The language of love, or division? Or something completely different.

Signpost for Sunday (Pentecost) 19 May 2024: Acts 2:1-21 or Ezek 37:1-14; Ps 104:25-35,36b; Rom 8:22-27 or Acts 2:1-21.

I think I may have got Pentecost wrong for years. I still don’t like the fact that it’s associated by people in some churches with ‘speaking in tongues’. I think that makes the idea that if you don’t speak in tongues or don’t want to speak in tongues or have tried but just can’t speak in tongues, then you’re some kind of second-class Christian. I don’t think that kind of thinking has anything whatsoever to do with Pentecost. For one thing Pentecost is a story about the disciples speaking in a variety of specific languages (Acts 2:7-12). It has nothing to do with glossolalia. For another, I believe that Yeshua/Jesus wouldn’t have had anything to do with making anyone who followed him feel second class.

Having said all of that more than once in a Signpost, I was reading through all the Signposts that have been written about Pentecost this week and I realised that maybe Pentecost’s importance is less a story about something that may or may or may not have happened. Maybe Pentecost is celebrated in Christian churches because it’s a story that is important to ‘church history’ rather than personal faith.

Much missed Andrew Brown (the only ordained priest among we latter day Signpost writers) put it best in 2015. The last sentence of what he wrote then struck me for the first time this week:

“The picture that I have in my mind of the early Church is of earnest students of the word. By the word I mean the scriptures that we call the Old Testament. By early I do not mean the years immediately after the crucifixion, but those times when things were beginning to be written down. There is a gap here because the first generation mostly believed that the times were so short that there was no point in writing things down. Then Paul and others began writing letters; and experience of being scattered throughout the Roman world meant that some gathered up sayings of Jesus and other little lists. And being driven out of Jerusalem by the Roman invasion and destruction was the last straw. 

So they looked back on what they could remember, and they also looked back on the scriptures; and they interpreted their memory of events to fit their understanding of the sacred writings, sometimes regarding them as predictions about their own times. 

For them the later portions of Isaiah were there in order to make sense of the Cross. Ezekiel’s skeletons were there to show how the dead church after the shock of Jesus’ death could come alive and spread to the whole Roman world. 

Pentecost celebrates the way the Church burst into life out of despair, and the way that the indwelling Spirit gives the gift or first fruits of the Spirit to the believers and transforms them.”

You can read Andrew’s 2015 Signpost here.

Paul

Crazy Little Thing Called Love (apologies to Queen).

Signpost for Sunday 5 May 2024: Acts 10:44-48; Ps 98; 1 John 5:1-6; John 15:9-17.

The well-known words ‘God is love’ (1 John 4:7) were written long after Yeshua was murdered (around 100 AD/CE), but what are conveyed as Yeshua’s own words about love are equally memorable. All of this week’s readings from the lectionary make it clear that love is central to how Yeshua tried to teach people to their lives on earth.

This is my commandment that you to love one another as I have loved you. (John 15:12)

That verse makes me ask, how did Yeshua love? Maybe we should trawl the New Testament and write down all the examples we can find. I think that’s quite a good idea. But for now I am pretty sure that the one thing at the root of the how we see Yeshua loving is compassion.

It’s compassion that separates Yeshua’s use of the word love from any romantic notions of the word. While compassion begins, like romantic love, with deep feelings, it doesn’t end there: 

Compassion (noun.) a strong feeling of sympathy and sadness for the suffering or bad luck of others and a wish to help them(Cambridge Dictionary).

Compassion (noun.) sympathetic consciousness of others’ distress together with a desire to alleviate it (Meriam=Webster).

Compassion (n.) Pity, inclining one to show mercy or give aid (The Shorter Oxford Dictionary)

Compassion (n.) Feeling or emotion when a person is moved by the suffering or distress of another, and by a desire to relieve it (The Oxford English Dictionary).

I was at a talk given by the Reverend Mark Beale (vicar of St Elizabeth’s Anglican Church in Clendon, South Auckland at the time) and I have never forgotten the first words he spoke on that day. He said, “Love is not a feeling, it’s a way of behaving.” The dictionaries think it’s both, but I got Mark’s point.

Interestingly, those dictionary definitions actually contain some suggestions on how we might go about ‘behaving love’: Help, alleviate, show mercy, give aid.

Paul

Secateurs or rough tooth saw blade?

Signpost for Sunday 28 April 2024: Acts 8:26-40; Ps 22:25-31; 1 John 4:7-21; John 15:1-8.

