THE MOST BASIC OF THOUGHTS ABOUT GOD

TWO THOUGHTS ON WISDOM.

 Judaism and Christianity include a "Wisdom Tradition" that is often ignored, even censored, in American religion. But it's right there in the Bible. In Proverbs 9, Wisdom builds her house with its 7 Pillars and calls to the foolish people in the streets to come in and learn. "Leave your simple ways and you will live. Walk in the way of insight."

But what constitutes "Wisdom" is not spelled out very clearly in Scripture. "What is Wisdom?" is a question worth a lifetime of pondering. I will offer just two points in the hope they may be of some value.

1. The Fear Of The Lord

Proverbs 9 says "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding. 

"Fear of the Lord" sounds off-putting. Who needs a religion that instills more fear? We've got enough of that already. Fortunately, Proverbs doesn't mean that. "Fear of the Lord" doesn't mean dread that God will do us harm if we don't tow the line. In The Idea Of The Holy, Rudolph Otto explained that the Hebrew term we have translated as "fear" means something more like awe, trembling in wonder before majesty.

The positive thing about "fear" is that it gets our attention. "The beginning of Wisdom" is attention to God. But where is God? Where are we supposed to look? Isaiah 6: 3 says, "The whole earth reflects God's glory." Where should we look? Everywhere.

Reality is made up of "here and nows" -- moments in places. God is the heart of each moment, present in each place. Most of us are usually spaced out, lost in our thoughts, missing the moment. Ram Das famously said, "Be here, now." He meant what Proverbs says, "Pay attention." God is the Beauty, Truth, Goodness, Value, and Meaning of each moment, each here and now. Wisdom begins with being on the lookout of God right here in this messy muddled meandering life. 

2. Know Yourself

The apocryphal Gospel of Thomas says, "When you know yourselves, then you will become known . . . But if you do not know yourselves, you will dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty."

Thomas echoes the ancient Greek adage, "Know yourself." That adage was written like a signpost at the entrance to the Temple of Delpi, where the greatest oracle lived. Greek stories often tell of people who received guidance from the oracle and attempted to follow her advice because she could see the future. But they misinterpreted her words and came to disaster because their understanding was skewed by their own inner selves. They did not know themselves, the lens through which they saw, so they could not see rightly.

Wisdom actually begins with two insights, or perhaps at the point where the two insights meet. We need to know God, but we also need to know ourselves. Our own personal quirks all too often distort our sense of who God is, what God is like, what God is saying to us. We attribute to God all sorts of things that are really our own thoughts, fears, wishes, animosities, etc. So we can't know God any better than we know ourselves.

That means Wisdom requires a life of self-discovery. There are many ways to get insight into yourself. Depth psychology is the most familiar. I practice Bio-Spiritual Focussing, a body-mindfulness discipline. Peter Campbell and Edwin MacMahon, Bio-Spirituality: Focussing As A Way To Grow; Eugene Gendlin, Focussing. A good way to learn the practice is to attend an on-line group session at Stillpoint California. https://stillpointca.org/biospiritual-focusing 

6

WHAT IS SALVATION AND HOW DOES IT WORK?

I. INTRODUCTION 

 In Georgia, as in Texas, people are apt to walk up and ask, Are you saved? Our Bishop in Georgia, Frank Allen, was visiting my congregation. Someon asked him, What do you say when people ask you if you are saved? Bishop Allen replied, I say "yes." That’s a joke because any other answer would lead to a conversation no one wants to have. He went on to say, he thought to himself, "yes, I have been saved, I am being saved, I hope someday to be saved." He was suggesting the Anglican answer of a 17th Century theologian, Richard Hooker. So what does it mean to be saved? How does it work? 

I don’t mean to challenge anyone’s beliefs or sell you some other idea. I just want to look at some answers that have been Christian teachings at different times in history. The ideas that are dear to some hearts are horrifying to others. Maybe that’s why Christian understandings of salvation have shifted from century to century. 

The first question is whether there is even a problem. Many people today say there is no problem. Everything is just fine. All we need to do is relax and enjoy it life. William James called that “the religion of healthy-mindedness." Norman Vincent Pealed called it “positive thinking.” But James didn’t think Don’t worry. Be happy, was a sufficient response to the hard situation of being human. St. Augustine, Freud, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, and countless great minds have seen a dark thread running through humanity and the whole world. If there’s  no problem, then salvation isn’t an issue. If there is a problem, then we have to ask: What’s to be done about it? The various Christian answers are called atonement doctrines. 

 II. WHAT DOES THE BIBLE SAY ABOUT SALVATION? 

 Let’s start with the Bible. Biblical scholars often say there are phrases that might be elaborated into atonement doctrines. There are suggestions of eight quite different atonement doctrines on just two pages of Romans -- but no full doctrines. For the past 400 years, most of us have had a particular understanding. It comes from John Calvin and is called penal (as in penitentiary) substitution. It goes like this: God has rules. If they are broken, someone has to be punished. We break the rules, so we deserve to be punished. Jesus suffered in our stead to satisfy his Father’s need for retribution. When we see the world "for" in the Bible, we read that penal substitution doctrine into it. Christ died for us means instead of us. He took our punishment. I’m not saying that isn’t true. But some people don’t like the way God comes across in that understanding. Someone breaks the rules; God gets so angry; someone has to be die to make him feel better; so he tortures and kills his son and that makes everything ok. That isn’t a God some people can love. 

