flannelectio

As Two-Faced as Paul

2009-02-06T02:30:00.000-08:00

“For though I am free with respect to all, I have made myself a slave to all…” (1 Cor. 9:19)

This is a powerful and tricky thing Paul is saying here. He declares his subservience, but this service is a gift of tutelage – in the logic of the gospel, Paul inverts the servant-master relationship, dissolving the domination factor, and mixing up who’s in charge, who is giving the orders, who has something to give the other.

But Paul is also declaring that he changes or adjusts himself to meet (at least some of) the expectations of those he speaks to. Sometimes radically. Paul goes on to give examples: to the Jew he became a Jew, to the Gentile a Gentile, to one “under the law” as under the law (though, he points out, he isn’t under the law), to one “outside the law” as outside the law (though, he points out, he is under God’s law). Paul’s examples are seemingly contradictory!

Not only is Paul open to the charge of being two-faced, but in fundamental ways, in ways that are foundational for other people’s identities and faith. He could have said: “To those under the law, I became as under the law (though I am not), and to those not under the law, I was just myself (since I’m not under the law, too).” But no. Paul goes to some trouble to point out that he does not “fit” in either exclusive category.

Paul is saying something terribly important about what it means to be a witness to the gospel of Christ: all other “identifications” or classifications fall by the wayside and are unimportant. And to drive the point home, he lifts up supposed “core values.” It is as if he said, in our day: “to the Believer I was as a Believer (though I am not a Believer); to the atheist I was as an atheist (though I am not an atheist). To the rich I was as if I were rich (though I am not); to the poor as though I were poor (though I am not). To the Conservative I was as if I were Conservative (though I am not); to the Progressive as if I were Progressive (though I am not that either).”

This is terribly uncomfortable for most of us – first of all that Paul could be so profoundly flexible in his self-identification as to meet all these different people on their own terms, as if he were one of them. But also because, if we are one “kind” of person, having Paul at once declare himself not one of us, and paling around with the other kind of person just a chummily as with us, we tend to get a little ticked off. Our friends are supposed to be our friends, on our side. Sure, they can be nice to other people, especially if they are trying to win them over to our side, but when push comes to shove our people should be with us. Even more disturbing is this dawning recognition that Paul isn’t “one of us” and is actually trying to convert us to something else. We’ve been betrayed.

Imagine the sense of betrayal Paul must have been answering in this letter. Presumably there were in the Corinthian congregation people of very different stripes. There were likely conflicts: what should the congregation do, how should they worship, what should they believe, what should they support, what should they discourage or not allow at all? And everyone – widely diverse people – were all appealing to their relationship with Paul as an authority. “Paul is my friend, and I say this.” “Well, Paul is my friend, and I say that.” “Paul converted me saying this!” “Paul converted me saying that!” Who knows the truth? Was Paul two-timing everyone? Was Paul just playing everyone the fool, just to get them to come to church? The jerk!

But rather than denying his duplicity, Paul lifts it up as the model gospel-revealing act. Paul says yes, I was different to each of you – and I’m not really one of any of your “groups.” My priority, says Paul, is sharing the gospel. And the gospel is shared first by meeting people where they are, and recognizing the sincerity, dignity and integrity of people in what they believe and how they see things. The gospel affirms what is best in us, and challenges what needs to be changed. One of the first things that needs to change is our self-identification as separate from others. One of the next things that needs to change is our belief that we are exclusively right, and that it is others who need to change to meet our expectations. (Can you see Paul’s example reinforcing itself here? Paul himself was a slave to all, though he did not need to be.)

Another profound change that needs to happen is that we must get over our death-grip on labels as being fundamental to our understanding of the gospel. Jew or Gentile, believer or atheist, Christian or Muslim – they are not what is most important when we are living out the gospel, when we are witnessing of the gospel in our actions. When we testify to the gospel in our lives, we must give up this fixation on triangulating people (as if labels ever really tell us about a person anyway).

The task of gospel-sharers is to love people where and for what they are. The gospel is shared in community, so welcome these divergent people into your community, into your heart and lives. They have as much to teach you, as you have to share with them. And we all have a lot to learn.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be as mad with Paul for talking to each of us as if he was “one of us.” Otherwise, we might not have listened to him.

1 Cor 9:16-23

2009-02-05T01:18:00.000-08:00

"...I may make the gospel free of charge...” (v18)

This is something of a play on words for Paul, and differently for us. For Paul, the phrase “free of charge” has a double meaning: he is not paid by the people to be an apostle, and that the gospel itself is a free gift of the grace of God, not something of his giving or doing. The gospel is grounded in grace – the free-giving of God.

In English, the translation itself has an additional meaning: to deliver the gospel in such a manner that it is free from accusation or charge of inconsistency, falsehood, duplicity or ulterior motive. To give the gospel integrity with/through my own living out of the gospel I preach. To make the gospel free of any charge that could be laid against it (because of my actions or representation of it).

This is important. We inevitably represent the gospel to people who are unfamiliar with us or the gospel. We as “believers” show what we believe both in what we say and in what we do – and perhaps most importantly, we show our truest selves in the relationship between what we say and what we do. We are the gospel to the world. So if we bring it couched in fear or loathing, it is a gospel of fear and contempt. If we bring the gospel at the point of a sword or gun, it is the gospel of violence and domination. If we bring the gospel through vindictiveness, gossip, condescension, vanity, self-righteousness, aggressiveness, surety, then the gospel we bring is those things.

Perhaps this is what the gospel-writer John was talking about when he meant that God is love – our gods are whatever we do, how we treat others reveals our truest god, and the God of the gospel is revealed in loving.

When Paul writes a few verses later: “I have made myself a slave to all, so that I might win more of them,” the word translated as “win” is an economic term akin to “make profit.” Another way to phrase this might be: I have met everyone on their own terms as a servant to their best selves, so that I could be profitable to them. Being of service to others – especially others who see themselves as quite different from you – is a gospel-bearing act.

It adds flavor to Paul’s declaration of being all things to all people, so that he may save some. Save, too, is an economic term – and saving for the sake of saving is a poor economic plan. But saving for some future, better use is wise indeed. Maybe this has something to do with Paul’s word choice. We aren’t saved from something, but for something, for an act, for acts of loving. That we might also make the gospel free of charge.

2008-09-15T04:39:00.000-07:00

As fine as frost on the ground… it is the bread that the Lord has given you to eat. (Exodus 16:2-15)
One difficulty for me – intellectually – is that God answers the people’s complaining. In some stories God answer their confidence, in others God punishes lack of faith, and in still others God surprises us before the question of faith is even raised. Here, the text says, God tests the people – except there is no test: the people complain and God provides.
There is also the likelihood that the morning-dew-bread the Hebrews find on the ground doesn’t taste very good. My understanding is that this is a natural phenomenon that still occurs to this day, but that the manna is a rather bland sort of emergency sustenance (notwithstanding the later description of it tasting like honey wafers [v31]).
I want to complain and have God meet my needs. I want God to deliver me from my anxieties, my frustrations, my uncertainties. I want God to provide for me a simple living. Like the Hebrews, I wanted my freedom more than anything else, but now that I am in the wilderness of adulthood, fending more for myself and finding the struggle terrifying and depressingly difficult, with starvation and homelessness hounding me on and threatening me at every failure. And I wonder if I also am finding the solutions open to me on the ground too bland to satisfy me.
I don’t think God is testing me – surely I would fail any such test, and I don’t think God is so petty as to schoolmarm me so. But I wonder if “test” is really describing our (human) experience, rather than God’s intention. Here we are, holding fast to a set of convictions, a distinct worldview (of hope and generosity, in constant tension with the world’s view of despair and struggle), and along come circumstances that seem to reinforce our basest instincts, our jealousy and rage, our protectiveness and resentfulness. It seems like an opportunity to choose between value-systems. It feels like a test – a test of our resolve, of our creativity, of our commitment to confidence in a worldview or story or hope that just doesn’t make sense sometimes. It feels like we can fail – that once choice is what we are supposed to select, and the other plainly wrong (but tempting for all that). Calling it a “test” is a descriptive term, not a prescriptive term – it describes the situation from our perspective, through the lens of our experience, not from the perspective of God. (Scripture is, we must remember, so often our human description and approximation of our experience of encountering God.)
But realizing that it isn’t a test engineered by God, but just feels like a test to me, doesn’t change how it feels to me. I feel tested – and failing. I want God to hear my complaining and meet my needs no matter what. I just want to cry out and be met by God, soothed by God, handed new life and strength, a change of certain situations, have my needs met (if humbly) without my having to worry about it. That’s what I want.
But can I not worry? Can I not be anxious? Will I not despair? Surely I will fail. But I suppose that’s one point of the story: God will meet us anyway. God will cover us with dew and chill, and when that has lifted (before the heat of the day melts it away) there will be a thin, flaky, surprising hope on the ground, sustenance for a little while longer.

Getting Back In the Saddle

2008-04-08T01:51:00.000-07:00

Acts 2:42-47

This should be an easy one for me to meditate on – so harmonious with my own thinking, so bold in its vision, so clear in its conviction, so powerful in its example. Perhaps I’m out of practice, but although many sermons come to mind, new insight is not burning within me. Perhaps I should take the scripture’s advice: devote myself to the apostles’ teaching, break bread with others, pray often, share my material wealth with the poor.

I am struck by the words devoted to the apostles’ teaching, and the difference between my job and my discipleship comes into focus. As a minister, my job is the devotion of the saints to the gospel of Jesus Christ. But my discipleship, my personal devotion, does not come with the title or in the 60-hour work week. Over the past two months or so – my first on the job, filled with new responsibilities and stress – I have focused on the job, and even lost site of the big picture there. I have been sucked into the details, the administrativa, the responsibility, the pressure. I need to remember to let myself breathe, and breathe intentionally with the Spirit sometimes, in order to be a good minister and a good disciple.

I am grateful for the patience of those around me: my wife, my co-workers and neighbor on whom I depend so, the congregants and church members who want to meet and welcome me. Surely, I am not done with the transition process – to European thinker, to Dutch resident, to regional president of the church, to supervisor, and so on. But I am hearing the need within me for more devotion. Prayer, breaking bread, sharing possessions (and time?), and returning to the scriptures as a tool for devotion. (I get too academic about scripture, sometimes.)

All the spiritual gifts and community proceeds from devotion to the apostles’ teaching. That’s where it all starts. At least for me. At least for this morning. I’m sure I’ll have more to learn tomorrow.

The One Who Said Yes

2008-02-25T23:33:00.000-08:00

John 11:1-16
Then Thomas said to the rest of the disciples, "Let us also go, that we may die with him."

However disturbing the fact that Jesus would intentionally neglect a dying friend, subjecting his family and friends to such grief, what I find worse is that Jesus does it as an opportunity for the glorification of God. (Couldn't God find better ways for glorification? Better ways to teach Jesus' followers? Better ways to inspire hope and assurance?) I can only assume that whatever Jesus was doing where he was, was so important that he could not leave until it was done. (Neither the place or Jesus' activities there ever receive mention in John's Gospel, however, so I question that idea, too.)

For me, right now, the real hero of the story at this point is Thomas Didymus ("the twin"), who speaks the words quoted above.

Jesus is heading back to Judea, where (in John's Gospel, at least) Jesus repeatedly visits and is threatened with death each time (and still manages to win converts and disciples as loyal and loving as Lazarus and his sisters). In John's Gospel, Jesus returning the Judea is the equivalent of walking into hostile, enemy territory. This is foolish behavior - obviously there is work to be done and disiples to make aplenty in the Galilee and even the Decapolis (the Hellenic cities on the far side of the Jordan). Jesus and his disciples receive a warmer welcome in Samaria than in Judea! But Judea is where Jesus is going - and apparently the disciples have a choice whether or not to follow him.

Of course, they always have a choice. They are not servants bound to a master. They are not slaves. At every moment of every day, they must choose whether or not to continue alongside Jesus. It is just like marriage or baptism - you can't rely on that first experience to see you through all the experiences to come, you must choose over and over again to be married, or a disciple. We all get to choose. Have to choose.

But to be a disciple, you often choose death in the service and footsteps of Jesus.

Here, Jesus ups and starts walking away, heading for Judea - and unspeakable resistance. His disciples, sitting around the fire, are stunned and unsure, questioning and reconsidering. And Thomas speaks up - "let us go with him, that we may die with him."

Thomas is the one who sees the reality - that following Jesus means walking in the shadow of death, of resisting powers and defying conventions in order to minister to those most needy. And that those in power and those whose fortunes are bound up by the conventions of culture and economy and might will bring all of their power, wealth and violence to stop you from upsetting things. And that what it means to be a disciple is just that: to suffer and die in upsetting things for the rich and powerful and proud.

Thomas says: I'm in. I signed on to this man's vision, and I believe in it. The world can be different, can be better, and if we have to go to the heart of the beast in order to start changing it, then I''m following Jesus there.

But here's the key to the story: Those that followed Jesus into the jaws of death were the ones to witness a miracle. Grief would be healed, the dead would rise, answers and faith would be found. Only those willing to risk persecution and death for the Kingdom of God witnessed the miracle. Only those willing to die with Jesus (rather than live without him) glimpsed the Kingdom.

Are we given no less a choice? Are the stakes lower for us than for Thomas? Are the Powers and Principalities of this world more congenial to Jesus' vision and the Kingdom of God?

Can we say, with Thomas, "Let us also go, that we may die with him"? Will we say, "Let us also go..."? Despite the trials and resistance? Are we willing to consider the values of the Kingdom of God more trustworthy than the values of our Culture, Economy, Government, Pocketbook?

Defying all logic and convention, Jesus went to Judea to raise someone from the dead. Are we willing to follow him into dangerous territory to witness a miracle?

Where did it go?

2008-02-14T23:15:00.000-08:00

John 9:6-12

"So the man went and washed, and came home seeing." (v7, NIV)

What an interesting way to put it: and came home seeing. The blind man didn't immediately receive sight, didn't dance and shout at the pool after seeing for the first time in his life, didn't run first to the Temple to offer sacrifcices in thanks for a miracle. He came home seeing, and was ridiculed by his friends and neighbors.

But isn't this always the way? If we come home different, with our eyes opened to a new reality, with new ideas and convictions, if we come home transformed, we consider it miraculous. While those still mired in the old world, in the old ways of seeing, in the old reality with the old convictions, will accuse us of treachery and treat us with suspicion. They will doubt the sincerity of our transformation - were we ever really the way we were, are we really the way we are now? And they will question us: How did this happen? And they will not be satisfied with our answer.

"How then were your eyes opened?!"

"Where is this man?"

I don't know.

This transformation, this healing, this opening to new worlds isn't something you can locate, corral, drag into court or put under a microscope. Its sponteneity is part of its charm. It is working in all of us all of the time, and sometimes some of us are particularly open to it. Jesus is walking all around - and there are blind people left and right. Why does Jesus stop to heal this one, who didn't even ask? Who can say? But it doesn't mean that man didn't receive (in)sight. Just because lightening strikes one person and not another doesn't mean lightening didn't strike at all.

And just like lightening, Jesus disappears, leaving the smoking, seeing man behind to face the doubts, looks and scrutiny of his peers.

Where is this man, they asked him.

"I don't know," he said. I'm not sure what happened, or where to go from here. All I know is that I see now what I did not before. And I will have to figure out how to be in this world now.

The Work of the Day

2008-02-13T23:18:00.000-08:00

John 9:1-5

It is interesting, first of all, that Jesus should say that neither the blind man nor his parents sinned. I am assuming that implied is "that he was born blind," because the liklihood of three people living sinlessly is pretty low - even lower that Jesus wouldn't find such examples worth commenting further on. But there is hope here, too, that we might be genuinely capable of living without sin in certain contexts - on our best behavior, if you will. Or, even if we can't live without sin, one aspect of the Grace of God is God's willingness to overlook or forgive sin - particularly sin in spite of our best intentions or actions.

Notice, though, that Jesus does not dwell on the issue of sin. A short, dismissive answer to the disciples saying in other words that sin isn't the concern here, and Jesus zeroes in on the real issue: "As long as it is day, we must to the work of him who sent me." (NIV) All this talk of sin and deserving is a distraction - the real issue is for us to be at God's work while we are able.

For Jesus, the work of God is healing those blind without fault - in other words, healing injustice and relieving suffering. It isn't so much that Jesus is a miracle-worker - there were plenty of miracle-workers across the Roman Empire. Even for the Gospel writer John the miraculous plays second-fiddle to the purpose and commentary of Jesus surrounding his works, what we are supposed to learn from the story or walk away from this reading believing.

We must do the work of that which sends us. The nature of our God is revealed by our actions. Even if we Christians sing devotedly one hour a week but live the rest of our lives as if that one hour meant nothing, then we reveal our personal god to be shallow, untransformative, soothing for us but insensitive to the cruelties of the world, and unable to move us to action and sacrifice on others' behalf.

We must do the work of that which sends us. If our God is one that has the power to move mountains or redeem sinners or make us want to do things that do not serve our own interests or pleasures, then where are we in relation to that power? If we believe that God can - and have every expectation that God will - be active in the world, in the hearts and minds of people; or that God can and does work in our world to end injustice, transform people, redeem individuals and societies, use every opportunity to transform what is to what should be, then why are we not just as actively engaged?

Night is coming! When no one can work! We have only so much time, people! We do not live forever. Our work for good or ill will not survive forever. The structures and mechanisms - governments, laws, cultures, economic systems, personal relationships - they will not last forever. We have to get to work in them now, before we have lost our chance. (Even then, though, we'll have the chance to work in our new situation - there is Grace even in our failure to act.)

Night is coming - the sun will set on opportunities before long. You will pass someone on the street needing to be reached out to. You will pass the opportunity to give your money to places where it is being put to the work of God. You will not stop from being angry, when gentleness and patience would be better called for. You will lose a friendship to time or distance. You will spend your money on silly things. You will move homes, change neighbors, change jobs and co-workers. Night is coming! Things will change - and you will have lost the opportunity to do the work of that which drives us.

Where are you in your day? What opportunities are at hand for you?

