Scripture for the 2nd Sunday after Pentecost includes Genesis 22:1-14; Romans 6:12-23; Matthew 10:40-42
The worldwide Anglican Communion has been called to make today a day of fasting and prayer for the people of Sudan. The timing of this call relates to several things. July 9th will mark the official separation of southern Sudan from the north. In these days leading up to that milestone, United Nations commissioners are making strategic decisions that will affect the transition, and UN peacekeepers are being put in place to monitor that transition. All of this is against a background of growing tension over unresolved disputes, not the least of which is who owns the oil that lie below the land, especially along the border between north and south.
So we shall pray, and at least symbolically honor the call to back up prayer with fasting by serving at our coffee hour today only that cup of cold water mentioned in Matthew’s Gospel. That may seem such a token effort, but let it remind us that we are in fact one global family: how the independence of Southern Sudan gets realized matters to all people, as does the resolution of disputed land, and oil, and water, and human rights, in all places.
What is being tested in Sudan is what can be built of hope and courage and a passionate desire for those basic freedoms that we in this country will recall and gratefully celebrate in just a few short days. Perhaps if we pay attention to what July 9th means to the people of Sudan, we will find our July 4th observance more meaningful than ever.
Elizabeth Williams tells me that displaced southerners—like Anglican Deaconess Mother Raile Daffala, who visited us years ago and gave us this powerfully apostolic bowl that keeps gathering our gifts for the world—as she and her extended family and the millions of southern Sudanese who have fled the violence in their homeland now consider returning, they face the grim fact that there is virtually nothing there. It is said that in an area as large as Alaska, not a building remains standing. Roads are in severe disrepair, agriculture disrupted, institutions gone.
This moment in the lives of displaced southerners is not so much an entrance into the promised land as it is their standing in the shoes of ancient Abraham and Sarah, hearing the call to leave whatever they now have and set out on a desert journey into the unknown. This is not exiled Israel returning to its homeland with the blessings of the government where they had resettled; northern Sudan is hostile to division. Nor is it in the mold of our own revolutionary story, patriot farmers and tradesmen and established householders defending their homesteads from tyranny: the people of south Sudan have little, and those who will return will return to nothing but the land and its resources, their rights, and their responsibilities. And, they trust, the support of the free world.
What can be built will be found through the testing of these days and months and years.
In our first lesson today, a famous, even infamous, passage, Abraham is being tested.
The Bible trains us to think of Abraham and Sarah as pioneers, founding figures like George and Martha Washington, representatives of the new. But in fact Abraham and Sarah also represent the truly ancient. They go back to times when people believed they were required to ritually sacrifice their children to ensure the success of some great venture or the security of a new settlement or the building of a new defense tower.
We could hear this difficult story as telling how Abraham’s obedience to God was being tested on that mountain, whether Abraham valued, loved, feared God enough, with an undivided heart, enough that he would follow through with this dreadful call to sacrifice his only child, whether Abraham believed and trusted God enough to keep taking one desperate step after another up that grim path. Another way of seeing this testing is that God was designing an experiment to learn if Abraham was ready to sever himself from that primitive culture of child-sacrifice, and so prove himself worthy of his being chosen to lead God’s yet greater experiment of forming the heart of a nation to listen for and treasure the mind and will of God.
This second way of hearing this grim story is reinforced by the unmistakable message that it is Abraham’s obedience that is being tested. Obedience to what? To the prevailing culture of the day, or to the mind and will of God? At the root of our word obey is a form of the Latin “audire”, to hear. To what is Abraham listening? What message is he hearing?
By the story’s end, he hears and finds the good news of the free gift of God. An unfortunate ram caught by its horns in a thorn thicket provides the life that is to be sacrificed. The demanding nature of God that drove him up that mountain is transfigured, revealed to be a gracious nature that in and of itself provides the way to freedom and new life. This outcome is so close to the heart of the Christian Gospel that this story is one of those appointed for use at the Easter Vigil, when the Church catches its breath at how far God goes on our behalf: in Christ God is the sacrificed victim. The earth shakes on Good Friday not as special effect, but as sign of the profound shakedown of the old order as the new creation takes hold and fills the void.
Poets have taken an interest in this story of transition between old and new. Delmore Schwartz in his poem “Abraham” has the patriarch say,
“…the boy (Isaac) was born and grew and I saw
What I had known, I knew what I had seen, for he
Possessed his mother’s beauty and his father’s humility,
And was not marked and marred by her sour irony and my endless anxiety.
Then the angel returned, asking that I surrender
My son as a lamb to show that humility
Still lived in me, and was not altered by age and prosperity.
I said nothing, shocked and passive. Then I said but to myself alone:
‘This was to be expected. These promises
Are never unequivocal or unambiguous, in this
As in all things which are desired the most:
I have had great riches and great beauty.
I cannot expect the perfection of every wish
And If I deny the command, who knows what will happen?’”
That’s as far as I’ll read—enough to suggest this poet’s view of Abraham cynically arguing himself into an obedience that sounds superstitious… not a high view of a hero. More like a self-interested man, a frightened man.
Our hearts are with Isaac, as the story goes dark around him. He was rescued from death, but not from trauma. That is caught in a poem by another 20th-century American, Bink Noll:
“When Isaac watched his father strain back
the ram’s head, its throat separate and bleed,
evisceration, and fat turn to smoke,
not he had heard any angel speak
but felt sharply where the rope still cut,
how his own neck cracked, his own flesh burned…
Then the poet appears to say in his own voice,
“How we sons lay awake to ponder
the misery of such divided men
to whom the patriarchal lies come true.
My son shall not watch me in a fury
of faith take fire to the altar where
I sacrifice nothing I cherish.
Then, as premonition and description of what the poet dreads,
“He may feel my hands grab like priest hands,
his eyes may die in the brightness
that I have meant obedience entire.
So much I walked with my mad Abraham.”
I think we’re meant to catch the message that, as indignant as it makes us, we are not above repeating what this poet calls the madness of Abraham.
One last poet drives this home, Wilfred Owen, himself a sacrificial victim in World War I, about which he writes in “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young”:
“So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretched forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.”
Owens imagines Abraham failing the test, refusing to listen, perpetuating the violence. And this Abraham is the governing power of each war-making nation that refuses to sacrifice its own pride.
No wonder we struggle with this story. It puts us squarely in the ancient sandals of Abraham.
We have seen how he is tested. How the peoples of Sudan are tested. We all are tested, day by day, to see what can be built of us, by us, set upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone. May it be a holy temple acceptable to God, shaped not by prevailing culture but by the mind and will of God that we are called to hear.
(The poems quoted can be found in Chapters into Verse: Poetry in English Inspired by the Bible, Volume 1, edited by Robert Atwan and Laurance Wieder, published by Oxford University Press, 1993)
Monday, June 27, 2011
Friday, June 24, 2011
The Knottie Trinity
Scripture for Trinity Sunday includes Genesis 1:1-2:4a; II Corinthians 13:11-13; Matthew 28:16-20
Let’s see: Trinity Sunday… Fathers’ Day… Trinity Sunday… Fathers’ Day… ? Trinity Sunday and Fathers’ Day?
Sure, both can be our subject today, and this is eased by an overlap with that first member of the Holy Trinity: Father.
And a father—any father—will serve as an illustration of what the doctrine of the Trinity says, and doesn’t say. Dan, for example, is a father. He is also a son. And he is also a friend.
I know you rounded those first two corners with me: Dan as father, and as son-- both identities echo the first two natures of God. You were expecting something to parallel the Holy Spirit, and what I gave you is friend. Three weeks ago, when I last preached, I brought to our discussion of the Holy Spirit, third person of the divine, Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of the traditional names Advocate or Counselor, his preference: Friend. One who knows you so well that it comes as second nature to stand up for you, champion you, guide you with the personal attention, affection, and fearlessness of a natural coach.
So the same man stands as a father, a son, and a friend. These are three of his natures, and each helps make him who he is.
To further the analogy between the multiple identities of Dan and those of God, we’d need to speak of those three natures of his as three persons, for that is what we say of the Trinity.
And that’s where some mischief creeps in. Take “three persons” literally and you not only make God sound like a committee, but also wrap the whole of God in flesh and blood, reducing the spiritual to the physical. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity invites us to see God enfleshed in Jesus Christ, but the personhood of God the Father and of God the Spirit is not about fingernails and hair follicles. That God has three persons takes us into the realm of metaphor, which is the province of language.
For this, I needed a classics consultation. So I emailed both partners of our parish classicist couple, Amanda and Chris, with this question: Do I recall correctly that the Latin word “persona” has a special use in theater? Within hours, Chris emailed from Kansas, where they’re visiting family. His answer was Yes: In Roman theater the masks (worn by actors) were called “personae”, and very early that Latin word takes on the meaning of “character”. Chris offers to help us out here, so I’ll quote him: “Without looking into the history of ideas about the Trinity, I would guess that the term personae was used to communicate that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three different appearances/aspects of the same unitary divine nature—three characters played by the same actor. But I dimly recall that the Church fathers spent a lot of time arguing about the doctrine of the Trinity…”
Indeed they did. And if you want to sample what came of those arguments, our Book of Common Prayer has in the wayback a section titled Historical Documents. And there you’ll find the late 4th-early 5th-century Creed of Saint Athanasius. Let me give you a taste of it.
“…We worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity;
Neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance.
For there is one person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Spirit.
But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit is all one, the glory equal, the majesty coeternal.
Such as the Father is, such is the Son, and such is the Holy Spirit.
The Father uncreated, the Son uncreated, and the Holy Spirit uncreated.
The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the Holy Spirit incomprehensible.
The Father eternal, the Son eternal, and the Holy Spirit eternal.
And yet they are not three eternals but one eternal.
As also there are not three uncreated nor three incomprehensible, but one uncreated and one incomprehensible.
So likewise the Father is almighty, the Son almighty, and the Holy Spirit almighty.
And yet they are not three almighties, but one almighty.
So the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God;
And yet they are not three Gods, but one God.”
Whew!
