On having dirty hands: Clean Up Australia Day

Sermon preached at St Matthew's Anglican, West Pennant Hills
On 1st March 2015, St Matt's held a joint service for all congregations after many parishioners had spent the morning cleaning up local parks and streets as part of Clean Up Australia Day.

Scripture readings: Psalm 104 and Romans 8.18-27.

When I was growing up not far from here, I had zero interest in my parents’ garden. For me, it was too much hard work - tending, watering, weeding - for too little payoff. With the impatience and selfishness of youth, I expected my efforts to result in immediate tangible personal benefits.

But now, I have a garden of my own: citrus trees, a blueberry bush, passionfruit vine, basil, tomatoes, zucchini, silver beet, basil, kale, leeks, capsicum, various herbs (including basil), a compost bin, a couple of worm-farms, some basil and a beehive. I love it! And I'm trying to inculcate an interest and appreciation in my two little kids that I never managed to gain until I was almost 30.

Some things take time to recognise. The patience, attentiveness, humility and willingness to get my hands dirty that I spurned as a youth are now things I cherish and seek to foster in myself, ever mindful of how fragile my grasp on them is.

Soil is now something I have learned to love. The opening chapters of the Bible speak poetically of humans being fashioned out of the soil. Indeed, even the name ‘Adam is a Hebrew pun, being the male form of the female word ‘adamah: soil, dirt, ground. ‘Adam from ‘adamah. The pun even (kind of) words in English: we are humans from the humus, a slightly unusual word for topsoil.* We are creatures of the dirt, relying on dirt for almost every mouthful of food.
*Technically, the dark organic matter in it.

And so I’ve come to love my worm-farms and compost: watching dirt form in front of my eyes. Seeing my food-scraps return again into the nourishing foundation of life from which they came.

But my garden in Paddington is apparently built on a rubbish dump. It seems like every time I dig, I come across broken glass, plastic, old bits of metal. My two year delightedly finds bits of glass and comes running excitedly to show me and I am caught between anxiety that he’s going to cut himself and pride that he is learning to cherish the soil and wants to keep it free of rubbish.

I often find myself wondering: what were they thinking, these people who apparently smashed their bottles into the soil and dumped random bits of plastic? Were they neighbours chucking things over the fence? Was it a former resident who was particularly careless? Was it the result of some long forgotten landscaping that brought in rubbish from elsewhere?

When we moved in, the house hadn’t been lived in for almost 12 months, and the backyard was overgrown. Gradually, as the garden has taken shape, we’ve been cleaning up the mess. And it feels good to be part of setting things right, even if it is in a small, very localised way. This little patch of dirt from which I’ve removed a few dozen bits of glass and plastic, is now cleaner and healthier than it was before.

And I bet some of you have had something of a similar experience this morning: taking a small patch of land and improving it, removing rubbish, cleaning it up, making it a little bit more healthy, more right, less polluted. Maybe you’ve wondered at those who dumped stuff – whether out of carelessness, apathy or haste. Maybe you’ve even got a little angry – it can feel good to be fixing something, and when you don’t know who was responsible for breaking it, it is easy to indulge in a little self-righteous harrumphing.

It also feels good to be working with others, doing something useful as a team, making the local area a little better for everyone. This is an act of service, an act of commitment to a place, an act that affirms that as creatures of the soil, it is right and fitting that we seek to take care of our little patch of it, even trying to clean up the mess that others have made. Both gardening as well as cleaning up the land, are very human acts – they are a kind of work that affirms our connection to the humus.

And when we turn to our passages this morning, we see that they are not just human acts, affirming our creatureliness, they are also, in an important sense, God-like acts. Cleaning things up out of care for others is to be a bit like God.

Our first reading, Psalm 104, is a wonderful poem celebrating the creative and caring concern God has for all of creation. Yahweh, the God of Israel, is here revealed as being the creator and sustainer of all creatures, great and small. God’s care extends not just to humans, but to the great family of life, the community of all creation. Written long before modern ecological science or the development of the concept of biodiversity, nonetheless, this psalm celebrates the diversity and abundance of the more-than-human earth. The psalmist notices the various habitats of animals, both domestic and wild, the times and seasons of their existence, and asserts in faith that Yahweh is the source and provider of all life, feeding and watering birds of the air, beasts of the land and even the monsters of the deep that so fascinated and frightened the inhabitants of the ancient near east.

