Unconditional Love

The United Reformed Church's National Synod of Scotland expresses its vision through a series of affirmations. I would like to explore these in turn, so this article reflects on the first aspiration. As a Synod we aspire to demonstrate unconditional love. We are an active Christian community which responds to the UNCONDITIONAL LOVE of God through celebrating the Christian Story in ways that bring meaning and hope to life. We seek to support each other in faith and doubt through caring. Martin Luther King, in his little book of sermons Strength to Love helps us understand what this means when he draws a clear link between love and forgiveness and with particular reference to Jesus’ exhortation that we should love our enemies, perhaps one of the most difficult standards that Jesus set. We tend rather to be people of revenge and find this call to unconditional love extremely challenging. Yet we need to take seriously our regular prayer, every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer: forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us (Luke 11:4). King writes: Forgiveness does not mean ignoring what has been done or putting a false label on an evil act. It means, rather, that the evil act no longer remains as a barrier to the relationship. Forgiveness is a catalyst creating the atmosphere necessary for a fresh start and a new beginning. It is the lifting of a burden or the cancelling of a debt. …. Forgiveness means reconciliation, a coming together again. Without this, no one can love their enemies. The degree to which we are able to forgive determines the degree to which we are able to love our enemies. Nobody should pretend that unconditional love is easy. However, it is a critical part of the relationship that Jesus calls us to have with each other. I think we can be helped towards this if we consider some of the many things that the New Testament urges us to do towards one another. We are, for example, to ‘love one another’ (John 15:17); to ‘bear one another’s burdens’ (Galatians 6:2); to ‘encourage one another’ (1 Thessalonians 5:11); to ‘serve one another’ (1 Peter 4:10); to ‘pray for one another’ (James 5:16); to ‘greet one another’ (Romans 16:16). There is no doubt that the Christian story is a story of unconditional love. God’s generous grace offers abundant transforming possibilities. The question becomes how we even begin to reflect that in the way in which we live. Desmond Tutu reminds us of how God models this unconditional love and how Jesus, in what he did and said, points that out. Citing the familiar parable that we usually describe as that of the prodigal son, Tutu (in Hope and Suffering) writes: The Good News is that God loves me long before I could have done anything to deserve it. God is like the father of the prodigal son, waiting anxiously for the return of his wayward son, and when he sees this feckless creature appearing on the horizon, he rushes out to meet him, embrace and kiss him, not recriminating, but asking that the fatted calf be slaughtered, a ring be placed on his finger, and the best robe be put on him; and they must rejoice in a party to celebrate because this lost one has been found, this dead one has come to life again. That’s a model for unconditional love!

Holy Disruption with Mark

Really enjoyed my Advent choice of a book, Tracy Daub’s “Holy Disruption: Discovering Advent in the Gospel of Mark” – a fascinating reflection on how to relate Mark to the Advent season. Mark challenges us to think about difficult things and, as Daub says, “Participating with Christ’s transformative work requires a willingness to enter into the real-time apocalypses around us. In this world of violence, intolerance, and division, a world where global pandemics and the consequences of climate change threaten the welfare of our planet, God gives us a special task: being witnesses to hope. Faithful anticipation in the coming of Christ is found not in calculating the exact time of the Messiah’s return, but in witnessing to his hope and love.” She also says, “In truth, all is not well in most of our lives or in our world. Quite often the peace we attempt to create at Christmas is not genuine. It is a fake peace. Like faux pearls, or faux furs, or faux leather, sometimes the peace we settle for is a shallow imitation. We settle for this imitation because often we would rather accept a comforting lie than an uncomfortable truth.” Mark may have no nativity, but there’s a lot of incarnational stuff!

Bread of Angels

I always enjoy reading Barbara Brown Taylor’s books, and “Bread of Angels”, recently completed, was no exception. Sub-titled ‘Feeding on the Word’, it offers a series of helpful reflections on brief Biblical passage, often with challenging and insightful comments. As a good example, I like the little note on the story of Mary washing Jesus’ feet. Taylor writes: ““Mary got the message and acted on it. While some of those standing by thought her mad, or smitten, or (God forbid) wasteful, at least she and the one whose feet she rubbed suspected the truth. Where God is concerned, there is no need to fear running out - of nard or of life, either one. Where God is concerned, there is always more - more than we can either ask or imagine - gifts from our lavish, lavish Lord.” It is good to be reminded of the fantastic generosity of God.