God cares deeply for us and for our world. Where Marxism and Capitalism fail - believing that people are merely products of their environment on the one hand, and that people's environment is a commodity to be purchased or crafted without regard to their spiritual condition - Jesus succeeds: the world is transformed and redeemed by the transformation and redemption of individuals, who then build a new world within the old, seed communities of Zion.

While it is yet day, what seeds are we planting?

2008-01-21T08:42:00.000-08:00

Lectio Divina on 163:

The hope of Zion – Zion is, embodies and expresses an abundant, abiding, perilous hope. Hope can be foolish and irrational, nonsensical and inappropriate. It is silly, and goes against all the seriousness of God and church. Hope is, in many ways, playful, smiley, and stands outside the rules of engagement in theological enterprise (mostly). And yet, it is a terribly important part of a full humanity and a full theology – people are not motivated or inspired or carried on by intellectual convictions, but by hope, the sense that the world can and will be different, better – and the realization that even if the confidence is in vain right now, that is the very spontaneity and fun of hope.

More Personal

2007-08-23T10:13:00.000-07:00

Jeremiah 1:4-10

I don't want to be self-centered or egotistical, but at the same time, isn't it an honest encounter with scripture to sometimes have the feeling it is speaking directly to you?

Recently, I accepted an administrative role in my church of increased responsibility - the most responsibility I've had in my life to this point. And I can't shake the sense that I am in so many ways not up to the task. (I'm not a complete boob, of course, and there are things I bring to the role that are advantageous. But still....) I am so young, so inexperienced.

I want to say with Jeremiah: "I am just a boy!" I don't know how to speak, what to say, how to administer such a large jurisdiction, how to guide ministers many years my senior, how to grow your church.

But God doesn't let me get away with that kind of thinking. God says to me: you will go to whom I send you. You will speak what I command you. Don't be afraid. I have appointed you (and this is the first scary part) over nations and over kingdoms, (this is the second scary part) to pluck up and pull down... to build and plant.

The job is mine, but the work is God's. In some ways, I am freed even as I assume greater responsibility. I feel the weight, but God doesn't let me get a big head about myself and let me go on thinking that I'm bearing the weight, or that the weight is my burden. I am engaged in a work that is greater than myself, and if I'm honest about that, then there's less reason to be scared.

Yes, I am just a human being. But I am not less than that. My inability or youth or inexperience is no excuse - God's job qualifications more than make up for my inadequacies, and there is work to be done.

Work to be done.

To Act Rightly

2007-08-21T10:02:00.000-07:00

Luke 13:10-17

Of course, my first instinct is to get hung up on the supernatural healing in the story. My scientific, postmodern mind protests and stops me from reading further. But something keeps my mind open, and I continue the story.

For the writer of Luke, and for his audience(s), the miraculous healing was not the point of the story. The Bible is chock full of miracles and healings, and there was no shortage of wonder-workers in Jesus' day. The point of the story is the protest put up by the leader of the synagogue... and Jesus' response to him.

The leader is bound by the laws, and he resists Jesus doing a good deed on the Sabbath merely because it is a deed, an act, on the day of rest. Several times in Luke and the other Gospels, Jesus has this same confrontation: religious authorities use Jesus' acting on the Sabbath as proof of his infidelity to the Law of Moses, and therefore to God. And over and over again, Jesus says in different ways that the law is meant to serve us, not we it. Here specifically, Jesus points out their own willful violations of the Sabbath stricture for small things - unyoking their ox, leading it to water. These are small acts of mercy extended to a poor, suffering creature - a gesture entirely befitting the spirit of the Sabbath: a day of rest for everyone and everything. Jesus points out these small and righteous violations of the law and asks why this poor woman deserves any less than their oxen.

The thing is, this passage is immediately followed by the parable of the mustard seed, which describes the Reign of God as starting small and growing into something large and obtrusive. Is Luke framing the narrative here? Are we to see in the pious leaders' mercy toward their animals a seed of the Kingdom? Are we to see these small acts leading to greater ones - acts that like a mustard bush will grow unruly and interfere with life the way we wanted it (orderly rows of manageable crops, for instance)? And when birds nest in its branches, is Jesus saying that these acts of disturbing mercy and compassion will lead to new priorities, unforeseen beauty, unexpected values?

Justice and mercy will be inconvenient, and the leaders will want us to curb our enthusiasm for God's Love, saying "limit what good you do." But Jesus doesn't argue with them, but points out how they themselves are already righteously disobeying the stricture, and asking them to expand their righteousness, their mercy, their love, their worship of God, to include even more people.

We have within us the seeds of the Kingdom. We just need to set ourselves free to let them grow. Free from expectations, from cultural mores, from ideas about appropriateness and what's "in." We have to be guided by love and compassion. And we may find ourselves breaking some rules in order to heal justly.

A Lovesong

2007-08-14T08:07:00.000-07:00

Isaiah 5:1-7

Anyone who walks away from reading the Bible with less than a conviction for social justice, peace and mercy, hasn't read enough.

That's how I feel coming off this week's lectionary scripture from Isaiah.

Isaiah paints us a picture - an object lesson, if you will - in the voice of God. God has great hopes and plants a vineyard on a hill of fertile soil. The vintner removes all the stones, plants the finest vines, and is so confident of the glorious harvest to come the gardener builds ("hews") a wine press. This is truly a love song.

But the love turns sour.

The vines do not yield choice grapes, but wild grapes - unsuitable for cultivation and useless for good wine-making. At any rate, they aren't what the Vintner was hoping and working for. Something has gone terribly wrong.

Isaiah expresses God's disappointment as the destruction of wrathful vengeance, as a clearing-away of the garden, as the Gardener's abandonment of the garden to the threats of the wild.

But the threat of imminent doom stands only to emphasize the source of God's disappointment: God expects fairness among the people, and finds only injustice (NRSV: "bloodshed"); expects righteousness, but finds only cries of distress. The people's failure to live a zionic lifestyle, to live in right relationship with each other, to treat each other and foreigners with compassion and fairness. Injustice is the real plague of the vineyard! And it is already bearing its fruit - useless to God.

From a rhetorical point of view, this poem is amazing. It was likely written at the time of the annual wine harvest, when such songs were common entertainment and praise in the streets. Isaiah plays on this. Typically, women would be primarily responsible for singing during the wine harvest, singing love-songs where they themselves are the vineyard and their lover is the vintner, their fruit children. Hearing a grizzled man singing this must have been a sight. (Perhaps the crowd might have listened to hear the story an old man's tryst in younger days, or the sexual imagination of a supposed man of God.)

The song's replay of working the fertile soil, clearing and planting the vineyard, would all have been heard as references to love-making. But at the end of verse two, Isaiah turns the tables, and declares the fruit unsuitable. The term "wild grapes" is literally "noxious fruit."

Even the wordplay in the final stanza would have impressed listeners: Isaiah poetically juxtaposes justice (Heb: mishpat) with bloodshed (mishpakh), righteousness (tsedaqah) with a cry of distress (tse'aqah).

Beautifully composed, the wine-harvest festival poem shows a genius of marketing - taking the occasion of the day, even a successful harvest (presumably a sign of God's favor and pleasure), and artistically turning it on its head to highlight the shortfall of the people in their (true) worship of God: social justice.

This is a love song that we need to sing again.

Outgrowing the Disciplinarian

2007-06-20T07:29:00.000-07:00

Galatians 3:23-29 (esp. v24)

The Law was a disciplinarian, a pedagagos: an educated, trusted and benevolent slave whose sole task it was was to watch the little children of the house and make sure they didn't get into trouble, and provide some basic moral guidance. This slave was still ultimately a servant of the children, even though she commanded them in their infancy and childhood.

Paul is being literary here (he takes the analogy and runs with it in following verses), but it serves his point well. The Law (or religious laws) was (were) set up to guide us, to serve us, not us to serve it. The holiness of the Law was not holy in itself, but in the moral guidance it provided and the devotion it nurtured within us. It was an instrument of God, not God godself. And in Christ we have seen a glimpse of God-godself. Once we have outgrown the pedagagos, we have no use for such a disciplinarian - we can continue to honor her service and advice, but we will never go back under her charge. And sometimes, we may see fit to violate her once-helpful commands and rules. Part of becoming an adult, after all, is recognizing the complexity of moral choices, and the multiplicity of possible actions and consequences - far beyond the face-value simplicity of children's stories, and more layered and contradictory than children's strategies for resistance, justice, fairness and so on. (Even though those principles and lessons are still valuable, and continue to inform our choices and ideals.)

I wonder if most Christians realize what Paul is saying here - that the Law is superceded by Christ. We can no longer use the Levitical or Deuteronomical laws to exclude people or beat people up inside themselves. Christ is the rule; Christ is the law. And Jesus said precious little about "homosexuality" or cohabitation or premarital sex. If anything, Jesus' ethic of radical love and inclusion of the marginalized (by us?) should command our embrace of these troublesome (to us) populations. The Law no longer commands Christians - but some Christians haven't gotten the memo yet. Some Christians believe the Law still serves to further exclude people already on the margins. At the same time, these Christians ignore the commands of Jesus for economic and social equity and justice, protection of the widow and orphan, hospitality to the poor and the foreigner. It is as if they take the worst - most petulant - of the Law and abandon the best - the grace and mercy - of Jesus. (While at the same time singing hymns that repeat "grace and mercy" - but what they mean is grace and mercy for me, continued aspersion to them.)

Paul here is breaking all that away. In Christ there is no Jew or Greek, no heterosexual or homosexual, no black or white, no rich or poor, and so on. ... Or is there? To the extent that these divisions still exist, our community does not reflect that of Christ.

But it isn't too late.

Prisoners & Release

2007-05-10T08:43:00.000-07:00

Acts 16:16-34

In 1913, 74 members of the International Workers of the World labor union (the "Wobblies") were arrested and put into the Snohomish County Jail near Everett, Washington. It was the newest jail, highest security technology - all steel. By common consent, all the Wobblies organized to start singing at a certain time that morning. They started singing, and jumping up and down, and soon enough hit the resonating frequency of the steel walls and broke the wall. They broke the jail by singing.

Now, it wasn't an earthquake, and they didn't have the opportunity to escape afterwards, but it does go to show the tremendous potential of being in prison for a just cause.

Paul and Silas were imprisoned and tortured because they set a girl free from economic exploitation. Her bosses were mad that they lost their source of revenue (they showed no concern for the girl, just their money), and took Paul and Silas to the authorities. The authorities, all too often ruled by the economic interests of the wealthy, agreed that Paul and Silas had to be kept under lock and key. Not only that, but stripped and beaten, then "severely flogged," and then taken to the inner-most cell of the jail, the most secure place, and even then put in stocks to hold them. (Sounds a little like Abu Ghraib.)

That night an earthquake destroys the jail (and their stocks?). The jailer comes rushing back, knowing that if these prisoners escaped it would be his life. He finds Paul and Silas waiting patiently for his return. The jailer asks: What must I do to be saved? His question is really a double entendre. What he means is what does he need to do to keep Paul and Silas from escaping, he is at their mercy. But what we know (because we're reading this story through the eyes of the Holy Spirit) is that what he needs is the gospel.

This is also a clear example of civil disobedience. Paul and Silas are arrested for an act of justice that violated the laws (and economic interests) of the rich and powerful. They do not take back the act, and do not attempt to evade the consequences of their actions. In fact, their submission to the laws (however unjust) is a double indictment of the injustice. Even when offered an opportunity to escape, they remain, forcing the authorities to confront the question of injustice in their midst.

But what is most striking is that the roles are reversed. (This is so Lucan.) Paul and Silas are tortured and imprisoned, but in the end they are the free ones, and it is the jailer who is tortured and imprisoned by his job and obligation and loyalty to the System, and it is he who requires liberation from his bondage. The jailer is converted by the experience of trying to hold Paul and Silas.

Individuals enmeshed in the System are converted not by people being nice and polite, but by people honestly and sincerely challenging the injustices supported by the actions of those enmeshed in the System. Paul and Silas' act showed the jailer who was really the victim of the State: not Paul and Silas the prisoners, but the jailer who is forced to torture and imprison men whose only crime is standing up against oppression.

The jailbreak, therefore, isn't for Paul and Silas, but for the jailer. When he asks: "What must I do to be saved?" he is recognizing that he is really not free, not safe, not saved.

What a tremendous testimony. Even those who are carrying out the orders of the System, who are doing terrible and unjust deeds, even those who think they are doing the right thing by supporting the State and its violence and oppression, can be converted by the civil disobedience and dedication of the faithful. A-men!

To Love More Than These

2007-04-17T07:56:00.000-07:00

John 21:15-19

Jesus asks Simon Peter three times "Do you love me?" This mirrors the three times Peter denied Jesus, but is without malice or vengeance. It is a literary purification, a forgiveness, a verbal baptism. Each time, Peter's response is "Of course I do," and Jesus replies: "Tend my sheep." Whatever love Peter genuinely has for Jesus, whatever lengths Peter is willing to go in service of Jesus, let him direct that devotion to the people.

And then, what is usually left out of the scene: Jesus gives a signal of what it means to be a disciple, what it means to tend the flock of Jesus. "When you were younger," Jesus says, "you knew your own way about. You went where you wanted to go, to did what you wanted to do, you were your own master and you were confident that you knew everything (or at least more than those around you).

"But you're not a kid anymore. You know better now. Being a disciple means being led by others, by others' needs and others' wills. Instead of going where you want to go, you will be led where you don't want to go. This is servant leadership. And, this applies to your spiritual life - you will be led to uncomfortable conclusions, led to acceptance of people you do not want to accept, challenged to do things and in places you could not have imagined yourself doing or being in. You are dedicating yourself to the Spirit, to Christ - which is why Jesus asked if you loved him more than 'these.' All 'this,' laws and money, respect and comfort, security and 'the world.'" All these are subject to one's devotion to Jesus, to the Spirit, to Christ. And devotion to Christ above all else means that we must be willing to sacrifice even our most dearly-held beliefs or possessions in the service of Christ, in the service of love, in the service of the flock of would-be followers of Jesus.

Most people see that statement of Jesus' as a reference to Peter's martyrdom. I suppose I can see that. But for the disciple, everyday is a martyrdom, a sacrifice. And if we love Jesus, we must feed his sheep. And if we want to feed his sheep, we must sacrifice ourselves and our high-born notions of ourselves to their service.

putting the meta in metamorphosis

2007-04-12T09:37:00.000-07:00

Acts 9:1-6

Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of Jesus, heads to Damascus to flush some more messianic-Jews out. I love that the text describes Saul "breathing" these things - such a dramatic word, but also a very good image. Part of becoming a disciple is to breathe in the story, to make it what informs you and fills you, what comes in and goes out, the most common and most intimate things about you. And whatever you breathe in is who you are - disciples of Jesus breathe Jesus, Saul breathes threats and hatred. The text seems to tell us that persecution had become itself a god and identity for Saul; it was what he breathed.

Also jumping out of this text for me is that Saul is on his way, he's on the road. How often the Spirit confronts us in the midst of our doing something very important, very intent, when we think we're very busy and perhaps even doing the right thing! On the road to Damascus. On the road to Emmaus. On the road to (or away from) Nineveh.

It seems that when we're in the midst of something we think is desperately important, God blinds us with insight. God knocks us down and speaks to us. We're stunned and confused and a little affronted, and we need to be led by the hand a few steps because we're unsure of our legs.

We can say our God is a God of Love, but I think just as much God is Change, Transformation, Newness, Difference. And sometimes change doesn't come easy or painless.

Saul gets knocked on his butt with the realization that what he is doing is profoundly wrong, and has to spend some time in the dark before he is ready to see the world through new eyes. There is some truth to this period of waiting, too, the in-between time after you realize what you were but not what you will yet become. It isn't a "twilight" period, or even darkness, it is just "not-seeing." A chrysalis.

"This Man's Blood"

2007-04-06T09:32:00.000-07:00

Acts 5:27-32

Jesus' disciples cannot stop talking about Jesus - and talk about Jesus is teaching about Jesus (which is why, incidentally, neo-orthodox theologians get so upset by historians and people like The Jesus Seminar who want to talk "about" Jesus... their "talk" becomes teaching about Jesus). As soon as the apostles get out of jail (either by escaping or by being set free), they return to talking all over Jerusalem about Jesus. And at this point, it is likely that whatever they say, even if it is the most orthodox Jewish claim, will be spoken and heard through the filter of making some statement about Jesus.

Is Luke being deliberately ironic when he has the high priest say to the disciples that they "are determined to bring this man's blood on us"? What the high priest means, of course, is the guilt of a condemned and executed criminal, perpetuating whatever crime of treason or disorder of which Jesus was convicted. But in another way, what the disciples are doing is precisely that: to bring Jesus' blood on all of them - spread recognition of Jesus' act(s) of sacrifice and opening the way to redemption. The high priest was exactly right about what the apostles were wanting to do, but misunderstanding it himself. (The continuation of the motif of misunderstanding is another link to Luke's Gospel - but here the high priest is in the position of the disciples in the Gospel: having heard the teachings but misunderstanding what they mean or imply, and being instead filled with confusion and fear of reprisal from earthly powers.)

The apostles do want to bring Jesus' blood on the people - but not as condemnation but as redemption, not as imprisonment but as liberation, not as a death-sentence but as new life.

Peter answers, however, the question of the high priest: "We must obey God rather than any human authority." What a perfect summary of principled disobedience. It is a more-articulate echo of an earlier similar confrontation a few verses previous (4:19). This is why Martin Luther penned his 95 theses; why Martin Luther King, Jr., led the bus boycott and spoke against the Vietnam War; why Gerrard Winstanley, Conrad Noel, Cesar Chavez, John L. Lewis, Rev. Lewis Bradford, and Hugh Thompson Jr., disobeyed and acted righteously: Holy (Dis)Obedience. Obedience to God supplants obedience to any human authority - something American Christians would do well to remember when the nation calls for war and vengeance. This new loyalty (and its political dimensions) is referenced again when Peter describes Jesus as "Savior": the Greek word "soter" was used to describe the Roman Emperor and the Roman gods. By using this politically-charged word Peter was making a statement about political loyalties and calling the religious leaders of Jerusalem on their collusion with an oppressive occupying power (instead of, presumably, principled disobedience of some kind).