Some people cherish the penal substitution doctrine -- others hate it. It’s drawn some into the Church, but kept others out. I just want to show you there’s more than one way to look at it. Actually, penal substitution didn’t come along for the first 1,500 years of Christianity. But isn’t it in the Bible? 

Morna Hooker, a leading New Testament scholar, did an in-depth study of salvation in the New Testament. Hooker says the New Testament passages about salvation often include the word "for"-- as in “Jesus died for us.” But what does that mean? The issue is how we interpret the word "for." Calvin and many of us hear it as, “Jesus died instead of us.” But Hooker tells us that isn’t what the Bible says. The New Testament uses four Greek different words, all of which we translate as for. Three of them, peri, dia, and huper mean such things as around, for the sake of, or for our benefit. Not one of them means instead of. Jesus said, “Take up your cross and follow me” -- not “I’ll take up my cross so you don’t have to.” The fourth Greek preposition anti could mean instead but it appears only twice, and both times it suggests a different atonement doctrine called “ransom.” We’ll get to that idea in a few minutes. 

Only one Bible verse, even in translation, sounds like penal substitution. 1 Peter 2: 24 – he bore our sins in his body on the tree. But in Greek that means he took our sins to be crucified there, not that he was crucified for our sins. 

Biblical scholars often say the Bible teaches salvation but not how it works Hooker says we can’t find an atonement doctrine in the New Testament because we’re asking the wrong question. Our basic assumptions are so different from the 1st Century worldview that the New Testament isn’t answering the question we are asking. We assume that each of us is a free moral agent who makes bad choices and should have to pay for those choices. We want to know how Jesus’ death gets us off the hook. But the the Ancient World view didn’t think so much about individuals except as members of families, communities, and nations. The New Testament is concerned with the salvation of communities. 

Hooker says the closest thing to an atonement doctrine in the Bible is about covenant: A covenant is a three-way contract with the parties being person A, person B, and God. Covenants organize communities around God. We have duties to one another and those duties are holy. In Jesus’ day, the most sacred obligations were “Blood Covenants” -- solemn vows sealed by blood, often the blood of lambs. The New Testament calls Jesus “the lamb of God.” Jesus sheds his blood to seal a covenant with humanity. That covenant binds us to God and to each other. Healing our relationship with God and our relationship with each other goes hand in hand. The crucifixion is the primal ritual covenant ceremony. When I was a child, we’d cut our fingers and bleed into each other’s wounds to seal an oath of loyalty. In Jesus, God and humanity bleed into each other to form the new covenant. Before we get to the different theologies that came along after the Bible, we need to see how salvation connects with healing. 

The word "salvation" is used over and over in the Bible. We usually think of that word in legal terms. We have been condemned for our crimes. Salvation means a pardon. But that isn’t what the word means in either English or Greek. It isn’t a legal term meaning pardon. The English root is salve – as in salve, a healing ointment. It’s a medical term – not a legal term. So why do the English translators use the word salvation instead of pardon? They are translating the Greek word, sozo. Sozo literally means rescue from any kind of danger. But its most common use in Bible times was about bodily health. It meant being healed from a sickness, not pardoned from a sentence. 

There was a Greek word for pardon, apoulo. The Old Testament used the word pardon 17 times. Jesus and the authors of the New Testament knew it well, but they never used it – not once. They used sozo – seeing sin a wound to be healed -- not a crime to be pardoned. If salvation means healing, Jesus’ healing miracles aren’t just showing off his power. They’re signs of what he will do on the cross. When the Canaanite woman called to Jesus, “Lord, have mercy on my son. He has seizures and is suffering greatly,” she isn’t asking for pardon but for healing. To go a little deeper into what healing meant, after a miracle Jesus would sometimes say, “Your faith has made you whole.” He wasn’t just curing a disease. He was restoring the wholeness to people who were broken apart. We’re often scattered into different parts, feelings and thoughts rushing in different directions. Wholeness is coming back together and finding ourselves. Now let’s look different ways the Church has explained salvation through the centuries. There have been a lot of ideas about salvation through the years. I’m just telling you about some of the main ones. 

 III. RANSOM THEORY 

Around 165 A. D., St. Justin Martyr gave us the Ransom Theory. Ransom was by far the party line of Western Christianity for 1,000 years and there are echoes of it today. "Ye chosen seed of Israel’s race, Ye ransomed from the Fall . . .. " The Ransom doctrine goes like this: We have fallen into bondage to something evil that exercises power over us – that “holds us in sin’s dread sway” the hymn says. We have made our pact with the devil to get whatever it is we wanted. That’s what’s happening in Goethe’s Faust, which is based on folklore going back to Justin’s saying “we’ve sold our souls but Jesus bought them back.” The way to free us from the dark power was to pay its bloody price. Jesus ransomed us because we were hostages to evil. God in Jesus redeemed us. Redeemed means bought back. Jesus bought us back from the power that held us in sin’s dread sway to quote another hymn. Jesus, our blessed redeemer died for us, but it wasn’t to satisfy God’s need for vengeance. He died to pay our debt – not to God – but to the devil and sets us free to be ourselves again. The one demanding the blood isn’t God, but Satan. 

