20th Sunday in Ordinary Time
19 August 2007
Luke 12.49-56
A lesson in long division
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007
We were kids. I was maybe nine or ten years old. My brother and I each had a pair of boxing gloves. Mom gave them to us. She saw we were at the age when we going to be getting on each other’s nerves, and she figured it was best that brothers pummel one another with a little cushioning between the knuckles and the chin. Maybe the gift of boxing gloves was also her way of telling us that fighting was part of being in a family, and we had her permission to hit and even hurt, as long as there was no major injury. I’m sure we did put those gloves on a few times, but I don’t ever remember the fights we must have tried to have. I do remember the lesson from my mother, if that’s what she was giving us. I remember that sometimes there has to be a fight, even with people we love.
It’s one thing, even if an unusual thing, for your mother to tell you you’re going to fight. It is somehow another thing when Jesus—the Prince of Peace—teaches us that we’ll be fighting within our own families over the truth he is teaching us. Whenever I read that anymore, it doesn’t surprise me. Old hat. Then I think about it, and the idea of spiritual antagonisms does take me back. Elsewhere, Jesus takes the idea even further and says that we will actually have to “hate” our family members, if we want to be his disciple. [Lk 14.25] That’s really shocking.
I suppose you’ve heard this passage before, and somewhere along the line you might have listened to a sermon about it. I’ll bet, though, that the sermons most of us have heard suggest that Jesus is just exaggerating to make a point about how hard religious disagreements can be. Most of the time I myself don’t believe that I will ever have to divide myself against my own brother or father or mother over an issue about my faith in God. What I don’t really state out loud, even to myself, is my assumption that God would never divide me against my family over a matter of faith. I may be right, but only if Jesus is wrong.
Jesus says that we will live in conflictual division with each other, and were he to have finished the thought, he would have told us that everyone is in for a long division. Ever since Jesus relinquished to his disciples the mission to teach faith to the world, people have been divided about what to believe and how to live. Jesus’ lesson in long division to his disciples reminds me of the lessons in long division I got in school. Long division is frustrating when it’s too hard and tedious even when you master it. And you have to learn it.
How shall we learn to be divided, today? How are we to be faithful to our belief about God and Christ to the point that we’ll put on our gloves and fight over it? And yet when does our division on the other hand become faithless and damaging to the church, the world and ourselves? Or are there some things about the faith that make damaging the church or the world our ourselves necessary?
My dad used to ask me about what I was learning in seminary. I talked about the things that invigorated me. Those things tended to be ideas that challenged beliefs about God and reality I had never questioned. When I heard new ideas and the explanations for why they came closer to the truth, the new discoveries excited me. I wanted to know more, because I wanted to understand better. Or sometimes I wanted to know more, because I wanted to sharpen my arguments for traditional ideas that would otherwise be displaced. Mostly, though, when I found a new school of thought that I learned to trust, I started to embrace the new ideas of that school. We must need new ideas, I figure, because the old ideas haven’t accomplished what their conceivers wanted.
When I explained the new ideas to Dad, it was hard for him to share my excitement with me. For the most part, the old ideas had served him well. He grew up a Baptist and became a Presbyterian only when he was in seminary himself and had to choose a denomination. He liked Presbyterian culture. The old Baptist in him, though, liked the gospel traditional and straightforward. At the end of these conversations I had with him, he’d say, “Christian faith shouldn’t be that complicated.” I’d say that simple didn’t mean true. He’d say, “Simple people like my father”—my grandfather was a plumber—“should be able to understand faith with out all these complicated ideas of yours.” (My father had college and seminary degrees, but he never could repair a faucet. I wish I asked him why it was his father who was simple.)
The reason these conversations with Dad always ended this way is that I didn’t have an answer for him that didn’t make me seem to insult my grandfather. My Dad admired him, probably more than anyone else in the world, and far be it for me to suggest that understanding Christian faith could be beyond the mind of the most admirable person in the world. So I didn’t fight, son against father, as Jesus taught. I walked away.
But what if I had stood and fought? Would I have hurt him and strained our relationship? Or would he have played out the filial loyalty gambit about my grandfather until he antagonized me? Or would we have drilled down into our beliefs deeply enough to see a common foundation of faith? And from that common foundation, might we have built a way for each of us to say what we believed without excluding one another? We’ll never know for certain—Dad and I never really put the gloves on. But eventually we all find out what will happen if we get into a fight with someone we care about, because sometimes life makes you fight, even when you don’t want to.
I have been typical of the moderate-to-liberal Christian. Certain traditional conservative beliefs have become less important to me than they still are to others. Once I’d studied the evidence for the theory of evolution, it was not hard for me to conclude that Darwin was on the right track, even if he could not prove everything about his theory. Especially, when someone pointed out to me that the first two chapters of Genesis present two distinct narratives of creation, I was able to see the Genesis testimony as something that taught me eternal truths so compelling that they transcended the significance of temporal facts, scientific or otherwise. As a moderate person, I was content to read at Christmastime the lovely testimony of Matthew and Luke that Jesus’ mother was a virgin, such that even when someone pointed out that the other two gospels—plus all the rest of the New Testament—showed know interest at all in Mary’s virginity—did not even seem to be aware of it—I realized it wasn’t worth fighting over how she actually got pregnant.
And there is more to be moderate about. Since the world is not flat but round, does it any longer make sense to believe that there could have been enough water to flood all of life into oblivion, or to believe that Joshua really stopped the sun for a day, when it would have to have been the earth that stopped rotating, which, it one day dawned on me, would in turn have made everybody’s coffee cup slide off the dining table? You could argue about these things, but as a moderate person, who values togetherness along with diversity, I didn’t see why I would fight about them, even if Jesus teaches us that we will fight with people we love about our faith.
Two kinds of things happen with respect to these differences that, according to Jesus, make push come to shove. One is that, at least over the last generation or so, people have kept backing moderates into a corner. Many conservatives have loudly challenged the faith of people like me. They assert a literal interpretation of the Bible, and they choose parts of the Bible, like the creation in six days, the virgin birth, the great flood and even of Joshua’s stopping the sun in the sky as the literalist line in the sand. Whereas I’ve been happy to let them preach the truth their own way, they have shouted at people like me, daring us to disagree with them. When we calmly affirm a belief they disagree with, they say, “They you are, a faithless liberal!” So all of us calm moderates are now liberal, and on top of that, we’re in a pitched battle for God, truth, and, somewhat surprisingly to us, the American way, which we consider a separate matter altogether.
Why don’t I just let this kind of thing roll off my back? Well, normally, I do. But one day in a weekly meeting of 10 or so church members who gathered at 7:30 for coffee, faith-sharing and prayer, someone read a forwarded email telling about a group of scientists associated with NASA, who discovered a full day’s worth of time missing in their calculations for the movement of the earth and sun over the last few thousand years. They scratched their heads until a Christian scientist showed them in a King James Bible the two places that accounted for the missing day. When the group member read this, people reacted with audible amazement, but I was doubtful. Wouldn’t we have read about this somewhere besides emails the tabloids, if it were verifiably true?
It turns out, there really was a group of people associated with NASA, which was the Curtis Engine Company, whose conservative Christian president published the story in a 1974 book, How to Live Like a King’s Kid. His company actually sold generators to NASA, but it wasn’t a consultant. Also, no scientists were really involved, nor was NASA ever looking for a missing day. Most of the story has been proven to be made up, but I didn’t know that then. I just knew it all sounded fishy, which is why I finally made my comment about coffee cups sliding off the table, because the earth stopped spinning to make the sun look still. I was trying for inoffensive humor as a way to change the uncomfortable subject, but what I got was silence from everyone around the table and stern looks from some. Then within the next few months, most of the people around the table quit our church over theological differences. It was bad enough that the minister wasn’t. to them, a true believer, but it was intolerable that so many other people refused to reject his beliefs.
So you may try to be moderate, but unless you are willing to surrender your integrity and flee from your own Christian faith, you find that you are in a pitch battle for the life of the church. When conservatives revile me, now, for stating my beliefs over against theirs and for thereby “attacking” their right to their beliefs, I realize sadly that they’ve had to resort to slimy rhetorical tricks in order to hold up their side of the argument. So one thing is that you’re sometimes in a fight because others take your beliefs as an assault.
The other kind of thing that happens to make push come to shove is that life puts up a fight of its own. My dad, who wanted to keep his faith simple and his biblical teaching literal, had to reckon with his own sexuality. For most of his life, Dad tried the simple way of literalism and condemned himself for his same-sex orientation. I’m living proof that he did his doggonedest to be a heterosexual for the sake of his faith, but one day he had to have a fight within himself. He had to decide. Was God just being mean to him by making him the way he was, or was it untrue to say the Bible condemned him the way God made him? Understanding the Bible became a little more complicated, which had always irked him about my point of view, but understanding God’s grace became a lot more clear. Dad lived the rest of his days with a somewhat complicated Bible and a blessedly simple God of grace.
Then one day I was in a presbytery meeting in Indiana and had to listen to someone support their view that homosexuals should be excluded from full service in ministry, because they are perverted and threats to our children, and the fighter came out in me. The man who was my model for faith, who had agonized more deeply about his obedience to God than anyone I’d ever known, who taught me so passionately about his love of Jesus that I committed my career to his ministry, who continued to love people who would not accept him as he was, and who prayed daily with a discipline we all in my family remember as the standard of spiritual discipline was not the person this speaker on the floor of presbytery was talking about. As it happened, I was next in line to speak, and I leveled a solemn and fierce response regarding the conduct of any Christian who would stoop to character assassination in order to persuade a body of earnest believers to vote their way.
Thus did my father’s inward fight become the outward fight between me and some of my spiritual brothers and sisters, people with whom I had served on committees and had broken bread in the name of the Lord—people I loved, which at once made the hurt more painful and the fight more inevitable. Today, though I am still dismayed that our church continues to be torn by controversy, I understand the importance of the fight. I am even energized by it, because I have learned that Jesus really means it when he says that following him faithfully is going to lead to divisions that can press us to antagonism, even when we don’t want them and try not to antagonize.
Jesus actually harshly confronts moderates like me. “You hypocrites!” he says to us, when we seem to be able to understand astronomy, “the appearance of earth and sky,” but can’t change our thinking, as he puts it, “to interpret the present time.” The present time is always changing, and that is why it always needs to be interpreted with insights we never saw before from scripture. Those new insights, of course, are going to cause fights, because, as Jesus knew better than anyone in history, new insights from scripture look very scary to people for whom the old insights have become their only protection from evil. People tried to prove Jesus wrong by killing him, but what Jesus has proven ever since is that, in the cause of faithfulness, even death leads to new life and victory. In a fight for his faith, Jesus surrendered his life, and he wants us to remember that we, too, may be called upon to do both. Amen.
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
July 29, 2007 - Prayer for grown-ups
17th Sunday in Ordinary Time
29 July 2007
Luke 11.1-13
Prayer for Grownups
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007
Everyone here as been thirteen years old, so I know you’ll understand.
It was just over a mile and a half walk home from school. There would be half a dozen of us when we left the building, but my friends peeled off one by one to their homes, while I trudged on along Yosemite Drive. The last three, Kim, Lynn and Donna, all turned off on College View Avenue, and I continued on up a hill on my own. Maybe it was the loneliness of the last ¾ mile that got to me. At some point I realized that I kept thinking about Donna. Oh, Donna. There was even a song about it.
One night, I actually included in my prayers the very sincere request that God put it in Donna’s heart to like me, the kind of “like” that would involve holding hands on the way home from school. Well, it would start there, at any rate, but I wasn’t about to ruin the chance of a miracle by sharing my more extravagant romantic reveries with God. Very soon, it might have been the very next day, as we were nearing College View Avenue, Donna turned to me and shyly invited, “You can come to my house, if you want. My mom will have a snack for us.”
I was beside myself with glee. They called the avenue College View, but I could see more than Occidental College from there. I could see sunlit fields of tall grass and daisies. I could see to people in love sitting in the shade of a tree. I could see it all as plainly as I can see the anguished winces of embarrassment on your faces right now. My heart was full, and the world was alive with amorous wonder. Kim and Lynn turned off to their streets, and Donna and I went on to her house.
Donna’s mother fixed us a plate of cookies and some milk. We sat in the family room, where Donna probably turned on the TV. I don’t remember, I wasn’t paying attention. I should probably have paid attention—to the TV or to something, I have no idea what—because on the way home the next day, things had changed. The walk home was quiet and almost solemn. When we got to College View and I asked about escorting Donna home again, she shook her head. I don’t think she looked at me, but I remember the cold glare in Kim’s and Lynn’s eyes. Whatever test I was supposed to pass, I didn’t pass it. Donna was out of my life.
Over time, when I remember that awkward moment in life, what sets it apart for me from other moments in my life, many of them far more awkward, is that I had prayed to God for something that I dearly wanted, and then I got it. It would be the last time I treated prayer that way—the last time I treated God that way—and yet it took me years and years to realize why. Today, when I hear Jesus encourage us to ask for things in daily life, what I hear him teaching us is enlightened by my experiences with prayer, especially the prayer I made when I was thirteen years old.
Now, if a thirteen-year-old can pray, you would think praying must be almost automatic, but apparently it isn’t automatic for the disciples. They’ve noticed that the followers of John the Baptist have a visible prayer regimen. They’ve been watching Jesus go off alone for long periods of prayer with God. They want to be part of that. So they ask Jesus, “Teach us to pray,” and he does. He tells them to start off with the idea that all around God there is sacred space. He tells them to contemplate even the deep sacredness of God’s very name. “Father,” Jesus says, according to Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer, “hallowed be your name.”
That’s major praying right there, if you think about it. First, you have to work out what it means to say God’s name is holy by understanding what it does not mean. The name as a human word, for instance, cannot be what Jesus means by holy, though Jesus may seem to suggest as much. The English word is God, and the German word is Gott, which is close but not exactly the same. Then there is the French word Dieu, which bears no similarity at all. Of course, there are also other religions with their words for God, by which they refer to a deity they describe in certain ways quite distinct from how we Christians think of God. How can God’s name be holy, when there are so many names and so many ideas about God represented by all those names? So what we use as a name for God, so far as it is a word, cannot be holy. It is just a human word, very provisional and indefinite, for the sound of something very deep and pervasive and incorruptible, and something intensely alive.
To say “hallowed be your name,” we must, if we really mean hallowed as in holy, shift our thinking. We have to step for the moment out of the narrowing affect of the insistent pressures of daily life. We have let go of immediate distractions and cast our sights off into the wide and far dimensions of The Holy, as the old German theologian Rudolf Otto used to call it. You cannot be sitting with your persistent worries tying knots in your heart and suppose you can say with honesty to God that you are contemplating what is holy. If you follow Jesus’ pattern for prayer, you begin by loosening the knots of constant anxious attention to the daily anxieties that have so far resisted your every effort to resolve them. If your child is obnoxious, you begin this prayer by letting her drift away into her own land of obnoxicity [don’t bother trying to look it up] and sail on to the hallowed place of God. If your coworker is a jerk and your boss is oblivious, you, in an almost dreamlike scene, introduce them to each other and politely adjourn to the parlor of God’s holy name, and you say to God, “Your kingdom come,” as if it were something that is just about to happen. Because, for all you know, it is.
When I was thirteen, of course, my operative assumption was that the kingdom of God was where Donna would fall in love with me. In other words, I believed that whatever perfect world I conjured for my happiness was what the kingdom of God must be.
The day after my kingdom of God was cancelled for lack of interest, I had to reconsider my assumptions. Let’s consider the options. I could’ve thought that God was playing a joke, as in: “Oh golly, Christy, you never said you wanted Donna to love you for more than a day.” Or I could’ve thought that God only had a day’s worth of influence on the heart of a girl. Or I could’ve thought that God thought to mock me for having an adolescent infatuation, as if an adolescent doesn’t already get more than enough mocking to make him crawl into a hole and die on a daily basis. There are a million things a thirteen year old can think, and I probably thought of all of them one night, all those years ago.
But what I did think at thirteen about God and prayer—and what it means for me to pray—was that getting favors from God is not what prayer is for. I realized that God did not make Donna invite me to her house for a snack and to meet her mother, and certainly not for Donna to fall in love with me. I realized that whatever I was doing in prayer, and however God was responding to my prayers, it was going to matter more that God and I were coming closer together than that I get relief from my pining. What I didn’t have was a way to pray that would let my prayers become what matters more than my pining, or any of my longings. If Jesus had appeared before me, I might have had the presence of mind to ask, “Lord, teach me to pray.” The point is, I didn’t want to decide the prayer was just stupid, but I didn’t know what to do with it.