Peter continues this inversion of expectations by actually highlighting Jesus' criminal conviction and violent end. Luke has Peter reference Jesus being hung on a tree. Is Luke taking some dramatic poetic license here in describing the cross as a tree? (It seems most contemporary Christians sing with this kind of language this way, as if Peter was euphemistically describing the wooden cross as a tree.) In Deuteronomy (21:22-23) hanging the body of an executed criminal on a tree was an act emphasizing his accursedness. It was a such a potent symbol of accursedness that it was not allowed to remain overnight, lest it defile the whole of the country. Luke is taking poetic license here, but not in describing the cross as a tree. Luke is using hyperbole in describing the general sense of accursedness attributed to Jesus. He wasn't just condemned, tortured and executed as a criminal by the Romans, the general impression is that Jesus was condemned and cursed by God! How much more powerful is the reversal of fortunes if this man so profoundly cursed is not only redeemed but exalted to the right hand of God, and declared Soter?!

Peter here is one-upping the high priest in describing the misfortune of Jesus, as if to say that no matter how bad you think Jesus was, we can go even further. Even more to say: no matter how much we describe his accursedness in this world, so much more profound is the work God has done (is doing) in/through Jesus and his redemption. Luke has Peter almost grandstanding in court (reflecting a fine twist of language that is characteristic of skilled Greek rhetoric), which makes it more understandable why the council before which Peter is speaking becomes enraged at his statements.

Finally, something that impresses me is that in this confrontation the apostles make no reference to Jesus' resurrection as part of the kerygma or message. They speak of exaltation, but not resurrection. Why is that? Was it just an oversight on the part of the author, or something more deliberate? Was the bodily resurrection (a notion popular at that time, so there was no reason to exclude it from the testimony of the apostles) not important to the message the disciples were spreading?

Something for me to chew on... and take comfort in. The fundamental of the kerygma is transformation, repentance, metanoia.

At least, in front of that council.

The Comfort of a Bridle

2007-03-20T08:54:00.000-07:00

Luke 19:28-40 (esp. vv 30-31)

No wonder the pharisees ask Jesus to tell the people to stop--what the people are doing is treasonous! Jesus is riding into Jerusalem like a king, and the people are singing hymns to him that describe him as a king. Jerusalem is already a tinder-box with thousands of people crammed inside the walls for the feast days, and there are likely hundreds of rabble-rousers and revolutionaries about trying to foment resistance and a take-over of power. Here comes Jesus in a veritable parade! Any of us would have done the same, and asked Jesus to quiet down the crowds before the soldiers come and someone gets seriously hurt. How insensitive Jesus must have seemed to those religious and social leaders, showing such disregard for the safety of the people and the holiness of the season.

And what are we to think of Jesus' charge to take ("borrow" isn't supported by the text) a colt without paying for it, with just the explanation: "The Lord needs it"? Would any of us allow our car to be taken by strangers with just such a plea? (We are apt to argue that there are charlatans that abuse such language and trust today, but are we to believe that there were no false-prophets, no profiteers, no one willing to take advantage of such trust and faith-claims then as there are now? We cannot let ourselves off the hook because of our jaded experience--I'm certain the first-century residents of Palestine, and even more so the residents of Jerusalem, were familiar with the abuses done in the name of God.) And then, if the people did somehow believe that the colt was to be used for God, they would object to this colt precisely because it had never been ridden before, it was unbroken, still virtually untamed. To try to ride it would be impossible--it would be uncontrollable and end up hurting the rider and everyone around! The owners of the unbroken colt would have offered another, more obedient servant for the Lord's work.

Every element of the story seems fanciful, impossible... but we must remember that this story isn't primarily a factual account, but a faith-building story: a telling that shapes our faith and understanding as it goes, and so the description of Jesus' entrance into Jerusalem is instructive for the reader, you and me.

What is the significance of Jesus' request to ride on a colt that has never been ridden on before? Is this a Lucan reference to the uniqueness of Jesus? A symbol of the untried message or means of Jesus? Lucan confirmation of the newness of the revelation brought by Jesus? What is distinctly Jesus in Luke?

Jesus calls for a radical transformation of society through the active subversion of oppressive structures (both mental/spiritual and political/physical) and through the substitution of new (Zionic) relations, grounded in a vision supplied by faith in a loving and forgiving and earnest God. To attempt a revolution of social, spiritual, and political dynamics without the use of force is an remarkably bold and untried program. Active nonviolent resistance that edifies both parties in conflict while establishing just relations is like an unbroken colt--impossible to manage or direct, impossible to control, and more than likely going to kick off any rider than be put to such direction.

OR, perhaps the world is symbolized by the colt: the assumption is that people need to be trained to obey before they can be managed, and that obedience comes from shows of power and strength, an understanding of position in hierarchy. In short, horses are broken through violence, and it is only after they are broken that they become valuable or useful in the eyes of the world. Jesus, however, asks for unbridled, unbroken people; Jesus asks for the wild strength and natural equality felt by an unbroken colt. And Jesus is somehow able (in a way that probably none of us could do) to mount and direct the colt for the Lord's work. This brings more force to Jesus' call to set the captives free--I'm sure he was talking about many of the people actually behind bars, but he was also talking about the broken people, those obedient to the masters of the world. This also brings more force to the people's cries of Jesus as king--defying the political king and the power of Rome.

We are called to Jesus for the Lord's work--though we think we are unfit, unworthy, unmanageable, that others are better suited. And we are called not as slaves, obedient to position and power, but as maverick spirits, and unbroken colts. God wants our natural sense of equality and justice, our sense of our own power and ability to resist domination; to put ourselves under the direction of Jesus, to recognize only one king (on earth as it is in heaven), to adopt Jesus' struggle and means of struggling. We are to continue the walk Jesus started on his way into Jerusalem: the conversion of the world through active nonviolent loving resistance (ahisma?) and substitution of a new world, a new way of thinking, Zion.

But that also means we have to give up the bridle and the bit (and the blinders and the saddle). We have to give up our addiction to control, to position, to direction, to domination (even sometimes over ourselves). We have to venture out of the stable, allow ourselves to be led away without assurance that we will ever return, simply at the call of the need of the Lord.

Loss and Gain

2007-03-16T08:34:00.000-07:00

Philippians 3:4b-14 (Part Three: esp. v 7)

Whatever gains I have made in the world, because of Jesus I consider them rather a loss--not only rubbish and worthless, but actually counting against me, listed in the 'minus' column of my spiritual balance-sheet.

Why should worldly success be counted so adversely to a transformative relationship with Christ? Can't we have a relationship with Christ and be successful in the world? For Paul, it seems, the answer is no. I wonder if he was reading the Gospel of Luke at the time.

Paul seems right in line with Luke on this point. One of the overriding themes of Luke is the danger of material (worldly) success: wealth, power, prestige, praise, and so on. More than the other Gospels, Luke castigates wealth and the stranglehold material possessions have on people's hearts--and he's right, of course, our wealth does hold us back from being the kind of disciples Jesus calls us to be. (We are all that rich ruler who asks in all sincerity what we must do to gain eternal life, but then shirk from Jesus' frank reply: give up all your wealth and comforts and follow me.) Paul, too, picks up on this radical demand of Jesus, and seeing how difficult it is to do, Paul counts all those things holding him back to a worldly sense of accomplishment and merit, success and comfort, power and praise... Paul holds all of them as a loss, as something that holds him back, something that holds him down or slows his reaction to the gospel, that prevents a true discipleship.

Here, Paul is wrestling with the same realization--that this is really tough, and most people won't be able to do it very well--the same realization that Matthew faced in his Gospel when the rich ruler confronted Jesus. Matthew's answer was that one could be a disciple to the degree to which one gave up attachment to possessions. If one would be perfect, he wrote, one would give up all possessions and follow Jesus... opening the door to all of our (eager? inevitable? satisfactory?) 'mediocre' discipleship: we'll give up a little and count that as discipleship, or we'll know that our attachment to possessions is bad and we'll consider that awareness as our discipleship. Matthew opens this door to a softer, more permissive, less demanding discipleship. And Paul wrestles with his own convictions on the one hand, and the likely response of seekers to such a demanding discipleship on the other. Even so, Paul for himself comes down clearly in step with Luke on this issue: confidence in the flesh (or worldly goods) is only a stumbling block to discipleship.

This is a big statement for the Philippians--signaled by the occupation of ten verses on this specific point.

And for me... it is a reminder. I easily jump to the condemnation of wealth and power (even though I enjoy both as a middle-class American in a world dominated by American interests and supporting an high American standard of living). (For all my love of Luke's harshness and clarity of vision, in the end I sneak into discipleship through the back door opened up by Matthew.) Condemnation of wealth and power comes easily to me--I have taken that part of the prophetic message to heart and it is in my blood everywhere just under the surface. What is harder for me is the 'being thought well of' and especially the surety of convictions that I hardly question that are to me stumbling blocks to my transformation. To have such single-minded confidence in ideas or theories is one way the world holds on to my heart. It gives me some impression (however false or inadequate) that I am in control, or that I have some profound understanding of the mechanisms at work. And this is a false impression (as Job so painfully shows us). I am not loosed from the struggle or senselessness of the world, even in my accepting struggle and senselessness as a reality or means of creating meaning and purpose. I have to accept the contingency of my confidence/belief in contingency. What is ultimate for me must not be these convictions about the world--the way it works, the evil of capitalism, the inevitability of war, the horror of alliance with Bush, and so on. What must be ultimate for me is the dedication to the possibility of transformation, new life, new understanding--and the shifts I cannot predict may be subtle or radical, but I have committed myself to them, not knowing what they are.

Discipleship is like baptism or marriage, we dedicate ourselves to something (and someone) not knowing what will happen, the changes we will be called upon to make, the demands we must answer, the roads we will have to go down. But we commit ourselves nonetheless. And that, like any two paths diverging in the woods, makes all the difference.

And our time spent deliberating about which path to go down--one leading to wealth and comfort, the other to suffering and Christ--is counted as loss.

Committing to Tentativeness

2007-03-15T10:09:00.000-07:00

Philippians 3:4b-14 (Part Two: esp. vv 13-14)

Not that I have become perfect, or have a complete understanding of the gospel yet, still I continue to wrestle with the revelation of God in Jesus, I struggle to make Jesus' revelation my own revelation, Jesus' story my own story--because Jesus made me his own. I'm certainly not finished yet, I haven't nearly made it my own. But regardless, this one thing I have committed to: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead--I am prepared to abandon the treasures and beliefs of my past if the upward call of God requires it. This forward straining, this search for the prize, this movement toward the goal is the most important thing--more important than tradition or previous understanding. It is this common yearning to grow, to be remade, to learn anew that is our faith, it is God as revealed in Jesus--an perennial call to unceasing creative transformation.

It is too bad that verses fifteen and sixteen aren't included in the lectionary selection, because they sum up nicely Paul's thinking here: there is room for diversity of opinion, room to disagree within the body of Christ, we are all growing and at different places inside ourselves. Just remember to focus on what we share, what we have attained as a community, the conclusions we have reached (keeping in mind that even these we might be called upon to abandon in the future--ever straining forward to what lies ahead).

I strain to hear the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Among my faith claims that one should stand alone, above all other claims I make: above all, I am committed to listening for and straining to follow the upward call of God, willing to abandon all other beliefs, preconceptions, confessions, understandings and priorities... even those I once held as revelation of God. I hold up the best that I know, knowing all the while that I may be called to abandon even that should I learn something better.

I think, generally, Christianity has a hard time with this. We revere tradition as something more than just the revelation of the past, more than just custom and culture and practice. Tradition and even scripture become holy in themselves, definitive revelations of God, not only constituting revelation but limiting and restricting it (even while scriptures like this point to the reality of needing to look beyond scripture or tradition to the Spirit).

There is good reason to acknowledge the tension here between the truth of past revelation and the truth of the uncertain future. (The devil you know is better than the devil you don't?) ;-) But there is also preserved here the value of diversity--we won't all agree, won't all see the same things the same ways, but there is much we have all been transformed by that we share, and we can build on that.

This is important for me to remember when approaching nationalist Christians--part of me would like to deal harshly with them, but I have to step back and admit that the Spirit is working with them as best it can under the circumstances, and that the Spirit is working with me, too, and that I may be called upon to change in the future. (I can't take myself too seriously, then.) We all have to accept each other for what we are--people who have committed to struggling to understand the gospel, forward-straining people, and that because of where we are or where we're leaning we won't be the same kind of people. None of us is perfect, and so none of us can claim absolute knowledge or authority, not you or me or the pastor or even Paul or any other Biblical author, let alone the Bible itself. We are all pressing on to make it our own, because we are convicted that Jesus made us his own. And what that means we may think we understand now, but tomorrow be shown we don't have a clue.

"The Chosen"

2007-03-14T07:57:00.000-07:00

Philippians 3:4b-14
(Part One: esp. vv 4b-7)

We all have this in our traditions - some of us embrace it now, but even if we don't it is still there, lurking. We believe we are chosen because of some fact about us. We are "American," and America is Chosen. We are in the one true church, so we are Chosen. We are white, and white people Rule. We are men, and men are the heads of families and states. We are wealthy, therefore we must deserve comfort and security. We are Christian, and Christians are God's people... so no matter what, we are God's people.

But here, Paul lays that all to rest. It doesn't matter. None of it matters. If anyone ought to be consoled by the facts of his existence in this world, it should be Paul: a sanctified Jew of the chosen tribe, a zealous follower of the law, righteous, and even in the Roman Empire Paul was a citizen and could call on that defense as well. I'm sure he could have added things like a three-car garage and two and-a-half baths, a solid portfolio and 401k, a walk-in closet filled with Armani suits and patent-leather shoes, an advanced degree from an Ivy League school, and a secure job working for the prosecutor's office--or the first-century Palestinian equivalents. Paul has it made, if you go by the world's standards! He has every reason to stick to the normal way of looking at things. Except one.

And that one reason opens up a world of difference, such that everything he thought was in his favor comes to nothing (and, if anything, actually counts against him).

God, as revealed through Jesus, brings Paul to a different understanding, and all of a sudden all of those values and prizes and marks of success according to the world are foolishness and vainglory, worthless and distracting. And in the place of those prizes is picked up values that seem absurd to the world: suffering, and a faith whose merit cannot be demonstrated or delineated by a code of conduct.

(I wonder what this implies about the issue of homosexuality in the church--whether this is an issue that the world concerns itself with for reasons of power and prestige, and whether or not a new life in Christ would lift our eyes above those kinds of distinctions [distinctions between people worthy of certain kinds of love and those unworthy, between love that deserves dignity and love that does not]. Could Paul have added to his list of worldly accolades above the title "heterosexual?")

Whatever the qualifications you come up with--even ecclesiastical ones like piety and faithfulness and years in mission work, etc.--Paul has more than anyone. This isn't boasting (although it's close), it is Paul saying how much he stands to gain by not making the choice he has: to find a new world-view in Jesus. Paul is trying to highlight the extent of his sacrifice (though it is only a sacrifice in the worldly perspective--once one adopts a Godly world-view, one's priorities change and all those worldly prizes are like "rubbish"). He is trying to frame his decision to follow Jesus as not a strategic one, not one to gain prestige or influence, not one to gain a public image of purity or "chosen-ness." Paul had all those things at his finger-tips in the world before Jesus. He is making the case for his sincerity, as well as building the distinction between worldly values and the nearly-inverse values of a world in Jesus.

No longer can we appeal to the law as a guide to righteousness, or birth as a guide to God's favor. These are things "of the flesh," "of this world." (The word "flesh" here [Gk: "sarx"] can mean the body [as opposed to the spirit], or as a symbol of what is external, or as the means of kindred, as well as implying human nature and its frailties. The connection with kindred and birth and "tribe" and provinciality is compelling.)

We must look to the life, love and revelation of Jesus--an act that inverts many of our previously-held assumptions about favor in God's sight, an act that breathes afresh the prophetic voice. As disciples of Christ, we must be prepared for this inversion, for this radical change in values, to give up worldly means of evaluating or assessing people. There are no more purity laws. There is only the transforming love of God as expressed in Jesus.

"from the human point of view"

2007-03-08T07:31:00.000-08:00

2 Corinthians 5:16-21 (esp. v.16)

"From a human point of view" is literally "according to the flesh," and must be understood in Paul's usage as that which is opposed to God. I'm not sure if the human point of view opposes God so much as distracts from God, or distracts from adopting God's point of view. (Sort of like contemporary advertising, where one doesn't convince a person to buy a product, one convinces a person that they have a need, a need that can be met by *surprise* your product. Sleight of hand is so much more successful, oftentimes, than brute opposition.)

We no longer know people from this 'human point of view,' "because we knew Jesus that way and look how wrong we were on that account," Paul seems to be saying. "And once we start seeing things 'from God's point of view,' we can't stop at just Jesus, and we see everyone as God sees them."

What is so distracting about "the human point of view?"

Using "the flesh" is such an easier question, with visions of swimsuit-clad ladies, luxury, and doting attentions from others. My "flesh" obviously enjoys being gratified, and it is "easy" to imagine how it could be, and how that gratification would be distracting. I remember when I first started dating my wife and being occasionally distracted by a passing attractive lady, how embarrassing that was and the discipline I had to exert over myself to focus on our conversation sometimes. At times like this I am willing to give in to Augustine and see myself as just a ball of concupiscence, a huddled mass of sinning, that it's not my fault, that it's my nature. "The flesh" is so hard to resist.

But is that the whole story? Is that the most honest answer I could give? There are surely some times (and some people for whom this is even more so the case) where I sin compulsively, I don't have a choice. But just as obviously, at some level, I am choosing to act one way rather than another - most of the time, if not all the time. (And I accept the difficulty of using the word "choose" here, considering cultural, linguistic, physical and imaginative limitations on our range of "choices.") At some level, it is my responsibility (even at the same time that it isn't entirely my fault). What makes me choose to see "according to the flesh?"