Last time I wrote about the ‘true vine’ verses in 2021 I mentioned the wisteria that I used to prune in our old house. This week I came across something I wrote over twenty years ago. I went on a one day retreat and the passage that we all had to think about happened to be the same verses from this week’s gospel reading.

It’s a bit of a (long) meditation on the imagery used in the passage. I thought you might be interested to read it:

Pruning

…my father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit… John 15:1

I have always been afraid that I would be cut off because I bear no fruit or inadequate fruit. It always seems like a threat – bear fruit or burn (John 15:7).

Today while those same feeling arose again, I felt a different interpretation was possible, for my life at least.

If I am a branch, pruning does not always mean chopping off the whole branch. It more often means cutting back to a shoot, a tiny vulnerable red or green bud.

When I pruned the wisteria last year, I thought it was dead. Yet I knew I had left those vulnerable buds in a few places. But I thought I hadn’t left enough of them. The body of the plant itself looked old and spent. Would it have the strength to rejuvenate through those few buds? Were they the right buds? What shape would the plant grow back in? What had been destroyed?

It came back as full as before, but quite different. It no longer clung to the balcony outside our bedroom. Bravely it reached out along the wire that led to the pergola where, in an ideal world, it would day create a beautiful shady place. The wire that it travelled along almost snapped with the weight of new growth. It swung precariously above our heads as we lay in the summer sun on the terrace. And I thought I should climb up and nail it into place. Add strength. But I never did because I thought I was too busy, and I know I was too lazy. Maybe it was even a subconscious thing; I wanted to see if the plant would make it on its own, if the old trunk and the new shoots together could travel that vital two metres and establish a hold on the first crossbeam of the pergola.

The wisteria made it without my help, and when it tentatively thrust out shoots that reached groping into the air, my heart softened. I stood on a chair and gently wrapped the green shoot round the brown beam.

This year I am waiting for the leaves to fall again and make their small piles which swirl into such perfect spirals in the breeze that people think I have deliberately swept them there, but I haven’t. Then it will be time to prune again. And this time I’ve already decided I won’t need to cut as much. That I will nail up that wire because the wisteria made its own way anyway and now pruning feels more like cultivation than harsh maintenance.

Last year I slashed at branches. I wanted to clear the growth around the windows so we could see out again. I wanted to stamp on the fingers that clutched at the balcony, dragging the weight of the plant up behind it, ugly against the wall. Now I feel content with the way the plant is – it and I have a kind of understanding.

And then there’s that other pruning. It came to me that the pruning I had dreaded wasn’t going to happen, wasn’t going to leave me as the dead growth watching through the haze of smoke as I died while the rest of the vine went on growing.

I thought back to all the meanings around pruning; and its real meaning is growth. I felt God saying (not in an echoey voice, but that way that is thought, a realisation) that I wasn’t the dead wood. I was the bud left behind. That not all of the branch was chopped off, only chopped back.

Re-birth is not the only image that helps – maybe this pruning is more pertinent to my kind of slow, twisted way of growing towards God.

I felt that the vine is there, that my branch is still there too, that I am still who I was and that I don’t have to feel guilty about that. Some bad things have been pruned. There is more pruning to come. I may even pray for pruning now.

Get rid of the dead wood of my selfishness. Hack off the dead wood of my habitual problems. Cut out the dead wood of my stunted emotions.

And yet, that is not quite right either. I get the impression God prunes me with secateurs not a rough tooth saw. Cutting bits off at a time; almost as if to say, “OK you think you only need to lose a little there? Well, try and see if that’s enough.” It’s a bit like a haircut – we can always take more off.

Back to the vine, the thick tangle of much of what went with the first fifteen or so years of my working life has been cut off. But the buds left behind were the good parts of that. Some things have blossomed that I always knew were there. A few things have grown, are trying to grow. There’s even new dead wood. The really good news is that God is a much better gardener than me.

(Written 17th May 2003)

Paul

On storytelling and story tellers.

Signpost for Sunday 21 April 2024: Acts 4:5-12; Ps 23; 1 John 3:16-24; John 10:11-18.

Lots of my friends, and my daughter, keep telling me how good Slow Horses on Apple TV is. It stars Gary Oldman as the main character, Jackson Lamb. Despite the fact that he is one of my favourite actors, I don’t want to watch it. When we read any story we form an image of who the people are in our heads.

I read the books first and I don’t want the pictures I created in my head of him and all the other people in the stories to be affected, or even overtaken, by watching TV versions. In my experience it has always proven true that if I see the film first, I prefer it to the book and if I read the book first I prefer it to the film.

