated points? Four calling birds, three french hens, two turtle doves, and finally..

* Is this the conclusive climax of a case he is making through the whole letter? The key bit of information which holds it all together, the lynch pin, the punchline?

I would say the latter, as there is a distinct movement through Ephesians as a whole, from theory into praxis, from the abstract into the detail, from a historic foundation into the complex application, from the what/why into the how-to. In this way, I propose preach Ephesians as a whole, as an argument in which the weaponry of the armour of God is the conclusive finale which we must read back onto the rest of the text, it is an interpretative key, a calibration of emphasis.

0.1 What was Ephesians all about?

So, think back, last two months of Sunday evenings, if Ephesians was going to be a single sentence, what would it say?

You are one in Christ now, so be united and stand firm in him.

At slightly greater length, Ephesians unpacks the mystery of a gospel of God's grace which makes the constitution of church unity gloriously possible and urgently imperative. This unity is a truth imperilled in application not only by fallible Christian incompetence but by vicious and targeted spiritual opposition.

You, St Marks, you are one in Christ now, so be united and stand firm in him.

Look to your neighbour, we are not just sharing a tube carriage, we are a we, we are a team, a gang, we constitute a body.

You, St Marks, yous are one in Christ now, so be a unity and as such stand firm in him.

0.2 Why did Ephesians need to be said?

What problem was it answering, what emphasis should we infer? Ephesians case for Unity needed to be said, and needs to be said over and over. Being one in Christ, as a principle and a practice is

* Valuable

* Vulnerable

Ephesians needs to be said to advocate unity and to counter

* Ignorance of Unity

* Misapplication of Unity

* Opposition to Unity

0.2.1 Ignorance.

God's unity which patterns church unity is not self-evident, it is not natural, it is not the default course of action. It is truly a mystery. In the absence of a Trinitarian God who is a unity of diversity, the world tends two ways: ignorantly into atomised individualism

0.2.2 Misapplication

Seen in the monolithic unity of bureaucratic behemoths – both annul the glory of the relational personal humanity and the image of God they bear.

0.2.3 Opposition

Thirdly, unity needs stating because the is opposition in the spiritual realm. Have you felt the pain of a tapestry unravelling as fast as you can weave it? Ephesians needs to be said because there is an urgency to Unity. We live time-limited lives, and for our 90minutes on the pitch there is another team with a vested interest in our disunity.

0.3 How do we apply Ephesians?

I will try to preach a grand vision of a functioning united whole. To try to prise it into life disruptively, unity is not nothing, no mere minimal tolerable consensus. The application of Ephesians is unity, dazzling unity, fully fledged towards the excellence of a thing..

To stand firm and fight for unity with proportional seriousness, that we would harrow hell with a portrait of trinitarian us-ness, to constitute as a body more than the sum of its parts. That is my prayer for St Marks, each member individually and we collectively.

1. Ephesians is a call to be church as a unity in Christ

Just to recap, let me try to persuade you that the last few weeks in Ephesians have in fact been all about unity.

8th Oct - Ephesians 1. 1 – 14

We began some weeks ago, Steve introduced Ephesians' breathless hymn of praise. A letter addressed to the church is Ephesus. 1v1 to the saints plural.

v3-14 This one long sentence declares that through Jesus blood we have received forgiveness of sins, and that in this Christ event rich blessing gushes into our reality, Paul using every superlative, from before the foundation of the world with a plan for the fullness of time. What was the plan? → v10 TO UNITE

The display of, the experience of, the ontology of unity, the metaphysical unity, union with Christ, that is the end game, that is the means and the meaning of the gospel. Unity with Christ in Christ through Christ.

15th Oct - Ephesians 1. 15 – 2. 10

Then, on the 500th anniversary of the reformation, Mark told us from v15-23 that we are saved into unity with Christ by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone. Into Christ, as the one head of one body, the Church.

We then contrast Unity in Christ is Life, contrasted with Death, 2v1-10 we were Dead in sin. By contrast with being in sin, we are in Christ 2v6 Raised in Christ, v7 receiving Grace in Christ and Kindness in Christ, v10 created for good works in Christ. In all this, we are v5 Alive together with Christ ~ writing to a you-plural about an experience we have together.

22nd Oct - Ephesians 2. 11 – 22

Sebastian used a football analogy for being Unite'ed. Being united contrasts being a One over and against being a Two. Arguing from this contrast is really important. The native state of the world's tribes and tongues is not unity.

So, 2v11 "Remember.." You used to be a disunity, a dis-integrated, disparate fractious factional dispersity: alienated. Remember. And this is how the world perpetually is: Them&Us. Them on the inner circle of privileged priority seating in private members clubs for cliques of the cogniscenti. Them, the haves vs the have-nots, the clean vs the unclean great unwashed. Remember being on the outside looking in. Remember militarised zones, quarantines, kerfews, apartheid. Remember a city red in tooth and claw. Remember because you may have forgotten.

2v13 "But now.." in Christ we are brought near, we have access to a peculiar Oneness. Don't forget it's peculiarity.

2v14 "he has made the two one." United to the body corporate, a more than sum of parts, a whole, a thung thing, not nothing, no accidental ceasefire, incorporated as a thing.

What is that thing?

v19 think of it as a citizenship, like a citizenship test gives access to certain rights and responsibilities, we as London citizens are cosmopolitan multiplicity identifying as one body because we all share in the one tube map.. but so much more so, in Christ we are a diverse membership incorporated into one household, you are brought onboard as a stakeholding associate in the firm.

v20-21 – Paul then introduces a building metaphor, again as a picture of oneness, a building is the very deliberate coordination of diverse construction components, no longer planks and bricks in the yard, we are the structural integrity of a solid whole, reciprocally dependent, mortared in place, to stand for a long time as a monument to stark one-ness.

29th Oct - Ephesians 3. 1 - 20

I couldn't find that Chris' sermon on Eph 3 was recorded. This chapter unpacks what unity means. Unity has a mysterious purpose beyond itself, unity has a because, it is no mere utilitarian convenience, expedient cooperation, unity is more-than the truism that it is good to get along, unity, church unity, counter-intuitively diverse unity, displays a cosmic truth, it the wisdom of God, in his long plan and far-reaching to reunite all things.

3v1-13 such a unity is the church: v6 church is members of the same body with a purposive unity. v9 The purpose of this unity is to display*the* wisdom of *the* God who created all things, who is now uniting all things. Unity is front and centre in the gospel, unity is the motivation of gospel, the vehicle for the gospel, and the fruit of the gospel. In making the two one in us, God is making God known, because God is the maker and the uniter, the author and the perfecter, the origin and the resolution.

Paul goes on in 3v14-20 to pray that we would understanding of the fully full fullness of God's love, v18 "together with all the saints.."as grasping the peculiar love of God is a sort of tacit knowledge, a knowledge known by experience, experienced through participation within an irreducible collective consciousness: simplistically, we know love by loving and being loved, a state which God enables by love which is v20 "this power at work within us” which reflects back “glory in the church." This benediction calls us to know love by being church.

5th Nov - Ephesians 4. 1 – 16

Ephesians divides into two halves, crudely, three chapters theory, three chapters application, Paul transitions from being church unity in theory to doing church unity on the basis of so being.

4v4 Paul espouses: There is ONE body, ONE spirit, ONE hope, ONE Lord, ONE faith, ONE baptism, ONE God and Father of all. - has he made his point?

Unity unity unity ~ but now in practice, the rubber hits the road, what does this unity look like?

So, from Eph 4, Ruth considered organisation as memory, the needful reminders through time of Who God Is, and Who we are, and through time it becomes a practice.