That’s not the whole of the Athanasian Creed, just 14 of its 44 verses, well more than twice the length of the Nicene Creed, perhaps five times the length of the Iona Community Creed we will use today. Yes, there’s a reason you may have never heard of it. But it’s worth hearing this ancient text insist that what the doctrine of the Trinity does not say is that we worship three Gods.
What it does say is that there is one God engaging humanity in three ways, three ways-in to the character of the divine, three ways to relate to God.
One way is best expressed by the creative love that gives life as does a father, a mother, and binds that life in covenant love, compassion, mercy, and justice. To relate to this first person of the Trinity is to open ourselves to those same powers being formed in us.
A second way is best expressed by the Word made flesh, love enfleshed in the one who walks with us, Jesus the Christ, the Son of man and Son of God. To relate to this second person of the Trinity is to dare grow up into his likeness.
And a third way is best expressed by the Spirit that animates and transcends the physical, freeing creation to enjoy, worship, and serve its maker and redeemer. To relate to this third person of the Trinity is to entrust ourselves and one another to the wind that fills our sails, and to trust the still calm when for a while our sails are empty.
To say that these three personae are like the character masks of Roman theater could be misleading. The purpose of the Holy Trinity is not the masking of God, but the revealing of God, each revealing something more of the essential character of God. On the other hand, perhaps the notion that there is one actor behind these three character masks of God, one reality that each expresses in its distinct way, honestly says what we know: that God is often experienced as a hidden presence, is always a mystery to be known in mystical ways, and, when all is said and done, there’s an awful lot we do not know.
The one God engages us in three ways. Three ways-into the divine. Three ways to relate to God.
The Holy Trinity speaks to our minds, and seeks our hearts.
I was reminded of that as I prepared this sermon, and kept hearing a fragment of a poem: “Batter my heart, three-personed God…” was all I could remember. I looked it up, and there it was: one of John Donne’s nineteen Holy Sonnets.
I was drawn into three of those poems, and will print them here. You who love the King James Version of the Bible may enjoy the Elizabethan language of these poems—and, when a word stumps you, just wonder over it.
For example, in the third of these sonnets Donne calls the Trinity “knottie.” Isn’t that a wonderful word? It echoes his prayer in the first of these poems, that God would break the knot that ties us, betrothes us, to false gods. Christ frees us, then binds us to the one true God by tying the knot between our souls and the Holy Spirit in baptism.
So, if you’ll read these poems now, you’ll bring this sermon to its close. Notice that in the knottie language of the third sonnet we’re told what comes of God being made like man: by his Passion, Jesus Christ gives us the spiritual wealth by which we reclaim life that would otherwise be lost to us.
From John Donne’s “Holy Sonnets”
XIV
Batter my heart, three person'd God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend,
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow mee, and bend
Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt towne, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in mee, mee should defend,
But is captiv'd , and proves weake or untrue.
Yet dearely I love you, and would be loved faine,
But am betroth'd unto your enemie:
Divorce mee, untie, or breake that knot againe,
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.
XV
Wilt thou love God, as he thee? then digest,
My Soule, this wholsome meditation,
How God the Spirit, by Angels waited on
In heaven, doth make his Temple in thy brest.
The Father having begot a Sonne most blest,
And still begetting, (for he ne'r begonne)
Hath deign'd to chuse thee by adoption,
Coheire to his glory, and Sabbaths endlesse rest;
And as a robb'd man, which by search doth finde
His stolne stuffe sold, must lose or buy it againe;
The Sonne of glory came downe, and was slaine,
Us whom he had made, and Satan stolne, to unbinde.
'Twas much, that man was made like God before,
But, that God should be made like man, much more.
XVI
Father, part of his double interest
Unto thy kingdome, thy Sonne gives to mee,
His joynture in the knottie Trinitie
Hee keepes, and gives to me his deaths conquest.
This Lambe, whose death, with life the world hath blest,
Was from the worlds beginning slaine, and he
Hath made two Wills, which with the Legacie
Of his and thy kingdome, doe thy Sonnes invest.
Yet such are thy laws, that men argue yet
Whether a man those statutes can fulfill;
None doth; but all-healing grace and spirit
Revive againe what law and letter kill.
Thy lawes abridgement, and thy last command
Is all but love; Oh let this last Will stand!
Let’s see: Trinity Sunday… Fathers’ Day… Trinity Sunday… Fathers’ Day… ? Trinity Sunday and Fathers’ Day?
Sure, both can be our subject today, and this is eased by an overlap with that first member of the Holy Trinity: Father.
And a father—any father—will serve as an illustration of what the doctrine of the Trinity says, and doesn’t say. Dan, for example, is a father. He is also a son. And he is also a friend.
I know you rounded those first two corners with me: Dan as father, and as son-- both identities echo the first two natures of God. You were expecting something to parallel the Holy Spirit, and what I gave you is friend. Three weeks ago, when I last preached, I brought to our discussion of the Holy Spirit, third person of the divine, Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of the traditional names Advocate or Counselor, his preference: Friend. One who knows you so well that it comes as second nature to stand up for you, champion you, guide you with the personal attention, affection, and fearlessness of a natural coach.
So the same man stands as a father, a son, and a friend. These are three of his natures, and each helps make him who he is.
To further the analogy between the multiple identities of Dan and those of God, we’d need to speak of those three natures of his as three persons, for that is what we say of the Trinity.
And that’s where some mischief creeps in. Take “three persons” literally and you not only make God sound like a committee, but also wrap the whole of God in flesh and blood, reducing the spiritual to the physical. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity invites us to see God enfleshed in Jesus Christ, but the personhood of God the Father and of God the Spirit is not about fingernails and hair follicles. That God has three persons takes us into the realm of metaphor, which is the province of language.
For this, I needed a classics consultation. So I emailed both partners of our parish classicist couple, Amanda and Chris, with this question: Do I recall correctly that the Latin word “persona” has a special use in theater? Within hours, Chris emailed from Kansas, where they’re visiting family. His answer was Yes: In Roman theater the masks (worn by actors) were called “personae”, and very early that Latin word takes on the meaning of “character”. Chris offers to help us out here, so I’ll quote him: “Without looking into the history of ideas about the Trinity, I would guess that the term personae was used to communicate that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three different appearances/aspects of the same unitary divine nature—three characters played by the same actor. But I dimly recall that the Church fathers spent a lot of time arguing about the doctrine of the Trinity…”
Indeed they did. And if you want to sample what came of those arguments, our Book of Common Prayer has in the wayback a section titled Historical Documents. And there you’ll find the late 4th-early 5th-century Creed of Saint Athanasius. Let me give you a taste of it.
“…We worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity;
Neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance.
For there is one person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Spirit.
But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit is all one, the glory equal, the majesty coeternal.
Such as the Father is, such is the Son, and such is the Holy Spirit.
The Father uncreated, the Son uncreated, and the Holy Spirit uncreated.
The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the Holy Spirit incomprehensible.
The Father eternal, the Son eternal, and the Holy Spirit eternal.
And yet they are not three eternals but one eternal.
As also there are not three uncreated nor three incomprehensible, but one uncreated and one incomprehensible.
So likewise the Father is almighty, the Son almighty, and the Holy Spirit almighty.
And yet they are not three almighties, but one almighty.
So the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God;
And yet they are not three Gods, but one God.”
Whew!
That’s not the whole of the Athanasian Creed, just 14 of its 44 verses, well more than twice the length of the Nicene Creed, perhaps five times the length of the Iona Community Creed we will use today. Yes, there’s a reason you may have never heard of it. But it’s worth hearing this ancient text insist that what the doctrine of the Trinity does not say is that we worship three Gods.
What it does say is that there is one God engaging humanity in three ways, three ways-in to the character of the divine, three ways to relate to God.
One way is best expressed by the creative love that gives life as does a father, a mother, and binds that life in covenant love, compassion, mercy, and justice. To relate to this first person of the Trinity is to open ourselves to those same powers being formed in us.
A second way is best expressed by the Word made flesh, love enfleshed in the one who walks with us, Jesus the Christ, the Son of man and Son of God. To relate to this second person of the Trinity is to dare grow up into his likeness.
And a third way is best expressed by the Spirit that animates and transcends the physical, freeing creation to enjoy, worship, and serve its maker and redeemer. To relate to this third person of the Trinity is to entrust ourselves and one another to the wind that fills our sails, and to trust the still calm when for a while our sails are empty.
To say that these three personae are like the character masks of Roman theater could be misleading. The purpose of the Holy Trinity is not the masking of God, but the revealing of God, each revealing something more of the essential character of God. On the other hand, perhaps the notion that there is one actor behind these three character masks of God, one reality that each expresses in its distinct way, honestly says what we know: that God is often experienced as a hidden presence, is always a mystery to be known in mystical ways, and, when all is said and done, there’s an awful lot we do not know.
The one God engages us in three ways. Three ways-into the divine. Three ways to relate to God.
The Holy Trinity speaks to our minds, and seeks our hearts.
I was reminded of that as I prepared this sermon, and kept hearing a fragment of a poem: “Batter my heart, three-personed God…” was all I could remember. I looked it up, and there it was: one of John Donne’s nineteen Holy Sonnets.
I was drawn into three of those poems, and will print them here. You who love the King James Version of the Bible may enjoy the Elizabethan language of these poems—and, when a word stumps you, just wonder over it.
For example, in the third of these sonnets Donne calls the Trinity “knottie.” Isn’t that a wonderful word? It echoes his prayer in the first of these poems, that God would break the knot that ties us, betrothes us, to false gods. Christ frees us, then binds us to the one true God by tying the knot between our souls and the Holy Spirit in baptism.
So, if you’ll read these poems now, you’ll bring this sermon to its close. Notice that in the knottie language of the third sonnet we’re told what comes of God being made like man: by his Passion, Jesus Christ gives us the spiritual wealth by which we reclaim life that would otherwise be lost to us.
From John Donne’s “Holy Sonnets”
XIV
Batter my heart, three person'd God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend,
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow mee, and bend
Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt towne, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in mee, mee should defend,
But is captiv'd , and proves weake or untrue.
