The Daily Disciplines
Everything we do is practice for the next time. When we cease to practice, we lose our fluency, and memory becomes imperfect. Some things are practiced by default- when did you last consciously practice eating? Other things require conscious effort. My handwriting is slow, laborious and has lost its fluency. I type without thinking.
When we took our young children back out to the desert where we had lived, they were profoundly uncomfortable with the open spaces. We noticed our son was happier and less fractious whenever we went walking in the enclosed space of mountain gorges. We become used to, and are affected by our environment. Years before, leaving the desert, my wife and I were depressed, dislocated and disoriented by urban life. A day out walking in the hills begins to resurrect memories and instincts which have been lost to our consciousness.
As urban westerners we live in a profoundly artificial environment. It is possible, even easy, to avoid the outside world for days at a time! Enter the garage by an inside door from the house, drive out using the automatic door opener, drive to the underground car park, and take the internal lift up to work. Leave before it is properly light, and return home after dark. We live in a world which we Australians especially, think we control. In truth, we are irradiated with uncontrolled advertising and other stimulation, rarely alone enough to be in silence, and uncomfortable if we are. We live in a noisy, crowded and driven world, which is the anathema of all that our spiritual ancestors learned is necessary for health. We have stepped out of reality into an artificial place.
The spiritual disciplines are designed to bring us back into the real world from our artificial place. They create time, silence and space for us to re-engage with the depths of life. They patrol the corridors of the mind, as someone has said, re-minding us of what is really important. Religion without practice becomes merely an idea, caught in the currents of the ideas round about, without the anchor of reality.
Corrupting Kingdom
Sunday July 27
More verses from Matthew 13
47 Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind; when it was full, they drew it ashore, sat down, and put the good into baskets but threw out the bad. So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Here we have a picture of the kingdom of heaven with lots of bad fish! It's like the previous week with the bad seeds. There is a strong message in these readings that suggests to me there is a point where it is no longer up to us to worry about some of the strange people who arrive in church. They are inevitable, caught in the net whether or not we want them.
He told them another parable:
33 The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.
This is an amazing story. The kingdom of heaven is like yeast! Yeast was a sign of corruption in this culture. In another place Jesus tells the disciples to beware of the yeast of the Pharisees. The kingdom of heaven corrupts? What's more, the kingdom of heaven is like a woman?! This can hardly have been less shocking to the first hearers. So the kingdom is like a tiny amount of yeast mixed in with the flour. Slowly it grows through the whole loaf until it is all leavened.
A colleague preached recently on the notion that one person's kingdom being another person's corruption. She talked about Rosa Parks, whose refusal to move to the back of the bus was one of the sparks of the Civil Rights movement. A great movement of the Kingdom began and is still happening. Yet many good people saw it as a corruption of what was ordained, and that it was was not something of God- and still feel this way!
44 The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.
In the early days of South Australia people found copper at Kapunda. They only had the land leasehold, and kept the discovery secret until they could buy the land.
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