In the doing of church unity note how Paul transfers from those same saints/apostles/prophets which were stolid static building materials in 2v21's analogy for being a unity, into 4v11's apostles/prophets/teachers etc who constitute a living body, in the animate doing of church unity on-going.

What can we say about this unity? That it is radically diverse in its gifts and characters, and that it is purposively so. Consider how your body works, the necessity of diversity: hands and feet, ears and mouth. And so Paul says we are to grow up into:

4v15-16 "whole body, joined and held together, by every joint.." I love that. When I picture the body of Christ, I tend to think of organs, but there are also joints, what are they..? The body as it matures will grow, and must learn such as hand-eyecoordination until it becomes a corporate complex structure of parts, an organic, subsidiary, interdependent unity.

12th Nov - Ephesians 4. 17 - 32

This united body is made up of parts in relationships within a boundaried whole. David and Sarah considered the parts in Ch4-5, Caroline the inter-relations, and I will at last address the definition and defence of the boundary of this united whole.

In David's portrait of parts he painted three walks, and we saw the disconstituted parts as absentee aliens agitatedly pacing the room, the away-facing, hollowed hardened hearts and calloused treads of those who have counted themselves out of the unity.

19th Nov - Ephesians 5. 1 – 20

Then, by contrast Sarah addressed these individuals. Unfurling hibernating hedgehog individualists from their myopic retreat, to come out and play. Wake Up oh sleeper! You cannot stand aloof, you must become immersed in the messy sensate, particulate, deliciously diverse, unexpected happenstance into which you are thrown, the God-authored world which comes at you, which others you, that which is not escapist projection or bland anaesthetic numbing Wake Up oh sleeper! to the really real.

4v17-5v20 This unity depends on the active engagement of the constituent parts, attentively attending to the reality beyond themselves.

26 Nov - Ephesians 5. 21 – 6. 9

Duly unfolded from the self, we then engage relationship. And so, lastly, last week, Caroline took the passage which considers the unities in three key relationships. Unities which require submission to one another.

As you attend to the world beyond yourself you will find yourself bound to entities utterly unlike yourself.

These connections are the ligaments of the broad unity:

* Unlike you in Gender.

* Unlike you in Generation.

* Unlike you in Economic Class.

I will return to these in a minute, because I think that these three domains are still the front line in out battle for unity.

2. Diverse Unity vs Homogeneous Disunity

To Unite all things

You are one in Christ now, so be united and stand firm in him.

We are to be united, which goes beyond the mere absence of conflict into a positive definition where we are together more than the sum of our parts. I want to call us to a high view of intentional unity, beyond utility value or efficiency, towards the emphatic poetic.

2.1 Personal Unity

(vs Abstract Monolithic Unity and the annulling of selfhood)

Throughout Ephesians God is referred in his separate persons yet working as one: from a Father God, in Christ the Lord, through the Spirit. As well, the church is considered as a whole, but addressed repeatedly a persons, agents individually gifted, named, intimately and inextricably the identity and operation of parts is bound to the cooperation of parts.

So, personal unity. This unity is not the blur of Buddhism, we do not merge like oats into porridge, we do not blend molten and homogenised as dissolved identities within a soup of indistinction. Unity fashioned after an infinite personal God is not a headless faceless committee, quorate to vote in a consensus around a tawdry lowest common denominator. God's unity is not just-a-bit-average. Risk-averse inoffensive unadventure, an entropic diminuendo towards grey homogeneity. Rather, in unity we are brought to an exquisite harmony tuned to a vast and varied coherent chorus, a symphony of infinite distinct parts. Layered and complex and personal.

2.2 Structured Unity

(vs Anarchy and the annulling relationship)

And yet this multiplicity it is a one thing. A structured one thing, a body under a head, 1v10 – 'head' becomes a verb, headify Jesus, a body headed with enemies underfoot. One body, jarringly structured as a one to we self-made, self-sufficient individualists.

And, I speak for myself, we individualise with good reason. Hell is other people: broken families have raised shattered children who trust slowly and risk little, with an aversion to hierarchy, structure and intimacy. We freelance free-range free-market libertarians, adolescent agitating anarchists, chaffing at the bit, raging against the machine, untethered from any shackles of responsibility or deference. We have learnt that humans are elaborately incompatible.

~ God ministers among us to help us unlearn this.

2.3 Excellent Unity

(vs Minimal)

Unity is not binary, not a tick-box exercise, not merely the absence of division. Unity, qualitative unity, ever closer union, if you will. Because our unity is from God and about God, it is like God in that it is always more-than, there is always more, eternally to explore further up and further in to unity.

2.3.1. An excellence of Cooperative Unity

(vs Competitive)

2v22 describes our establishment as built together then 4v12 extends we build one another up. We are a cooperative unity, by contrast with a competitive enterprise.

Philosophically committed to the idea of progress evolving through competition. This is not nothing. At risk of deviating, but, just to say, the house which Sarah and I live in with some other esteemed members of the evening service, have begun to get food delivered wholesale from Suma Wholefoods.

Now, I'm sure they're not a utopia, and this model is not the answer in many conditions, but they have been operating for 40 years on a cooperative basis. Everyone in the company owns the company, there are 160 of them, and they all earn the same. I was really unsettled by that, I'm not even sure why I was so unsetteld. Go deep, St Marks, press into provocative cooperative unity. And if you'd like some chickpeas come and speak to me after the service.

2.3.2. An excellence of Diverse and Asymmetric Unity

(vs Self-similar symmetric)

God calls his church to a radically diverse unity, being radically inclusive in who we unite. What are we uniting – 2v11 Jew and Gentile, chalk and cheese - separated, alienated, strangers – living with no hope.

The world wants unity, the vogue for the ampersand, from Mumford&Sons to Harris&Hoole. The world pines for unity. From Kinfolk magazine to the UKIP party we all pining for old fashioned community wrapped in an instagrammed veneer of nostalgia for unity. But it is a tribal unity, united around a love of beards and craft beer, or united around a suspicion of immigrants. This is not God's unity. We are a club that exists for the benefit of its non-members, doors wide open for the most unlikely others.

2.4. Embattled Unity

2.4.1 Contextually Contentious Timely Unity

(vs Vague or Acontextual)

Consider the domains: Gender/Generational/Economic

Ephesians moves from theory into practice in Ch 4. At 6, that practice hinges into this language of armour and battlement. And it does this from the springboard of these three difficult relationships, transactions which (almost neatly align as) Money, Sex, Power ~ I'd love to say more about Money, Sex & Power ~ and how a framework of being a united whole, a diverse body of parts gives rich and purposive meaning to difference in these areas. This is very loose sketch.

In Ephesians:

* Money – servants obey masters ~ we engage through money: economic/financial means of wealth or class

* Sex – husbands love your wives etc ~ married or not, we all engage a gendered arena of difference.

* Power – Children honour your parents ~ we all negotiate intergenerational power exchange.

Today. Each of these realms is typified for many by tendentious disunity:

* Money: horrible bosses on a global scale conspiring to concentrate wealth in the hands of a very few

* Sex: cruel marriages of exaggerated masculinity codependent on over compensated feminine caricatures

* Power: chronic and intractable family feuding

Also today. In our own strength we labour for an abstract unity:

* Money - mechanical wealth redistribution through tax, it doesn't change hearts towards responsible unity, it just sends wealth offshore and dehumanises a subsidised class.

* Sex – against abuse, we problematise difference we dismantle gender.

* Power - generational peace achieved only by ghettoised demographics. Rendering contexts for intergenerational continuity as impossible.

2.4.2 Diabolically opposed

None of those are the unity which Paul would call us to in Christ:

Personal unity through responsible diversity.

Why is unity contentious and difficult? Because it not the mere coagulation of identical units, it is the choreography of asymmetric persons, in complex non-identical non-reciprocal exchanges of love. (love-for-love is not necessarily like-for-like)

In this, difference is not a problem to be ironed out, but an opportunity to display God in the dance of our unity. And for this reason it is diabolically opposed.