Yet dearely I love you, and would be loved faine,
But am betroth'd unto your enemie:
Divorce mee, untie, or breake that knot againe,
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.
XV
Wilt thou love God, as he thee? then digest,
My Soule, this wholsome meditation,
How God the Spirit, by Angels waited on
In heaven, doth make his Temple in thy brest.
The Father having begot a Sonne most blest,
And still begetting, (for he ne'r begonne)
Hath deign'd to chuse thee by adoption,
Coheire to his glory, and Sabbaths endlesse rest;
And as a robb'd man, which by search doth finde
His stolne stuffe sold, must lose or buy it againe;
The Sonne of glory came downe, and was slaine,
Us whom he had made, and Satan stolne, to unbinde.
'Twas much, that man was made like God before,
But, that God should be made like man, much more.
XVI
Father, part of his double interest
Unto thy kingdome, thy Sonne gives to mee,
His joynture in the knottie Trinitie
Hee keepes, and gives to me his deaths conquest.
This Lambe, whose death, with life the world hath blest,
Was from the worlds beginning slaine, and he
Hath made two Wills, which with the Legacie
Of his and thy kingdome, doe thy Sonnes invest.
Yet such are thy laws, that men argue yet
Whether a man those statutes can fulfill;
None doth; but all-healing grace and spirit
Revive againe what law and letter kill.
Thy lawes abridgement, and thy last command
Is all but love; Oh let this last Will stand!
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Make Way for the Advocate
Scripture for the 6th Sunday of Easter includes Acts 17:22-31, I Peter 3:13-22, and John 14:15-21
At Wednesday’s eucharist at Sweet Brook Care Center, I thought I’d test the currency of the word Advocate. “What is an advocate?” I asked, hoping the question might launch a seat-of-the-britches nursing home homily, but fearing it might just as likely sink it.
Scanning their faces, I thought “Note to self: think twice about starting out with a question like that,” when, clear as a bell, from the front row, the person directly in front of me, came this voice: “It’s someone who stands up for you, speaks for you in front of a magistrate.” Thank you, Joan.
From there it is a graciously short reach to grasp the barely-imaginable good news announced by Jesus: that in whatever trials we will face we will be represented, defended, counseled, by One whom God the Father will send to us.
If you’re a fan of the Christian Year, you know what season comes next. You also know that this One Jesus promises is the Holy Spirit, the very energy of God that we will celebrate on June 12th, the Day of Pentecost, and keep celebrating the following Sunday, Trinity Sunday, when we need our fingers to count the ways we and God encounter one another.
And if this One who will represent, defend, and counsel us sounds too airy-fairy to grab hold of, or to be able to embrace us, it might help to hear Lutheran re-voicer of scripture Eugene Peterson speak not of the Advocate, but the Friend (capital F) who will always be with us.
I find appealing the growing trend to speak of this Spirit of Truth, this third person of the Holy Trinity, as feminine in nature. That’s not a modern or novel idea; it rises from the period between Old and New Testaments, when the Wisdom literature of Israel personified Lady Wisdom, and subsequent Christians found it easy to imagine that this Lady Wisdom, said to be present at the creation of the universe, could be that Spirit of truth promised by the Christ who, according to the Gospel-writer John, was also present at the creation.
So indulge me, and argue with me later. I’m picturing the Advocate, the One sent from God with all the energy of God to defend, represent, and counsel us, as any one of an array of compassionate but tough, gracious but gritty female attorneys who could, even for a moment of fantasy, serve us metaphorically. Name your pick: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Martha Coakley, Sonja Sotamayor, or that passionate, intense, persistent and very hot Assistant DA on Law and Order (you know the one?). I’ll bet you can do a better job generating a list of candidates, but let’s not lose our focus…
Which is that when any one of us is in a time of trial, and must face any number of things that could go against us, for us and for our salvation stands one who speaks for us, who knows us better than we know ourselves, and whose role it is to speak the deepest truth, so moving the whole proceedings from the courtroom of fear to the sanctuary of faith.
Our scriptures today bear witness to what that deep truth is.
The concept of conscience is brought to us in the First Letter of Peter. By classic definition, conscience is the voice of God within us. By equally classic distortion of religion, that voice is quick to accuse and judge us guilty. But Peter speaks of conscience as if it were a sanctuary to be kept clear and open for the reconciling love of God to work on our behalf. Even more, he reminds us that baptism’s saving power is how it roots conscience in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. This takes conscience to a deeper place than right and wrong, innocent and guilty. The resurrection takes us to the purifying place where all that is human is bathed and renewed in all that is God, all that is limited in the limitless, the mortal in the eternal, the wounded in healing.
The deep truth the Advocate speaks is not that we are guilty, but that we are loved. I believe this good news is just as revolutionary and transformative in our 21st century as in our New Testament’s first century, and just as urgently needed to be heard. It is news that brings our souls to a new springtime, and frees the human will to love as boldly and generously as God in Christ loves all.
And there is Christianity’s best claim on our allegiance. That the voice of God-in-us calls the human race not to pour out more blood, sweat, and tears on more altars whether public or private, but to respect the dignity of every human being and learn to live up to the full stature of Christ, not live down to the common denominators of fear, greed, blame, and self-serving power.
Which brings us to our lesson from the Book of Acts. There we find the apostle Paul, a Jew trained in the rabbinic model of religious argument, reaching out to philosophical Greeks in their great city, Athens. He presents credentials meant to open Greek ears, the talent to carefully observe and reflect upon the phenomena of life. He says little judgmentally about the various shrines he must have seen, shrines that glorified those traits that made the Greek gods what they were, displaying those attributes by the art of craftsmen in gold, silver, and stone. But he implies that these various altars and shrines required endless offerings by human hands, and I think we hear, barely below the surface of Paul’s words, his inner conviction that what he saw was idolatry, the worshiping of something human or manmade as if it were God, and it isn’t.
But he sits on that judgment and rather deftly addresses these Greeks as a religious audience in a religious way about religious matters, looking for a religious response. And like any good commencement speaker (and it is very much a commencing that Paul intends), he uses a local site layered with legend to catch the attention and open the minds and hearts of his audience.
Somewhere in Athens, he has found an altar with the inscription, “To an unknown god.” For Paul, this is like finding the gene in the genome that opens the future to new life, restoring the wholeness of the body. He is able to use this evidence to remind the Greeks that by their own light they have recognized that there is more to the divine than they know, and Paul names this the Creator God who made the world and everything in it, all nations, all people. (This is, you know, how Israel described God.) Here is an altar that shows recognition of religion as claiming something much more than tribal or nationalistic or idolatrous allegiance. Here is a religion that may be of the mind and of the heart and of the will. And Paul intends to ride this horse right into the corral of Jesus Christ, and hope someone follows him (a small number do, and so a Christian congregation is born in Athens).
He builds a sympathetic case. This God who has made the very web of life has planted in us the desire to know him, the urge to search for God “and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us.” This may sound less like Paul the Rabbi and more like Paul presenting himself as a philosopher like Socrates, while in fact being true to his calling to be a winsome truth-teller like Jesus.
The point Paul drives home in Athens is the same he makes in Corinth and Rome and every other city he visits: that the one true God has not left us comfortless, has not left us to our own devices to find truth and to know the Holy One. God has taken on our human flesh in Jesus of Nazareth and by his resurrection has completely revealed this Jesus as the Christ so that through him the world may be set right, one person, one household, one community at a time. “In him we live and move and have our being,” wrote an unnamed Stoic philosopher; and to this Paul says, “Yes, and now it is up to each person to enter that truth, lay claim to it, make the astonishing discovery that what God says to each is not ‘I judge you,’ but ‘I love you,’ and thereby frees each person from the ancient way of blame, frees each person for the new life of self-giving love.”
Such is the freedom we claim today for Nicholas and Diego. What is truly ours to claim is a joyful responsibility to introduce these boys to a religion of the heart and mind and will, one that will have more appeal than the altars of 21st-century gods of gold, silver, stone, success, technology, sensation, and violence—all the powers that fall far short of love. Religion can fall far short of love, too, and what we wangt for Diego and Nicholas is a dose of St. Paul’s insight that by our own best light there is more to know of God than we yet know.
We, their families, their Godparents, their Church will fulfill our responsibility best by deeply hearing, receiving, and treasuring the Advocate, the Friend, the relentless voice of love that frees us to be agents of the very energy of God.
At Wednesday’s eucharist at Sweet Brook Care Center, I thought I’d test the currency of the word Advocate. “What is an advocate?” I asked, hoping the question might launch a seat-of-the-britches nursing home homily, but fearing it might just as likely sink it.
Scanning their faces, I thought “Note to self: think twice about starting out with a question like that,” when, clear as a bell, from the front row, the person directly in front of me, came this voice: “It’s someone who stands up for you, speaks for you in front of a magistrate.” Thank you, Joan.
From there it is a graciously short reach to grasp the barely-imaginable good news announced by Jesus: that in whatever trials we will face we will be represented, defended, counseled, by One whom God the Father will send to us.
If you’re a fan of the Christian Year, you know what season comes next. You also know that this One Jesus promises is the Holy Spirit, the very energy of God that we will celebrate on June 12th, the Day of Pentecost, and keep celebrating the following Sunday, Trinity Sunday, when we need our fingers to count the ways we and God encounter one another.
And if this One who will represent, defend, and counsel us sounds too airy-fairy to grab hold of, or to be able to embrace us, it might help to hear Lutheran re-voicer of scripture Eugene Peterson speak not of the Advocate, but the Friend (capital F) who will always be with us.
I find appealing the growing trend to speak of this Spirit of Truth, this third person of the Holy Trinity, as feminine in nature. That’s not a modern or novel idea; it rises from the period between Old and New Testaments, when the Wisdom literature of Israel personified Lady Wisdom, and subsequent Christians found it easy to imagine that this Lady Wisdom, said to be present at the creation of the universe, could be that Spirit of truth promised by the Christ who, according to the Gospel-writer John, was also present at the creation.
