How does Superman shave? Think about it. He's invulnerable to everything other than kryptonite. What could he use to shave his whiskers? Or cut his hair? Did Jor-El put some super razor blades into that little escape rocket with his infant son? Kryptonian scissors? I actually looked this up and there are some very funny answers on the internet but many remember a comic book where he uses his heat vision and a mirror to singe it off! As for how Clark and Lois could ever, uh, have kids, well, science fiction writer Larry Niven explored that insurmountable problem in hilarious detail. Suffice it to say, Superman only looks human; he's not really one of us.
There's been a lot of fan commentary on the idea that Superman, created by 2 Jewish teens, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, was a kind of Messiah. He saves the world, repeatedly. But he does so because he's physically more powerful than his enemies and impervious to bullets. It's precisely the kind of hero that would be dreamed up by a boy like Jerry Siegel whose father died as his business was being robbed by armed men.
Jesus is God Incarnate and many would be totally cool with it if he had been like a real-life Superman--superstrong and invulnerable. He'd never suffer the pain and humiliation of being crucified. He'd never be a victim. Of course, he's also never get a splinter or understand our pain or weaknesses. He would never understand how fear would make Peter deny him 3 times and then be able to forgive him. He would never understand how grief and bitter disappointment could make Thomas doubt. He would never know why Mary, Martha and their friends would be so brokenhearted over Lazarus' death and so weep himself.
At our last Lenten midweek service, we considered why it is important to hold onto the fact that Jesus is God. This week we emphasize the other fact of the paradox: that Jesus was also fully human. Why is this important? There was a whole philosophy called Gnosticism that felt Jesus' humanity was not just unimportant but a bad mistake. All matter was evil to them and that meant that anyone as pure as Jesus could not have really become a flesh and blood man. They often resorted to the idea that Jesus' corporeality was an illusion. This was called Docetism, from the Greek word for "seems." Jesus only seemed to have a body; he was, rest assured, pure spirit.
As I said before, we tend to think in binary terms: black or white, flesh or spirit, this thing or that thing, and never the twain shall meet. The idea of God Incarnate makes many people uneasy. They want to say, "Jesus, pick a side already." But reality doesn't care for our categories. We separate mammals and birds, noses from bills, say reptiles can be poisonous but not mammals. And then reality throws a duck-billed platypus at us. We make our categories neat and clean and reality messes them up and blurs the lines. It turns out reality is just taking cues from its creator. He doesn't like us dictating to him what is acceptable in the divine.
God, according to the philosophers, is supposed to be aloof, passionless, a spirit who is primarily defined by what it isn't: immaterial, invisible, incomprehensible, implacable, immortal. Jesus breaks all those rules. He can be touched, seen, understood, and appealed to. He can be hurt. He can be tortured. He can be executed. He knows what it is to be human from your first breath to your last.
In his classic book, "Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People?" Rabbi Kushner admits that Christians have an advantage in believing God became a man in Jesus. If God was one of us, it means evil is not abstract to him; it's not an intellectual problem; it is not an annoyance that dirties up his clean creation. It means it is something that he encounters everyday, in his life and the lives of those he loves. He sees the damage it does, hears the cries of its victims, feels their deformed limbs and ravaged skin, smells the coppery scent of the blood they shed, and tastes the poor fare they eat. Evil is what he masters and denounces: the evil people do deliberately, the evil people let happen, the evil of not wanting to know what happens, the evil of hypocrisy, the evil of deceit, the evil of violence, the evil of neglect. Evil is what he himself endures: the evil of betrayal, the evil of injustice, the evil of political convenience, calculation, and cowardice, the evil of just following orders.
Jesus also understands goodness, not as an abstract quality commended by philosophers but as a sign of God's grace. He sees it in the strong faith of men willing to tear up a roof to get their friend fixed. He hears it when the scribe quotes the 2 great commandments to him in response to his question. He feels it in the children thrust into his arms by their parents for his blessing. He smells it in the last Passover meal he shares with its friends. He tastes it in the wine provided by the women of Jerusalem for those condemned to the cross. He models and encourages the goodness of justice, of mercy, of peace, of faith, of hope, the goodness of self-sacrificial love.
People sometimes have trouble with the divinity of Christ. It seems a vague, unnecessary quality to some. But in Jesus the human and divine meet. In his humanity, his divinity is concretely expressed. In Jesus we see what God is like. And because he is the perfect image of God, we see what we are intended to be and what, through Christ, we can be. He came to humanity so we can share in his divine life. And so we can spread his eternal life to others. But God is love and none of us alone can fully mirror that. But a whole world, loving God with all they are and each other as Christ loved them, can display the true nature of the God who so loved the world that he sent his unique son into it so all may know, trust and live that love.
Saturday, December 22, 2012
Wednesday, December 19, 2012
Good Thing, Small Package
There are, depending on how you count them, about 37 recorded miracles performed by Jesus. Some of them echo miracles performed by prophets of the Old Testament, especially multiplying food, healing lepers, controlling weather and even raising the dead, all of which Elijah and Elisha did. But the unique miracle that Jesus performed was walking on water. Nobody had done that before or since. And as we learn in Matthew, the immediate effect is that the disciples worship Jesus and say, "Truly you are the Son of God!"
Today it is basic theology that Christ is fully God and fully man. In the first century that was not a obvious solution to what folks encountered in Jesus. They thought he was a prophet, possibly the Messiah, but that didn't necessarily translate to him being divine. There were various ideas of the nature of the Messiah but God Incarnate was not one. To Jews this would seem blasphemous and sure enough, whenever Jesus says things like "I and my Father are one" or "Before Abraham was, I am" the reaction of his critics was to start picking up stones in order to kill him. So it took a lot for even the disciples to wrap their heads around the idea that Jesus was divine. Even after walking on water, it didn't really hit home until after his resurrection.
For us, Jesus' divinity is a given. And yet, our minds are so influenced by the concept that things belong to either one category or another, that we tend to at least overemphasize one of Jesus' natures. And that was the problem the early church had. In the first 300 years of Christianity, the hot topic was the relationship of Jesus' divine and human natures. I'm not going to get into details because that would mean first explaining the Greco-Roman philosophy of nature, spirit, mind and soul. Suffice it to say, that various solutions were suggested. Some made Jesus a victim of multiple personality but most seemed to have Jesus' divine nature totally override his human nature.
Arius was a Christian priest who came up with a different solution. Jesus was a lesser god, created by God the Father before the rest of creation. Thus the Trinity was an improper picture of the relationship of the Father and the Son. When Jesus says the Father is greater than he, he is not talking merely about his present state as a human being but his pre-human state as well.
The problem is that Arianism essentially makes Christians polytheists. And it means that when we are dealing with Jesus we are not dealing directly with God but a subordinate, albeit a highly placed one. God did not become human; a lesser god did. God did not die for the world; a lesser god did.
The advantage of this is that it does do away with the Trinity which is a confusing concept for many. But what if we did that in science? What if we ignored the fact that light acts as both a particle and as a wave and came down definitively on one side or the other? Physicists would object that we would be ignoring a whole lot of data for the sake of making a complex piece of reality easier to understand and digest.
What is the Biblical data? That the Father is God. That the Son is God. That the Holy Spirit is God. And that there is one God. The Trinity doesn't so much explain this as preserve the paradox. It is like maintaining that light is both a particle and a wave and we just have to deal with it. The same is true of the theologians who debated Arianism and decided to maintain the paradox of the Trinity and the paradox of the 2 natures of Christ in the Nicene Creed. "We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father. Through him all things were made." Once you have that clear in mind, that on God's plane of existence 3 persons can be one being (something hinted at and reflected in the Genesis account of male and female becoming one flesh or organism) then the story of Christmas becomes even more marvelous. God did not delegate our redemption to a lesser being but took upon himself the task of saving us. The One who made you died for you.
Translator J. B. Phillips in his book, "Your God is Too Small," put it this way: that Jesus is the infinite transcendent God whom we cannot truly imagine focused in terms we understand, those of time and space and human personality. In Jesus we see what God is like, especially his character. He is, as the Methodists would say, Holy Love. And he is now one of us. So just as it is mind-blowing to contemplate that all of the universe was, prior to the Big Bang, compressed into an infinitesimally small singularity, so too at Christmas we realize that in a manger in Bethlehem the Creator of the universe became a creature within it, a baby, a thing of flesh and blood, who fed at his mother's breast and had to be changed. Just because that's hard to understand doesn't make it less true. We just have to deal with it.
There is a meme going around Facebook, a Someecard that says, "I'm not short, I'm concentrated awesome!!" That was the infant in the feeding trough: Concentrated Awesome. The mind-blowing power of all creation in one tiny creature. God become human. That's an explosive combination. What happens next? Well, the last time anything close to that much power was that compact, it triggered the creation of the universe. This time it is primed to set off the New Creation, the grand restoration of all things as God intended, beginning with us. So at Advent our message is: watch out, world! Concentrated Awesome is coming!
Today it is basic theology that Christ is fully God and fully man. In the first century that was not a obvious solution to what folks encountered in Jesus. They thought he was a prophet, possibly the Messiah, but that didn't necessarily translate to him being divine. There were various ideas of the nature of the Messiah but God Incarnate was not one. To Jews this would seem blasphemous and sure enough, whenever Jesus says things like "I and my Father are one" or "Before Abraham was, I am" the reaction of his critics was to start picking up stones in order to kill him. So it took a lot for even the disciples to wrap their heads around the idea that Jesus was divine. Even after walking on water, it didn't really hit home until after his resurrection.