If bondage to the devil sounds too superstitious, we can demythologize it this way. We live out of self-interest and do what the world demands in order to give us what we want. That’s the deal we make and it costs us our freedom. So, what constitutes our bondage? Most psychologies deny that our freedom is sufficiently robust to empower us for full humanity. There’s Darwin, Freud, Skinner, Systems Theory, you name it. The prevalent theory today is from French sociologist, Paul Bourdieu, and Canadian philosopher, James K. A. Smith. They say assumptions and patterns of believing, feeling, and acting are hard-wired into us by our culture. Those patterns are so entrenched we don’t even notice them. For Justin, the problem is this bondage and the goal is freedom. Jesus paid the worldly system’s price or Satan’s price with his life. The problem is bondage and the answer is liberation. 

A shortcoming of the ransom model is that it’s all about the cross, and doesn’t see the point of the Resurrection. In the 6th Century, St. John Chrysostom focused on the Resurrection. He saw the crucifixion as setting the stage for the Harrowing of Hell. 1st Peter says that after the crucifixion Jesus “went and made proclamation to the imprisoned spirits.” Originally the Apostle’s Creed said,“He descended into Hell.” That sounded a little too shocking so we’ve changed it to “He descended to the dead.” But John Chrysostom knew it as “He descended into Hell. Hell means eternal separation from God represented by the gates that swing only one way – in – and the sign over the gate: Leave All Hope Ye Who Enter Here. According to John Chrysostom, Jesus was crucified so he could descend into Hell, then break out in the Resurrection, emptying hell and shattering the gates so that they swing both ways. 

 IV. SATISFACTION THEORY 

 Justin Martyr’s ransom theory was the main understanding of atonement until 12000 AD. In the feudal society of the high Middle Ages, St. Anselm rejected Ransom Theory, saying it allowed too much power to evil. In his day, the Church was in charge of society. He didn’t see his world as under a dark power. Bondage was not the problem since the system is good. In a feudal society, Anselm reframed salvation in a feudal way. God was the King in the hierarchy of the world. His position was clothed in honor. Disobeying God was an affront to God’s honor just as if a vassal disobeyed his feudal Lord. God’s honor demands satisfaction to preserve the system. God cannot rest until the divine honor has been vindicated. That would require sinners to go to Hell, but God loves us too much for that. So, God takes human form in order to play both roles. God crucifies Jesus to satisfy God’s honor. But it isn’t a matter of God’s wrath. He just has to save the system. 

 V. MORAL INFLUENCE THEORY 

 But is God really so insecure that God needs to torture someone to feel better? Anselm’s younger contemporary, Peter Abelard, disagreed. He taught the Moral Influence theory, which is all about love. Sin makes life miserable. The cross is God’s response. Out of love God goes to the cross to suffer with us. God plunges into the brokenness of human experience. But how does that save us? Abelard said sin isn’t breaking rules. It’s failing to love God, who is the heart of Reality, the heart of all our experience. If we don’t love God, we can’t love anyone or anything, not even ourselves, rightly. That’s why sin makes life miserable. But when we look to the cross. we see God’s love and we love God back. That restores our connection to everything. Loving God heals our core spiritual wound. 

 VI. ASSUMPTION THEORY 

 Abelard’s theory is first cousin to what St. Athanasius taught in the 4th century. It’s called TheAssumption Doctrine. Assumption means God assuming human nature. The whole Jesus story – not just the Cross – – birth, death, and resurrection -- saves us. God assumes all of human of our experience, joyful and tragic – even death. Athanasius said, That which has not been assumed has not been redeemed. Jesus rejoices and suffers with us, which means when we rejoice and suffer, we rejoice and suffer with him. Because we are united to him in life and death, we are united to him in Resurrection. The chasm of sin and death separated us from God. We couldn’t cross the chasm to God, so God crossed it to us. 

VII. THRE-STAGE SALVATION

The 16th Century theologian, Richard Hooker, offered a nuanced doctrine of salvation. He said there are three parts to salvation. Justification is being set right with God, forgiven, reconciled in relationship. Sanctification is being made holy. God loves us as we are but he loves us too much to leave us the way we are. God makes us better, makes us holy. Union means becoming one with God. 

Hooker asks two questions of each part. When does it happen and who does it? He answered Justification happened at the cross, before we are even born. Baptism is a seal to the Justification that has already happened. God does it before we exist.

Sanctification is a lifelong process. We do it with God in partnership.

Union happens in the life to come. At that point, there is no question of who did it. We are one. 

VII. CONCLUSION 

The Bible doesn’t give us a definitive explanation of salvation. There have been many explanations over the years. We aren’t bound to buy any one of them. Our salvation doesn’t depend on holding the right opinion. If one of these explanations helps brings us closer to Christ, we can think of it that way. Or we can take a little from one and a little from another. What matters is that Christ saves us.

