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.
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