One reason may be because most of the rest of the world works in that order - things make more sense (in the World) if I abide by the World's logic and economy (oikonomia: [GK] how one orders the household/life). It's just easier to participate in the conversation if you speak the same language everyone else is speaking - and everyone wants to belong, to feel included and participatory. And we live our lives so much in "the World" and "according to the flesh" and "from a human point of view" that even to us the logic of God's point of view seems nonsensical, contradictory, impossible. And, indeed, when we hold God's logic up to human evaluation, it often comes up profoundly lacking - you can't make money like that! You won't win a fight that way; you'll lose! Those people can't change, that they way they are! And so on.

(And all this while we repeat over and over the narrative(s) of Jesus' life - which was a clear indictment of just that kind of thinking: Jesus did win that way.)

Why do I keep coming back to living and seeing "from a human point of view?" Perhaps it is because I have not yet given myself wholly over to living from God's point of view (and accepting the Worldly consequences of such a lifestyle, likely including poverty, homelessness, public derision, hunger, discomfort, harassment, imprisonment, and so on... prices for full-fledged discipleship I cannot afford while still stradling the line between the two worlds). While I have even a toe in the human point of view, God's point of view will seem terribly risky, costly, nonsensical. (Even now, trying to convince myself of the ultimate sensibility of a God-view-lifestyle, I know that my marriage would likely fall apart under the stress, and that my group of friends would drift from me, and these are things I can't believe would be good or right - surely that isn't supposed to happen in God's view of the world!)

Will there be a time when the world as one can take that step, make that leap, all at once and together, so the new logic makes sense, so the new reasoning "works," so we're all working off the same definitions of success and winning? Am I wrong and weak to hope for such a time so that my discipleship would be easier? (Is it possible to be a disciple if discipleship were easy?)

It is an enormous task, to see people from God's point of view, not "according to the flesh" - not to see in them how my own desires or ambitions could be gratified. To see in them God's desire for them - to wish them success in losing money or position; to hope with them for public scorn and violence; to smile as you join each other in prison, or under torture, or being executed. To see people as agents of a subversive counter-culture, a colony of heaven in a foreign land. To not see in their eyes the reflection of your own wishes for yourself (prestige, power, influence, comfort, and so on).

But we changed our minds about Jesus - he was "just a man," too. But in him we saw a glimpse of God's point of view, and feel all of humanity reconciled to this foreign way of thinking. What was so desperately strange and contrary, in Jesus becomes our very own. Perhaps Paul is advocating that we see everyone as little Jesuses - each of them carrying within them the potential reconciliation of humanity to God, each of them helping to shift our points of view away from Worldly notions of winning and losing and toward God's (totally different) priorities. Or perhaps, to see everyone as a mystery to be respected, even revered.

At any rate, we're challenged to not see them as they are - rich or poor, powerful or outcast, sick or healthy, loving or vengeful. And that might be the toughest demand of discipleship of all.

Prodigals All

2007-03-07T09:14:00.000-08:00

Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

I assume we are to sympathize with the elder brother, the faithful son who stands bitterly unrewarded for his constant service while his younger brother is celebrated for having returned from gluttony and caprice. I certainly sympathize with him - and perhaps this shows just how far I have to come in my spiritual journey.

The preface is Jesus welcoming sinners who listen to him, and the Pharisees grumbling about it. The series of parables that follow, one of which is of the "prodigal son," illustrate the inverted relationship God has with humanity. God celebrates those we find it difficult or unfair to welcome. God revels in the recovery of one sinner more than the faithful piety of a hundred people. A dishonest manager who forgives debts out of scheming is praised for his good judgment - being faithful with dishonest wealth (which I will have to think about seriously sometime - 16:1-13 isn't on the lectionary schedule for this year).

I would like to think that I am above worldly ambitions, beyond American piety-prosperity and just rewards principles, not captive to notions of position in return for faithfulness and righteousness. But Jesus' parables call me out. My sympathies do not immediately follow Jesus'. I can understand Jesus' point, of course (all are equal in God's eyes, and therefore the recovery of one lost is cause for celebration, while the faithful continuance of another is just par for the course). But if I am honest with myself, I have to admit that I feel for the others - I am easily part of the crowd that is amazed and confused by Jesus' profound reassessment of the Reign of God and my particular place in it. I do feel like we faithful ones should be rewarded, and better! Those who come late, who haven't struggled and who may have even fought the faithful, don't deserve as much praise or celebration or reward as those who have fought the good fight, run the good race, longer, harder, with more sacrifice. Put shortly, I sympathize with the elder son.

A good deal of my identity - for better and for worse - is bound up in struggle: the struggle for this, the struggle against that - all very worthwhile and Christian principles. And I find myself bitterly struggling against other Christians oftentimes... even my own father. Now, my father, for instance, in his support for President Bush, is partly responsible for the horrific deaths of millions of people. I have been struggling with him for years now. If, at the very end, he responds to the gospel and decides he was wrong all those years - that won't bring those dead people back, it won't un-torture all those prisoners, it won't erase all the harm and violence he supported and contributed to. Meanwhile, not only have I been struggling against these things happening, my own father has struggled against me so that those things happen. And Jesus is saying that if my dad comes around at the last minute, God will throw a huge party. But my struggle remains uncelebrated.

That isn't fair.

At least, not according to the way the world thinks of fairness.

But, I suppose God isn't so interested in "fairness" as much as God is interested in love. Sure, economic and social justice are in part about fairness, but only as a public expression of our love for people - there isn't anything ultimate or absolute about how much wealth or food or comfort someone has, except that no one goes without or has needs unmet while others feast.

I have to give up my superiority complex, my holier-than-thou-because-I-struggle notion. If I'm struggling in order to feel superior or holier than someone else, then I'm doing it for the wrong reasons. Any struggle I engage in, any sacrifice I make, any cause I support, any side I take, must be done - if I am to be more like Jesus - in love, out of love, for love. I am to love such that I would celebrate any conversion, no matter how late, and not seek to be celebrated myself.

And, too, perhaps Jesus meant the listeners to identify with the younger son, who spent how many years squandering precious life and resources, and came back humble, desperate, ashamed, willing to be the least of the servants in his father's house - and finding his return celebrated. All of us, at some point, were the younger son returning, having wasted so much, been blind so long, only seeing the truth too late. Perhaps we get one party - when we turn - and then we get to work.

I guess no one ever said discipleship was easy or fair. It is what it is. And I should be content with mere discipleship, mere love.

Hope and Forgiveness Under Captivity

2007-03-06T08:01:00.000-08:00

Isaiah 55:1-9

The background of captivity and exile for these verses is important. It is one thing for those in power to sing about the justice of God and about their nation being a light to the world. But here, deutero-Isaiah speaks of God's steadfast love and everlasting covenant with the people - a people defeated and exiled and returned to the kind of slavery from which they were delivered in Egypt. To speak of God's steadfastness and love in this context is daring and unexpected.

But it is also a song of comfort and reassurance: come and drink and eat, you don't need money or to work for what God offers. While all around you you are ruled by money and markets and demands and exchange, God offers what is God's freely, without price. Even David, so long ago a warrior and king, is lifted up as still meaningful - "you still have a nation," deutero-Isaiah seems to be saying, "you still have an identity as a people, you are still unique and special and beloved." And then, as if to glory in the inversion deutero-Isaiah is creating here, the writer shouts that nations they are not aware of will run to them, that God is working beyond them to bring new people to them (as a rescue from the Babylonians, or referring to the Babylonians themselves as having been brought to the Israelites to learn something from them?). Even in the midst of enslavement and exile, God is working to bring people together.

Who are the wicked here? The Babylonians? Israelite exiles who have abandoned their religion for that of their captors? Hebrew or Babylonian overlords who deal unjustly with their charges? We don't know, but are assured that God's forgiveness extends even to them - should they turn from unrighteousness.

It takes extraordinary suffering, sometimes, to cultivate an awareness of forgiveness. Profound hardship can sometimes (hopefully) lead to a profound forgiveness - a forgiveness so deep that it mirrors a divine compassion, and is articulated as God's own pardon.

Their Story is Our Story

2007-03-02T09:54:00.000-08:00

1 Corinthians 10:1-13

Here is Paul at his syncretic finest. Here he retrofits the Exodus story as revelation and participation of Christ. In somewhat a backwards fashion, to my mind, Paul grafts baptism on to the journey through the Reed Sea and deliverance - where it seems clear to me that it was the other way 'round: baptism emulated the deliverance and redemptive act performed in the Exodus. (Crossing the Jordan into Palestine, in fact, was considered reminiscent of the Exodus, and it was this that was re-enacted by desert prophets like John the Baptist.) And Paul identifies the rock that gave sustenance as Christ - following in the footsteps of Philo, a hellenistic Jewish philosopher and contemporary of Paul, who identified the rock as "wisdom." (This would be taken up by Hellenic Christians later in the association of Jesus with Wisdom in ancient philosophy.)

For all of Paul's discussion of immorality and such - certainly a dominant theme of the letter as a whole - it doesn't strike me as the most important thing bubbling up from the text.

For me, what stands out is that Paul is identifying the ancient Hebrews as the ancestors of all of us - signaling a very early identification of Christians with the spiritual history and heritage of the Jews. Even years later, when Jews and Christians went their separate ways, and throughout the centuries of later animosity and violence, our pasts are bound up with each other - their story is our story. Even if we understand it differently, we as Christians ought to remember that ours is a religion rooted in Judaism, in a Jewish figure among Jewish followers to start. I wonder how much suffering in the world could have been avoided by recognizing and honoring our spiritual indebtedness to Judaism. (And how Christianity could have been a model for Islam to follow - instead of a model of barbarism and sectarian violence.)

Our World and the Fig Tree

2007-03-01T08:27:00.000-08:00

Luke 13:1-9

Some people around Jesus ask him about the recent (?) execution of a group of Galilean pilgrims at the hand of Pilate (in Jerusalem?). This comes after Jesus encourages people to "settle with their opponent" before it is too late - so it is possible that the crowd is asking Jesus if Pilate's treatment of the pilgrims is a result of divine judgement, or perhaps an occasion to sound out Jesus' feelings on the Roman occupation. The Galileans, apparently, are being thought of as either holy martyrs or sinners who were duly punished (by proxy via the Roman occupation).

Jesus, however, cuts through the fat of the argument and gets to the point: do you think, he asks the crowd, that these Galileans were any worse (or better) than any other group of Galileans, that they deserved the fate they met in Jerusalem? No.

And, Jesus adds, if you continue acting and thinking they way you do, you will meet the same end they did.

What?! What is Jesus saying here? The trouble is, we don't know from the text anything about these Galileans and their beliefs. Is Jesus making a political point that if we continue to support or resist the occupation, we will be subject to it, and therefore forever under threat of execution by it? Or is Jesus making some religious point that beliefs similar to the Galileans ends in sticky deaths? (And is it also important that Jesus was himself referred to as a Galilean - does the region imply some background religious or political flavor?)

Jesus seems to emphasize his point by adding the comparison with innocents who were killed when a tower collapsed. Why just them? Were they worse than everyone else in Jerusalem?

Is Jesus here taking a stand somewhat like Job, pointing out that chance seems also to play a part in the world, that the world is not always just and fair. Sometimes innocent perish along with the guilty, suffering and fortune do not signal righteousness or sin. Who can know the mind and will of God, in a world such as this? The book of Job ends with the demand that we believe and have confidence in God regardless, despite all the chaos and seeming senselessness of the world around us (which, for all it's drawbacks, is at least more honest about the world than the Calvinist piety-prosperity principle).

But then Jesus says, No - they were no worse (or better?) than any of you - but unless you repent (metanoia: [Gk] change your way of thinking, change direction, turn around) you will perish as they did - randomly, senselessly, innocent along with the guilty, unforseeably? With this would-be clarification of what he means, Jesus ends up making the confusion even greater.

Unless....

Jesus follows this discussion with a parable of a barren fig tree, which for three years hasn't borne fruit - the landlord said "cut it down." The gardener, though, asked for one more year, a year in which he would dig around the tree and fertilize the soil, to see if this didn't cause the tree to fruit.

I think Luke is putting this parable here in order to make two points: first, there is always hope - even after three years, the gardener still pleads with the landlord for time to nurture the tree to see it bear fruit. At the same time, however, there is a point after which continuing to waste time on a tree that will not bear fruit is poor stewardship of resources. There is a sense of enduring hope, but not endless permission for inactivity.

Secondly, Luke is contrasting the former discussion with the latter - religious pilgrims and random people on the street all meet their deaths in seemingly senseless violence and caprice. But the fig tree is judged on whether or not it bears fruit - its existence is laid against a backdrop of an expectation of productivity. Is Luke saying that those who put their hope in the other-worldly, in the power of God outside of them, are doomed to die just like those who have no such confidence and spend their time hoping for redemption in the streets beneath towers of human accomplishment? (The Galileans were religious pilgrims killed by the state; the eighteen people in the streets were killed by a chance collapsing of a tower.)

Is Luke advocating a Third Way? A blend of hope in the divine and a commitment to working to change this world in that vision? The admixture seems typically Lucan: discipleship is grounded in a transformation of ourselves that comes from outside ourselves, but that transformation necessarily leads to our intentional living as to transform the lived-world around us.

Is this what the fig tree is supposed to teach us? That we are forgiven for our reluctance or misunderstanding up to this point, but there is a limit to even God's patience, and we must at some point decide (or, more accurately, to continue to not decide or commit is itself a decision and commitment not to bear fruit).

Hymn for Nonviolence

2007-02-23T09:45:00.000-08:00

Psalm 27

(3) Though an army encamp against me, my heart shall not fear.
(6) Now my head is lifted up above my enemies all around me, and I will offer in God's tent sacrifices with shouts of joy; I will sing and make melody to the Lord.
(10) If my father and mother forsake me, the Lord will take me up.
(11) ... lead me on a level path because of my enemies.
(12) ... they are breathing out violence.
(13) I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.
(14) ... be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!

This psalm is one of extraordinary confidence. It is more than hope, but less than casual certainty. Most of all, however, it is a hymn of nonviolence in the face of violence. Though enemies surround and attack, the psalmist here chooses to worship and sing for joy rather than fight.

What's more, the psalmist wants to grow in the Lord through her enemies: in verse eleven, perhaps the most inspiring verse in addition to the final stanza, the psalmist asks that the enemy be instructive to her, that the enemy teach her something, that the Lord open her heart to see herself through the eyes of her enemy. Oh, that American Christians would pray earnestly to see themselves through the eyes of their enemies, that they would ask God to help them transform themselves through an encounter with their enemies! This is an incredible line.

The psalmist is singing a daring hymn - confident in God's ability to transform people, and not being primarily concerned for one's own physical safety at the hands of an enemy, but being concerned with one's own transformation in light of God and one's enemy. What would happen if American Christianity turned around and instead of supporting horrific violence against their supposed enemies in certain Islamic factions, asked to see themselves through their "enemies'" eyes, asked how they could change to meet their enemies' desires? What if American Christianity's first reaction was not to reach for the gun or aircraft carrier group, but to reach for our enemy and embrace them for a moment - recognize their worth, their perspective, their experience - and not be so preoccupied with securing our own physical safety. (The irony is clear: risking our personal safety then would actually secure it in the long run; while the opposite strategy is proving a terrible failure: secure our physical safety first - through the denial of such safety to others - is costing us our safety for generations to come.)

What if, when surrounded by armies, we Christians chose to worship and sing songs of joy, rather than fight?

This hymn gives us hope, speaks of confidence in God's power. It places the confession in our mouths: "I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of living." These are not idle words, not easy words - they don't rush to our mouths in the heat of approaching battle. When faced with an enemy, it is easy (and cheap) to speak bravado and boasting, to speak of vengeance and power. How much more difficult (and costly) is it to speak love on the battlefield?

What if, when "terrorists" charge at us, Christians waited... just waited a moment? "Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage." Just wait a second! Slow down. Think about what we're doing, about how we're reacting, about the possible legitimacy of our enemies' grievances. Wait. "Wait for the Lord."

In this psalm we have preserved for us a precious jewel in the foundations of our faith tradition. Even in that violent, tentative time and culture, we have here an articulation of a fundamental conviction that stands in contrast with the bulk of human discussion. Perhaps, when asking ourselves which voice to follow, we should look at these exceptions with special care - and ask ourselves which genuinely represent the mind and will of God.

Christians may find ourselves standing on the wrong side of things.

Prophets and Capitals

2007-02-22T08:28:00.000-08:00

Luke 13:31-35 (esp. v 33b)

"It is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem."

It isn't impossible for anyone to be killed outside of Jerusalem... just take them outside the city walls and execute them there! Jesus isn't making a statement about someone being killed, so much as he is making a statement about being a prophet. What makes someone a prophet is if they speak truth to power, if they confront the Powers That Be on their own territory with the word and will of God. And in an occupied land, Jesus preaching his message of renewal and resistance, Jesus must eventually preach it at the seat of the oppressive occupation - in Jerusalem. (For the same reason that Paul, speaking to the whole Roman Empire, must preach - and be killed - in Rome.)

If one is to be a prophet, one must speak truth to power - and worldly powers are seated in capitals (unlike the Reign of God which is spread throughout creation, and thus has no "capital"). Jesus is declaring his intention to continue the prophetic critique of the status quo. The prophetic voice - so strong and clear throughout much of Hebrew history - in Jesus' time had not been heard again for several hundred years. Jesus knew that God continued God's desire for unity, solidarity, charity, hospitality... and felt called to give voice to God's longing.

A capital is the centerplace of earthly organization - it concentrates wealth and resources, it decides where to allocate resources and attention, it guides the machinations of institutionalized relationship between people. It has so much potential for good, but so easily falls prey to greed, gluttony, and deceit. Still, Jesus weeps over the city and its wasted potential. It could be so much, do so much, feed so many, lift so many out of poverty, answer so many needs - but it refuses to do so. Even though Jesus senses that he is facing his death by bringing this critical voice to the capital (particularly at a nationalist festival time when crowds are already gathered and restless), he still feels a loving lament for the city. He wanted to gather Jerusalem like a hen gathers her chicks - a surprisingly warm and intimate sentiment, given his critical stance and Jerusalem's likely violent reaction. You can see here Jesus' underlying love for this world - even the fallenness of it. No part of this world is beyond redemption.

