The Last Supper

Two thousand years ago a man sat down with his friends and ate a meal.It could be argued that no meal has echoed down the centuries quite like this one. That meal is the Last Supper and this moment is remembered by churches around the world by eating bread and wine in memory of the man who first did it, Jesus.

If you haven’t read the account of the Last Supper before, or would like a refresher, then you might like to turn to the gospel of Mark in the New Testament and have a read of chapter 14 verses 12 to 26.Theories about the Last Supper, and how we should practice our remembrance of it in the church today, are widespread and numerous. It seems there are as many opinions as there are grains of sand on the seashore! But perhaps there is more to draw from the accounts of the last supper than a simple set of rules of how we should or shouldn’t conduct our church services.

Picture the scene: The tension is rising in this group of 12 friends. Their leader, friend and spiritual teacher Jesus has been confronted by the authorities many times.They are aware that Jerusalem is not a safe place for him to be yet he insists on going there to celebrate the Passover, an important festival in the Jewish calendar (see Exodus 12 for its origins).Two of the disciples head into the city early to prepare a space for the celebratory meal, the others follow.The meal starts off well. They sit back in their chairs, enjoy each others company and then suddenly the man who called this motley crew together changes the atmosphere. “One of you will betray me,” he says.

The reaction of these friends and disciples of Jesus is fascinating. They immediately ask the question ‘Is it me?’ I think this, and Jesus’ response, says something big about us and God.
The disciples loved Jesus, they had given up their homes and livelihoods to follow him and yet they still thought to themselves and said out loud, “Could it be me that betrays him?” I think we universally know this potential in ourselves.Words slip out of our mouths that we wish hadn’t. We make wrong choices out of anger, sadness and disappointment. We wish we could take things back, daily sometimes.

But what is really interesting is Jesus’ response to this rag tag bunch, none of whom is confident that they are not his betrayer.He picks up a loaf of bread and says ‘Take it, this is my body,” and a cup of wine saying “This is my blood which is poured out for many.”
Jesus sees their inability to be what even they want to be, to even know if it is they who would betray the one they love.Later that evening he tells them they will be scattered like sheep when he is taken from them, a prediction that comes true alarmingly quickly after this cosy meal among friends.And to Peter, one of his closest friends he says, “Tonight, you yourself will deny me three times.”

It is with this full knowledge that Jesus performs these powerful symbols of what is to come, his death within days on the cross–An act to unite people ever falling short with God who desires to give them a fresh start as many times as they need it. This offering of bread and wine at the last supper is the gospel in a moment. In this act Jesus says, I know you fail, that you can’t even be sure of yourself, but here is the solution: “Take, eat – it is given for you.”

Sometimes Christian life can feel like you are ever striving. Striving for a perfection that even you know you cannot reach.This story shows us that God knows full well our struggles and our inabilities. It is into this reality that he offers himself, going to die knowing that the closest people to him will run from him at the time he needs them most.

And to this he says, I have the answer. The answer is me.

This post originally appeared on the Underground Blog in 2010. I recently rediscovered it and now that the Underground has closed down it seemed like a good idea to give it a new, permanent home. Thanks for reading.

Connections

We human beings love to categorize. It is part of how we make sense of the world and our place within it. But in recent weeks, and in as I dwell on the Christmas story this Advent, I have been thinking more and more about connections not categories.

At college I am currently studying Sociology of Religion. There the world is placed firmly into the category of the social. The behaviour and beliefs of religions are assessed on the basis of their social role. Of course there is much to be gained from this approach but it often places the individual into the social system as an unautonomous being who is simply moulded and changed by the social world around them. The connections between sociology, psychology, biology and belief are severed and this produces a flatter view of the world than it really is.

