The beginning of the end of pessimism.
But first, this is going to hurt.
Alternate mornings. 07729056452
Lk21v1-2 We often say that we give out of our abundance. I agree with this principle of sustainability and joy, but Jesus words are a challenge. The Greek 'perisseuontos' translated as 'out of their abundance', 'out of their surplus', 'out of what is abounding'. Let us be careful, then. This is not the only way to give, this is not the only principle to reach for. There is such a thing as giving 'out of one's poverty'. This also is not a rule to fetishize, and we see countless examples of how this story has been used to guilt or shame the vulnerable. How do we give out of our abundance and poverty both, in the right ways? I am struck for the first time that this woman is a _widow_. In part this emphasises that she was poor, dependant on others for care, but it likely also means that she was freer than a married woman to make decisions about what little she had. The money she gave away was hers to give, and as such there was a greater freedom to give out of her poverty, for the consequences could be born fully by her, rather than also by spouse and children. So our recent conversations that it is harder to be spontaneously generous when married or as part of a household, as this sense that you are giving not just of yourself, but taking away from others. It is hard to give from the poverty of others - surely you can only give from your own poverty? We are praying for understanding on this at the moment, and any wisdom would be gratefully received. How do you give 'out of your poverty' as a collective? Can you? If you can, how do you do this well? Or should collectives give out of abundance and only individuals give out of poverty? If so, how do you conceptualise what is individually yours to give? How do you have these conversations well?
Lk21v3-4 "..all.."
➗ There is a reading of this passage that claims it illustrates a principle about relative giving:
- The rich gave a small % of their networth
- The widow gave a large % of her networth
~ Jesus commends the widow, therefore you should move the dial on your giving towards a larger, more uncomfortable and sacrifical % of your networth. True.
🏹 But. That considers the sacrifice in view as a mere percentile. Sacrificial giving is not novel to the world. Means-testing and Robinhood-Taxing and a no-pain-no-gain approach to wealth depolarisation and calibrated proportional redistribution, etc ~ the sense of this sort of sustainably moderated economy is popularly understood (if not not responded to) in the precarity of societies with high Gini coefficients and is reflected such perennial studies of giving by income bracket:
One article observes: "An inverse relationship is found between giving and income.." and this from the Guardian quotes from 1845 "Poor contributions, whether we consider the proportion which they bear to the whole wealth of the givers or their aggregate amount, are, in effect, beyond all comparison the most important."
Universally, sacrifice is honoured and privilege is scrutinised. Christians do not have a monopoly on this principle, and it is a thin reading of Jesus countercultural financial extremism.
💯 This morning I am unsettled by the "all" of her giving "all she had to live on.." We're no longer in the realm of proportionality, but of absolute abandon, she gave it all.
Two questions arise in my mind:
1. If I was going to give likewise, what would I give that money to?
😇 What is it to give to God?? The idea of giving to God is rendered absurd in such passages as Jb35v7 "..what do you give to Him, Or what does He receive from your hand?!" which Paul extends in Rm11v35 "Who has given to him that is might be paid back?!" Furthermore, the whole pious notion of "giving to God" is problematised as tending to hypocrisy in Mt15v5 "Whoever says to his father or mother, "Whatever I have that would help you has been given to God" he need not honour is father.."
🥧 If I was to make a pie chart of my money, all the out-goings and try to colour in what proportion of it is "given to God.." ~ there is the easily categorised pizza slice which is the standing order tithe to church, then, misc charitable giving and other gifts could be "to God", then, that which is invested into a generous commons but which I share the benefits of, then there is that spending which I would defend as robust stewardship ~ food received as a gift, art which is constitutive of worship, and leisure which is properly sabbatical. What slice of the pie remains as not-God? Purely private indulgence, wealth-as-hoarded-wealth, gambled waste, power play and personal empire building? Maybe. But what of all the ambiguous expenses in between? How do you give it all to God?
2. If I was going to give likewise, what would I then live on?
What did the widow then live on? It is not said.
