Poetry for Lent

In my last post I mentioned, a little dismissively, that I had considered the possibility of writing 40 poems for Lent this year. It has become a little more than a possibility, and if you look at The Consolations of Writing you can track my progress or, as the case may prove to be, failure at this fairly ambitious project. I'm up to three now, with a few in the wings, so we'll see how it goes. I hope they can be helpful for thoughts/prayers/devotions during this season.

Lent #1: I'm Not Ready

"Every time I read that story again,

I want to run and take the nails out..."

(Mark Nicks, "I'm Not Ready")

I've been a bit slow on the uptake with Lent this year. Perhaps it's just that Easter is very early this year and so I haven't been prepared for Lent to begin in February. Perhaps it's that my church does not pay any attention to these things (we still observe Easter, but Lent and Advent aren't usually big focuses; Pentecost, unsurprisingly, comes and goes unnoticed). But I suspect my mind has also just been in other places. And it's for this very reason that I like to observe Lent: not because the observation of it in any way contributes to my salvation, but because I can't expect that, on Good Friday, I'll be in the right headspace to remember what Jesus has done for me. That'll never happen. We're rarely ready even when we prepare our hearts; it's just too monumental a thing for the human mind to grapple with. Lent, at the very least, gives us 40 days to get the process going.

I see Lent more as a time of reflection than of fasting. Anything I give up, I do so to give myself more space in my thinking. One year I decided to only listen to worship music and hymns for the whole forty days; I didn't want anything other than God's truth to fill my head. It was a wonderfully edifying time. Still, when Easter Sunday came, I felt cold and spiritually dry. Thank God that our emotional state doesn't count for anything in our salvation. But the fact is that the forty days I'd spent focusing on God had still borne fruit; it just hadn't given me emotional elation on Easter Sunday. But is that really the point?

Now, I'd had grand plans for what to do this Lent. I'd enjoyed writing my Advent reflections so much that I was determined to do the same thing for Lent. In fact, I decided that I would write a reflection each day - forty reflections in total. That's obviously not going to happen. Ash Wednesday has been and gone; now it's Saturday. I'd have to write four reflections today just to catch up. I'm not sure if my "40 Poems for Lent" project will be any more successful, but at least I've got a head start on that one: I've already written four poems that could go towards it. Again, it's not the point. My unreadiness, my spiritual flabbiness, my lack of discipline: all these things are reasons why Lent should be a wonderful time of hope and promise for me. The disciples fell asleep in the garden while Jesus sweated blood, their very name "disciples" being an irony that night; and yet still His blood was shed to cleanse them. I am the same. I'm not ready for Lent this year, but that doesn't matter. Lent - the time of remembering Jesus' great love and mercy - is most certainly ready for me.

The ALP and Absalom

So it's all over the Australian newspapers: we're set to have another Labor party leadership challenge, less than two years since the last one, and it's the reverse of the last one, this time with Kevin Rudd challenging Julia Gillard. And the whole thing seems very, very messy. One of my colleagues today expressed that she hasn't been able to look at the newspapers since it all started heating up, she finds it that frustrating. "It must be making us the laughing stock of the world," was how she summed up the situation.

Now, I'm not wanting to evaluate which of Gillard or Rudd was the better, or, as one infamous campaigner once put it, "the least worst", Prime Minister. It's not something I could possibly judge. But one thing does strike me - that, if you're going to challenge your leader, this isn't the way to do it.

This quote from Gillard particularly struck me when I read it paraphrased in The Age today:

Ms Gillard said that she did "everything" she could as deputy prime minister to try and get the Rudd government functional, but it became "manifest" to her that continuing with Mr Rudd as prime minister was not going to work. (Judith Ireland and Michelle Grattan, "Gillard throws down gauntlet", The Age Online, Thurs 23 February 2012)

Well, perhaps she means what she says. Perhaps she really did try. But why, I wonder, did it occur to her that she was the one to replace him? Did someone tap her on the shoulder and suggest to her the idea that would otherwise have been unthinkable, that she was the one for the big job? If so, how did she respond? "Oh, no, not me, don't dream of it..."? (The whole situation seems very reminiscent of Yes, Minister..."If one was asked, one might consider..." Or Mrs Elton in Emma: "I wouldn't call myself a potential prime minister, but my friends say...")

It makes me think of a story from a small kingdom in the ancient Middle East, where the second ever king of that kingdom, a man named David, was being challenged for the leadership of their fledgling nation, Israel, by his son, Absalom. That boy had been approached by the people; they had said to him, "This father of yours, he's treating us all very badly." And Absalom had stood at the gate of the palace and heard all their grievances, nodded, made sympathetic noises, said, "Oh dear, that is bad." And he'd done a very good job, fooling perhaps even himself into thinking that it would be for the good of the country if he were king instead - not because he wanted the job, of course, but because...well, someone had to do it, and the people seemed to want him...