Advent in the Holy Land

Back in 2011 I was able to spend twelve days during Advent in the Holy Land. It was a fascinating and moving experience to visit the places we remember at Advent and Christmas at that time of year. One of the first places we visited was Ein Kerem, the beautiful, though hilly, village where John the Baptist was born and grew up. Someone living there in John’s time would probably have been relatively well off. When we got there, we went first to a spring known as Mary’s spring – and there we were reminded of the importance of wells and springs in Jesus’ day, both for the water they supplied, but also because they were a gathering place for the women. They met at the well and there exchanged the news and the gossip. Today we have many more means of communication, but then it was important that they took the opportunities that were there to share news. Have you heard … ? Did you know ….? It is always interesting to reflect on what news we pass on. It is so easy to spread rumour and gossip, but what we are called to do is spread the Good News, the Gospel. Go and tell. I wonder what are the things that we are going and telling. What is it that we want to share? Ein Kerem is where Mary would have visited her cousin, Elizabeth – and there they were, both expecting babies, and both, it might be assumed, should not have been in that state. Why did Mary go to visit Elizabeth? Was it because she wanted to share her good news? Or might it just be that Mary was sent there to get her out of the way for a bit? How scandalous that she was unmarried and pregnant! And Elizabeth wasn’t much better. She was probably the source of gossip too. She was married all right, but you shouldn’t be having babies at her age. Having a baby should be a source of joy, but for both Mary and Elizabeth there was an element of scandal. How do we respond to the scandal of the Gospel? What do we do with those awkward things that come our way? Mary responded by writing a fantastic song, the one that we now know as the Magnificat – and on a wall in the grounds of the church, which marks Ein Kerem as the place where John lived, was written, as gifts from many nations, the Magnificat in very many different languages. There it was in Greek, in Hebrew, in Arabic. It was in Spanish and French, Swahili and English and very many more. The Magnificat has many important things to say to us about God’s care for the disadvantaged. He has performed mighty deeds …. He has brought down rulers …. He has filled the hungry …. Are we ready to listen? Are we ready to hear the message of liberation? What a joy to visit Bethlehem just ahead of Christmas! Just like that first Christmas, as Luke tells it to us, there were lots of visitors in town – only these visitors were not there on business, needing to register themselves for the census that was being undertaken. These visitors were pilgrims, wanting to see the place where Jesus was born, marked now, not by a stable or any other form of domestic or farm building, but by a church. This is an interesting church, not just because of what it marks, but because there has been a church on this site from very early times, and we were able to see something of the indicators as to how it had been adapted and added on to down through the ages. We were able to imagine a very tired Mary arriving in Bethlehem, desperately wanting to find somewhere to rest and then, almost immediately, discovering that the baby was on its way. We have cleaned up the story and made a pretty picture of it, but giving birth in a draughty and, almost certainly, messy stable, cannot have been something anyone would have wanted for their child and themselves. Being in Bethlehem and thinking back some two thousand or so years was fascinating. We only queued up some ten minutes or so to see the place believed to be where Jesus was born, but I am told it can take a lot longer. Why are there so many twenty-first century pilgrims who want to encounter this spot, when it was just a few shepherds in the first century. One of the things to learn is not to be in a hurry, and to realise that God’s time is always best. People were selling all sorts of things, but mainly souvenirs. I suspect there were lots of people selling things in Jesus’ time too, but they would more likely be food and the basic necessities of life. What do we spend our money on? What are our priorities? Perhaps we are helped to work that out when we pause to ponder where it is that God would have us be, what it is that God would have us do? At Bethlehem that first Christmas, that great thing that we often refer to as the incarnation took place. What does that mean for us here and now?

God in Pain

I always enjoying reading Barbara Brown Taylor’s books and God in Pain, which I have just finished reading, is no exception. It is a great collection of sermons (or homilies) exploring the theme of suffering and pain and what it means. One of the key points, and values of the collection, is that this is something that we cannot always avoid. Towards the end of the book, there are a number of pieces originally prepared for Good Friday which offer a helpful exploration of the theme. She points out the good death that many religious leaders (like Buddha and Confucius) experienced, adding that: “Jesus was not so lucky. But if he had been luckier, what would he have had to offer all those others who die too soon – abandoned - who suffer for things they did not do, who are punished for the capital offence of loving too much, without proper respect for the authorities? His hard luck makes him our best company when we run into our own. He knows. He has been there. There is nothing that hurts us that he does not know about. On the whole, his love was not the sweet kind. It may have been sweet when he was holding a child in his arms or washing his friends’ feet. But more often it was the fierce kind of love he was known for - love that would not put up with any kind of tyranny, would not stand by and watch a leper shunned or a widow go hungry - love that turned over tables and cracked homemade whips before it would allow God to be made into one more commodity.” She goes on to point out the different, transforming approach offered by Jesus, to which we are called, but with which we struggle. “Our world is built on knowing who is up and who is down, who is in and who is out, who is last and who is first. His world turns all that upside down, and we simply cannot function like that. So we run this world our way and we make noises about wanting to do it his way, but we do not really mean it or we would.”