For us, Jesus' divinity is a given. And yet, our minds are so influenced by the concept that things belong to either one category or another, that we tend to at least overemphasize one of Jesus' natures. And that was the problem the early church had. In the first 300 years of Christianity, the hot topic was the relationship of Jesus' divine and human natures. I'm not going to get into details because that would mean first explaining the Greco-Roman philosophy of nature, spirit, mind and soul. Suffice it to say, that various solutions were suggested. Some made Jesus a victim of multiple personality but most seemed to have Jesus' divine nature totally override his human nature.
Arius was a Christian priest who came up with a different solution. Jesus was a lesser god, created by God the Father before the rest of creation. Thus the Trinity was an improper picture of the relationship of the Father and the Son. When Jesus says the Father is greater than he, he is not talking merely about his present state as a human being but his pre-human state as well.
The problem is that Arianism essentially makes Christians polytheists. And it means that when we are dealing with Jesus we are not dealing directly with God but a subordinate, albeit a highly placed one. God did not become human; a lesser god did. God did not die for the world; a lesser god did.
The advantage of this is that it does do away with the Trinity which is a confusing concept for many. But what if we did that in science? What if we ignored the fact that light acts as both a particle and as a wave and came down definitively on one side or the other? Physicists would object that we would be ignoring a whole lot of data for the sake of making a complex piece of reality easier to understand and digest.
What is the Biblical data? That the Father is God. That the Son is God. That the Holy Spirit is God. And that there is one God. The Trinity doesn't so much explain this as preserve the paradox. It is like maintaining that light is both a particle and a wave and we just have to deal with it. The same is true of the theologians who debated Arianism and decided to maintain the paradox of the Trinity and the paradox of the 2 natures of Christ in the Nicene Creed. "We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father. Through him all things were made." Once you have that clear in mind, that on God's plane of existence 3 persons can be one being (something hinted at and reflected in the Genesis account of male and female becoming one flesh or organism) then the story of Christmas becomes even more marvelous. God did not delegate our redemption to a lesser being but took upon himself the task of saving us. The One who made you died for you.
Translator J. B. Phillips in his book, "Your God is Too Small," put it this way: that Jesus is the infinite transcendent God whom we cannot truly imagine focused in terms we understand, those of time and space and human personality. In Jesus we see what God is like, especially his character. He is, as the Methodists would say, Holy Love. And he is now one of us. So just as it is mind-blowing to contemplate that all of the universe was, prior to the Big Bang, compressed into an infinitesimally small singularity, so too at Christmas we realize that in a manger in Bethlehem the Creator of the universe became a creature within it, a baby, a thing of flesh and blood, who fed at his mother's breast and had to be changed. Just because that's hard to understand doesn't make it less true. We just have to deal with it.
There is a meme going around Facebook, a Someecard that says, "I'm not short, I'm concentrated awesome!!" That was the infant in the feeding trough: Concentrated Awesome. The mind-blowing power of all creation in one tiny creature. God become human. That's an explosive combination. What happens next? Well, the last time anything close to that much power was that compact, it triggered the creation of the universe. This time it is primed to set off the New Creation, the grand restoration of all things as God intended, beginning with us. So at Advent our message is: watch out, world! Concentrated Awesome is coming!
Sunday, December 16, 2012
One Man Intervention
An intervention is more than inconvenient; it is an intrusion into one's personal life. What business do family members and friends have in telling you how to live your life? That is the mildest response an addict can have to being the center of a concentrated effort to get him or her into rehab. From what few episodes I've seen of the cable TV series "Intervention," the addict's reaction is often much more emotional and much more negative. On one episode I recall the young woman in question spewing her loved ones with a seemingly endless string of expletives (which, when bleeped, sounded like the heart monitor of someone having a very bad case of atrial fibrillation). She then stormed off and paced up and down the road outside her house, crying and cursing. I don't remember whether she was ever convinced to go into rehab.
In his hilarious but harrowing memoir "Dry," Augustin Burroughs recalls being outraged but a bit less outwardly offensive at his intervention. That's because it was done by coworkers and his boss and the upshot of refusing rehab was to be fired. He was nevertheless extremely resentful and it took a while before he saw how bad his problem was and how deep in denial he was. One of the exercises rehab made him do was estimate how much alcohol he consumed, year by year, since he began drinking, which was in his childhood. The numbers surprised and alarmed him. Also astounding was the fact that he constantly took antihistamines because he was one of those rare individuals who is actually allergic to alcohol. Another shock hit him when he first returned home after rehab. His apartment was full of empty bottles. He had not noticed them until he was fully sober. In the end he carted out several trashcans full of empty liquor bottles, an unsettling and previously unseen reminder of how severe his problem had become.
Intervention did not exist in the days of Jesus. Besides, when the whole world is sick and enslaved to sin, where do you get the non-addicts to perform it? So John the Baptist is doing it all by himself. And, unlike the rules of staging an intervention, he isn't using very objective language. He is, quite frankly, insulting the residents of Judea, calling them a brood of vipers. The specific vipers he referred to were thought to chew their way out of their mother's womb. I'm sure he offended people and even got heckled but a lot of folks actually responded appropriately to John. Why?
Years ago I had a young patient who had a very rare condition. The doctors and parents knew the child had medical problems and they treated the symptoms and complications but they didn't know what was at the root of the child's disorder. And this was before the internet. The mother did a lot of research and found his condition through the National Organization of Rare Disorders that collects what little was known about various diseases too uncommon for research and treatment to be profitable. Her son's condition was one of only about 100 documented cases worldwide. There was no cure, only treatment, but after living with this mystery for 2 years, the parents were just happy to know the name and cause of their son's congenital condition. They found that there was a small group of parents and patients who, by banding together, were trying to get researchers to learn more about this disability.
I heard other patients say that, after suffering for years, they were just glad that the cause of their misery had a name. It is hard to fight a nameless, undefined enemy. Even if the diagnosis brought little hope, they were encouraged by the fact that at least they knew what they were dealing with.
As in the time of Samuel, it had been a long time since there had been a prophet declaring the Word of the Lord to his people. Maybe that's why people flocked to John despite his inflammatory rhetoric. They knew they had problems but no one was telling them what it was. Then as now they did have people telling them what they wanted to hear. The Zealots told them the problem wasn't them; it was the Romans who occupied their country. Scapegoats are always popular. Get rid of the bad people and all of our problems will be solved. They are still doing that in the Middle East. "If we just got rid of all the (Arabs, Jews, Palestinians, Muslims, Shiites, Sunnis, etc) all of our problems would be solved." We do it here. "If we just got rid of all of the (illegal aliens, gays, homophobes, unions, conservatives, liberals, brown people, white people, etc) all of our problems would be solved." It doesn't work that way. Logistically it is impossible. The Nazis devoted considerable resources to exterminating the Jews. They killed 6 million but the Jews still survive. And had they succeeded, would Nazi Germany have been saved from all or most of its problems? No. Scapegoating not only harms innocents; it diverts us from our real problems. They tend to be closer to home. The comic strip Pogo was on the mark when it mangled Caesar's declaration of victory "We have met the enemy and he is ours" into "We have met the enemy and he is us."
But maybe the problem isn't us but the way we are doing things. If we follow this technique or program or regimen, the problems will be licked. Not a week goes by that I don't receive a postcard or email or flyer proclaiming a hitherto unknown method of making a church grow or increase its giving. And while the touted program might have a lot of truth to it, the idea that merely implementing it will yield magical results is patently untrue, unless, perhaps, you were doing absolutely nothing. This way of thinking didn't even work with the Law. The Pharisees told people the problem was they weren't obeying the entire Law of Moses, along with all the addenda the rabbis had attached to it. It was a very comprehensive system that dictated what to do in just about every situation. And this is, after all, God's law. So why didn't it make things all better?
Any medical professional will tell you one of the biggest problems we have is patient compliance. Rare is the patient who does everything the doctor prescribes or does it in the way the nurse or physical therapist teaches them to. It's hard to give up all smoking, or to keep track of every morsel you eat, or do your exercises with a painful new knee, or practice safe sex, or use the communications techniques taught in your marriage counseling sessions. We like our solutions to be easy to implement. Why can't everything work like an infomercial gizmo so we can simply "set it and forget it?"
At first it looks as if John buys into the "you're simply doing it wrong" mindset. When people ask him what should they do, he gives commonsense advice: Share your excess with people who have nothing. Don't cheat people. Don't abuse your power and don't be greedy. And certainly those are good things to do. They are a start. But even John recognizes these as treating the symptoms. Like a GP who recognizes that the disease is beyond his powers to cure, he tells his patient they have to go to a specialist if they really want to get well rather than merely learn to cope.
"I baptize you with water but one who is more powerful than I is coming. I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire." Baptism was at this time a matter of total immersion. When he came, the Messiah wasn't going to apply the Holy Spirit sparingly, on this small problem area or that tiny patch. God's Anointed was going to immerse God's people in God's Spirit. No halfway measures will do. Nothing but a full Silkwood decontamination shower by the Spirit of God himself would suffice. Not a rad of resistance could remain.
But what does John mean by baptizing people not only with the Holy Spirit but with fire? Fire had various uses and therefore could be used to symbolize different things. 2 seem more likely than most here. First, fire was used to refine metals. The impurities could be removed only by heating gold or iron ore to high temperatures. The resulting metal would be pure. Secondly, fire was used to burn the inedible parts of grain. After winnowing the wheat from the chaff, the dry covering was burned as waste. So John could mean that the Messiah would purify the people who followed him. He could also mean he will judge and consign those who didn't comply to the trash fires. Gehenna, the Valley of Hinnom where Jerusalem burned the city's trash, was the word Jesus used to signify Hell. So which are you? Wheat or chaff? Gold or slag? A light to the world or a pile of refuse to be burned? Don't wait to find out, says John. Repent: change your mind, turn your life around. And then get baptized to signify the fact that you are making a clean start on a new life.