Was he fooling himself? He no doubt believed it. But, in acting the way he did, he showed how unlike his father he really was, though not quite in the good way that he had thought. You see, his father reacted to the leadership challenge with quite an extraordinary attitude, one we rarely see in politicians at the best of times, least of all at the worst: he showed humility.

David had once been the popular young leader. At a time when the first king, Saul, had become a mad tyrant, David was the nation's hero. But he had never stood in a leadership challenge. When given multiple chances to stab his king in the back, he had chosen not even to stab him in the front. When the king had died, David had grieved.

And now, challenged by his own son, David remembered what he had known then: that God was the one who appointed kings, and if He wanted him to be king, then He would make it so. His job while Saul had been king was to submit to Saul's kingship, broken and tyrannical though it was. And now, perhaps this challenge to his leadership was not a threat he had to stand against but an indication that God no longer wanted him to be king.

You can read the whole story in 2 Samuel 13-18. It has also been brilliantly adapted into a parable about leadership by Gene Edwards in his Tale of Three Kings. The moral of the story, according to Edwards, is this: if your superior is a Saul, it is still not your place to overthrow him. Or, if you are a David and you are challenged by an Absalom, approach God with humility. Seek His protection, or accept His judgment. Either way, He is right.

And if you are an Absalom? Woe to you. You may become king, but being king by foul means is never, ever going to be satisfying.

So which, you may wonder, is Kevin Rudd in this parable? And which is Julia Gillard?

I cannot say. But I wish that they both knew that there never comes a time when stabbing in the back is appropriate. And the good of the nation should never be used as an excuse for our own petty power plays.

Perhaps one day 2 Samuel 13-18 will be taught in politics classes, but I doubt it. In the meantime, let it be a voice in the wilderness, showing how things should be done if people had their hearts and minds in the right place.

News: The Consolations of Writing

If you have not yet discovered my new blog, you may want to check out The Consolations of Writing, a site devoted to posting my writing and thoughts about writing. There has not been an enormous amount of activity there yet, but I'm expecting to use it much more in coming weeks, months and hopefully years. Have a look at it if you haven't done so already - and feel free to leave a comment so I know that you've been there!

Time For Us To Leave?

I rediscovered Larry Norman's music for some reason early last year. I don't remember what prompted me to listen to him, except perhaps the fact that I was trying to track down Geoff Moore's version of "UFO" and, failing to do so, settled for the original.

But I wasn't settling at all. Having grown up on a compilation of contemporary versions of Norman's songs - One Way, released by Forefront Records in 1995 - I had been fairly convinced that the originals would be too daggy for words. I was wrong. The years that had interceded had made the 90s pop schtick of most of the covers from "One Way" a little less than ideal for my ears, but I loved folk, and Larry Norman, I discovered, did too. I went from "UFO" to "Why Don't You Look Into Jesus?" and "Righteous Rocker #1" and "The Great American Novel". I didn't like everything I heard, but I liked most of it. Larry was sort of equal parts Bob Dylan and a more rebellious Keith Green. This was, to my mind, a very good thing.

There's only one problem with Larry: his theology of the end-times. Perhaps it was the way people thought in the 1960s - my parents suggest to me that it was - but there is a fairly pervasive sense, in many of his songs, that the end of the world is looming and that Jesus and the rapture are only seconds away. We know, of course, that this wasn't the case, but it's a little hard for a child of the 80s and 90s like myself to really get why he would have thought this way. Songs like "If the Bombs Fall" help, I think; Larry, like everyone else in his day, lived with the semi-regular threat of nuclear war and other similar catastrophes. Global politics seemed, to him and to others, to have gone mad. His most distinctly eschatological song, the famous "I Wish We'd All Been Ready", captures what Larry saw to be the mood of his day with its opening line:

Life was filled with guns and war

And everyone got trampled on the floor.

The song has remained something of an anthem for - generally American - dispensationalist thinking, the sort that made the Left Behind books such an immense success. This video set to Norman's song demonstrates this phenomenon quite well:

Now, I only recently realised that, having grown up in a moderate Brethren church in rural Australia, I was exposed to my fair share of dispensationalist thinking without realising. It shocked me to learn that, for many theologians, the concept of a literal rapture seems both spurious and unbiblical. I suspect that learning the lyrics to "I Wish We'd All Been Ready" and feeling deeply moved by it at a fairly young age also had quite a bit to do with this thinking. I'm not here to critique the theology of such an interpretation, partly because I'm still very early in my thinking about it and partly because I don't think this is the place to do so. Certainly N.T. Wright has done a pretty good job of at least laying the groundwork for a solid theological challenge to it, and I'm not going to try to regurgitate his ideas here.

