Who do you think you are? Who do you say I am? Two questions whose answers are always shifting - Unitarians in Ringwood gather again in May 2022

It’s such a different experience — being there, compared with being told about what it was like to be there.

Reading a blogpost about our gatherings, whether online or in person, is always likely to leave the impression that our gatherings are like lectures, webinars, study classes.  They are never like that.  In the subtlest ways, everyone in the room participates and changes what transpires, changing it into a woven, group activity.  And as our gatherings take place explicitly to allow a space for reverence to emerge, whether that reverence is in regard to a special circumstance of life, a personal deity, or, as most would probably suggest, the biggest mystery of all (life, in its fullest), the woven, group activity evokes what cannot be conveyed in a written report.

Our gathering on Zoom on 8 May 2022 included singing along to videos, silence for personal reflection, two readings from the Christian Bible, and a period for sharing joys and concerns in our minds at the time.  On Zoom, other rituals are more difficult to arrange, and we will be considering that as we move back to meeting in person, in July.  We have no intention of meeting in person merely to listen to someone’s words about somebody else’s written words that have been read out loud.  There has to be more to the act of gathering, than that.

This is representative - it's a gathering of Unitarians in the
 Ringwood Meeting House, but this is an old picture.

Nonetheless, you’re reading this because you want to know what theme was covered in our gathering, so here goes, as usual.

We opened with a recollection that, though it has to some extent worn off to people in the UK, in Ukraine there is no escaping the continuing shock of the invasion.  We lit our chalice candle while hearing words prompting us to keep watch with those suffering: 

'My soul is sorrowful, even unto death: stay awake and keep watch with me.' (Book of Mark, chapter 14 verse 34)

The first reading was from the Bible, book of Job, chapter 38, verses 4-21.  God confronts Job, saying, 

‘Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?

    Tell me, if you have understanding.’

We heard a second reading from the Bible, book of Mark, chapter 8 verses 27-30.  In this reading, the teacher Jesus is asking his followers who people think he is.  And Peter answered Jesus, ‘You are the Messiah.’

The president of the day reflected on the two readings.

“In our first reading we are given the fictional speech where God turns the tables on Job and all his wise friends.  Job has been asking the hard questions, and his various friends have trotted out the ‘right answers’; but none of it has been satisfying.  Finally, it is God who speaks.

“God unfurls the wonder of the cosmos and the passing of aeons, and in essence poses the question, ‘Just who do you think you are?!’  The wonder is not that Job does not know all the answers, or that he is left with so many questions.  The wonder is that anyone should ever have thought they knew it all !

“Whilst there is a nobility and vitality in wanting to know more and to understand better, it is foolishness and arrogance to think that any of us has ever got it all worked out.  That is not to say our insights, our thoughts, and our experiences are worthless.  It is not to say that there is no difference in value between one way of seeing and doing, and another.   But it is to say that there is always more to know, more to ask, more to do. 

“This confrontation, staged between God and Job and all the wise friends, is a call not to lose heart in the face of questions and doubts, and not to become rigid in our ideas, in our ways of doing and saying.  After all: who do we think we are?

“In our second reading we find a similar question posed.  The main protagonist of the Gospel of Mark is asking his friends and followers who the crowds think he is. They have a mix of answers: maybe John, the fiery preacher who was apparently recently executed.  Maybe Elijah, the returned ancient figure of power from the past. Or maybe, just one of the many insightful people who have something important to say.  There’s conspiracy theories in there, there’s fanaticism, and there’s perhaps more balanced respect and interest, too. 

“Then Jesus asks them who they themselves think he is. You can almost imagine an awkward pause. Would we have a ready made answer to this, if asked by someone important to us? 

“It is Peter who finally breaks the silence, by saying, “You are the Anointed One.” And that’s all the author of Mark has Peter say.  We’re not told what that means, or what that implies. We get that it marks Jesus out as special, but in what way?  Early readers of Mark would have immediately known that priests are anointed, prophets are anointed, kings are anointed, and, of course, the dead are anointed for burial too.  Mark doesn’t have Peter explain himself in his Gospel, and Mark doesn’t give us a narrator’s answer either.  The Jesus we read about in the book of Mark is said to be many things by the different people who meet him.  And, depending on their varying encounters with him, what they say of him and their actions towards him vary too. 

