God-Soaked Life - Chris Webb (2018)

hi welcome everybody thanks for coming in on this obvious sunny day it's it'll be worth the exchange of an hour sunshine I promise my name's Elizabeth Foy I am the head of adult learning here and it's my it's my joy and my privilege to organize this program and particularly delighted today to welcome Chris who I met through his publisher holder who ran the corn have a beautiful roof garden on their fantastic office building I have to say and he was doing something to talk to us about this lovely book and we sang a song over the city I was just talking about it's changed my sense of how we are how we are as Christians in the city where where our own story is not enough of history and it was a it was a marvelous moment for me and I'm really delighted he's come to talk about this really marvelous book which I recommend to you with all my heart it's called God so blind and if you by the way Chris is as you see a Benedictine in a community which must stretch across from America to here he's deputy warden of you know well good afternoon guys thank you very much Elizabeth has taken a great leap of faith already in saying that here we are sitting indoors on a beautiful sunny afternoon but assuring you that it will be absolutely worth it I think that's an evaluation you should be allowed to make in about an hour's time but I'm still very grateful so I want to begin with some good news if I may which is this that it is time it is time and the kingdom of God is near it is at hand it is among us and so my friends I would invite you to turn your lives around then orient them in that direction and believe what I truly think is good news I think you've only recognized there's a little paraphrase there Jesus quoting from the beginning of Mark's Gospel all sort of paraphrasing from the beginning of Mark's Gospel it's not every day at least for me it's not every day that you get asked to speak in some Paul's Cathedral you want to say something good you want to say something this worthwhile I had a good thing and I thought well you know Jesus has done well over the last couple of thousand years I'll just steal some good material but that was where Jesus began his preaching and it was the theme of his message pretty much all the way through its time look the kingdom of God is right among you so why don't you turn yourself around believe this good news I don't ever think with you a little about what that might mean and why that might lead us to think of this life that we live the life that we are invited to live in this world as being a God soaked life Dallas Willard the philosopher for a late philosopher from Southern California who also was a prolific writer on the Christian life particularly on Christian spiritual formation Dallas Willard said this that the aim of God in history is the formation of a community of loving persons with God himself at the very center of that community as its prime sustainer and most glorious inhabitant the formation of a community of loving persons with God Himself at the very center of that community as his prime sustainer and most glorious inhabitant now when Dallas when I wrote that he didn't make this connection directly but I think that's a pretty good working definition for me at least of what Jesus may have been talking about when he described the kingdom of God that it was not primarily some kind of legal or judicial or national or political reality in the way that in the medieval era for example we tried to form this idea of Christendom this this kind of political national reality and then and then sort of half pretend that that was the kingdom of God but that's not what Jesus was talking about but instead he was talking about people defined by their relationship with one another and the way that those relationships were held in relationship with God a community of loving people with God at the very center a god centered loving community I think that's a good working definition of the kingdom of God I think that would mean that what Jesus was talking about from the beginning of his ministry and then all the way through the Gospels would be consistent with what we see all the way through Scripture as what God is doing from the beginning of history to its very end at least the way that the Bible tells that story from the very first page of Genesis all the way through to chapter 21 of Revelation the contention that Dallas will I was making was that this is the aim of God in history this is God's purpose I would suggest that the contention of Jesus was this is the first thing that you need to hear this is the foundation on which everything else is built I'm not coming to talk to you about the church or about theology or about doctrine or about ordination and priests or about renewal and reform documents passing through General Synod or any of those other fascinating things that will change the world I want to talk about the kingdom of God about God centered loving community if we we go back to the beginning of the book of Genesis magnificent telling of the story in the first and second chapter of Genesis one of my favorite parts of scripture the poetry of it I mean it's just the glorious storytelling that goes on in those opening chapters we have God they are the opening of the Bible that if you like we have sat in the theater the curtains open and we have God brooding over chaos we don't that moment of creation from nothing that we talk about theologically or in in scientific terms when we talk about the Big Bang and and that sort of a first cosmological instant we don't have that in Scripture what we have is the oak curves open and it's already there and it's mess and the Spirit of God broods over this chaos which we're told this formless and void and begins to form it and begins to fill it and that's the shape of the the days those six days that follow we have three days of a forming of structuring of patterning of giving shape to something that was shapeless and therefore impossible to dwell in it was just a vast abyss of stormy waters and nothing could live there but by the end we've gone light and dark and land and sea and sky and everything that's needed for a habitation within which life can flourish and then we have three days of that that habitation being filled with life and at the end of all of that the the the finale of