So indulge me, and argue with me later. I’m picturing the Advocate, the One sent from God with all the energy of God to defend, represent, and counsel us, as any one of an array of compassionate but tough, gracious but gritty female attorneys who could, even for a moment of fantasy, serve us metaphorically. Name your pick: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Martha Coakley, Sonja Sotamayor, or that passionate, intense, persistent and very hot Assistant DA on Law and Order (you know the one?). I’ll bet you can do a better job generating a list of candidates, but let’s not lose our focus…
Which is that when any one of us is in a time of trial, and must face any number of things that could go against us, for us and for our salvation stands one who speaks for us, who knows us better than we know ourselves, and whose role it is to speak the deepest truth, so moving the whole proceedings from the courtroom of fear to the sanctuary of faith.
Our scriptures today bear witness to what that deep truth is.
The concept of conscience is brought to us in the First Letter of Peter. By classic definition, conscience is the voice of God within us. By equally classic distortion of religion, that voice is quick to accuse and judge us guilty. But Peter speaks of conscience as if it were a sanctuary to be kept clear and open for the reconciling love of God to work on our behalf. Even more, he reminds us that baptism’s saving power is how it roots conscience in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. This takes conscience to a deeper place than right and wrong, innocent and guilty. The resurrection takes us to the purifying place where all that is human is bathed and renewed in all that is God, all that is limited in the limitless, the mortal in the eternal, the wounded in healing.
The deep truth the Advocate speaks is not that we are guilty, but that we are loved. I believe this good news is just as revolutionary and transformative in our 21st century as in our New Testament’s first century, and just as urgently needed to be heard. It is news that brings our souls to a new springtime, and frees the human will to love as boldly and generously as God in Christ loves all.
And there is Christianity’s best claim on our allegiance. That the voice of God-in-us calls the human race not to pour out more blood, sweat, and tears on more altars whether public or private, but to respect the dignity of every human being and learn to live up to the full stature of Christ, not live down to the common denominators of fear, greed, blame, and self-serving power.
Which brings us to our lesson from the Book of Acts. There we find the apostle Paul, a Jew trained in the rabbinic model of religious argument, reaching out to philosophical Greeks in their great city, Athens. He presents credentials meant to open Greek ears, the talent to carefully observe and reflect upon the phenomena of life. He says little judgmentally about the various shrines he must have seen, shrines that glorified those traits that made the Greek gods what they were, displaying those attributes by the art of craftsmen in gold, silver, and stone. But he implies that these various altars and shrines required endless offerings by human hands, and I think we hear, barely below the surface of Paul’s words, his inner conviction that what he saw was idolatry, the worshiping of something human or manmade as if it were God, and it isn’t.
But he sits on that judgment and rather deftly addresses these Greeks as a religious audience in a religious way about religious matters, looking for a religious response. And like any good commencement speaker (and it is very much a commencing that Paul intends), he uses a local site layered with legend to catch the attention and open the minds and hearts of his audience.
Somewhere in Athens, he has found an altar with the inscription, “To an unknown god.” For Paul, this is like finding the gene in the genome that opens the future to new life, restoring the wholeness of the body. He is able to use this evidence to remind the Greeks that by their own light they have recognized that there is more to the divine than they know, and Paul names this the Creator God who made the world and everything in it, all nations, all people. (This is, you know, how Israel described God.) Here is an altar that shows recognition of religion as claiming something much more than tribal or nationalistic or idolatrous allegiance. Here is a religion that may be of the mind and of the heart and of the will. And Paul intends to ride this horse right into the corral of Jesus Christ, and hope someone follows him (a small number do, and so a Christian congregation is born in Athens).
He builds a sympathetic case. This God who has made the very web of life has planted in us the desire to know him, the urge to search for God “and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us.” This may sound less like Paul the Rabbi and more like Paul presenting himself as a philosopher like Socrates, while in fact being true to his calling to be a winsome truth-teller like Jesus.
The point Paul drives home in Athens is the same he makes in Corinth and Rome and every other city he visits: that the one true God has not left us comfortless, has not left us to our own devices to find truth and to know the Holy One. God has taken on our human flesh in Jesus of Nazareth and by his resurrection has completely revealed this Jesus as the Christ so that through him the world may be set right, one person, one household, one community at a time. “In him we live and move and have our being,” wrote an unnamed Stoic philosopher; and to this Paul says, “Yes, and now it is up to each person to enter that truth, lay claim to it, make the astonishing discovery that what God says to each is not ‘I judge you,’ but ‘I love you,’ and thereby frees each person from the ancient way of blame, frees each person for the new life of self-giving love.”
Such is the freedom we claim today for Nicholas and Diego. What is truly ours to claim is a joyful responsibility to introduce these boys to a religion of the heart and mind and will, one that will have more appeal than the altars of 21st-century gods of gold, silver, stone, success, technology, sensation, and violence—all the powers that fall far short of love. Religion can fall far short of love, too, and what we wangt for Diego and Nicholas is a dose of St. Paul’s insight that by our own best light there is more to know of God than we yet know.
We, their families, their Godparents, their Church will fulfill our responsibility best by deeply hearing, receiving, and treasuring the Advocate, the Friend, the relentless voice of love that frees us to be agents of the very energy of God.
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Planting Good Seed in a Time of Terror
Scripture for the third Sunday of Easter includes Acts 2:14a, 36-41; Psalm 116: 1-3, 10-17; I Peter 1:17-23; Luke 24:13-35
I find this Gospel story from the road to Emmaus deeply satisfying.
To start with, it presents Jesus Christ as our companion in pilgrimage. We’re always on our way somewhere, and so is he. There will be times when he comes near us and journeys with us. We may or may not notice him, recognize him. He may or may not help us recognize him: he may play us on the line the way he did those two disciples. They were hooked in dialogue with him, but he kept on feeding them all the line they needed to swim in great figure eights under his boat until, exhausted, they’re landed and he pulls out of their pitiable mouths the sharp hook of their grief and frees them.
I know, I just turned that into a fish story. You don’t have to hear it that way to find it satisfying.
But it’s that disconnect between the disciples and their familiar teacher that’s so fascinating, isn’t it? He draws near to them, but he sees no spark of awareness in their eyes, which are glassed-over by pain and loss. Is he unrecognizable because of his three days of torture, assassination, and harrowing of hell? Could be, though Luke doesn ‘t invite us to go there.
Quite simply, Jesus calls them out of their tomb by a most superficial question, “What are you talking about?”
Then comes the delicious moment when they answer, “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who doesn’t know?”
“Know what?” he plays along.
Then comes the part that later must have caused these two to slap their foreheads: they lay it all out to him, what he has just gone through, and along the way they drop a few clues about their own short-sightedness. They call him a prophet, not the highest opinion of him in the circle of their peers (Peter, early on, knew that he was the Messiah, the anointed one of God). They tuck in their own disappointment (“But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel,” in other words the Messiah) as if he had somehow flunked the test. And their report of astonishment at the announcement by the women that his tomb was empty reveals how little these men had been paying attention to the promise of God, that justice and lovingkindness will prevail on earth as in heaven.
So, in perfect segue, Jesus upbraids them. “You seem to think that God has failed, that because you are in pain and grief, this suffering of the Messiah should never have happened. How foolish you are! How slow of heart to believe the deep truth of the prophets! Salvation comes in the shadow of judgment. First the Messiah takes on the full freight of human flesh, including suffering and death; then, having crossed through those perils, he is able to lead the human race into his own freedom. You’d rather have it some other way, would you? Like, God aiming the turret gun of his tank right at the imperial throne and blasting the powers of oppression to smithereens? That is so old, so lame, don’t you see that? These three dark days show God suffering with you, for you, to build in you a power that will leave human violence in the dust, the power of spirit and truth transcendent over terror and all that terror teaches.”
This Gospel could help us consider the recurring headline of this past week, America’s finding and killing Osama bin Laden. I’m not sure I can explain why, but I find these two disciples good companions as I try to make sense of what has happened. Maybe it’s because their story brings into focus a powerful history of suffering that can be told in different ways, from very different points of view, and on that road to Emmaus those viewpoints are brought into dialogue. And much to the point, that dialogue reveals two distinctly opposite understandings of power. Our Lord Jesus facilitates this dialogue and enters it fully. So must we.
You could say that the disciples enroute to Emmaus represent everyman and his instincts. You could also rightly say that they were representatives of the Church in its very first generation. In a sense, Luke the Gospel writer operates somewhat like a journalist, thrusting a microphone to the mouths of these men on the street.
Had a reporter done that to me last week, as happened doubtless to countless religious representatives around the world, with the question, “How do you respond to the killing of Bin Laden?”, I think I might have said—and still will say—that I am torn between the requirement of justice, satisfied that it finally caught up with this mass murderer, and on the very terms which he himself required by his outlaw way of daring us to find him. And, on the other hand, tearing apart that satisfaction is my certainty that if this midnight raid fulfills any holy scripture, it is that they who live by the sword will die by the sword.
Painfully, I have to apply that to us as well as to Osama bin Laden. When I do, I recognize that by spilling his blood we have forged one more link in the ancient chain of retribution, and that chain, now heavier by one more (and universally known) act of violence, weighs down the whole human race in bondage to the power of the iron fist. A verse of our psalm today echoes eerily when cast in the present tense, “ The cords of death entangle us; the grip of the grave takes hold of us; we come to grief and sorrow” as violence begets violence.
In a more perfect scenario, Bin Laden would have been captured, and perhaps killed nonetheless, by operatives of a Muslim nation, not by armed Americans; and with that, the ancient chain could have had its last link snapped apart, the otherwise endless dynamics of blame snuffed out, and the glory of martyrdom denied this man of violence. But we know too well that the Pakistani army would have no part in that dream scenario. Quite to the opposite, they appear to have been playing both ends of a game that resembles more a nightmare of deception and treachery.
It’s truly impressive how our intelligence community and our Navy Seals broke through the subterfuge and found the engineer of 9/11.