“Mark places Jesus into situations that were recognizable then and, with a bit of imagination, are recognizable now; but then has the man doing and saying the unexpected.  Mark is setting out a protagonist who is challenging to those around him as well as to us the readers: Jesus won’t let things be just as they are.

“If those crowding around Jesus want things to carry on unchanged, as they expected them to go, well then Jesus needs to go.  If, on the other hand, those following him want to keep hold of this figure who intrigues and inspires them, then it is other things that need to change or be jettisoned. 

“We know how this went.  Every character in Mark had to decide for themselves about this Jesus, and every reader of Mark has to as well.

“In a lot of ways, the book of Mark is a Unitarian Gospel. It challenges, and it asks the question, but it is left open to us to rise to it and to answer.  I offer you these two questions today — not as a test and not because I have the answers, but because the questions themselves are at the heart of our shared Unitarian practice.

“Firstly, who do you think you are?!  And secondly, when you think about the story Mark weaves around his strange protagonist Jesus, and the odd things Jesus does and says, who do you say he is?"

We finished with this blessing, based on Repose in The Sun Dances – Prayers and Blessings from the Gaelic, collected and translated by Alexander Carmichael.

Thou of Wonders

Shield us with might

Oh thou of natures laws and all its stars

Compass us this night

Body and soul

Compass us aright

Between earth and sky

Tonight 

Between the allness of thy mystery

And the blindness of our sight

Compass us this night

And every night

Oh thou of Wonders 

Compass us aright.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnlMktJTHTA

And you thought you knew the word 'Gospel'? — Think again. The Good News from Ringwood #Unitarians 3 May 2022

Gospel Tidings and Good News

In the ancient Greek city of Priene, in current day Turkey, the following inscription was found.  It was justifying the measuring of the years — a new calendar dating system — from the birth of its protagonist.  Its phrasing will, we are sure, be familiar to many.

“God, who has ordered all things and is deeply concerned with our lives, has arranged all things well by giving us the Holy One, filled with virtue that he might benefit humankind, sending him as saviour, both for us and for our descendants, that he might end war and put all things in order.  His revelation (excelling even what we hoped for), surpasses all who have done us good before, and all who will come hereafter. The divine birth of the Holy One was the beginning of the Gospel for the world that came about because of him.”

What won’t be quite so familiar is who, in fact, is being spoken of. 

Dating from 9 BCE, this inscription is referring to the Emperor Octavian, better known as Caesar Augustus, and the Good News, the ‘Gospel’, referred to is the ushering in of the Pax Romana. The Greek term evangelion, meaning “good news”, was at the time of the Roman Empire in common use to herald the good news of the arrival of a new kingdom.

Ending the civil war that had distracted Rome, Augustus reconquered and enlarged the territory of the Roman Empire, bringing peace and prosperity.  Good News, if you were one of the few whose way of life was enriched by more resources, more labourers, and more affirmation that you were better and deserved all this.  Good News, unless you were one of the millions killed, enslaved, or generally brutalised by an empire in which anyone not a Roman Citizen was regarded as only half human.  For those torn from their homelands, who had seen their identities and ways of life destroyed, swallowing the Gospel of the Pax Romana as definitively Good News may have been a bitter pill they were unable to take.

It would be another fifty or so years before a different kind of Good News was announced, in the same language and in the same familiar form to those listening — the Gospel of Jesus: same linguistic references, but utterly different and shocking as they heard it. 

The Gospel we are familiar with from about 50 CE didn’t fall out of the sky: it was awaited, longed for, needed; it was a response to the older, different Gospel, that different kind of Good News.  No matter how it has come to be viewed over the centuries, the Gospel we know wasn’t about putting forward new dogmas or novel religious teachings, to be bedded in on the layer of pre-existing society.  It was proposing a different Good News, a wholly new and different way of living together, a Gospel for the many not just the few.