this opening act of Scripture is God's creation of human beings in the Bible's telling of the story I never saw someone throw centric telling but still we have the creation of human beings and these human beings are made in the image and likeness of God this is a tremendously important part of the story because this is following an ancient idea that relationships can best be held by two things that are most alike you can be most in relationship with something like youth for example it's difficult to have a relationship with a rock people try it people have pet rocks I don't think that the relationship is terribly mutual but they do it's a little easier to have a relationship with a goldfish usually not great but still you can feel very attached to a goldfish I'm not throwing the goldfish terribly attached to you can have a more meaningful relationship with a cat or a dog the level of intelligence is nearer to ours there's something that enables us to relate chimpanzees and gorillas and well now we're really talking about meaningful relationships and communication but for most of us the most meaningful relationships we have are with other human beings they have most like us and that's the significance of that part of the story God says to create human beings in my image and likeness because he wants to dwell in relationship with them it's the creation of a loving community in you'll notice in both Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 one of the important parts of the story in Genesis 1 God creates human beings male and female he creates them so there's a multiple multitude of human beings from the beginning in the telling in Genesis to the story progresses slightly differently but we have that crucial line after the creation of Adam it's not good for the man to be alone it doesn't work so those stories are all about the creation of community as well as habitations within which community can flourish the habitation that we call the universe which i think is a pretty pretty neat you know you're gonna prepare a guest room for somebody to stay in for a while the universe is not a bad one that's the story that we are told and God looked and saw that it was good and it was good and it was good and it was very good if you read though the translation in the Septuagint a translation of the Old Testament into Greek in the centuries just before Christ you'll fight now of course we know even if we know no Greek if we've ever sat in a church and listened to preachers being clever about Greek we all know that the Greeks had about 17 words for everything they had 17 words for love 17 words for death 17 words for carrot-cake everything and they had multiple words for good and they chose a very specific word in that translation that then recurs again and again and again and again and it was not the word that's usually you for good in the sense of morally and ethically good something that's right it was the word that is used for when everything has fit together in such a right and pleasing an appropriate way that it is not only it is not only well ordered it is not only fitting but it is aesthetically pleasing to Agathis is the word for something that's morally good but this word for something that is aesthetically good to his cows and the most literal translation of it usually in Greek is beautiful I love that Genesis 1 God creates one thing after another and then at the end of each one this little refrain in the Greek translation and God looked and saw that it was beautiful it was beautiful and it was beautiful and then finally creates these human beings among whom he can dwell in relationship and says that he's very beautiful because that's what God is seeking to do to create community and then dwell within it and we see that dwelling from the beginning as well yeah wonderful passage in Genesis 3 and I admit that this comes after the story of the fall or in the midst of the story of the fall but all the same that wonderful moment when we find that God is walking in the garden in the cool of the evening and you get the sense that this is not God's response to sin and fall in this it's not that God was sat in heaven and looked down and said oh they've eaten the Apple I must go now and walk in the garden in the cool of the evening it doesn't have that feel it has the feeling of the thing that God did every evening dwelling in the midst of the community and created it's the story at the beginning it's the story I think of the whole of Scripture Abraham come I will take you to a new place and I will make of you a family a nation a great people I will bless you and through you I will bless all the nations of the earth now this is from Genesis 12 and that becomes the pattern of what God does through most of the rest of the Old Testament the slow formation of a other people and then the formation of that people into a nation and then the vicissitudes of that nation through history that follows but God constantly trying to create from them this loving community indwelt by God himself and then out pops Jesus in the midst of all of that and says I've come to tell you that the kingdom of God is now so why not embrace this and come and live as a part of this and of course a large part of the story of the remainder of the New Testament is the discovery this is particularly that that the central theme in many ways of the book of Acts the discovery that this kingdom this this community this God centered community was not only about God's people the Jews but that it was spilling out now beyond that boundary and out to all nations to Jerusalem Judea Samaria but into all the world as Peter says when he does his dreadful sermon - Cornelius I mean really you go read Acts chapter 10 Peter walked in the his starting point when he's invited by the Gentile Centurion Cornelius is to say well you know that I do not associate with the unclean but here I am it's wonderful Cornelius is so tremendously and unfailingly gracious and generous and an open-hearted towards Peter all the way through and then Peter does this quite tedious theological sermon a halfway through very clearly the Holy Spirit decides Peter that's enough the Holy Spirit comes down and Peter says now I understand clearly that God shows no partiality now I understand clearly that this is for the Gentiles not just the Jews this is for all people by