2.1 You will live on God.
🦅 Others like Elijah, George Muller et al have happily subsisted by faith in God's provision through the charity of others and the carrion of ravens. And to some extent that is the emphasis here and in all encouragements to give: give, give sacrificially so it costs you something, give injuriously so that it leaves you properly dependent on God.
~ If giving contributes some fungible aid to statistical social needs it has some value - although that value is debatable ~ teach a man to fish etc, rice-Christians etc, complicity co-dependence etc..
~ If giving changes the giver, if it pricks human pride, if it populates the world with one more humble, joyful, God-dependent gardener of paradise.. that changes everything, that is the sort of catalytic and durable change that might actually stem the tide of anthropogenic climate change, amongst other things. Giving must change the giver.
So, I am trying to give in such a way that I am transformed toward a more God-dependent Phil. Give until I live on God.
2.2 You will live on church.
⛪ How to? How to common purse? Is it appropriate or even possible to pursue a much much higher view of a contemporary temple offering box? Ac4v32 suggests we can "give all" so to then exist on the basis of a pure commons, giving to God by laundering all money through God's people? Ac5's Ananias and Sapphira suggests the allness of a declared "all" is a deal-breaker. And, while it doesn't mandate total dis-ownership or independent stewardship, it does paint a picture of community that takes a great deal of shared stewardship for granted, of a kind which I cannot imagine in any instance of church I have so far experienced.
👛 How to? How to meanwhile, over and against the welfare state, and in light of historic monastic excess. How to start such a common purse from our present private and taboo enshrouded mode of being moneyed? What are the baby steps of a common purse? What design of social/church structure would make it more plausible and more sustainable to give in this extreme way?
💯💯 And then, having given to the temple the alleviation of need (Ac4v34) and the promotion of corporate effectiveness to be church .. how then can the church corporately "give all" as Paul commends the Macedonians in 2Co8v104 etc. I feel a long way from this sort of fractal sacrificial generosity in my experience of being-church.
Lk21v5-6 Buildings & 1Pt1v23-25 Flowers. We tend to separate things into inorganic and organic, thinking the former are not susceptible to the cyclic forces of nature in the same way as the latter, but this is an illusion of our perspective in time. In human time we should build buildings to last, but in geological time both buildings and flowers are perishable. We should see the life of flowers as a metaphor for all we labour for in the work of life and culture - beautiful and glorious and finite. This is not to advocate that we build things that are quickly ripped down on a human time scale (this is nothing like the organic life of a flower)...But we should also recognise that buildings are finite things taken up into the infinite, rather than themselves infinite. All finite life is taken up into the infinite through death and resurrection. Buildings (and all human work) have a cycle of death and resurrection, even where they endure for millennia. All that is good in this world will be taken into the new creation in some way, but in a way that is mysterious, a way that is resurrected and transformed, a way I don't think we can say much about. An eschatological eye is less an obsessive waiting for a particular moment and more a humble bow to the reality of death and resurrection as we see it in the world, surrendering to this as a picture of God's mysterious work at a cosmic level. We must submit to the patterns of 'the continuous and the discontinuous' as N.T. Wright puts it, for this is what resurrection must be. Seeds fall to the ground, flowers fade, temples crumble slowly...but the word of the Lord endures forever, and with it Love is the last word - seeds burst again into new bloom, the honest worker labours restoratively in the work of repair, rebuild and new build. We image the making of All Things New in our work as Christians, and we can only do this intelligibly where we acknowledge the forces of entropy first. I pray for this eschatological eye in all I labour for today.
Lk21v7-8 ❔❕ "Teacher, when will these things be .. what will be the sign..?!" History pictures the disciples stroking their beards pondering this cerebrally. The tone of their question is surely more WTF? Jesus' tone and content, properly understood, allows me only to be utterly alarmed or quite dismissive. If someone came to dinner here, and spoke as Jesus spoke about the world, he would be welcomed and cared for, but handled with a degree of that patronising pity preserved for the ambiguous category of liar-lunatics. I think of M, or M, or J, or T.. They are not Jesus by any means, and their language and motives are far from straightforward, but the exceptionality of these cases and my pathologisation-as-paranoia of their extreme sensitivities and left-field cultural criticism illustrates how very little room for contemporary apocalyptic there is in my life and in the imagination of the church at large.