On Guardian Science today research was presented on the 'wiring' of male and female brains. The article presented sex differences as if they were a fait accompli. We are born with these wirings, that determines what it is to be a man or a woman and we just have to get on with it. The reality is, of course, much more complicated than this. Our genes limit what we can become but the expression of those genes, the development of our biology – even the functioning of our brains, is also determined by our environment. We create men and women on the basis of our cultural norms. We are not just biological, or social, or psychological, we are connections.

Our behaviour is full of connections. We are like walking self fulfilling prophecies. Psychological research shows that if you believe you will have a bad day, your behaviour shifts, you attract fewer positive responses from others (because we are, of course, social animals as well as individuals) and your perception of 'having a bad day' is reinforced. So much of our daily experience is shaped by our assumptions about it. Our behaviour is full of connections.

And in our typical way of categorizing we have done this no more so than in ideas about the 'spiritual'. We have sacred and we have secular. This is a very 'Western' thing. In many cultures there is no such divide. The spiritual is not the thing that goes boo in the night or which gives you a warm glowy feeling it, it is the wind blowing through your hair and a bird perched on a tree branch. That we separate the world so categorically breaks us off from so much of the reality of God and from the depth of our own lives. If God is only to be found in the 'spiritual' then will I miss him when a baby clutches my finger or when my Mum gives me a hug? Will I seek God out in the 'spiritual things I do' rather than in the way I have a conversation with my family over dinner?

The wonder of the Christmas story for me is that it smashes open these box and lays bare all the connections. God in a tiny baby. Divinity in the dust. Nothing about our humanity, our every day here and now, is untouchable. It is validated and made whole. Our assumptions are turned upside down, our categories broken down. It tells us to open our eyes wider, to see our every day as sacred. To stand whole and to celebrate those connections.

Present Moment, Perfect Moment

I've just started reading a book by Thich Nhat Hanh called Peace in Every Step. I'm always very interested in anything people like Thich Nhat Hanh have to say. He is both a deeply spiritual man abounding in peace and joy but also deeply involved in the daily sturggle of his people against poverty and war. Peace isn't an abstract concept or a nice warm feeling when your village is being stormed by rebels. Anything that comes out of that scenario has a depth and a reality to it that makes it worth hearing.

In Christian teaching Jesus stresses that the only thing we can really change is ourselves. Why go round trying to change others when you haven't even dealt with youself? If we want peace then we must be peace. War originates in the hearts and minds of people like us. If we hate then we contribute to the human created disasters we see, and are devastated over, on the news. We, by getting our own house in order, can contribute to a better, fairer world. Well, that's what I think anyway.

That's why I take this stuff seriously and see time investing in my own sanity and well being as important. I usually spend Monday mornings this way if I can, setting myself up for the week and setting intentions for how I want to tackle the week ahead. Today, after reading Peace in Every Step, I was reminded of the importance of being in the present monent. This is another thing that resonates with what Jesus taught, why worry about tomorrow when you cannot extend you life by even a single hour? All we really have is now. The past is gone, the future isn't here yet. So I spent half an hour just breathing and being where I am - in my house, in my pyjamas, on a slightly grey autumn day.

When I was travelling I was always in the present moment, there was so much to absorb, where else would you be? I tasted everything with the enthusiasm of someone who knew this might be my one and only chance to walk round a market in Madrid or eat gelato in Florence. I was deeply, deeply happy. But back at home it can feel like that is all slipping away and the days become so mundane again. But perhaps that is because we aren't really seeing them, too busy caught up in our thoughts and worries and so life just passes us by.

I loves taking photos on holiday, it made me see the detail in everything I was looking at and savour it. So this morning I walked around my ordinary place and took some snaps.

Snaps of ordinary things like the flowers in the corner of the room...

 

 

And the carpet beneath my bare feet...



The chilli that finally went red....

 

 

Piles of colourful felt....



A bathroom companion...

 

 

Crumpled bed sheets....

 

The things I love about home...



 

 

Where I 'make use of my time'....(and clearly don't dust much!!)

 

Present moment, perfect moment.