the time we get to the final chapters of the Bible what do we find we have this magnificent vision the end of the book of Revelation now I grant you there's been a lot of fireworks and entertainment along the way they're kind of blockbuster apocalyptic movie that is the rest of Revelation which I don't propose to go into now but at the end there is this incredible vision and as part of this vision of the the new heavens and the new earth we have the New Jerusalem now they love this I want to say out upfront absolutely I understand okay that this book is dealing in visions and metaphor and symbols and so on and that it is just a disastrous mistake to try to take the book of Revelation to literally write nevertheless I would like you to imagine that you are the kind of sad person who might sit down with a a chapter like that chapter that describes the arrival of the New Jerusalem and say to yourself I wonder if I think if I did take all these measurements and things seriously I wonder what that would look like no matter how big that would be I wonder if I did some research on Wikipedia what that would tell me about population densities and so on and so forth if you can imagine that being that kind of sad person then you and I should have coffee afterwards we'd relate well because some time ago I decided to do exactly that not because I thought the revelation was literal but because I wanted to grasp something of what John might have been trying to communicate as he described that vision let me tell you this would either what you'd imagine that we're all up on the International Space Station and we're looking down and the New Jerusalem is arriving from heaven somehow like a gigantic inhabitable rubik's cube because it's a cube shaped thing and it comes and it settles and lands on the earth just as John describes I wanted to imagine what we might see if this cube were to come down and land so that the eastern edge of the city of New Jerusalem were resting on the city of New York I don't worry we evacuated everyone we knew it was coming his big we saw it a long while away like movies when the asteroids come we saw it but it lands and it just rests down it so you know sinks to Staten Island Ferry we won't disaster movies are great but we won't have it crushed the Statue of Liberty because symbolically that just feels wrong doesn't it so we're down it comes the eastern gates are now where the Empire State Building used to be the western wall of the city would be somewhere over a near the Rocky Mountains two-thirds of the way across the United States the northern wall would be up in Canada and the southern wall will be down in Mexico and the Gulf of Mexico that's the scale city that John is described now let's see much the other thing about its it's a cube took us a thousand miles up so I need to tell you that most of it is still in space if you are invited to live in the New Jerusalem in the eschatological future being brought by God and you are not on the ground floor do not open the windows this is what John described now if you were to be furthermore yet more sad and to ask yourself I wonder if we were to imagine for example that that every floor of the New Jerusalem were a mile above the next so you know we've got a lot of space for four views and landscaping and weather patterns and within the city you know would be very generous and if we were to look on Wikipedia and see what the estimates are for the number of human beings who have ever lived and we were to take those estimates very generously and say what's the maximum number that anyone has ever estimated and then we were to say you know what we'd like to do is to have these people have the opportunity to live in the New Jerusalem mariela Park floors at about the population density that you might find around my retreat house in rural Estes here and not like the center of the City of London where we're all crowd each other all the time because you know that can be fun but for all eternity yes that we might want to get away from time to time we would discover that there is room in this visionary city for every man woman or child who ever lived in all of time about four or five times over it's an astonishingly generous vision and it's a vision of a community it's a vision of people brought together to dwell together and of course famously John tells us but there's no temple in this city why because God dwells among them himself and so scripture from beginning to end is a vision of God centered loving community and Jesus at the beginning of his preaching announces this and says I want to talk to you about this what he calls the kingdom of God and I want to tell you that the time has come and the kingdom of God is now we are so accustomed sometimes to talking about life after death and at the end of all things and eternity in heaven and hell and in Advent we have the four last things death judgment heaven and hell we whip we'd have a tendency to take a lot of God stuff and project it elsewhere project it into special buildings like Church is projected onto other people who are more saintly than we are project it off into the future anyway that we don't have to deal with it now but that's precisely what Jesus does Jesus comes and says this God centered loving community it is here it is now my invitation to you is to dwell in it in the present moment what happens after you die we'll talk about that another time in fact Jesus talked about it very literally and talks a great deal about dwelling in their community right now about what it might mean to live a life soaked with the presence of God in the present moment not in some uncertain vagueness T future beyond the veil of death now I don't know about you but you you may like me find something of that vision compelling and attractive most of us are hardwired to desire a relationship with one another we don't all find relationship easy some of us find relationships tremendously difficult but even when we find relationships hard to enter into and hard to manage and when we find other people difficult nevertheless there's something in us that still empowers most of us to desire those relationships even the relationships that we struggle with and if st. Augustine is right of course there's also something hardwired in us that designers similarly relationship with God that famous quote of his then