GROUP THINK VS. FAITH

The blind man in today’s Gospel is one of my favorite Bible characters. I’d give him the Oscar for best supporting actor in a New Testament role. He gave us the hymn verse, “I once was . . . blind but now I see.”That isn’t quite what he said though. Not wrong -- but the feeling’s not right.We translate his words as “I see.” But in the original Greek, it’s just one word – Vlepo. “I once was blind. Now: vlepo.”

 

It’s emphatic like the French Voila, the Spanish Claro, or the Italian Presto. Once I couldn’t find it. Now voila. Once I didn’t have a clue. Now claro. Once I was stuck. Now presto.Once I was blind. Now vlepo. It’s a crisp, emphatic rejoinder.

 

The Pharisees didn’t like it one bit that Jesus restored this man’s sight. They knew such healing was just hocus pocus to fool rural hicks in Galilee. Now Jesus had healed someone in the city. To add insult to injury, he did it on the Sabbath.  Well that wasn’t right. So they confronted the man with an undeniable religious truth. “We know this Jesus is a sinner, so how can he have restored your sight? Just answer us that.”He replied. “You say he is a sinner. I don’t know whether he’s a sinner or not. All I know is I was blind. Now vlepo.”

You see what I like about this guy? It’s such a Zen thing to say, He physically sees while the Pharisees remain spiritually blind. So, how is it that this man could see but they couldn’t? There’s a clue in the singular and plural subjects of the sentences in our Gospel. The Pharisees (plural) speak 10 times – always, every time -- in one voice. I hear their voices in unison like the chorus in a Greek drama. Whether or not they literally spoke in unison, they all said the same thing always in lockstep because they thought in lockstep.  They say, “We know . . ..” They’re stuck in group think mentality.

 

As John Heywood said in 1546 and Ray Stevens sang in 1970, “There is none so blind as he who will not see.” Like the churchmen who refused to look through Galileo’s telescope for fear they might see something different from Church teachings, our Pharisees are afraid to look outside the box of what “we know” – “how we do things.” The only people in this story who speak for themselves (first person singular) are Jesus and the man he healed. 

 

Group think is a cataract obscuring insight into ourselves, each other, and the world. We all live in groups and every group --  political parties, churches, families, poker clubs – all of them have their dogmas and their heresies.They all try to think alike.

 

We need community. We become ourselves through relationships. We need to sing together, pray together, serve the world together.Community is good. But it can easily slip into group think conformity. Unless we keep enough self to think our own thoughts, feel our own feelings, pray our own prayers, we have nothing to bring to the community table--  be it church, family, friends, whatever. Without individual identity, we melt into a human glob.

 

The difference between community and group think conformity is just this: Community is built on love; group think is built on anxiety. Anxiety wants to control life, pin it down with certainties and rules. Then we want a group to assure us we’re right.The group think veil hangs from a rod of anxiety.

 

Our secular critics accuse Christianity of religious group think.There’s some truth in that.  Christians are fallible human beings. The Church is a fallible community. Anxiety distorts religion into everyone sticking to the same opinions, rituals, and customs. That’s religious group think. No argument.

 

But group think isn’t faith. In fact it’s the opposite of faith. It’s fear. It’s anxiously trying to tie life down with rigid rules. Faith on the other hand rachets down our anxiety by trusting Reality with an open heart.

 

When the disciples were afraid during a storm at sea,Jesus said, “Why are you afraid? O ye of little faith?” His most repeated commandment was “Do not be afraid.” The Bible says, “Do not be afraid” 365 times – once for each day of the year. John writes, “God is love,” and, “There is no room for fear in love.”

 

Faith isn’t afraid because it knows that so much is just gift. Jesus said,  “Have no fear little flock.It is the Father’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom” -- not reward you with the Kingdom – “give you the Kingdom.”  We don’t make the sun rise, the flowers bloom, or the rivers flow. We don’t paint the shadows of bare branches on the winter snow.  We don’t have to control things by what we think and what we do. Mary Oliver wrote:

I don’t know . . .  what . . . prayer is.
I do know . . . how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed . . ..

 

Faith relaxes our minds and opens our hearts to receive these gifts.  

 

We don’t get free from group think by some heroic act of defiance. We don’t rebel against our communities. We need them. It’s faith that sets us free from group think. We get free by exercising faith.

 

One faith exercise is to notice situations we are trying to control --  then just step back and make space for the gift.We might give up fretting for Lent. We might “kneel down in the grass to be idle and blessed.” Then look around and see.

Post-Script. Quite a few people told me how much they apperciated this sermon.

They cited specific points that struck them. They asked me how to spell words I had used. But I got more people saying they could not hear it. We had tried multiple sound amplification technique and I used the best. Sound checks proved that it was working perfectly. Nonetheless, I asked people siting in different parts of the building if they could hear. They said they heard the sound check perfectly clearly. But many people could not hear the sermon. I was completely perplexed. I then reread the text and came to a suspicion the problem might not be acoustic but spiritual. 

