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:

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.

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.