our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you that's a one of the most well known quotes of st. Augustine and with good reason because it resonates with people we recognize the experience of desiring relationship with God so there's something about this idea of God centered loving community that really draws us of course the only problem is us not to put too fine a point on it you know there's that cliched old saying if you if you ever find the perfect Church don't join it because you'll ruin it but likewise it would be possible perhaps for us to say if you should ever happen to stumble across the kingdom of God this god centered loving community perhaps you to steer well clear because how frequent turning away from God and turning away from one another all the brokenness that the twisted miss the frailty infallibility within us that constantly takes us away from relationship and turns us in on ourselves would be extraordinarily destructive to the life of that community God centered loving community would be the kind of place where human life really ought to flourish it ought to be the place where we find what Jesus described as life and life in abundance but I suspect that many of us would struggle to live well in it I think we would find ourselves grating all the time up against all these perfectly loving people surrounding their perfectly loving God we'd find that hard to cope with and we'd find it hard to participate in that too and I think that one of the the first things that we have to acknowledge if we are going to engage seriously with what Jesus teaches about the kingdom of God and the the presence of the kingdom of God among us now in this invitation to within our lives to respond to that one of the things that we have to deal with this truth is the reality about ourselves and who we are we all like to paint a picture of who we are at least to the rest of the world right I mean some of us have to do it less because we're fairly wonderful people anyway and then some of us have to work really hard at it and we have a public persona and we project all the things in us that we know are socially desirable and acceptable we magnify look at me I'm a kind person I'm a patient person I'm a gracious person of course I'm a happy person because that's also important to all these things we kind of magnifying we we try to play down all that you know and I'm also very angry person and I'm a needy person and I'm gonna try and hide that from everybody else and there's my public persona but we're not good at hiding it from ourselves we can be in denial about certain aspects of who we are but on the whole when we close the door and look in the mirror and say who is really there we are our own harshest critics and with good reason we know the things that we will not reveal to anybody else we know the truth about who we are one of the things that I find very revealing in my work in the retreat house I do a lot of one-to-one work with people around their life of prayer and their particularly their relationship with God and with other people one of the questions that I have learned to ask people over the years is this when God looks at you what do you think God sees thank God looks at you what do you think God sees when I ask that question I learned very little about what God thinks of that person but what I usually do is learn a great deal about how they see themselves because they might look in the mirror and see themselves as difficult disappointing a failure a mess quite broken' twisted wicked wounded whatever a fairly truth or maybe even skewed towards the negative but a fairly truthful assessment of themselves but if I asked him for that they won't give it to me they don't know me well enough and so they'll give me more public persona you see and if I ask them to reflect theologically on what God thinks of people what they'll tell me is all the things he learned in Sunday school God loves people people are wonderful but when we ask them when God looks at you what does God think of what he sees in you I tend to get a fairly honest answer about what they think of themselves oh I don't know I think that God's probably disappointed I think God's angry with me I don't know that God really pays any attention to me I don't think I'm important enough actually what typically what people are saying is when I look in the mirror this is what I see and I see that because I know more of the truth about myself than anyone else and so it's relatively simple then for me to project that under God if I know all the truth about myself and this is one the my evaluation then God who knows all the truth must have a similar evaluation right so I learned a great deal from that about what the way that people see themselves I learn a great deal about people's brokenness and about their their struggles and their pain but also about their fallenness and their twisted Mis now within us which is most turned away from God and most turned away from other people and one of the other things that I learned through my work in a retreat house working in a context of Prayer is that it is very difficult for many people to be honest with themselves about that and it is extremely difficult for people to be nice with God about that one of the things that I have really appreciated about the regular round of liturgy that we have in the retreat house and that echoes the kind of monastic liturgy that you would find in a Benedictine community is the constant immersion in the Book of Psalms because the Book of Psalms is a book that seeks to tell the truth to God and I find it a great antidote to the games that we play that we when we pray the Psalms we are forced to articulate truths which we uncomfortable saying about ourselves and certainly very uncomfortable saying to God but it is the beginning of transformation to acknowledge to go back to this idea of the kingdom of God that we are not people who are well placed to flourish and live well within God centered loving community it's important it's essential for us to be able to acknowledge this let me tell you them story that may help to illustrate why I think some years ago I had a I was ministering in a local church in South Wales it was around the time of evening prayer I think we had said evening prayer thinking must have been I had stayed on behind afterwards I was