The most dramatic version of that for me was One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest and that was the opposite of what I fear about Slow Horses. I saw the film of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest on a wet night in Sutton Coldfield, UK and was blown away. The thing I remember most is that the character called The Indian is presumed to be dumb, and at a very dramatic moment turns out to be able to speak after all. I loved that reveal. In the book much of the story is told from The Indian’s point of view and you know from the beginning that he is pretending to be dumb. Ruined the book for me.

All of which made me think about this week’s reading from John. Here we have Yeshua speaking; this is the character Yeshua in the book written by the author(s) of John.

I love this good shepherd, Yeshua bin Yosef. He says I am one of his sheep. Even though I am not of that original Jewish fold he is talking to. He says there shall be one flock (John 10:16) which comprises ‘the chosen people’ and everyone else.

But he also says there shall be only one shepherd (John 10:17) and that’s one of those verses that have been used by fundamentalists to create problems for hundreds of years. ‘Ecumenical’ is a word that does not exist for such people. Likewise ‘multifaith’. I think those fundamentalists are creating their own version of the character Yeshua, and it’s not the one I imagine when I read John’s book or any of the books in the New Testament.

That’s why, as I have said before, I like Marilynne Robinson’s description of the New Testament as “a story written down in various forms by writers whose purpose was first of all to render the sense of a man of surpassing holiness, whose passage through the world was only understood after his death, to have revealed the way of God to humankind.”

Paul

Continuity and character development.

Signpost for Sunday 14 April 2024: Acts 3:12-19; Ps 4; 1 John 3:1-7; Luke 24:36b-48.

The reading from Luke starts: “As they were saying this…”

‘They’ is Cleopas and his mate who had just rushed back from Emmaus, and this is what ‘They’ were saying: … they told what had happened on the road, and how he [Jesus] was known to them in the breaking of the bread. (Luke 24:35)

But even before that ‘They’ had found the Eleven and those with them, assembled together and saying, “It is true! The Lord has risen and has appeared to Simon.” (Luke 24:33-34)

And yet when Jesus is suddenly standing among the Eleven (plus Cleopas and his mate) again, they were startled and frightened, and supposed that they saw a ghost. (Luke 24:37)

In a previous life I was lucky enough to work with a few people and make small films. The one thing you didn’t want to get wrong was continuity. Continuity in film making involves making sure that no-one forgets anything that has gone before in the story. So is this discrepancy just an error of continuity, maybe caused by the different people telling or copying the narrative down over the years? Maybe.

Of course the most noticeable thing about this week’s reading from Luke is that ‘the ghost’ asks for something to eat and then scoffs a piece of ‘broiled fish’. The thing I find interesting about that is not whether it really happened but that it occurs exactly at the mid-point in the story, the pivotal point you might say. That is where the other main characters in the story are transformed themselves. They start out as a bunch of people frightened of ghosts; they end up as a bunch of people who are now designated as “witnesses”. That’s their new role, the one they play throughout Luke’s next book – Acts.

Paul

Thomas, twins, and rabbit holes.

Signpost for Sunday 7 April 2024 (Low Sunday): Acts 4:32-35; Ps 133; 1 John 1:1-2:2; John 20:19-31.

This week it’s the well-known doubting Thomas story. Only the author(s) of John’s gospel tell this story but it has still become one of the most famous stories in the whole New Testament. What do you think when you read or hear it? Do you think, as I do, that, like Thomas, you would not have believed that someone who you knew was dead was somehow still alive? Do you think that the point of the story is that we should believe even though we have not experienced the risen Christ for ourselves (John 20:39)?

After writing quite a few Signposts about Thomas and reading what other Signposters think, these are the main things that strike me about the Doubting Thomas story:

  1. Thomas is no different from any of the other disciples; they had all been shown Jesus’s nailed hands and his wounded side to convince them that resurrected Jesus was indeed the same person who was crucified. (John 20:19-20)
  1. Jesus doesn’t want to leave anyone out, that’s why he came back to show Thomas his wounds and allow him to not only see them but also touch them (yeeew, as my daughters might say)
  1. Thomas encourages us to examine what each of us really believes, and that there’s nothing wrong with doubting things we are told by others, including whatever church we may or may not belong to. One of my favourite quotes about this comes from Francis Bacon, the 16thcentury philosopher, statesman and devout Anglican, who wrote in his essay, The Advancement of Learning: If you begin in certainty, you will end in doubt. If you begin in doubt, you will end in certainty.