But that's just the beginning. John knows the people need to do more than just change a few habits. He also knows he is not the guy tasked to do that. He is a herald. He is to tell people to get ready because the king is coming. There are things only a king can accomplish. Or we wouldn't need a king.
Advent is about heeding John's cry and getting ready for the king. Of course, we are looking at what is to us the past. We know who the king is and what he will do. We know all the spoilers, as geeks would say. And yet Advent is not merely about Jesus' coming as a powerless baby but also about his next coming as our powerful Lord. And it is also about his coming not just to one couple as the gift of a newborn but also his coming to anyone who welcomes him as the giver of new life. "Let every heart prepare him room" says the carol and that too is what we do at Advent. If Jesus were coming to stay at your house, you'd clean the whole place and take out the garbage. If he is coming to stay in your heart, you'd do the same. Get rid of the greed, deceit, and violence there. Throw out the trash. Be generous to others, knowing what you do for them you do for him.
But this guest isn't going to be content to lie around and relax. If John is like the TV show "Intervention," Jesus is more like "Extreme Makeover." He has big plans for you, your heart and your life. He doesn't just want them clean but redone, remade, larger than before. Because your heart, the person you are, and the life you live are going need to be a lot bigger to accommodate our awfully big God.
In his hilarious but harrowing memoir "Dry," Augustin Burroughs recalls being outraged but a bit less outwardly offensive at his intervention. That's because it was done by coworkers and his boss and the upshot of refusing rehab was to be fired. He was nevertheless extremely resentful and it took a while before he saw how bad his problem was and how deep in denial he was. One of the exercises rehab made him do was estimate how much alcohol he consumed, year by year, since he began drinking, which was in his childhood. The numbers surprised and alarmed him. Also astounding was the fact that he constantly took antihistamines because he was one of those rare individuals who is actually allergic to alcohol. Another shock hit him when he first returned home after rehab. His apartment was full of empty bottles. He had not noticed them until he was fully sober. In the end he carted out several trashcans full of empty liquor bottles, an unsettling and previously unseen reminder of how severe his problem had become.
Intervention did not exist in the days of Jesus. Besides, when the whole world is sick and enslaved to sin, where do you get the non-addicts to perform it? So John the Baptist is doing it all by himself. And, unlike the rules of staging an intervention, he isn't using very objective language. He is, quite frankly, insulting the residents of Judea, calling them a brood of vipers. The specific vipers he referred to were thought to chew their way out of their mother's womb. I'm sure he offended people and even got heckled but a lot of folks actually responded appropriately to John. Why?
Years ago I had a young patient who had a very rare condition. The doctors and parents knew the child had medical problems and they treated the symptoms and complications but they didn't know what was at the root of the child's disorder. And this was before the internet. The mother did a lot of research and found his condition through the National Organization of Rare Disorders that collects what little was known about various diseases too uncommon for research and treatment to be profitable. Her son's condition was one of only about 100 documented cases worldwide. There was no cure, only treatment, but after living with this mystery for 2 years, the parents were just happy to know the name and cause of their son's congenital condition. They found that there was a small group of parents and patients who, by banding together, were trying to get researchers to learn more about this disability.
I heard other patients say that, after suffering for years, they were just glad that the cause of their misery had a name. It is hard to fight a nameless, undefined enemy. Even if the diagnosis brought little hope, they were encouraged by the fact that at least they knew what they were dealing with.
As in the time of Samuel, it had been a long time since there had been a prophet declaring the Word of the Lord to his people. Maybe that's why people flocked to John despite his inflammatory rhetoric. They knew they had problems but no one was telling them what it was. Then as now they did have people telling them what they wanted to hear. The Zealots told them the problem wasn't them; it was the Romans who occupied their country. Scapegoats are always popular. Get rid of the bad people and all of our problems will be solved. They are still doing that in the Middle East. "If we just got rid of all the (Arabs, Jews, Palestinians, Muslims, Shiites, Sunnis, etc) all of our problems would be solved." We do it here. "If we just got rid of all of the (illegal aliens, gays, homophobes, unions, conservatives, liberals, brown people, white people, etc) all of our problems would be solved." It doesn't work that way. Logistically it is impossible. The Nazis devoted considerable resources to exterminating the Jews. They killed 6 million but the Jews still survive. And had they succeeded, would Nazi Germany have been saved from all or most of its problems? No. Scapegoating not only harms innocents; it diverts us from our real problems. They tend to be closer to home. The comic strip Pogo was on the mark when it mangled Caesar's declaration of victory "We have met the enemy and he is ours" into "We have met the enemy and he is us."
But maybe the problem isn't us but the way we are doing things. If we follow this technique or program or regimen, the problems will be licked. Not a week goes by that I don't receive a postcard or email or flyer proclaiming a hitherto unknown method of making a church grow or increase its giving. And while the touted program might have a lot of truth to it, the idea that merely implementing it will yield magical results is patently untrue, unless, perhaps, you were doing absolutely nothing. This way of thinking didn't even work with the Law. The Pharisees told people the problem was they weren't obeying the entire Law of Moses, along with all the addenda the rabbis had attached to it. It was a very comprehensive system that dictated what to do in just about every situation. And this is, after all, God's law. So why didn't it make things all better?
Any medical professional will tell you one of the biggest problems we have is patient compliance. Rare is the patient who does everything the doctor prescribes or does it in the way the nurse or physical therapist teaches them to. It's hard to give up all smoking, or to keep track of every morsel you eat, or do your exercises with a painful new knee, or practice safe sex, or use the communications techniques taught in your marriage counseling sessions. We like our solutions to be easy to implement. Why can't everything work like an infomercial gizmo so we can simply "set it and forget it?"
At first it looks as if John buys into the "you're simply doing it wrong" mindset. When people ask him what should they do, he gives commonsense advice: Share your excess with people who have nothing. Don't cheat people. Don't abuse your power and don't be greedy. And certainly those are good things to do. They are a start. But even John recognizes these as treating the symptoms. Like a GP who recognizes that the disease is beyond his powers to cure, he tells his patient they have to go to a specialist if they really want to get well rather than merely learn to cope.
"I baptize you with water but one who is more powerful than I is coming. I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire." Baptism was at this time a matter of total immersion. When he came, the Messiah wasn't going to apply the Holy Spirit sparingly, on this small problem area or that tiny patch. God's Anointed was going to immerse God's people in God's Spirit. No halfway measures will do. Nothing but a full Silkwood decontamination shower by the Spirit of God himself would suffice. Not a rad of resistance could remain.
But what does John mean by baptizing people not only with the Holy Spirit but with fire? Fire had various uses and therefore could be used to symbolize different things. 2 seem more likely than most here. First, fire was used to refine metals. The impurities could be removed only by heating gold or iron ore to high temperatures. The resulting metal would be pure. Secondly, fire was used to burn the inedible parts of grain. After winnowing the wheat from the chaff, the dry covering was burned as waste. So John could mean that the Messiah would purify the people who followed him. He could also mean he will judge and consign those who didn't comply to the trash fires. Gehenna, the Valley of Hinnom where Jerusalem burned the city's trash, was the word Jesus used to signify Hell. So which are you? Wheat or chaff? Gold or slag? A light to the world or a pile of refuse to be burned? Don't wait to find out, says John. Repent: change your mind, turn your life around. And then get baptized to signify the fact that you are making a clean start on a new life.
But that's just the beginning. John knows the people need to do more than just change a few habits. He also knows he is not the guy tasked to do that. He is a herald. He is to tell people to get ready because the king is coming. There are things only a king can accomplish. Or we wouldn't need a king.
Advent is about heeding John's cry and getting ready for the king. Of course, we are looking at what is to us the past. We know who the king is and what he will do. We know all the spoilers, as geeks would say. And yet Advent is not merely about Jesus' coming as a powerless baby but also about his next coming as our powerful Lord. And it is also about his coming not just to one couple as the gift of a newborn but also his coming to anyone who welcomes him as the giver of new life. "Let every heart prepare him room" says the carol and that too is what we do at Advent. If Jesus were coming to stay at your house, you'd clean the whole place and take out the garbage. If he is coming to stay in your heart, you'd do the same. Get rid of the greed, deceit, and violence there. Throw out the trash. Be generous to others, knowing what you do for them you do for him.
But this guest isn't going to be content to lie around and relax. If John is like the TV show "Intervention," Jesus is more like "Extreme Makeover." He has big plans for you, your heart and your life. He doesn't just want them clean but redone, remade, larger than before. Because your heart, the person you are, and the life you live are going need to be a lot bigger to accommodate our awfully big God.
Sunday, December 9, 2012
Love, Knowledge and Insight
John Lennon famously sang the song "All You Need is Love" in the "Yellow Submarine" feature cartoon. It's a great song. And it's wrong. You might be surprised that a preacher whose primary message is the good news of God's love would say that love alone is not sufficient. But we have it on the highest authority that it is not. In today's reading from Philippians Paul writes, "And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what is best…"
We see love without knowledge and insight all the time. Someone just meets a person and in no time they've moved in together, setting up a household with little knowledge of their partner. We see people blind to the fact that the boyfriend or adult offspring they love so much is damaging them, all the while defending the person doing evil. We see people raising the children they purportedly love without insight or even common sense. Worse, we see people following an ideology or a religion with no clear idea of the real essence of the thing, blindly defending it using methods its founders would repudiate.