We’re discovering that there are differing narratives about what happened in that midnight raid. One early telling of the story suggested that a very different outcome was attempted, capturing Bin Laden rather than killing him. We’ll never know whether that could have resulted in more—or less—deterrence of terrorism.
We’re surely hoping that intelligence gained from computers seized in the raid, and what may be learned from Bin Laden’s wives, will hasten the disintegration of Al Qaeda. But I can’t help thinking that what I know about crabgrass gives me useful metaphors for understanding Al Qaeda: even with the measures I take to counter it, that pest is going to spring up along borders and will flourish in tricky patches that will keep its seed blowing in the wind long after I’m gone. In addition to countering it, my best intelligence tells me to plant good seed, healthy, hearty, desired grass in the thin spots where, otherwise, poverty ensures a new generation of trouble.
Translated out of the garden and into the world, that would be pre-emptive counter-terrorism that counts less on the iron fist of military action and ratchets-up our resourcing of intelligent foreign aid, out-of-the-box diplomacy, and imaginative re-envisioning of person-to-person initiatives like international youth exchange (though perhaps it’s we older adults who ought to be exchanging with one another, less likely to be mistaken as special operatives or spies) and what a 21st-century version of a Peace Corps would look like. There must be other examples of planting good seed, and we need to find them.
In an age when religion divides the peoples of the earth more and more sharply, followers of Jesus must freshly hear “the things about himself in all the scriptures”, paying close attention to those which make our hearts burn within us, never being surprised when these involve the breaking of bread, the sharing of resources, the open hand of what the apostle calls “genuine mutual love” which wields a surprisingly more resilient and liberating power than the iron fist.
That this is true is not because we wish it were, but because, as Jesus reveals to his roadside disciples, and as the apostle echoes, the God who created the universe “judges all people impartially according to their deeds,” and counters the futile ways inherited from our ancestors by extending to all the precious self-offering of Christ, freeing us to be “born anew, not of perishable but of imperishable seed, through the living and enduring Word of God.”
I find this Gospel story from the road to Emmaus deeply satisfying.
To start with, it presents Jesus Christ as our companion in pilgrimage. We’re always on our way somewhere, and so is he. There will be times when he comes near us and journeys with us. We may or may not notice him, recognize him. He may or may not help us recognize him: he may play us on the line the way he did those two disciples. They were hooked in dialogue with him, but he kept on feeding them all the line they needed to swim in great figure eights under his boat until, exhausted, they’re landed and he pulls out of their pitiable mouths the sharp hook of their grief and frees them.
I know, I just turned that into a fish story. You don’t have to hear it that way to find it satisfying.
But it’s that disconnect between the disciples and their familiar teacher that’s so fascinating, isn’t it? He draws near to them, but he sees no spark of awareness in their eyes, which are glassed-over by pain and loss. Is he unrecognizable because of his three days of torture, assassination, and harrowing of hell? Could be, though Luke doesn ‘t invite us to go there.
Quite simply, Jesus calls them out of their tomb by a most superficial question, “What are you talking about?”
Then comes the delicious moment when they answer, “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who doesn’t know?”
“Know what?” he plays along.
Then comes the part that later must have caused these two to slap their foreheads: they lay it all out to him, what he has just gone through, and along the way they drop a few clues about their own short-sightedness. They call him a prophet, not the highest opinion of him in the circle of their peers (Peter, early on, knew that he was the Messiah, the anointed one of God). They tuck in their own disappointment (“But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel,” in other words the Messiah) as if he had somehow flunked the test. And their report of astonishment at the announcement by the women that his tomb was empty reveals how little these men had been paying attention to the promise of God, that justice and lovingkindness will prevail on earth as in heaven.
So, in perfect segue, Jesus upbraids them. “You seem to think that God has failed, that because you are in pain and grief, this suffering of the Messiah should never have happened. How foolish you are! How slow of heart to believe the deep truth of the prophets! Salvation comes in the shadow of judgment. First the Messiah takes on the full freight of human flesh, including suffering and death; then, having crossed through those perils, he is able to lead the human race into his own freedom. You’d rather have it some other way, would you? Like, God aiming the turret gun of his tank right at the imperial throne and blasting the powers of oppression to smithereens? That is so old, so lame, don’t you see that? These three dark days show God suffering with you, for you, to build in you a power that will leave human violence in the dust, the power of spirit and truth transcendent over terror and all that terror teaches.”
This Gospel could help us consider the recurring headline of this past week, America’s finding and killing Osama bin Laden. I’m not sure I can explain why, but I find these two disciples good companions as I try to make sense of what has happened. Maybe it’s because their story brings into focus a powerful history of suffering that can be told in different ways, from very different points of view, and on that road to Emmaus those viewpoints are brought into dialogue. And much to the point, that dialogue reveals two distinctly opposite understandings of power. Our Lord Jesus facilitates this dialogue and enters it fully. So must we.
You could say that the disciples enroute to Emmaus represent everyman and his instincts. You could also rightly say that they were representatives of the Church in its very first generation. In a sense, Luke the Gospel writer operates somewhat like a journalist, thrusting a microphone to the mouths of these men on the street.
Had a reporter done that to me last week, as happened doubtless to countless religious representatives around the world, with the question, “How do you respond to the killing of Bin Laden?”, I think I might have said—and still will say—that I am torn between the requirement of justice, satisfied that it finally caught up with this mass murderer, and on the very terms which he himself required by his outlaw way of daring us to find him. And, on the other hand, tearing apart that satisfaction is my certainty that if this midnight raid fulfills any holy scripture, it is that they who live by the sword will die by the sword.
Painfully, I have to apply that to us as well as to Osama bin Laden. When I do, I recognize that by spilling his blood we have forged one more link in the ancient chain of retribution, and that chain, now heavier by one more (and universally known) act of violence, weighs down the whole human race in bondage to the power of the iron fist. A verse of our psalm today echoes eerily when cast in the present tense, “ The cords of death entangle us; the grip of the grave takes hold of us; we come to grief and sorrow” as violence begets violence.
In a more perfect scenario, Bin Laden would have been captured, and perhaps killed nonetheless, by operatives of a Muslim nation, not by armed Americans; and with that, the ancient chain could have had its last link snapped apart, the otherwise endless dynamics of blame snuffed out, and the glory of martyrdom denied this man of violence. But we know too well that the Pakistani army would have no part in that dream scenario. Quite to the opposite, they appear to have been playing both ends of a game that resembles more a nightmare of deception and treachery.
It’s truly impressive how our intelligence community and our Navy Seals broke through the subterfuge and found the engineer of 9/11.
We’re discovering that there are differing narratives about what happened in that midnight raid. One early telling of the story suggested that a very different outcome was attempted, capturing Bin Laden rather than killing him. We’ll never know whether that could have resulted in more—or less—deterrence of terrorism.
We’re surely hoping that intelligence gained from computers seized in the raid, and what may be learned from Bin Laden’s wives, will hasten the disintegration of Al Qaeda. But I can’t help thinking that what I know about crabgrass gives me useful metaphors for understanding Al Qaeda: even with the measures I take to counter it, that pest is going to spring up along borders and will flourish in tricky patches that will keep its seed blowing in the wind long after I’m gone. In addition to countering it, my best intelligence tells me to plant good seed, healthy, hearty, desired grass in the thin spots where, otherwise, poverty ensures a new generation of trouble.
Translated out of the garden and into the world, that would be pre-emptive counter-terrorism that counts less on the iron fist of military action and ratchets-up our resourcing of intelligent foreign aid, out-of-the-box diplomacy, and imaginative re-envisioning of person-to-person initiatives like international youth exchange (though perhaps it’s we older adults who ought to be exchanging with one another, less likely to be mistaken as special operatives or spies) and what a 21st-century version of a Peace Corps would look like. There must be other examples of planting good seed, and we need to find them.
In an age when religion divides the peoples of the earth more and more sharply, followers of Jesus must freshly hear “the things about himself in all the scriptures”, paying close attention to those which make our hearts burn within us, never being surprised when these involve the breaking of bread, the sharing of resources, the open hand of what the apostle calls “genuine mutual love” which wields a surprisingly more resilient and liberating power than the iron fist.
That this is true is not because we wish it were, but because, as Jesus reveals to his roadside disciples, and as the apostle echoes, the God who created the universe “judges all people impartially according to their deeds,” and counters the futile ways inherited from our ancestors by extending to all the precious self-offering of Christ, freeing us to be “born anew, not of perishable but of imperishable seed, through the living and enduring Word of God.”
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Finding the Easter Power
Scripture for Easter Day includes Acts 10:34-43; Colossians 3:1-4; John 20:1-18
There’s a lot of violence behind that story of Easter Day. Did you hear it?
Brave Mary Magdalene rose early, before the sun, to face an awful walk to the graveyard where her dearest friend’s body lay freshly buried after his horrifying death by crucifixion. A shocking violent death for a sweet man, Jesus, whom she loved. That violence claimed a part of her, in the way that trauma leaves its mark.
She trembled when she saw the enormous stone, not where it should be, covering his grave, but rolled away. To her, this meant that more violence had come—but from where? From those same brutal imperial soldiers who had beaten him, bullied him, done the unthinkable to fasten his body to the beams of a cross? Or was this new violence from the earth, an earthquake shifting that great stone?
Brave Mary Magdalene had not let the darkness before dawn keep her from his side, but now she ran to find Simon Peter and the other disciples, of whom she was one. By then she’s describing this new violence as human: they have taken the Lord—we don’t know where!
Quickly, before the sun’s rising could expose them to the iron fist of the emperor’s men whose only care was to snuff out every life that could disturb the emperor’s peace, quickly now Peter and John ran to that graveyard to be sure Mary had the right spot, to see for themselves if they must suffer the loss of what peace it gave them to know where he lay.
Their quick daring of danger showed them how right Mary was. Then they saw more than what she described: Jesus’s burial shroud lay discarded on the floor of the tomb, as if Jesus had shed those long bands of cloth just Friday wrapped around him, like a great luna moth erupting from its chrysalis.