What I had been taught about prayer was an acronym: A.C.T.S.. Adoration, confession, thanksgiving and supplication. A: Say how wonderful God is. C: Tell God you’ve sinned. T: Thank God for the good things. S: Ask God for what you want. It was a good way of explaining that prayer is more than begging, and in the process of adoring, confessing and thanking, you acknowledge more facets of your spiritual life than base needs. A lot of the time, this sort of fill-in-the-blank form of prayer, though it may sound a bit wooden, has met the need well enough.
It’s just that, whenever I’ve needed the transforming power of prayer most, filling in the blanks came and went like a long night train of empty boxcars. As the whistle’s low moan faded into the darkness, the prayers seemed to ride off with it. But if I could have prayed in some other way, I might have felt the holiness of the night alive around me. Prayer has come to have a nighttime quality for me. Maybe that’s why when the shepherds were abiding in the fields, it was while they were keeping watch over their flock "by night" that they were able to see an angel. Maybe it was when they had stopped trying to get favors from God, when they’d given up filling in the blanks of their prayers, that something so holy happened one night that the glory of the Lord shone around them.
It was many years before I came to know prayer this way—prayer that stills the constant prattling on of my mind about how God could improve my world, prayer that opens the door to what is holy about God’s name, God’s glory, God’s peace and God’s love. Once I got that, prayer, even when it was an expression of all in my life that is wanting and broken and confusing and discouraging, even then, prayer became an outpouring of the stirrings of my heart in the presence of God who listens to all I have to say, who embraces me in all I have so far become, who stands alongside me wherever yet I have to go. I am aware in such prayers of descending ever more deeply into the holy and of rising ever more hopefully into the coming kingdom.
There are still people who teach thirteen-year-old prayer, seeking favors from God, as the primary model even for grownups. It shouldn’t surprise me. For goodness sake, look at this teaching of Jesus in Luke. He tells people precisely that prayer is in fact the relentless pestering of a friend for a piece of bread. And I can actually imagine that if I were a Sudanese refugee with a child that is mostly distended belly in my arms, it would be the lack of a piece of bread that is the main fact of my life which I would take to God again and again. I would bang on God’s door all night long, if that’s what I was dealing with. Indeed, this is nearly the situation of the friend at the neighbor’s door. The friend is not only lacking any bread for himself, but a hungry visitor has arrived at his door, tired from a journey, also needing something to eat. In that situation, if God isn’t with you in your hunger, what kind of God would you pray to? And what else would there be to say? Asking for bread would be a prayer.
But a prayer is not a middle-class thirteen-year-old banging on God’s door all night to satisfy the perpetual yearnings of the adolescent psyche. A lot of what people seem to expect from God looks like the adolescent expectations of an impatient child who wants to be indulged. There are, for instance, very pious people who have finally accepted the reality of human caused climate change, but they explain away their own adult responsibility with the immature reassurance that “God will provide.” That is not faith. That’s dependency. I really can’t imagine what God must feel like listening to irresponsible adults who leave their mess for God to clean up and then expect God to indulge them with more comforts and easier happiness. I would be embarrassed to tell people I believed in a God I would pray to that way.
And maybe the immature prayers and beliefs of so many boisterously vocal Christians today are what have made so many people not only lose their belief in prayer but even reject a belief in God. They see how childish prayer like that is, and they reject the God that goes with it. I don’t blame them. If I hadn’t had an intuition that there is a kind of prayer more rich and alive than what I understood at age thirteen, I might have given up on prayer myself. If I hadn’t had an intuition for a God more profound than an overindulgent parent, I might even have given up on faith.
The prayers I have to pray are sometimes very hard, but to pray them is all I have to do. When Jesus said the hardest prayer he ever prayed, he didn’t ask God for a favor. His prayer was, “Into your hands I commit my spirit.” He was suspended in darkness at three in the afternoon on Calvary hill, and that was his prayer. Jesus was about to die, of course, but his prayer from the cross is, all the same, a good prayer for me any day of my life. What I really want to do with my prayer is commit my spirit into the hands of God. Whatever else I say in prayer—whatever I ask of God—what will finally matter most about my prayer will be what God will have done with me when I have fully committed my spirit to God. I know I am safe in surrendering myself into Gods hands, when I have descended deeply into God’s holiness, so that I can rise daily into God’s kingdom. I look forward to seeing you there. Amen.
29 July 2007
Luke 11.1-13
Prayer for Grownups
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007
Everyone here as been thirteen years old, so I know you’ll understand.
It was just over a mile and a half walk home from school. There would be half a dozen of us when we left the building, but my friends peeled off one by one to their homes, while I trudged on along Yosemite Drive. The last three, Kim, Lynn and Donna, all turned off on College View Avenue, and I continued on up a hill on my own. Maybe it was the loneliness of the last ¾ mile that got to me. At some point I realized that I kept thinking about Donna. Oh, Donna. There was even a song about it.
One night, I actually included in my prayers the very sincere request that God put it in Donna’s heart to like me, the kind of “like” that would involve holding hands on the way home from school. Well, it would start there, at any rate, but I wasn’t about to ruin the chance of a miracle by sharing my more extravagant romantic reveries with God. Very soon, it might have been the very next day, as we were nearing College View Avenue, Donna turned to me and shyly invited, “You can come to my house, if you want. My mom will have a snack for us.”
I was beside myself with glee. They called the avenue College View, but I could see more than Occidental College from there. I could see sunlit fields of tall grass and daisies. I could see to people in love sitting in the shade of a tree. I could see it all as plainly as I can see the anguished winces of embarrassment on your faces right now. My heart was full, and the world was alive with amorous wonder. Kim and Lynn turned off to their streets, and Donna and I went on to her house.
Donna’s mother fixed us a plate of cookies and some milk. We sat in the family room, where Donna probably turned on the TV. I don’t remember, I wasn’t paying attention. I should probably have paid attention—to the TV or to something, I have no idea what—because on the way home the next day, things had changed. The walk home was quiet and almost solemn. When we got to College View and I asked about escorting Donna home again, she shook her head. I don’t think she looked at me, but I remember the cold glare in Kim’s and Lynn’s eyes. Whatever test I was supposed to pass, I didn’t pass it. Donna was out of my life.
Over time, when I remember that awkward moment in life, what sets it apart for me from other moments in my life, many of them far more awkward, is that I had prayed to God for something that I dearly wanted, and then I got it. It would be the last time I treated prayer that way—the last time I treated God that way—and yet it took me years and years to realize why. Today, when I hear Jesus encourage us to ask for things in daily life, what I hear him teaching us is enlightened by my experiences with prayer, especially the prayer I made when I was thirteen years old.
Now, if a thirteen-year-old can pray, you would think praying must be almost automatic, but apparently it isn’t automatic for the disciples. They’ve noticed that the followers of John the Baptist have a visible prayer regimen. They’ve been watching Jesus go off alone for long periods of prayer with God. They want to be part of that. So they ask Jesus, “Teach us to pray,” and he does. He tells them to start off with the idea that all around God there is sacred space. He tells them to contemplate even the deep sacredness of God’s very name. “Father,” Jesus says, according to Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer, “hallowed be your name.”
That’s major praying right there, if you think about it. First, you have to work out what it means to say God’s name is holy by understanding what it does not mean. The name as a human word, for instance, cannot be what Jesus means by holy, though Jesus may seem to suggest as much. The English word is God, and the German word is Gott, which is close but not exactly the same. Then there is the French word Dieu, which bears no similarity at all. Of course, there are also other religions with their words for God, by which they refer to a deity they describe in certain ways quite distinct from how we Christians think of God. How can God’s name be holy, when there are so many names and so many ideas about God represented by all those names? So what we use as a name for God, so far as it is a word, cannot be holy. It is just a human word, very provisional and indefinite, for the sound of something very deep and pervasive and incorruptible, and something intensely alive.
To say “hallowed be your name,” we must, if we really mean hallowed as in holy, shift our thinking. We have to step for the moment out of the narrowing affect of the insistent pressures of daily life. We have let go of immediate distractions and cast our sights off into the wide and far dimensions of The Holy, as the old German theologian Rudolf Otto used to call it. You cannot be sitting with your persistent worries tying knots in your heart and suppose you can say with honesty to God that you are contemplating what is holy. If you follow Jesus’ pattern for prayer, you begin by loosening the knots of constant anxious attention to the daily anxieties that have so far resisted your every effort to resolve them. If your child is obnoxious, you begin this prayer by letting her drift away into her own land of obnoxicity [don’t bother trying to look it up] and sail on to the hallowed place of God. If your coworker is a jerk and your boss is oblivious, you, in an almost dreamlike scene, introduce them to each other and politely adjourn to the parlor of God’s holy name, and you say to God, “Your kingdom come,” as if it were something that is just about to happen. Because, for all you know, it is.
When I was thirteen, of course, my operative assumption was that the kingdom of God was where Donna would fall in love with me. In other words, I believed that whatever perfect world I conjured for my happiness was what the kingdom of God must be.
The day after my kingdom of God was cancelled for lack of interest, I had to reconsider my assumptions. Let’s consider the options. I could’ve thought that God was playing a joke, as in: “Oh golly, Christy, you never said you wanted Donna to love you for more than a day.” Or I could’ve thought that God only had a day’s worth of influence on the heart of a girl. Or I could’ve thought that God thought to mock me for having an adolescent infatuation, as if an adolescent doesn’t already get more than enough mocking to make him crawl into a hole and die on a daily basis. There are a million things a thirteen year old can think, and I probably thought of all of them one night, all those years ago.
But what I did think at thirteen about God and prayer—and what it means for me to pray—was that getting favors from God is not what prayer is for. I realized that God did not make Donna invite me to her house for a snack and to meet her mother, and certainly not for Donna to fall in love with me. I realized that whatever I was doing in prayer, and however God was responding to my prayers, it was going to matter more that God and I were coming closer together than that I get relief from my pining. What I didn’t have was a way to pray that would let my prayers become what matters more than my pining, or any of my longings. If Jesus had appeared before me, I might have had the presence of mind to ask, “Lord, teach me to pray.” The point is, I didn’t want to decide the prayer was just stupid, but I didn’t know what to do with it.
What I had been taught about prayer was an acronym: A.C.T.S.. Adoration, confession, thanksgiving and supplication. A: Say how wonderful God is. C: Tell God you’ve sinned. T: Thank God for the good things. S: Ask God for what you want. It was a good way of explaining that prayer is more than begging, and in the process of adoring, confessing and thanking, you acknowledge more facets of your spiritual life than base needs. A lot of the time, this sort of fill-in-the-blank form of prayer, though it may sound a bit wooden, has met the need well enough.
It’s just that, whenever I’ve needed the transforming power of prayer most, filling in the blanks came and went like a long night train of empty boxcars. As the whistle’s low moan faded into the darkness, the prayers seemed to ride off with it. But if I could have prayed in some other way, I might have felt the holiness of the night alive around me. Prayer has come to have a nighttime quality for me. Maybe that’s why when the shepherds were abiding in the fields, it was while they were keeping watch over their flock "by night" that they were able to see an angel. Maybe it was when they had stopped trying to get favors from God, when they’d given up filling in the blanks of their prayers, that something so holy happened one night that the glory of the Lord shone around them.
It was many years before I came to know prayer this way—prayer that stills the constant prattling on of my mind about how God could improve my world, prayer that opens the door to what is holy about God’s name, God’s glory, God’s peace and God’s love. Once I got that, prayer, even when it was an expression of all in my life that is wanting and broken and confusing and discouraging, even then, prayer became an outpouring of the stirrings of my heart in the presence of God who listens to all I have to say, who embraces me in all I have so far become, who stands alongside me wherever yet I have to go. I am aware in such prayers of descending ever more deeply into the holy and of rising ever more hopefully into the coming kingdom.
There are still people who teach thirteen-year-old prayer, seeking favors from God, as the primary model even for grownups. It shouldn’t surprise me. For goodness sake, look at this teaching of Jesus in Luke. He tells people precisely that prayer is in fact the relentless pestering of a friend for a piece of bread. And I can actually imagine that if I were a Sudanese refugee with a child that is mostly distended belly in my arms, it would be the lack of a piece of bread that is the main fact of my life which I would take to God again and again. I would bang on God’s door all night long, if that’s what I was dealing with. Indeed, this is nearly the situation of the friend at the neighbor’s door. The friend is not only lacking any bread for himself, but a hungry visitor has arrived at his door, tired from a journey, also needing something to eat. In that situation, if God isn’t with you in your hunger, what kind of God would you pray to? And what else would there be to say? Asking for bread would be a prayer.
But a prayer is not a middle-class thirteen-year-old banging on God’s door all night to satisfy the perpetual yearnings of the adolescent psyche. A lot of what people seem to expect from God looks like the adolescent expectations of an impatient child who wants to be indulged. There are, for instance, very pious people who have finally accepted the reality of human caused climate change, but they explain away their own adult responsibility with the immature reassurance that “God will provide.” That is not faith. That’s dependency. I really can’t imagine what God must feel like listening to irresponsible adults who leave their mess for God to clean up and then expect God to indulge them with more comforts and easier happiness. I would be embarrassed to tell people I believed in a God I would pray to that way.
And maybe the immature prayers and beliefs of so many boisterously vocal Christians today are what have made so many people not only lose their belief in prayer but even reject a belief in God. They see how childish prayer like that is, and they reject the God that goes with it. I don’t blame them. If I hadn’t had an intuition that there is a kind of prayer more rich and alive than what I understood at age thirteen, I might have given up on prayer myself. If I hadn’t had an intuition for a God more profound than an overindulgent parent, I might even have given up on faith.
The prayers I have to pray are sometimes very hard, but to pray them is all I have to do. When Jesus said the hardest prayer he ever prayed, he didn’t ask God for a favor. His prayer was, “Into your hands I commit my spirit.” He was suspended in darkness at three in the afternoon on Calvary hill, and that was his prayer. Jesus was about to die, of course, but his prayer from the cross is, all the same, a good prayer for me any day of my life. What I really want to do with my prayer is commit my spirit into the hands of God. Whatever else I say in prayer—whatever I ask of God—what will finally matter most about my prayer will be what God will have done with me when I have fully committed my spirit to God. I know I am safe in surrendering myself into Gods hands, when I have descended deeply into God’s holiness, so that I can rise daily into God’s kingdom. I look forward to seeing you there. Amen.
Monday, July 16, 2007
July 15, 2007 - Who is your neighbor?
15th Sunday in Ordinary Time
15 July 2007
Luke 10.25-37
Who is your neighbor?
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007
It was our fourth of many wonderful days in Poland, but we were having a less than wonderful moment. Marcia and I were in the main train station of a central industrial city, where even in summer there wasn’t much reason for pandering to American tourists with cheap tricks like providing information in English. Polish, unlike French or German, has nothing recognizable in it to English speakers, so the printed word might as well be Chinese. We were standing at a ticket window trying to figure out where to go next and how to get there.
The attitude of the ticket clerk was helpful enough, but everything about the situation made our attempts to communicate pointless and his attempts futile. Also, the Soviet style poured concrete rail terminal itself cast a grey, dehumanizing light on everything. In Poland you can really see that everything Karl Marx must have cared about for the masses was drained of its humanity by a Soviet government that used the name of communism to mask the totalitarian ambitions of the likes of Josef Stalin. We would stand in that train station and all places like it and feel sinking into us what happens to people when rulers arrogate power to themselves by taken rights away from citizens. Totalitarian rulers trade on intimidation and fear, leaving the citizen with the cold, hard reality that he is on his own to make a fulfilling life. Marcia and I were beginning to see that our cold, hard reality was that we were not going to figure out how to get out of that place on a train that night Nor did we have any idea of somewhere to sleep, except against a urine stained wall of poured concrete with all the other people who had no place to go after dark.
A man appeared beside me at the ticket window. He asked if he could help. He didn’t smile. I felt unsure, but I explained what we were after. He talked to the ticket clerk. He asked me more questions and then explained that our plan to travel east for a cultural excursion, before heading back west to Krakow, would add at three extra days on trains and layovers, and did we want that? I was non-committal. The two Poles talked some more, and then the man confirmed his first sense that we were better off to skip the trip east. He also said we should stay the night where we were, in the cold industrial city. We adjusted our expectations and purchased the tickets that would take us to Krakow the next morning.