MY POOR EARTHBOUND COMPANION AND FELLOW MORTAL

 On Ash Wednesday we talk about sin and death together. So what’s the connection? It isn’t that sin causes death. Death is the price tag for having a life to begin with.The connection is that we don’t want to think about either one. Ernest Becker's Pulitzer Prize winning book,  The Denial of Death, says, to a greater or lesser extent  we all pretend we aren’t mortal – like the Paul Simon lyric: “and so I’ll continue to continue to pretend my life will never end. . ..”No surprise there. 

But Becker goes on to show convincingly that denial of death is the psychological root  of all sorts of regrettable behaviors and our refusal to own up to them. In Christian parlance, to the extent we deny our death, we deny our sin.I once heard several people furiously denying they were racist though no one had said they were.In Georgia we used to say, “It’s the hit dog hollers.”

People accuse religion of shoring up our denial.They say it’s a pie in the sky fantasy for hiding from hard truths.Often, they’re right. Many Ash Wednesday sermons will caution people not to think about anything unpleasant. Some priests use cute variations on the imposition ashes. More than once I’ve heard: “Remember that ‘You are stardust. You are golden.’” 

There’s plenty of escapist religion.But St. Augustine, defined “sin” as precisely this kind of escapism. Sin is disengagement. Sin is denial. Religion can be sin.In Isaiah’s day, people were jumping through religious hoops so they could bypass the hard stuff.But God wasn’t impressed. He said, “On the day of your fasting . .  . you exploit yourworkers.Your fasting ends in quarrelling and strife. . .”

He had no use for petty pieties like giving up coffee, candy, or Face Book for 40 days – as if that makes us ok. He thought we had real issues to deal with – especially each other. 

Feel good religion, self-help books, and video games are all escape routes for fleeing  from the common life of family, church, and civic engagement.  Smoke and mirrors religion won’t cut it.  

God says, “Let’s get real.” This is real. We’re awash in unspoken grief that life doesn’t meet our expectations. We’re lonely. Sometimes we’re angry. Often, we’re afraid. We aren’t who we want to be, so we’re ashamed. Sooner or later, we’re going to die. It adds up to a load of unacknowledged grief we act out in unfortunate ways. That leave us with a rucksack of unacknowledged guilt. 

Theologian Luke Bretherton says we avoid guilt andgriefin two ways: denial and projection. Denial pushes our guilt, grief, and shame down below our awareness, but they don’t go away. They fester.So we project our negative feelings on scapegoats -- human screens for  the parts of ourselves we refuse to own.I’m not selfish – not manipulative – not judgmental. I’m not angry and I’ll fight the man who says I am. I don’t have the psychological baggage that afflicts everyone else. Not me. It’s the immigrants, the gays, the homeless.

Jesus said a Pharisee and a Tax Collector went up topray:“The Pharisee stood apart and prayed,‘God, I thank you that I’m not like other people – robbers, evildoers, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week (and tithe).’” 

But the Tax Collector prayed, “God have mercy on me a sinner.”He didn’t escape. He didn’t project. He owned his moral failures. It was the Tax Collector who went home justified.

If we want a Lenten discipline, let’s try this one: Withdraw our projections. The road to personal wholeness begins when we withdraw our projections. Jesus’ word for personal wholeness was “salvation.”Whoever we’re demonizing, give it up – at least for 40 days. Instead of giving up chocolate, give up a grudge. Maybe it’s someone in our family, church, or neighborhood. Maybe it’s someone we disagree with over politics. A rational disagreement is good. A principled stance is good. But passionate animosity is ineffective and fueled by projection. 

This Lent let’s withdraw our projections and look inside. When we stop blaming others and acknowledge our own sin and mortality, two things become possible:

First, we can see someone else as, in Robert Burns’ words,“my poor earthbound companion and fellow mortal. “ 

Second, we can do some serious soul-searching, cultivating a healthy self-awareness.We may find some stuff that isn’t pretty. But we may also discover the capacity to forgive ourselves for being human. We don’t have to beat ourselves up. Beating ourselves up misses the point.The point is to acknowledge our faults with Christ-like compassion. Maybe start with just one. Acknowledge one fault and forgive yourself.  Then forgive someone else.

If we practice the gentle art of self-forgiveness, we can forgive our “poor earthbound companion(s) and fellow mortal(s).” We may even forgive life for disappointing us long enough to actually live it.  Wouldn’t that be an Easter! Wouldn’t that be a Resurrection!

RECIPES FOR LIFE RECONSIDERED

“Where is the wisdom of the wise?” Paul asks,

“Has God not made foolish the wisdom of the world?”

Philosopher Auguste Compte was the child of the Enlightenment 

     and the father of much philosophy that would follow.

A large stone monument to Compte stands in front of the Sorbonne, 

     one of the world’s greatest universities.

     It portrays the triumph of modern philosophy

          over the both of the old wisdom ways 

  – Greco-Roman Classical philosophy : 

     Aristotle, Cicero, and Marcus Aurelius. 

     and the Medieval Christianity of St. Francis, St. Benedict, etc.