As yet they did not understand. St. John the gospel writer tells us that: they had not yet shed their own tight grasp and recognized what God was doing (which was what God had long promised), not yet opened their minds and hearts to dare believe that death could not stop Jesus from being with them always.
These men were only so daring. Now, fast, they ran back into hiding before they could be scooped up as rebels to be crucified. But brave Mary Magdalene remained by his grave.
Weeping. Through those tears, she peered into the tomb, and where the men had seen discarded linen, she saw two angels in white. Were her tears distorting what she saw, or were those cleansing tears what it took to reveal the more the others missed? The angels ask her why she’s crying. Does she wonder whether angels aren’t as sharp as they’re thought to be, that they ask her this? Or is it that she can’t yet hear their message, “You don’t need to cry any more,” as if the ears of her heart need freeing, like the eyes of her mind.
Something makes her turn around. Something is reflected in the eyes of those angels. Or someone…
Standing there is Jesus, but she doesn’t yet know this, her eyes are still washed in her tears; but it’s her hearing that he engages as he asks the angels’ question again (Why are you weeping?) and adds his own, “Whom are you looking for?”
The best she can make of what she sees is that he must be the cemetery gardener, so, sensibly, she asks for his help in finding Jesus. Then, by one word, in one rush of breath as Word becomes flesh, Mary’s ears of the heart are freed as she hears him call her, “Mary!” In this story, that is Mary’s tipping point, opening all her senses to receive what is happening.
She does not move backward in time when she utters her one word, “Teacher!” By that word, she tells him that she recognizes him and trusts what is happening now. To make sure that she moves forward with him, Jesus teaches her the new footing of their love: Do not hold on to me in the old way— from now on I live within you, I live among the open-hearted community of believers, and I live in the world to love it into what it will become as God’s new creation, through you.
Brave Mary Magdalene, first disciple to follow Jesus beyond fear of death, into new life. In her tears, she encourages us to be honest with our feelings. In her staying close to Jesus, she teaches us patience and courage in asking the questions that will show us who he is. In the opening of her senses to recognize him, she shows us how conversion of life is our becoming open to the tender gracious forever-open heart of God, the source of a power so different from the sort that emperors and armies have-- lasting, creative, peace-making, and open to all who are willing to receive it.
There is a lot of violence in our world today. This world needs many more open hearts to move with Mary’s bravery to find the Easter power that is stronger than the iron fist.
There’s a lot of violence behind that story of Easter Day. Did you hear it?
Brave Mary Magdalene rose early, before the sun, to face an awful walk to the graveyard where her dearest friend’s body lay freshly buried after his horrifying death by crucifixion. A shocking violent death for a sweet man, Jesus, whom she loved. That violence claimed a part of her, in the way that trauma leaves its mark.
She trembled when she saw the enormous stone, not where it should be, covering his grave, but rolled away. To her, this meant that more violence had come—but from where? From those same brutal imperial soldiers who had beaten him, bullied him, done the unthinkable to fasten his body to the beams of a cross? Or was this new violence from the earth, an earthquake shifting that great stone?
Brave Mary Magdalene had not let the darkness before dawn keep her from his side, but now she ran to find Simon Peter and the other disciples, of whom she was one. By then she’s describing this new violence as human: they have taken the Lord—we don’t know where!
Quickly, before the sun’s rising could expose them to the iron fist of the emperor’s men whose only care was to snuff out every life that could disturb the emperor’s peace, quickly now Peter and John ran to that graveyard to be sure Mary had the right spot, to see for themselves if they must suffer the loss of what peace it gave them to know where he lay.
Their quick daring of danger showed them how right Mary was. Then they saw more than what she described: Jesus’s burial shroud lay discarded on the floor of the tomb, as if Jesus had shed those long bands of cloth just Friday wrapped around him, like a great luna moth erupting from its chrysalis.
As yet they did not understand. St. John the gospel writer tells us that: they had not yet shed their own tight grasp and recognized what God was doing (which was what God had long promised), not yet opened their minds and hearts to dare believe that death could not stop Jesus from being with them always.
These men were only so daring. Now, fast, they ran back into hiding before they could be scooped up as rebels to be crucified. But brave Mary Magdalene remained by his grave.
Weeping. Through those tears, she peered into the tomb, and where the men had seen discarded linen, she saw two angels in white. Were her tears distorting what she saw, or were those cleansing tears what it took to reveal the more the others missed? The angels ask her why she’s crying. Does she wonder whether angels aren’t as sharp as they’re thought to be, that they ask her this? Or is it that she can’t yet hear their message, “You don’t need to cry any more,” as if the ears of her heart need freeing, like the eyes of her mind.
Something makes her turn around. Something is reflected in the eyes of those angels. Or someone…
Standing there is Jesus, but she doesn’t yet know this, her eyes are still washed in her tears; but it’s her hearing that he engages as he asks the angels’ question again (Why are you weeping?) and adds his own, “Whom are you looking for?”
The best she can make of what she sees is that he must be the cemetery gardener, so, sensibly, she asks for his help in finding Jesus. Then, by one word, in one rush of breath as Word becomes flesh, Mary’s ears of the heart are freed as she hears him call her, “Mary!” In this story, that is Mary’s tipping point, opening all her senses to receive what is happening.
She does not move backward in time when she utters her one word, “Teacher!” By that word, she tells him that she recognizes him and trusts what is happening now. To make sure that she moves forward with him, Jesus teaches her the new footing of their love: Do not hold on to me in the old way— from now on I live within you, I live among the open-hearted community of believers, and I live in the world to love it into what it will become as God’s new creation, through you.
Brave Mary Magdalene, first disciple to follow Jesus beyond fear of death, into new life. In her tears, she encourages us to be honest with our feelings. In her staying close to Jesus, she teaches us patience and courage in asking the questions that will show us who he is. In the opening of her senses to recognize him, she shows us how conversion of life is our becoming open to the tender gracious forever-open heart of God, the source of a power so different from the sort that emperors and armies have-- lasting, creative, peace-making, and open to all who are willing to receive it.
There is a lot of violence in our world today. This world needs many more open hearts to move with Mary’s bravery to find the Easter power that is stronger than the iron fist.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Seer and Seen
Scripture for the 4th Sunday in Lent includes I Samuel 16:1-13; Ephesians 5:8-14; John 9:1-41
Sight is a theme that unites our readings today. Sent by God to find the next King of Israel, the prophet Samuel must first clear his eyes of tears so he may see. His grief over the failure and decline of the current King Saul still finds him crying. Everything is a blur. God appears to lack compassion, urging Samuel to snap out of it and get on the road that will lead him to Jesse the Bethlehemite; it is one of his sons God has chosen to become King. There is where we see divine compassion: knowing that King Saul is in breakdown, God will not allow Israel to be a flock without a shepherd.
This assignment lands Samuel at a sacrificial ceremony where the elders of Bethlehem are gathered. Samuel ritually cleanses Jesse and his assembled sons so they may attend the feast, and as he examines the first of them, presumably the eldest, God interrupts with a puzzling lesson on the subject of seeing.
“Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected this one; for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.”
One by one, I suspect in descending birth order, seven of Jesse’s sons pass before Samuel, and, in each case, Samuel says, Nope.
“Are all your sons here?” Samuel asks Jesse. “Are you holding back on me?”
“All my sons who amount to anything are here,” we might imagine Jesse answering, with some surprise. “Each of these has proven himself, one way or another. One handles his sword like it was an extension of his arm. Another shoots his spear with deadly aim. This one handles public speaking with the ease of an actor. Over here is my business wizard. They’re all born leaders. I’m not so sure about the youngest boy. Number eight. He’s keeping the sheep. That seems to suit him. Kind of a puzzler, that boy. Don’t know what to make of him.”
“Send and bring him,” orders Samuel, “for we will not sit down until he comes here.”
David was not expecting to attend the sacrifice. He couldn’t have been dressed, even washed, for the occasion. The smell of the sheepfold had to be about him, as in he came from the fields.
You might want to look at David in this next to last window in the west aisle as you hear the author of I Samuel describe him: “Now he was ruddy, and had beautiful eyes, and was handsome.” There is what another David, David Maitland Armstrong, American painter and stained glass designer of the Gilded Age, made of that description in 1896.
Is it a bit puzzling that after a cautionary lecture on not looking on the outward appearance, the four things we’re told about David is that he was young, ruddy, had beautiful eyes, and was handsome? Presumably, God looked on his heart and found qualities there that suited him for Israel’s throne (even if he would wreck a marriage and betray his most loyal soldier, abusing the authority of that throne).
“Once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Live as children of light…” writes the apostle to the Christians at Ephesus. Everyone has clay feet, things they’re ashamed of; all have sinned and fallen short of their God-given glory. But the Lord God, the one who looks upon the heart, in Jesus Christ sees each of us in the light of Christ’s risen glory. That light exposes everything about us, and exposes us to everything in Christ so that the apostle can say, “in the Lord you are light.” As we become fully visible ourselves by Christ shining within us, we learn how to see each other in his light.
The old darkness is palpable as Jesus’s disciples see a man who has been blind from birth. These same disciples will one day be seers of the resurrection and apostles who train others to recognize the Christ in all persons—but they are not yet there. They look at this man and see a plight that must be explained, they see a damaged life that they assume is punishment for someone’s having sinned. While we’re tempted to judge them as ignoramuses, in fact they’re showing a certain religious training that puts everything in dreadfully neat little boxes of explanation, an attempt to keep suffering and mystery at bay by believing that bad things happen to bad people, and good things to good people.
To my eye, the most important and most beautiful moment in this Gospel is our Lord’s answer to their obnoxious question, “Who sinned, this man or his parents?” “Neither! He was born blind, and God’s works will be revealed in him. It us up to us to do those works of God while we have light to see by. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” We hear a premonition of Good Friday there (“as long as I am in the world”), though from our vantage point we can rejoice that the light that makes us who we are will swiftly penetrate that darkness universally once and for all.