tidying up the church a woman walked in came over said do you mind if I just have a word no I said fine so we sat down in the purity began to talk and she began to unfold her story and the short version of a very long story was that she had been through a tremendous experience of betrayal from from someone with whom she'd been living for a number of years her partner with him she'd been living who had announced a few months before that he was leaving her and in the process of breaking this news told her also that he was leaving her to go and live with her best friend and that he'd been carrying on an affair with her best friend for a number of years and had hidden this fact from her as had the best friend so you can imagine this was a devastating experience for her she told me that she had been has seen various counselors and therapists and so on because it had costs such issues though there was it created a bitterness and an anger within her that was consuming her from the inside out she was really struggling with this but she hadn't been able to get past it hadn't been able to get through it she told me that she was this was her description she told me she was not a Christian she was not a person of religious faith or religious commitment at all but she had been walking past the church and she had thought to my herself I've tried everything else why not try this so you know it's of great faith like this that mighty miracles are born I think so she had wandered in to talk to me and I said okay well look I'm not trained as a counsellor if you would like to see a counselor or a therapist perhaps a Christian counselor or therapist I'm sure I could arrange that for you and she said that's very kind but now I've been down that road it was helpful but I'm still stuck and I said well I've had I need to be very straight with you I'm a priest and what I do is help people to pray that's my only talent and gift and I'm not good at that but I'll do my best I can offer that to you and nothing more is that something you'd want and and she inspired by her mighty faith said give it a go I said let's do this I said okay so here's the thing I really there I want to give you my prayer 101 my basic introduction to prayer it goes like this God already knows everything there is no point lying to God so here's where prayer starts you tell the truth you tell the truth about who you are to God I said let me ask you what is a little bit of truth this fellow who treated you like this how do you feel about him she said I wish you weren't dead so I said as any pasta in that circumstance would have done I said then that's what you should pray for I'm not in pastoral ministry anymore I work in a retreat house now so she said I can't do that and I said well what are you gonna do I mean prayer 101 you tell the truth right so that's the truth you either tell that till you say something that's not true those are your choices she said I don't think I can do it see there's a reluctance there that any of us might understand share that there are truths about ourselves we don't want to admit to ourselves and we certainly don't want to admit quite so bluntly to God so I said alright look here let's try something different I said in the middle of the Bible there is a book called The Book of Psalms doesn't matter what that means it's basically a book of prayers and these prayers were written by God now I care and I know that there we could have a much more subtle and nuanced theology of the Bible okay but we were on a fairly straightforward level we were operating how I needed to try to find so this was more pastoral than theological conversation okay these prayers were written by God so they must be okay right I mean God must be okay with hearing them if she said I guess I said I took a Bible I circled a passage from Psalm 55 and I said to her listen I want to just hear these words it is not enemies who taunt me I could bear that it is not adversaries who deal insolently with me I could hide from them but it is you my equal my companion my familiar friend with whom I kept pleasant company we walked in the house of God with the throng that bit wasn't true it doesn't matter so you understand this is the voice of a person who's been deeply betrayed by a closed compartment she understood that I said here's the next verse let death come upon them let them go down alive to share that's polite Bible language for may they go to hell literally for evil is in their homes and in their hearts I took a pencil a circle didn't I said I want you to pray that prayer every day and I want you to think of him she said all right [Laughter] I went home thinking well I'm good at this bickering stuff I saw her twice after I saw her a few weeks later and she came and I said how are you getting on she said I have prayed that prayer every day I said and what's the result of that pain she said I said you need to keep going she came to see me a third time last time she saw me and I said how are you getting on she said I have to be truthful with you I am NOT praying that prayer every day and I said why not she pointed her finger at me accusing me and said you told me that I must never say anything in prayer that wasn't true I said right I woke up one morning and looked at those words she said and they were no longer true I don't like him I'm still desperately upset but I didn't want him to die something's changed I said what did you do then if she said I hope you don't mind I had to look through some of those other Psalms and found another one and used that instead I said I think that's okay I think God will allow it you see this is my theory of what happened is what I think happened to her you know Jesus said repent and believe this good news and repent is about the word literally means about changing our minds but in order to change our minds we have to acknowledge where we're starting from here's what I think that she did I think that she got down on her knees at least figurative knew not literally every day and she came before her up until that point if she prayed at all her prayer might have been more pious like one of ours might have been and she might have said Oh Lord in heaven above thou knowest that this mine companion and from friend has been terribly naughty and has hurt me mightily but I just ask that thou forgive us him as commanded by Jesus