The man assumed we’d be staying at the hotel adjacent to the train station. How much? No, we can’t afford that. Is there a hostel? Yes, but you will take a cab; out at the curb. We went out to the curb and headed toward a cab. The man appeared again and hailed a different cab for us. In Poland, you don’t take the wrong kind of cab. The man gave instructions to the driver of the right kind of cab. I thanked the man exuberantly and shook his hand. He never did smile. Once in the cab, I suddenly wondered where the driver was really going to take us. In just minutes we were at the door of a reasonable, safe and comfortable hostel.
It’s not as if Marcia and I had been overtaken by highwaymen, stripped, beaten, and left for dead without our belongings, so we do not feature ourselves like the victim in Jesus’ story. But in our vulnerability, we did meet a person who behaved like the Samaritan. We also were, like the Samaritan and the victim he helped, subject to historical and political influences that made everything harder than it might have been. The difference between our unsmiling helper and the Samaritan was simply a matter of everything being so extreme.
The Samaritans Jesus knew about traced their spiritual and cultural lineage from the early Hebrews, but because of geographical separation, internal divisions, and external factors like war and exile, it’s hard to say what happened to whom and when. And the ideological differences between Samaritans and Jews were huge. When the Jews insisted, for instance, that God said the temple belongs at Jerusalem, the Samaritans insisted that God put it on Mt. Gerizim. The Samaritans and the Jews remembered everything about God differently, and because of their differences, they came to distrust and eventually despise each other. When peoples tell divergent stories about themselves, they often write their rivals into the stories as enemies.
We know what that’s like. Here in Newark, we should have been close neighbors to the center of Mormon religious life in Palmyra, the birthplace of what came to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, but our divergent stories made us enemies. Mormonism’s founder Joseph Smith wrote down all sorts of historical information about how the Mormons descended from the holy people of God that Christians would never accept, and people distrusted Mormons. They harassed and drove them off. Christians often hated and sometimes killed Mormons, though Christians and Mormons were culturally like each other. Samaritans were hated like that. So Samaritans had all this working against them on the day Jesus told his story to the lawyer who was curious about what it means to be a neighbor.
The point is, there is a whole wide political context and also a deep historical conditioning that makes up the mind and heart of the Samaritan who comes upon the beaten and stranded Jewish stranger in the road. The Jewish stranger is broken and robbed and good as dead, and everything in that context and in his conditioning should make the Samaritan feel hatred, or short of hatred, should make him fearful. I cannot imagine that the Samaritan smiled at the Jew. He found the whole situation, no doubt, serious as a heart attack. But there was something the Samaritan could not not do, and that was to save the life of a stranger in distress. There was something deep inside the Samaritan at work, something deeper than the social loyalties he had been taught, deeper than the emotional clash of ethnic difference, deeper than traditional values that tilted against cultural enemies, something more true than even the truth of his religion that made an unpredictable decision in him.
But can anything be more true than your religion?
Jesus seems to think so.
Jesus plucks this traveling Samaritan merchant off the road between Jerusalem and Jericho and stands him up in front of the expert lawyer of Jesus’ own religion. He tells the lawyer that the Samaritan understands, better than the lawyer does, the ancient law of Moses about love of neighbor. In fact, the Samaritan understands the law of Moses better than a Jewish priest and better than a Levite. If you want to see what it means to obey God’s single most important commandment for living in this world, Jesus says to the lawyer, watch this Samaritan.
What happens to the Samaritan that leads him to such admirable obedience?
When the Samaritan lets go of historical animosities, when he never minds that his rivals the Jews think they have the only God there is in their own temple, when he sets aside his bitterness about the invectives that have been traded and all the blood that has been shed between his own kith and kin and the people of this very man lying bleeding in the road, when the Samaritan ignores the very reasonable thought that the man in another circumstance would happily spit in his eye or strike with the fist or even slash him with a dagger—when the Samaritan lets rise into his moral consciousness something deeper than everything he has been conditioned to think or feel or expect, he follows a deep law of love that surpasses anything the priest and the Levite and, more to the point, the lawyer have been able to understand from within their own religion.
Love in that fashion, Jesus says, even if everything in you militates against an act of love. The Jewish lawyer cannot imagine a Samaritan capable of such love, but Jesus says that, on any given day, anyone, including a Samaritan, is not only capable of but will be inwardly compelled to act with such love. And that’s why we know that Jesus wants us to remember that there are some things that will be more true than anything we ever think we’ve known, even the truth of our own religion.
It is because Jesus chose the Samaritan for his parable that our personal spiritual acts must mean something for God and for the neighbor. Our persona spiritual acts are never just for our own sake, and they do not take place in a vacuum. The most profound acts of love, we now know—because the Samaritan is our model—are personal, historical and political acts. And since that is true, then what? If our spiritual lives are personal, historical and political, how does that truth change our lives?
If we are going to learn what Jesus wants us to understand from the Samaritan, we will have to face the fact that such personal and political matters as our health care system challenge us to look at people as if they were lying in front of us in the road suffering for lack of health care. And it is not enough to act like the Samaritan every now and then by supporting a free clinic or persuading doctor or dentist to treat an indigent for free. We’re fond of the bumper sticker that suggests random acts of kindness, but Jesus does not say that good person is only randomly good. Jesus says that true obedience to the second of the two great commandments for your whole life is to understand that every person anywhere, including your sworn enemies, deserves your deep, personal, practical love…
…and your political love. It’s the notion of political love that trips us up, but what else would you call it? It’s the love that the man in the train station in Poland showed us for probably close to an hour without ever smiling. He had seen too much to feel the giddiness of a kindness randomly acted. That isn’t the love Jesus is talking about. That’s just a sop to a self indulgent conscience. Or if it’s love, it is not agape love, which is love that comes from the dispassionate goodness we rediscover in ourselves when all the love that feels good has been too little and so unreliable. The motive for the love grounded in the second great commandment can never been warmhearted resolve or the satisfaction of having cared. The motive for the love of the second great commandment is that God wants it. Wherever in this world the love of God for the sufferer goes unfulfilled, the second great commandment is crumbling for lack of human faith, and that is a political and a spiritual reality for those who would be faithful.
So it is time to stop dithering, for one, about national health care. The fact of tens of millions of Americans going untreated because of an economic and medical system that puts treatment out of reach is a threat to our spiritual health, no matter what religion you profess.
And there is a yet deeper issue—and a wider intercultural issue—that Jesus opens up when he makes the Samaritan the neighbor of the Jew. For just a moment, forget the lawyer’s question—who is my neighbor?—and ask the real question underlying Jesus’ parable: Who is your Samaritan? Obviously, you and I have no problematic history with Samaritans, though they still exist out there with their heritage and traditions. So everyone has to figure out who the Samaritan is.
So who is your Samaritan? The question has been made easy for us over the last six years. The Samaritan, to us, is the sort of Muslim who is critical toward, fearful of and angry at us Americans. So it is that the Samaritan to us is the Arab Muslim who might find us along the road and carry us on his donkey to a safe place and provide for our care. This would be in stark contrast to who we might be if we had not already violated what Jesus has instructed us—if we had not already picked up Muslims along the road and taken them not to an inn for food and care, but to a prison for detainment and interrogation, and sometimes worse. Jesus teaches us to expect to find in these possible enemies the same deep law of love buried somewhere underneath all their reasons for rage, perceived and historic, as he taught the lawyer to expect in the Samaritan.
We may find such love impossible, but it is Jesus’ teaching. Just as hatred’s purveyors have known that there is a deep resentment in such people, be they rich or poor, that they can cultivate into passionate hatred, Jesus expects us to know that there is something yet deeper in everyone that we can cultivate into dispassionate love. It is not easy, and it is far from sure that we will always or even often succeed, but this is the vision of humanity that Jesus teaches us is our truest obedience. Jesus is not unrealistic about such love, as his cross has fiercely demonstrated, but he sees no faithful way around the faith that obedience to the law of loving God is connected at the hip with the law of loving neighbor. Jesus also seems to believe that obedient love of neighbor is our best hope.
And here’s what I believe. I believe that when we finally learn how to orient our soul rightly toward our enemies, according to Jesus, we will better orient our soul rightly toward our loved ones and friends. For remaining callous to our neighbors without access to health care is training ourselves for callousness to the people near us we care for. You already know that some people who profess to love you have been more than rarely callous toward you. They had to learn this callousness, and you have in the same way learned a certain amount of callousness yourself. Learning the Samaritan’s love of neighbor will change you and cast out callousness from your soul.
What’s more is that some people you love at home and in the world, even in the church, are people to whom you sometimes attribute malevolent thoughts to you and others. Attributing malevolence to the heart of Muslims, even militant extremists, is to practice attributing malevolence to members of your family and community, even to members of your church. When you base your own attitudes on the malevolence of others, you trap yourself in a cycle of passions that leads to destruction. The destruction spreads outward to the world and inward through your own soul. Jesus wants to spare you and your loved ones and all the world of this. His death on the cross is his witness to the conviction that no life, however true and spotless and gracious, is worth preserving at the expense of obedience to the deep and ancient law of love written into the core of every human being. Hatred is learned, it is temporary, and it is corrosive to the soul. But love is the life-giving force of every human being, and it is the only hope for the kind of destiny Jesus describes as the kingdom of God.
Maybe Jesus could have thought of a way to keep his teachings about truth and faithfulness, which are necessarily personal and practical, from also turning political, but he didn’t. For Jesus, God’s truth and faithfulness bear on everything that happens in human life and society. I suspect that this is because he sees that when we subtract God from culture and politics, it is such an easy step to subtract God also from a friendship and even from family. Jesus believes that the love of God belongs everywhere to everyone, and he expects us to live accordingly. Amen.
15 July 2007
Luke 10.25-37
Who is your neighbor?
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007
It was our fourth of many wonderful days in Poland, but we were having a less than wonderful moment. Marcia and I were in the main train station of a central industrial city, where even in summer there wasn’t much reason for pandering to American tourists with cheap tricks like providing information in English. Polish, unlike French or German, has nothing recognizable in it to English speakers, so the printed word might as well be Chinese. We were standing at a ticket window trying to figure out where to go next and how to get there.
The attitude of the ticket clerk was helpful enough, but everything about the situation made our attempts to communicate pointless and his attempts futile. Also, the Soviet style poured concrete rail terminal itself cast a grey, dehumanizing light on everything. In Poland you can really see that everything Karl Marx must have cared about for the masses was drained of its humanity by a Soviet government that used the name of communism to mask the totalitarian ambitions of the likes of Josef Stalin. We would stand in that train station and all places like it and feel sinking into us what happens to people when rulers arrogate power to themselves by taken rights away from citizens. Totalitarian rulers trade on intimidation and fear, leaving the citizen with the cold, hard reality that he is on his own to make a fulfilling life. Marcia and I were beginning to see that our cold, hard reality was that we were not going to figure out how to get out of that place on a train that night Nor did we have any idea of somewhere to sleep, except against a urine stained wall of poured concrete with all the other people who had no place to go after dark.
A man appeared beside me at the ticket window. He asked if he could help. He didn’t smile. I felt unsure, but I explained what we were after. He talked to the ticket clerk. He asked me more questions and then explained that our plan to travel east for a cultural excursion, before heading back west to Krakow, would add at three extra days on trains and layovers, and did we want that? I was non-committal. The two Poles talked some more, and then the man confirmed his first sense that we were better off to skip the trip east. He also said we should stay the night where we were, in the cold industrial city. We adjusted our expectations and purchased the tickets that would take us to Krakow the next morning.
The man assumed we’d be staying at the hotel adjacent to the train station. How much? No, we can’t afford that. Is there a hostel? Yes, but you will take a cab; out at the curb. We went out to the curb and headed toward a cab. The man appeared again and hailed a different cab for us. In Poland, you don’t take the wrong kind of cab. The man gave instructions to the driver of the right kind of cab. I thanked the man exuberantly and shook his hand. He never did smile. Once in the cab, I suddenly wondered where the driver was really going to take us. In just minutes we were at the door of a reasonable, safe and comfortable hostel.
It’s not as if Marcia and I had been overtaken by highwaymen, stripped, beaten, and left for dead without our belongings, so we do not feature ourselves like the victim in Jesus’ story. But in our vulnerability, we did meet a person who behaved like the Samaritan. We also were, like the Samaritan and the victim he helped, subject to historical and political influences that made everything harder than it might have been. The difference between our unsmiling helper and the Samaritan was simply a matter of everything being so extreme.
The Samaritans Jesus knew about traced their spiritual and cultural lineage from the early Hebrews, but because of geographical separation, internal divisions, and external factors like war and exile, it’s hard to say what happened to whom and when. And the ideological differences between Samaritans and Jews were huge. When the Jews insisted, for instance, that God said the temple belongs at Jerusalem, the Samaritans insisted that God put it on Mt. Gerizim. The Samaritans and the Jews remembered everything about God differently, and because of their differences, they came to distrust and eventually despise each other. When peoples tell divergent stories about themselves, they often write their rivals into the stories as enemies.
We know what that’s like. Here in Newark, we should have been close neighbors to the center of Mormon religious life in Palmyra, the birthplace of what came to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, but our divergent stories made us enemies. Mormonism’s founder Joseph Smith wrote down all sorts of historical information about how the Mormons descended from the holy people of God that Christians would never accept, and people distrusted Mormons. They harassed and drove them off. Christians often hated and sometimes killed Mormons, though Christians and Mormons were culturally like each other. Samaritans were hated like that. So Samaritans had all this working against them on the day Jesus told his story to the lawyer who was curious about what it means to be a neighbor.
The point is, there is a whole wide political context and also a deep historical conditioning that makes up the mind and heart of the Samaritan who comes upon the beaten and stranded Jewish stranger in the road. The Jewish stranger is broken and robbed and good as dead, and everything in that context and in his conditioning should make the Samaritan feel hatred, or short of hatred, should make him fearful. I cannot imagine that the Samaritan smiled at the Jew. He found the whole situation, no doubt, serious as a heart attack. But there was something the Samaritan could not not do, and that was to save the life of a stranger in distress. There was something deep inside the Samaritan at work, something deeper than the social loyalties he had been taught, deeper than the emotional clash of ethnic difference, deeper than traditional values that tilted against cultural enemies, something more true than even the truth of his religion that made an unpredictable decision in him.
But can anything be more true than your religion?
Jesus seems to think so.
Jesus plucks this traveling Samaritan merchant off the road between Jerusalem and Jericho and stands him up in front of the expert lawyer of Jesus’ own religion. He tells the lawyer that the Samaritan understands, better than the lawyer does, the ancient law of Moses about love of neighbor. In fact, the Samaritan understands the law of Moses better than a Jewish priest and better than a Levite. If you want to see what it means to obey God’s single most important commandment for living in this world, Jesus says to the lawyer, watch this Samaritan.
What happens to the Samaritan that leads him to such admirable obedience?
When the Samaritan lets go of historical animosities, when he never minds that his rivals the Jews think they have the only God there is in their own temple, when he sets aside his bitterness about the invectives that have been traded and all the blood that has been shed between his own kith and kin and the people of this very man lying bleeding in the road, when the Samaritan ignores the very reasonable thought that the man in another circumstance would happily spit in his eye or strike with the fist or even slash him with a dagger—when the Samaritan lets rise into his moral consciousness something deeper than everything he has been conditioned to think or feel or expect, he follows a deep law of love that surpasses anything the priest and the Levite and, more to the point, the lawyer have been able to understand from within their own religion.
Love in that fashion, Jesus says, even if everything in you militates against an act of love. The Jewish lawyer cannot imagine a Samaritan capable of such love, but Jesus says that, on any given day, anyone, including a Samaritan, is not only capable of but will be inwardly compelled to act with such love. And that’s why we know that Jesus wants us to remember that there are some things that will be more true than anything we ever think we’ve known, even the truth of our own religion.
It is because Jesus chose the Samaritan for his parable that our personal spiritual acts must mean something for God and for the neighbor. Our persona spiritual acts are never just for our own sake, and they do not take place in a vacuum. The most profound acts of love, we now know—because the Samaritan is our model—are personal, historical and political acts. And since that is true, then what? If our spiritual lives are personal, historical and political, how does that truth change our lives?