This sort of personal unity is hard, it doesn't come naturally, there are these things to hold in tension, we constantly prone to muddled and self-interested disunity. But it is this, and only this, personal and asymmetric dance of unity which is the sort of unity speaks of God's character and person, and for this reason, this sort of unity is opposed by vested interests opposed to God's character, and by spiritual forces of evil opposed to God's person.

3.0 Spiritual Warfare

Before addressing the armour, consider, do you think we need it?

Ephesians thus far we have observed what a glorious form of personal unity that God is, which we are invited into, towards this we must be awakened each to new life, and that as we relate we need to learn how to interface in the areas of Money Sex and Power. It will be difficult, but you are a smart lot, and with this knowledge, you'll figure it out.

That is not the end of Ephesians, and to leave at that point in grossly incomplete, in my experience. Paul's claim is that the Christian life is a battle. His risk analysis would advise you to expect opposition and to take proportional precaution.

If you want to do lasting good, create new life, grow a church, get married, stay married, end well. Expect opposition.

Expect opposition from an enemy who is smarter than you. Expect opposition. The church doesn't need any more pointless premature martyrs. There are no prizes for burnout. Expect opposition. No bonuses for the walking wounded. This is not a kamakazee religion. Life is complete with enough danger before you go cycling with no helmet. Expect opposition from a liar who lies about lying. That there is a fight, and the chief lie is that there is no fight.

So, spiritual warfare. A caveat. I have not experienced the more cinematic versions of this, the exorcisms. I'm open to that.

My conviction is this, that there is God's Spirit, a Spirit of truth. There is His true truth which is alive and brings a world to the light fruitful order. And then there is untruth: The lies of a distorted reality, opaque layers of alternative truth, slippery and unanchored from reference in the real, lies which darken and destroy.

How this untruth manifests to our experience is culturally specific. A conscious enemy varies the language of attack according to the most effective way to control a given culture through fear, shame, or guilt.

But the battle is always truth against lies, substantial reality against a warped distortion.

I consider CS Lewis' Screwtape. If he were to consult on the best way to addle the unity of St Marks, of Richborne Terrace, of the Pawlett Jacksons. It is always sowing lies.

Three primary lies

* There is no Battle

* You fight for nothing

* You fight alone.

3.1 “There is no Battle.”

Jeremiah meets this. 6v14 They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. 'Peace, peace,' they say, when there is no peace.

A lackadaisical approach to spiritual reality, where church consists in passing the ball between players inside our own half, waiting for heaven, treading water in luke warm tea, we float down the Liffey, a lethargic faith, indulging an indefinitely extended adolescence claiming a tawdry and tedious faith, self-satisfied, preening and postulating masters of in the great indoors.

It is such an attractive lie, perhaps Satan's primary lie in my life. Culturing in me foppish ingenuousness, less than the sum of my stylised affectations, I am basic cowardice under the guise of pacifism, absentee virility under the banner of compassion, total timidity, asserting nothing, venturing nothing, risking nothing. I make of my own life a commitee-run buereacracy, gingerly treading an inoffensive line, obsequious flaccidity to the last, non-commital, a theological RSVP maybe, a life of ease, animated occasionally by bouts worldly sorrow and self-pity

Dear Phil. There is a battle.

3.2 You Fight for Nothing

* The Christian fight it is worth it

* Unity against division is worth it

There's a fight, but is it worth it? Like Ecclesiastes, “What has been will be again..” Oscillating between cynicism and idealism, especially in the arena of church unity.

I go in with unrealistically high expectations of what church could be. I get burned on the battlefield of life, and return with unhelpfully low ambitions for what church should be.

The oscillation between flimsy idealism and premature pessimism is a collusion with the worst parts of myself, hunkered at the bottom of a well, the enemy takes me out.

Dear Phil. The armour of God is not naïve about the fight, and it is a fight worth fighting.

3.3 You Fight Alone

As Elijah, 1Ki19 "I have been very zealous for the LORD God Almighty. .. I am the only one left, and now the Israelites are trying to kill me too.."

Obadiah had saved hundreds of prophets, it was untrue then, it is untrue now. But the mindset of the imperilled individual is pervasive, down to the reading of the passage about the armour of God. The solitary superhero, pilgrim making his progress, one man's battle against the world the flesh and the devil.

Just as the whole of Ephesians has been holding in tension the one-and-the-many, so in this way we apply the armour, equally to the whole and the parts. It is both-and a forcefield for the whole ship, and buoyancy aids for each. Particularly in the case of the shield, (we'll come to) there is a WE experience of being an army, a collective, holding a line, not a cloud of individuals, we stand firm arm-in-arm line, a chain linked whole in a tortoise formation.

Dear Phil, We do not fight alone, we argue for God's diverse unity, by our diverse unity necessarily together, necessarily by his help.

4.0 Weaponry

Paul would have spent a lot time with soldiers around the Roman Empire generally, but more intimately he would have spent a long time chained to one while in prison, perhaps also whilst writing this letter.

The elements are listed in the order that they would be put on, the first three strapped to the body always, the second three being carried or taken to hand when summoned to an imminent fight. And from a soldiers typical armoury Paul omitting the spear, the remaining weapons are all defensive for close hand-to-hand combat.

I will toy a little bit to tease out further extrapolations of the pieces, but belts and breastplates are used by such as Paul and Isaiah to refer to other virtues or gifts. Simply put, the emphasis is to put on the whole armour:

The Whole Armour is:

The Whole Gospel: Justification -- Redemption -- Sanctification -- Glorification

For the Whole Person: Body Mind Heart - Ethics, Emotions, Intellect

Each aspect of your interior life is a gateway for the enemy. Cover all bases. That would be enough, in terms of how far we can stretch the clothing metaphors here:

4.1 Belt of Truth

The soldier's belt, hold everything else together. First on and presuppositional, foundational, without which everything is topsy-turvied.

Belt keeps straps flapping robes down ready for action. As with Peter's slightly different belt calling us ‘gird up the loins of your mind’ tightening his robes round his waist to prepare for rowing the boat.

By a belt of truth, reality is tethered to us, held in place, anchored to immovably to our person. This foundational true truth is no mere truism, or incidental factuality. But the exclusive and acute actuality of the universe's substance: that there is a God who is there. And who is personal, and who came in Christ. Who rose again.

Without basic true truth, other things unravel. You cannot deflect the firey darts of lies without previous certain assurance of the truth of truth first.

4.2 Breastplate of Righteousness

You can destroy a whole person by assassinating their character, outing a moral defect in any area of the life of an otherwise good person can disqualify themselves totally. If you can't find dirt on a person, insinuate it, or better still cause it. Satan knows this, he knows how far from good we each have been, he knows our favourite sin, he knows the way to your heart. Guard your heart.

The best way to guard your heart is to be righteous already, rather than when you're halfway through the chocolate cake, halfway up the stairs... Shame begets sin begets shame, it's vicious cycle.

Christ breaks the cycle. The breastplate of righteousness is not yours, it is his righteousness, imputed at the cross, and imparted daily.

He is your breastplate, he guards your heart.

4.3 Shoes of Readiness given by Peace

There is a temporal dimension to being Christian. I'm great with a manuscripted sermon. Tidily premeditated. How is my readiness if you catch me on the bus after a ragged day at the office?

Readyness! timeless truth at all times for all things in all situations. Always be ready to give an answer for the hope that you have, for all events that present themselves not on your terms. Are you ready? Christ is coming. Look busy.

That is not it. This readiness comes from a Gospel of Peace. Rest in that. Do you know God as your peace, the foot-massaged quality of peace.