🧖♂ The landscape of Christian rhetoric is muchly a doughy plateau of mild disinterested compassion for the fatalistically uncaused brokeness of a lost world just out of reach, and at the edge of that plateau there is a policed precipice, at the bottom of which are discretely no-platformed persona non grata, cult leaders, holy fools, prophets, conspiracy theorists, Westboro Baptist, poets, exorcists, artists, autistics, communists, charismatics, paranoia and loud voices in general. When it is said of 41 that we are bourgeious, it is in part because we do not sound like Jesus in such passages as this.
🏺 The world's brokenness is not static. It is not the shards of Adam's ming vase, dusty tragic pieces of a one-time fall, now analysed in a steady state.
🌋🌪🌊 The world's brokenness is a writhing tumult of perpetually escalating conflict. Human selfishness alone would be a powder keg of dominoes rolling a snowball down a valley towards a hydro-dam above a nuclear power plant. The precarious and exponential build up of injustice, rebalanced only moments before escalation by revolution and bloody counter revolution. Beyond mere selfishness, the world contains active and dynamic personal evil fixed on a non-linear trajectory calculated towards a cosmic clusterfuck day of reckoning. The fall of Jerusalem is always about to happen. And meanwhile, churches debate their fairtrade coffee and the government rolls back its green commitments. There has to be an uncensored untabooed serious stern cautionary language, pessimistic in proportion to the impending apocalypse that rightly triggers urgent action. Would that I could without cowardice, self-consciousness or pride.
Lk21v9-10 Nation against Nation, Kingdom against Kingdom, Me against You. So it is and will be, for a season. Do not be frightened, says Jesus. Stand firm, says Jesus. May we find the right place to stand, the right posture, may we be ruled in the end by Love and not Fear.
Lk21v11-12 "..earthquakes, famines, pestilences.."
🏛⚠ There will be a state of national emergency.
↪ But. ".. before all this they will lay hands on you.."
👂 When the going gets tough.. and before that. If you put your ear to the ground you can hear the sound of hooves, the roll of tanks, the barbarians at the gates, the steady crescendo of overwhelming force. 300 or Dunkirk
Life is a dance with telos, an eschatological anticipation, a negotiation with the end game. We know what is coming. We know that modernity is built on borrowed time.
When civilisation is threatened, when the end of the runway is in view, when bankruptcy looms, the preemptive blame game of the middle managers begins. The predicament is the fault of immigrants, bankers, boomers, the aristocracy, gypsies, Jews, liberals.. Christians.
Christians are perfect scapegoats, excellent human shields, likely candidates for cannon fodder sent first to the wood chipper. Christians, with their uncompetitive lazy grace, promiscuous antinationalistic abandon, uncomfortable truth-telling..
Christianity is played to the pain, physical pain, relational pain, financial pain, political pain.. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of church. If the church is in decline, reseed it. ~ Embrace the blame in Jesus name.
v13 "This will be your opportunity to bear witness.."
"This"
Perhaps what we need is more of this.
Lk21v13-14 Defence. Defending yourself. Thinking a lot about if and how one defends oneself. Jesus here seems to suggest that we shouldn't invest a lot of energy behind the scenes working out the perfect defence, fantasizing or planning the perfect combination of superior tone, wit and argument that sures up one's defence. Rather, we are to arm ourselves with the eph6v10-18 armour of God. We are to invest energy in our defence, our resistance, our resilience to all that comes against us, not by practicing speeches in the mirror, but by clothing ourselves daily with gifts from heaven: the love of truth, the daily practical habit of righteousness, a readiness to speak beyond one's comfort zone or current mood, ever-returning to God in faith, belief that I myself am not excluded from God's saving work, even now, and immersion in scripture & honest ongoing prayer. These are your defences, you need no more.