And the striking thing is, there is no hint here that God’s care is exclusively or even primarily for humans; this psalm does not give us a human-centred view that assumes everything really belongs to us and exists to be used in our projects. No, God cares for humans in their labouring during the day, but the same land is then the abode of wild beasts at night that are also in divine care. God causes grass to grow for the cattle, but God also feeds the wild lions, the wild donkeys, the creeping things innumerable that scuttle under the waves. These animals were not only outside of the human economy, but at least in the case of wild lions, actively a hindrance to it. God’s providential care embraces even creatures that make life more difficult for people.*
*This point, and the language of the community of creation, is indebted to Richard Bauckham's Ecology and the Bible: Rediscovering the Community of Creation. Highly recommended.

Now, within this community of creation we do have a particular human vocation, a weighty responsibility placed upon us to reflect the image of God, to show forth God’s own caring concern for other creatures, to manage and steward the land in such a way that the blessing multiplies and grows. We are indeed invited to be gardeners. But Psalm 104 keeps us from getting too cocky, too ambitious, too self-obsessed in this task. We are to reflect and participate in God’s loving authority, which is always directed to the good of the other. Yet this authority is to be exercised as creatures. We are not demigods, halfway between God and the rest of creation, we don’t float six inches above the ground. We are pedestrian creatures, creatures of the dirt and to dust we will return. Fundamentally, we belong with all the other creatures, under the care of God, and if we are then invited to join in that task of caring protecting, it is precisely as creatures. We care for the soil as those who are deeply dependent upon it.

And this is a good reminder to us on Clean Up Australia day. It is so easy, especially in a modern industrial society, to act as though we are above or outside of the rest of life on the planet, rather than intimately connected to it in a vast web of life. Getting our hands dirty today hopefully did some local good, helped make a little part of the world somewhat better. But as we look at our dirty hands, this can also re-ground us as creatures of the soil and we can remember again our dependence upon crops growing, rain falling, soil remaining healthy, biodiversity remaining robust, pollutants being minimised, climate being stable. We have never before in history been so powerful, never before had such amazing technological wonders; but never before have we had such a massive, and largely detrimental, effect upon the habitability of the planet as a whole. There isn’t time this morning to recite the familiar litany of statistics, but they are indeed dire. I’ll just pick one: that as best as we can calculate, the number of wild vertebrates living on the planet has declined by about one third during my lifetime. There are all kinds of factors contributing to this: habitat destruction, hunting, overfishing, climate change, but our stewardship is failing if we are squeezing out these creatures, who are also dear to the one who created us.

And so there is a darker side to today. Our second passage hints at this. In Romans 8, the apostle Paul paints a vivid picture of creation groaning, as though in childbirth, in great pain, in bondage to decay.

If you have the passage in front of you, you’ll notice that there are actually three things groaning. First, there is creation itself, waiting with eager longing, yearning for the day when the current conditions of frustration and decay are no more. Just pause there for a moment and notice the content of Christian hope in Paul’s vision: “the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God”. The creation itself: this is not a salvation that is purely for humans. We are not to be whisked off a dying planet away to a heavenly realm somewhere else. The creation itself is groaning, yearning, hoping. The creation itself is to participate in God’s great renewal, of which the resurrection of Jesus was the first taste. The Christian hope embraces earth as well as heaven – which ought to be no surprise to those of us who regularly pray for God’s will to be done "on earth as it is in heaven".

The second thing groaning is “we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for […] the redemption of our bodies”. Again, the Christian hope is bodily – we hope for a bodily resurrection, just like Jesus'. But more than this, groaning is a normal, healthy part of the Christian life. Paul is no triumphalist, who thinks that discipleship consists of ever-greater thrills and bliss. No, we follow a crucified messiah and our fundamental experience is of frustration, which is the necessary precondition for hope, for who hopes for what is already present, already manifest? Groaning is spiritual – not grumbling, mind you – but groaning, a deep yearning desire for all that is wrong to be set to rights. And that deep desire is inspired by God’s Holy Spirit, since it is those who have tasted the first fruits of that Spirit who groan. There is way in which being a Christian ought to lead us to being less content, less satisfied, less ready to make our peace with a broken world as though such brokenness is acceptable.