But at this moment on that Judean roadside, the difference between how Jesus sees this blind man and how his disciples view him is in sharp contrast, more dramatic than day and night. The way the disciples see him, they keep him at arm’s length. The way Jesus sees draws him to this man to touch him, first mystifying us with what looks like a ritual—or is it an example of folk medicine?—as he spits into the sand, makes a poultice of that mud, and spreads it on the man’s eyes. The very substance that you and I would go to any extreme to keep out of our eyes, sand, is what serves in this healing. Perhaps the one thing we understand is our Lord’s directions for followup care: go and wash. Go and wash in a certain pool with the name Siloam, near which was an aqueduct named Shiloah (meaning “sender of water”, a perfect description of an aqueduct). But John takes the pool’s name, Siloam, to mean “the One who was sent,” underlining in his story the nature and purpose of Jesus.
In other words, this is not just a healing. This is one more example of the perfect obedience Jesus shows to his God-given purpose, to restore our human nature to its intended divine likeness.
Which is to say that compassion is a power that extends exponentially, a gift that keeps on giving. The kingdom of God, the reign of God that is established in Jesus Christ, the new creation, can be understood as the global movement of his compassion apostolically sent by way of us. Here is one way to understand the astonishing vision at the heart of Christian baptism, that each of us is to grow into the full stature of Christ.
And it all depends on how we see the person we’re looking at. Jesus’s way of seeing—and it’s very much the way of the prophets announced by Samuel—is not upon a person’s appearance, stature, status, intellect, or curriculum vitae, but upon the heart, where the image of God pulses, however strong, however weak. In that seeing, the seer cannot be above the seen: they stand in radical equality as children of the Most High who dwells within.
But how can this blind man and this itinerant healer be called equal? One has no sight. Here, with this recognition, the seeing done by the disciples stops, arrested by the rules of a zero-sum game.
Neuroscientist Oliver Sacks helps us out. He writes about how, in the brain of a blind person, there is sensory redistribution. This person’s other senses are used by the brain to help compensate for what is lacking optically. Even the tongue, says Sacks, can be trained to gather stimuli that the brain can process as images.
There is a good starting point for disciples developing humane ways of seeing: let it start with awe at how the divine image is already pulsing within the person we would see. Our seeing of a person we could call disabled can begin with deep respect for how ably this person navigates life. Humane compassionate seeing starts with all that puts seer and seen on the same road.
Then what may mystify us is free to move through us. Into the spit, sweat, blood, and tears that compassionate action may require. To a stepping outside the box of what tradition approves, as we rise to obey what the divine image requires and accomplishes.
Sight is a theme that unites our readings today. Sent by God to find the next King of Israel, the prophet Samuel must first clear his eyes of tears so he may see. His grief over the failure and decline of the current King Saul still finds him crying. Everything is a blur. God appears to lack compassion, urging Samuel to snap out of it and get on the road that will lead him to Jesse the Bethlehemite; it is one of his sons God has chosen to become King. There is where we see divine compassion: knowing that King Saul is in breakdown, God will not allow Israel to be a flock without a shepherd.
This assignment lands Samuel at a sacrificial ceremony where the elders of Bethlehem are gathered. Samuel ritually cleanses Jesse and his assembled sons so they may attend the feast, and as he examines the first of them, presumably the eldest, God interrupts with a puzzling lesson on the subject of seeing.
“Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected this one; for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.”
One by one, I suspect in descending birth order, seven of Jesse’s sons pass before Samuel, and, in each case, Samuel says, Nope.
“Are all your sons here?” Samuel asks Jesse. “Are you holding back on me?”
“All my sons who amount to anything are here,” we might imagine Jesse answering, with some surprise. “Each of these has proven himself, one way or another. One handles his sword like it was an extension of his arm. Another shoots his spear with deadly aim. This one handles public speaking with the ease of an actor. Over here is my business wizard. They’re all born leaders. I’m not so sure about the youngest boy. Number eight. He’s keeping the sheep. That seems to suit him. Kind of a puzzler, that boy. Don’t know what to make of him.”
“Send and bring him,” orders Samuel, “for we will not sit down until he comes here.”
David was not expecting to attend the sacrifice. He couldn’t have been dressed, even washed, for the occasion. The smell of the sheepfold had to be about him, as in he came from the fields.
You might want to look at David in this next to last window in the west aisle as you hear the author of I Samuel describe him: “Now he was ruddy, and had beautiful eyes, and was handsome.” There is what another David, David Maitland Armstrong, American painter and stained glass designer of the Gilded Age, made of that description in 1896.
Is it a bit puzzling that after a cautionary lecture on not looking on the outward appearance, the four things we’re told about David is that he was young, ruddy, had beautiful eyes, and was handsome? Presumably, God looked on his heart and found qualities there that suited him for Israel’s throne (even if he would wreck a marriage and betray his most loyal soldier, abusing the authority of that throne).
“Once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Live as children of light…” writes the apostle to the Christians at Ephesus. Everyone has clay feet, things they’re ashamed of; all have sinned and fallen short of their God-given glory. But the Lord God, the one who looks upon the heart, in Jesus Christ sees each of us in the light of Christ’s risen glory. That light exposes everything about us, and exposes us to everything in Christ so that the apostle can say, “in the Lord you are light.” As we become fully visible ourselves by Christ shining within us, we learn how to see each other in his light.
The old darkness is palpable as Jesus’s disciples see a man who has been blind from birth. These same disciples will one day be seers of the resurrection and apostles who train others to recognize the Christ in all persons—but they are not yet there. They look at this man and see a plight that must be explained, they see a damaged life that they assume is punishment for someone’s having sinned. While we’re tempted to judge them as ignoramuses, in fact they’re showing a certain religious training that puts everything in dreadfully neat little boxes of explanation, an attempt to keep suffering and mystery at bay by believing that bad things happen to bad people, and good things to good people.
To my eye, the most important and most beautiful moment in this Gospel is our Lord’s answer to their obnoxious question, “Who sinned, this man or his parents?” “Neither! He was born blind, and God’s works will be revealed in him. It us up to us to do those works of God while we have light to see by. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” We hear a premonition of Good Friday there (“as long as I am in the world”), though from our vantage point we can rejoice that the light that makes us who we are will swiftly penetrate that darkness universally once and for all.
But at this moment on that Judean roadside, the difference between how Jesus sees this blind man and how his disciples view him is in sharp contrast, more dramatic than day and night. The way the disciples see him, they keep him at arm’s length. The way Jesus sees draws him to this man to touch him, first mystifying us with what looks like a ritual—or is it an example of folk medicine?—as he spits into the sand, makes a poultice of that mud, and spreads it on the man’s eyes. The very substance that you and I would go to any extreme to keep out of our eyes, sand, is what serves in this healing. Perhaps the one thing we understand is our Lord’s directions for followup care: go and wash. Go and wash in a certain pool with the name Siloam, near which was an aqueduct named Shiloah (meaning “sender of water”, a perfect description of an aqueduct). But John takes the pool’s name, Siloam, to mean “the One who was sent,” underlining in his story the nature and purpose of Jesus.
In other words, this is not just a healing. This is one more example of the perfect obedience Jesus shows to his God-given purpose, to restore our human nature to its intended divine likeness.
Which is to say that compassion is a power that extends exponentially, a gift that keeps on giving. The kingdom of God, the reign of God that is established in Jesus Christ, the new creation, can be understood as the global movement of his compassion apostolically sent by way of us. Here is one way to understand the astonishing vision at the heart of Christian baptism, that each of us is to grow into the full stature of Christ.
And it all depends on how we see the person we’re looking at. Jesus’s way of seeing—and it’s very much the way of the prophets announced by Samuel—is not upon a person’s appearance, stature, status, intellect, or curriculum vitae, but upon the heart, where the image of God pulses, however strong, however weak. In that seeing, the seer cannot be above the seen: they stand in radical equality as children of the Most High who dwells within.
But how can this blind man and this itinerant healer be called equal? One has no sight. Here, with this recognition, the seeing done by the disciples stops, arrested by the rules of a zero-sum game.
Neuroscientist Oliver Sacks helps us out. He writes about how, in the brain of a blind person, there is sensory redistribution. This person’s other senses are used by the brain to help compensate for what is lacking optically. Even the tongue, says Sacks, can be trained to gather stimuli that the brain can process as images.
There is a good starting point for disciples developing humane ways of seeing: let it start with awe at how the divine image is already pulsing within the person we would see. Our seeing of a person we could call disabled can begin with deep respect for how ably this person navigates life. Humane compassionate seeing starts with all that puts seer and seen on the same road.
Then what may mystify us is free to move through us. Into the spit, sweat, blood, and tears that compassionate action may require. To a stepping outside the box of what tradition approves, as we rise to obey what the divine image requires and accomplishes.
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Suffering: From Kvetching to Compassion
Scripture for the 3rd Sunday in Lent includes Exodus 17:1-7; Romans 5:1-11; John 4:5-42
Poor Moses. If we think that unifying Episcopalians is harder than herding cats, Moses has his tales to tell, and we hear one today. He’s trying to lead into freedom a multitude of Hebrew slaves, refugees from Egypt, and anxiety among them is running high. They complain about his so-called freedom that requires them to put up with lots of hardships, like having no water in the desert. They quarrel among themselves. They kvetch. I gather that’s not a Hebrew word, but a good Yiddish word that means to be a grumbler, moaner, sniveller, squawker, whiner, bellyacher, complainer, crybaby. Its root in high German means to squeeze, to pressure, and today we hear them putting the squeeze on Moses.
They’re just about ready to stone Moses, as if that would have been a good idea—Moses was their global positioning device, and without him they would have been really lost. Moses agonizes with God: “What am I to do with these people?” And God promises him that at Mount Horeb they will find a rock. Moses must strike that rock, and water will flow.
It is an ancient story from the rabbis that not only did those refugees find water there at that rock, but—you must put on your imaginations for this—that rock followed the Hebrew people throughout their long years of being homeless in the wilderness.
How do you imagine that? Everybody takes ten steps forward… they turn around, and the folks in the back row shout out, “Yep, it moved!” This sounds like the stuff of cartoons. Every time they break camp and resettle a few miles north, that rock is with them.