But it does strike me that, much as I love Larry Norman's music, there's a line of thinking which goes very well with a rapture-oriented perspective, which is the mindset conveyed in the final line of an otherwise very subtle Norman song, "The Outlaw": "And I think we should get ready 'cause it's time for us to leave". What's wrong with this kind of thinking? I suspect it views the world primarily as something we should be seeking to escape from rather than working to redeem. It fails, in fact, to fully grasp what Jesus was praying for His disciples, and for the church, when He said:

"My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one." (John 17:15)

Now, this does not mean at all that Jesus wants us to stay in this fallen world permanently. There is a very real sense in which Jesus will deliver His followers from the pain of separation from Him. But will He snatch us out of this earth and take us to a celestial kingdom, or will He invade and transform the earth, making it what it was always intended to be? Interestingly, I have long believed the latter, but have still not quite grasped what that means for my thinking about the rapture. But I'm open to being challenged in it, and think it might be wise to begin with these questions posed by Wright in his article:

We might begin by asking, What view of the world is sustained, even legitimized, by the Left Behind ideology? How might it be confronted and subverted by genuinely biblical thinking? For a start, is not the Left Behind mentality in thrall to a dualistic view of reality that allows people to pollute God’s world on the grounds that it’s all going to be destroyed soon? Wouldn’t this be overturned if we recaptured Paul’s wholistic [sic] vision of God’s whole creation? (N.T. Wright, "Farewell to the Rapture")

What, I wonder, would be the implications of living like Jesus wanted us to stay here and invest in this place, painful as it is? What would it mean for us if we knew that our home here was being redeemed, not destroyed? I suspect we might start living a lot more like Jesus, because we would have to love this place just as much as He did. We might even have to start dying for it, instead of waiting for our ticket out.

Beatitude #3: Blessed are the meek

"Meek" is one of those wonderfully archaic words which seems only to be used in a Biblical context - much, I suppose, like "blessed". It comes, I understand, from an Old Norse word meaning something like "soft". A Google search of the word, however, is quite informative. Firstly you get the standard array of dictionary definitions and Wikipedia entries. But somewhere down the line your screen will display a website entitled "Blesse'd Are The Meek". Interested, you may click on the link, to find this page - the homepage for an Australian fashion label. Click on "About" and you will read their story, accompanied with fairly raunchy photos of their not-particularly-meek products, and the following opening line, in all its mock-Biblical splendour:

In the beginning, in Melbourne 2003AD a small gathering of obsessed fashion devotees embarked on a quest to create divine and coveted pieces with which to adorn themselves.

And so Bless’ed Are The Meek was born, and it was humbly decreed that they would strive together to push the boundaries of meekdom.

Have they, perhaps, pushed the boundaries a bit far? Have they, in fact, missed the point altogether?

Meekness is wonderfully misunderstood. Friedrich Nietzsche famously criticised this verse because of the "slave morality" it reflected. Others have parodied Matthew 5:5 or simply been fascinated or intrigued by it (Wikipedia boasts a formidable list of musicians, comedians, authors and the like who have referenced the third beatitude, ranging from Eddie Izzard to Frank Zappa to Gorky's Zygotic Mynci). But what exactly does it mean to be meek? Is it the same, as many understand, as being a wuss? It's fairly clear, I think, that it means nothing of the sort. But that isn't very helpful; neither, for that matter, is a quick, unscholarly survey of the Greek, which merely tells me that meek comes from the Greek word "praeis" which means...meek.

Though that isn't half as unhelpful as it seems at first. You see, in Matthew 5:5 Jesus is using the noun form of "meek", a word that should perhaps be rendered "the meek ones". Then, in Matthew 11:29, he uses the same word, as an adjective, to speak of himself:

Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle [praos = meek] and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.

So here we see something utterly wonderful: that Jesus calls us to be meek, because he himself is meek. He blesses the meek, declaring that they shall inherit the earth, and he leads the way. Meek to the death, he inherits all things as his reward (Philippians 2:9-11). And as for us - well, we are "co-heirs" with him, if we believe (Romans 8:17) - which isn't to say that we receive all that Jesus receives, but it does tell us that, in some manner which we cannot yet fully grasp, we will gain from that to which we have absolutely no right: His glorious inheritance.

So what then does it mean for us to be meek? Well, not to be wusses, that's for sure. Going to the Cross was just about the least wussy thing a human being could do - and that's exactly what Jesus did for us, much as it terrified him. But it was meek. If he had put himself on the pedestal that he deserved, he could have spat in Pilate's face, told Herod where to get off, shown the mocking soldiers who was really in charge. But he didn't.

If we want to know what meekness is, what humility is, let's start with Jesus: God in every way, yet humble; the creator of the universe letting His created subjects mock Him, torture Him, kill Him.

Is that the fruit of a "slave morality"? Look at meek Jesus, risen and exalted, then look at proud Friedrich Nietzsche, dead in despair. Tell me who was the slave.

Blessed are the meek,

for they will inherit the earth.

I don't understand half of what that means. I'm not even beginning to understand it. But I know where to begin it: Jesus, in the Garden of Gethsemane, on the Cross, and now in Heaven, meek but exalted, humble but acknowledged for who He is. And what a place that is to begin.