But if we keep reading our passage, we find that not only is creation groaning, not only are we groaning, but the Spirit also groans. In verse 26, where the Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words, it’s the same Greek word Paul used earlier for our groaning: this discontented yearning for the renewal of all things, this deep desire for the resurrection of Jesus to be expanded and applied to all creation, extends into the heart of God. God too groans.

We are again, therefore, invited to be godly. If Psalm 104 helped us to be a little like God in caring for a community of life that extends beyond human projects, Romans 8 teaches us to be a little like God in yearning for the renewal of all things. These two passages give us a way of looking at the world in which the rest of creation is not merely a backdrop to an exclusively human drama. We discover wider horizons as we come to see ourselves as creatures in a community of life, as sharing with all life a fundamental dependence upon God’s provision and interdependence with other creatures. And we are invited to see ourselves as sharing with all creation a fundamental frustration, a desire for our brokenness to be healed, our pollution cleaned up, a desire grounded in God’s own desire that all things be made new in Christ.

Because the pollution degrading our lives isn’t just the rubbish dumped in a local park, it isn't even just the rubbish we’re collectively dumping into the oceans and atmosphere, largely out of sight and not as easily cleaned up with a pair of gloves and some elbow grease, pollution that is altering the very chemistry of the air and water, changing the climate, acidifying the oceans. Even more than these, the pollution degrading our lives is also the rubbish we allow into our hearts when we place ourselves at the centre of our own lives, when we live as though we were something other than creatures in a vast web of life, when we pretend that salvation doesn’t include the rest of creation. All this needs to be cleaned up too.

And so in the context of these passages, our efforts today become far more than just being good citizens, or kind neighbours, or taking pride in our local area, or seeking to make some amends for times we may have trashed the place. In the grace of God, they can become a little taste of the Psalmist’s vision of true creaturehood, a little taste of Paul’s Spirit-filled discontentment with disorder. In God’s hands, our efforts today can become another step on a journey into following Jesus with our whole lives, a journey that may break our fingernails, that may break our hearts, but which is the only path towards true joy.

Dependence, independence, interdependence

As a parent of an energetic, social and delightful one year old, I have only slightly more than zero experience to offer on the parenting front (this didn't stop me attempting a series of theological reflections on children before she was born, of course!). Nonetheless, I'll risk a brief recommendation. I found this short piece on parenting a toddler very helpful and commend it to others in a similar situation.
H/T Jessica.

The key idea is that neither dependence ("You do it for me") nor independence ("I do it myself") are the goal of parenting, but rather a healthy interdependence ("We do it"). Independence is overrated, both in parenting and in life more generally. I don't want to stand on my own two feet, since such a task is both impossible and undesirable.

Who is a child? III

Back in August, I began a three part series exploring my current theological understanding of children and so of my new role of parent. It took me a month to get to the second post and now I'm finally getting to the third and final one. Since it has been so long, here (again) is the outline:

Who is a child?
• A precious gift of the Father and a member of the community of creation
• A brother or sister for whom Christ died and an image-bearer called into service of neighbour
• A recipient of God's Spirit, an addressee of God's word and a bearer of living hope

A recipient of God’s Spirit
Children, as members of the community of creation, are not only dependent upon the Father’s initiative and formed in and for the likeness of the Son, but are also quickened by the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is God’s pneuma or breath, which he graciously breathes into all living things. Hence, for children too, each breath is not earned but received as a gift. The length of their lives is not a right, but pure grace. Therefore, while early death is a tragedy, even so it is both possible and right to give thanks amidst the tears for whatever life was given.

Being alive also means being able to act, and to be acted upon: to give and to receive; to kill and to be killed. And children, for all their surprising capacities, are nonetheless more sinned against than sinning, more recipients than givers. We are all mortal and vulnerable to the violent attention of our neighbour. But for children, as their capacity for action is generally less developed, so their vulnerability to being harmed is greater, and their need for nurture, protection and provision increases.