 

Don't Judge a Book by its Dodgy Pamphlet

When I first read any of the New Testament gospels it was from a dodgy looking pamphlet that one of my well meaning, but rather irritating, Christian friends had left lying around my house in an effort to convert me. God bless them, it was a noble effort, but it really wasn't getting anywhere. I ignored the pamphlet of Matthew's gospel for a good six months until a series of events sparked by a rather eventful pub outing lead to me picking it up from its dusty corner of my student apartment and giving it a look.



Needless to say I wasn't reading it in Greek back then!

I immediately had to rip the covers off, far too embarrassed to be reading anything that looked that naff (really, Christian publishers, enough with the dewy eyed lambs already!) and swallow my nagging feelings of annoyance at somehow vindicating my friend for having left it there. I didn't own a Bible except an illustrated childrens one I had been given at Primary School and hadn't even considered cracking that open since it was handed to me age nine.

My reaction, then, to this sad looking pamphlet took me rather by surprise. It actually contained some quite good stuff. It was the teaching that grabbed me first.

‘Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? ….So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.' (from Matthew 6)

Good stuff eh? I started to catch a voice in there, of someone really quite interested with a depth and wisdom that I knew I was very much seeking in my own life. As I read more and, horror of horrors, went into a shop and, very red faced, purchased a Bible I heard more and more of this voice, in the different gospels, in the Jewish prophets, all through the book. It was pretty exciting.

It is a strange thing as an adult to come to some of the stories of the Bible in a church that is so familiar with them they sometimes can't even hear them any more. This was the case none more so that the crucifixion stories. I merrily plodded my way through the gospels, drinking in the teaching and laughing (yes, the gospels are actually intentionally funny some times!) at some of the wry remarks of Jesus. I really started to like this guy. He was wise, sure, but kind too. This voice emanating from the page was so very kind. But not in soft, lamb hugging, kind of way. He had a razor sharp tongue and no issue putting people in their place if need be. But he was good, the best really, and like no one I had read about before.

Like a kid watching Narnia and not really getting the whole 'Aslan comes back to life thing' I got to the crucifixion scenes and they knocked me sideways. Sure I knew the story but the narratives are brutal and by now this guy had found a place quite firmly in my heart. I cried a bucket load for someone I didn't even know. I still do in fact, even now when I come back to them for study or in a service, I want to run in like Lucy in Narnia and wrap my arms around him and it make it all ok.

Something in the story sums up so much loss to me. The cruelty of humanity to humanity. How we tear down and destroy even what is good and beautiful. How we are filled with this anger somehow, this alienation and we act it out in such violence and turmoil. And then the loss, the terrible grief that comes with being human. The disciples run away and the women, including Jesus' mother, watch on as he is taken away and beaten and killed. That deep seated horror at the finality of life is summed up in that story for me somehow. That moment when everything is lost.

And then of course comes the resurrection. That great stumbling block that scholars are still arguing about in universities today. I've written my reasons for taking something that seems so utterly fanciful seriously before. But needless to say here there comes up the other part of these stories that has captivated me so very much. They are sown through and sprinkled with hope. At the end of Matthew's gospel I felt like I had been on an epic journey. Met this wonderful new person, learned amazing new things and then horror upon horror lost him in the cruellest way only to find him back again and saying these wonderful words,

'And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age'.

What a story, what a book.

We are Water

Water is the stuff of life, all life on earth depends on it. We are used to seeing the earth as land surrounded by sea but in ancient thinking, not knowing what lay beyond the ocean, the sea was the dominant, most imposing feature of the earth. It was a powerful entity onto which the land simply clung.

The Bible has a lot to say about water too. Interestingly it links it to the early days on earth when we know, from biological research, that the earth was something of a 'soup of life'. Cells formed and developed to form the building blocks of everything we see on earth today.

As well as the source of early physical life water is seen as the source of spiritual life. The spiritual searcher is like a deer who pants for water. If you have ever been truly thirsty and unable to access water then you will know what this means.