     

     The statue of a proud Compte is big, very big.

     There are two small figures at his feet.

     To his left is a forlorn Classical Greek boy with his lyre 

          resting idly in his lap --  superseded and un-played.

      To his right is Mary, the Christ Child in her arms;

      but she does not look at Baby Jesus.

      She gazes upward in rapt adoration of Auguste Compte.

     But on the day I saw this monument,

      a real life pigeon was perched on Compte’s head,

        there to do what pigeons do.

     The pigeon’s name was Paul.

     

     Actually, the Bible isn’t anti-intellectual.

     The so-called “wisdom” Paul rejected

      wasn’t about reason in search of truth. 

     It was a prescriptive philosophy 

            – a how to succeed at business formula

          --  only it’s broader than business. It’s how to succeed at life .

     Take the adage, “Early to bed, early to rise,

      makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”

     Ben Franklin was paraphrasing a Greek adage from 

     the how-to-be successful guidelines of Paul’s day,

     what he called “the wisdom of the world.”

     

     Prescriptions for a happy life still abound.

     Some are religious like Joel Osteen’s prosperity gospel.

     Others are secular or New Age. 

     Amazon offers The 7 Habits of Effective People, 

        The 48 Laws of Power,

      Think And Grow Rich, and multiple guides for how 

         to make our spouse affectionate, our children obedient,

      our subordinates at work docile, and our boss distracted.

     Much of this is rubbish, but there’s some sound advice in the mix.

     It would be rank hypocrisy of me to condemn it all

      -- not while I eat a brain health diet, do family systems therapy,

      and keep a warehouse of nutritional supplements.

     So eat kale. Wear sunscreen. Fine.

     

     But here’s Paul’s point: 

    There are limits to what life prescriptions can do.

     Too many things are beyond our control;

      most are even beyond our influence:

         genetics, family history, social and economic constraints,

         the weight of history and random luck.

     

     When we drive down life’s highway, we should drive carefully, 

          but we aren’t the only driver on the road. 

     Other people run red lights.

     Driving carefully down life’s highway 

         improves our odds but it doesn’t guarantee happiness.

     

     Kentucky poet Robert Penn Warren says,

      “the earth grind(s) on its axis . . . 

     history drip(s) in darkness like a leaking pipe .  . ..”  

     Call it entropy, Murphy’s law, fate, or bad luck. 

Sometimes life is tough.

     Christians say it this way: life has a cross in it.

     “Must Jesus bear the cross alone and all the world go free?

      No there’s a cross for everyone and there’s a cross for me.” 

     

     Sometimes we fail. Sometimes we suffer. Eventually we die.

     That’s the cross. But you know who we meet at the cross? 

     Jesus. We meet Jesus at the cross.

     At Calvary he made our cross his cross.

     The cross isn’t the only place of communion with Jesus,

      but it’s the place that we need him most. 

     We meet him in times of trouble, at the point of our vulnerability.

     I’ve had times of trouble. You have too. 

    Maybe you’ve got troubles today.

     

     Those troubles lead us to the Beatitudes.

     Matthew’s and Luke’s versions are a little different, 

        but their point is the same.

     Instead of “Blessed are the indigent,” 

        it’s “blessed are the depressed.”

     Instead of “Blessed are the malnourished;’ 

        it’s “blessed are the downtrodden.”

     Jesus never said, “Blessed are the rich, the good-looking 

    and charming, the self-assured and serene, 

        the prosperous and the healthy.” 

     It’s “blessed are the afflicted, the anxious, 

        the stumblers on life’s road.”

     

     Jesus isn’t prescribing masochistic self-mortification 

        like Medieval monks.

     We don’t have to fast, flagellate ourselves, 

        or climb stone steps on our knees.

     Life deals us our share of sorrow.

     But when hardship inevitably happens, Jesus meets us there.

     When we bleed, he bleeds – we bleed together. 

     Jesus doesn’t just comfort us.

     He redeems our suffering by investing it with spiritual meaning.

     He doesn’t cause our suffering. The world does that. 

    He redeems it.  

     Jesus turns our tragedy into the gateway to joy.

     

     We are blessed when we falter, 

          because we meet Jesus at the cross

          and that’s Communion with the power of love in it.  

     For Holy Communion to happen, the bread of life must be broken.

     Hemingway said,

      “The world breaks everyone and afterward 

          many are strong in the broken places.”

          

          In R. S. Thomas’s poem about the sinking 

            of a Welsh fishing trawler, he says to Jesus,

          “You are there also 

            at the foot of the precipice

                 of water that was too steep for the drowned . . ..

          You have made an altar of the deck of the lost

          trawler whose spars are your cross. .  . . 

        There is a sacrament there . . ..”

           

Our cross. Jesus’ cross. It’s the same cross. 

That’s the sacrament. That’s Communion.

          We may or may not feel his presence. 

          But he’s there. We know it by faith.  

             

     Rough patches are where we find the love of Jesus,

             and to know the love of Jesus is better – it is better –

      than being “healthy, wealthy and wise.”