Yet the Spirit is not only the source of life, but also its perfecter, drawing all things towards their fulfilment in Christ. And so the growth of a child in being able to give and receive love is also the work of the Spirit. Children embody an openness to growth and change that is at once fragile and full of possibilities. It is fragile because the accumulation of hurt can lead the heart to close up, to harden in vain pursuit of self-protection. But it is also full of possibilities, because only a childlike willingness to trust and explore can expand lives beyond the borders of the self. Such openness is not only for children, since from them we all might learn again of the renewal of wonder and the wonder of renewal.

And so the double vulnerability of human life is brought into focus by the lives of children: vulnerable to sin; but also vulnerable to grace. We are never so secure in one that the other might not break through. But belief in the Spirit means discovering that the fight is not evenly-matched. And so children are not condemned to repeat the mistakes of their parents or their culture. The gift of the Spirit is not simply being, but truly being, and ultimately, truly being ourselves.* The Spirit brings not only life, but power. Not power to pursue our whims, or crush our enemies, but power to become children of God, power to act despite fear, power to persevere in love, power to break free of destructive habits.

And so it is possible for children to learn their parents’ strengths without each generation being an inevitable degeneration. There are no guarantees of progress, but it is possible for parents both to aim to set an example, and yet hope that their children might yet exceed it.
*Thanks to Anthony for this formulation.

An addressee of God’s Word
Children learn to speak because they are first addressed. Their communication skills are gained though imitation, repetition and play. They are brought into a conversation they did not start but in which they are invited to play a genuine role. This is true both at a sociolinguistic and theological level. Parents and carers speak to an infant who can only reply with cries and gurgles, in the hope that one day the conversation will be richer and broader. God initiates a spiritual conversation with us, rejoicing over us with singing before we know who we are or how to respond. And we only learn through imitation, repetition and play, gradually discovering the language of love in which we are addressed and through which we begin to form our stumbling replies.

The word with which children are addressed is the same Word given to us all: the incarnate Christ, breathed out by the Spirit. And as such, it is a word of welcome and permission: "let the little children come to me". This divine word of acceptance is spoken through many messengers and generally begins in and with the love and acceptance offered by parents and family to a newborn. It may be more or less articulate, more or less liable to be confused or drowned by other voices, but it is never entirely absent.

As co-addressees of God's revealing and redemptive Word, children are therefore dignified. The divine address is a recognition and conferral of personhood. Before knowing anything, they are known, and loved. They are welcomed by God and so are to be welcome among us. We must make room in our lives for children. This is not to say that all have an obligation to generate offspring, but that no one may attempt to live a life that avoids or ignores the voices and presence of children. If God has recognised them, welcomed them, who are we to turn them away?

With this recognition comes the responsibility to respond. Communication is far more than a mere transferral of information, it is an offer of communion, of mutual sharing, of relationship. To be addressed is to be invited, summoned to reply. The same Spirit that breathes out the word also opens the heart to respond. And so all children are to be given room to hear and obey the divine address, to begin learning the language of faith, hope and love so that they may become full conversation partners. Fluency is the task of a lifetime.

A bearer of living hope
Finally, children are born into a dying world, a world filled with problems they did not create. They suffer deprivations and afflictions they have done nothing to deserve. They frequently succumb to the patterns of failure in which they are raised, or by rebelling against them, create an equally distorted mirror image of their parents' dysfunctions. Likewise, they inherit riches they have not earned and a cultural and familial legacy deeper than they can fathom.

And yet, children also represent a renewal of life, a new generation that will face different possibilities (and which may face similar possibilities differently). They are not bound to repeat the mistakes of their parents. They can grasp afresh the human condition and act in ways that are more than merely the sum of their inputs.

And so children are at once bearers of both continuity and discontinuity, ambiguous symbols of new life amidst decay, and yet still of death amidst even new life.