If we are going to learn what Jesus wants us to understand from the Samaritan, we will have to face the fact that such personal and political matters as our health care system challenge us to look at people as if they were lying in front of us in the road suffering for lack of health care. And it is not enough to act like the Samaritan every now and then by supporting a free clinic or persuading doctor or dentist to treat an indigent for free. We’re fond of the bumper sticker that suggests random acts of kindness, but Jesus does not say that good person is only randomly good. Jesus says that true obedience to the second of the two great commandments for your whole life is to understand that every person anywhere, including your sworn enemies, deserves your deep, personal, practical love…
…and your political love. It’s the notion of political love that trips us up, but what else would you call it? It’s the love that the man in the train station in Poland showed us for probably close to an hour without ever smiling. He had seen too much to feel the giddiness of a kindness randomly acted. That isn’t the love Jesus is talking about. That’s just a sop to a self indulgent conscience. Or if it’s love, it is not agape love, which is love that comes from the dispassionate goodness we rediscover in ourselves when all the love that feels good has been too little and so unreliable. The motive for the love grounded in the second great commandment can never been warmhearted resolve or the satisfaction of having cared. The motive for the love of the second great commandment is that God wants it. Wherever in this world the love of God for the sufferer goes unfulfilled, the second great commandment is crumbling for lack of human faith, and that is a political and a spiritual reality for those who would be faithful.
So it is time to stop dithering, for one, about national health care. The fact of tens of millions of Americans going untreated because of an economic and medical system that puts treatment out of reach is a threat to our spiritual health, no matter what religion you profess.
And there is a yet deeper issue—and a wider intercultural issue—that Jesus opens up when he makes the Samaritan the neighbor of the Jew. For just a moment, forget the lawyer’s question—who is my neighbor?—and ask the real question underlying Jesus’ parable: Who is your Samaritan? Obviously, you and I have no problematic history with Samaritans, though they still exist out there with their heritage and traditions. So everyone has to figure out who the Samaritan is.
So who is your Samaritan? The question has been made easy for us over the last six years. The Samaritan, to us, is the sort of Muslim who is critical toward, fearful of and angry at us Americans. So it is that the Samaritan to us is the Arab Muslim who might find us along the road and carry us on his donkey to a safe place and provide for our care. This would be in stark contrast to who we might be if we had not already violated what Jesus has instructed us—if we had not already picked up Muslims along the road and taken them not to an inn for food and care, but to a prison for detainment and interrogation, and sometimes worse. Jesus teaches us to expect to find in these possible enemies the same deep law of love buried somewhere underneath all their reasons for rage, perceived and historic, as he taught the lawyer to expect in the Samaritan.
We may find such love impossible, but it is Jesus’ teaching. Just as hatred’s purveyors have known that there is a deep resentment in such people, be they rich or poor, that they can cultivate into passionate hatred, Jesus expects us to know that there is something yet deeper in everyone that we can cultivate into dispassionate love. It is not easy, and it is far from sure that we will always or even often succeed, but this is the vision of humanity that Jesus teaches us is our truest obedience. Jesus is not unrealistic about such love, as his cross has fiercely demonstrated, but he sees no faithful way around the faith that obedience to the law of loving God is connected at the hip with the law of loving neighbor. Jesus also seems to believe that obedient love of neighbor is our best hope.
And here’s what I believe. I believe that when we finally learn how to orient our soul rightly toward our enemies, according to Jesus, we will better orient our soul rightly toward our loved ones and friends. For remaining callous to our neighbors without access to health care is training ourselves for callousness to the people near us we care for. You already know that some people who profess to love you have been more than rarely callous toward you. They had to learn this callousness, and you have in the same way learned a certain amount of callousness yourself. Learning the Samaritan’s love of neighbor will change you and cast out callousness from your soul.
What’s more is that some people you love at home and in the world, even in the church, are people to whom you sometimes attribute malevolent thoughts to you and others. Attributing malevolence to the heart of Muslims, even militant extremists, is to practice attributing malevolence to members of your family and community, even to members of your church. When you base your own attitudes on the malevolence of others, you trap yourself in a cycle of passions that leads to destruction. The destruction spreads outward to the world and inward through your own soul. Jesus wants to spare you and your loved ones and all the world of this. His death on the cross is his witness to the conviction that no life, however true and spotless and gracious, is worth preserving at the expense of obedience to the deep and ancient law of love written into the core of every human being. Hatred is learned, it is temporary, and it is corrosive to the soul. But love is the life-giving force of every human being, and it is the only hope for the kind of destiny Jesus describes as the kingdom of God.
Maybe Jesus could have thought of a way to keep his teachings about truth and faithfulness, which are necessarily personal and practical, from also turning political, but he didn’t. For Jesus, God’s truth and faithfulness bear on everything that happens in human life and society. I suspect that this is because he sees that when we subtract God from culture and politics, it is such an easy step to subtract God also from a friendship and even from family. Jesus believes that the love of God belongs everywhere to everyone, and he expects us to live accordingly. Amen.
Sunday, July 1, 2007
July 1, 2007 - Using our spiritual freedom
13th Sunday in Ordinary Time
1 July 2007
Galatians 5.1, 13-25
Using our spiritual freedom
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007
Two childhood transportation moments: one on bicycle, one pedestrian.
My older brother Mark’s bicycle was a blue Schwinn one-speed with coaster brakes, which he could ride without training wheels by the time I was ready to learn to ride. So the training wheels went back on. I think he got a new bike, then, a three-speed with hand brakes—a big kid bike. I didn’t get a big kid bike for a while, but I wanted to be like a big kid. The training wheels came off soon enough.
You could ride your bike to Ivanhoe elementary school in Los Angeles, if you had a license and permission. The license was a little tag you got from, I think, the police department—the LAPD, Sergeant Friday, maybe. Permission came from the principal’s office—Mrs. Joyner—and you had to be in sixth grade. That was a dumb rule, because I rode my bike all around the neighborhood and never had permission from the principal’s office. So one day, instead of walking to school, I rode the Schwinn and parked it in the bike rack.. Who was going to notice one more blue Schwinn? Who would have nothing better to do than check for unapproved bicycles in the bike rack?
Just before lunch I got a note to come to the principal’s office. Why, Mrs. Joyner wanted to know, did I ride my bicycle to school without permission? I was reprimanded, and my mother was contacted. No more riding the bike to school.
Another transportation moment. I was walking home from school, which is what you did if you couldn’t ride your bike.( In LA, you walked or cycled; there were no public school buses.) I came to the intersection of Rowena Avenue and Glendale Boulevard, which had a traffic signal, and for some reason I thought, “What would Daddy do here?”.
I had been noticing the way my father drove. Even if I wasn’t going to have permission to get around with the freedom he did, I could at least start to get ready for my freedom for when I got it. One thing I noticed about how my father waited for the signal to change was that he didn’t just sit there watching the signal facing him. He also watched the signal facing the other people, the one coming down the other street. Their signal would turn yellow just moments before his turned green. My father was able to get his car on the way along the street a little sooner by getting it rolling during the yellow light that faced the other way. That meant he could already be getting out of the way of the people behind him by the time his light turned green. This was more efficient and thus more grown up.
So I was watching a red light facing me, and when I also saw the yellow light for coming down Rowena Avenue, I started across the street. Someone driving a Pontiac on Rowena Avenue honked at me and went on through the intersection in front of me. I don’t know why the honking, I could see the Pontiac. It was only six inches away. But there was honking, after which I finished crossing the street and walked the rest of the way home. The lady who lived two doors away from us on Locksley Place drove a Pontiac, and that afternoon my mother was contacted. No more crossing the street on other people’s yellow light.
First we get rules; then we get freedom. The reason for the rules is that we often get hurt without them, since we don’t always know how to use our freedom safely. Some of us grab all the freedom we can as soon as we can get it. Some of us grab it before we can get it. Then there are those who happily wait for when the rules grant us freedom, and there are even those who prefer rules to freedom, even when it’s offered. Me, I’m ready to claim my freedom before people in charge of the rules are ready to grant it to me. Most of the time, that means I get in a little trouble from the people in charge; some of the time, that means I nearly get killed.
When the apostle Paul claims his freedom, he goes for broke. For a long time, he claimed the spiritual freedom to persecute Christians. The religious authorities he reported to granted him that freedom, but in retrospect, it was a bad freedom. It violated not only the spirituality of human beings but also the very spirit of God. The authorities were wrong. So God dramatically took Paul’s freedom away and struck him to his knees. When Paul came around, he made a yet more daring claim on spiritual freedom, the freedom of following Christ, which the religious authorities distrusted, denied and reproved. But it was too late. The spiritual cat of Christian freedom was out of the bag. Christians who know what to do with spiritual freedom have been grateful ever since. Christians who fear spiritual freedom have been undermining what Paul fought for ever since.
The world has never gone back from the spiritual freedom won in Christ and championed by Paul, though some still try to pretend it never happened. They try to paint Paul as the champion for a new set of spiritual rules, not for freedom. Champions of spiritual freedom look different to different people. To those who do not trust spiritual freedom, or who fear it in themselves, a champion of freedom looks childish or irresponsible—and, of course, there are childish and irresponsible spiritual choices that can make freedom dangerous. Sometimes the opponents of freedom have a point. Adolf Hitler claimed the freedom to make Christian spirituality serve the purposes of the German state. That was disastrous, because Hitler may have been old enough to be Führer, but he was so spiritually immature that he used Christianity to commit evil. One way to protect the world from this is to prohibit spiritual freedom, but people who distrust and fear spiritual freedom also commit grievous harm. The atrocities of the Spanish Inquisition prove that there are dangers in protecting human beings from their own spiritual freedom.
Today, there are Christians who out of a combination of care, distrust and fear try to deny spiritual freedom to others. Just try to be a devout Christian and also gay in almost any conservative or mainline denomination, and you’ll find out how welcome your spiritual freedom is. Or try to explain at a presbytery meeting that Jesus is more important to your faith as a moral exemplar, a shepherd to the vulnerable and a spiritual pioneer than as an animal sacrifice for human sin, and your spiritual freedom will invite accusation and threats of censure. The guardians of faith get very edgy about thoughts like that, but if we stop people from their spiritual freedom, we foreclose on the very power of Christ by which Paul made faith in Christ a possibility for anyone in any culture. Were it not for Paul and his freedom, Christian faith would have remained the religious practice of a tiny minority sect in Judaism. There would have been nothing wrong with that, but it would never have been more than that. For the Christian life, freedom is essential.
So once you claim your spiritual freedom, what do you do with it? I believe that we who value the freedom to venture into new spiritual territory are called to four modes of spiritual life: to brave the unknown path, to learn the principles of spiritual sight, to reckon with our own fears and demons, and to stand up against the overly careful, untrusting and afraid. Those are four spiritual modes I see in the champion of spiritual freedom. Let’s reflect on them one at a time.
Brave the unknown path
brave [v., tran.]: to face or endure with courage. (merriam-webster.com)
Spiritual freedom may have its excitement, but it is not all warmth and comfort. You are on a path, not in the bath. In any meaningful journey, spiritual or otherwise, there will be unknown challenges, threats and terrors. If you acknowledge this going in, you can prepare yourself for the unexpected. If preparation meant knowing exactly what to do, it wouldn’t be an unknown path. The Christian life fully lived ventures into the unknown. The moral gate that opens onto the path of spiritual freedom is courage.
Learn the principles of spiritual sight
This is not the same as studying a catechism or mastering theology. It is not even learning the Bible through and through. Those are worthy undertakings for any believer, but spiritual sight goes further. Spiritual sight comes from taking the little nagging question about what you’ve always been told and making it your teacher. There is always more to learn than anyone has learned before, and there is every reason why you should be the one to learn it.. Spiritual sight comes from doubting the familiar answers that are meant to make you stop asking your questions. It is high time that certain impermissible questions be asked, and there’s every reason why you should be the one to ask them. Spiritual sight stares at the unacceptable situation until it sees the one unnoticed possibility that has escaped the vision of even the saints and doctors of the faith. There is always something in the impossible situation that everyone has so far failed to see, and there is every reason why you should be the one finally to see it.
Spiritual sight holds on for dear life to the last thread of Christian truth, for the Christian tradition, like every true religious tradition, really is based on long experience with God through a wide variety of people. Spiritual sight will look at all of the divine, with its depth and height, in its power and weakness, in its fullness and emptiness. Spiritual sight is willing to see any of it, though it is never granted to see all of it.
Reckon with your own fears and demons
Your first and most potent enemy on the quest of freedom is yourself. I have noticed, by anology, that when I feel anxious about a conversation or a meeting where I expect conflict, most of my fear is about my inability to deal with what might happen. The path of spiritual freedom is like this, and for good reason. Since there are no clear rules or predictable patterns on the unknown path, you don’t know what might happen, so you can’t know how you will respond. You have to prepare yourself for the fears of not knowing. Preparation for freedom means learning to find within yourself calm in the face of danger (so you can see everything in front of you), clarity in the face of confusion (so you can think and assess the situation), and resolve in the face of opposition (so others can’t intimidate you).
When Paul talks about works of the flesh versus fruits of the Spirit, he is teaching you to reckon with your disintegrating demons and to harness your integrating gifts. Your inward demons will be as real as your outward enemies, and most of them are defeated by love in the face of hatred (so your emotions won’t control your actions) and self discipline in the face of empty satisfactions (so your pleasures won’t overwhelm your purpose).
Stand up against the overly careful, untrusting and afraid
People who protect their religion from freedom get a lot of practice at it. Careful authorities reasonably try to stop certain spiritual adventures, like Nazism and the Inquisition, that should be stopped, so they have not only the benefit of practice but also a track record of being right. But authorities are not always right. The seeker Martin Luther was right to open the Bible to every believer, and he was opposed by religious authorities. The seeker Henry Ward Beecher was right to denounce slavery, and conventional church authorities justified slavery. What we know is that the world has so vastly changed in the last few generations that untrodden paths of faith will be required, and the seeker on the path of spiritual freedom will have to face down the overly careful, untrusting and afraid.
Now, Paul never got up in the morning wondering what fun he could have dismantling the spiritual constructs of either Jerusalem’s temple priests on the one hand or imperial Roman priests on the other. It’s just that when his time came to explore new spiritual territory, Paul knew it. The good news is that as he struck out in freedom, he became more secure he in his faith, found more peace in his soul, and had more hope for the world God loved so much that he sent his son to save us from the sin of so loving where we’ve been that we would neglect the path on which Christ is leading us.
Claim, then, the spiritual freedom won for us in Christ. Learn to use it and depend on each other for support along the way, for community is the container for spiritual freedom. Trust the gifts you find in yourself, and celebrate the gifts of others, and the safety we seek in freedom will be found in spiritual community. Amen.
1 July 2007
Galatians 5.1, 13-25
Using our spiritual freedom
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007
Two childhood transportation moments: one on bicycle, one pedestrian.
My older brother Mark’s bicycle was a blue Schwinn one-speed with coaster brakes, which he could ride without training wheels by the time I was ready to learn to ride. So the training wheels went back on. I think he got a new bike, then, a three-speed with hand brakes—a big kid bike. I didn’t get a big kid bike for a while, but I wanted to be like a big kid. The training wheels came off soon enough.
You could ride your bike to Ivanhoe elementary school in Los Angeles, if you had a license and permission. The license was a little tag you got from, I think, the police department—the LAPD, Sergeant Friday, maybe. Permission came from the principal’s office—Mrs. Joyner—and you had to be in sixth grade. That was a dumb rule, because I rode my bike all around the neighborhood and never had permission from the principal’s office. So one day, instead of walking to school, I rode the Schwinn and parked it in the bike rack.. Who was going to notice one more blue Schwinn? Who would have nothing better to do than check for unapproved bicycles in the bike rack?
Just before lunch I got a note to come to the principal’s office. Why, Mrs. Joyner wanted to know, did I ride my bicycle to school without permission? I was reprimanded, and my mother was contacted. No more riding the bike to school.
Another transportation moment. I was walking home from school, which is what you did if you couldn’t ride your bike.( In LA, you walked or cycled; there were no public school buses.) I came to the intersection of Rowena Avenue and Glendale Boulevard, which had a traffic signal, and for some reason I thought, “What would Daddy do here?”.