I'm put in mind of David's three walkers from Eph 4, and the agitated pacing. When I'm not at peace, I pace around, procrasti-Netflix, channel switching, itchy feet.. But a gospel of peace, to my feet, and you can participate in that, rest in that, stand firm and calm in that which Christ has already done.

4.4 Shield of Faith against firey darts

Satan, a roaring lion, the troubler of the peoples, accuser of the brethren, he rains down a volley of lies.

At a time when shields were made with wood, military engineers devised the ingenious tactic to shot arrows on fire, you strike the shield, burn the shield.. Roman shields were large and door-shaped with inflamable metal or water-doused leather veneers.

More than perhaps the other items in the weaponry, the shields gain a certain quality in multiple. Made fantastic in Asterix & Obelix, these shields in multiple formed tortoises, or in one book, a rolling sphere.. The principle relates back to unity, that we constitute a whole, and that whole is subjected to spiritual attack.

So then, firey darts. Somewhat as James says of the tongue being as fire. Dangerous, contagious, the devastating work of fire. Your shield stops the firey accusations, the lies, the gossip.. it stops with you and spreads no further.

4.5 Helmet of Salvation

Not a great deal to say about this. I like the idea that protecting your mind is important, as Satan wants to get inside your head ~ but I'm not sure that that is how the ancients necessarily located the thinker. It applies never the less keeping your head ~ its a good principle, and that we would run head first, eyes on the prize, and it is the head which gets crowned.

Salvation here is the hope of future glory, we advance in hope head up, eyes fixed on Christ, helmet of assured salvation on.

4.6 Sword of Spirit/Word

Sword is short stabbing hand-to-hand weapon, and the “Word of God” is not Logos (the in-the-beginning-was-the-word), but Rhema, most helpfully understood here as the Bible ~ spoken words revealing God.

Pressing the metaphor, we can think of two concerns if this before us is a sword.

Misusing the sword ~ like playing with knives, as Sarah cautioned us in Eph5 ~ the foolish talk, crude joking, and empty words ~ we are to be careful with our words. How much more so with something you know to be sharp, turning it on one another – not what it is for.

Disusing the sword. There is an enemy and he is familiar with the Bible, we see in his engagement with Jesus, they go verse-for-verse. What a victory it would be for him if he could persuade us to relegate the bible, diminish its importance, cast it as a blunt theological instrument, an antique.

* What are you? What is the battle?

* What is St Marks, how would you attack it?

You, St Marks, you are one in Christ now, so be united and stand firm in him.

Has it yet ceased to be strange that I am a disembodied voice speaking into disembodied ears? 

Good evening St Marks, we are a peculiar unity in these times. Preaching to camera, is news from nowhere, content casting for the clicks, absentee memos to a disconnected diaspora. But I am here. Here I am. Offering at least the image of myself, hoping for connection, offering the vulnerability to bare my soul for youtube, rendering a performance before an audience of one, or none, or a billion.

Hello friends. What did you come out here to see? 

We are three weeks in to a journey through this Old Testament book. Moses has died. Joshua has been commissioned. The Israelites are in the wilderness. Spies have been sent into the promised land, and God is preparing Joshua to lead the people across the Jordan.

“all Israel crossed over on dry ground..”

Trying to interpret this prompts three questions:

* Who is Israel?

* Where are they crossing between?

* What is dry ground?

And the answers conceptually are:

* Israel are God’s chosen people

* They are crossing to God’s promised land

* By God’s provided route

~ God’s people to God’s land in God’s way.

And these three interpretations translate to our lives in three uncomplicated applications:

* Who is Israel? We are. You and me, dear listener. The church. 1Pt2 “you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people..” Eph2 God has made gentile+jew into one in Rm11 God he has grafted us into the root of Israel. It is us.

* And where are we crossing? From any here to any there that God leads ~ perpetually. Out of addiction and into recovery, out of a present predicament and into your calling: obviously, it seems, just now, out of covid and into the new normal.

* What is our dry ground? It is the miracle of orderly safe passage across a deathly threshold where God rends apart chaotic waters. God providing a way, a method, a resource - from the outside, against the impossible. A process: if virus then vaccine, if loneliness then companionship, if division then reconciliation.

Interpreting: Assurance + Nuance

In moving to application we read ourselves onto the narrative, symbolically, subjunctively, parabolically, equivalently. 

Chris said in week 1, that we are both Joshua and not-Joshua. I want to learn to live inside the paradox and live it out in a way that is productive and not evasive. I speak for myself, but when I gauge myself against biblical characters I am selective and unaccountable in how I choose to own an as-Joshua responsibility. I need help to interpret myself to myself-as-Joshua

Steve said in week 2, that God uses the unlikely and unpopular in such as Rahab. When this is me? Am I Rahab? Am I spies? I want to grapple with the difficult proposition that God would put me in situations which ennoble deceit. Is that it? The wrestle is interpreting and I need help.

So here in week 3 I am considering that God makes a way across the chaotic waters, so a possible reading is that we are Israel, entering post-Covid, and God is providing the dry land of a vaccine. I want to believe this, in the right way and for the right reasons.

These interpretations of the Old Testament are positive and plausible. But. I need to work them out in my own life, and particularly we in our life-together, in the grit of our daily shared existences but life has been so dispersed and disordered that it makes interpretation and application hard and painfully so. I want my exegesis to be less speculative and more grounded in an embodied epistemology of convivial coattention. A sparsity of thick fellowship during Covid and the mediated nature of so much of my worlding has had an eroding effect on my ability to gauge reality, to calibrate anything I presume to understand.

Two issues to solve for:

* On their own, these interpretations of Joshua are not self-evident or automatically corroborated - they lack assurance.

* And, on their own, these interpretations are not sufficiently detailed or contextually clarified - they lack nuance.

This sermon is an appeal for help, an internal monologue, an invitation to go deeper. I desire assurance and nuance both in my interpretation and my application ~ that is, in our reading into and our living out the Bible. 

* How can we have confident assurance? Where do you find the the right way to read? What can I say concretely and so rest weight upon risky decisions? What can we say, as a group, collectively and how can we gather consensus across diversity with assurance?

* And how can we gain nuanced wisdom? How should we then live from those details? Is there an anatomy of this sort of interpretation. Nuanced wisdom is so needed right nowThere’s so much detail in this biblical text that has come down to us at great cost - we’re leaving value on the table if we don’t have a method of unpicking what-is-the-ark for us, what-might-it-be-to-consecrate-ourselves, what-is-2000cubits.. Etc ~ what does it involve for you and me to live out those details.

Bible-as-Pattern

To this end, (nuance and assurance) I’ve been thinking about the bible, and the equipment I could help fashion for our life together. The Bible claims to be a unified revelation, and it is remarkable to read. It is striking the recurrence of themes, and the recurrence of details. God is godding about God and the bible is all breadcrumb trails and recursive easter eggs, and hyperlinks and knowing winks. 

Consider how many times 3-days, or 40 years happens. Consider typologies and archetypes, and the many ways we revisit blood, trees, lambs, firstborns. God’s narrative repetition paints the enchantment of a universe he is authoring. 

Yes, these servant-suffering-saviour patterns point to Jesus, but less in an X-marks-the-spot sort of fire-exit signage, and more in the Mandelbrot set sense, that Jesus recurs as the long longed-for anticipated one, the imitated and emulated typology - the seed of all icons and idols. Jesus is the original source.

I’m interested to try to read the Bible as a legible patternbook, and to then seek to live so patterned and be so legible. I consider such a parabolic life goes beyond mere Jungian archetypes and mythological primaries, to engaging an altogether more intricate creative and idiosyncratic playfulness at work in the heart of a personalist universe.