But children also live in a world ravaged by grace, inundated with the Spirit who raised Christ from the dead, and so a world infected by hope. Their lives, though arising from the dust, are not exhausted in three score years and ten. Their bodies, though frail and susceptible to accident, neglect and abuse, are nonetheless witnesses of an open secret: all things are to be made new. Even here, amidst the most beautifully fresh and thus also most poignantly flawed aspect of human life, the already-dying flesh of a newborn, even here, the Spirit of God hovers, waiting to breathe life forevermore.
See here for the first post and here for the second post in this series.
Image by Steve Chong.

Dirty and dusty

Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent, the season of preparation for Easter. From Ash Wednesday, there are forty days until Easter (excluding Sundays, which are always for celebrating the resurrection, not fasting).

In most liturgical services on this day, the sign of the cross using the ash from the previous year's Palm Sunday is made upon the foreheads of worshippers. It is called a sign of penitence and mortality. That is, it symbolises that we are both broken and dying, flawed and finite, fragmented and fragile, dirty and dusty.

As the mark is made, these words are spoken:

Remember, o man/woman/mortal, that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. Repent and believe the good news.

How to relate our mortality to our sinfulness is an important issue in Christian theology. Are we dying because we sin? Or do we sin because we are dying? Which is the more fundamental problem and how does the good news address each?

The Ash Wednesday quote above gives one way into this discussion. Notice that while both mortality and sinfulness are referenced, the appropriate response to each differs. We remember our mortality; we repent of our sins. Our mortality is not itself a fault, but part of our creaturely existence. We receive the breath of life, it is never ours to claim or secure, our life is always dependent upon a source beyond us. The call to remember this is the call to relinquish control over our deaths, to relinquish the demand that I must be kept alive at all costs, and so to discover the freedom that comes from giving space in my life to projects other than survival.

Yet we are to repent of our sins, to turn from our self-obsession and to discover joy (and pain) in meeting and loving others beyond the echo-chamber of the self. This repentance will make no sense unless it is accompanied, enabled and completed by believing the good news. Only the good news of the risen Jesus liberates us from the patterns of false behaviour that diminish our capacity for life and love. That is why the sign that is made in ash is that of a cross. The cross symbolises the good news of liberation: not liberation from being dust and ashes (the sign of the cross is itself made in ash and God's saving work amongst us in Christ was as dust and ashes), but freedom from guilt at our dirty lives, freedom from sin and its false dreams, freedom from despair and so freedom to be truly human.

On Ash Wednesday, Christians are marked as dirty and dusty, but the shame of the dirt and the frustration of the dust are placed within the hope of the cross.

Much more can be said on each of these topics, but let me finally introduce one further idea. While being exhorted to remember our mortality - that we will return to dust - we are also encouraged to remember our origin and identity- that we are dust. Like Adam, we are from and of the earth ('adamah in Hebrew). Being dusty means not only that our life is received as a gift, but that we exist as a member of the community of creation, in solidarity with the rest of the created order. Although we are often quick to lay claim to human uniqueness, part of lenten penitence is re-membering ourselves within this larger sphere. This is both dignity and frustration. Dignity because we too belong to the ordered material world over which God declared his blessing. Frustration because we share with all created things a present "bondage to decay". But our origin and destiny are bound together with the non-human world. Thus, to be smeared with cinders is to be humbled, and yet simultaneously to discover in that humility a properly human and creaturely glory.

Who is a child? II

A few weeks ago, I began a new three part series hoping to reflect upon the theological assumptions behind parenting. Although it’s taken me a while, today I return to that series with my second post. A third will complete the sketch at some point in the future. My first post argued that a child is a a precious gift from the Father of all and a member of the community of creation.

A brother or sister for whom Christ died
If children are a gift from the one who is Father of us all, then they are also brothers and sisters with us in the same family. Our children are also our siblings. Although they may be younger siblings, they are nonetheless full members of God’s family and in that sense our equals. They belong within God's community as much as any adult and they are as welcome to approach God as the rest of us. Jesus said, “Let the children come unto me” - and woe to those who would turn them away. Children are therefore not proto or potential Christians, but can be welcomed from birth as those who are loved and welcomed by God. And in this, they are in the same position as everyone: we all only love because God first loved us. Our loving is always learned from a prior experience of receiving love.