This is a tough call for me. It is as if I walked to Washington D.C. and into the White House and told George W. Bush that I loved him, that God loves him, and that he must stop being an international terrorist. If I could gather a crowd to listen to and support me, I might be arrested and detained as a terrorist myself (perhaps tortured and executed as well). But even in the midst of all that drama, Jesus would have me still see Washington as redeemable. I can see tremendous potential in Washington, but considering the tremendous suffering it has inflicted and is inflicting the world over, I find it difficult to see it as redeemable, let alone worth loving. But this is what I am called to do, as a disciple of Jesus.

This isn't some "Love America" spiel. Bush is called to make the same journey to Baghdad, or the Sunni Triangle, or whatever outpost of resistance that seems to be leading at the moment. I'm not saying America is ok in what it is doing - just as Jesus was not condoning the brutality of the Roman occupation by preaching in Jerusalem. But Jesus brought a loving critique. And that is what I have to remember. "Washington, Washington, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! See, your house is left to you - you will not see Christ until you say 'Blessed is the one who challenges us in the name of the Lord.'"

Share with the aliens among you

2007-02-21T13:27:00.000-08:00

Deuteronomy 26:1-11

Lectio Divina is an interesting exercise for me. If I do it regularly, I find a pattern: I start with something that catches my eye - either something I really disagree with or, more often, something that fits well within my prepossessed convictions. But, through the exercise (and through the grace of God), I end up with a broader perspective than when I started, even broader than the selected scripture I seized upon. So I start again.

In this passage, we have one of the earliest articulations of the Hebrew faith - the crystallization of the central narrative core and its most important interpretation: a wandering alien became a great nation, this great nation became slaves, these slaves were freed by God and led to Palestine. Whatever you have belongs firstly to God, and whatever you have left should be shared with the aliens and lowly among you.

Sharing with God and extending hospitality to the strangers among us is part of the identity of those who would incorporate this story into their lives. Social and economic justice is built into the faith declarations of the Hebrews. God showed concern for them when they were a foreigner, when they were slaves, when they were few and poor and oppressed. God looks after these kinds of people. If we would remember that, then we too have to look after these kinds of people - especially when these kinds of people live among us. To forget them is a sin, a transgression of God's law, love and relationship with humanity. And this sharing among all people is an act that renews the people's solidarity with God.

God gives the land as an inheritance - that means it was previously "owned" (by God) and is the perennial inheritance of all. The point is not that it was given, but that it was an inheritance. If we forget the source of our bounty, then we dishonor the inheritance.

I have to think about this some more.

Citizens of Heaven: Living the Way of the Cross of Christ

2007-02-20T08:57:00.000-08:00

Philippians 3:17-4:1

I am distracted this morning by an article I read yesterday evening in Christianity Today. The article was about an "arch-conservative" Christian radio host that claimed that living out Christianity makes one conservative. Of course, I couldn't disagree more (and I question the wisdom of subscribing to this magazine). And along comes this morning's scripture to rouse these feelings all over again - or perhaps to flush them out, to daylight them.

"Brothers and Sisters, become co-imitators with me of Christ," Paul says. "For many live as enemies of the cross of Christ."

There is little agreement among scholars who Paul is referring to here, living as enemies of the cross. But it seems reasonable to me to assume that these are individuals within their faith community - other Christians... otherwise, what would be the point of saying they live outside of and in opposition to the example of Christ, they don't know or care about the way of Jesus. The critique only has teeth if it describes individuals who ought to know better.

Paul describes them a little: their end is destruction, their god is the belly, their glory is in their shame, their minds are set on earthly things.

Their end is destruction - this might not be an eschatalogical claim, that is, it might not be describing their fate or future consequence. It might be describing their goal, their intention, their modus operandi. Enemies of the way of the cross seek destruction in the world, not creation. They seek to destroy - with bombs, with words, with laws, with torture chambers, with executions.... A contrast to the way of the cross of Christ is destruction. Those who seek it are living as enemies of the cross of Christ.

This is one place where we see the clear significance of the cross - an instrument of brutal oppression, fear, torture, execution, condemnation, revenge... destruction. Through Jesus, this symbol of everything Jesus stood against becomes redeemed, and represents Jesus' resistance and victory over the forces of destruction. The way "of the cross" in Jesus reverses expectations, inverts worldviews, goes against the "normal" way of the world. There is the cross of the Empire - brutal, vengeful, destructive; and there is the cross of Christ - forgiving, loving, suffering, creative.

Their god is the belly - their ultimate concern is their own satisfaction, their own sustenance, their own appetite. Paul is contrasting this with Jesus in the wilderness, when tempted by bread Jesus responds that humanity cannot live by bread alone. Living as an enemy of the cross of Christ is living for bread alone - with no thought to the greater issues at stake. Shopping at Wal-Mart with no thought to the working conditions of those employed by that company; "supporting the troops" with no thought to the vast mechanism of militarism, consumption, exploitation, waste, violence and misallocation of resources necessary for American militarism; and so on. Thinking primarily of oneself, of one's own satisfaction or comfort (even, perhaps especially, under the guise of "helping" someone else) is living as an enemy of the cross - living life as an enemy to the idea of self-sacrifice for others, of equitable distribution of wealth and resources, of equal stake in life and prosperity of all people, especially the lowly, weak, disenfranchised, poor and the enemy.

Their glory is in their shame - when we parade our vices and weaknesses as if they were our virtues and strengths. We cannot embrace Jesus' vision of creative nonviolent resistance, and so we parade tanks and boots in front of adoring crowds and fanfare. We cannot embrace Jesus' vision of the abolition of poverty, and so we parade the super-rich along red carpets in front of crowds and flashbulbs, and even in grocery check-out lines. We cannot embrace Jesus' vision of homeless itinerant preaching, and so we build bigger and more expansive houses for smaller families and fewer people. The World and the Cross are inversions of each other. What is glorious in one is shameful in the other. What is essential in one is impossible in the other. What we called upon to do and be in one is forbidden and disgraced in the other. This is the stark dichotomy presented to us in Paul's distinction here.

Their minds are set on earthly things - surely Paul is not condemning "earthly" things like food, shelter and remunerative work for the poor, hungry and homeless; things like liberation to the captive, freedom to the oppressed. Paul here is speaking of the values of the World: wealth, prestige, influence, power, strength, comfort at the expense of others, and so on. When people's minds are set on earthly things, they are subjects of earthly powers, adherents to Worldly ideas, victims and citizens of earthly principalities. This, Paul contrasts with discipleship.

The true Christian citizenship (alternatively translated "commonwealth") is in heaven, and it is there we look for salvation. The word Paul uses is "Savior" (in Greek, Soter), which is a word also used to describe the Roman emperor and Roman gods. Paul is making a clear distinction here - you owe your allegiance to God through the person of Jesus, or you owe your allegiance to the state. You can't have it both ways. One or the other. One allegiance is inimical to the cross of Christ, the other is subject to it. The rule of Jesus in oneself is a political as well as spiritual condition. Disciples of Jesus do not look to the President for hope or truth or security - because the President can only offer the ways of the World (violence, greed, destruction). Disciples of Jesus look to the example of Jesus for hope, truth and security.

But the example of Jesus is one of abject humiliation, poverty, death, and even failure. Jesus was executed as a convicted criminal, his life and movement and ministry snuffed out after only a couple years. This is the cross of Christ! To stand up to the Powers of this world and risk being cut down for it. Who would choose that?!

No wonder conservatives see the only way to solve problems in the world as to out-brutalize the enemy, to kill more of them than they kill of us, to see "freedom" as the power to exploit as many people as possible with as little inconvenience to oneself as possible. But that is not the way of the cross of Christ. That is the way of the cross of the Empire. And it is to live as an enemy to the cross of Jesus.

We are convicted, however, that Jesus was not snuffed out that day. We are certain that his life and ministry and movement continued. We agree that he was killed - tortured and executed as an example to those who would follow him. But we further hold that he didn't stop there. The reign of God was not defeated. We were shown the way to victory over earthly powers. Creative, nonviolent, intent, persistent resistance, and the willingness to sacrifice oneself (rather than someone else).

I think we often misunderstand what happened at the cross. Jesus didn't end sacrifice by dying on the cross. He ended the practice of sacrificing others. He brought a new law - a vision of a new world (grounded in the prophetic tradition of the old), and a new sacrifice (grounded in the tradition of sacrifice, but transformed in the way Jesus transforms so much). We worry about our humiliation and troubles, but Paul reminds us of our conviction that our humiliation will be transformed to glory. Our way of thinking about ourselves and our actions (enmeshed as we are in the ideas and priorities and understandings of this World) will be transformed (to conform with the ideas and priorities and understandings of God as revealed in the example of Jesus). By declaring ourselves loyal to the example and rule of Jesus, we are already being remade and transformed - we are becoming citizens of that Greater Kingdom. If we would but stand firm.

I have never been so moved by Paul's writing.

The Healing Faithless

2007-02-16T08:44:00.000-08:00

Luke 9:37-43a

Why is Jesus calling the crowd a "faithless and perverse generation" here? They had come to him in hope and faith. The man who ran forward describing his son's demonic posession came to Jesus in the purest of motives - the healing of an only child. Surely they didn't deserve such blanket condemnation. What is Luke trying to convey to the reader with Jesus saying this so soon after the transfiguration on the mountain?

The father of the sick child also says that he brought his son to Jesus' disciples, but that the disciples could not heal him. Are the disciples the target of Jesus' venom here? Because they could not heal the boy, Jesus sees this as evidence of perversity and faithlessness? This all seems very harsh and unforgiving.

And when Jesus utters sentiments like "how much longer must I bear with you?" it gives the impression that Jesus feels he has already given the fullness of the gospel, already offered all that is needed for faith and purity, already provided (in the Sermon on the Plain and the few parables and miracles already narrated) sufficient teaching for discipleship.

Is Luke contrasting the transfiguration on the mountain with the disciples' lack of similar power down below? Is Jesus already expecting his disciples to exhibit the same wonder-working power and ministry that he has? Obviously, one lesson the disciples should be learning is that a follower of Jesus doesn't just tell about what Jesus did, but is to do what Jesus did. (Some will focus on the miraculous healing of the epileptic, others will focus on the barrier-breaking between separated peoples, others on the creative non-violent subversion of political and cultural mechanisms that perpetuate inequality and oppression.)

Another lesson for discipleship is that sometimes healing comes from a word of rebuke against evil possession. Jesus was asked to look at the boy, as so we must be willing to look at our world and see the demons at work in it. Jesus drove the evil spirit out with a word of rebuke. We should also be so challenged, to speak truth to power and honestly rebuke the Powers that possess people, that control people, that seize people and dash them to the ground.

And yet another lesson for disciples is that they will fall short of the best hopes of the Kingdom, but that the command to continue working does not disappear for all that.

Transformation: Vision and the Veil

2007-02-14T10:07:00.000-08:00

Exodus 34:29-35

This week's lectionary scriptures develop the theme of transformation in the presence of God. Here, Moses' face is illuminated, so much so that when he descends people can't stop staring at him, can't stop talking about it, and Moses puts on a veil. Every time he goes to speak with God, Moses takes off the veil, then returns to the world and puts the veil back on again.

Moses understood something about encountering God and then returning to the world. In the presence of God one sees clearly, and is illuminated. When one returns to the world after such an experience, it is like looking at the world through a veil - things aren't as clear or as certain, the confidence and conviction and comprehensive understanding are gone, and there is a barrier between you and the world. This veil is only lifted again in the Presence of that Transforming Power.

Moses would try his best to communicate his experience on the mountain - and he phrased it in the language of commandment - a harsh and ruling word, but sometimes necessary to speak the truth. But note also that these words must be spoken, must be communicated. Commandments given to Moses cannot stay with Moses alone - they must be shared. Hence, the beginning of corporate spirituality, communal responsibility for faith. Even if we see but through a veil, we must share the vision given us in Transformation. When we come down from the mountains, come out from the Tabernacles, are are given new vision of the world, we must share.

Despite partial understanding, confused vision, we are commanded to act as if our world and behavior was sacred - to make our lives a covenant (a living sacrifice).

Shrub-mentality versus Tree-by-the-Water-thinking

2007-02-08T08:18:00.000-08:00

Jeremiah 17:5-10

Here are contrasted two ways of being - two worldviews, two life-patterns, two paradigms, two approaches to life and the world. One is grounded in the trust of motrals and flesh, the other in the trust of God. One is rooted in a mindset and economy of scarcity, where there are never enough resources and one must get all one can when one can; and the other rooted in an economy of abundance, where one need not worry about resources or hoarding, and where sharing is the order of the day.

The scarcity model, or "shrub mentality", is grounded in the trust of "mortals" and "flesh." Don't mistake me here - our lives are embodied ones, and fleshy-experience is part of who we are (and therefore also a partial revelation of the divine, in whose image we are). When Jeremiah talks about trust in mortals and flesh, he isn't saying embodied experience is bad - he's saying trust in mortal things is misguided, trust in things that perish, that are transitory: things like wealth, popularity, strength, military might, prestige or position. When (a) people trust in these things supremely, they will see the world as one of scarce resources, and that their wealth or position or might or popularity are always under threat of being lost or supplanted or defeated. Shrub thinkers will see the world as a salted desert or wilderness where you have to fight to survive - and they won't even see when relief comes, because the rains threaten desert shrubs just as much as the sun does (washes away plants and dirt, exposes roots, causes plants to blossom and then leaves them parched in the heat). Even bounty and relief is a threat to them. And we can see this in those who put their trust in riches or strength - our nation has been extraordinarily fortunate in the past 200 years, but now we see our bounty as precisely what makes us a target, we see our bounty as something we have to defend - and go to great lengths to defend it. We're thinking in a shrub mentality! Take, take, take - consume, consume, consume - hoard, hoard, hoard - defend, defend, defend! We are the richest people on the planet, and yet we feel one of the least secure in what we have. We see ourselves as living in a salted desert, and can't even see what relief is.

In contrast to Luke, in the other lectionary scripture for this Sunday (6:17-26), Jeremiah describes the "cursed" first and the "blessed" second - the two texts ask us: you want the good news first or the bad news?

Opposed to the "scarcity model" of shrub-thinking, there is the "abundance model" described as tree-by-the-water thinking. Jeremiah says those who trust in the Lord are blessed. In contrast with those above who trust in temporary, transitory, perishable things, Jeremiah lifts up confidence in imperishable things: eternal, undying values such as love, fellowship, the long view, the eventual victory of justice (hope), peace, joy. People who don't put their trust in things like money or power over others to give them security or happiness are like trees planted by the water - no matter what droughts may come they feel watered, no matter what heat waves come their leaves stay green. And note what Jeremiah says: they're not anxious. (You want to know if our country is a tree by the water, ask if we're anxious.) My wife and I try to live by the motto: if everyone keeps sharing, there will always be enough. It's not a kind of mathematical equation you can work out or clear-cut trade-off you can point to. It's a way of looking at the world. (And some times it's easier than others.)

For Jeremiah, people who trust in the Lord - in the eternal - are like trees by the water: ever nourished and watered, and ever-bearing fruit. (Contrast that with desert shrubs who quickly blossom and seed in the short rainfalls - like some of us who, when fortune smiles on us we quickly burst out with a little gift or kindness and then just as quickly close up again, waiting for the next rain.) (Which is our tithing model? Which is our stewardship model?)

But then Jeremiah changes tact - and says: the heart is devious above all else, who can understand it? He answers himself: the Lord searches the heart - these eternal values, our endurance and dedication, our faith, search our heart. Jeremiah says God will give to all according to their ways, according to the fruit of their doings. Now, this might seem in contrast to the doctrine of Grace - that any gift of God is because of God's grace, not because of anything particularly good we've done (because, frankly, we could hardly ever deserve the kind of love God shows). But I don't think Jeremiah was commenting on grace here. He is laying this alongside his statement about the deviousness of the human heart. We can never escape mixed motives, but we shouldn't have to worry about our own purity before setting to the work of bringing about the Kingdom of God in the world.

There are two ways of looking at the world - one in which the world is a place of danger and villainy that is always threatening us and against which we must defend ourselves and our fortunes; the other in which the world is a place of abundance and grace that has the tremendous and perennial potential to feed us all despite the droughts and heat-waves that come.

Right now I know what you're thinking - you're thinking there's a little truth in each of them, that we need to be "realistic" and see some scarcity out there as well as some abundance. I know you're thinking that, because I'm thinking that too. I can feel the World telling me to not believe this gospel story too much, not to take this abundance view too seriously. I can feel the World's voice(s) inside me, saying that this tree-by-the-water thing is great and all, but that reality is more complicated than that, that the "real world" is a place of scarcity, no matter what we say here at church.

In the end, we have to decide which voice we're going to listen to. We're human - we live in a world of mortals and flesh, as well as a world of God - so we're mixed and confused and we'll probably go back and forth. But let's be careful in our desire to listen to one voice over the other that we not identify them as the same thing. One is the voice of the World, the other is the voice of God. We can choose which to listen to, but let's not do God (or the World) the disservice of confusing their sentiments. As Jeremiah puts it: there is the desert shrub and then there's the tree by the water. Who can understand the heart? One thing we can rest assured of: God is still searching us.

Death and Resurrection

2007-02-04T14:12:00.000-08:00

1 Cor. 15:12-20 (esp. v 19)

To be honest, this is a very difficult passage for me. I'm not of the Corinthian faith that the dead are "raised" (at least in the sense that I have of the traditional notion of rising dead). Paul is calling me out on this - if I do not believe the dead have been raised (or are being raised), then I do not believe Jesus was raised; and if I do not believe Jesus was raised from the dead, then my faith is futile, he says. And I am almost convinced of the futility of my faith.