Dry Land

The Christian claims that God patterns a world that is consistent and detailed, a world that is coherently narrative and populated with patterns that are captured sufficiently in the Bible that we are able to make sense of them and sense-make by them. Fundamentally, if the text is so intentionally interlinked it should be possible to read the bible sideways - not as mere gamified Concordance Geekery but to consider that every time that God saves his people through water there is a cumulative portrait of God being embellished differentially by the trope.

In the beginning

Gen1v9 And God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so.

After the fall

Gen7v11 In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, on the seventeenth day of the second month—on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened.

Gen8v11 And the dove came back to him in the evening, and behold, in her mouth was a freshly plucked olive leaf. So Noah knew that the waters had subsided from the earth.

2Ki2v8 “Elijah took his cloak, rolled it up and struck the water with it. The water divided to the right and to the left, and the two of them crossed over on dry ground.”

Jh2v10 And the LORD spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out upon the dry land.

Mt3v16 As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him.

1Cor10v1-2 For I do not want you to be ignorant of the fact, brothers and sisters, that our ancestors were all under the cloud and that they all passed through the sea. They were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea.  

Chiasm

But perhaps most interestingly for talking about talking about the pattern of water-crossing. Is the couplet of crossings within the extended Exodus sequence functions as a chiasm: from Egypt they cross water to wilderness. Then from wilderness they cross water on dry land to promised land:

Ex14v21 Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and the LORD drove the sea back by a strong east wind all night and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided.

Js3v17 Now the priests bearing the ark of the covenant of the LORD stood firmly on dry ground in the midst of the Jordan, sand all Israel was passing over on dry ground until all the nation finished passing over the Jordan.

This pair of crossings is asymmetric. One a centrifugal flight-from, and freedom-from, a being anywhere-but. The other a drawing-to, a gathering in a specific destination.

If I could distill my unfinished thoughts on this to one question, it would be, should our primary understanding of the world, of London, of St Marks be primarily leaving-Egypt-into-the-wilderness or should it be leaving-the-wilderness-into-the-promised-land? What is on our near bank, and what is on the far bank? What is your experience?

I am interested to hear the diversity of experiences of Covid, and to hear the metaphors you are living by.

I suspect there are those whose experience has been wilderness. A long ambiguous uncertainty, but daily a walking-with-God as a pillar, a reformation from the abstraction of a working-from-home with some discomfort, a furloughed displacement with benefits sufficient to muster the audacity for a vision of building back better.

I suspect there are those whose experience has been slavery. Precariat workers burning the gig economy at both ends watching exponential and systemic social injustice profit silicon valley in a time of tragedy. A group whose experience is that of being beneath the boot of a globalist cabal of invisible nowhere people, who pine for a liberation theology. A group of the shredded care sector, pastoral workers thanklessly at the medical and pastoral coalface negotiating with extreme biology and extreme social tribalism for the claps. Any exit.

I think it matters. I think not all water crossings are the same. I consider that the church is a mix of many and there is peculiar testimony in hearing each other’s story.

If indeed we are on the banks of the river Jordan looking over to the promised land, questions for discussion could include.

Who are the people of God now? What group, by their collective identity and mutual practice and shared resource and civic agency manifests the visible image of God? 

What is for us to consecrate ourselves? What sort of ritual purity do we lack, what form of collective repentance should we engage to create such purity? What is the ark of the covenant for us now? What costly sacrifice, what visible testimony goes before us as we cross? And how might we imagine a way that is, as the text states “Not a way they had been before”? 

Who is Moses? Who was our patriarch? What demagoguery were we led by to this point? What would it be for me to disqualify myself from entry to the promised land? 

Who is Joshua? Who would God exalt to credible leader? Who needs to be bold and courageous? What would it be for God to exalt them? What form of leadership is distinguished from wilderness leadership? 

What is the promised land? What would it be for us to send spies in? Do we consider that this promised land the other side of Covid is an occupied territory?

Patterns and practices

I consider that, we need epistemological assurance and nuance, and that by a practice of bible-reading and life-together, we, St Marks can grow this way.

* 1. Gain assurance through accumulating patterns from the bible

* 2. Gain nuance through comparing patterns from the bible

* 3. And then, we can become patterns that are assured by cumulative weight of testimony borne out in our collective practice.

* 4. And we can be patterns that are nuanced by practicing lives in proximity to and in critical dialogue with one another.

So. If the world is amidst a meaning crisis, I want to be a part of a participatory plausibility structure, a community that can be robustly humble and gently confident in discerning the times. 

* Who are we?

* Where are we crossing between?

* What is our dry ground?

What can I possibly say that’s new about love? 

Good evening St Marks. Well done everyone for making it to October 2020. I am feeling at a low-ebb, maybe it is seasonally affected lock down blues, maybe it’s just being 34, maybe it’s the vast ennuie of late capitalism’s meaning crisis. I am at a low-ebb, but being at church, being present to church, being church is rich, there’s so much latent redemptive power in gathering as a Corinthian unity to bless one another, to fight the good fight, to love one another.. I do believe in a thing called love.. 

We could play pop culture bingo - but there will be no prizes

So, Love one another.

Paul has written this letter to the church in Corinth crucially containing this short sermon about love.

~ so, I’ve been thinking, about love. 

~ and, I’ve been thinking, at length, about sermons and letters and preaching. In my own imitable and meta way. What am I doing here, “preaching”? I’ve been thinking about this strange activity? What is our relationship? What content am I carrying? What effect does it have? 

I’ve already preached a sermon on love. If you’ll refer to my previous excellent talk from June broadcast from my living room ~ the church is a vine, a lego jug, filled with spirit, held together by love, with an emphasis on unity unity unity. 

So, I thought I might try a different approach, an approach which risks being narcissistic in the extreme. I generally preach to myself, seeking to solve my own problems, generally offering lessons and exploring concepts which I think are interesting to me etc. But. What if I went further and made this whole sermon about me? Work with me. 

I have two questions for us to discuss and if you’d like to join us on Zoom, at say, 8.30, we’ll be back home and online them.

Q1. What did you come out into the wilderness to see this evening?

Question 1 ~ which I’m borrowing from Jesus but thinking about church

“As they went away, Jesus began to speak to the crowds concerning John: “What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken by the wind? What then did you go out to see? A man dressed in soft clothing? Behold, those who wear soft clothing are in kings’ houses. What then did you go out to see? A prophet?” Mt11v7-9

What did you come here to see? Is this a meaningful question? Why are you here? Cold dark night. No singing. No coffee. No cake. Tier 2 risk of infection from an unprecedented global pandemic. What did you come out into this wilderness of Kennington to see? There are lower risk things you could be doing. 

And, What did I come out here to see? Who am I talking to? Why am I here, speaking? I do like the sound of my own voice, but. Why am I here? What question am I answering, what service am I providing?

Question 1. What did you come out here to see? 

Q2. Do you love me?

Question 2 ~ also borrowing from Jesus, and applying the question to all of us and to me in particular

“When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” He said to him, “Feed my lambs.” He said to him a second time, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” He said to him, “Tend my sheep.” He said to him the third time, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” Peter was grieved because he said to him the third time, “Do you love me?” and he said to him, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep.”” Jn21v15-17

Jesus is talking about Jesus, but also

* Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me.

* Everyone will know you are my disciples, if you love one another.. This command I give you, love one another..

* Do you? love one another? 

And, as one of those one anothers, do you love me? Did you love me today? Did I love you? Do you love me? Phil Pawlett Jackson is here all week. Do you love me?  Not because I’m loverly or particularly loveable ~ I’m fairly disagreeable. But, rather, as a fellow church member.. Do you love me? 

Icky question. It sounds needy. Aren’t we all. Don’t we all need to be needy sometimes? Shouldn’t we confess our weakness? 