 A high school music teacher, Rhea Miller, said it best:

             “I’d rather have Jesus than silver or gold.

      I’d rather be his than have riches untold.

      I’d rather have Jesus than houses or land.

      I’d rather be led by his nail pierced hand.”

LET US GO TO BETHLEHEM AND SEE

In 16th century Spain, where Teresa of Avila was the abbess 

    of a convent,    the high point in Catholic mysticism 

    was a vision of the Virgin Mary.

One night a novice rushed to Teresa’s door and breathlessly called,

“Rev. Mother, Rev. Mother, I have received a vision 

        of the Blessed Virgin.”

Teresa replied, “It’s alright. Just keep praying. It will go away.”  

  

Teresa, you see, had read today’s Gospel lesson

  in which the Shepherds teach us a spiritual practice 

     that runs 180 degrees opposite     

     to what we sometimes call “spirituality.”

This story isn’t about  getting into some “spiritual” zone 

--  an out-of-the ordinary state above this world 

         of jobs, bills, and car repairs.

We may think of “spirituality” as a place 

     of deep serenity, or visions, or a glow of love

     where our feet don’t touch the pavement.

 

All that’s good. I’m not disparaging it.

But Luke is about a different spirituality – related but different.

Like Teresa’s novice, our Shepherds were in the zone 

     -- gazing in awe at the night sky.

They saw angels, heard the heavenly chorus. 

But what did they do next?

They could have just reveled in their advanced spiritual state,

     maybe built a shrine to mark the spot.

They could have travelled to a holy place to give thanks

     —maybe to Mount Zion -- or if they were interfaith 

     to Delphi, Kathmandu, or a Celtic thin place.

The Jerusalem Temple was just up the road.

     

Instead they went to a stable in po-dunk Bethlehem – population, 300 

    -- to see a poor couple with a new baby.

To imagine this scene the way Luke painted it, just for today,

     we need to set aside our creche and Christmas carols.

We’ll go back to them later but —just for today – 

    let’s look at  Luke’s description

     of what the shepherd’s saw in Bethlehem. 

     

There are no angels  – no wisemen – no little drummer boy 

     – an ox, maybe, but no lamb.

If the poor baby woke, he cried. This wasn’t the zone. 

They were looking at earth, not heaven -- at people, not angels.

This is “the sacred ordinary” – a spiritual discipline 

     of simple, caring  attention to people.

The words “look” or “see” appear in this Gospel over 100 times.

Luke keeps saying, “Look at what’s right there in front of you.”  

.

Christian practice begins with holy people watching 

    – the holy watching of ordinary people -- 

    the grocery store cashier, the furnace repair technician, 

    our neighbors walking their dogs.

It takes an interest in people  – not their roles or functions – 

        but  themselves

     --  attending to their stories, their situations, 

    the expressions on their faces. 

We don’t  evaluate them like an HR executive, 

    diagnose them like a therapist, or judge them like a magistrate.

We see them personally -- or as painter might,

     as DaVinci saw Mona Lisa 

    and Vermeer saw the girl with a pearl earring . 

Chaucer, Burns, Hawthorne, and Melville 

    all worked in Customs Houses.

Their jobs were so boring they had to watch the people there 

    just to stay awake.

Those people became characters 

    in some of the world’s greatest literature. 

John Donne’s newest biographer says Donne’s core message is that

      “for all its horror, the human animal is worth your attention.” 

We are on stage with a wild and wonderful cast of characters

     – if we just look up and notice them. 

     

 Paying attention is delightfully engaging, 

        but it isn’t just for entertainment.

 It’s the foundation of morality.

We cannot treat people justly unless we first see them clearly.

Morality – Buddhists call it “right action” – is a natural, 

     nearly automatic, response to other people if we just look at them. 

      

20th Century philosophers, Simone Weill and Iris Murdoch, 

     both taught that morality isn’t following a rule book,

     and it doesn’t spontaneously gush from our good hearts.

Moral acts happen -- almost reflexively -- 

    when we really see each other.

Today’s neurology supports their point. 

Murdoch said, morality begins 

     with  “patient, loving regard directed upon a person . . ..” 

     Weill said, “Attention, taken to its highest degree, 

        is the same thing as prayer.”

     

Weill left her professorship to work in factories and on farms 

     with ordinary people. 

Knowing them led her from agnosticism to Christian faith. 

Murdoch was an atheist.

But Weill believed that an atheist who pays attention to people 

     is a better Christian than is a Christian who doesn’t pay attention.

     

 Luke’s primordial commandment is, “Look” 

     because seeing is itself an act of justice and mercy. 

In The Death Of A Salesman, Willy Loman is 

       the most mundane of people.

But, at his burial, his widow pleads,

      “He’s not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog.

       Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person.”

The Bible says, “If we don’t find Christ in our brothers and sisters, 

     we won’t find him in Heaven.” 

True, but Christ is both divine and human. 

His humanity is our contact point.

Eventually, we may see his divinity in someone and say “namaste.”

But that’s advanced practice. 

First we connect to Christ’s humanity 

     by looking for the humanity in others.

Just see them as human and take an interest.