If we read a little further, however, in the following verses Paul expands on what he means - since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being (v 21). Now, we who have accepted a generally scientific worldview (as opposed to a "literal" interpretation of the Genesis story) are rarely convicted that "death" was a result of Adam's (and Eve's) actions. Death is just a fact of living in this universe. So if the physical death of the body isn't what we're talking about in interpreting the Adam story in our lives, then is the "resurrection" of physically dead bodies necessarily what we must talk about in interpreting the story of Jesus in our lives?

I don't want to dance around the issue - and it seems Paul is pretty clear what he believes here. I don't want to play semantic games to squirm my way out from under Paul's condemnation. But at the same time, I want to be faithful to the best that I know, all the best that I know. And confidence in dead people's bodies rising to life again doesn't speak to me that way. By invoking the Adam story as the beginning of the journey of which Jesus signals the start of the end, Paul opens up (for post-modern readers) an entirely different read of the point he is trying to make.

Verse 19 says: "If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied." This verse jumps out at me. In the traditional reading, Paul is talking about this life as this first living-and-dying, as opposed to the next living-again ushered in by Jesus. But read the verse again - "this life" being our short-term ideas, our narrow focus on our own priorities and experiences. If we have hoped in the transformative power of Christ merely for our own individual sakes, we are indeed pitiable. If, however, we have hoped in that transformation for the greater transformation of the world - not necessarily within our lifetime, or within our limited scope of knowledge or experience - then we are closer to deserving that transformation. If Christ means to us merely the reinforcement of our own ideas or preconceived notions, then we are indeed pitiable. If, however, Christ means to us a new life, bold and loving, then we see Christ in our selves and world. If we have hoped in Christ only within the context of our-lives-as-they-are, or sought Christ to be a soothing balm to heal our own wounds exclusively, then we are of all people most to be pitied. But in fact, Christ is not for us alone, for only our sins or only our redemption.

If the preservation of this right here, right now, is the only reason we hope in Christ, we are in for a big shock and disappointment. The life, death and continuing resurrection of Jesus is a challenge to the status quo, and changes those in whom Jesus would be resurrected.

For me, however much I enjoy this embodied existence, there is something more important than just this-my-life. If my hope in Christ has only been for this-my-life, then I've gone down the wrong road. But if my hope in Christ is for the greater good, the greater transformation, the greater redemption of the world, for the Kingdom of God, for Zion, for the peaceable Kingdom, then at least I'm pointed in the right direction, and can feel Christ urging me on.

for

2007-02-02T08:22:00.000-08:00

1 Corinthians 15:1-11

In this passage, we have one of the earliest crystalizations of (Pauline) Christianity in the first century - small, condensed summaries like this would become for the early church like creedal statements and rules of faith. Selections like this would be read or recited at baptism, and formulas like this start to become common in Christian literature within the first hundred years.

Also, we see developing here an atonement understanding of the cross - an idea that is largely absent from the gospels, and so must be developing independently from the communities that produced those texts. This theology of the cross holds that our sins must be accounted for - a debt to be paid - and since humans in our smallness are unable to pay the debt, and because God loves us regardless, God took it upon Godself (in Jesus) to pay the debt with a blood sacrifice on the cross. (This idea actually dates back to medieval Christianity, and as such is somewhat grafted on Paul's theology, but it fits so well that Christians today can hardly imagine Paul saying anything else.)

Paul certifies that "Christ died for our sins" (v 3), and "for" will come to mean "in the place of". The preposition "for" (Gk: huper) in the genitive case can indeed mean "for (the sake of)" in a causal sense. Another meaning, "instead," also leans toward atonement - Jesus suffered instead of us. Yet another meaning, "regarding," is a little more slippery.

When George Bush says he is waging war for me - does that mean I forced him, or that he is doing it because of something I've done or am? Or, rather, does it mean that he is doing partly as a result of how we live, a somewhat direct result of our lifestyle and values?

Might Jesus have been crucified regarding our sins - our lifestyle and values as a backdrop and context for his death? It certainly seems reasonable: we make decisions every day that condemn the gospel to death (and thankfully it continues to rise again, as Paul confesses). Many of us have chosen our allegiances - Nation, Profit, Comfort, Prestige, Money-as-Security, Exclusive-notions-of-Family, and so on. Especially we North Americans, we crucify Jesus a thousand times a day, in our homes and businesses and commutes, and all over the world - we export crucifixion with our greed, guns and terror-power. But the gospel keeps on rising, and meeting us here again.

In one sense, Jesus died for us so we wouldn't have to - and in effect, we don't have to do much of anything at all to be received into the Kingdom. Atonement theology, in other words, seems like cheap grace.

In another sense, Jesus died because of our lifestyle, our decisions, our misplaced loyalties, because we are not willing to make the sacrifices necessary to see the Kingdom thrive - in our own lives and in our world. That is costly grace, because it doesn't come cheap.

So much depends on a preposition.

Give it all up - Count it all joy

2007-01-31T08:09:00.000-08:00

Luke 5:1-11

What strikes me first is that Jesus is fleeing the crowd - he is willing to teach, but wary of crowds... crowds seems dangerous, they can take things wrongly, crowds don't seems to think as well as the individuals who make them up, the anonymity of crowds often breeds irresponsibility or dreams of grandeur. Jesus is wary of this, but recognizes that for most people learning in a crowd will be their only (poor) exposure to his teaching.

Simon, the fisherman, first had to respond to Jesus' call (to set out in his boat) before he could ever reap the benefits (nets full of fish). He first had to act without thinking of his own benefits. And as he called his partners out to help him drag in the laden nets, you can almost hear in his voice the glee of the piety-prosperity principle - material prosperity indicates a piety and love of God. You can hear the excitement - how wealthy this one catch will make him, how respected he will be with the town leaders, how well dressed his wife and children will be, he might be able to hire another boat and hands to begin building a real business and then he could really take advantage of God's favor!

But, you see, Simon is a self-aware man, and hears his own thoughts and recoils at them. "Master," he says to Jesus, "I am a sinner" - I don't deserve this bounty, I am not as pious as you think, and God knows the truth. Don't bless me like this when I am so undeserving! Jesus answers tellingly - you will become a fisher of people - your bounty is not with these things, fish and position in town - your bounty is in people and their coming to know creative transformation in the Spirit.

And note what happens next: Simon, and his partners James and John, up and left it all - all that material blessing, all those fish and the prosperity and easier life it meant for them, up and left. Their livelihoods, families, homes and furniture and mortgages and cars and internet service and stocked refrigerators - they left it all. For Luke's readers, the possibility that God would bless the faithful isn't out of the ballpark - God had a history of blessing the faithful, even the Temple Priests and local rabbis said so. What would have been surprising and disturbing would have been that Simon and the others just left it all right there on the beach, abandoned wealth and prosperity and the so-called "blessings" of God. (After all, if God did bless them, what poor stewardship it was to leave it on the beach to be taken by thieves and beggars!) But that was Luke's strategy - his readers should be surprised and a little horrified at the audacity, the foolishness, the lack of wisdom! Luke is impressing on his readers that Jesus is turning the tables, inverting priorities... and in fact, getting them straight as they should be.

Now, later on in Luke they will return to Simon's house, so some connection is maintained there, but Luke is very clear what it means to be a disciple of Jesus: giving up attachment to any and all possessions. Here we have the first disciples - blessed beyond their imaginations with the possibility of wealth and comfort (tempted, like Jesus in the wilderness?) and giving it up to follow him.

Is this what it means to be a disciple in the community of Christ? How much can we ask from our parishoners, ourselves?

Sermon on the Plain

2007-01-18T08:09:00.000-08:00

Luke 6:20-26

It has been said that the Sermon on the Plain, with Matthew's parallel Sermon on the Mount, serve as the constitution of the Kingdom of God.

These blessings and curses aren't for the future - this isn't the same thing Jesus does to the fig tree that doesn't bear fruit - but descriptions of the immediate present. Not "you will be blessed," but "you are blessed." Not "the Kingdom of God will be yours," but "the Kingdom of God is yours."

This shouldn't come as a surprise, because just two chapters earlier Jesus himself reads his career mission statement from the Isaiah scroll in Nazareth (4:17-19). And even before that, at the beginning of Luke, Mary sings out that God is bringing down the powerful and proud, and lifting up the lowly; feeding the starving, and sending the rich away hungry (1:51-53).

But it is still jarring when we read it here (which is miraculous in itself, given the years of layering and repetition that would have smothered any other radical pronouncements). What is it that is theirs, the poor? What is it that is theirs, the hungry? the weeping? And why would that be so violently denied the rich, the well-fed, the happy?

Yes, yes, "the Kingdom of God." But what does that mean? It has to be more than comeuppance - shaking your fist, crying "you'll get yours!"

Whatever it is, what should be most frightening to American audiences in the pews is where do we fall: in the beatitudes or the curses? Are we poor and hungry and weeping? Or are we - though we don't like to admit it - rich, well-fed, and comfortable? (It's a good thing this scripture isn't paired up with Jesus' encounter with the rich aristocrat [18:18-27], or we might be emotionally devastated right there in the pew. Or, perhaps we need to be heartbroken to really hear the gospel.) As it is, I think we know that we prove the curse: we are having our consolation now - shallow that it is, we still can't bring ourselves to give it up.

There's no confession of faith or creed to gain the Kingdom. No special prayer or sacrament required. What is required? Poverty, hunger and profound compassion. I wonder that anyone has that.

What Nourishes the Body...

2007-01-17T07:24:00.000-08:00

I Corinthians 12:12-31

"... and we were all made to drink of one spirit." (v13)

It is a strange and beautiful image to link baptism with drinking - this is the drink, after all, after which we will never thirst again. But so closely linked, it is almost as if during the baptism we are supposed to take a big gulp of water! Drink in the Spirit - be transformed inside and out, totally remade new. Drink of one spirit, breathe in the spirit, clothe yourself in the spirit - how many ways can we say it? But the important part mustn't be lost on us - we drink of one spirit. We breathe one air and clothe ourselves with one garment. For better or for worse, we are united, and what one of us does affects the taste in everyone's mouth.

I wonder if this is where Augustine might have started his ideas of the corporate or social nature of sin (and conversely righteousness?). We never sin in a vacuum, and the ripples of our actions do not stop before they hit another person. Take global warming, for example - I may sin a little by not carpooling, but absolutely everyone is affected by that decision. Likewise, if I reduce my personal greenhouse gas emissions, everyone is affected. (And typically, even strategies to conserve energy themselves use energy to be created or implemented - buying a fuel-efficient car or adding new insulation to a home - revealing how inmeshed we are in sin, there are few ways to genuinely escape it.)

For better and for worse, however, we're in it together. The scripture reminds us forcefully that a person cannot say they are not a member - or that even if they do say that, it doesn't change the fact that they still are. Also, and perhaps more importantly (because it is less intuitive), a person cannot be told by another that they are not a member. Paul here is writing about the church and the community of Christ, which many Christians would do well to remember when we speak too sternly of denominations, authority, membership in Christ, and so on. We cannot say with any hope of accuracy that someone else is not a member of the community of Christ, that someone is beyond the redemptive and loving arms of Christ and those who would follow him. And as Jesus accepted everyone at his table, it may be fair to extend this sentiment to the world beyond the Church as well: we Christians cannot tell Muslims or Jews or Buddhists, for example, that they are not members of the body. We have no rights of exclusion from the embrace of the Spirit, and have no grounds to make such claims or distinctions. (I feel I'm treading on a universalism that is very postmodern and not just a little dangerous for doctrine and dogma.)

I am also struck by the language in verse 26, coming so close to the beloved labor mantra: An injury to one is an injury to all. The noblest sentiments of the labor movement are rooted in a radical Christianity.

And, speaking of radical Christianity, note that "forms of assistance" is counted among the gifts of the spirit, and ranked among the acts of apostles and prophets. Do those Christians who promote gifts like the speaking of tongues also recognize the gift of the spirit that manifests itself in helping other people? This is incredible! Paul is virtually declaring social justice work and compassionate action as a gift of the Holy Spirit, worthy of prophets and apostles... and you and me.

I must say that I found the closing of this scripture passage comforting. Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? No. There are different kinds of testimonies to give. Just last night, I was talking with my wife on the phone and joking about learning all this doctrine and dogma development in Christian history and how so many people took it so seriously, and for me (showing my postmodern stripes again) what these people considered essential beliefs for salvation are really not that important at all. I find myself driven, rather, by the social gospel, the vision of a new world possible, of changed relations (power, economic, social, personal, international), the imperative to creatively resist the Powers and Principalities, to stand up to oppression and forces that denigrate humanity. This is what for me is redemptive and necessary for salvation - working to transform oneself and one's world radically and creatively. This is what I feel is required to be a faithful Christian.

And that is, essentially, a prophetic testimony - social justice as the true worship of God. Apostolic witness, I imagine, is something more along the lines of getting people to declare that Jesus is Lord - change their allegiances, give them a new heart. That's important, of course. But the scripture here allows me not to have to do everything - I can recognize that some people are apostles, some teachers, some prophets (in the Old Testament sense of someone who critiques the status quo and calls the faith community to reify their faith declarations in the lived world).

And, this scripture affirms, that is a voice that also needs to be heard in the body. I can't pretend I'm not part of the body (although sometimes part of me wants to). And others can't tell me I'm not part of the body (as has happened more than once). The gospel will taste differently coming from my hand, but we're all drinking from the same spirit.

Interpreting Scripture so That They Understand

2007-01-16T08:00:00.000-08:00

Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10

So they read from the book, from the law of God, with interpretation. They gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.

This passage this the definitive scripture for preaching - this is the first recorded act of preaching in the Bible, and lays out the process that remains basically the same to this day. The people gathered, scripture was read, and then selected leaders among the people interpreted the passage so that the people understood. They made the book relevant to the lives and experience of those listening, so that the lessons and insight from so long ago would breathe new life amid the people

The story has specifically to do with the book of Deuteronomy, which was "discovered" buried beneath a wall in Jerusalem when the Temple was being rebuilt. It was brought to the king and read - and as the story goes, the king ordered it read to all the people, so that they might know the laws of God.

And the people, upon hearing the word of God, cried - but the priests told them not to cry: this is a joyous time, you have been given understanding, celebrate!

Oh, if only my preaching made people cry. If only hearing the word of God caused people to tremble inside themselves today - imagine if people were this moved by the word today: America would stop waging wars of aggression across the world, we would end homelessness and poverty and hunger, our justice system would become one of restorative justice rather than punitive or remunerative justice, everyone would work a little and enjoy life more. It doesn't have to be as hard as it is, people! If only the vision of what-could-be could move people to tears today. What-could-be could be.

We could say - go your way, celebrate, and send provisions for celebration to those who have nothing to celebrate with. (Look at that - social and economic justice right there, immediately following the preaching and response by the people! Social and economic justice ought to be part of our worship - do you hear this, people?!).

No wonder utopian communities have been so attractive to people over the centuries - this is a beautiful vision that captures the heart. It is something worth making real. It might be tough to bring about... but the passage ends reminding us that God is our strength... God will do all the heavy-lifting. We just need to get things squared away.

"Jesus is Lord", eh?

2007-01-10T08:39:00.000-08:00

I Corinthians 12:1-11 (esp. v. 3)

When the writer of I Corinthians says: "...no one can say 'Jesus is Lord' except in the Holy Spirit," surely he (?) can't be absolute in this. All kinds of people might be able to utter the sounds "Jesus is Lord" without being under the influence of the Spirit. Televangelists, for example, claim this regularly, but only wish to climb on the cross so that they can be better seen by others, often trampling on the One already up there. Just a person saying "Jesus is Lord" doesn't necessarily express anything.

The author can't be literal with this - if he were, is this claim then limited to the original Greek words? Obviously not. The author must be writing about the meaning of the words. And the meaning of the words is a whole different ballgame.

What does this phrase do in an individual? We're not just talking about a person, a first-century Palestinian Jew, here. This phrase is meant to work in us or express between us a conviction greater than that a man called Joshua (Gk = Jesus) existed and was executed by the Roman Empire around 33CE. The phrase "Jesus is Lord" must express a conviction of the sovereignty of something greater than worldly powers in the world. Whatever one might mean by "Jesus" and whatever one might mean by "Lord" (and there are several possibilities for either), this phrase must confess that something in the Spirit of that ancient, young, rebellious, deeply caring man is, in fact, ruling over this world in a way that "lords" cannot. There is a Power at work in us and in our world that is far beyond the Powers That Be, beyond their control, beyond their manipulation, and not serving their needs. Nations and Leaders of all kinds will claim a hold on this Power-we-know-not-What, but the confessional of Jesus being Lord is (among other things, surely) a confession that these things (nations, presidents, armies, ideologies, denominations, money, greed, debt, lifestyles of consumption, and so on) do not have the ultimate claim on us. We pledge our allegiance to something above and beyond them, and must keep our eyes fixed on that point beyond the horizon.

And That, my friends, IS, the Holy Spirit working in us. We cannot confess that "Jesus is Lord" without making a resounding distinction between what our world tells us should be ruling our lives. When Americans say "Jesus is Lord," they are making a bold claim that flies in the face of nationalism, self-interest, labels like "terrorism" and "freedom" and "patriotism". This is a huge thing, and comes about through a Spirit of something greater working in us.

If it is possible for someone to profess Jesus is Lord without confessing this (like, for example, the televangelist), might it also be true for someone to confess this underlying conviction without professing that "Jesus is Lord"? I would think so.

Oftentimes, in fact, I think Christianity is a stumbling block to people seeking to follow Jesus. All too often, it is a community of hypocrites and self-righteousness. I've said several times to friends that they'd be better off not joining a particular denomination. But of course, that's only half true. We need each other - flawed and faulty as we are - to help learn about the Spirit. We need to practice Grace in order to learn about it more; practice forgiveness in order to learn it.

But must one finally profess "Jesus is Lord" in order to confess the Spirit in their lives? I don't know. The bulk of me says no. But there is a small portion of me that wonders if I am merely allowing myself an indulgence in saying this.