in the Gospels bla bla but we know that's the right sort of Prayer we probably should pray in essence it's a way of coming before the Lord and saying my heart is broken but I've got this I'll fix it I've got instructions from you I'll fix it and I wonder whether at that moment the Holy Spirit doesn't respond by saying I don't think that's gonna work but if you want to try we'll give you the space to try the moment she got down on her knees and prayed the way that the psalmist prayed all the way through and took all the bile and vengeance and anger and hatred and bitterness and disappointment and darkness and everything and just threw it out there and said I know this is ugly and this is unattractive but here it is this is the reality of Who I am but that mode the Holy Spirit begins to respond by saying oh now that I can do something about when you come before me and open yourself up and pronounce yourself helpless to be anything other than you are that's the precise moment that I can begin to bring about to change you see our life should be characterized should they by love joy peace patience kindness goodness faithfulness gentleness and self-control Paul tells us that right but Paul tells us that this is the fruit of the Spirit it's not the things that we do to bring the Holy Spirit into our lives it's the result of inviting the Holy Spirit into our already broken light it's how life in the kingdom of God works we we see a proteus this God centered loving community and we look in the mirror and say we are not the people who can flourish well in this community we come before God on our knees and we say I want this I want this with all my heart but I will destroy it and it will destroy me and I am helpless to do anything and at that precise moment God says you are I'm not and this is the beginning of our transformation into Christlikeness the time is now has come which is here today 1:40 Sunday afternoon the time is now the kingdom of God is close at hand and among us you are invited open up your life turn around repent and believe that this is good news have some questions I have to say how to tell one moment there when I thought she's gonna say do do funerals the lady was gonna cut back here for the third time and say so funerals so thank you thank you was slightly reluctant to break into that beautiful bit of silence where we took in some of what Chris has said anybody got questions I could start if people are still thinking things over but I tell you what always happens nobody else at the beginning and then at the end people six people I haven't got a question so look Bowles boldly go so some hints about how to stop kidding ourselves yeah sure um the two places where I have learned the most about this I mean there are all kinds of ways that we can learn to be more self aware more truthful about who we are an open about who we are to the two places I have learned the most one has as I mentioned it communities which take seriously praying the Psalms not studying or reading the Psalms of a praying the Psalms it's it's a strong tradition within monastic communities it's a strong tradition within liturgical churches it can be very easy to do that in a way that actually disengages us and it's not about prayer it's just about reading words and so on but but wherever that's done there is an opportunity to pray and to continuously engage and re-engage with the experience of the people of God through the centuries as they have sought to be honest before God it is hard not to be shaped in the end it took to become more open when you are some days saying praise the Lord let everything that has breath praise the Lord that unlocks something within us that tells the truth about how our love for God or I love for one another us reassurance praise and celebration and so on but there's a lot more in the Psalms famously there's that wonderful passage at the end of the Psalm 137 the psalm that was written by boney in by the rivers of Babylon it isn't and that's an interesting one isn't it you know boney m had a hit with by the rivers of babylon Dom mcclain on the American Pie album had recorded a folk song version of by the rivers of Babylon it has been a favorite to record even in recent times and of course the boney and it was huge and people dancing along to and so on and yet the song is starts tragically and descends into vicious violence the you as some of you will know it starts off with we sat down and wept and so on by the end it's saying how wonderful it would be if we could take your children and smash their heads open on the rocks there's a version from a few centuries ago of the Psalms done metrically in other words to be son of a hymn tunes by Tate and Brady and it has all of them including that I I've heard a few of those used in churches things when you're singing things like the king of love my shepherd is your singing taking brady type compositions never heard a congregation perform psalm 137 him you know and and and enthusiastically sing about smashing open children's heads i don't know why but but you read that Psalm and you think to yourself that I cannot possibly be my prayer I cannot possibly give voice to that kind of bloodthirsty that's we do this right that's Old Testament vicious God now we're into New Testament Jesus who's all light and love and flower power that's what we do but now I would ask this just this question go away and read that Psalm and ask yourself could I imagine this being the voice of a mother in Syria right now I wish I could take your children and break their heads open on the rocks it's not pretty it's not grace-filled but it is very very true and it so the Psalms encourage us to speak words of truth even when they're ugly the other place that I found very helpful has been 12-step groups like Alcoholics Anonymous who where where groups which cultivate an atmosphere of of complete candid open this vulnerability and also create the kind of trust where that is possible it is oddly easier to tell the truth to other people first and then accept that yourself once you voiced it aloud to others it's a kind of a known phenomenon that that a number of people when they first connect for example with Alcoholics Anonymous come in with a kind of public narrative of I'm coming because fred has invited me and I'm you know I'm not sure I really have a power saw it takes a