Quam dilecta: Start:Stop-Where the hell is God?

Tuesday 11 September 2018

Start:Stop-Where the hell is God?

Start:Stop offers the chance for busy commuters to Start their day by Stopping to reflect for ten minutes. Starting every quarter hour between 7.45am and 9.00am on Tuesday mornings at St Stephen Walbrook, in the heart of the City of London, we invite people to drop in for as long as they can to hear a sequence of bible readings, reflections and prayers or simply to sit and reflect. For more information visit our website. This reflection is from Tuesday 11th September 2018.

Thank you for joining us for Start:Stop. My name is Phillip Dawson. This reflection will last ten minutes. We begin with a bible reading, which can be found on page 15 in the New Testament section of the Bible.

Bible Reading – Matthew 13:24-30 - The Parable of Weeds among the Wheat

He put before them another parable: ‘The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well. And the slaves of the householder came and said to him, “Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from?” He answered, “An enemy has done this.” The slaves said to him, “Then do you want us to go and gather them?” But he replied, “No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.” ’

Reflection

When bad things happen, we sometimes hear people asking questions such as “Where the hell is God?” Fr Richard Leonard was posed this question by his mother, while sitting in a hospital waiting room in Darwin. His sister - a nurse who had saved lives in disaster zones all over the world, lay in the room next door; her arms and legs having been amputated after a car accident in the outback.

Fr Richard’s book “Where the hell is God?” is his extended answer to his mother. Informed by his experience of being with his sister in the months after she was discharged from hospital, and drawing on his formation as a Jesuit priest, Fr Richard offers a series of steps to help us to return to what he calls "spiritual sanity" whenever we are tempted to ask this question ourselves.

The first, and most fundamental, step is for us to remember that God is good and does not want us to come to harm. He does not directly send suffering or disease. He doesn't punish us with bad things or wish us to suffer pain to make us "grow" - although we can learn from suffering. God does not will natural disasters; famine, droughts or tsunami.

But, as our bible reading reminds us, the world is a mixture of good and evil; the wheat and the weeds, in the same field. Why does God permit this?

Fr Richard suggests that free will is “such a critical gift to humanity that to give it on the one hand and then create a perfect world within which to exercise it, would mean that we never see the fruit of our good choices, or the destructiveness of our poor ones...our freedom has [he says] been God’s greatest and most risky gift to us.”

Some commentators have suggested that the weeds in the parable were a particular type of poisonous rye grass, which, at a certain stage of growth can appear almost identical to ears of wheat. As the parable explains, when weeds are that hard to see, ripping them out will almost certainly destroy that which is good in the process. Our desire to eliminate what we perceive is bad, or evil, or does not belong, gets in the way of our ability to love our neighbour. Have we ever been tempted to look around when in airports or on the tube or while walking across London Bridge – at people who look different – and thinking ‘could they be ....’ ?

If the capacity for evil is difficult to spot in others – it is even harder to see it within ourselves. Perhaps interpreting the wheat and the weeds as separate individuals is too simplistic – after all, only God is wholly perfect. Many of the greatest spiritual writers have described us as a balance of the wheat and the weeds - of saint and sinner - viewing the field as a metaphor for our own lives, as well as the world around us.

Fr Richard Rohr, one of the most popular writers on spirituality today, encourages us to learn to engage with our “shadow” side. Shaped like us, our shadow is that part of us that “we don’t want to see, that we’re always afraid of and don’t want others to see either.” Rohr explains that our shadow is not evil itself - but allows us “to do evil without calling it evil.” Through spending time in contemplation, Richard Rohr encourages us to accept our weeds - not to accept that evil actions are good - but because acknowledging when we are not compassionate or caring allows us to change. Rohr reminds us that “Jesus is never upset with sinners; he’s only upset with people who think they are not sinners!”

“A Long Shadow Over London” is one of the finalists in Historic England’s “Immortalised” design competition, on show in Lambeth until this Sunday. Placed below a model of the statue of General Robert Clive, which stands at the heart of Whitehall, the designers, Studio MASH, have placed a shadow of the statue made from etched paving stones. The shadow contains the contested history of “Clive of India” in the form of engravings set out as newspaper articles – describing the suffering of the people of Bengal during his leadership of the East India Company. The designers have made their interpretation of Robert Clive’s “Shadow Self” into a physical object, which confronts us.

Other finalists in the competition, which challenged artists and designers to find new ways of remembering events, people and identities and memorialising these in the public realm, include “Contextualising Colston” by MSMR Architects. This installation reimagines the setting around the statue of Edward Colston, which stands in Bristol City Centre. Colston’s links to the slave trade have led to the Grade II listed statute being vandalized. Instead of defacing it, the designers have proposed ‘contextualising’ the statue; envisioning the plinth in a recessed scoop representing the hull of a transport ship; with images of slaves set out on the ground below at the same scale as the statute; surrounding Edward Colston with the mortal cargo which fuelled much of his wealth.

Like the response to Robert Clive’s legacy, instead of uprooting the statue (as the “Rhodes Must Fall” campaigners in Cape Town and Oxford sought to do), the designers of Contextualising Colston, have placed the weeds (or at least their vision of them) back in the field, alongside the wheat, for us all to see. In so doing they invite us to judge, but not condemn (the last judgement – as our reading reminds us – is God’s to make). These installations encourage us to consider the mortal cargo at the foot of our own statue, placed in a world shaped by the philanthropy of slave traders, but where we still allow slavery to persist, a world with enough resources to support all life, but where, every day, we allow children to starve. A world where information is readily available to all, but understanding and acceptance of others can sometimes seem a distant reality.

Jesus described himself as the light of the world. Living in the presence of such amazing grace is not meant to blind us - but to change us. Jesus said those who walk with him will never walk in darkness.

By walking with Jesus, light is cast on our darker sides. By seeing the weeds in the field of our lives we are given the chance to judge but - not condemn - ourselves; we can change - to become more Christ-like; full of love, humility and compassion - to live a life where outward appearances match inner realities; away from the self and more closely into relationship with Jesus, and those around us.

Through the gifts of prayer and contemplation we do not have to wait until we are memorialized in stone to place ourselves in the field of our lives. We might use this time of silence before we join together in prayer, to recognise where the wheat and the weeds were present in our lives yesterday and how we might, through God’s mercy and grace and following the example of his Son, seek to nurture the good in ourselves, in others and in the world today.

Prayers

As we join together in prayer, asking God to help us to change ourselves and each other so that we might change the world, the response to Lord, help us to amend what we are is “and direct what we shall be.”

Almighty God,

You have searched us out and known us.

Grant us the courage to search the fields of our own lives, to see what is growing there.

Help us to nurture the good in ourselves, in others and in the world.