Last year I mentioned that Thomas was also known as Didymus (John 20:24). ‘Didymus’ is the Greek word for twin. Interestingly, ‘Thomas’ is the Hebrew word for twin. I had never before asked myself who was his twin? Was he an identical twin? Did he have a twin brother or a twin sister?

Wikipedia says his “actual name was Judah (Jude) and he was mentioned along with the other brothers of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark 6:1. It is believed he was dubbed the “twin” due to his resemblance to his brother Jesus.” (Wikipedia gets the Gospel reference wrong. I think it should be Mark 6:3.)

If that surprises you how about this from Dr. Bart Erhman, the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who writes: “there were some early Christians who thought that one of Jesus’ brothers, Jude (or Judas: both are translations of the same Greek word), was actually a twin. Not just of anyone, but of Jesus himself.”

If that’s true, those early Christians can’t have thought there ever was a virgin birth or that Yeshua was God’s only son.

And what about the tradition that suggests Thomas travelled to India spreading the word?

Well, there is a church of St Thomas in India today. Saint Thomas Christians there wholeheartedly believe: ‘The true teachings of Jesus have survived only in India. Thomas Christians trace their origins to the arrival of St. Thomas at Malankara, on a lagoon near present-day Kodungallur (Cranganore; near ancient Muziris) in 52 CE and to congregations he established in seven villages.’

Oh look, we’ve just gone down a rabbit hole. Let’s climb out quickly, but let’s not be afraid to carry on doubting until we find our lord and our god for ourselves.

Paul

The very long weekend.

Signpost for Sunday 24 March 2024 (Easter): Acts 10:34-43 or Isa 25:6-9; Ps 118:1-2,14-24; 1 Cor 15:1-11 

or Acts 10:34-43; John 20:1-18 or Mark 16:1-8.

A few years ago Andrew (much missed Signposter) suggested we really should cover at least three days of Easter, and we did one year. I’m sort of doing that again this year but slightly differently.

This week’s Signpost is a collection of poems for Easter that I have been working on for a while and recently completed. So please indulge me if you will and accept these, for a change.

Paul

This week’s cross word.

Signpost for Sunday 24 March 2024 (6th Sunday in Lent – Palm Sunday): Mark 11:1-11 or John 12:12-16; Ps 118:1-2,19-29.

Twenty years ago Sheila wrote a Signpost about Palm Sunday that ended with some very practical advice: “Make your palm crosses out of palms!  We used flax last year, and it’s sooooo difficult to turn into ashes.”* 

Sheila’s advice always springs to mind at this time of year. This year it made me Google where churches in the UK get their crosses from. Because palms aren’t abundant in the UK, are they? According to Google most palm crosses that will be used in UK churches this weekend are imported from India, Africa or Spain. And they are already made into crosses. They buy them in packs of 50 like this:

Nothing wrong with that at all of course. It’s just that it made me think of the many small groups of people all over Aotearoa New Zealand who have got together this week to sit and weave crosses for this Sunday. 

My guess is that a lot of people who turn up to a church service in many countries this week won’t give a second thought to where the crosses come from or who made them. And what happens to the crosses after the service? My wife would always take more than one cross. She would give a palm cross to whichever of our children hadn’t been with us on Palm Sunday. Latterly it was both of them. We tended to pin them to a notice board, or use them as bookmarks. They hung around for at least a year and I still come across books with palm cross bookmarks in them now.

I have written a number of Signposts about Palm Sunday over the years in an effort to understand what may have happened on that Sunday in around 30AD/CE,  and it’s clear that no one was holding a palm cross on that day. But that doesn’t devalue the crosses handed out on Palm Sunday .

This year I realised though that there is one difference between reading or hearing the story of Yeshua’s/Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem and holding a palm leaf cross in your hand on Sunday.

I think the poignancy of holding a palm cross in your hand is that those people (however many or few they may have been) that stood by the side of the road as Yeshua entered Jerusalem riding a donkey or a young horse didn’t know how the story would develop. Palm crosses literally weave together the joy of Yeshua’s arrival with the shock of his crucifixion.

Paul

* Many churches collect and burn the palm crosses to make the ash used in next year’s Ash Wednesday service.

‘Swifties’ and Greeks have difficulty getting backstage.

Signpost for Sunday 17 March 2024 (5th Sunday in Lent): Jer 31:31-34; Ps 51:1-12 or Ps 119:9-16; Heb 5:5-10; John 12:20-33.