little while before they will acknowledge in the presence of other people who are very open and candid you know I'm Chris I'm an alcoholic I haven't had a drink for the last so and people talking very open you know I have fallen off the wagon I'm sitting here drunk now in that atmosphere of openness they find the courage to tell the truth to themselves anybody else so I think when we are able to create small trusting communities of people who are able to tell the truth to one another that ought to be the church we're not very good at it I really think it would do us a lot of good to study Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous and so we we ought to see we can get a get them to come along we should get some of the folks who lead them and say come and facilitate some of our house groups and and small group meetings and so I help us to learn it we're brilliant at telling the truth about Romans 8:17 but we're not at all good about telling the truth of ourselves and who we are to help us but it but it can be done yeah sure I was talking about the question wasn't can I talk a little bit about the importance of silence that was mentioned in the description of this event here yeah I was just chatting with Elizabeth before we came through we first met when hata brought me up here for a day to do various interviews and things when when this book came out and they sent something out saying although Chris Webb published this book God so life it's jolly good because they write that sort of thing that's jolly good and then they did a little two line biography or deputy warden of law and Abbey and they mentioned the practice of silence at the Abbey and we have about an hour or so we have about an hour and a half or so of shared worship and prayer every day and about or of communal silence as a community and there now of course in living in a retreat house you are dealing with silence a lot of the time all the interviews that I had went something like this we'd have a half an hour or so and the person would say and so it's Chris Webb let me make sure I spelt that right let me a couple of questions so this book you could you just summarize the book you know yes I'll have a go and so we did that and then I just want to ask about then where did the title come from or something you know deep and meaningful I know every single interview the next question was I read on the description that you have an hour of silence how does that work and then the next 27 minutes will be conversations about silence which I shouldn't say this please buy the book but the book doesn't actually talk about that a lot and and by the end of the day the the lady who was with me from the publishing company said we now need to get you to write a book about silence because I think we could really sell that one yeah happy to say something about it though oh boy where do we start for most of us there seems to be in my experience something very attractive about silence when we don't have any and something quite difficult and disturbing about it when we discover it and find ourselves caught up in the midst of it and we're not used to it from the outside it always looks tremendously attractive I mean I think it is attractive I think their silence is a real gift but we think of silence and we think forgive me this may not be you but many people silent we have this kind of dichotomy in our cultural understanding at the moment I think okay and over here is religion and religion is sorry people with dark collars and religionists rules and regulations and religion is anti thing religion is homophobic and and some everything phobic actually and and stands against joys and simple pleasures and an institutional and also in tedious and boring that's religion and everything else spiritual is the Dalai Lama and and monks and putting in rocks in a pile by a seaside and lighting candles by your bubble bath and little statues of Buddha and fat Buddha's and the fat bird is so reassuring only because we can be spiritual I still eat whatever we like so Buddha sits on and and and and just take sense and that's you know it says this spiritual and and religion is weighty and horrible and intrusive on our day-to-day lives and spirituality is something that we can just think aging when we feel like it to feel all kind of numinous Andrew still than an a piece and and grounded and mindfulness and blah blah blah so a silence for many people feels like it should be on this side yeah that's not only institution aboard and religion as an attractive spiritual thing so it's desirable and people come looking for it they come they come to our retreat house looking for it and it's not an unusual experience to have something like this to somebody will turn up and they'll say I want to cut I've decided to come on a silent retreat we have silent retreats in our retreat house up to about ten days in some places because they'll do a month or more but we have up to about ten days when people try to book in for those we always have to have a chat with them first what's what's your experience maybe don't list before you might want to start a little oh I don't ten days so they come and and they discover this place in the middle of the countryside and there is peaks and there is tranquility and the outer peace is nearby in and all the anxieties float away and life is good and they feel wonderful and they have ten days of this and that's sensor of being a one with the universe sometimes lasts as long as 15 minutes at which point they start going [Laughter] they find our library and they read a book and then they go to find the television and then they discover that we don't have our television that's the first dark night of the soul right and then we start the roller coaster you see because the truth is that once you are truly in silence not just the absence of noise without kind of positive stillness and so on that you you hope to cultivate in places light retreat houses and monasteries and so on you are you are placed in the presence of God and you are placed in the presence of yourself and other people without distraction and without shield you enter into that kind of vulnerability you come before God for half an hour prayer and you've got lots of words if you've got our liturgy you've got tons of words to say to God so it's perfectly safe yeah you you can present