Question 2. Do you love me? 

[1] What did you come out here to see?

Some part of what you came for is the doing of church life together, and some part of what you came for is a sermon. You’re in luck as we’re in the middle of a sermon series about church life together - we are learning as a church about how to do church through Paul’s letter of sermons on the topic of doing church.

So, regarding that sermon though - What did you come out here to see? 

I’m going to speculate 5 possible answers why you might have come for this sermon, and you can tell my others later - on the Zoom.

[1.1] What did you come out here to see? [Vine unity Sermon Series theme]

We’re in a series on church - maybe you’ve loved that and have come out here for a sermon advancing this general enquiry into how the church is a vine-like unity which we presented back in John and which we have been building on through this series in Corinthians. Back in June, the end of John’s gospel concluding through Jesus’ departure discourses and high priestly prayer saw him speak to commission a church that should be a vine, and so bear fruit by a unity abiding in his love - that church is commanded to love one another aided by spirit. In this way, we, St Marks, are meant to be a vine with sap flowing between our limbs, to bear weight across our length and to bear fruit at our extremities - rather than potted cuttings vaguely proximate in the same greenhouse. 

* Is that what you came to see? An extension of a grand theory of church. I did. I want some plausible sense of if and how this vine of unity might be possible. How’s your vine? What did you come out here to see? 

[1.2] What did you come out here to see? [Cliff Hanger: More excellent way]

Maybe, more immediately, you came for a sermon to answer last week’s cliffhanger? What did Sarah preach about? /////// The end of Corinthians 12 promised “a more excellent way” to solving the problem of diversity of gifts and division around suffering? That passage offers a portrait of the fledgling church as a radically diverse group of recalcitrant individuals who were as spectacularly gifted as they were also perversely obstreperous, who were glorious whilst they were also terribly self-involved, who were the hope for the world whilst also being the walking wounded. 

* What did I come out here to see? Part 2 of a believably realistic picture of the problem of church and how to solve for it. Give me a sermon on an appropriate calibration of the difficulty of diversity - to count the cost and pay it forward. A more excellent “way” to grow in my measured awareness that the ways church can be a unity and to learn to try to remediate all the ways that I am an impediment to that unity.

* What did you come out here this evening to see? Paul promises “And I will show you a still more excellent way.” I’m here for that. 

[1.3] What did you come out here to see? [Cost benefit analysis]

Coming out this evening cost you something. Writing this sermon cost me something. What did you come out here to see? Something worth the risk, something worth the cost. So, this sermon should consist of costly and risky communication, proportional to the necessity, value and urgency of the content desired.

I was listening to a great lecture on Paul’s friendships with various women given by L’Abri’s Joshua Chestnut a couple of weeks ago. He describes at length the various named individuals who were involved in Paul’s project to plant churches across the mediterreanean - notably Phoebe.. Phoebe taking the epistle to the Romans to the Romans would have intensively involved her carrying the artifact at great risk and then of ‘delivering’ the message complete with spoken tone and translated interpretation. Then, in a throw-away comment which jumped out at me it was claimed that the cost of organising to send a letter like this at that time would have been about £2000. 

I imagine, a similar cost, for the Corinthians. What’s the transaction cost for my epistle to the Kenningtones? If I was going to bill you, I’d need to charge a day rate of about a £1000 but I reckon I could make this sermon cost that. 

I tend not to think of the cost of communication. I barely pay for anything: news, media, music, books, instant messaging, the bible..  I tend even less to think of the risk of communication: a squall at sea and that is a sunk cost with no two blue ticks, no signed-for delivery. Paul thought it was worth the high cost and the non-trivial risk. Paul thought that was a fruitful was to spend that money because of the benefit.

If I knew that a thousand years hence the church on Alpha Centuri was going to be reading my immortalised epistle to the Kenningtones, I might put more effort in. Paul didn’t know that I’d be reading his letter in 2020, he was paying it forward simply to tell a motley crew in Corinth how to love one another, because he thought saying that was necessary and urgent and would be valuable and effective. And, I suppose, within that, he considered the danger of not saying it. I think about this a lot. How much should a sermon cost me? How much value does it deliver?

What did you come out here to see? At the cost of a cosy evening in, and at the risk of spreading a lethal respiratory virus, you’ve come out here to listen to me criticise your lifestyle choices. I feel the weight of that expectation.

[1.4] What did you come out here to see? [Preaching that is “Preaching” because it is contextual and transformative]

You came out here to see preaching, or you came for the biscuits and can tolerate the preaching, but there are no biscuits. What is “preaching”? When is preaching “preaching”? And what is the point?

The best bits of what I’ll say on Corinthians this evening are just footnotes to Alastair Roberts’ commentary online (h/t). You could get his teaching at home, more intelligently ordered, more winsomely articulated and more efficiently conveyed. What did you come out here to see from me? 

A dog-whistling pearl-clutching sabre-rattling sermon from the not-at-all-reverend Phil PJ? Maybe? What are you hoping to hear from me? Is my preaching making your life better? By my words, am I helping you make the world a better place? If I suggest a lifestyle change - will you do it? If I author a mnemonic - will you learn it? If I inspire a direction of travel for us - will you follow us? If I coordinate an activity in Oval - will you join it? If I say something wrong - will you correct it? If I ramble incoherently - will you constructively critique it? If my investment advice brings you to profit - will you share it? What is our relationship? Can I set you homework? If I can, the question is: ///// What did you come out here to see? 

Preaching should force a severe choice and convict measurable action such that next week it would be possible to return and ask, what changed? Life is too short for bad preaching and mediocre limited ambition churching. Don’t keep showing up as morbid pew fodder in a morose perpetuation of self-sabotage. Ask yourself, what did I come out here to see, and then send it to me on a postcard.

[1.5] What did you come out here to see? [Joint Attention]

You came here to view something together, because listening and applying preaching is a collective activity. Paul’s letter is to a multiplicity about them being a multiplicity. We, St Marks, are gathered as a multiplicity, not because it is an efficient way to disseminate info, but because listening together is qualitatively different to watching the youtube  at home alone. 

If I stand up here at the front and say, you, Boris, stop looking at porn. Then that individual can go and make that lifestyle choice. But if I stand at the front and address yous plural, and say love one another, forgive one another, cooperate as a diverse distributed team with one another - you can’t do that on your own. 1 Corinthians 13 is not simply about being christian, but rather, more challengingly: about being church

* This is Difficult - because who it means coordinating with people who are not you. 

* This is Easy - because they’re all here in this room, they’re on your side and we are working for the same ambition. And, 

How? Well, what did you come out here to see?

The application of any imperative Paul offers, has to be worked out together. How? You must join a discussion after this service, you must join a zoom call, go to a small group, get a socially distanced pint in a pub. You must be in the lives of others. If you cannot find a context to do church, multi-personally vulnerably interrogatively, you are a fantasist and Sunday evening is just cathartic colocation. So much better is possible. 

(I speak to myself at my own low-ebb of multi-personal church immersion.)

What did you come out here to see: possible answers

* [1.1] A sermon in a series about the churchiness of church.

* [1.2] A detailed commentary that explains that specifically that excellent way to the unity diversity question

* [1.3] You’ve come for costly sermon delivering high value to honour the cost of your coming out this evening

* [1.4] A tailored sermon that is preaching towards bespoke personal transformation not merely teaching content for education ~ I’m doing my best

* [1.5] You’ve come to jointly attend of a sermon, the interogative interpretation and joint application of which benefits our mutual life ~ that’s up to you

What did you come out here to see?

[2] Do you love me?

So Paul has written a sermon, and I’ve tried to interrogate why we sermon. He’s written a sermon about love, and I’ll try to draw out love in a rich and challenging way through this question, where the rubber hits the road: Do you love me?