Although it is a much disputed issue in some circles, this is the theological basis for the ancient and widespread Christian practice of baptising children. While their confession of faith might not yet be explicit, they are nonetheless already enfolded in God’s love, included in his promise and welcomed by Christ.

And God’s love is manifest to all through the death of Christ on our behalf. And this death was for all, and so also for children. There is a widespread belief in contemporary society concerning the primordial innocence of children. Yet this Romantic conception is relatively novel and only became popular during the Victorian period. If Christ died for the sins of all, then he also died for the sins of children. They are just as much in need of salvation and healing as the rest of us. Traditionally, this has been expressed in the doctrine of original sin. Despite much confusion, this teaching basically claims that we all begin in a broken situation, with divided hearts and amongst a fractured world. Even before children are able to express any kind of conscious or deliberate rebellion, they are born and raised in patterns of behaviour that dishonour God and diminish life. This teaching can be unhealthily overemphasised, but without it, our conception of children will be dangerously naïve.

An image-bearer called into service of neighbour
Like the rest of us, the young need to be taught how to live. To act naturally no longer comes naturally. It is only through repentance and humility that children (or any of us) come to learn what it means to be human. And when we stop trying to fly, we might learn how to walk. Indeed, the metaphor of walking is used repeatedly in the holy scriptures as an image of how we live. For those of us who seek to walk in the true and living way of Christ, learning how to live means learning to take up our cross and follow him. As Christ was the image of God, giving us a picture of God’s love and generosity, his gentleness and patience, his grace and truthfulness, so we are to mirror Christ and so also present an image of godly character to the world.

But what can it mean for children to be bearers of the divine image? Jesus said that the rule of God belonged to children, and that unless we become like children, we can never enter it (Matthew 18.3; 19.14). Again, it is not their alleged innocence or purity that we are to emulate, far less their ignorance, and not even their curiosity. To be a child is to be dependent; and children mirror to us the deeper truth that applies to us all: we all rely on resources beyond ourselves. Not one of us is self-sufficient. No one is a self-made woman or man. We have all received our existence from others and our life is lived for others. Ultimately, we have all received our lives from our heavenly Father and it is towards him that we are oriented. And so, to become a child in order to receive the kingdom of heaven means that God’s rule is acknowledged by those who give up the project of making themselves something and recognise the limited scope of their agency and responsibility.

Yet children are also to grow up. There is a way of embracing one’s limitations that is irresponsible and seeks to escape from the tasks placed before us, that uses our relative impotency as an excuse. Children need to learn and grow and become more than they presently are, to delight in new experiences and gradually to shoulder new (though still limited) responsibilities. To be mature is better than being immature. But if we listen to Jesus when he tells us to become like children, we also learn that part of maturity is recognising that I am not yet mature, that I still have room to grow, new responsibilities and possibilities to embrace.

And so we raise our children as equal siblings in God’s family. And we raise them as those who share the same vocation of mirroring God’s love. To grow in the capacity to give and receive love is what it means for a child to flourish. And we raise them aware of our continuing immaturity and the perpetual openness and ongoing repentance required of us all as we seek to grow up together.
See here for the first post and here for the third and final post in this series.
First image by JKS.

Who is a child? I

“And whoever welcomes a little child like this in my name welcomes me.”

- Matthew 18.5

Introduction
I would like to begin a new three part series that attempts to give a rough outline of what, or rather who, is a child. In one sense, this is simply one way into a theological account of humanity, a discourse which interests me. But in another sense, I hope to begin a dialogue with parents, prospective parents, those who care for young people and those who have ever been a child, about the theological underpinnings of raising children. Why? Because children in our culture are too often ignored as an inconvenience or worshipped as idols. Also because Jessica and I are expecting a little girl in December. And today is Jessica's birthday and this was something she asked for.

So, who is a child? My answer will come in three parts (each with a few sub-points):
• A precious gift of the Father and a member of the community of creation
• A brother or sister for whom Christ died and an image-bearer called into service of neighbour
• A recipient of God's Spirit, an addressee of God's word and a bearer of living hope

A precious gift from the Father of all
The first thing to say about children is that they are received. Although they come from human flesh and partake in their parents’ DNA, they arrive gratuitously. They cannot be bought or sold, earned or deserved. They are unnecessary, entirely contingent, thoroughly dependent upon a source outside themselves. They are an expression of divine grace from one called Abba, Father, from whom all good gifts originate. They are not simply another one of his many gifts, but are a particularly precious one.