Iona - Interfaith Pilgrimage

Back in September I had the opportunity to be part of the Christian delegation on the Scottish religious leaders’ pilgrimage to Iona. Organised by Interfaith Scotland, we were celebrating twenty years of working together across the faiths. In 2002, and in the aftermath of what has become known and remembered as 9/11, three Christian church leaders, from the Church of Scotland, the Roman Catholic Church and the Scottish Episcopal Church suggested that it was important for religious leaders to get to know one another, and so, what has become Interfaith Scotland was born in September 2002 and, exactly 20 years later, we found ourselves, a group of Scottish religious leaders, augmented by a number of interfaith chaplains and representatives of local interfaith groups, travelling to the beautiful island of Iona for what proved to be an amazing few days together. All the main faiths were represented, and so we went, worshipped and lived together – from the Baha’i, Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, Pagan and Sikh communities. An earlier question had been whether Iona was too strongly associated with the Christian faith, but representatives from the non-Christian faiths insisted that they were happy with the destination, and indeed I think we all found it a great place to be. It was not intended that we would be making our way to Oban, and then on across Mull and to Iona on the day of the Queen’s funeral – but that is how it was, but many of us caught up on what we had missed by watching it through iPlayer on a large screen in the village hall in the evening, and it was good to do that together. It was a pilgrimage and one of the things to do on Iona is a mini pilgrimage around the island, reflecting on some of the things it that the place might say to society at large on all sorts of issues – and so we walked round part of the island together, reflecting on education, health, and so many of the other everyday things that matter to all of us, and had the perspective of a different faith leading some reflection on each issue. Alongside that there was plenty of time for further exploration and I particularly enjoyed a rather longer than I had anticipated walk over to St Columba’s Bay where we enjoyed dipping fingers or toes in the sea and the beauty of the beach there. One of the main tasks was to renew our commitment to work together. I found it immensely encouraging that we found it surprisingly easy to agree a text. In the statement we recognised the value of marking the twentieth anniversary of the Scottish Religious Leaders’ Forum by our pilgrimage together on the holy and historic island of Iona. We recognised the diversity of culture, religion and belief within Scotland, and the damage and suffering caused by prejudice, discrimination and war. We affirmed our commitment to good interfaith relations and trust across Scotland and the particular challenges, which we must address together, around caring for the earth, living sustainably and addressing climate change. We further committed ourselves to walk alongside and listen to local communities across Scotland in the many challenges we all face in a time of bewildering change. This all came together in the multi-faith service of commitment live-streamed from Iona Abbey (and available on YouTube if you search for InterFaith Scotland). The service, to which each faith community contributed was a remarkable culmination of an extraordinary few days. I went, if I’m honest, with a degree of uncertainty, but I came away seeing it as one of the highlights not just of 2022, but of all that I have done in over forty years of ministry. How good to spend time together. How good to learn from each other. How good to be part of a Scottish Interfaith pilgrimage to Iona.

God Is A Black Woman

Christena Cleveland’s God Is A Black Woman is a powerful, challenging, uncomfortable and inspirational read, and much more. I can’t say that it was easy to read, but I am so glad that I came across it. It is a really important challenge to our conventional thinking, which is there, whether we like to admit it or not, but which needs to be moved into a significantly new place. We simply cannot impose our categories on God, and then especially when they are rooted in wrong ideas of power and position. Cleveland puts it powerfully, but importantly: “The prevalence of white male images of God easily lead us to conclude that God is definitively and exclusively white and male. And like many culture-shaping ideas, we don’t even question the idea or how it shapes our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. For most of us, regardless of what we might want to believe or claim to believe, the image that immediately comes to mind when we imagine God is that of a powerful white man who is for and with powerful white men. It’s a deceptive idea that flies under the radar, powerfully shaping us without our consent.” She rightly points to the importance of our imaginations and the effect of how we ‘imagine’ things to be. We need to capture a new understanding of God, which take us to radically different places, and which retains the ability to free our thinking about God. “The Sacred Black Feminine cannot be distilled into a TED Talk or a tidy sermon. Though She can rock with the best of the intellectuals, She exists beyond the edges, beyond the orthodox ways of knowing, and beyond traditional logic. She beckons us in dreams and speaks to us through our embodied experiences. As I continued to journey toward the Sacred Black Feminine, I could see that She was guiding me away from my obsession to prove Her and instead inviting me to simply experience Her.”