Those first hearing the Good News of Jesus, as it is called in the written Gospel of Mark, would have got what was being said, as surely as if we today swapped out in our national anthem the name ‘Jesus’ for the title ‘Queen’.  They wouldn’t have been invested in going over any deeper meaning to the individual titles and claims. They would have known at once that this person was being set up as an alternative vision, a challenge. They would have seen the kingdom of Jesus set up as a challenge to the kingdom of their day.  Indeed, rather than merely swapping out one ruler for another, in this new Gospel the world order upheld by the powerful, wealthy, privileged, monarch against the backdrop of Rome was radically contrasted with one where the poor, the uneducated, the vulnerable are valued, and where good things are shared not hoarded. 

Well: a world where the few benefit from the labour of the many, and where the few enjoy the enriching of their lives on the back of the suffering of others, a world where cultural and personal identities are fragmented and disintegrated in the name of an economy that is advantageous mostly to those at the top, such a world is a world we recognise, more surely than we recognised the inscription we began with. 

We think this is important.  If we can liberate the Good News from the dogmatic terms and the bespoke religious ideas that specialists have bound it up in, then perhaps we can recognise too the various attempts at living differently, counter-culturally, from a profoundly unjust and uncaring world, a world we often find ourselves in, too. 

The Good News we share today is that ‘Gospel’ doesn’t require you to believe certain religious ideas or agree with special formulas or terms.  ‘Gospel’ is a challenge.

Which message do you consider ‘Good News’?  Are you with Augustus, or for Jesus?  Caesar, or Christ?  The choice is yours; and what that means in the concrete is all part of a social experiment that never seems to end.

Addressing power and joy on Palm Sunday 10th Apr 2022 - gathering of #Unitarians and friends associated with Ringwood

Our gathering on 10th April this year coincidentally fell on Palm Sunday for the western Church, which may not feature strongly in the landscape for many Unitarians, even among our group.  

But the president for the day had this to say: “We have been open that, in the past two years, some of us have become much more interested in the classical Unitarian heritage endowed to our denomination, and in the shared language of Bible stories.  But we maintain that these are to be considered inspirational, and the stuff of legend; myths underpinned by world views we may not adhere to.  We see Bible stories and biblical language as kinds of short-cut to forming an understanding in common, and not in any way a legalistic or definitive framework.”

We use stories in all sorts of ways in our gatherings.  At this April gathering, at the lighting of the candle in our chalice, instead of hearing a short maxim or proverb, or a dedication, we heard a folk tale:

An elderly grandfather says to his grandson: ‘There’s a fight going on inside me.  It’s a terrible fight between two wolves.  One is evil — greedy, fearful, arrogant, jealous, cowardly, deceitful, divisive, closed in on himself.  The other is good — humble, trusting, modest, generous, courageous, honest, peaceful, loving.  These two wolves are also fighting within you, and inside every other person too.’

After a moment, the boy asks, ‘Which wolf will win?’

The old man smiles.  ‘The one you feed.’

Regular readers of this blog will know that it is important to us to include wordless activities, which we can take part in together without nailing down what they mean to each of us privately.  And so it was with this gathering, which included a short period of personal reflection rounded off by the words, ‘This is what the Sacred asks of you; that you act justly, that you love tenderly, and that you walk humbly in its presence’ (Micah chp 6 verse 8).  We also included a longer period of silence for personal practice; perhaps meditation, prayer, contemplation, mindfulness, intercession.  And yes, still on Zoom this time, we included the by now familiar muted singing, of Unitarian hymns, for those who get benefit from the activity.

The readings were both taken from the Christian tradition.  The first was Jesus’ teaching regarding the need for leaders, for those in authority, to act and be as servants; as set out in ‘The Good Word of Jesus’ under the authorship of Mark, in the Bible.  The second was from a book by a Franciscan monk living and working today in the USA, namely Richard Rohr ("Things Hidden — Scripture as Spirituality”, Richard Rohr 2016, pub. SPCK).