Corinthians 13 is a familiar passage about love, invoked often with romantic sentimentality but what makes it more than a fridge magnet tautology ~ that love is lovely - is the context in Paul's argument about spiritual gifts and their place in the church. Paul’s strong emphasis is over against the Corinthians’ inappropriate spirituality, he wants to put the practise of gifts in the appropriate place. Love is not an alternative to spiritual gifts - it is The (more excellent) Way that such gifts must be exercised. 

Love is the antidote to inappropriate spirituality in a church? Is this the word you need to hear? Is this a word for St Marks? Do we have such an inappropriate spirituality? Do I? Is this me? Puffed up? Unloving? Bickering? Grandstanding? 

[Church /// Multiplicity /// Love]

We are theorising about church - difficult in a time of Covid, difficult for lots of reasons. That theory of church is resting on an understanding of reconciled multiplicity, church is where God has made the two one - all gifts playing in harmony - the gift prophecy working alongside the gift of administration, those who think they are an eye cooperating with those who identify as a foot. This is achieved not be technique, but by love. 

This edifice of the church, and it’s multiplicity sits on the bedrock of a theology and practice of Love. Love as well as difficult and easy mentioned above, it’s also presuppositional:

* Loving one another is Essential - because the functional interconnected life of the multipersonal church members is the primary illustration of the multi-personal infinite personal God that we espouse. We love one another to make a God of Love plausible and visible. 

* Loving one another is Good News - because the challenges to the representation of God (sin) happen between us. We demonstrate that there is an effective ingredient between us, that reconciles us, that overcomes shame, that pays the price for sin. 

* Learning to Love is Urgent - because the world needs love and needs to know what love is and that it is available. So many in the world self-understand as unloved and unlovable, so much destruction in the world is caused by sentimental surrogate substitutes for love sought for lack of a demonstration that a God of love is substantial 

However, as well as being massive and cosmological, Love must also be bespoke and peculiar - hence, do you love me. Not do you love. Do you love me, because that is where it is difficult. That’s the deal breaker - a chain is only as strong as it’s weakest link - and we’re not a very big or complex chain, we ought to be able to work this out. Do you love me. 

So, Paul’s going to go on in praise of love - superlative, must govern everything. There are three sections to 1 Corinthians 12

* [2.1] Verses 1 to 3 are Love’s Absolute Necessity

* [2.2] Verses 4 to 7 are Love’s Varied Glories

* [2.3] Verses 8-13 are Love's Enduring Fruit

[2.1] VERSES: Love’s Absolute Necessity 1-3

“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not LOVE, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. v1-2

[2.1.1] Love is vital to effective appropriate speaking

Consider, from this verse that we communicate in various ways, speak in various tongues, with more or less poetry or spiritual import. Verbal or pre-verbal - Love is the key.

Tongues of Men. Christianity is verbal, Christianity is spoken word, Christianity is a living word, and words create worlds. Faith comes by hearing. Use words because you have to.

Tongues of Angels: Christianity is pre-verbal - all of creation is groaning, as the spirit is groaning, so we the sons of God groan waiting. By such tongues, by art, by symbolism, by precognitive yowling for joy and pain. This pre-verbal communication is prayer. Christianity is right to speak out the legitimate exclamation of a thing broken - in this way, Christianity is translation: *Praying tongues translates what we do not see into what we cannot say* Rendering the invisible in the inexpressible, expressly and gloriously declaring the impossible in the imminent. 

So. Make some noise. 

But.

Without love your noise is just noise, your words and your tongues are worse than empty. They are a damaging cacophony of Pagan ritual worship, gongs, cymbals

Love is what’s left in the signal to noise ratio. Love is what actually lands when the grandstanding of Look-at-me Look-at-me Pagan Christianity subsides.

In this very sermon, my flustering, effusing, poly-syllabic cascades are worse than silence, they are anti-communication, if I don’t first love. WIthout love, then my words are part of the problem. In my life at large, and in this sermon, if I don’t have love my words are kerosene rather than water on the simmering fire of resentments in our community.

Do you love me?

And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not LOVE, I am nothing.” v2

[2.1.2] Love is vital to the effective appropriate use of gifts (gifts: power for understanding & faith for miracles)

Power for understanding knowledge - You can know the Greek, you can have all the letters after your name, you can be a masterful knowledge worker but without love, that power is all power-play and power-over, it is an abuse of power. 

Paul has said this already in 1Cor8: knowledge puffs up but love builds up. Knowledge without love is just grade inflation. 

Love must be the logicians regulating principle. Love counter-intuitively should be non-trivial, non-optional in our academy’s pursuit of knowledge and understanding. Love should be the binding glue in your mental constructions, love should be the lubricating oil in your machine for learning. Without love, the life of the mind is a heartless abstraction - worth nothing. 

The same applies to the power for miracles. Human beings in their glory and spiritual gifting are spectacular - we regularly move mountains - lovelessly. 

In the first chapter of Corinthians, Paul said Jews seek signs and Greek seek wisdom - but we preach Christ crucified. It’s interesting to see this similar pairing here. Churchianity devolves to two possible predilections - a neo-Greek cerebrality of doctrine and cognitive assent or a new-Jewish somatic preference for embodied experience, affect and spectacle. The antidote to both is love: (seen in Christ crucified). Which are you? I tend to idolise knowledge-as-power. And when I do. Paul says I am nothing. The void. The tumbleweed. The yawning gaping hole on the balance sheet of joy. An exasperating net zero. 

Do you love me?

“If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not LOVE, I gain nothing.” v3

[2.1.3] Love is vital to effective appropriate sacrifice

Gary Chapman has a book ‘the five love languages’ if you’re familiar: Words of Affirmation, Acts of Service, Gifts, Quality Time, and Touch (although, in 2020, we have cancelled Touch). We’ve found it useful in the past at the house to survey one another on this. My love language of choice is acts of service. It is also my passive aggressive unlove language. I’m sure Sarah and others can attest that Phil is capable of performing an act of sacrificial service, delivering his body up to be burned at the washing up bowl just so others incur debt I can charge with interest. Sacrifice performed without love is the worst. 

I gain nothing. If you give to get, you get nothing. Martyrdom, service, social care, sacrifice without love is just accruing negative karma of the ledger of your moral being, you are just draining the tank of a zero sum game. 

I’ll hammer this, because I’m addressing myself largely. Without love, Christian sacrifice is just masochism and passive aggression. In church, without love, we’re just charity muggers defrauding one another on commission and embezzling the windfall. I can seek to serve and even lead a community house of ten people without love. I can just grind it out as a marathon slog. Justify my existence and earn my reward - and the wages of this self-centred sacrifice is death and nothingness. 

So, overall, Paul is arguing for love’s strong necessity. No one thinks love isn’t a nice thing. Paul is making an argument on very much more ultimate terms. All or Nothing, nothing! Because it really is that stark.  Paul is arguing much more strongly against any insinuation that love can be cost-engineered out of your practice of church. 

And so it is interesting the way he targets specifically what love stands over-against ~ which is against the religiouse impulse of the Corinthians, and so in me, and St Marks. 

Religion tends to honour/police these: speech, identity, morality. Religiously, we want to be 1 saying the right thing, 2 having right identity or ultimate experience, 3 we want to be seen as giving to charity. But trying to be speaking right, being right, and giving right without Love is all in vain. You will end up saying nothing, being nothing, gaining nothing. Brutal.

[2.2] VERSES: Love’s Varied Glories 4-7

What then is this love that is such a deal breaker?

Glad you asked. Paul goes on to describe the glories and qualities of this crazy little thing called love.

He says these things at cost, because they are worth saying, because they are not automatic, and there is a great risk of taking-for-granted that love is love is love. Love is process, love is practiced, love is learnt gradually through many mistakes. 