So I invite you to make this your 2023 spiritual discipline. 

Look. Look closely. 

Look beneath people’s orneriness, wrongheadedness,

     rudeness, and outrageous politics.

Those are just costumes. Look beneath them.

Look deeper for the struggling, vulnerable, mortal person 

     who is Christ just by being human.

When we see people as themselves, we bless them.

It may make them better. It will make us better.

It certainly makes our world vastly more interesting. 

Brothers and sisters, Bethlehem is all around us. 

     “Let us go to Bethlehem and see.”

1

PUSHING UP SUGAR BEETS

 

Back in the 70s, when I was younger and dumber,

            I was hitch hiking from Denver to Greeley.

Two men picked me up.

They were fresh out of prison

            on parole for serious felonies.

One of them intended to rob me.The other did not.

Unfortunately, their communication with each other

            was unworthy of partners in crime.

Criminals, like spouses, need to talk to each other.

 One of them told me way too much about themselves.

 

They drove out into the beet fields Northeast of Ft. Lupton, 

flashed a gun,  relieved me of my $15, 

put me out of the car in the middle of nowhere, 

    and drove off.

Then they remembered they’d told me their names,

            their parole officer’s name, where they lived, etc.

Letting me live wasn’t smart.

They came back and ordered me into the car.

But I wasn’t that dumb.

So one got out and tried to drag me in.

Then, the miracle. A car came driving down that lonely dirt road.

I dragged my assailant into the path of the oncoming vehicle.

He let go and I started flagging down the car.

 

When I saw the driver, I knew I was ok.

He was a fit, clean-cut, young white guy -- my kind of people.

I knew I was saved.

He sped up, nearly killed me, and rushed right past. 

The robber resumed pulling me toward their car.

 

Then, miracle of miracles, another car along.

Again I pulled the robber into car’s lane. 

Again, the robber released me.

Again, I started to flag down the car.

But this time when I saw the driver, my heart sank.

She was a Latina mother in a cheap old car 

    hauling a load of kids.

No way was she going to stop for me in a dangerous situation.

 

She didn’t stop.

She slowed down, threw open the passenger door 

for me to jump in on the run, then hit the gas and sped off.

She turned out to be someone with a strong reason 

    to avoid situations.

Her family was undocumented.

But if they’d been legally in Mexico 

    instead of illegally in Colorado,

            I’d be pushing up sugar beets in Weld County.

 

The lawyer had read Leviticus. 

He knew salvation depends on loving our neighbor.

But he asked: who is my neighbor? Jesus answered:

A Jew was beaten, robbed, and left by the road.

A priest and Levite came along. 

They were bound by race, religion, & nationality 

    to help their fellow Jew.

But they just passed him by.  

Then along came s Samaritan

            -- wrong race, wrong religion, wrong nationality. 

But he stopped and helped

beyond anything the Jew could expect from his own kind.

Jesus said, “go and do likewise."

 

So, when the chips were down, 

why did I assume the young white guy would save me

and the Latina mother would not?

In the Stone Ages people used tribalism as a survival strategy.

Tribalism -- -- us vs them  -- our group vs their group – told them 

who they were bound to help 

and who they could expect help from.

Evolution passes survival strategies 

    down through the generations

            so it’s with us today 

    -- White vs Black, Christian vs Muslim, 

Liberal vs Conservative, Straight vs. Gay, 

Native vs Immigrant.

 

Dividing into antagonistic groups is wired into all of us.

It’s the way of the world. Enter Jesus. 

He said, In this world you will have trouble.

He might have elaborated, 

            You will have racism, classism, 

            divisions of religion, politics, and language.

 

In this world you will have trouble, Jesus said, 

            but take heart. I have overcome the world.

Jesus can set us free from those constraints that separate us 

-- divisions that shackle our minds 

            and hold us back from full humanity. 

They make our hearts tighter, 

our minds narrower, and our lives smaller.

 

But how does that work? 

How do we overcome genetically programed prejudice? 

Philosopher Martha Nussbaum, calls it participatory imagination,

            seeing things through another person’s eyes,

                        walking in their shoes, feeling what they feel.

Basic empathy expands our experience 

    and wisdom immeasurably.

It’s a fundamental part of being human.

Nussbaum says today fear is intensifying our divisions. 

We are regressing into tribalism,

 losing our capacity for participatory imagination. 

and our lives are diminished.

Jesus said, 

    I have come that you might have life and have it abundantly.

To make our life abundant, 

    Jesus teaches us to love our neighbor,

especially our who neighbor is the wrong race, 

wrong nationality, wrong religion, wrong language, 

wrong sexuality, or wrong political party. 

Imagine how things look to that person

and – bam! -- the size of your life doubles. 

But how can we possibly 

    go against genetically wired human nature

to love across the divide?

The answer is enabling, empowering, amazing grace.

Whatever Jesus commands us to do,

            he gives us the power to do it. 

 

To love across the divides is a miracle – a supernatural act.

But we can do it – with God’s help.

We just direct our hearts toward anyone Jesus calls us to love,

then pray for Jesus to open our hearts and our eyes.

His grace will do the rest.