They reckon more than 280,000 people went to see Taylor Swift in Melbourne recently. Which made me wonder how many of them managed to get ‘back stage passes’ and got to meet her in person, if any. And I wonder what those few were expecting her to say to them if they did get to meet her.

Interestingly, Taylor Swift has been known to do more than perform songs for her fans. Last year during her show in Minneapolis on June 24 she is reported to have taken a moment to encourage her fans to act with “kindness and gentleness” online.

In this week’s gospel reading ‘some Greeks’ attempt to get a backstage pass to see Yeshua by telling Philip they wish to see him John 12:21). Philip tells Andrew and they both go to tell Yeshua that some of his fans want to meet him.

Of course the author of John’s gospel doesn’t put it quite that way, but did Yeshua see it that way? After all, earlier in the chapter we are told that the crowd who met him arriving in Jerusalem on Palm Sunday had heard he was coming (John 12:12). And just before that another great crowd had turned up in Bethany not only on account of Jesus but also to see Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead (John 12:9).

It seems quite possible all this sensational stuff is what had attracted a lot of the people who crowded around him in Jerusalem. Could that be an explanation for why as soon as Andrew and Philip have told him that a bunch of Greeks want to meet him Yeshua launches into one of his big speeches:

Andrew went with Philip and they told Jesus. And Jesus answered them, “The hour has come for the Son of man to be glorified. Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. If any one serves me, he must follow me; and where I am, there shall my servant be also; if any one serves me, the Father will honour him.” (John 12:22-26)

We might have expected Yeshua to tell the visiting Greeks to treat their neighbours with “kindness and gentleness” too, but no. We can’t even be sure whether he’s is talking to the Greeks or just to the messengers, Andrew and Philip.

Either way, does Yeshua (and the author of John’s gospel) choose this moment to shift the focus away from the purely sensational (Lazarus and other miracles)? From a narrative perspective it makes sense to do that now because we’re coming to the most dramatic events in the story. And that’s what the author of John wants his readers and listeners to focus on.

I suspect those readers and listeners also need to be reassured. They were mostly Jewish Christians who had recently been banned from the synagogues, and were likely to be estranged from people and places they had grown up with. They had quite literally given up their old life in this world. John 12:25-26 reassured them that not only had they had done the right thing, but the Father would honour them.

Paul

Because, because, because. But not the Wizard of Oz.

Signpost for Sunday 10 March 2024 (4th Sunday in Lent): Numb 21:4-9; Ps 107:1-3,17-22; Eph 2:1-10; John 3:14-21.

I’ve just started reading a novel written by the Reverend Richard Coles called A Death in the Parish. It’s a Canon Clement Mystery set in the late 1980s and it is what they call a cosy crime caper. It’s certainly very cosy although there’s been no mention of any crime yet.

But what I did come across is a passage where Daniel Clement, a Church of England vicar, explains what ‘born again’ means to his mother, Audrey. He tells her, “The first birth is into sinful life, thanks to the disobedience of Adam and Eve. The second birth is into the life of Jesus Christ, and that is once and for all. Not just in life but in eternity.”

“Don’t you think that?” [Asks his mum.]

“I think we’re forever turning this way and that and life is essentially Come Dancing until we finally waltz into heaven, and that can take not only a lifetime, but more than a lifetime. That’s why I pray for those who have died, to help them along. Chris would think that very naughty.” Chris being Rev Clement’s newly appointed colleague who’s turned out to be ‘an evangelical’.

I mention all this because it reminded that John 3:14, the start of this week’s Gospel reading, is actually the end of Jesus’s conversation with Nicodemus, who much like Daniel’s mum, has a bit of trouble getting his head around the idea of someone being born twice (John 3:4). And it got me thinking about John 3:16, which must be one of the most well-known and arguably the most loved verses from the Bible. It’s also one often quoted by both evangelicals and naughty vicars alike.

I’m always a bit wary when verses from the Bible are quoted on their own and out of context though, and we see Christian churches all over doing exactly that on signs outside their places of worship.

For instance, look at the first word of John 3, verse 16 – ‘For’. It means ‘because’ and it’s clearly an explanation of the words that immediately precede it: the Son of Man must be lifted up,that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.” That’s the author(s) of John’s explanation not Jesus’s, by the way. Maybe it’s an explanation that the author needed to give to those new Judeans/followers of The Way who might have been questioning why the Messiah had to murdered by the Romans in the first place. It might equally be a word of encouragement aimed at those who might have been having trouble believing, and were wondering why Jesus hadn’t turned up to his own second coming yet.

Paul