I had been noticing the way my father drove. Even if I wasn’t going to have permission to get around with the freedom he did, I could at least start to get ready for my freedom for when I got it. One thing I noticed about how my father waited for the signal to change was that he didn’t just sit there watching the signal facing him. He also watched the signal facing the other people, the one coming down the other street. Their signal would turn yellow just moments before his turned green. My father was able to get his car on the way along the street a little sooner by getting it rolling during the yellow light that faced the other way. That meant he could already be getting out of the way of the people behind him by the time his light turned green. This was more efficient and thus more grown up.
So I was watching a red light facing me, and when I also saw the yellow light for coming down Rowena Avenue, I started across the street. Someone driving a Pontiac on Rowena Avenue honked at me and went on through the intersection in front of me. I don’t know why the honking, I could see the Pontiac. It was only six inches away. But there was honking, after which I finished crossing the street and walked the rest of the way home. The lady who lived two doors away from us on Locksley Place drove a Pontiac, and that afternoon my mother was contacted. No more crossing the street on other people’s yellow light.
First we get rules; then we get freedom. The reason for the rules is that we often get hurt without them, since we don’t always know how to use our freedom safely. Some of us grab all the freedom we can as soon as we can get it. Some of us grab it before we can get it. Then there are those who happily wait for when the rules grant us freedom, and there are even those who prefer rules to freedom, even when it’s offered. Me, I’m ready to claim my freedom before people in charge of the rules are ready to grant it to me. Most of the time, that means I get in a little trouble from the people in charge; some of the time, that means I nearly get killed.
When the apostle Paul claims his freedom, he goes for broke. For a long time, he claimed the spiritual freedom to persecute Christians. The religious authorities he reported to granted him that freedom, but in retrospect, it was a bad freedom. It violated not only the spirituality of human beings but also the very spirit of God. The authorities were wrong. So God dramatically took Paul’s freedom away and struck him to his knees. When Paul came around, he made a yet more daring claim on spiritual freedom, the freedom of following Christ, which the religious authorities distrusted, denied and reproved. But it was too late. The spiritual cat of Christian freedom was out of the bag. Christians who know what to do with spiritual freedom have been grateful ever since. Christians who fear spiritual freedom have been undermining what Paul fought for ever since.
The world has never gone back from the spiritual freedom won in Christ and championed by Paul, though some still try to pretend it never happened. They try to paint Paul as the champion for a new set of spiritual rules, not for freedom. Champions of spiritual freedom look different to different people. To those who do not trust spiritual freedom, or who fear it in themselves, a champion of freedom looks childish or irresponsible—and, of course, there are childish and irresponsible spiritual choices that can make freedom dangerous. Sometimes the opponents of freedom have a point. Adolf Hitler claimed the freedom to make Christian spirituality serve the purposes of the German state. That was disastrous, because Hitler may have been old enough to be Führer, but he was so spiritually immature that he used Christianity to commit evil. One way to protect the world from this is to prohibit spiritual freedom, but people who distrust and fear spiritual freedom also commit grievous harm. The atrocities of the Spanish Inquisition prove that there are dangers in protecting human beings from their own spiritual freedom.
Today, there are Christians who out of a combination of care, distrust and fear try to deny spiritual freedom to others. Just try to be a devout Christian and also gay in almost any conservative or mainline denomination, and you’ll find out how welcome your spiritual freedom is. Or try to explain at a presbytery meeting that Jesus is more important to your faith as a moral exemplar, a shepherd to the vulnerable and a spiritual pioneer than as an animal sacrifice for human sin, and your spiritual freedom will invite accusation and threats of censure. The guardians of faith get very edgy about thoughts like that, but if we stop people from their spiritual freedom, we foreclose on the very power of Christ by which Paul made faith in Christ a possibility for anyone in any culture. Were it not for Paul and his freedom, Christian faith would have remained the religious practice of a tiny minority sect in Judaism. There would have been nothing wrong with that, but it would never have been more than that. For the Christian life, freedom is essential.
So once you claim your spiritual freedom, what do you do with it? I believe that we who value the freedom to venture into new spiritual territory are called to four modes of spiritual life: to brave the unknown path, to learn the principles of spiritual sight, to reckon with our own fears and demons, and to stand up against the overly careful, untrusting and afraid. Those are four spiritual modes I see in the champion of spiritual freedom. Let’s reflect on them one at a time.
Brave the unknown path
brave [v., tran.]: to face or endure with courage. (merriam-webster.com)
Spiritual freedom may have its excitement, but it is not all warmth and comfort. You are on a path, not in the bath. In any meaningful journey, spiritual or otherwise, there will be unknown challenges, threats and terrors. If you acknowledge this going in, you can prepare yourself for the unexpected. If preparation meant knowing exactly what to do, it wouldn’t be an unknown path. The Christian life fully lived ventures into the unknown. The moral gate that opens onto the path of spiritual freedom is courage.
Learn the principles of spiritual sight
This is not the same as studying a catechism or mastering theology. It is not even learning the Bible through and through. Those are worthy undertakings for any believer, but spiritual sight goes further. Spiritual sight comes from taking the little nagging question about what you’ve always been told and making it your teacher. There is always more to learn than anyone has learned before, and there is every reason why you should be the one to learn it.. Spiritual sight comes from doubting the familiar answers that are meant to make you stop asking your questions. It is high time that certain impermissible questions be asked, and there’s every reason why you should be the one to ask them. Spiritual sight stares at the unacceptable situation until it sees the one unnoticed possibility that has escaped the vision of even the saints and doctors of the faith. There is always something in the impossible situation that everyone has so far failed to see, and there is every reason why you should be the one finally to see it.
Spiritual sight holds on for dear life to the last thread of Christian truth, for the Christian tradition, like every true religious tradition, really is based on long experience with God through a wide variety of people. Spiritual sight will look at all of the divine, with its depth and height, in its power and weakness, in its fullness and emptiness. Spiritual sight is willing to see any of it, though it is never granted to see all of it.
Reckon with your own fears and demons
Your first and most potent enemy on the quest of freedom is yourself. I have noticed, by anology, that when I feel anxious about a conversation or a meeting where I expect conflict, most of my fear is about my inability to deal with what might happen. The path of spiritual freedom is like this, and for good reason. Since there are no clear rules or predictable patterns on the unknown path, you don’t know what might happen, so you can’t know how you will respond. You have to prepare yourself for the fears of not knowing. Preparation for freedom means learning to find within yourself calm in the face of danger (so you can see everything in front of you), clarity in the face of confusion (so you can think and assess the situation), and resolve in the face of opposition (so others can’t intimidate you).
When Paul talks about works of the flesh versus fruits of the Spirit, he is teaching you to reckon with your disintegrating demons and to harness your integrating gifts. Your inward demons will be as real as your outward enemies, and most of them are defeated by love in the face of hatred (so your emotions won’t control your actions) and self discipline in the face of empty satisfactions (so your pleasures won’t overwhelm your purpose).
Stand up against the overly careful, untrusting and afraid
People who protect their religion from freedom get a lot of practice at it. Careful authorities reasonably try to stop certain spiritual adventures, like Nazism and the Inquisition, that should be stopped, so they have not only the benefit of practice but also a track record of being right. But authorities are not always right. The seeker Martin Luther was right to open the Bible to every believer, and he was opposed by religious authorities. The seeker Henry Ward Beecher was right to denounce slavery, and conventional church authorities justified slavery. What we know is that the world has so vastly changed in the last few generations that untrodden paths of faith will be required, and the seeker on the path of spiritual freedom will have to face down the overly careful, untrusting and afraid.
Now, Paul never got up in the morning wondering what fun he could have dismantling the spiritual constructs of either Jerusalem’s temple priests on the one hand or imperial Roman priests on the other. It’s just that when his time came to explore new spiritual territory, Paul knew it. The good news is that as he struck out in freedom, he became more secure he in his faith, found more peace in his soul, and had more hope for the world God loved so much that he sent his son to save us from the sin of so loving where we’ve been that we would neglect the path on which Christ is leading us.
Claim, then, the spiritual freedom won for us in Christ. Learn to use it and depend on each other for support along the way, for community is the container for spiritual freedom. Trust the gifts you find in yourself, and celebrate the gifts of others, and the safety we seek in freedom will be found in spiritual community. Amen.
Monday, June 25, 2007
June 24, 2007 - Spiritual freedom
12th Sunday in Ordinary Time
24 June 2007
Galatians 3.23-29
Spiritual freedom
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007
In 1998 they made a big deal about a meteor shower that was supposed to happen in November. Apparently, the comet Tempel-Tuttel zooms by the earth every November 17th, or thereabouts, and in 1998 they expected the fly by to produce a meteor shower so spectacular that it has its own name, the Leonids. I went out and looked up to the sky on the scheduled night, but it was overcast and I didn’t see anything.
But in 1833 it was a different story. Of course, they didn’t have the science to predict the Leonids, and so when something between 100,000 and 200,000 meteor per hour lit up the sky from the eastern seaboard to the Rockies, people were shaken. When something that cosmic happens, it usually means something—something probably not good.
Abraham Lincoln was 24 when he witnessed that most spectacular meteor storm, and he recalled the experience by way of explaining the nation’s difficulties to people. Walt Whitman related an account of it that Lincoln related:
Harriet Tubman was an eleven-year-old slave the night of the 1833 Leonids. Her skull had just been fractured when her overseer threw a dry goods store weight at another slave and struck her by mistake. Tubman was from then on given to having visions and conversations with God, so that fantastical night sky held special portents for her. Like Lincoln, there was something steady and reliable behind the sky’s chaotic foreground. The one unmoving star in the sky, the North Star, came to have particular meaning for her, for that was the star by which she steered as many as 300 slaves to freedom, over the years.
And there was also Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon church, who watched the Leonids in the skies over Kirtland Ohio, concluding it to be a sign the Christ was about to return, according to his diary.
Lincoln and the deacon at his church, the slave who created freedom and the Palmyra farmer who created a religion, they and everyone across the land stood on the same earth and watched the same Leonids with the same wonder and the same ignorance of where it came from or what it meant. Occasionally, there come such singular moments. There are moments when the truth strikes home as hard as a dry goods store weight against your skull that if you look deep enough, you see we are all of us made of the same stuff, cast in the same predicament and subject to the same forces and same mysteries of the universe. We are neither slave nor free, neither president nor prophet. We are together in this, our often chaotic world where confusion comes easy and meaning comes hard.
Paul is working hard to describe a background of meaning to the church at Galatia. We don’t know exactly what reports have come to him about the Galatians, but it’s clear there has been some dispute between those who believed a believer had to become Jewish under the law of Moses in order to become Christian and those who believed that Gentiles could be Christian without being subject to Mosaic law. Paul works himself into such a lather that he hurls insults at his readers: “You foolish Galatians!” he sputters at the beginning of chapter three. He reminds them that they came to faith because they believed the story Paul told them about Jesus Christ, not because he made them obey religious laws.
Then, in our passage today, he says a funny thing. He doesn’t counter the claim that being a Jew is necessary with a claim that not being a Jew is acceptable. He says something surprising. He says their are no Jews. But, to be consistent, there also are no Greeks (Gentiles), either. For completeness, Paul adds that there are no slaves, even though some of the people listening to the reading of his letter seem to be owned by someone else. And if that is not comprehensive enough, there is no such thing as a male or a female. In other words, the social order that has seemed so real to the Galatians all their lives and that seems to determine where they can go and what they can do and who they can be just does not exist. All the apparent categories of life that people push against, yield to, and rail at vanish in the moment you pull over your head the garment of Jesus Christ. “As many of you as were baptized into Christ,” Paul explains, “have put on Christ.”
I believe this, and it is for me wonderful and hard. I am happy beyond words that I am not what people say that I am. People over the years have often explained to me who I am, according to them, and I am always surprised. For instance: I affirmed once that I think the theory of evolution explains how plants and animals adapt over generations of change, someone called me a “secular humanist” and quit my church. Now, to be fair, I do certain secular things unabashedly. In civic life, I vote in elections. At public events, I sing the Star Spangled Banner. When I study, I learn from the humanist John Calvin, among others, about the vast possibilities of human knowledge. But because of what I’ve learned from Paul about faith and selfhood, no one has the power to assign me to the category of secular humanist.
I find, come to think of it, that when people put me in a category, they usually do it either because they’re afraid of what it means that I’m in the category they’re not in, or if I am in their category, they’re afraid because of all the categories out there that are a threat to our category. I admit, I myself find it convenient to distinguish people by categories when talking about broad cultural developments, because it’s useful to see where ideas fit and how they work in our common life to change things or keep them the same. Harriet Tubman was certainly glad she could reject the category of slave for herself, but she was certainly just as happy that there was a category called Abolitionist that she could identify and rely on. She would have been justly afraid of anyone who shunned the category of Abolitionist. Her fear would have been rational.
But Paul is making an important distinction about how we understand categories of human beings. Putting someone into a category may tell you something about a life condition in common, like slavery, or a set of ideas you share, like Judaism, but if you really understand the meaning of Christ, these labels that describe your condition or your ideas have nothing to do with who you are. Who you are on this earth under the sun is freely defined in your relationship with God. In the second paragraph of this chapter we’ve read from today in Galatians, chapter three, where Paul has just called them all “foolish”—Paul may not divide people by categories, but he’s not above the occasional insult—he explains that the promise God made to Abraham has now come true. That promise, the big one that outlasts all the momentary ones God made to Abraham, is that in Abraham “all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” [Gn 12.3] In other words, there is now only one category of person on the earth, and that is the category of the blessed.
What is interesting here is that Paul does not say to the Galatians that they are now in the category of Christian. In fact, nowhere in any of Paul’s writings—nearly a third of the New Testament—nowhere does Paul call himself or anyone a Christian. He never sees himself as an agent to establish a new category of religion in history. He just starts from the religion he came from, kicks out the door, knocks over the walls, and says: Here. I have seen a vision of God, which I know as Christ, that has shown me a world where no one is separated from the love of God, and I know how to describe that grace to you so that when you believe it, you will receive that grace.
This is the constant star that Paul finds behind the chaos in the night sky. As Abraham Lincoln saw an intact Union behind the national chaos of war and Harriet Tubman saw the North Star behind the moral chaos of slavery, Paul saw Christ behind the spiritual chaos of a heartless culture ruled for the sake of empire and heedless of the health of souls. Paul’s North Star is Christ, and when he follows that star, he comes into the promised land of grace, where neither he now anyone is separated from the love of God.
The trick is to believe that this is true. The trick of living the life of faith is to believe that, all the conditions and ideas people apply to you notwithstanding—all the conditions and ideas that get you shunted off into categories of those who don’t belong to the good or to the right or to God, all of that notwithstanding—you are among the blessed of the earth. Harriet Tubman, for one, figured this out. She put the notion that the blessed of the earth cannot be slaves together with the notion that she is among the blessed of the earth, and it became impossible to believe that she was a slave. Living in that truth took some risk and some work, but once Harriet Tubman fully believed in it, nothing could stop her. Harriet Tubman figured out that she was a descendant of Abraham according to the promise that everyone ever would be one, and that put her in a whole new story. Then the story of 300 more children of Abraham also changed.
So you can take that home and live your life with it. You can live the life of the blessed of the earth, once you believe you are. It does involve risk and work. Living as the blessed of the earth will require a set of decisions. The first, of course, is the decision that it is true. If the idea of Christ is compelling for you, then putting Christ on as a garment is the first choice. It means that you honor the tradition you came from and at the same time live beyond it. It means that you begin to see that the resources of the earth are enough for everyone, and just as Jesus decided to feed 5,000 with five loaves and two fishes, you begin to take what we have and make it enough for everyone. Putting on the garment of Christ means that you tell the hardest truths for people to hear with the deepest love they will ever know. It means accepting the difference between what you dearly wished being blessed would mean and what is actually so. (Harriet Tubman could do amazing things, but she could not, for one, turn herself from black to white.) Putting on Christ means doing a lot when you have a lot to offer and doing at least a little when you think you have nothing left. It means sticking up for people nobody cares about and defying people everybody’s afraid of. It means also that letting go of things you cannot change is sometimes your most faithful choice. Putting on the garment of Christ means waking up on the scariest day of your life and trusting that it is the day that the Lord has made, all the same.
This is the grace of Christ, not that you get it and wait for bliss, but that once you have received this grace, everything you do flows from that blessing. This is the freedom of Christ, not that the world falls over and leaves you alone, but that once you are free, none of the world’s fear or hatred or alienation or violence will defeat your spirit. Grace lets you believe; freedom lets you risk and work. Then there is redemption, which is that when all is said and done, the whole of it is taken up into the arms of God, remembered in all its joys and all its sorrows, and healed at the touch of the loving hand that has been reaching out for us all from the beginning of time. Grace, freedom and redemption are the fulfillment of the promise in which you live. So why don’t you go right ahead and live it? Amen.