Faithful Love, Saving Justice

2007-01-09T07:37:00.000-08:00

Pslam 36:5-10

This psalm lifts up two themes: faithful love and saving justice. ("Steadfast love" and "righteousness" in the NRSV, but I like the NJB words.) They both reach far beyond what we can fathom, past where we can see, and beyond even our imagination. Still, no matter how far we've come, no matter how much we have imagined and learned, the love and saving justice of God is there and calls us further on.

And yet, even while pulling, dragging, pushing, urging us on, on, on... faithful love meets human and animal where we are, and we can take refuge and drink from delicious streams. The dual nature of God: meeting us where we are now, and always always calling us further on our journey; comforting us where we are now and making us uncomfortable with where we are now (and drawing us into further discomfort, but comforting us there, too).

And in a verse made for process theologians: "in you is the source of life." That which animates us and opens up to creative transformation; that which expands life in us, against those forces that would diminish us and our life. We confess confidence in this we-know-not-what that brings us about as we could not have been brought about by ourselves.

And in this season of Epiphany, the bringing of the Light, the psalmist expresses the truth: by Your light we see the light. It is the source of illumination, but also the means by which we learn to see the illuminating. Maintain this faithfulness, this stick-to-it-tiveness on Your part, to those who would seek this source. And extend Your saving justice (not vengeance, not retribution; but mercy and recognition and redemption) to everyone, particularly those with an honest heart (who recognize their own shortcomings, myopias, and littleness). A-men.

2007-01-08T10:57:00.000-08:00

Isaiah 62:1-5

In the context of "Racial Justice Sunday" and so near the celebrations of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday, this scripture takes on forceful meaning. "For Zion's sake, I will not keep silent" - about injustice, about prejudice, about militarism, about nationalism. All of these themes King lived and spoke about. Our particular debt to King rests in his having put plainly before us the undeniable economic dynamics of our moral malaise. Racism is an economic proposition, too, designed and perpetuated in part to maintain economic relations in place. Injustice is an economic issue as well. Militarism and nationalism are racism writ large, and serve the same economic ends - to further enrich the wealthy, at the expense of maintaining the grinding poverty of the poor.

For the sake of Jerusalem I will not rest until her vindication shines out like the dawn. A declaration of commitment for justice activists today, and a pledge in Isaiah's day as well. Isaiah, we must remember, defined the true worship of God as defending the poor, the widow and the orphan, the stranger and foreigner. (And remember that he was speaking in the context of Israel being invaded by a brutal enemy, marching on Jerusalem itself.) For him, Jerusalem and the Temple were meant to be the center-place of worship of God - the epicenter of justice and right-treatment of others.

Isaiah was facing the imminent siege of Jerusalem. The invading Babylonians were laying waste to the countryside in their march to the holy city. And Isaiah steps back from this horrific scene of doom to say that Jerusalem will be a jewel, neither forsaken nor desolate, and that quite contrary to everyone's expectations Jerusalem will be rejoiced over by God because of her faithfulness - her treatment of the poor and lowly!

The actual fate of Jerusalem, we know from history, was more mixed - spared this time but later to fall to Babylon. But spoken on our lips, in our country, the pledge is no less poignant: we will not keep silent! We will stand up and protest and speak truth to power. We will set ourselves against the unjust actions of our nation and churches. We will rise up like lions after slumber, always before us the vision of the reign of God. We are not as naive as Isaiah was, believing that the king or president will obey God's Will in true worship, rather than serve the nationalistic, tribalistic, greedy and racist values that increase his wealth and power. The king and president serve Power. We serve God. And in God's reign there is no place for race or borders; no flags are flying in that kingdom. God serves all; so must we.

The nations will see our vindication, and we shall be called by a new name that the mouth of the Lord will give. There is yet no name to describe the citizens of this new kingdom, the kingdom of God, of Zion. We are yet indescribable, indefinite, beyond any label or category. We will be given a new name.

Let's work to be worthy of the new name, the new kingdom, the new world. Keep salvation burning like a torch, setting fire to pyres of injustice and inequality. And, of course, that means that something will have to burn before the day is done.

May God Bless All People with Peace

2007-01-04T10:38:00.000-08:00

Psalm 29

This psalm speaks of the power, violence even, of God. It seems to lift up the pairing of violence with glory, power-over with holy splendor. It reads at first like a advertisement for the latest artillery: thundering, flashing with flames of fire, shaking the wilderness, breaking the mighty cedars of Lebanon, causing oaks to whirl and forests to be stripped bare. It is almost frightening in its cadence and persistence. It is somewhat as if a ten-year old boy wrote down his fantasy god: lots of explosions and destruction; unbridled, unmatched and unrelenting power ripping through the world (naively not mentioning or considering the suffering all this might cause people or animals).

But for all that, the last word is peace. This song of power and destruction ends with the affirmation of peace. Whatever else God's word seems to be, the psalm seems to say, in the final analysis it is peace.

Reading through again, we might find a different theme rising up. The voice of God over the waters (v 3), like Genesis 1:2, is an ordering principle bringing order out of chaos, bringing formation out of unformed existence. Even when the Lord sits enthroned over the flood (v 10), the flood being an event of unmatched destruction and suffering, it was an act aimed at redemption and peace - a price too terrible to be paid again, as even God would afterwards admit.

The cedars of Lebanon, broken by God's voice, reveal that the strongest of powers - either physical strength like cedar beams (v 5) or political strength like Lebanon and Sirion (v 6) - crumble beneath God's word. God does not want us servile to political or psychological Powers any more than we would be servile to beams of strong wood. The psalm reminds us of the true power, true authority, the true source and object of our allegiance. And those places of wilderness (v 8) where we believe we are beyond God's work or word - there the timbre of God's voice can yet be felt.

And the Voice that causes the "oaks to whirl" (v 9) is also the voice that "causes the deer to calve" (alternate interpretation of verse 9). We oftentimes read into God's presence and activity that which we want to see, or that which we expect. Since leaders and kings and warriors are the ones whose stories are told over and over, we expect God to resemble these figures. But God's creative activity persists. Those who want a warrior god will have it regardless, but God's activity will all the while be working behind the scenes bringing forth new life.

And while through it all it may be difficult to discern the activity of God, the song ends in the confidence that God's word is peace.

Faithfulness

2007-01-03T08:07:00.000-08:00

Isaiah 43:1-7 (esp. 1-2)

The connection, presumably, to the other lectionary texts this week is the mention of water (which can be interpreted to refer to baptism, specifically the baptism of Jesus by John in the Jordan). There is an irony here, though, since in this Isaiah passage the waters are a threat and danger against which God protects the faithful. God's promise in Isaiah, however, is companionship through the waters and fires - the same promise made by Jesus in leaving the Paraclete, "the one who walks beside", or the Spirit.

There is another parallel here with the Paraclete: redemption. The way "redeemed" is used has legal and economic implications - as if there is a debt or suit against someone, and another advocates for that person and perhaps assumes the debt or pays the suit in that person's stead. Paraclete has that same nuance of "advocate" as well as comforter.

Another part of this scripture is important: the command "Do not fear." Isaiah is just coming off a long list of charges against Israel, criticisms and chastisements. And yet, he can turn right around and in that same spirit of God speak words of consolation. You have failed, Israel, you have been unfaithful; but don't be afraid, I haven't given up on you. No matter what happens, I will be with you.

Such faithfulness, even if it is onesided, is beautiful (and anti-semitic Christians would do well to remember the pledges of God on Israel's behalf).

Confirmation of the Holy Spirit

2007-01-02T08:57:00.000-08:00

Acts 8:14-17

That the lectionary selection stops at verse seventeen kills me. Verses eighteen to twenty-four talk about the role of money and wealth in gaining the the powers of the Holy Spirit, specifically the assumption of the rich that they can buy such blessing without any true conversion. But perhaps my blood boils too easily, too quickly, at such verses, and the limits of this week's lectionary can focus me and minister to my resistant heart.

Two things jump out at me. First, that the Samaritans were converted before Peter and John got there - indicating that some first-contact missionary was sent or had arrived among them, and that Peter and John arrived to confirm the conversion and status of the new adherents to their Jewish Jesus-movement. Second, that this must be the origin of the Christian rite of Confirmation. First comes Baptism, and then comes Confirmation of the Holy Spirit.

That these early Christians (although they weren't called that yet at the point when this story takes place) still needed education and to be brought further along in their faith, even after baptism, is a good sign to us who would claim the fullness of the gospel descending all at once. Humans are stubborn creatures, and our wills and understandings and beliefs may change quickly sometimes, but even then there are hold-outs, carry-overs, the residue of our former minds and hearts. It is easy to change the clothes we wear, but more difficult to change what those clothes are put over. Peter and John arrive to help in that process.

Also, the prayer the apostles give involves laying on of hands. Growing the Holy Spirit in someone requires physical contact. We are intellectual beings, and emotional beings, but we are also embodied beings. The prayer Peter and John give reflects all these realities. And it reminds us that we must reach out physically, as well as metaphorically, to those whom we would help gain the Spirit.

John's Expections and Jesus' Baptism

2007-01-01T13:53:00.000-08:00

A Sense of Divine Mission and Approval
Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

This passage picks up at the end of the lectionary texts from two weeks ago (Dec. 14 & 15), and as such acts virtually as "part three" in repeated coverage. But I suppose that's the thing about scripture: we keep coming back to it, looking at it again and again.

This is still the story of John - he has whipped up people into a frenzied excitement; they are eager to see and work toward an in-breaking of the reign of God, and they look to him for leadership. Wisely, John demurs, and explains that he is merely starting us on the journey, preparing us for the work, that there will be a leader who will demand and guide us to greater things. John is taking the role of the prophet - declaring his sense of God's Will but not taking the responsibility away from the people themselves to answer that call or not, nor to what degree or what kind of answer they will make. John will not accept the hope and expectation they project on him. One way he does this is by anticipating another leader who will be worthy of their confidence and allegiance.

But this is the story of John's expectations for Jesus, too. John declares that Jesus will baptize with the Spirit and fire - Jesus will take the kindling spirits of those John has sparked and set them on fire. You think you're excited now? John seems to be saying. You think you're ready to work for the Kingdom of God now? You think I have a sense of what this new world can be? Wait until you meet Jesus - he's gonna blow you away.

John immediately sets into a work-metaphor: winnowing and harvest (anyone who's forked hay before knows that this is long, hard work - not for the faint of heart or weak of will). This is important. John is communicating right from the get-go that this in-breaking of the reign of God is going to mean hard work for a lot of people. This isn't some return to Eden where everyone is happy all the time and no one works for their food or medical care. This is going to be work, actual work, not just "spiritual" work - but it will be work worth the effort.

John then descends into rough judgment language - pursuing the metaphor too far, in my mind: gathering the wheat is a good image, but burning the chaff with unquenchable fire seems excessive. John is an apocalyptic thinker, remember; he isn't the Messiah and doesn't even claim himself to have a full grasp on the love and dynamics of God's revelation-to-come. (Does one even burn chaff? I thought chaff just blew away in the wind when winnowing in the old style. This may give us a clue as to John's excessive language. And when winnowing, it isn't as if the harvester has any ill-feelings toward the chaff - it's just part of the work to bring in the harvest, not an object of loathing upon which to wreak vengeance. A more appropriate use of the metaphor would have been if the chaff is just let go of... but that wouldn't quite have the sharpness that John was after.) John was also trying to captivate his audience, keep them waiting for something indefinite and uncertain (however glorious). We all have seen how fear captivates people's hearts and minds, especially when directed at some unknown fate. Fear of horrific judgment keeps people in line (at least in the short run), and this may be a strategy of John's to capture the attention and loyalty of his listeners. The baptismal scene of Jesus doesn't carry any of this judgmental tone - and in fact, if anything, seems a loving contrast to John's vindictiveness.

In this baptismal scene, I can understand how "adoptionists" could imagine that Jesus was "adopted" by God and made God's son, not born God's son. It is too bad this interpretation was declared (and violently enforced) as heretical, because it seems a lovely way to represent God's relationship with all humanity: each person, any one of us could be the adopted child of God, so we shouldn't treat anyone with disrespect or unkindness. (Another chit for adoptionist heresy is the footnote: "Other ancient authorities read You are my Son, today I have begotten you.")

It is important that the heavens opened and that Jesus was beloved and approved of before his work began. Similarly, when we are baptized, we are beloved and approved of, God's spirit descends on us, before we're worthy of any such confidence. We just declare our intention, our will to bring about Zion, and God is pleased. We still have the work to do, but we don't have to prove ourselves or earn the affection or approval of God. Picking up our own winnowing fork is a first and glorious step, and the heavens open up and we can hear the voice of Creativity and Love encouraging us, urging us on.

Now, that's confirmation!

The Kingdom Call: Unity of Opposites

2006-12-29T10:03:00.000-08:00

Psalm 148

I am usually uncomfortable with so much praising - seeing it as an outgrowth of imperial or kingly court influence or overlay on the religious devotion of the people, an attempt to transfer awe and allegiance of God to the king or emperor. So I found this particular psalm difficult to approach.

That being said, I can certainly appreciate the idea that the whole universe ought to appreciate the source of creative growth, stand in awe at the wondrous complexity and endurance, the fragility and perserverance of life and crystals and the atomic numbers on the periodic table of elements.

(I did find it entertaining when the psalmist spoke of the "waters above the heavens" [4] and "sea monsters" [7]. It reminds me that, yes, this an historical document reflecting a particular time and understanding, much of which I cannot share. And it reminds me to be generous in my reading.)

But something started to come together in verses 9 through 12. Fruit trees and cedars, wild animals and cattle, creeping things and flying birds, kings and people, women and men, young and old. These are all pairings of populations that compete with one another. Each of these is clearly distinct from the other and often vies for power and prosperity, sometimes for survival. Yet in this psalm they are united, singing with one voice, in praise of something greater than they. Herein lies the crux: God unifies disagreeing parties, and those who would praise God must join their voices with their enemies' if they would send a pleasing sound. This is the kingdom of God, Zion: unity in the face of division, diversity in the face of competition and forces that would wipe out diversity, holding all things sacred - especially our enemies and victims and those who oppose us (and whom we oppose). The wolf shall lie down with the lamb, and a little child shall lead them. (Isaiah 11:6)

Worship of God necessarily includes reconciling with our enemies, with our resources, with our sources of sustenance... with all creation, starting with what we most violently oppose or exploit.

And that is truly worth the whole world's praise.

Precedents and Overtures

2006-12-28T09:52:00.000-08:00

Jesus' Childhood Casts a Shadow
Luke 2:41-52

Luke loves childhood stories of Jesus, and I for the longest time held this against him, assuming that therefore his Gospel was the most fabricated, most hypothetical of the synoptics. But I feel a change in the winds of my heart, and I turn to Luke anew - recognizing the style and literary intent in the narrative, and relating more to the Lucan conception of Jesus' role in salvation than of any other Gospel. So I look again at this story as part of Luke's sensitivity to Greek style and storytelling.

The purpose of relating that Jesus' family travels every year to Jerusalem is to establish their piety and credibility as faithful followers of the Jewish spiritual laws. Jesus' family is above reproach, despite their low estate. This could be foreshadowing of Jesus' trip(s) to Jerusalem, particularly during the Passover feast and his subsequent passion. And I find myself compelled to see it as a literary indulgence, rather than an accurate description of Jesus' family - among other questions, there is the economic possibility of making pilgrimage every year and during the most expensive time of year for travel to Jerusalem at that. Even so, the purpose is clear: Jesus' childhood was steeped in the rich tradition of the Jewish faith, and Jesus was clearly an exemplary Jew (if a somewhat insensitive child), excelling in the intellectual and spiritual exercises that were held in such high esteem by Jew and Gentile alike - an eager student of tradition and wisdom, with a keen mind of his own and the confidence and articulateness to respectfully and insightfully question his elders.

Luke also loves significant numbers - Jesus was twelve years old, and his parents looked for him three days. Could this be foreshadowing of the passion narrative? His parents, those who loved him but did not understand him, felt like they lost him - he'd disappeared from their sights, couldn't be found in all the usual places, and they were anxious (and probably confused and angry, too). And after three days he was found again, in the Temple no less, still about his Father's interests. (Is this what Luke is referring to when he says: "But [his parents] did not understand what he said to them"? [50])

And then, making sure not to push the precociousness of Jesus too far, not to make him too disobedient or difficult, Luke makes sure to note that he then returned with his parents and obeyed them thereafter. We don't hear of him again until the appearance of John the Baptist and the beginning of Jesus' conversion and career. But the precedent has been set - Jesus will disobey authority in the service of God, Jesus will break the rules when seeking the truth and when learning and teaching about God's will and Rule. And, it can be extrapolated, Jesus will be so focused on learning and teaching about God that he goes homeless for several days, and isn't particularly concerned about food or security. Another overture to his later life?

Jesus here is an intent student of God, and he seeks knowledge and wisdom from the traditional authoritative sources. Luke uses this as a preface to Jesus' preaching: Jesus is fulfilling the Law, not destroying it. Jesus is a good Jew, and the fact that he was born into that community is significant. Luke is going to great lengths to show that Judaism is the fertile soil from which sprang the fullness and truth he relates in his Gospel.

Let the Peace of Christ Rule

2006-12-27T08:28:00.000-08:00

Col. 3:12-17 (l)

This is a great passage. I hardly have anything to say - except how poorly I put it into practice, and how much I need to work on that.

Some time ago, when I first started exploring "MySpace", I was interested in a "Christian" discussion group. I put Christian in quotes because the group was so large that there were many people of various Christian stripes - including virulently judgemental, hyprocritical, condescending, and self-righteous ones who insisted on abusively attacking anyone who didn't see the world and gospel precisely as they did (even if the topic being discussed had nothing to do with any complaint they could bring). (You can see I still have some hard feelings about this.) So I put Christian in quotes because they would call themselves "Christian", but I could see precious little of whatever I would consider Christian in their behavior or thoughts. For me, Christianity is an embracing, empowering, encouraging gospel that pushes the boundaries and makes us re-evaluate our parochial interests. I go the impression that, for one vocal person in particular, Christianity was an exclusive, fixed, condemning thing that demanded obedience rather than love.