Just because some person or activity or lifestyle attracts you doesn't mean it's right for you--or anyone. What looks or even feels good is not always good. Nobody takes drugs with the intention of becoming an addict. They do it because it feels good--at first and fleetingly. If the effect were lasting they'd never take another hit. Other people do some terrible things because they make good money at them. Or because, without checking them out, they mistakenly thought that they would be good things.
Evil is a chameleon. It is fake goodness, a cunning knockoff that promises what it cannot deliver. It is spoiled fruit with the rotten or fuzzy side turned away from you so that you will buy it unwittingly. It's the contract that seems too good to be true, until all the unfavorable conditions and fees in the fine print catch up to you. Were it seen for what it is, no one would choose it. So a good deal of wisdom is discerning what is good and what merely appears to be good.
Knowledge and judgment are the 2 things that Paul prays that the reader's love overflows with. Knowledge is important. You have to have the facts. I can't believe the stuff people post on the internet without looking up the facts. There are whole websites devoted to correcting internet misinformation. Snopes.com is my favorite. You would think with the equivalent of a world class library on your laptop or smartphone people would stop believing foolish things. But knowledge is not enough. Otherwise, all of these studies governments commission would lead to better policies.
It is insight, judgment, the proper weighing of the facts, that leads to wise choices. Facts only tell you what is; judgment tells you what ought to be. And it needs to be right about what ought to be; it needs to be good judgment. Different philosophies, political parties and religions have various ideas of what ought to be. They can't all be right. Hedonists have one view of what the world ought to be; Nazis have a different one; Quakers yet another. Values must be decided.
Our values are derived from scripture's wisdom. They begin with the idea that we are created in the image of God. That means human beings have intrinsic value. This is why it is wrong to harm others. That's why the natural corollary to loving God is loving human beings.
Another insight is that human beings are fallible. All human beings. Popes, priests, scientists, atheists, politicians, thinkers, writers, soldiers, athletes, rock stars, actors, doctors, nurses, teachers, you name it. The Bible says that there is none who is righteous. Thomas Jefferson was a great president but terrible at managing his personal finances and also when it came to acknowledging his illegitimate sons by his slave, who was his wife's half-sister. Charles Dickens was a beloved and world famous writer who exposed the plight of the poor but left his wife and the mother of his 10 children for an 18 year old actress. Richard Wagner was a great composer but an anti-Semite. Weekly the news reveals the flaws of otherwise admirable people.
That's why we don't worship someone who is merely human, but Jesus Christ, who was tempted in every way we are yet did not sin. And that's why humility is a Christian virtue. Even when we must correct others, we need to look towards our own behavior. Jesus warned about trying to take specks out of others' eyes while carrying around a log in our own.
The obverse of the fact that none of us is perfect is that anyone can be redeemed. No one can be written off completely. Nor are we supposed to. Jesus told us not to pass judgment on others lest we be judged by the same standards. All saints have a past...which means all sinners can have a future! It also means people we are tempted to look down on may be in transition, in the process of coming to God, however roundabout it looks to us. Our job is to help them, not impede them; to encourage them, not discourage them; to invite them, not repel them.
Because we know the good news that anyone can be redeemed by Christ, we share it. We come not as conquerors or judges or enforcers. We are messengers, heralds, emissaries of God's Kingdom. We offer God's love and forgiveness, his mercy and transforming power, his grace. We offer new life, a new beginning, new hope. We offer an alternative to the world's increasingly fatalistic reading of genetics and environment as one's inescapable destiny. We offer an opportunity to become more than an animal, whose purpose is just to reproduce and die. We offer the opportunity to become one of God's children, following in his footsteps, continuing his work. We offer a community that gives support in following Jesus, providing free instruction, inspiration, music, prayer, communion and love.
And so we come full circle. From love to knowledge to good judgment to love. They go together. If you love something, you want to learn more about it. If you love someone you want to learn everything about them. You want to know what they like and don't like, what they are interested in, and what they love to do. If we love God, we want to know everything we can about him, what he likes and doesn't like, what he is interested in, what he loves to do. If we really listen to him, to his Word, we will gain knowledge about him. If we use good judgment, we will uphold his values. If we uphold his values, we will show our love for him and for those he made in his image and for whom, in the person of his son, he died.
Paul wrote that he prayed his readers' love may overflow with knowledge and insight "so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness…" The old saying is that practice makes perfect. Jesus said we must be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect (or complete). We are learning about God and his love so that we get better at emulating it. Our goal is eventually reaching perfection. We will probably never reach it in this life but when Christ returns we are told we shall be like him. The righteousness he imputes to us by grace will be realized.
We will be changed. That's what knowledge and insight do to you. They change you. The knowledge of God and the insights of his wisdom are meant to change us until we are more like him. We were created in his image and we have marred that. But through knowing God we come to be more like him. Especially because we cannot really get to know God without knowing Christ. And we cannot know Christ without opening ourselves to his Spirit. Through the work of the Holy Spirit, we are transformed and shaped into the image of Christ.
Christianity is becoming less popular these days. But Christ isn't. And that's the problem. People are not stupid. They see that many folks who use Christ's name do not resemble him very much. But when we do resemble him, when we do the things he would do, when we display his Spirit, the world makes note. Like when a mentally ill man shot up a schoolhouse full of Amish girls and the Amish community comforted the shooter's widow and family and attended his funeral. The world realized that was Christlike behavior.
The obvious solution to the unpopularity of Christians is that we need to resemble Jesus all the time. We may not achieve it perfectly in this life, but if we were the next best thing to Jesus, if we were a reasonable approximation of him, if our presence reminded others strongly of his presence, imagine the impact we would have. Imagine the good we would do. Imagine the people who would be interested in knowing more about the God we love, if we more perfectly reflected that love.
We see love without knowledge and insight all the time. Someone just meets a person and in no time they've moved in together, setting up a household with little knowledge of their partner. We see people blind to the fact that the boyfriend or adult offspring they love so much is damaging them, all the while defending the person doing evil. We see people raising the children they purportedly love without insight or even common sense. Worse, we see people following an ideology or a religion with no clear idea of the real essence of the thing, blindly defending it using methods its founders would repudiate.
Just because some person or activity or lifestyle attracts you doesn't mean it's right for you--or anyone. What looks or even feels good is not always good. Nobody takes drugs with the intention of becoming an addict. They do it because it feels good--at first and fleetingly. If the effect were lasting they'd never take another hit. Other people do some terrible things because they make good money at them. Or because, without checking them out, they mistakenly thought that they would be good things.
Evil is a chameleon. It is fake goodness, a cunning knockoff that promises what it cannot deliver. It is spoiled fruit with the rotten or fuzzy side turned away from you so that you will buy it unwittingly. It's the contract that seems too good to be true, until all the unfavorable conditions and fees in the fine print catch up to you. Were it seen for what it is, no one would choose it. So a good deal of wisdom is discerning what is good and what merely appears to be good.
Knowledge and judgment are the 2 things that Paul prays that the reader's love overflows with. Knowledge is important. You have to have the facts. I can't believe the stuff people post on the internet without looking up the facts. There are whole websites devoted to correcting internet misinformation. Snopes.com is my favorite. You would think with the equivalent of a world class library on your laptop or smartphone people would stop believing foolish things. But knowledge is not enough. Otherwise, all of these studies governments commission would lead to better policies.
It is insight, judgment, the proper weighing of the facts, that leads to wise choices. Facts only tell you what is; judgment tells you what ought to be. And it needs to be right about what ought to be; it needs to be good judgment. Different philosophies, political parties and religions have various ideas of what ought to be. They can't all be right. Hedonists have one view of what the world ought to be; Nazis have a different one; Quakers yet another. Values must be decided.
Our values are derived from scripture's wisdom. They begin with the idea that we are created in the image of God. That means human beings have intrinsic value. This is why it is wrong to harm others. That's why the natural corollary to loving God is loving human beings.
Another insight is that human beings are fallible. All human beings. Popes, priests, scientists, atheists, politicians, thinkers, writers, soldiers, athletes, rock stars, actors, doctors, nurses, teachers, you name it. The Bible says that there is none who is righteous. Thomas Jefferson was a great president but terrible at managing his personal finances and also when it came to acknowledging his illegitimate sons by his slave, who was his wife's half-sister. Charles Dickens was a beloved and world famous writer who exposed the plight of the poor but left his wife and the mother of his 10 children for an 18 year old actress. Richard Wagner was a great composer but an anti-Semite. Weekly the news reveals the flaws of otherwise admirable people.
That's why we don't worship someone who is merely human, but Jesus Christ, who was tempted in every way we are yet did not sin. And that's why humility is a Christian virtue. Even when we must correct others, we need to look towards our own behavior. Jesus warned about trying to take specks out of others' eyes while carrying around a log in our own.
The obverse of the fact that none of us is perfect is that anyone can be redeemed. No one can be written off completely. Nor are we supposed to. Jesus told us not to pass judgment on others lest we be judged by the same standards. All saints have a past...which means all sinners can have a future! It also means people we are tempted to look down on may be in transition, in the process of coming to God, however roundabout it looks to us. Our job is to help them, not impede them; to encourage them, not discourage them; to invite them, not repel them.
Because we know the good news that anyone can be redeemed by Christ, we share it. We come not as conquerors or judges or enforcers. We are messengers, heralds, emissaries of God's Kingdom. We offer God's love and forgiveness, his mercy and transforming power, his grace. We offer new life, a new beginning, new hope. We offer an alternative to the world's increasingly fatalistic reading of genetics and environment as one's inescapable destiny. We offer an opportunity to become more than an animal, whose purpose is just to reproduce and die. We offer the opportunity to become one of God's children, following in his footsteps, continuing his work. We offer a community that gives support in following Jesus, providing free instruction, inspiration, music, prayer, communion and love.