24 June 2007
Galatians 3.23-29
Spiritual freedom
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007
In 1998 they made a big deal about a meteor shower that was supposed to happen in November. Apparently, the comet Tempel-Tuttel zooms by the earth every November 17th, or thereabouts, and in 1998 they expected the fly by to produce a meteor shower so spectacular that it has its own name, the Leonids. I went out and looked up to the sky on the scheduled night, but it was overcast and I didn’t see anything.
But in 1833 it was a different story. Of course, they didn’t have the science to predict the Leonids, and so when something between 100,000 and 200,000 meteor per hour lit up the sky from the eastern seaboard to the Rockies, people were shaken. When something that cosmic happens, it usually means something—something probably not good.
Abraham Lincoln was 24 when he witnessed that most spectacular meteor storm, and he recalled the experience by way of explaining the nation’s difficulties to people. Walt Whitman related an account of it that Lincoln related:
One night I was roused from my sleep by a rap at the door and I heard the deacon’s voice exclaiming, ‘Arise Abraham, the day of judgment has come.’ I sprang from my bed and rushed to the window and saw the stars falling in great showers! But looking back of them in the heavens I saw all the grand old constellations with which I was so well acquainted, fixed and true in their places. Gentlemen, the world did not come to an end then, nor will the Union now.
Harriet Tubman was an eleven-year-old slave the night of the 1833 Leonids. Her skull had just been fractured when her overseer threw a dry goods store weight at another slave and struck her by mistake. Tubman was from then on given to having visions and conversations with God, so that fantastical night sky held special portents for her. Like Lincoln, there was something steady and reliable behind the sky’s chaotic foreground. The one unmoving star in the sky, the North Star, came to have particular meaning for her, for that was the star by which she steered as many as 300 slaves to freedom, over the years.
And there was also Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon church, who watched the Leonids in the skies over Kirtland Ohio, concluding it to be a sign the Christ was about to return, according to his diary.
Lincoln and the deacon at his church, the slave who created freedom and the Palmyra farmer who created a religion, they and everyone across the land stood on the same earth and watched the same Leonids with the same wonder and the same ignorance of where it came from or what it meant. Occasionally, there come such singular moments. There are moments when the truth strikes home as hard as a dry goods store weight against your skull that if you look deep enough, you see we are all of us made of the same stuff, cast in the same predicament and subject to the same forces and same mysteries of the universe. We are neither slave nor free, neither president nor prophet. We are together in this, our often chaotic world where confusion comes easy and meaning comes hard.
Paul is working hard to describe a background of meaning to the church at Galatia. We don’t know exactly what reports have come to him about the Galatians, but it’s clear there has been some dispute between those who believed a believer had to become Jewish under the law of Moses in order to become Christian and those who believed that Gentiles could be Christian without being subject to Mosaic law. Paul works himself into such a lather that he hurls insults at his readers: “You foolish Galatians!” he sputters at the beginning of chapter three. He reminds them that they came to faith because they believed the story Paul told them about Jesus Christ, not because he made them obey religious laws.
Then, in our passage today, he says a funny thing. He doesn’t counter the claim that being a Jew is necessary with a claim that not being a Jew is acceptable. He says something surprising. He says their are no Jews. But, to be consistent, there also are no Greeks (Gentiles), either. For completeness, Paul adds that there are no slaves, even though some of the people listening to the reading of his letter seem to be owned by someone else. And if that is not comprehensive enough, there is no such thing as a male or a female. In other words, the social order that has seemed so real to the Galatians all their lives and that seems to determine where they can go and what they can do and who they can be just does not exist. All the apparent categories of life that people push against, yield to, and rail at vanish in the moment you pull over your head the garment of Jesus Christ. “As many of you as were baptized into Christ,” Paul explains, “have put on Christ.”
I believe this, and it is for me wonderful and hard. I am happy beyond words that I am not what people say that I am. People over the years have often explained to me who I am, according to them, and I am always surprised. For instance: I affirmed once that I think the theory of evolution explains how plants and animals adapt over generations of change, someone called me a “secular humanist” and quit my church. Now, to be fair, I do certain secular things unabashedly. In civic life, I vote in elections. At public events, I sing the Star Spangled Banner. When I study, I learn from the humanist John Calvin, among others, about the vast possibilities of human knowledge. But because of what I’ve learned from Paul about faith and selfhood, no one has the power to assign me to the category of secular humanist.
I find, come to think of it, that when people put me in a category, they usually do it either because they’re afraid of what it means that I’m in the category they’re not in, or if I am in their category, they’re afraid because of all the categories out there that are a threat to our category. I admit, I myself find it convenient to distinguish people by categories when talking about broad cultural developments, because it’s useful to see where ideas fit and how they work in our common life to change things or keep them the same. Harriet Tubman was certainly glad she could reject the category of slave for herself, but she was certainly just as happy that there was a category called Abolitionist that she could identify and rely on. She would have been justly afraid of anyone who shunned the category of Abolitionist. Her fear would have been rational.
But Paul is making an important distinction about how we understand categories of human beings. Putting someone into a category may tell you something about a life condition in common, like slavery, or a set of ideas you share, like Judaism, but if you really understand the meaning of Christ, these labels that describe your condition or your ideas have nothing to do with who you are. Who you are on this earth under the sun is freely defined in your relationship with God. In the second paragraph of this chapter we’ve read from today in Galatians, chapter three, where Paul has just called them all “foolish”—Paul may not divide people by categories, but he’s not above the occasional insult—he explains that the promise God made to Abraham has now come true. That promise, the big one that outlasts all the momentary ones God made to Abraham, is that in Abraham “all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” [Gn 12.3] In other words, there is now only one category of person on the earth, and that is the category of the blessed.
What is interesting here is that Paul does not say to the Galatians that they are now in the category of Christian. In fact, nowhere in any of Paul’s writings—nearly a third of the New Testament—nowhere does Paul call himself or anyone a Christian. He never sees himself as an agent to establish a new category of religion in history. He just starts from the religion he came from, kicks out the door, knocks over the walls, and says: Here. I have seen a vision of God, which I know as Christ, that has shown me a world where no one is separated from the love of God, and I know how to describe that grace to you so that when you believe it, you will receive that grace.
This is the constant star that Paul finds behind the chaos in the night sky. As Abraham Lincoln saw an intact Union behind the national chaos of war and Harriet Tubman saw the North Star behind the moral chaos of slavery, Paul saw Christ behind the spiritual chaos of a heartless culture ruled for the sake of empire and heedless of the health of souls. Paul’s North Star is Christ, and when he follows that star, he comes into the promised land of grace, where neither he now anyone is separated from the love of God.
The trick is to believe that this is true. The trick of living the life of faith is to believe that, all the conditions and ideas people apply to you notwithstanding—all the conditions and ideas that get you shunted off into categories of those who don’t belong to the good or to the right or to God, all of that notwithstanding—you are among the blessed of the earth. Harriet Tubman, for one, figured this out. She put the notion that the blessed of the earth cannot be slaves together with the notion that she is among the blessed of the earth, and it became impossible to believe that she was a slave. Living in that truth took some risk and some work, but once Harriet Tubman fully believed in it, nothing could stop her. Harriet Tubman figured out that she was a descendant of Abraham according to the promise that everyone ever would be one, and that put her in a whole new story. Then the story of 300 more children of Abraham also changed.
So you can take that home and live your life with it. You can live the life of the blessed of the earth, once you believe you are. It does involve risk and work. Living as the blessed of the earth will require a set of decisions. The first, of course, is the decision that it is true. If the idea of Christ is compelling for you, then putting Christ on as a garment is the first choice. It means that you honor the tradition you came from and at the same time live beyond it. It means that you begin to see that the resources of the earth are enough for everyone, and just as Jesus decided to feed 5,000 with five loaves and two fishes, you begin to take what we have and make it enough for everyone. Putting on the garment of Christ means that you tell the hardest truths for people to hear with the deepest love they will ever know. It means accepting the difference between what you dearly wished being blessed would mean and what is actually so. (Harriet Tubman could do amazing things, but she could not, for one, turn herself from black to white.) Putting on Christ means doing a lot when you have a lot to offer and doing at least a little when you think you have nothing left. It means sticking up for people nobody cares about and defying people everybody’s afraid of. It means also that letting go of things you cannot change is sometimes your most faithful choice. Putting on the garment of Christ means waking up on the scariest day of your life and trusting that it is the day that the Lord has made, all the same.
This is the grace of Christ, not that you get it and wait for bliss, but that once you have received this grace, everything you do flows from that blessing. This is the freedom of Christ, not that the world falls over and leaves you alone, but that once you are free, none of the world’s fear or hatred or alienation or violence will defeat your spirit. Grace lets you believe; freedom lets you risk and work. Then there is redemption, which is that when all is said and done, the whole of it is taken up into the arms of God, remembered in all its joys and all its sorrows, and healed at the touch of the loving hand that has been reaching out for us all from the beginning of time. Grace, freedom and redemption are the fulfillment of the promise in which you live. So why don’t you go right ahead and live it? Amen.
Sunday, June 3, 2007
June 3, 2007 - One in three and me
Trinity Sunday
3 June 2007
Proverbs 8.1-4, 22-31; Romans 5.1-5
One in three and me
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007
My oldest son Russell is 32; his daughter Chloe is 4. Russell was outside pulling weeds with Chloe a couple of weeks ago. The weeds had gotten tall, which meant that they had bloomed their little yellow flowers. Chloe was collecting the flowers.
“These are for my Warehams,” she was saying. Statistically, Wareham is the last name of most relatives Chloe sees, so her “Warehams” are the odd assortment of people related to her. She was picking flowers for Marcia, Blake and me, all Warehams, and also for her other grandmother Betty, whose last name is Wease, not Wareham, but who gets her flower, all the same, especially because she is already in heaven with God. The thought of heaven may have triggered Chloe’s next idea for flowers.
“And these flowers,” Chloe announced to her father, “are for God’s wife.”
“God’s wife?” Russell wondered out loud, and then collected his thoughts. “What is God’s wife’s name?”
“We call her Gloria,” she answered confidentally.
“What does God’s wife do?” Russell wanted to know.
“Same thing God does.” Of course.
“Well, what does God do?”
“Same thing God’s wife does.”
It is Chloe’s way to be nonchalant about the cosmic and fantastic. She knows what she knows, and what she doesn’t know doesn’t worry her. She knows that God is a husband and a wife. She does not know what either God or God’s wife do, but they both alike do it, which is enough to know, for now.
You may call all of this the clever product of a fertile imagination, but you might want to take care how easily you dismiss the contribution the imagination makes to understanding God. If you think you outgrow the need for your imagination in understanding God, how do you think, for instance, about the Trinity? How do you think of the three in the one and the one in the three without imagining it? You can’t take a picture of it. You can’t analyze it in a test tube. It doesn’t show up on an MRI. They haven’t found the Trinity with the Hubble space telescope, no matter how deeply they peer into the heavens. The Trinity isn’t out there in the universe to find. It’s down inside the heart of the believer to understand, and what the heart uses to understand the Trinity is the imagination.
So what you may find interesting to note is that Christians were officially allowed to use their imaginations, the way my granddaughter does, to understand God for about the first three centuries after Christ. People often imagined God as a Father and a Son and a Holy Spirit all those years, but no one ever said you had to, or that you couldn’t talk about God as a woman named Wisdom, as today’s reading from Proverbs did. The truth is, Christians were being persecuted by the Roman emperors most of that time, and church leaders were concentrating on pastoral concerns more than doctrine.
Then the Emperor Constantine turned up, whose mother, inconveniently for persecutors, was Christian, and in ad 313 he declared that the persecutors of Christians had to knock it off. Nobody knows just when it happened, but Constantine himself converted to Christianity somewhere along the line. It had to have been before ad 325, because that’s when he decided that all the bishops in Christendom, about a thousand of them, needed to come together in the city of Nicaea and decide how to write down what all Christians believe about god. Well, it wasn’t going to be what all Christians believed, because some Christians believed things about God that other Christians did not believe. What Constantine meant was that, once all the bishops voted, the majority report would become what all Christian were going to believe. That’s when we got the Nicene Creed.
You can look up the Nicene Creed every Sunday here at Park Presbyterian Church between ten and eleven o’clock. It’s on page 15 of the hymnal, and as you can see, the first paragraph is about God the Father, the second about God the Son, and the third about God the Holy Spirit. The Trinity. This happens because of what a Roman Emperor who had come out of the closet with his faith wanted to do to establish a unified faith for his empire, and the church has been very proud of it ever since.
It’s a good thing the Presbyterians weren’t handling it, because of the 1,000 or so bishops invited, only something between 270 and 313 actually turned up. (People didn’t agree on the actual number.) The point is, there wasn’t a Presbyterian quorum, but it didn’t matter, which was a lucky thing for the bishop Athanasius, because he was using dirty tricks to keep away other bishops, who disagreed with him about the Trinity. So it’s also lucky that there wasn’t a constitutional right to free speech then, either. (Whenever someone tries to tell you that faith and politics don’t mix, you can remind them that the main thing people believe about God in most churches came about from a political process, and a messy one.)
So why is the Trinity so important to the church through all the ages and all the way down to our lifetime, when we know how arbitrary and sometimes even unfair it was the way people came up with it? There a lot of reasons the Trinity is important, of course, not least being that it helped Constantine secure a unified society, and that it was the only way to talk about God as Christianity grew in enormous numbers.
But the Trinity has also been a very serviceable piece of teaching to believe in. If you mostly thought of God as a far deity, up and away and in charge, you could. That was one way to think of God the Father, as long as you allowed for at least two other ways to think of God.. If, though, you liked the experience of a God who is personal, like a wise and trusted friend, there was Jesus, the Son. Just remember there were a couple of options for other people. And then, for those who find meaning and excitement in immediate connection with whatever God is doing and saying right now in the stirrings of contemporary life, the Holy Spirit is the promised force of love, peace and strength that binds you not only with God but with all souls for all time. There are at least three ways to think about God in the Trinity, so the Trinity has been a sign, source and shield for diversity in the church.
Also, the Trinity has been useful in that, while on the one hand it seems to peg God down to a specific definition, on the other hand it’s the sort of definition that slips out of your hand when you try to grab it too hard. “God is one!” Well, good, we’re monotheists. But also, “God is three!” Oh, three Gods? “No, three persons.” (Gr. prosopon = L. persona = face/mask/person) Oh, so God sometimes just alternately puts on the mask of a Son, and other times the mask of a Father. They’re not really different. “No, they are distinct. The Son is not the Father, and neither are either one the Holy Spirit.” But they’re one. “Yes,” the Trinity says, You’ve got it!” It’s a conceptual game you can’t fully master, which may not be comforting in the sense of having mental control of God, but the inability to use the Trinity to pin God down to a definition is the perfect reminder that God is always beyond comprehension. That’s a good thing.
Finally, for now, the Trinity has the advantage of being both scriptural and contemporary, in the sense that there are oodles of texts in the Old and New Testaments where we can see Trinitarian concepts expressed, and in that it was in its time very contemporary in its incorporation of philosophical concepts. The ideas of substance and their natures, for instance, which were key to the debates and used in the language of the Nicene Creed, came from the teachings of secular philosophers in the western world.
Of course, it’s possible to get too much of a good thing, or at least to rely on a thing that is good so long that it becomes not the right thing at all, some of the time.
Suppose, for instance, my granddaughter said, “And these flowers are for God’s wife,” and her father said, “No, Chloe, God can’t have a wife. There’s only three parts of God, and one of them is not a wife. Father, Son and Holy Spirit. That’s it.”
What if her father said that? Does anyone think it would be right? I don’t. It would dampen Chloe’s imagination for God at just the moment when she was growing in her care for God. All those bishops got to use their imagination for God—and remember, everyone got to use their imagination for God for about 300 years before the Council of Nicaea—so why would it be right to stop Chloe’s imagination for God now?