And so they are to be welcomed with thanksgiving wherever they are found. They are strangers arriving at our door, to whom warm hospitality is due. They ought not be turned away empty-handed or shut outside but received with joy. And once they have crossed into our lives they must not be abused or abandoned, but should be generously provided with all they need.

A member of the community of creation
As God’s creations, children share in the common existence of all creatures. They too fall under the original divine blessing; they are good, very good. They take their place amidst a complex and interdependent web of relationships, expressing their creaturely dependence upon God through interdependence with their neighbours, human and non-human. Like us and all living beings, they require nourishment, warmth and protection since their lives, like ours, are fragile and vulnerable. Theirs are particularly vulnerable. Compared with most other animals, human children are born very immature and with few resources to contribute to their own survival. And so while we receive them from God, they receive care from us. They require attention and affection, others who will take responsibility for them and provide for their needs.

Like the rest of us, they need the rest of us, and like the rest of us, they have something with which to bless the rest of us. They are recipients of care, and yet from the beginning and increasingly, they are also a source of blessing, a conduit of divine generosity. We are not simply to receive them from God as blessings, but to receive blessings from them.

Children are one of many, and the dependency shared by all created beings is particularly apparent in them. Yet they also have their own distinct being. They are not their father or mother. Their existence is not exhausted by reference to the family, the society and environment into which they are given. They are unique members of a common kind and so each requires particular attentiveness to this child.

And yet this uniqueness is not an undifferentiated negative freedom as some have falsely imagined pure subjectivity. Although they each have their own stories, they are born into larger stories already underway. They are not the beginning, but a new start within something already begun. And so they belong to particular locations, particular people, particular communities, particular cultures. They will be raised to speak particular languages and hold particular beliefs. These may be open to revision and correction as all living traditions inevitably are, and yet they belong within a tradition nonetheless. Tradition is not a prison from which to escape, but the ground under our feet. We do not fly like the angels (who, being immortal, did not arrive in history midstream like we each do and so do not require tradition). We are human from humus (earth), Adam from adamah (ground). We require a given basis upon which to walk, both literally and metaphorically, even if we are also nomads whose journeys may not always be circular.

Consequently, raising a child within a tradition is not an evil imposition or a form of child molestation, as it has become fashionable to claim in some circles. It is a gift and a necessary provision. No child begins the human race again, but we all receive from those who have come before us. Similarly, no child can claim to end the human race, and so these children will themselves become the bearers of tradition to future generations.

” Tell it to your children, and let your children tell it to their children, and their children to the next generation.”

- Joel 1.3

See here for the second post and here for the third and final post in this series.
Images by Steve and Bill. All children pictured in this series are my nieces and nephews.

The Word became flesh: looking again at Jesus V

A sermon from John 1.1-14: Part V
2. LIGHT – shining in the darkness

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

- John 1.1-5.

The generously conversational God spoke the world into being. He is the source of all that is. Nothing can avoid being in relationship to him via his creative word. If you exist, if you’re alive, you’re already a recipient of his grace. Your very life and breath is a gift from outside. I didn’t ask to be born. I didn’t earn the right to start breathing. Every time the sun rises on a new day, all we can do is receive it with empty hands and thanks. Like the sun, the source of our life streams relentlessly into us from a source beyond us, a source we cannot control and can only accept.

Let’s listen to one artist’s thoughts on this theme. This is from a track called “You are the Sun” by Sara Groves.

You are the sun shining down on everyone
Light of the world giving light to everything I see
Beauty so brilliant I can hardly take it in
And everywhere you are is warmth and light

And I am the moon with no light of my own
Still you have made me to shine
And as I glow in this cold dark night
I know I can’t be a light unless I turn my face to you

Shine on me with your light
Without you I’m a cold dark stone
Shine on me, I have no light of my own
You are the sun, you are the sun, you are the sun
And I am the moon

Twelve points for the first to guess the Scottish location in the photo.
Series: I; II; III; IV; V; VI; VII; VIII; IX; X.