These rabbis loved to tell that tale to make their point that this is just like God, isn’t it? God with us, Emmanuel, whose amazing grace at just the right moment is so etched in memory that it follows—or leads—God’s people forever.
And sure enough, in one of his letters St. Paul dusts off that great old tale and reinterprets it by saying, “And that rock was Christ!”
That’s all he says about it… doesn’t explain himself…figures that if the elder rabbis could appeal to people’s imagination, so can he.
As we hear today’s Gospel story about a woman who comes to a famous well in Samaria, we won’t be too surprised to find Jesus there. Emmanuel is where the water is. “The water that I will give will become in you a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” Water saves the lives of refugees in the desert; water becomes the sacramental sign of salvation in Jesus Christ.
But let’s see if that rock is still following us. It is. What offers more solid footing than rock? Until it moves in its most massive way, tectonic plates deep in the earth sliding, falling, rising, squeezing the surface, grotesquely distorting whatever man has built on that surface, as happened in Japan two weeks ago. Seven hundred times more powerful than the big earthquake in Haiti, hundreds of aftershocks repeating the message that rock is not the most solid footing, after all.
In his Letter to the Romans that Jim read today, St. Paul says that we stand in the love that God has poured into our lives in Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit. Emmanuel, God-with-us in Jesus, the Savior with the wet feet, is the solid ground of our being. To walk in his love is to have peace, says Paul, not because we wish it were so but because God has made it so; not because we did anything to qualify for this change that puts us on firmer footing than rock. In fact, in Paul’s version of the Good News, when God acted on our behalf it wasn’t at some moment when the human race was at its best, but exactly when we were at our weakest, so anxious in our suffering, so anxious and kvetching that we were, says Paul, enemies of God, opposed to God.
It was then that Jesus Christ laid his life down to make the way of the cross to be the way of new life. I think of his strategic selflessness when I hear about the nuclear reactor workers in Japan harrowing that hell, standing in that breach, entering those deadly places to get water cooling those overheated radioactive components. They risk their health, they dare to live and die in hope that what they do will save the lives of countless people, their people, their children, their communities.
Peter Abelard, twelfth-century French philosopher, argued with traditional atonement theory that saw Jesus’s death on the cross appeasing a wrathful God. Abelard insisted instead that the purpose of our gazing upon the crucified Christ is to be so moved by compassion that we will recognize the power of selfless love and choose to bravely give such love when it is asked of us.
If God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-loving, why can’t he design the created order without human suffering? That’s a powerful question I’m hearing in the Foundations group. My hunch is that no answer will fully satisfy anyone asking this question.
Rabbi Harold Kushner tries. In his book “When Bad Things Happen to Good People,” he pulls apart the premises of that question. Freedom of will cannot exist if God knows all. The unbendable laws of nature that allow the created order to exist put the squeeze even on God. Not all-knowing, not all-powerful, nonetheless God is all-loving, all-encompassing, all-compassionate.
Let’s hear a different way of approaching the question. Suffering is indispensable to the human quest for wisdom. We must suffer into truth, suffer into mature human ripeness, suffer into blessing. That’s the thinking of Aeschylus, Greek playwright in the fifth century before the common era. He wrote plays for the festival of Dionysus, god of transformation, putting suffering on stage to cause the audience to feel empathy, to strengthen the bonds of Athenian citizenship and leave no one alone in his or her sorrow or suffering. He resolves one of his plays by appeasing the terrifying Furies, gods of wrath, giving them their own shrine and renaming them the Eumenides, the compassionate ones—as much as to say that citizens in a civilized society must make a place for suffering and darkness in their own minds and hearts, transforming primitive passions into a force for compassion.
“We boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” That’s Paul again.
His words could make us furious, if we hear him being dismissive and unfeeling. But I hear him building the case for compassion. Hope does not disappoint because hope is what keeps the doors of our hearts and the windows of our minds open, open to recognize pain and promise, need and opportunity. Hope is the spark of energy that makes me rise from the throne of me-first and give that place to someone else who needs my attention, my care.
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune--without the words,
And never stops at all…
That’s Emily Dickinson commenting on hope not disappointing us. But if hope sings the tune without the words, there is the task of compassion: finding the words and the actions born of feeling, empathy, love, the strong ground on which we stand, the only firm ground on which we walk.
(Karen Armstrong’s book “Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life”, Alfred A. Knopf, 2010, was very helpful to me in the preparation of this sermon.)
Poor Moses. If we think that unifying Episcopalians is harder than herding cats, Moses has his tales to tell, and we hear one today. He’s trying to lead into freedom a multitude of Hebrew slaves, refugees from Egypt, and anxiety among them is running high. They complain about his so-called freedom that requires them to put up with lots of hardships, like having no water in the desert. They quarrel among themselves. They kvetch. I gather that’s not a Hebrew word, but a good Yiddish word that means to be a grumbler, moaner, sniveller, squawker, whiner, bellyacher, complainer, crybaby. Its root in high German means to squeeze, to pressure, and today we hear them putting the squeeze on Moses.
They’re just about ready to stone Moses, as if that would have been a good idea—Moses was their global positioning device, and without him they would have been really lost. Moses agonizes with God: “What am I to do with these people?” And God promises him that at Mount Horeb they will find a rock. Moses must strike that rock, and water will flow.
It is an ancient story from the rabbis that not only did those refugees find water there at that rock, but—you must put on your imaginations for this—that rock followed the Hebrew people throughout their long years of being homeless in the wilderness.
How do you imagine that? Everybody takes ten steps forward… they turn around, and the folks in the back row shout out, “Yep, it moved!” This sounds like the stuff of cartoons. Every time they break camp and resettle a few miles north, that rock is with them.
These rabbis loved to tell that tale to make their point that this is just like God, isn’t it? God with us, Emmanuel, whose amazing grace at just the right moment is so etched in memory that it follows—or leads—God’s people forever.
And sure enough, in one of his letters St. Paul dusts off that great old tale and reinterprets it by saying, “And that rock was Christ!”
That’s all he says about it… doesn’t explain himself…figures that if the elder rabbis could appeal to people’s imagination, so can he.
As we hear today’s Gospel story about a woman who comes to a famous well in Samaria, we won’t be too surprised to find Jesus there. Emmanuel is where the water is. “The water that I will give will become in you a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” Water saves the lives of refugees in the desert; water becomes the sacramental sign of salvation in Jesus Christ.
But let’s see if that rock is still following us. It is. What offers more solid footing than rock? Until it moves in its most massive way, tectonic plates deep in the earth sliding, falling, rising, squeezing the surface, grotesquely distorting whatever man has built on that surface, as happened in Japan two weeks ago. Seven hundred times more powerful than the big earthquake in Haiti, hundreds of aftershocks repeating the message that rock is not the most solid footing, after all.
In his Letter to the Romans that Jim read today, St. Paul says that we stand in the love that God has poured into our lives in Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit. Emmanuel, God-with-us in Jesus, the Savior with the wet feet, is the solid ground of our being. To walk in his love is to have peace, says Paul, not because we wish it were so but because God has made it so; not because we did anything to qualify for this change that puts us on firmer footing than rock. In fact, in Paul’s version of the Good News, when God acted on our behalf it wasn’t at some moment when the human race was at its best, but exactly when we were at our weakest, so anxious in our suffering, so anxious and kvetching that we were, says Paul, enemies of God, opposed to God.
It was then that Jesus Christ laid his life down to make the way of the cross to be the way of new life. I think of his strategic selflessness when I hear about the nuclear reactor workers in Japan harrowing that hell, standing in that breach, entering those deadly places to get water cooling those overheated radioactive components. They risk their health, they dare to live and die in hope that what they do will save the lives of countless people, their people, their children, their communities.
Peter Abelard, twelfth-century French philosopher, argued with traditional atonement theory that saw Jesus’s death on the cross appeasing a wrathful God. Abelard insisted instead that the purpose of our gazing upon the crucified Christ is to be so moved by compassion that we will recognize the power of selfless love and choose to bravely give such love when it is asked of us.
If God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-loving, why can’t he design the created order without human suffering? That’s a powerful question I’m hearing in the Foundations group. My hunch is that no answer will fully satisfy anyone asking this question.
Rabbi Harold Kushner tries. In his book “When Bad Things Happen to Good People,” he pulls apart the premises of that question. Freedom of will cannot exist if God knows all. The unbendable laws of nature that allow the created order to exist put the squeeze even on God. Not all-knowing, not all-powerful, nonetheless God is all-loving, all-encompassing, all-compassionate.
Let’s hear a different way of approaching the question. Suffering is indispensable to the human quest for wisdom. We must suffer into truth, suffer into mature human ripeness, suffer into blessing. That’s the thinking of Aeschylus, Greek playwright in the fifth century before the common era. He wrote plays for the festival of Dionysus, god of transformation, putting suffering on stage to cause the audience to feel empathy, to strengthen the bonds of Athenian citizenship and leave no one alone in his or her sorrow or suffering. He resolves one of his plays by appeasing the terrifying Furies, gods of wrath, giving them their own shrine and renaming them the Eumenides, the compassionate ones—as much as to say that citizens in a civilized society must make a place for suffering and darkness in their own minds and hearts, transforming primitive passions into a force for compassion.
“We boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” That’s Paul again.
His words could make us furious, if we hear him being dismissive and unfeeling. But I hear him building the case for compassion. Hope does not disappoint because hope is what keeps the doors of our hearts and the windows of our minds open, open to recognize pain and promise, need and opportunity. Hope is the spark of energy that makes me rise from the throne of me-first and give that place to someone else who needs my attention, my care.
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune--without the words,
And never stops at all…
That’s Emily Dickinson commenting on hope not disappointing us. But if hope sings the tune without the words, there is the task of compassion: finding the words and the actions born of feeling, empathy, love, the strong ground on which we stand, the only firm ground on which we walk.
(Karen Armstrong’s book “Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life”, Alfred A. Knopf, 2010, was very helpful to me in the preparation of this sermon.)
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