And so we come full circle. From love to knowledge to good judgment to love. They go together. If you love something, you want to learn more about it. If you love someone you want to learn everything about them. You want to know what they like and don't like, what they are interested in, and what they love to do. If we love God, we want to know everything we can about him, what he likes and doesn't like, what he is interested in, what he loves to do. If we really listen to him, to his Word, we will gain knowledge about him. If we use good judgment, we will uphold his values. If we uphold his values, we will show our love for him and for those he made in his image and for whom, in the person of his son, he died.
Paul wrote that he prayed his readers' love may overflow with knowledge and insight "so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness…" The old saying is that practice makes perfect. Jesus said we must be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect (or complete). We are learning about God and his love so that we get better at emulating it. Our goal is eventually reaching perfection. We will probably never reach it in this life but when Christ returns we are told we shall be like him. The righteousness he imputes to us by grace will be realized.
We will be changed. That's what knowledge and insight do to you. They change you. The knowledge of God and the insights of his wisdom are meant to change us until we are more like him. We were created in his image and we have marred that. But through knowing God we come to be more like him. Especially because we cannot really get to know God without knowing Christ. And we cannot know Christ without opening ourselves to his Spirit. Through the work of the Holy Spirit, we are transformed and shaped into the image of Christ.
Christianity is becoming less popular these days. But Christ isn't. And that's the problem. People are not stupid. They see that many folks who use Christ's name do not resemble him very much. But when we do resemble him, when we do the things he would do, when we display his Spirit, the world makes note. Like when a mentally ill man shot up a schoolhouse full of Amish girls and the Amish community comforted the shooter's widow and family and attended his funeral. The world realized that was Christlike behavior.
The obvious solution to the unpopularity of Christians is that we need to resemble Jesus all the time. We may not achieve it perfectly in this life, but if we were the next best thing to Jesus, if we were a reasonable approximation of him, if our presence reminded others strongly of his presence, imagine the impact we would have. Imagine the good we would do. Imagine the people who would be interested in knowing more about the God we love, if we more perfectly reflected that love.
Monday, December 3, 2012
Clash of the Values
One of the most suspenseful parts of Corrie Ten Boom's memoir "The Hiding Place" had nothing to do with Corrie's being interned in a concentration camp. You know going in that she, her sister and her father are arrested for hiding Jews. But she tells of the very different way her sister-in-law acted while saving Jews. Corrie felt that lying to the Nazis was justifiable. After all, she was already using forged ration cards to get food for the people she was hiding. But her sister-in-law drew the line at lying when asked a direct question. So when Nazi troops showed up at her brother's house to look for Jews and asked his wife where they were, she told them. "They are under the table." They lifted the tablecloth on the heavy dining room table but no one was crouched beneath it. Then the sister-in-law began to laugh. Apparently thinking she was unhinged, they left in disgust. But the woman had told the truth. There were Jews hiding under the table…if one looked under the rug under the table and found the trapdoor the fugitives had used to get out of sight. God knows what the woman would have said had the Nazis been more specific.
Our sermon suggestion slip asks, "Why do Christians have different moralities?" First off, let's grant that believers usually pick and choose among which of the different laws in the Bible they will and will not obey. Part of this is that we all find things in scripture we do not like or agree with. These either get ignored or explained away. For instance, the Bible condemns charging interest. Our whole economy is based on it and I am unaware of any church that condemns it. Jesus condemned divorce with little or no exceptions. No-fault divorce is the law of the land. Very few churches forbid the marriage of divorced people. In the Roman Catholic church one must first get an annulment from church authorities which states that the previous marriage did not legally exist. Henry VIII never divorced; he annulled.
And there have been more egregious examples of people engineering workarounds for Biblical rules, especially when it comes to violence. You'll be interested to know that the church never executed heretics. After securing their confession, the church turned them over to civil authorities to carry out the sentence, mirroring what the religious leaders of Jesus' day did by turning him over to the Romans. Plausible deniability is as old as politics.
Some of this is just sinfulness, us wanting to do what we shouldn't. Or not do what we should. But some of this is practicality. As A.J. Jacobs found in his book "The Year of Living Biblically," no one--not fundamentalist Christians, nor Orthodox Jews, nor the Amish, nor any other group--manages to keep every rule in the Bible. In Romans, Paul points out that it is impossible. Which is why our salvation does not depend on our keeping the law perfectly but upon our faith in God's grace revealed in Jesus Christ. But that doesn't mean we can act immorally. That's like thinking that as long you keep your prescription for your asthma inhaler filled, you can go back to smoking.
Jesus boiled down our ethical priorities to two: we must love God with everything we are and have, and we must love our neighbor as we do ourselves. Everything else in the Bible hangs on this. Or as N.T. Wright translates Matthew, every other ethical rule in the Bible "is a footnote." Mark records that Jesus said that no commandment is more important than these two.
Looking at it that way, one can see how Corrie and her family felt they could break laws and deceive authorities. The primacy of the commandment to love their neighbors overrode other Biblical rules about obeying civil authorities and telling the truth. When one finds oneself in a situation where the honest or lawful thing to do will result in harm and injustice, the loving thing to do instead is to protect innocent people from evil authorities. After World War II, nobody agreed with the defense low-level Nazis gave for contributing to the deaths of 6 million Jews and an equal number of non-Jews in the camps; namely that they were "only following orders." In fact, the U.S. military code recognizes the existence of illegal orders and soldiers are not to carry them out, nor are they to be punished for refusing to carry them out.
But not all ethical quandaries in Christianity are that easy to clear up. Sometimes when 2 ethical demands clash, it is difficult to decide which has top priority. Jesus told us to turn the cheek should someone strike us on our other one. Many peace churches like Quakers, Mennonites and the Amish feel that by this Jesus forbade his followers from retaliating against physical force or using physical force on others. But what if the person being physically beaten or harmed is someone other than me? Is it Christian to observe someone beating up another person and if he doesn't stop when told, to not use force to pull him off whoever is being beaten? Is that loving? What if the aggressor has a weapon and is threatening to kill his victim. Would it be permissible for a Christian to shoot the violent person? Can one use deadly force on one person to protect another? Is that loving to all concerned? And what if the Christian is a cop?
This is the stuff of true ethical dilemmas. It's not a dilemma if you simply want to beat someone up and know Jesus says you shouldn't. It's a dilemma when you don't know how to honor both the command to love and the command to not act violently. It is when a situation brings 2 Biblical principles into conflict that we find Christians sincerely differing on morality.
Jonathon Haidt, a moral psychologist, who wrote "The Righteous Mind," has uncovered 6 elements of morality: the care and compassion vs. harm axis, the fairness and justice vs. cheating axis, the liberty vs. oppression axis, the loyalty vs. betrayal axis, the authority vs. subversion axis, and the sanctity and purity vs. degradation axis. And when they conflict, people find themselves pulled in different directions. Should a poor person steal medicine to save a life? Here care and compassion are in direct conflict with fairness and justice. What about a violent revolution against an oppressive government? Here the values of liberty, authority and doing no harm are up against each other.
What believers have to do is weigh each element and prioritize. Hippocrates began his oath for physicians with "First, do no harm." Haidt found that tops everyone's list: care and compassion usually come first. Then come fairness or justice. The rest vary greatly. Loyalty is very important in groups but so is liberty, especially to oppressed groups or individuals. Authority is very important to some as is sanctity, but some rate them both very low. In fact, Haidt found that the difference between liberals and conservatives is how they rank these 6 moral values. For both sides care and compassion come first but liberals rank it much higher than any of the other values. Compassion for liberals is followed by fairness and liberty while the other 3--loyalty, authority and sanctity-- are ranked much lower. Conservatives also rank compassion first but the other 5 values are closely clustered and not far behind compassion. Conservative's values, Haidt found to his surprise--he is a liberal Jew and an atheist--are more balanced.
To make things more complicated, some values are viewed differently by the two sides. Fairness for the liberal means equality, mixed with compassion. For conservatives, fairness primarily means proportionality. So, say, when dividing up resources, for liberals, fairness means everyone gets an equal portion but for conservatives fairness means taking into account what each person contributed when determining how much each gets.
But it's the difference in ranking that makes prioritizing some values easier for liberals and more difficult for conservatives. It explains why highly moral people on different sides make different judgments on the same issue. It also explains why people on both sides have such a hard time understanding each other's values. To liberals, when faced with an ethical dilemma, the most compassionate attitude or action is far and away the correct course. For conservatives, compassion comes first but other values must be considered as well. And this is one big reason why liberal and conservative Christians often make divergent moral decisions.
So what was Jesus? Like both sides, compassion came first. If he saw someone sick or suffering, he didn't wait till the Sabbath was over but healed the person right away. He incurred ritual impurity by touching lepers and other unclean individuals. He even healed the slave of a Roman officer. He fed the hungry people who came to hear him.
On the issue of justice, he sees Jews, Samaritans, and foreigners as equal in that they all are in need of God's love and forgiveness. Their standing with God is primarily affected by their acceptance of God's grace. Notorious sinners who repent come before righteous people who don't in God's kingdom. As to proportionality, those who put in more effort in using their gifts for God are better rewarded. But that doesn't translate directly into being rich or poor. The poor widow who donates the only 2 cents she has is more commendable than rich folks giving larger sums but a smaller percentage. It also means that God favors more fortunate people when they help those so unfortunate that they can't even repay them.