Here’s the problem. It’s one thing to have a doctrine, a teaching. It’s something entirely different to call something that’s not that doctrine a heresy. The problem is not that we sometimes need a doctrine. The problem is that some people need to brand other beliefs heresy. Offering believers a consistent explanation for God and reality is to offer them a doctrine. That is a gift. Telling believers who are not helped by the gift that they’re heretics is intolerance. That is a travesty. My granddaughter is not a heretic, not because she expresses a belief in God acceptable to hundreds of bishops, but because the dogmatic idea of heresy applied to her belief is irrelevant. And immoral.
But maybe you still want to be dogmatic, but you also want to be kind. You can say, you think, that she’s a child and that as she gets older, she’ll outgrow cute but wrongheaded notions of God. But is that the case? Or is it the case that other people get older and outgrow their ability to care for God through their own imaginations? Or are they afraid what will happen if too many people start disagreeing with them about God? Or are they afraid that if other people start to become secure in fresh and exciting expressions for God, they’ll start to feel insecure about their stale and tedious expression for God? I don’t know what they’re thinking. I can’t read their minds, but whatever they’re thinking, it isn’t good for imaginative believers or for the church. When people start suppressing the authentic, imaginative engagement others have with God, they cut those others off from a nurturing heritage and the communion of the people of faith, and they cut the church off from a future of vibrancy and relevance.
Several years ago, a group of Presbyterians who wanted to think about God in the way our passage today from Proverbs thinks about God were attacked, derided and condemned by self-appointed protectors of the faith. The group wanted to talk about God as Wisdom—Heb. chokmah; Gr. sophia—a distinctively feminine representation of God. The representation was biblical, which also made it traditional, but it did not fit in with the rigid notions of doctrine held by their detractors, who did not fail to call these renegades heretical. It became an enormous controversy, which, for reasons that still elude me, came to be seen as the fault of the imaginative group that were just being open, responsive and non-coercive.
Something happens in the church at certain times that certain people take as permission to inflict their personal rigidity onto everyone else. In such times, they get to project their own constrained beliefs onto the whole church. A few Southern Baptists, several years back, cleaned house at Southern Baptist seminaries of numerous professors deemed too open minded, and they reversed years of restorative work to include women in church leadership—this, in a denomination with a core conviction that there be no fixed creeds or formal doctrines. Because of this, Jimmy Carter, the world’s most famous Southern Baptist, announced in October of 2000 that he could no longer be part of all that. In Afghanistan, the Taliban have likewise taken over the spiritual environment with their truly brutal intolerance, especially toward women. Intolerance is a human failing in every religion, never a spiritual gift. There are people in every religion that know how to be intolerant.
But the Trinity is not for intolerance. The Trinity is for faith. As far as you can even call something so conceptually elusive as the Trinity a doctrine, it is a doctrine that requires a supple mind and an ability to anchor faith in a belief that was influenced by the shifting sands of history and the changing tide of human thought. The Trinity, as a doctrine, is a work of faith when it is liberating, open to question, answerable to doubt and resistant to fear.
The Trinity is a work of faith when it encourages imagination and engages people with one another in trust and hope. When I think of the Trinity, in other words, I do not think of God as out there in some triangular closed system. I think of God and community and my life: one in three and me. The Trinity, like the Sabbath, is made for us, not us for the Trinity. The Trinity is the theological servant of a hopeful, imaginative church.
And the Trinity would like the idea that God’s wife occasionally gets flowers. Amen.
3 June 2007
Proverbs 8.1-4, 22-31; Romans 5.1-5
One in three and me
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007
My oldest son Russell is 32; his daughter Chloe is 4. Russell was outside pulling weeds with Chloe a couple of weeks ago. The weeds had gotten tall, which meant that they had bloomed their little yellow flowers. Chloe was collecting the flowers.
“These are for my Warehams,” she was saying. Statistically, Wareham is the last name of most relatives Chloe sees, so her “Warehams” are the odd assortment of people related to her. She was picking flowers for Marcia, Blake and me, all Warehams, and also for her other grandmother Betty, whose last name is Wease, not Wareham, but who gets her flower, all the same, especially because she is already in heaven with God. The thought of heaven may have triggered Chloe’s next idea for flowers.
“And these flowers,” Chloe announced to her father, “are for God’s wife.”
“God’s wife?” Russell wondered out loud, and then collected his thoughts. “What is God’s wife’s name?”
“We call her Gloria,” she answered confidentally.
“What does God’s wife do?” Russell wanted to know.
“Same thing God does.” Of course.
“Well, what does God do?”
“Same thing God’s wife does.”
It is Chloe’s way to be nonchalant about the cosmic and fantastic. She knows what she knows, and what she doesn’t know doesn’t worry her. She knows that God is a husband and a wife. She does not know what either God or God’s wife do, but they both alike do it, which is enough to know, for now.
You may call all of this the clever product of a fertile imagination, but you might want to take care how easily you dismiss the contribution the imagination makes to understanding God. If you think you outgrow the need for your imagination in understanding God, how do you think, for instance, about the Trinity? How do you think of the three in the one and the one in the three without imagining it? You can’t take a picture of it. You can’t analyze it in a test tube. It doesn’t show up on an MRI. They haven’t found the Trinity with the Hubble space telescope, no matter how deeply they peer into the heavens. The Trinity isn’t out there in the universe to find. It’s down inside the heart of the believer to understand, and what the heart uses to understand the Trinity is the imagination.
So what you may find interesting to note is that Christians were officially allowed to use their imaginations, the way my granddaughter does, to understand God for about the first three centuries after Christ. People often imagined God as a Father and a Son and a Holy Spirit all those years, but no one ever said you had to, or that you couldn’t talk about God as a woman named Wisdom, as today’s reading from Proverbs did. The truth is, Christians were being persecuted by the Roman emperors most of that time, and church leaders were concentrating on pastoral concerns more than doctrine.
Then the Emperor Constantine turned up, whose mother, inconveniently for persecutors, was Christian, and in ad 313 he declared that the persecutors of Christians had to knock it off. Nobody knows just when it happened, but Constantine himself converted to Christianity somewhere along the line. It had to have been before ad 325, because that’s when he decided that all the bishops in Christendom, about a thousand of them, needed to come together in the city of Nicaea and decide how to write down what all Christians believe about god. Well, it wasn’t going to be what all Christians believed, because some Christians believed things about God that other Christians did not believe. What Constantine meant was that, once all the bishops voted, the majority report would become what all Christian were going to believe. That’s when we got the Nicene Creed.
You can look up the Nicene Creed every Sunday here at Park Presbyterian Church between ten and eleven o’clock. It’s on page 15 of the hymnal, and as you can see, the first paragraph is about God the Father, the second about God the Son, and the third about God the Holy Spirit. The Trinity. This happens because of what a Roman Emperor who had come out of the closet with his faith wanted to do to establish a unified faith for his empire, and the church has been very proud of it ever since.
It’s a good thing the Presbyterians weren’t handling it, because of the 1,000 or so bishops invited, only something between 270 and 313 actually turned up. (People didn’t agree on the actual number.) The point is, there wasn’t a Presbyterian quorum, but it didn’t matter, which was a lucky thing for the bishop Athanasius, because he was using dirty tricks to keep away other bishops, who disagreed with him about the Trinity. So it’s also lucky that there wasn’t a constitutional right to free speech then, either. (Whenever someone tries to tell you that faith and politics don’t mix, you can remind them that the main thing people believe about God in most churches came about from a political process, and a messy one.)
So why is the Trinity so important to the church through all the ages and all the way down to our lifetime, when we know how arbitrary and sometimes even unfair it was the way people came up with it? There a lot of reasons the Trinity is important, of course, not least being that it helped Constantine secure a unified society, and that it was the only way to talk about God as Christianity grew in enormous numbers.
But the Trinity has also been a very serviceable piece of teaching to believe in. If you mostly thought of God as a far deity, up and away and in charge, you could. That was one way to think of God the Father, as long as you allowed for at least two other ways to think of God.. If, though, you liked the experience of a God who is personal, like a wise and trusted friend, there was Jesus, the Son. Just remember there were a couple of options for other people. And then, for those who find meaning and excitement in immediate connection with whatever God is doing and saying right now in the stirrings of contemporary life, the Holy Spirit is the promised force of love, peace and strength that binds you not only with God but with all souls for all time. There are at least three ways to think about God in the Trinity, so the Trinity has been a sign, source and shield for diversity in the church.
Also, the Trinity has been useful in that, while on the one hand it seems to peg God down to a specific definition, on the other hand it’s the sort of definition that slips out of your hand when you try to grab it too hard. “God is one!” Well, good, we’re monotheists. But also, “God is three!” Oh, three Gods? “No, three persons.” (Gr. prosopon = L. persona = face/mask/person) Oh, so God sometimes just alternately puts on the mask of a Son, and other times the mask of a Father. They’re not really different. “No, they are distinct. The Son is not the Father, and neither are either one the Holy Spirit.” But they’re one. “Yes,” the Trinity says, You’ve got it!” It’s a conceptual game you can’t fully master, which may not be comforting in the sense of having mental control of God, but the inability to use the Trinity to pin God down to a definition is the perfect reminder that God is always beyond comprehension. That’s a good thing.
Finally, for now, the Trinity has the advantage of being both scriptural and contemporary, in the sense that there are oodles of texts in the Old and New Testaments where we can see Trinitarian concepts expressed, and in that it was in its time very contemporary in its incorporation of philosophical concepts. The ideas of substance and their natures, for instance, which were key to the debates and used in the language of the Nicene Creed, came from the teachings of secular philosophers in the western world.
Of course, it’s possible to get too much of a good thing, or at least to rely on a thing that is good so long that it becomes not the right thing at all, some of the time.
Suppose, for instance, my granddaughter said, “And these flowers are for God’s wife,” and her father said, “No, Chloe, God can’t have a wife. There’s only three parts of God, and one of them is not a wife. Father, Son and Holy Spirit. That’s it.”
What if her father said that? Does anyone think it would be right? I don’t. It would dampen Chloe’s imagination for God at just the moment when she was growing in her care for God. All those bishops got to use their imagination for God—and remember, everyone got to use their imagination for God for about 300 years before the Council of Nicaea—so why would it be right to stop Chloe’s imagination for God now?
Here’s the problem. It’s one thing to have a doctrine, a teaching. It’s something entirely different to call something that’s not that doctrine a heresy. The problem is not that we sometimes need a doctrine. The problem is that some people need to brand other beliefs heresy. Offering believers a consistent explanation for God and reality is to offer them a doctrine. That is a gift. Telling believers who are not helped by the gift that they’re heretics is intolerance. That is a travesty. My granddaughter is not a heretic, not because she expresses a belief in God acceptable to hundreds of bishops, but because the dogmatic idea of heresy applied to her belief is irrelevant. And immoral.
But maybe you still want to be dogmatic, but you also want to be kind. You can say, you think, that she’s a child and that as she gets older, she’ll outgrow cute but wrongheaded notions of God. But is that the case? Or is it the case that other people get older and outgrow their ability to care for God through their own imaginations? Or are they afraid what will happen if too many people start disagreeing with them about God? Or are they afraid that if other people start to become secure in fresh and exciting expressions for God, they’ll start to feel insecure about their stale and tedious expression for God? I don’t know what they’re thinking. I can’t read their minds, but whatever they’re thinking, it isn’t good for imaginative believers or for the church. When people start suppressing the authentic, imaginative engagement others have with God, they cut those others off from a nurturing heritage and the communion of the people of faith, and they cut the church off from a future of vibrancy and relevance.
Several years ago, a group of Presbyterians who wanted to think about God in the way our passage today from Proverbs thinks about God were attacked, derided and condemned by self-appointed protectors of the faith. The group wanted to talk about God as Wisdom—Heb. chokmah; Gr. sophia—a distinctively feminine representation of God. The representation was biblical, which also made it traditional, but it did not fit in with the rigid notions of doctrine held by their detractors, who did not fail to call these renegades heretical. It became an enormous controversy, which, for reasons that still elude me, came to be seen as the fault of the imaginative group that were just being open, responsive and non-coercive.
Something happens in the church at certain times that certain people take as permission to inflict their personal rigidity onto everyone else. In such times, they get to project their own constrained beliefs onto the whole church. A few Southern Baptists, several years back, cleaned house at Southern Baptist seminaries of numerous professors deemed too open minded, and they reversed years of restorative work to include women in church leadership—this, in a denomination with a core conviction that there be no fixed creeds or formal doctrines. Because of this, Jimmy Carter, the world’s most famous Southern Baptist, announced in October of 2000 that he could no longer be part of all that. In Afghanistan, the Taliban have likewise taken over the spiritual environment with their truly brutal intolerance, especially toward women. Intolerance is a human failing in every religion, never a spiritual gift. There are people in every religion that know how to be intolerant.
But the Trinity is not for intolerance. The Trinity is for faith. As far as you can even call something so conceptually elusive as the Trinity a doctrine, it is a doctrine that requires a supple mind and an ability to anchor faith in a belief that was influenced by the shifting sands of history and the changing tide of human thought. The Trinity, as a doctrine, is a work of faith when it is liberating, open to question, answerable to doubt and resistant to fear.
The Trinity is a work of faith when it encourages imagination and engages people with one another in trust and hope. When I think of the Trinity, in other words, I do not think of God as out there in some triangular closed system. I think of God and community and my life: one in three and me. The Trinity, like the Sabbath, is made for us, not us for the Trinity. The Trinity is the theological servant of a hopeful, imaginative church.
And the Trinity would like the idea that God’s wife occasionally gets flowers. Amen.
Sunday, May 13, 2007
May 13, 2007 - Enchanted
Sixth Sunday of Easter
13 May 2007
Revelation 21.10, 21.22-22.5
Enchanted
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007
My brand new yard tractor was delivered on Monday. I had never owned one before. This one is red and shiny. I can pull a trailer with it and attach a snow thrower to clear my driveway in 42-inch swaths during winter. I have read all the literature and identified all the operating parts. I can describe how to detach the mower deck. I now feel somehow more competent that I can use the term “mower deck” in a complete sentence. I own a piece of equipment that has a real mower deck, which has had some sort of existential effect on me. I didn’t have time on Tuesday to mow the lawn, but I had time to climb into the seat—which is situated directly above the mower deck. I actuated the clutch and moved all the levers through their various positions. I am part of the society of yard tractor owners.
On Friday, I mowed the lawn to an audience of numerous birds and squirrels, guided, at first, by the pattern shown in the yard tractor manual. The birds were disinterested, but the squirrels watched with something between curiosity and terror. The pattern in the yard tractor manual was drawn without the trees. I made up my own pattern. If you looked at the lawn after I mowed it from the upstairs bedroom window, it appeared that I was trying to draw Van Gogh’s painting “Starry Night” in the grass, with fanciful circles and sweeps and swirls and reminding you of an artist who at a distracted moment might, in the course perhaps of paring an apple, accidentally slice off his ear.
The way I first mowed my lawn with a yard tractor, the squirrels seemed surprised that I did not cut off my ear. They were relieved that I didn’t cut off their ears, though I did cut the grass in certain places low enough to have cut off the ears of several worms, who had previously assumed that a habitat an inch deep in the soil rendered them safe from my whirling blades. Silly them. I have heard that if you cut a worm in half, it grows into two worms. The worm population in various parts of my lawn has recently doubled. These parts of the lawn, according to the image of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” would be black holes, which is how they appear from the upstairs window.
If you were to have looked at the lawn not from the upstairs window but from the downstairs floor level (about twelve inches above the lawn), you’d have seen that it appeared entirely smooth and green, and I made sure to call Marcia’s attention to my handiwork from this pleasant angle. With the help of a clever and brawny machine, I have created a green velvet acre that might remind a nearsighted person of paradise, which gives me a certain satisfaction. A kind of peace comes to me from manipulating and managing the little bit of the world where I live, and so to drink in that satisfaction, I walked my fresh cut lawn, for the creation of which I am only the most recent agent. My course took me from the street around the side and across the back of our house and brought me against the end of the lawn at the edge of the wood.
Then I kept walking.
I’m not sure why I kept walking after the lawn had ended. Many things remain to be done to the house we’re still moving into. There are repairs and installations and painting and flooring jobs. There is the putting away of every single thing we have, which at this point still involves climbing over boxes of every other thing we have. There are books to read and the impossible backlog of thank-you notes to feel guilty about. But I kept walking from the end of the lawn into the wood.