The president for the day then gave quite a personal reflection, starting by saying how angry she has been for several years now, regarding the climate and biodiversity catastrophe threshold at which we stand, and the parlous state of democracy and world politics — at the very point when concerted, joint action is needed, if we are to undo the damage that humans have done.  The invasion of Ukraine was referenced, as was the outwash yet to be fully realised from the COVID19 pandemic, and the deliberate plans by the UK Government to drive away migrants, treating some migrants as more worthy than others.  She said the basis of her anger was misuse of power, and that anger is necessary to drive change, on occasion; but also that prolonged anger always comes with the risks of wearing a person down, of making them hard to live with, of risking their health and relationships close to home.

She said: “I am getting bored with my own anger.  I want to return to joy.  I recall a story from a church worker in among Salvadoran refugees in Honduras:

‘Every time the refugees in Honduras were displaced and had to build a new camp, they immediately formed three committees: a construction committee, an education committee, and the comité de alegría — “the committee of joy.” Celebration was as basic to the life of the refugees as was digging latrines and teaching their children to read.’  (Joyce Hollyday, published in 'Resources for Preaching and Worship: Year B' compiled by Hannah Ward and Jennifer Wild p20). 

As much as we need to fix the things that are wrong, we need to find and celebrate sources of joy.

“In the wider Western church, today they will be celebrating Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey, a story extolling a new sense of joy and power.  Not so much, in this church.  ‘But the thing about stories is that they are not just stories.  Few ideas have as much power to shape the world as our view of other people.  And we get and develop our view of other people through stories. It matters what stories we tell.’ (Rutger Bregman, in his book “Humankind — a hopeful history")  The Bible is a work of literature which is concerned with stories of a people trying to live together.  Though we may not personally share the worldview of the various authors of the Bible, surely a collection of books that has inspired for 2000 years or more has something to teach us?”

The reading from Richard Rohr had looked at dominative power, that is to say political power, and how hard it is for people in positions of power to stay honest and humble, no matter how honest they thought they were, as they secured their position.  Rohr’s view is that the more you focus on your positional power, your power to make change through external threat of some kind, the less you look inside yourself to see where real, kind, generous, gentle power lies, and how to access it interiorly.

And so the president said: “I find it a source of hope and joy that, from the beginning, the Bible teaches a different kind of power.  We may not imagine an interventionist God.  We may not imagine God at all.  We may prefer to think of good emerging in the world, rather than God breaking into the world.  Nonetheless, we do recognise the difficulties in living with other people, with getting appropriate political structures, in promoting the health of all.  The God of the Bible undercuts the sort of power that is coercive, the power that relies upon external threat.”

She went on to explain that the story we had heard from the book of Mark, and most other stories from the Bible, such as the story of Hannah, who unexpectedly becomes able to bear a child (the prophet Samuel), and the protection God offers to the Israelites as they escape the Egyptians by way of the reed sea of the Nile delta, are all stories about people on the edge, about people at the bottom being supported and elevated, most often at the cost of those already in power.  If it is read like this, the Bible is definitively and distinctively anti-establishment.  The Bible challenges those in power, and promises their overthrow in favour of a more inclusive agenda that also includes those from the margins.  In fact, the theme is that the more inclusive agenda can only be introduced by people driven to the margins by those in power, because marginalisation is the only way to experience the faults in the status quo.

She finished by saying: “So although my source of joy is not actually in this character Jesus riding into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, it may lie in the subversive message repeated in the stories attached to his name, reflecting the Bible culture  — it may lie in the words attributed to Jesus, words that "the last will be first and the first will be last, and that every mother's son is sent to ensure the life of the many."

This might be a dark spell in politics and behaviours both for society, and for the survival of humankind itself.  But there are things we can do to collaborate with good, to enable good to emerge in the world.

We can feed the right wolf !

We can read the right literature, and read it in the right way.

We can tell ourselves stories that inspire us to live better and to think differently of others.”