Liberty is important to Jesus but not in in political sense. It is freedom from the slavery of sin that Jesus grants. And by healing those banished from the worshiping community by their diseases, Jesus freed these pariahs from their internal exile. But Jesus showed himself to be in harmony with the prophets in denouncing those who oppressed, exploited and neglected the poor.
Loyalty to God and to himself is very important to Jesus. As he said, you cannot serve 2 masters. And your primary commitment should be to God. Otherwise when there is a conflict of interest, you can't be counted on to stick up for God's way.
We see this with Peter. He denies knowing Jesus three times in the courtyard of the High Priest while Christ is being tried. The only reason is cowardice. But after his resurrection, Jesus three times asks Peter if he loves him. Three times Peter answers yes and three times Jesus tells him to feed his flock. Reconciled, Peter becomes a fearless apostle and dies a martyr.
Jesus supports the authority of Scripture but always with an emphasis on the spirit of the law rather than its letter. Understanding that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath, frees you from an unreasoning slavery to the rules of the Sabbath when you come upon someone in need. And, of course, Jesus spoke on his own authority and expected that to be sufficient in resolving moral questions. As God Incarnate, his word is law. Which is the ultimate loyalty test for those who claim to follow him.
When it comes to sanctity and purity, Jesus again goes to the heart. The purity that counts is that of the heart. It is evil in our hearts that defiles us, not acts of ritual pollution. Thus he can touch lepers, menstruating women and the dead in order to heal and raise them. The only thing that keeps him from going to a Gentile's house is that the Roman officer believes that Jesus can command his slave's healing from a distance. As for sexual purity, Jesus holds a high view of marriage with faithfulness practiced within it and chastity outside of it. But he when speaking to the Samaritan woman he doesn't denounce her checkered marital history and he does not condemn the woman caught in adultery though he tells her to go and sin no more.
Jesus upholds all 6 moral elements like a conservative but when there is a conflict, compassion and mercy triumph over other considerations in every case except that of his own authority. Which is crucial because it is his authority as the Son of God that allows him to forgive sins and set aside restrictions which in specific instances create a barrier between God and people. Sin is the only real barrier between us and our creator and the repentant are always forgiven and granted a new life in the Kingdom of God.
Today's Christians face moral questions both old and new. In some cases we have Jesus' explicit commands; in others we must rely on the Spirit he sent to dwell within the hearts of all who trust him. But often, as Haidt found in his research, we go with our gut and then rationalize our moral stance after the fact.
We also are adept at looking for evidence and arguments which confirms our position. We seize upon 1 positive piece of evidence so we can answer the question "Can I believe or do that?" with a "yes!" Or we unearth 1 negative piece of evidence so we can answer the question "Must I believe or do that?" with a "no!"
The good news is that as social creatures we can be persuaded to change our outlook by the arguments of those who we respect or care about. And so, lacking Jesus' authority, we should, through listening and discussion within the body of Christ, work towards a consensus on these issues. But love for God and compassion for others, whether neighbors or enemies, comes first. It really does go back to those two commandments. Everything else hangs on them and no other commandment is greater than they. And Jesus said we would be known to the world as his disciples by our love for one another. So when Christians do disagree on some non-essential moral rule, even if it seems somewhat important, we need to be able to say to one another, "I really disagree with you on that, but I still love you as a brother or sister in Christ and you are a vital part of his body." The true test of love is loving those who disagree with us. It's not easy. If it were, Jesus' command to love each other would not be considered such a moral milestone.
Let us close with 2 quotations. Peter, who knew what it was to screw up big time, wrote in his first letter, "Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins." Or as St. Augustine said about Christians, "In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty and in all things love."
Our sermon suggestion slip asks, "Why do Christians have different moralities?" First off, let's grant that believers usually pick and choose among which of the different laws in the Bible they will and will not obey. Part of this is that we all find things in scripture we do not like or agree with. These either get ignored or explained away. For instance, the Bible condemns charging interest. Our whole economy is based on it and I am unaware of any church that condemns it. Jesus condemned divorce with little or no exceptions. No-fault divorce is the law of the land. Very few churches forbid the marriage of divorced people. In the Roman Catholic church one must first get an annulment from church authorities which states that the previous marriage did not legally exist. Henry VIII never divorced; he annulled.
And there have been more egregious examples of people engineering workarounds for Biblical rules, especially when it comes to violence. You'll be interested to know that the church never executed heretics. After securing their confession, the church turned them over to civil authorities to carry out the sentence, mirroring what the religious leaders of Jesus' day did by turning him over to the Romans. Plausible deniability is as old as politics.
Some of this is just sinfulness, us wanting to do what we shouldn't. Or not do what we should. But some of this is practicality. As A.J. Jacobs found in his book "The Year of Living Biblically," no one--not fundamentalist Christians, nor Orthodox Jews, nor the Amish, nor any other group--manages to keep every rule in the Bible. In Romans, Paul points out that it is impossible. Which is why our salvation does not depend on our keeping the law perfectly but upon our faith in God's grace revealed in Jesus Christ. But that doesn't mean we can act immorally. That's like thinking that as long you keep your prescription for your asthma inhaler filled, you can go back to smoking.
Jesus boiled down our ethical priorities to two: we must love God with everything we are and have, and we must love our neighbor as we do ourselves. Everything else in the Bible hangs on this. Or as N.T. Wright translates Matthew, every other ethical rule in the Bible "is a footnote." Mark records that Jesus said that no commandment is more important than these two.
Looking at it that way, one can see how Corrie and her family felt they could break laws and deceive authorities. The primacy of the commandment to love their neighbors overrode other Biblical rules about obeying civil authorities and telling the truth. When one finds oneself in a situation where the honest or lawful thing to do will result in harm and injustice, the loving thing to do instead is to protect innocent people from evil authorities. After World War II, nobody agreed with the defense low-level Nazis gave for contributing to the deaths of 6 million Jews and an equal number of non-Jews in the camps; namely that they were "only following orders." In fact, the U.S. military code recognizes the existence of illegal orders and soldiers are not to carry them out, nor are they to be punished for refusing to carry them out.
But not all ethical quandaries in Christianity are that easy to clear up. Sometimes when 2 ethical demands clash, it is difficult to decide which has top priority. Jesus told us to turn the cheek should someone strike us on our other one. Many peace churches like Quakers, Mennonites and the Amish feel that by this Jesus forbade his followers from retaliating against physical force or using physical force on others. But what if the person being physically beaten or harmed is someone other than me? Is it Christian to observe someone beating up another person and if he doesn't stop when told, to not use force to pull him off whoever is being beaten? Is that loving? What if the aggressor has a weapon and is threatening to kill his victim. Would it be permissible for a Christian to shoot the violent person? Can one use deadly force on one person to protect another? Is that loving to all concerned? And what if the Christian is a cop?
This is the stuff of true ethical dilemmas. It's not a dilemma if you simply want to beat someone up and know Jesus says you shouldn't. It's a dilemma when you don't know how to honor both the command to love and the command to not act violently. It is when a situation brings 2 Biblical principles into conflict that we find Christians sincerely differing on morality.
Jonathon Haidt, a moral psychologist, who wrote "The Righteous Mind," has uncovered 6 elements of morality: the care and compassion vs. harm axis, the fairness and justice vs. cheating axis, the liberty vs. oppression axis, the loyalty vs. betrayal axis, the authority vs. subversion axis, and the sanctity and purity vs. degradation axis. And when they conflict, people find themselves pulled in different directions. Should a poor person steal medicine to save a life? Here care and compassion are in direct conflict with fairness and justice. What about a violent revolution against an oppressive government? Here the values of liberty, authority and doing no harm are up against each other.
What believers have to do is weigh each element and prioritize. Hippocrates began his oath for physicians with "First, do no harm." Haidt found that tops everyone's list: care and compassion usually come first. Then come fairness or justice. The rest vary greatly. Loyalty is very important in groups but so is liberty, especially to oppressed groups or individuals. Authority is very important to some as is sanctity, but some rate them both very low. In fact, Haidt found that the difference between liberals and conservatives is how they rank these 6 moral values. For both sides care and compassion come first but liberals rank it much higher than any of the other values. Compassion for liberals is followed by fairness and liberty while the other 3--loyalty, authority and sanctity-- are ranked much lower. Conservatives also rank compassion first but the other 5 values are closely clustered and not far behind compassion. Conservative's values, Haidt found to his surprise--he is a liberal Jew and an atheist--are more balanced.
To make things more complicated, some values are viewed differently by the two sides. Fairness for the liberal means equality, mixed with compassion. For conservatives, fairness primarily means proportionality. So, say, when dividing up resources, for liberals, fairness means everyone gets an equal portion but for conservatives fairness means taking into account what each person contributed when determining how much each gets.
But it's the difference in ranking that makes prioritizing some values easier for liberals and more difficult for conservatives. It explains why highly moral people on different sides make different judgments on the same issue. It also explains why people on both sides have such a hard time understanding each other's values. To liberals, when faced with an ethical dilemma, the most compassionate attitude or action is far and away the correct course. For conservatives, compassion comes first but other values must be considered as well. And this is one big reason why liberal and conservative Christians often make divergent moral decisions.
So what was Jesus? Like both sides, compassion came first. If he saw someone sick or suffering, he didn't wait till the Sabbath was over but healed the person right away. He incurred ritual impurity by touching lepers and other unclean individuals. He even healed the slave of a Roman officer. He fed the hungry people who came to hear him.