Lk21v15-16 🧠 "..not to meditate beforehand .. for I will give you a mouth and wisdom.." We've been thinking about 'creativity' definitions and applications in the prep for the Big Weekend [8-10th March - come all!]
When we read Lk12v11-12's "..do not be anxious about what you should say.." I'd mused that apologetics must be prophetic. That is, as opposed to by-rote or by-formula, there is something in contending apologetically that must be creative in order to be prophetic? What is the prophetic? The novel, the unseen? Where does it come from and how does it come? How do you hear?
🚰 Creativity has an aspect of being in a state of flow - channeling preconceptual understanding with a purity of connection to the unfiltered world-as-it-actually-it unafraid.
⚗ Creativity involves a certain alchemy - a more-than-the-sum-of-its-part, a unexpected outcome, an abundance. Creativity is predicated on abundance and it generates abundance.
🎁 Creativity is a gift ~ and not as some gross downpayment dolloped, but as a goose laying golden eggs. It is a perpetual potential, which is given in the moment of a performance. At the moment that risk is mitigated by formula, the electricity of creativity is evaporated. Creativity is a gift of "mouth" and of "wisdom" ~ Jesus gives us the what and the how, the means and the ends, the medium and the message. Creativity is a gift given and a gift to give.
👨👩👦👦 "delivered up by parents, brothers, relatives.." We are family?
Lk12v53 "They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.."
Lk14v26 "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters .. cannot be my disciple.."
Lk18v29 "..there is no one who has left .. wife, brothers, parents or children, for the sake of the kingdom of God, who will not receive more.."
Luke is on a campaign to caution Christians against family. Why?
- Partly idolatry of family was acute in that eastern ancient culture in a way that it is less so today under western individualism.
- Partly the power of family allegiance, and the way it muddles personal identity formation, financial and physical security, socialised notions of duty, honour, virtue, and the way generationality embeds fears about mortality and shame into a suprahuman entity .. these are universal, and will always contend against proper gospel freedom.
- Partly, family love, for being a high good is a preeminent candidate for distortion, and when distorted it is especially effective at unravelling a person who would be an effective disciple, missionary, minister, witness to the world, and indeed to their own very family.
How shall we then?
Lk21v17-18 Everyone will hate you. To everyone else, you will seem worthless and contemptible. It's possible for those of us prone to self-contempt to wallow in this verse in the wrong way, perhaps. There's a way of wallowing but also denying this idea that go hand in hand. Not everyone hates you. But what if they did and that were bearable? (To wallow in it is to deny that it can be borne). What would it be like to be able to bear the contempt of others? Not as I do at the moment, by absorbing it and then allowing it to resurface in pain and anger later. But what if it were possible to not absorb the contempt of others at all, such that not one hair on my head would perish as a result of the toxicity of any environment I find myself in? What of this was what 'standing firm' looks like? Standing firm in Christ, becoming like the Christ such that I less absorbed the world into myself and more was an agent of transformation, being a site for absorbing the world into God. Come Lord Jesus.
Lk21v19-20
"Stand firm, and you will win life." NIV
"By your endurance you will gain your lives." ESV
"In your patience possess ye your souls." KJV
By your endurance you will endure. Tautological much?
- patient endurance is the premise and symptom of salvation
- patient endurance is the proof-of and the participation-in salvation
- patient endurance is the sign and the substance of salvation
Like, true love waits.
Patient endurance is the third way that is not over-realised eschatology, nor under-realised. This is not delayed gratification, per se, it is gratification of/in/through delay. Our being within time that would otherwise be momentary, an uncaused, uncausing flash in the pan, is made weighty. We are given a currency of tokenised immortality, that is never spent but can always be used - a true utility token, which appreciates in value to the degree that you appreciate its value. Heaven's eternity and God's infinity is accessed within our temporal finity as perfect assurance, deathless derring-do and the rich freedom of perfect creative abandon.
Christians, by patience, are creative. Christians, by perfect patience are the creativist ones.
Thusly, as Ruskin, when we build let us think that we build forever.
Lk21v21-22 Flight from the city. We've said we will and we must.
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