 

In my own spiritual searching images of water have featured prominently. One of the first quotes I wrote down when I first started to ponder such things was from an ancient Japanese poem. It reads,

 

'My heart thinking "how beautiful he is" is like a swift river.
Though one dams it and dams it,
it will still break through.'

Water is the spring of life and is the description used of Jesus in the Christian tradition and notably the Gospel of John. Jesus is the spring, bubbling up to life abundant. In baptism, the start of the Christian life, water makes new just as it gave life in the beginning.

One of my favourite programmes of late is the American series Nashville and I particularly love this song 'We are water'.

It reminds me so much of the journey we are all on. Constantly moving over new terrain, constantly on the move, always searching but ultimately heading back to the sea. As Zora Neale Hurston writes,

'Don't you realize that the sea is the home of the water? All the water is off on a journey unless it's in the sea, and it's homesick, and bound to make its way home someday.'

Thank you for stopping by!
 

Wonder

I'm a bit in love with Emeli Sande's song, Wonder. It's a real 'whirl around the kitchen and hope they neighbours aren't watching' tune and when I hear it I wish more than anything that we could have this kind of music in church. So I decided to play it when I led worship last week. What can I say, I'm a maverick!

The theme of wonder is very dear to my heart. Before I began training for ordination I spent some time organizing a science festival. We spent a whole lot of time talking about wonder. How to get the kids to really see, to really experience the world around them and fall in love with it, even a little bit. It seems to me that we all need to do a bit of that.

I'm a scientist by training. I don't have any qualms with evolution. I think it's quite beautiful. But I also see the hand of God in everything on this earth, in evolution itself. Every flower, every field, every mountain, most especially, every human face. I'm lucky to have some exceptionally gifted photographer friends and this video contains of some of their most beautiful photos that evoked pure wonder in me.

 

Doesn't in make you want to grab a camera, get out there and get snapping?
 

As well as belting out brilliant new tunes I also happened to be part of a team putting together a service based around creation this week and I wrote this prayer for it. So I finish with that - celebrating a God who makes bumble bees, roses, oak trees. And you and me.

Lord of all creation, 
who gathered the seas together
and raised the mountains by a single word.
Draw us together by your Holy Spirit,
by whose wisdom the foundations of the earth were set in place,
to worship you in wonder and awe,
through Jesus Christ,
the first born of the new creation.
Amen

Love

 

There is something that surprises me and that is how little a fuss we make about love. Perhaps that sounds a bit weird. People certainly make a big enough fuss at their wedding. Valentines day harangues us all with its foil heart balloons and over priced roses. But I'm talking about a different kind of love. Not the flash in the pan, 'here today gone tomorrow' kind of love. I'm talking about the sacrificial kind, the devoted kind. The kind that week in week out hangs out another's socks on the washing line. The kind that loves till the last. That thinks of another before itself. The kind that wonderfully, unexpectedly, sees the true worth in another and throws its life down in response.

I'm talking about the sheer wonder that human beings commit themselves willingly for life to other human beings. That's the part of weddings that get me going. When you hear that mad set of promises they are making, seeing partners throughout the congregation look sheepishly at each other for the loving they haven't done, and yet we continue to make these outlandish promises for no other reason than because they just think the other person is absolutely wonderful and we want so badly to do it. I think that is wonderful.

I think love is an overlooked gift, that it is God's greatest gift.

My wedding was four and a half years ago now. My husband is my great love, but not the only love in my life. I make a big fuss in my heart for my friends, new and old, and my family whom I love, love, love. But the song we played at our wedding always reminds me of how wonderful, unexpected and joyous this great capacity to love and be loved is.

Here it is:

 

 

In Group, Out Group

I blogged a little while ago on Nicola Writes about a course I had taken in Conflict Resolution. This was mostly in an effort to not go crazy within my first couple of years as a church minister by showdowns over the coffee rota or end up in a 'secateurs at dawn' scenario with the flower ladies (God bless you church, I love you all but you know it's true!) But little did I know that this week of thinking about Conflict would literally blow my mind and world view right open.