On the issue of justice, he sees Jews, Samaritans, and foreigners as equal in that they all are in need of God's love and forgiveness. Their standing with God is primarily affected by their acceptance of God's grace. Notorious sinners who repent come before righteous people who don't in God's kingdom. As to proportionality, those who put in more effort in using their gifts for God are better rewarded. But that doesn't translate directly into being rich or poor. The poor widow who donates the only 2 cents she has is more commendable than rich folks giving larger sums but a smaller percentage. It also means that God favors more fortunate people when they help those so unfortunate that they can't even repay them.
Liberty is important to Jesus but not in in political sense. It is freedom from the slavery of sin that Jesus grants. And by healing those banished from the worshiping community by their diseases, Jesus freed these pariahs from their internal exile. But Jesus showed himself to be in harmony with the prophets in denouncing those who oppressed, exploited and neglected the poor.
Loyalty to God and to himself is very important to Jesus. As he said, you cannot serve 2 masters. And your primary commitment should be to God. Otherwise when there is a conflict of interest, you can't be counted on to stick up for God's way.
We see this with Peter. He denies knowing Jesus three times in the courtyard of the High Priest while Christ is being tried. The only reason is cowardice. But after his resurrection, Jesus three times asks Peter if he loves him. Three times Peter answers yes and three times Jesus tells him to feed his flock. Reconciled, Peter becomes a fearless apostle and dies a martyr.
Jesus supports the authority of Scripture but always with an emphasis on the spirit of the law rather than its letter. Understanding that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath, frees you from an unreasoning slavery to the rules of the Sabbath when you come upon someone in need. And, of course, Jesus spoke on his own authority and expected that to be sufficient in resolving moral questions. As God Incarnate, his word is law. Which is the ultimate loyalty test for those who claim to follow him.
When it comes to sanctity and purity, Jesus again goes to the heart. The purity that counts is that of the heart. It is evil in our hearts that defiles us, not acts of ritual pollution. Thus he can touch lepers, menstruating women and the dead in order to heal and raise them. The only thing that keeps him from going to a Gentile's house is that the Roman officer believes that Jesus can command his slave's healing from a distance. As for sexual purity, Jesus holds a high view of marriage with faithfulness practiced within it and chastity outside of it. But he when speaking to the Samaritan woman he doesn't denounce her checkered marital history and he does not condemn the woman caught in adultery though he tells her to go and sin no more.
Jesus upholds all 6 moral elements like a conservative but when there is a conflict, compassion and mercy triumph over other considerations in every case except that of his own authority. Which is crucial because it is his authority as the Son of God that allows him to forgive sins and set aside restrictions which in specific instances create a barrier between God and people. Sin is the only real barrier between us and our creator and the repentant are always forgiven and granted a new life in the Kingdom of God.
Today's Christians face moral questions both old and new. In some cases we have Jesus' explicit commands; in others we must rely on the Spirit he sent to dwell within the hearts of all who trust him. But often, as Haidt found in his research, we go with our gut and then rationalize our moral stance after the fact.
We also are adept at looking for evidence and arguments which confirms our position. We seize upon 1 positive piece of evidence so we can answer the question "Can I believe or do that?" with a "yes!" Or we unearth 1 negative piece of evidence so we can answer the question "Must I believe or do that?" with a "no!"
The good news is that as social creatures we can be persuaded to change our outlook by the arguments of those who we respect or care about. And so, lacking Jesus' authority, we should, through listening and discussion within the body of Christ, work towards a consensus on these issues. But love for God and compassion for others, whether neighbors or enemies, comes first. It really does go back to those two commandments. Everything else hangs on them and no other commandment is greater than they. And Jesus said we would be known to the world as his disciples by our love for one another. So when Christians do disagree on some non-essential moral rule, even if it seems somewhat important, we need to be able to say to one another, "I really disagree with you on that, but I still love you as a brother or sister in Christ and you are a vital part of his body." The true test of love is loving those who disagree with us. It's not easy. If it were, Jesus' command to love each other would not be considered such a moral milestone.
Let us close with 2 quotations. Peter, who knew what it was to screw up big time, wrote in his first letter, "Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins." Or as St. Augustine said about Christians, "In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty and in all things love."
Sunday, November 25, 2012
The Realm of Truth
The gospel examined is John 18:33-37.
One of the really annoying features of our recent presidential election was how everyone seemed to confuse a constitutionally limited position with some kind of divine right kingship. Both candidates and their supporters were acting as if the president can rule by decree. But as we've seen over and over, unlike a monarch or a CEO, a president has to persuade people, including those in his own party, to go along with his policies or he's stymied. So whenever either candidate spoke as if he could magically create jobs (other than government jobs), or control the economy (which would require controlling the world) or make sure that a foreign country did or didn't do something (ditto), I wondered if they and my fellow countrymen had forgotten the civics lessons we got in school. And I still see Facebook posts that act as if the president can take away Americans' guns (not since the Supreme Court decision in 2010) or as if states can secede (I seem to recall us settling that question in the 1860s). In fact, George Washington, once he had accepted the surrender of the British, was urged to become the first king of the United States. But he did not think that they had defeated a King George III in order to turn around and install a King George 1st.
Early on in human history it made sense to give one man all the power to make decisions for a group. Ordinary life was not much different than warfare. Small family groups faced extinction at the hands of famine, wild animals, and hostile tribes. You needed a tough warrior in charge. As families grew into clans and tribes, as tribes settled together into cities, those strong men gained more power. They then conquered neighboring lands to become nations, and adjoining nations to become empires. There was comfort in having a strong man at the top to protect everyone's home and livelihood and to impose order on an otherwise chaotic society. The safety and stability a king provided were considered way more important than individual rights.
Though they may not call themselves kings, the leaders of many countries today still seek or hold absolute power over their citizens. And for most of history that was fine with the people, provided the strong leader kept things orderly if not perfectly just.
Israel had lived for hundreds of years under the judges, divinely called leaders who arose when needed to protect the people, usually from outside attack. But they wanted the continuity and stability of a king, like other nations had, and urged Samuel, the last of the judges, to anoint one for them. Samuel wasn't happy about this because he foresaw how such power might corrupt any man made king. But he went ahead and anointed Saul as the first king of Israel. When Saul lost God's favor, Samuel was sent to anoint David, who was both devout and a great warrior. He became for Israel the template of the ideal king.
In Jesus' day, under the oppression of the Roman Empire, the hope was for God to raise up and anoint another holy warrior king. That was the popular idea of what the Messiah would be. And it explains why, early in his career, Jesus discouraged those he healed from telling anyone. He didn't want the Messiah talk to begin before he had redefined the term. After feeding the 5000, John's gospel tells us the crowd wanted to make Jesus king by force. His talk of the necessity of eating his flesh and drinking his blood discouraged them. That wasn't the kind of Messiah they wanted.
The same goes for the disciples. They couldn't accept Jesus' teaching about his being betrayed and killed because that didn't sound like something a strong leader would let happen. That wasn't the kind of Messiah they wanted.
In today's Gospel we see Jesus once again faced with an erroneous idea of what kind of king he was. Jesus was turned over to the Roman governor by his enemies, the religious leaders. They were Pilate's enemies, too, and it looks like he wasn't going to give them what they wanted if he could help it. But when they said Jesus claimed to be king, which was tantamount to treason against the Emperor, Pilate had to interrogate him.
"Are you the King of the Jews?' he demanded. To which Jesus countered, "Are you asking this on your own or did others tell you about me?" Pilate retorted, "I am not a Jew, am I?" Pilate sounds a bit contemptuous but he might have actually been ignorant of what the Messiah actually was. Pilate was not very understanding when it came to the Jews he governed. It's one of the reasons his governorship was so tumultuous and why he ultimately was removed by Rome.
Pilate continues: "Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?"
Jesus hadn't raised an army or issued marching orders or called for revolution. But he didn't defend himself. He accepted the title of king implicitly and said, "My kingdom is not from this world." Note that he didn't say, "My kingdom is not of this world," but "My kingdom is not from this world." The Greek preposition indicates origin. So it's not that Jesus' kingdom doesn't belong here; it's that it doesn't originate from this world.
And the evidence for that fact? Jesus said that if his kingdom came from this world, his followers would be fighting to rescue him. The difference is that, unlike the kingdoms of this world, physical might and violence isn't the way to establish or keep power in God's kingdom. So what is its basis?
When Jesus says, "my kingdom is not from here," Pilate responds, "So you are a king?" And Jesus answers, "You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice." Notice that he doesn't say, "everyone who belongs to my kingdom," but "everyone who belongs to the truth." And it parallels what Jesus says in chapter 10 about his sheep knowing his voice and following him.
Though our lectionary text cuts off on the verse just before it, Pilate's reply to Jesus is to ask, rhetorically, and possibly cynically, "What is truth?" And, frankly, it's a question anyone reading John's gospel would eventually ask as well. The word pops up more than 2 dozen times in John and in almost every chapter. But by the time Pilate asks about the truth, the astute reader would already know the answer. In chapter 14, Jesus says, "I'm the way, the truth and the life." The answer to Pilate's question is standing in front of him.
The kingdom of God is not based on brute force but on the truth of who Jesus is. He is the God whose power is love. Those who belong to him, who know the voice of the truth, listen to him and follow him. Unlike every earthly kingdom, which expands by conquering the unwilling, the kingdom of God expands exclusively by incorporating those who listen and respond to Jesus' call. It grows by love. The church gets in trouble whenever it tries to expand in the way worldly realms do, by imposing itself upon others or forcibly converting people.
Another thing that has gotten the church into trouble is converting people to something other than Christ. By that I mean converting them to a theological system or a style of worship or an ethical system or a philosophical point of view or an institution. People have shown themselves to be quite capable of putting parts of Christianity ahead of Jesus. They have loved the church or an issue or even a certain interpretation more than Christ. They will nullify Jesus' plain words in order to defend something they actually value more. We see people trying to be more Christian than Jesus by either denying his emphasis on social justice or his emphasis on personal holiness.