So when I first read this scripture - speaking of dealing with others in meekness and patience, forgiving each other, and above all clothing ourselves in love - I thought I should have quoted this as a defense against this young man's attacks. I considered emailing the scripture to him, in lieu of a demand that he deal with others more kindly, and by way of a demand that he apologize and treat me more kindly. Aha, I thought, another scripture to use against him!

And then, as it tends to do, the scripture turned on me. Have I forgiven this boy? Have I given up my complaint against him who wronged me? Am I clothing myself with humility - not assuming I know what's best for him or others? Am I clothing myself in love? Is the Peace of Christ ruling in my heart? I must re-evaluate myself in this encounter with the scripture.

I have a tough time with forgiveness, generally. At least, when it takes me unawares. If I'm prepared for being wronged, I can be quite generous. But if it surprises me, I find myself unwilling at some level to let it go. I need to work on this.

So even if I'm not at the point of thanking God for the arrogance and cruelty of this boy in his offence against me, I can be thankful that I am still challenged by the gospel in transformation. Thank God for the scripture turning on me - making me realize how much I yet need to clothe myself with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness and patience.

Faithfulness and Service

2006-12-26T10:00:00.000-08:00

1 Samuel 2:18-21

This snippet is put immediately following a description of the high priest's wicked sons - how they exploited their positions of power and stole from those who came to sacrifice at the Temple. Presumably, this description of the crimes and shortcomings of the priestly family is inserted into the narrative of Samuel's early life in order to contrast with the piety of Samuel's family. Despite obvious hardship, every year Samuel's father and mother, Elkinah and Hannah, come to offer annual sacrifice. Every year, the scripture says, Hannah makes a little robe for young Samuel to wear in his ministrations at the Temple.

Instead of taking from those who come to sacrifice (flying in the face of the sacredness of the event), as Eli's sons do, Hannah herself brings more to offer to the Temple so that others would not have to provide this additional support for Samuel's ministry.

The obvious lesson and nobility in both sacrificing for the work of God and treating people fairly (even generously) is clear. The obvious farce of so-called priests treating both penitents and their sacrifices with contempt and greed is also clear. I'm amazed that this has remained in the Bible, edited all the while by priests and priestly scribes, who would have served themselves well to have merely omitted it. Perhaps the truth is too difficult to avoid - there are those who would abuse their position, turn a position of servanthood into mastery, we know all too well. And we would do well to be wary of such abuse. Even the halls of God are no match for the pervasive greed of human hearts.

But there is also room for praise here, too. These priests and scribes who could have been self-serving and edited out this lesson (taken it out of the text, but surely not out of people's ongoing experience), didnt. They served the people and God in their honesty and truthfulness - even self-critical truthfulness (oftentimes the most important truthfulness there is).

However intriguing the preceeding verses are, the lectionary selection focuses on Samuel's family and their faithfulness. Elkinah and Hannah are blessed by Eli, the high priest, for their faithfulness and for the service of Samuel at the Temple. Now, the blessing comes in the form of more births and children by Hannah, revealing the Priestly "piety-prosperity principle" (that is: the pious and faithful are rewarded with propserity in this life - if someone has riches, therefore, that is proof of their favor in God's eyes, while someone who is poor is poor because they have sinned in some way.) The piety-prosperity prinicple is patently contradictory to experience - sometimes good things happen to bad people, and bad things happen to good people, and personal wealth is no reliable indicator of spiritual piety. (This is discussed at some length in the book of Job.)

While tossing out the peity-prosperity idea, we can look at the blessings that did come to Elkinah and Hannah - they had more children. Look at what happens: they have a child and consecrate it to the service of God, and find themselves with more children - and their faithfulness and response to God is all the greater. Apart from the agrarian praiseworthiness of having lots of kids (which doesn't necessarily translate into our urban, ecologically-minded lifestyles), there is another lesson here: our responses to God's call to serve beget more opportunities to serve.

Instead of something like paying ones taxes - where once you pay, it's paid (hopefully) - God's response to our faithfulness is to ask more of us, give us more opportunity to respond. Serving God faithfully is like a descending spiral: once you start to give in, you find yourself sucked in more and more, feeling strangly compelled to do more and more things that you wouldn't have expected yourself to do (and that certainly don't jive with the rest of your surrounding culture). Responding to God is the first step on a journey you have no idea where it will end.

In Remembrance of Mercy

2006-12-21T08:29:00.000-08:00

Mary's Song of Praise (Luke 1:46-55)
part four (v 54)

"God has helped God's servant Israel, in remembrance of God's mercy..."

I am tempted to talk about loving one's enemies - but that comes too quickly to my heart.

This comes in the context of describing the salvic acts of God, three "revolutions" being ushered in through the birth of Jesus: a moral one (v 51) where arrogance and pride are overturned, a social one (v 52) where class and station are erased, and an economic on (v 53) where the dispossessed are lifted up and the rich are taken away from. This is a lot of upsetting happening here! This is the context of God's mercy, this is God's mercy?

It certainly won't be "merciful" toward the rich and powerful - unless we stretch the meaning of "mercy" to include "liberating" the rich and powerful of the chains of their riches and power. (This is a legitimate reading, of course, but something in it seems stretched thin to me.)

Perhaps God's mercy is the setting-right of social relations. God's mercy are those forces and acts that put us in right relation to other people (and, more broadly, to all life). "Sin" and "evil" thus would be those forces and acts that put us in wrong relation to others: economic inequality, arrogance, nationalism, capitalism, property, style and fashion, and so on, ad infinitum. Or perhaps God's mercy is God's will or wish that we should live in right relations with each other - and our acts are our remembrance of that mercy. (Is there a difference between God's will and God's acts?)

God's mercy, it seems to me now, is God's will for us to be in right relations with each other and the confidence that right relations are both possible and certain in the future. We speak of these things with such confidence that we speak of them as if they've already happened, even though they clearly have not (have only begun?). This has been the ongoing story of the children of Abraham - to which the verse makes reference - and is the story we take up in our discipleship of Jesus.

Social and economic justice are the hallmarks of God's Rule and Mercy. God does not forget this, and neither should we - especially on this very special occasion.

Pride Resisting the Fall

2006-12-20T08:52:00.000-08:00

Mary's Song of Praise (Luke 1:46-55)
part three (v 51)

"God has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts"

We proud, who believe we know better, who hold our own opinion so dear, who stand so tall with conviction, who are certain we know who God is and what God wants, and trust those voices on "our side". We are destined - over and over again, it seems - to be scattered in the thoughts of our hearts. God is the source of confusion here. ("There is a confusion that brings death, and a confusion that brings life.")

When we are proud and arrogant, we take ourselves very seriously, hold ourselves as more valuable, knowledgable and noble than others. We must be broken down in this. Our hearts must be disturbed, our thoughts upset, our certainty shaken, our self-importance crumbled - and this is not an easy or pleasant thing to bear. It is better, of course, to start it at one's own hand - approach and pray and open oneself to change. But it is inevitable, so the scripture attests, for all the proud, and for some it will be difficult indeed. For me, too....

I'd say I am more proud than most, but I wonder if that declaration of above-average suffering is itself a mark of pride, of thinking that I am somehow exceptional, if even in my sinning. Suffice it to say I am proud, and it is a struggle for me. I forego some honors, and yet I love honor and miss it when it passes me by. I lose some games, and yet I seem to lose my temper when I lose without my consent. I can be self-deprecating, but do not allow others to be so critical of me. These are ways I struggle with my pride.

Thankfully, I have been given good friends, who both accept me and are secure enough in our friendship to offer criticism. They honor me with their friendship, but do not let that honor stand too high, or make it exceptional - we all honor each other so. And I lose more games than I win, to be sure, and they love me regardless of my reactions, and invite me to play again. (And also my occasional victories are not made too much of, either.) We are all self-deprecating, but all in a context of love and ultimate respect. Whatever shortcomings I am reminded of, I am reminded of them in the context of a loving, enduring frienship. These close friends make me a better person. They are a more compassionate and slow hand of God, working with me mercifully, and investing in me some measure to work with them.

I must be open to the scattering of my thoughts - not hold too tightly to even my firmest convictions - and trust in a God of love that will restore my spirit and thoughts to right. I am already a changed person from who I was five years ago. But it would be prideful to think that I do not have more change awaiting me.

Mercy is for those who fear...

2006-12-19T18:40:00.000-08:00

Luke 1:46-55, part 2 (esp. v 50)

This is a tough scripture for me. I don't like the idea of a God who likes people to fear it, or rewards such a dysfunctional relationship. Respect, fine. Honor, great. Love, even better. But fear? It sounds too much like the popular God-as-abusive-father image that I hear too often. My God isn't that - and certainly wouldn't be a god worth respecting or honoring. (If all God wants is fear, then that's what God gets from people predisposed to praise a scary God. Less generous parts of me say: leave them to it, if that's what they want.)

But perhaps I'm letting myself be taken in by the popular image to start off with. Am I reading that verse already thinking that I know what it means - the same thing I see scared-of-God people doing? Perhaps I misunderstood the line.

"God's mercy is for those who fear God from generation to generation."

Could it be that God laments the fact that some fear God? That God feels bad for those who fear? Perhaps this is a prelude to the Beattitudes - blessed are the poor and those who mourn. Jesus wasn't saying we should kill our loved ones so that we would mourn more. Jesus was saying something about God's relationship to those who suffer. Is Luke giving a pre-echo of that here? God's mercy is for those who fear God - God doesn't want people to fear God, but God extends God's mercy and compassion toward those who can't help but fear, who have been taught to fear or who have experienced such uncertainty or lack of love that a terrible God is more real to them than a loving and present one. God's mercy is for those so close and yet lost to God.

There is mercy everywhere, it seems. Even here in fear.

My Soul Magnifies the Lord

2006-12-18T08:43:00.000-08:00

Mary's Song of Praise (Luke 1:46-56, esp. v 47)
part one

My soul magnifies the Lord. Can the Absolute be magnified? Can the Ultimate be made larger? What does it mean for my soul to magnify the Lord?

I'm thinking of a child holding a magnifying glass up to an insect (hopefully away from direct sunlight) - the child's increased vision doesn't change the insect at all, it doesn't even necessarily change the child at all - they are both what they were before, in the same relationship they were in before. But something has changed. The child's focus has changed, her vision has narrowed and intensified for a moment. To her extraordinary details come to light, subtleties she was not aware of, complexities and (dare I say) beauties become manifest. A new world opens up to her - a world that was always there, paralleling her own, but that in her hurry and self-centeredness she never noticed before. All it took was a look through a magnifying glass, and she was shocked into seeing a whole new world.

Is this what Mary meant when saying "my soul magnifies the Lord"? Of course, she may have been just emoting, just expressing her feelings of closeness to the Spirit, of exaltation, in being chosen, in having a baby. But the expression "my soul magnifies" seems subtly important.

Can our persons, our souls, act as a magnifying glass for God? Can we focus people's vision on finer details of a world of which they may not even be aware? And how can we do this?!

If we look to Mary's experience, her magnification comes in the context of her joy. Upon arriving at her aunt's house and feeling the welcome there, Mary is surely relieved and begins to overcome her fear of social rejection, and allows herself to feel the joy of new motherhood. And there is also confidence - more than hope (but less than certainty, for what mother thinks of certainty) - a confidence that she will raise a fine son and that he will do good things. Mary magnified the Lord when her soul was filled with joy and confidence.

Confidence in God's workings in the world - that justice and peace will someday prevail, that economic and spiritual relations between people will someday be equal and nourishing, that those in need will have theirs met, and that there will be mercy. Mercy. Mercy and blessedness.

Oh, that we all could be filled with such joy and confidence. We might just be able to change the world. And wouldn't that magnify the Lord.

John's Advice: Behavior Change

2006-12-15T09:57:00.000-08:00

Luke 3:7-17 (part two)
(esp. vv. 12-14)

When asked what they need to do in the face of judgment, John tells the crowd they must do acts of justice. His two examples are of equal distribution of resources: coats and food - the one with two coats must give to her who has none, the one with food must give to him who has none. And then specific kinds of people come up to him, asking for advice: tax collectors and soldiers.

(Surely, Luke is at least partly interested in setting the literary stage here: tax collectors and soldiers as populations reviled in an occupied Palestine, one group within the religious community and the other entirely outside Abrahamic culture. They approach John, as later they will encounter Jesus. So this vignette with John may serve partly as foreshadowing for the rest of the Gospel. But my interest right now isn't the literary role of these two classes of people.)

What grabs and unsettles me this morning is verses 12-14, John's answer to the tax collector and soldier. The tax collector asks, and in reply John says merely "collect no more than the amount proscribed to you." And to the soldier he says: "do not extort money from anyone by threats... and be satisfied by your wages." A verse earlier John is saying we should redistribute resources and wealth equally among all, which would seriously upset the social/political/economic structures of his time, and then he gives permission for people to continue to participate in those same unequal structures but not use them for their own unfair gain.

I'm certain that my labor background is making me balk at the idea of advice to a soldier being "be satisfied with your wages." That is, honestly, the last thing I'd tell a soldier. There are so many other things I'd rather them do, including dissatisfaction with their wages (who can pay one enough to kill?), not to mention the larger implication of telling workers anywhere to be satisfied with their wages (setting them up for perpetual and abhorrent exploitation at the hands of their employers!).

There is the obvious context to those sentences: John is telling them they should deal more fairly with the people they meet - don't take advantage of them despite your ability to do so, your station is not to be lorded over people. This is a good message in itself, but is hardly comprehensive.

Perhaps this is where Luke plans on having Jesus pick up the baptist's message and bring it closer to fulfillment. Luke might be wanting Jesus to take John's message of "not abusing your unequal station" a step further, to one of "abandon your unequal stations because their very existence treats people unfairly." Jesus' ministry is preluded by John's message.

John says he baptizes with water, while another will baptize with the Spirit. John begins people with a physical act, calling them to mere behavioral changes in the face of abject inequity. Jesus will be calling them to change the way they think about the world and themselves, calling them to more than behavioral changes, calling them to spiritual transformation.

So often we substitute fundamental spiritual change with superficial behavioral changes. We spend a holiday serving at the soup kitchen and somehow manage to come out unchanged but thinking well of ourselves. We give a set amount of our money to church or charity, but give no thought to how we earned that money (was it a Christ-like activity?) or that the very existence of monied interests represents unequal distribution of resources and power. It seems we'd all rather be disciples of John the Baptist - just needing to change our behavior a little bit, still being able to go about our lives participating in all kinds of structures and activities that in themselves perpetuate inequality, but as long as it is the structure's fault and not our own, then we have no problem facing judgment! We'd rather not really listen to Jesus' message that participation in these unequal mechanisms is itself unholy. We must be changed through and through, to give us the vision and resolve necessary for discipleship.

"Be satisfied with your wages..." is half-assed advice, which is why it falls on the lips of John and not Jesus.

Judgment and Justice

2006-12-14T08:14:00.000-08:00

Luke 3:7-18 (part one)

These verses are a strange mix of judgment and justice.

John the Baptist warns people not to flee from judgment, but to perform acts that will stand them well. John uses the word "repentance" - which is always key, since repentance isn't something like feeling sorry or regretful, the Greek word is "metanoia", "change one's way of knowing."
Don't believe, John warns, that other qualifications will save you - and although John speaks of using the lineage of Abraham as cover, it brings to my mind those who use the name of Jesus as cover. Christians that claim that merely confession of Jesus' name and belief in him as some sort of supernatural savior will "save" them, these Christians seem fundamentally misguided. There is no "name" or label or single confession that saves, but acts of justice in the context of a changed heart and mind that "save." This is the point of John's claim that only trees that bear fruit will remain standing.

I don't like the undertone of vengeance and violence, but I do like the overall message. The crowd asks John: what do we do? And his response is fabulous: whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise. Yee-freakin-hah.

While I want to talk about the "justice" verses, I'm feeling led to tarry with the judgment ones for a while. Indulge me.

God is able to raise up children of Abraham, so being one won't save (v 8) - in other words, since God can bring it about, it isn't really that important for our salvation. A possible midrash of this might be that we are able to do (called to do?) what God is not necessarily able to do - that is, make people (ourselves) treat others equitably. The axe that is lying at the root of the tree might not be God's "wrath", but the consequences of our own decisions - our choice to live in iniquity (inequality), to refuse to do what God cannot do without us. Those trees that do not bear good fruit (equality and justice) will be consumed by their own fires of greed and selfishness, while those that do bear good fruit will pass on seeds of generosity, sharing, compassion. Of course, we're always a mixed bag when it comes to what we are - what we inherited from those before us, what we've chosen, and what we pass on to others. So it isn't as if our judgment is final or singular. But, too, I suppose, an axe doesn't cut down a tree in one blow, either. In every act we are either chipping away at our roots or planting seeds of hope for the future. Either way, our fate seems certain, but we can pass on to others the possibility of a future time of equality. We are judged now - so that others later might live free.

Why "flannelectio"?

2006-12-13T16:35:00.000-08:00

Why not?

But, more seriously, Lectio Divina, the practice of reading and meditating on scriptural passages is an ancient spiritual discipline. A discipline, frankly, I'm not very good at, and could use some practice.

Lectio Divina, isn't often written, and although I certainly could use more time when I don't feel compelled to produce something, I find it helpful in retrospect to come back to lectios I've done before. So I offer this as much to my future self (selves?) as to my own spiritual present.

My task here is to meditate on a scripture - probably one in the upcoming lectionary schedule - and simply reflect on it. Without the more historical research and literary criticism and skepticism that I usually approach texts with. I want this to be a time when I just encounter the text. I don't imagine that I'll not have criticism, or that I won't also at times be surprised and moved. And, in all honestly, there will likely be times when the work doesn't seem all that fruitful at all. But that's the point, I suppose: no pressure to be particularly fruitful... just honestly, thoughtfully, prayerfully engage the text as scripture.

I'd like to offer a prayer at the beginning of this discipline:

Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.
(Psalm 19:14)