In many ways I think these kind of ideas were floating about my head anyway. How can they not be when you are part of a church that has as many factions as there are days in the year? We all know it's a naff example to be setting to the world but we can't help ourselves. I'm in, you're out. It's the story of the centuries, of humanity itself and definitely of the church.

The week on conflict taught me that, in some ways, this is all quite natural. We are categorizing creatures. When we see something, including another human being, we want to make sense of it, put it in safely in a box with a recognizable label on it so we know what to do with that person and how to take them. But the problem is these labels are artificial and limiting for the person we stick them on and mind shrinking for ourselves. All the many possibilities that person presents to us are shut down. They are categorized. We have nothing to learn from them. How divisive. How dull!

Jesus was no stranger to in group/out group dynamics. Sometimes I think we can look back on his day with rosy specs on and think he had it so much easier than we do in our multi-faith, media laden culture where opinions are as ubiquitous as air. But I just don't think that's true. About forty years after Jesus died Jerusalem was tragically ransacked by the Romans because of the level of internal revolt. When Jesus was alive there were no shortage of parties pushing one agenda and others the exact opposite. There was the elite temple leaders and a whole bunch of people who thought they shouldn't be there. There were the Samaritans who thought they worshipped the same God as they did in Jerusalem but man, oh man, down at the Temple they did not agree.

And Jesus had his fair share of heated debates. He was hardly a head in the sand man, those kind of people don't tend to get executed. But he was resolute when it came to mixing with all kinds of people. Of resisting pigeon holing. He hung out with women, with Samaritans, with Romans, with temple workers, with revolutionaries and this mantle was taken on after his death by the Apostle Paul whose letters we have so many of in the New Testament. Paul says 'there is neither Jew nor Greek, Slave nor Free, Male or Female'. So basically whteher your British or African, work in Tesco or at Canary Wharf, a man or a woman, we are equally valuable in the eyes of God and God wants us to try and see each other as he does.

This doesn't mean sacking off your opinions or compromising what you believe. It just means looking to the other and hearing what they have to say before you put them into that box. It means avoiding like hell that desire to ridicule, to stereotype and assume. It means looking for shared values with others, seeking relationship, respecting their right to a voice as much as you respect your own. It means being a peacemaker. It is pretty hard work. I too am a natural pigeon holer. But it also blows your mind right open to new possibilities, new views, new ways of seeing things.

Expectations

What are your expectations this year? Have you made some resolutions? Vowed to stay off the cakes and get on the celery? To sort the paperwork mountain that has been threatening to overwhelm you since June? To finally run that marathon you promised to sign up for in 2008? All noble goals indeed but as we stare down another year, no doubt packed with busyness and demands from all angles, it seems like a good time to ask God about his agenda for us this year.

This week we celebrate the story of the Magi, or wise men, who came to visit Jesus on his birth. I wonder what they thought as they approached the place where this new King lay. What were there expectations as they clutched their gifts? Did what they found surprise them? God's upside down agenda: God made man, vulnerable as a new born, born into poverty, friend to the outcast, suffering servant.

And so I finish with this poem by Elizabeth Jennings and the hint at the possibility that God might just show up where, and in the way, we least expect him to this year.

Words for the Magi

'Shall I bring you wisdom, shall I bring you power?'
The first great stranger said to the child.
Then he noticed something he'd never felt before -
A wish in himself to be innocent and mild.

'Shall I bring you glory, shall I bring you peace?'
The second stranger said when he saw
The star shine down on entire helplessness.
The gift that he offered was his sense of awe.

'Shall I show you riches' the third one began
Then stopped in terror because he has seen
A God grown up and a tired tempted man.
'Suffering's my gift' he said
'That is what I mean.'

This reflection was first given on Friday 4th January as part of Morning Prayer at Ripon College Cuddesdon.