Finally then to address: do you love me?

“LOVE is patient and kind; LOVE does not envy or boast; it his not arrogant” v4

[2.2.1] Love is Patient

Patience takes time with people, gives time to people, makes time for people. Love is practiced in the dimension of time. Time is a funny thing. So subjective in our experience of it. It is literally ephemeral. You have agency over the choices you make about how you spend your time. Patience costs time. Do you love me? Are you patient with me? In what possible context would you need to be patient with me? (will this sermon ever finish?) How entangled would our lives need to publicly be, for it to be apparent that you love me through patience? Love makes time for people. But you only have a finite amount of it. If you are going to afford to be patient with me, you may have to sacrifice secondary commitments, you may lose other races for the survival of the fittest and most expedient.

[2.2.2] Love is Kind

Kind is generous, Proactively Benevolent, Noble. Love initiates an alternative to anger and resentment. Love breaks the cycles - interrupts and starts new. Love is spending in the currency of grace on the basis of abundance. Do you love me?

[2.2.3] Love does not Envy

Love is not status seeking, advantage over others - self-forgetting. This is a disposition. Just as man with hammer everything is a nail, to a man in the rat race, everyone is a rat. You are not in a rat race. You are performing before an audience of one, and he is a massive fan. Love chooses not to envy. Love opts out of the arms race of consumerism’s one-up-manship. Do you envy me?

[2.2.4] Love does not Boast

Compared to the Corinthians with their moralising slogans and sense of having spiritually arrived. Love needs no claim, over against. 

[2.2.5] Love is not Arrogant

Love knows its own gifts and weaknesses and opportunities to to serve and to emphathise. Love lives without any sense of inflated importance. Love knows that it’s life is not it’s own. Love takes responsibility for those who suffer in hierarchies. Love seeks to build up the least. the last and the lost. Do you love me?

“or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;” v5

[2.2.6] Love is not Rude

Love is mindful of the manner of treating others. Love is submitted to appropriate social order, by contrast with the Corinthians improper behaviour at table. Love is sensitive to culturally relative ways we might neglect and signify dishonour - as seen in the Corinthians attitudes to headcoverings. Love is not rude, it is courteous, it honours decorum and politeness ~ do these things seem gratuitous to say? Yet, this claim Love is not rude - seems to me the hardest to pin down. 

Love is only really and finally love if it is received as such. And it is only received as such through the culturally relative channels and personal lenses. You cannot love generically, you can just love bomb. You do not love in a vacuum, you love unique individuals in their cultural milieu, collective unconscious and linguistic hegemon. You have to be involved with people and speak their language. The onus is on the lover to ensure their love lands. Love does not mansplain and goes to pains not to. Love reads the room. Love does not victim blame. Love does not punch down, it steps down to build up. Have I failed to love you like this? Undoubtedly. 

[2.2.7] Love does not insist on it’s own way.

Love surrenders its rights for others. Love is willing to become all things to all men. Love is prepared to make sacrifices for a weaker brother. Love does not insist on it’s own way?! 

What is my way? What is your way? Whose way is St Mark’s following? What forum do we have for negotiating that? The opposite of insisting is listening. Love listens. Do you love me? Do you hear me? 

[2.2.8] Love is not irritable

Love easily provoked to anger or bitterness, love governs its moods and its hormones, its tiredness and sugar level. Love follows from mindfulness. Love happens in the moment, love is tested by fire, love is what comes out under pressure. Love is a high bar.

[2.2.9] Love is not resentful

Love suffers wrong without acting out of grievance or vengefulness or entitlement. Love is not litigious as Corinthians in chapter 6. Love does not keep a score, tally petty grudges in mental register. Do you love me? Do you remember that thing I said? It was cruel and thoughtless - and you’ve held on to it. As I do. I hold on to your sins against me like a sort of dark currency, leverage, for the settlement. Love lets it go. Love takes the bit of broken glass out of clenched fist. 

“it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.” v6

[2.2.10] Love does not rejoice at wrongdoing

Love grieves rather than gossip about other’s sins. Love does not click like the tweets of scoffers. Love takes no pleasure in the downfall and comeuppance of other humans. Love is not partisan. Love is not clickbaitable. Love cannot be whipped into a media frenzy. Love never scandalmongers. Love is a firewall.

[2.2.11] Love rejoices with truth

Love wishes good on all and her enemies. Love is not about self-interest but rather truth. Truth is bigger than both of us. The true truth, of objective beyond us, an infinite personal God, the stranger outside of myself. Truth doesn’t tidily align with self-interest. In this way love allows self interest to be compromised for the sake of something great. Love is not defensive. Do you love me?

“LOVE bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” v7

[2.2.12] Love bears all things

All things. Love never ceases to support. Love  keeps holding up relationships with others, even under burden and pressure. Know that in these things, God’s burden is light and he will not test us with more than we can bear. Do you love me? Can you bear me? At my worst? At my darkest? 

[2.2.13] Love believes all things

All things. Love never surrenders faith - not a naive faith in human goodness, but a faith in God and a confidence in future hope. Love perseveres in and through all things, even when it might seem beyond recovery. Love is certainly more optimistic than my native disposition. Can you love me despite that? 

[2.2.14] Love hopes all things

All things. Love never despairs of people. Love never despairs of situations. In order to love, you have to hope, you have to hope for others - seeking to love without hope is mere sympathy or vague benevolence. To love, you must hope. Do you love me? Do you hope for me?

[2.2.15] Love endures all things

Love never gives up on, and never abandons. Love is permanent. We are here for the long haul, the hell or high water, the harrowing yet to come. Love is a light house in the storm of 2020. Love is capacious, because in loving, you are channeling an ultimate reality which is God, who is through all and above all things. 

[3] VERSES: Love's Enduring Fruit 8-13 

“LOVE never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away.” v8-10

There is a partial-ness and a temporary-ness to the present church and the way it engages our gifts and our persons. The legacy we are leaving is only the love that we spent on it. The artefacts we build as a church, the great coordinatings of gifts, the details and the rotas the orchestral arrangements, will be forgotten. Gifts are scaffolding - they will pass. What will be left is the love by which the building is established. 

Do you love me more than as a means and more than a gift? Do you call others to love or to merely behave? 

“When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.” v11

Maturity is a transition from a focus on the gifts to a focus on the giver - who is love. Our spiritual gifts are a means to an end, and that end is maturity, and that maturity is Love in all things. We’re all in process. Giving up childish ways is a slow process. Do you love me? Do you, from a place of maturity, call me to maturity? Do I? 

“For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.” v12

There is a not-yet dimension to seeing the fruit of love. 

We think we see ~ in our preeminently visual age, we are snared in our own neon oblivion, so busy sightseeing we're blindsided. Or I am, plank-in-eye religiouse, blinkered and navel-gazing, short-sighted and eyes-averted from the real of the world's needs, I blacken the darkened glass we see through dimly with my own grime. I’ve reflected elsewhere, King Lear’s Gloucester stumbled when he saw while the Australian blind professor John Hull lectured in the prophetic.

“So now faith, hope, and LOVE abide, these three; but the greatest of these is LOVE.” v14

Paul elsewhere combines these Faith Hope and Love - Christian Virtues:

Rm5 - since we have been justified by faith, rejoice in hope.. .which doesn’t put us to shame, because of Love through the Spirit. Gal5 by faith we wait for hope.. Works count for nothing and only faith working through love. 

Ultimately, love is supreme, front and centre, core to solve for difficult church. 

So. That is all. Join us for tea on Zoom. Ask me if I love you, and, where I don’t we can and we must work on doing that better. And, if this sermon is not what you came for, let me know, what did you come out here to see?