Luther on Lebensraum

We conclude, therefore, a Christian lives not in himself, but in Christ and in his neighbour. Otherwise he is not a Christian. He lives in Christ through faith, in his neighbour through love. By faith he is caught up beyond himself into God. By love he descends beneath himself into his neighbour. Yet he always remains in God and in his love.

- Martin Luther, The Freedom of a Christian

According to Luther, our problem is that we are curved in upon ourselves, trapped in self (incurvatus in se). Freedom is then to live not in myself, but in Christ and my neighbour. As a Christian, I am no longer the source of my own life, the provider of my own needs. I am delightfully dependent. My goals are no longer for myself, but for God and the common good. I can now live expansively, having been brought into the wide space of God's mercy: He also allured you out of distress into a broad place where there was no cramping (Job 36.16). Living in Christ and the neighbour: this is where we can find Lebensraum.
Eight points for picking the country.

Worse than death? II

Sin is worse than death

Our God is a God of salvation,
   and to GOD, the Lord, belongs escape from death.     - Psalm 68.20

Death will be the last enemy to be defeated at the general resurrection of the dead and the renewal of all things. Yet while it will be the last to go, it is not the Great Enemy, the Adversary. There are things worse than death.

There are things that diminish life, that corrode joy, that devour the heart, shrink the spirit, corrupt the good. Sin is worse than death. Death brings an end to the goodness that is life, but sin can take what is good in life and turn it sour. Death is a negation; sin is a negative. Death reduces to zero; sin puts it in the red. Now, of course, the picture is more complex than this, since what is good is not removed when it is corrupted, and evil is not simply the reverse scale of quality as good. Created things remain good, even while corrupted. Fallen humanity in particular is a complex thing, simultaneously both blessing and problem, both gift and cursed.

When our first parents disasterously declared their independence from God, claiming their own pre-emptive knowledge of good and evil, God's gracious response was to cut them off from the tree of life:

Then the LORD God said, “See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever”-- therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life.

The denial of everlasting life to the wayward husband and wife was to place a boundary on the spread of evil, to prevent it becoming forever woven into the fabric of the world. Death, the return of the dust to dust, was on the one hand the inevitable result of life that denies its own basis as the generous gift of God. Human death is a self-made self-annihilation, a suicidal turn from the source of life. But, on the other hand, it was also from the start useful as a curb on evil: a self-limiting curse.

Again, we must be careful here. Simply having boundaries, being embodied, temporal or dependent are not themselves problematic. Such finitude is part of the good gift of God. The finitude of death contains a darkness not found in being six feet tall or living in a world where snowmen melt. The tragedy is not change, not limit, but the disordering infection of rebellion, a will turned upon itself, an entity oriented to its own goals without reference to the whole or the head. This is the sad shock of sin: irrational, destructive, malignant - and ultimately self-destructive. Death is the result, but sin is the cause.

Sin is worse than death. Untrusting anxiety, apathetic lethargy, bitter regret, faithless betrayal: these are the real enemies of God and his people. These will blunt and bleed the soul, poison the spirit and stop the heart more surely and grievously than the cessation of brainwaves and breath.
Series: I, II, III, IV, V, VI.
Fifteen points for naming the novel in which the ill-treated heroine is finally captured at this ancient location.

The case for grace

After years of writing speculative theology, Augustine returned in later life to the causa gratiae,* the case for grace. He was convinced that humanity, despite our many achievements, could be most aptly compared to a little child before God: totally dependent. Why did he write so much about grace?

First and foremost because no subject gives me greater pleasure. For what ought to be more attractive to us sick men, than grace, grace by which we are healed; for us lazy men, than grace, grace by which we are stirred up; for us men longing to act, than grace, by which we are helped?

- Augustine, Epistle 186.7.39.

It is his insistence of the priority of divine grace that was Augustine's most significant legacy, particularly once a brilliant young Augustinian monk caught onto the idea...
*I include the Latin to show jm and MPJ that I am learning/can copy things out of books.