yourself to God you can say some prayers and this is some readings don't go away and say I spent half an hour in the presence of the Lord you don't have to really have opened yourself up at all so you can feel good about that I'm often reminded of the verse in Genesis 3 after the fall where it says that the man and the woman hid themselves in the garden from the presence of the Lord we do we all do that's been the story of humanity ever since and one of the places we sometimes hide it's in church so we can hide behind those words if that half-an-hour is simply silence spent in the presence of the Lord you can't hide you can't tell God who you who you really are and manipulate your image and you you you can't offer prayers to propitiate his what fierce anger disappointment uncertainty ignorant of you whatever it is that you think or that question again what do you think God sees when when God looks at you you can't do all the stuff you just have to sit there and whatever God is thinking of you God is thinking of you and you to deal with it and whoever you are you are and you can't manage a manipulator and one other whatever other people are seeing in you they're seeing in you and you can't do anything about it you are incredibly vulnerable and it's an intensely uncomfortable the far side of that using is extraordinarily life-giving but there is a kind of genuine dark night that has to be gone through first before that silence becomes life-giving what comes out of the other end if you go through that experience and you discover at the other end of it that this God who looks upon you in the silence no longer able to justify yourself looks down and says as he said to over Christ at both the glorious Transfiguration and also in the baptism when Jesus identified with sinners in the River Jordan both times God looks down and says my son my beloved in whom I delight if you are ever certain silence and you have any sense of God singing over you my son my daughter my beloved in whom I did mine if you have any sense of the grace of God work in your life taking all that is broken an Australian ruin everything that is so disappointing about you but transforming it and restoring in you that image and likeness of God if you have any sense of that happening if you have any sense sometimes of of the compassion of other human beings in silence when you see your true self beginning to emerge you discover a compassion for other people in their failures as well you've messed your life up join that club take a ticket and join the line I mean haven't we all so you you find yourself surrounded suddenly by far more compassion and understanding than you ever thought was possible and it's life transforming but there's no shortcut to it no one arrives at a retreat house and finds that in the first 15 minutes that's why the crisis that's why the hunt for the television that's why some people never do some people will come and they will hide in the retreat house and they will distract them so they'll come for ten days and distract themself persist constantly 24/7 but for ten days and they'll go away in this thing that was great thought it was like Teflon it was just straight off I don't even know that I can't even remember what the question was except us to do with Silas but does that that was helpful good pray good you're very kind you're a wonderful that's one sure so um I don't know all the answer to this this is my best shot the question is how do we encouraging that woman to pray for the death of the of the man who hurt her so much how do we reconcile that with Jesus on the cross saying Lord my father forgive them they don't know what they're doing now that forgiveness I would want to say absolutely that Jesus taught that we should forgive right and Jesus taught that we should love our enemies but Jesus was also a realist he knew that we would have enemies that's why he told us to love them he didn't say don't have enemies he said love your enemies so there's a recognition there that there's a kind of gap between what we shall one day be become a by the grace of God when the likeness of Christ is fully formed in us and what we are now there's a gap there and the gospel is constantly wrestling with that gap and and what we hope that one day we shall be by the grace of God is a people who are able to constantly offer grace and forgiveness and mercy to those even those who wound us the most deeply but most of us are not there yet and encouraging that woman to pray as I as I did I was not actually trying to encourage her the whole long to her bitterness in fact quite the reverse I was encouraging her to open it up to God but to tell the truth about it in order that she could I hoped begin to experience that transformation but that she would stop trying to do it herself that she would stop looking at all that bitterness within and saying I will fix this and then I will come to God and say look I've done it you told me to forgive now I forgive but that he said a little bit like the famous feller and the Gospels who comes to Jesus and says I believe help my unbelief it's a sort of attitude of heart that says I acknowledge that the desirable thing to do here is to forgive and be gracious I can't do it but I'm not going to pretend that I can I acknowledge her that's the way of the gospel this is who I am and I will also tell the truth about that the only way I'm ever gonna get from here to there is by the grace of God by the healing work of the Holy Spirit in my life like lack the capacity to get there myself so that really is all that I was encouraging you to do of course in there in the classic Liturgy of of monastic communities and liturgical churches the the praying of the Psalms is always followed by the reading of an meditation on Scripture so we tell the truth about who we are but then we hear the story of who we will be so we are constantly playing with that detention we're not ignoring the fact that that grace leads us to what forgiveness does I help as my best short perfect thank you I'm just going to say [Applause]

Channel: St Paul's Cathedral

Views: 2,841

Rating: 4.75 out of 5

Keywords: St Paul's Cathedral, Adult Learning, Chris Webb, Bendictine, spirituality, God, prayer, life, Psalms, Kingdom of God, silence, scripture

Id: cPxpVkFJo1o

Length: 59min 57sec (3597 seconds)

Published: Wed May 09 2018