The first sensations were the crunch of leaves and then my feet sinking into the softer woodland floor. The drone of neighboring yard tractors receded, while birds sang out between suddenly penetrating silences. These are silences of the sort in which creatures wait for the response that might lead to a new life. What happens in the birdsong is a calling out to the universe by a creature that wants something more, something new. What happens in the ensuing silence is the expansion of space and the suspension of time in which a miracle may occur. Or so it seemed to me, as I stepped from my pleasant and satisfying little lawn into the transcending wonder of the wood.
The difference between the lawn and the wood is the difference between delight and enchantment. There is nothing wrong with either, but they are not the same thing. I delight in the lawn, because it is the pleasing product of human ingenuity. I am enchanted by the wood, because it arises from a wider spirit of life. I delight in the lawn, because my imagination is reflected in it. I am enchanted by the wood, because it bursts the boundaries of my thoughts. The delight of the lawn is the beauty it exposes. The enchantment of the wood is in the mysteries it hides.
Delight and enchantment are two goods. I would not enjoy life much without delight, and I would slowly die without enchantment.
If ever there were an author of scripture who wrote from his enchantment, it was the one we call John of Patmos, the author of Revelation. In paragraph after paragraph, John draws us into a world of strange singing creatures; a slaughtered but living lamb with seven horns and seven eyes, worshiped by myriads of angels and creatures and elders; four horses, white, black, bright red and pale green with riders bearing a crown, a sword, scales and the name of Death; the sun black as sackcloth; stars spinning into the earth; a cosmic battle between Michael and the angels against a great red seven-headed dragon. By fours and by sevens and by twelves, the forces of good and life are cast into a final cosmic conflict against the forces of evil and death.
King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table would have blanched at the enormity of the dangers presented in Revelation, but something in the time and place of the late first century church suggested just such a dread and serious state of things. Only in an ecstatic state of enchantment could a visionary see in the deepest horrors of existence the hope of good’s greatest triumph. John found a way to unleash from the boundlessness of his soul the spectacular imagery that would ignite the imagination of every generation since.
But every now and then a generation misses the point of it all. In our generation, we miss the point in two ways. One way we miss the point of Revelation is chronicled in the Left Behind series of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, the popular fictionalized account of the rapture and its aftermath, when all the acceptable Christians can expect to be dematerialized on earth and rematerialized in heaven. These are morality stories about good guys and bad guys, and they’re meant to scare you into wanting to be one of the good guys, no matter how statistically remote that possibility is. The problem is that the Left Behind books teach fear so imaginatively that you’re left shaking in your boots, whereas the power of the book of Revelation is that it engages your own imagination to provoke awe in the core of your being.
The other way our generation misses the point of Revelation is to consider the Left Behind version definitive and then reject it as balderdash. On some level, most of us know that Tim LaHaye is just riding his own personal, profitable apocalyptic high horse. As a commercial genius, we have to admire him; as a purveyor of truth, he makes us gag. We spew the hollowness of his lukewarm intellect from our collective mouth, and the taste of it has been so bad that we refuse altogether the cup of Revelation, as if it were some Jonesian apocalyptic Kool-Aid. We’re afraid of being suckered, or worse.
But there is an alternative, and the alternative is enchantment. We almost all of us know how to be enchanted. In a small way, many of us were enchanted the first time we saw Star Wars. We realized there’s probably no world like Tatooine with two suns that sustain human life in a dry, barren desertish sort of way, but the characters, battles, inventions and mysterious powers were too wonderful not to believe in, if only for a couple of hours. In a similar way, we look forward to the release of the next Harry Potter novel, because just as the legends of King Arthur and his knights transported readers and listeners from lives diminished by cramped imaginations into the hope of fulfillment and goodness, so do we trust that somewhere, someday there is, has been and will be a boy who cannot help be and do everything possible for him. If that is true for him, it may be true for us, and in that truth may be the seed of the salvation of the world. The original wonder of life may be restored. We actually imagine that someday, again, things will be okay.
So if, now, you can let yourself be enchanted by something in the book of Revelation, see what happens when you step from the nicely clipped lawn of your carefully managed life into the wild, surpassing wonder of John’s vision of the “holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God,” the city that has no need of sun or moon, because its light is the glory of God and its lamp the Lamb.
There is a river there, bright as crystal, flowing with life through the middle of the street of the city. Now, stop any other thought you may be having and see only that crystal river flowing down the middle of the wide main street. Watch the glints of light, which sparkle only with the light of God. Watch it all closely, for this is the life toward which you have already chosen to live. And notice, now, the tree of life on either side of the river with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month. This is how full and sweet real life is. People have told you what “real” life is, by which they mean a life full of disappointment and treachery and the prevalence of wrong, but now you see that the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit is more real than any of that, because your imagination has shown this to you at your core.
And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. Whatever else you have read in the history of nations—whatever mutual distrust nations have harbored, whatever wars have been waged, whatever despicable monarchs, generals, presidents and prime ministers have despoiled with their lies and their intrigues and their power over nations—whatever else you know about nations, notice, now, that the final act among nations will be their healing. The final act among nations will be their healing by the leaves of the tree of life. In certain seats of political power, in certain boardrooms of corporate domination and in certain studios of cultural influence there is great gain to be sought in disenchanting you of your belief in the healing of the nations. You should think you are naïve, they will tell you, if you believe in this healing. But then if you insist on being naïve, they will shame you in public for believing in the healing of all instead of fearing the power they alone wield. But then if you won’t be ashamed, they will turn their power against you and injure your reputation or deprived you of your prospects or damage your very living and being.
But then if you won’t be intimidated out of your belief in the healing of the nations—which is also the healing of the religions, whatever their creeds, and which is also the healing of the sexualities, whatever their orientation, and which is also the healing of the races, whatever their pigment or the shape of their eyes or the texture of their hair—if, still, you won’t be intimidated out of your enchantment with the healing power of the leaves of the tree of life, then all the world leaders and CEO’s and talking heads and talk show bullies are utterly powerless against you. Powerless against you, because you have been shaken to the core of your being by the power of God’s idea for the fulfillment of life, and no one, anywhere, by any means, can shake you. You are at peace.
You are at peace down by the riverside, where the crystal water nourishes the tree of life and its sweet fruit and its healing leaves. You are healed every time you remember them. You are healed after the mean-spirited comment someone made to you or that you made to someone. You are healed after the memory of something painful swallowed yet another hour you might have spent happy. You are healed of resentments that chain you to old sadness. You are healed of the chemistry your body still obeys, in spite of everything you’ve done to change it. You are healed, at least in the moment of enchantment and peace, and in that moment resides the promise for your life.
I believe that the enchantments of our faith, which we anchor in the life, ministry and eternal spirit of Christ, are what really teach us about salvation. We have creeds and laws, dogmas and doctrine, which we use to order matters of faith to make them manageable, but faith management is not what I pray for. Faith liberation and healing is what I pray for, and when we are enchanted by the Spirit of God, we are free and healed. Amen.
13 May 2007
Revelation 21.10, 21.22-22.5
Enchanted
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007
My brand new yard tractor was delivered on Monday. I had never owned one before. This one is red and shiny. I can pull a trailer with it and attach a snow thrower to clear my driveway in 42-inch swaths during winter. I have read all the literature and identified all the operating parts. I can describe how to detach the mower deck. I now feel somehow more competent that I can use the term “mower deck” in a complete sentence. I own a piece of equipment that has a real mower deck, which has had some sort of existential effect on me. I didn’t have time on Tuesday to mow the lawn, but I had time to climb into the seat—which is situated directly above the mower deck. I actuated the clutch and moved all the levers through their various positions. I am part of the society of yard tractor owners.
On Friday, I mowed the lawn to an audience of numerous birds and squirrels, guided, at first, by the pattern shown in the yard tractor manual. The birds were disinterested, but the squirrels watched with something between curiosity and terror. The pattern in the yard tractor manual was drawn without the trees. I made up my own pattern. If you looked at the lawn after I mowed it from the upstairs bedroom window, it appeared that I was trying to draw Van Gogh’s painting “Starry Night” in the grass, with fanciful circles and sweeps and swirls and reminding you of an artist who at a distracted moment might, in the course perhaps of paring an apple, accidentally slice off his ear.
The way I first mowed my lawn with a yard tractor, the squirrels seemed surprised that I did not cut off my ear. They were relieved that I didn’t cut off their ears, though I did cut the grass in certain places low enough to have cut off the ears of several worms, who had previously assumed that a habitat an inch deep in the soil rendered them safe from my whirling blades. Silly them. I have heard that if you cut a worm in half, it grows into two worms. The worm population in various parts of my lawn has recently doubled. These parts of the lawn, according to the image of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” would be black holes, which is how they appear from the upstairs window.
If you were to have looked at the lawn not from the upstairs window but from the downstairs floor level (about twelve inches above the lawn), you’d have seen that it appeared entirely smooth and green, and I made sure to call Marcia’s attention to my handiwork from this pleasant angle. With the help of a clever and brawny machine, I have created a green velvet acre that might remind a nearsighted person of paradise, which gives me a certain satisfaction. A kind of peace comes to me from manipulating and managing the little bit of the world where I live, and so to drink in that satisfaction, I walked my fresh cut lawn, for the creation of which I am only the most recent agent. My course took me from the street around the side and across the back of our house and brought me against the end of the lawn at the edge of the wood.
Then I kept walking.
I’m not sure why I kept walking after the lawn had ended. Many things remain to be done to the house we’re still moving into. There are repairs and installations and painting and flooring jobs. There is the putting away of every single thing we have, which at this point still involves climbing over boxes of every other thing we have. There are books to read and the impossible backlog of thank-you notes to feel guilty about. But I kept walking from the end of the lawn into the wood.
The first sensations were the crunch of leaves and then my feet sinking into the softer woodland floor. The drone of neighboring yard tractors receded, while birds sang out between suddenly penetrating silences. These are silences of the sort in which creatures wait for the response that might lead to a new life. What happens in the birdsong is a calling out to the universe by a creature that wants something more, something new. What happens in the ensuing silence is the expansion of space and the suspension of time in which a miracle may occur. Or so it seemed to me, as I stepped from my pleasant and satisfying little lawn into the transcending wonder of the wood.
The difference between the lawn and the wood is the difference between delight and enchantment. There is nothing wrong with either, but they are not the same thing. I delight in the lawn, because it is the pleasing product of human ingenuity. I am enchanted by the wood, because it arises from a wider spirit of life. I delight in the lawn, because my imagination is reflected in it. I am enchanted by the wood, because it bursts the boundaries of my thoughts. The delight of the lawn is the beauty it exposes. The enchantment of the wood is in the mysteries it hides.
Delight and enchantment are two goods. I would not enjoy life much without delight, and I would slowly die without enchantment.
If ever there were an author of scripture who wrote from his enchantment, it was the one we call John of Patmos, the author of Revelation. In paragraph after paragraph, John draws us into a world of strange singing creatures; a slaughtered but living lamb with seven horns and seven eyes, worshiped by myriads of angels and creatures and elders; four horses, white, black, bright red and pale green with riders bearing a crown, a sword, scales and the name of Death; the sun black as sackcloth; stars spinning into the earth; a cosmic battle between Michael and the angels against a great red seven-headed dragon. By fours and by sevens and by twelves, the forces of good and life are cast into a final cosmic conflict against the forces of evil and death.
King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table would have blanched at the enormity of the dangers presented in Revelation, but something in the time and place of the late first century church suggested just such a dread and serious state of things. Only in an ecstatic state of enchantment could a visionary see in the deepest horrors of existence the hope of good’s greatest triumph. John found a way to unleash from the boundlessness of his soul the spectacular imagery that would ignite the imagination of every generation since.
But every now and then a generation misses the point of it all. In our generation, we miss the point in two ways. One way we miss the point of Revelation is chronicled in the Left Behind series of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, the popular fictionalized account of the rapture and its aftermath, when all the acceptable Christians can expect to be dematerialized on earth and rematerialized in heaven. These are morality stories about good guys and bad guys, and they’re meant to scare you into wanting to be one of the good guys, no matter how statistically remote that possibility is. The problem is that the Left Behind books teach fear so imaginatively that you’re left shaking in your boots, whereas the power of the book of Revelation is that it engages your own imagination to provoke awe in the core of your being.
The other way our generation misses the point of Revelation is to consider the Left Behind version definitive and then reject it as balderdash. On some level, most of us know that Tim LaHaye is just riding his own personal, profitable apocalyptic high horse. As a commercial genius, we have to admire him; as a purveyor of truth, he makes us gag. We spew the hollowness of his lukewarm intellect from our collective mouth, and the taste of it has been so bad that we refuse altogether the cup of Revelation, as if it were some Jonesian apocalyptic Kool-Aid. We’re afraid of being suckered, or worse.
But there is an alternative, and the alternative is enchantment. We almost all of us know how to be enchanted. In a small way, many of us were enchanted the first time we saw Star Wars. We realized there’s probably no world like Tatooine with two suns that sustain human life in a dry, barren desertish sort of way, but the characters, battles, inventions and mysterious powers were too wonderful not to believe in, if only for a couple of hours. In a similar way, we look forward to the release of the next Harry Potter novel, because just as the legends of King Arthur and his knights transported readers and listeners from lives diminished by cramped imaginations into the hope of fulfillment and goodness, so do we trust that somewhere, someday there is, has been and will be a boy who cannot help be and do everything possible for him. If that is true for him, it may be true for us, and in that truth may be the seed of the salvation of the world. The original wonder of life may be restored. We actually imagine that someday, again, things will be okay.
So if, now, you can let yourself be enchanted by something in the book of Revelation, see what happens when you step from the nicely clipped lawn of your carefully managed life into the wild, surpassing wonder of John’s vision of the “holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God,” the city that has no need of sun or moon, because its light is the glory of God and its lamp the Lamb.
There is a river there, bright as crystal, flowing with life through the middle of the street of the city. Now, stop any other thought you may be having and see only that crystal river flowing down the middle of the wide main street. Watch the glints of light, which sparkle only with the light of God. Watch it all closely, for this is the life toward which you have already chosen to live. And notice, now, the tree of life on either side of the river with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month. This is how full and sweet real life is. People have told you what “real” life is, by which they mean a life full of disappointment and treachery and the prevalence of wrong, but now you see that the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit is more real than any of that, because your imagination has shown this to you at your core.
And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. Whatever else you have read in the history of nations—whatever mutual distrust nations have harbored, whatever wars have been waged, whatever despicable monarchs, generals, presidents and prime ministers have despoiled with their lies and their intrigues and their power over nations—whatever else you know about nations, notice, now, that the final act among nations will be their healing. The final act among nations will be their healing by the leaves of the tree of life. In certain seats of political power, in certain boardrooms of corporate domination and in certain studios of cultural influence there is great gain to be sought in disenchanting you of your belief in the healing of the nations. You should think you are naïve, they will tell you, if you believe in this healing. But then if you insist on being naïve, they will shame you in public for believing in the healing of all instead of fearing the power they alone wield. But then if you won’t be ashamed, they will turn their power against you and injure your reputation or deprived you of your prospects or damage your very living and being.
But then if you won’t be intimidated out of your belief in the healing of the nations—which is also the healing of the religions, whatever their creeds, and which is also the healing of the sexualities, whatever their orientation, and which is also the healing of the races, whatever their pigment or the shape of their eyes or the texture of their hair—if, still, you won’t be intimidated out of your enchantment with the healing power of the leaves of the tree of life, then all the world leaders and CEO’s and talking heads and talk show bullies are utterly powerless against you. Powerless against you, because you have been shaken to the core of your being by the power of God’s idea for the fulfillment of life, and no one, anywhere, by any means, can shake you. You are at peace.
You are at peace down by the riverside, where the crystal water nourishes the tree of life and its sweet fruit and its healing leaves. You are healed every time you remember them. You are healed after the mean-spirited comment someone made to you or that you made to someone. You are healed after the memory of something painful swallowed yet another hour you might have spent happy. You are healed of resentments that chain you to old sadness. You are healed of the chemistry your body still obeys, in spite of everything you’ve done to change it. You are healed, at least in the moment of enchantment and peace, and in that moment resides the promise for your life.
I believe that the enchantments of our faith, which we anchor in the life, ministry and eternal spirit of Christ, are what really teach us about salvation. We have creeds and laws, dogmas and doctrine, which we use to order matters of faith to make them manageable, but faith management is not what I pray for. Faith liberation and healing is what I pray for, and when we are enchanted by the Spirit of God, we are free and healed. Amen.
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