The truth has an inconvenient habit of not hewing to our personal opinions of what it should be. Nor is the truth concerned with being simple or one-dimensional. Jesus wasn't. That's why it takes 4 gospels to tell the story of Jesus from various perspectives. That's why it takes 39 books of the Old Testament to establish the background and precursors of the gospel. That's why it takes 23 books to examine the implications and aftermath of the gospels. But to interpret them you have to keep Christ in the center. If you don't, you get a skewed version of the truth.
Of course, this puts Jesus at a disadvantage as a king. If he only rules the consenting, those who respond to his truth, he isn't going to have as many followers as leaders who use their power to make people their subjects.
And yet Christianity grew. Gentiles, slaves and women were especially drawn to this religion of love, where everyone is equal in the sight of God. A woman could be an apostle, a slave could be a bishop, Jews and Gentiles were both saved by God's grace through faith, not by their achievements. When Rome decided to wipe out Christianity through brute force and death, it had no better luck than when it killed Jesus. As he rose from the dead, so too faith in him lived by the blood of the martyrs. Pagans start to feel sorry for Christians, whom, they noted, went to their deaths with nobility. And when Christians stayed in Rome to care for victims of plague rather than flee, people began to admire the faithful. For more than 300 years Christianity was illegal. And during those same three centuries, Christianity spread throughout the Empire, so much so that tolerance of the faith was the best political option for Constantine when he becomes emperor.
After this, however, Christianity enters into an uneasy marriage with the state. It gains power and extends its influence but it loses much of its prophetic stance, it compromises its ethics and takes up the traditional role of religion in a society: the blesser of the status quo. And when it does find itself in conflict with the rulers of earthly kingdoms, it finds that few so-called Christian princes will submit themselves to its authority.
It is ever thus. When the church is too closely allied to the state, political power corrupts it. It gets used and when it is inconvenient, just like Pilate, politicians will sell out Jesus and try to kill the truth. In Romans 13, we are commanded to obey our national leader, to obey the laws and to pay our taxes. But as we see in Acts 5, when specifically forbidden to preach the gospel, we must obey God rather than men.
As Christians we are to live in this world but not to be of it. Our kingdom does not originate in the passions of this world but comes from the realm of God's Spirit. Finding a dynamic balance of expressing the spiritual in the physical realm is a difficult one. But we must always remember who has the last word and the final say: our true king, Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God. And we must follow his example. What he did was not what the rulers of this world would do. They would never show themselves to be vulnerable, nor sacrifice themselves or their power. He, by contrast, was never motivated by gaining power but by the truth he must express, the truth of God's self-sacrificial love for all those created to bear his image. Jesus was that truth incarnate and he has passed that mission on to us. Now we are to live out that truth. And in some ways it is harder today than it was when the faith was young. The first Christians had little or nothing to lose in a culture where they were a small illegal group. We are a large and prosperous portion of the population. If we live according to the commands of our king, we risk sacrificing our comfortable and respectable lives. And so we must ask ourselves: whom do we serve? This world or God's kingdom? The worshippers of power or the one who is the truth? And how do we prepare for the coming of our king?
One of the really annoying features of our recent presidential election was how everyone seemed to confuse a constitutionally limited position with some kind of divine right kingship. Both candidates and their supporters were acting as if the president can rule by decree. But as we've seen over and over, unlike a monarch or a CEO, a president has to persuade people, including those in his own party, to go along with his policies or he's stymied. So whenever either candidate spoke as if he could magically create jobs (other than government jobs), or control the economy (which would require controlling the world) or make sure that a foreign country did or didn't do something (ditto), I wondered if they and my fellow countrymen had forgotten the civics lessons we got in school. And I still see Facebook posts that act as if the president can take away Americans' guns (not since the Supreme Court decision in 2010) or as if states can secede (I seem to recall us settling that question in the 1860s). In fact, George Washington, once he had accepted the surrender of the British, was urged to become the first king of the United States. But he did not think that they had defeated a King George III in order to turn around and install a King George 1st.
Early on in human history it made sense to give one man all the power to make decisions for a group. Ordinary life was not much different than warfare. Small family groups faced extinction at the hands of famine, wild animals, and hostile tribes. You needed a tough warrior in charge. As families grew into clans and tribes, as tribes settled together into cities, those strong men gained more power. They then conquered neighboring lands to become nations, and adjoining nations to become empires. There was comfort in having a strong man at the top to protect everyone's home and livelihood and to impose order on an otherwise chaotic society. The safety and stability a king provided were considered way more important than individual rights.
Though they may not call themselves kings, the leaders of many countries today still seek or hold absolute power over their citizens. And for most of history that was fine with the people, provided the strong leader kept things orderly if not perfectly just.
Israel had lived for hundreds of years under the judges, divinely called leaders who arose when needed to protect the people, usually from outside attack. But they wanted the continuity and stability of a king, like other nations had, and urged Samuel, the last of the judges, to anoint one for them. Samuel wasn't happy about this because he foresaw how such power might corrupt any man made king. But he went ahead and anointed Saul as the first king of Israel. When Saul lost God's favor, Samuel was sent to anoint David, who was both devout and a great warrior. He became for Israel the template of the ideal king.
In Jesus' day, under the oppression of the Roman Empire, the hope was for God to raise up and anoint another holy warrior king. That was the popular idea of what the Messiah would be. And it explains why, early in his career, Jesus discouraged those he healed from telling anyone. He didn't want the Messiah talk to begin before he had redefined the term. After feeding the 5000, John's gospel tells us the crowd wanted to make Jesus king by force. His talk of the necessity of eating his flesh and drinking his blood discouraged them. That wasn't the kind of Messiah they wanted.
The same goes for the disciples. They couldn't accept Jesus' teaching about his being betrayed and killed because that didn't sound like something a strong leader would let happen. That wasn't the kind of Messiah they wanted.
In today's Gospel we see Jesus once again faced with an erroneous idea of what kind of king he was. Jesus was turned over to the Roman governor by his enemies, the religious leaders. They were Pilate's enemies, too, and it looks like he wasn't going to give them what they wanted if he could help it. But when they said Jesus claimed to be king, which was tantamount to treason against the Emperor, Pilate had to interrogate him.
"Are you the King of the Jews?' he demanded. To which Jesus countered, "Are you asking this on your own or did others tell you about me?" Pilate retorted, "I am not a Jew, am I?" Pilate sounds a bit contemptuous but he might have actually been ignorant of what the Messiah actually was. Pilate was not very understanding when it came to the Jews he governed. It's one of the reasons his governorship was so tumultuous and why he ultimately was removed by Rome.
Pilate continues: "Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?"
Jesus hadn't raised an army or issued marching orders or called for revolution. But he didn't defend himself. He accepted the title of king implicitly and said, "My kingdom is not from this world." Note that he didn't say, "My kingdom is not of this world," but "My kingdom is not from this world." The Greek preposition indicates origin. So it's not that Jesus' kingdom doesn't belong here; it's that it doesn't originate from this world.
And the evidence for that fact? Jesus said that if his kingdom came from this world, his followers would be fighting to rescue him. The difference is that, unlike the kingdoms of this world, physical might and violence isn't the way to establish or keep power in God's kingdom. So what is its basis?
When Jesus says, "my kingdom is not from here," Pilate responds, "So you are a king?" And Jesus answers, "You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice." Notice that he doesn't say, "everyone who belongs to my kingdom," but "everyone who belongs to the truth." And it parallels what Jesus says in chapter 10 about his sheep knowing his voice and following him.
Though our lectionary text cuts off on the verse just before it, Pilate's reply to Jesus is to ask, rhetorically, and possibly cynically, "What is truth?" And, frankly, it's a question anyone reading John's gospel would eventually ask as well. The word pops up more than 2 dozen times in John and in almost every chapter. But by the time Pilate asks about the truth, the astute reader would already know the answer. In chapter 14, Jesus says, "I'm the way, the truth and the life." The answer to Pilate's question is standing in front of him.
The kingdom of God is not based on brute force but on the truth of who Jesus is. He is the God whose power is love. Those who belong to him, who know the voice of the truth, listen to him and follow him. Unlike every earthly kingdom, which expands by conquering the unwilling, the kingdom of God expands exclusively by incorporating those who listen and respond to Jesus' call. It grows by love. The church gets in trouble whenever it tries to expand in the way worldly realms do, by imposing itself upon others or forcibly converting people.
Another thing that has gotten the church into trouble is converting people to something other than Christ. By that I mean converting them to a theological system or a style of worship or an ethical system or a philosophical point of view or an institution. People have shown themselves to be quite capable of putting parts of Christianity ahead of Jesus. They have loved the church or an issue or even a certain interpretation more than Christ. They will nullify Jesus' plain words in order to defend something they actually value more. We see people trying to be more Christian than Jesus by either denying his emphasis on social justice or his emphasis on personal holiness.
The truth has an inconvenient habit of not hewing to our personal opinions of what it should be. Nor is the truth concerned with being simple or one-dimensional. Jesus wasn't. That's why it takes 4 gospels to tell the story of Jesus from various perspectives. That's why it takes 39 books of the Old Testament to establish the background and precursors of the gospel. That's why it takes 23 books to examine the implications and aftermath of the gospels. But to interpret them you have to keep Christ in the center. If you don't, you get a skewed version of the truth.
Of course, this puts Jesus at a disadvantage as a king. If he only rules the consenting, those who respond to his truth, he isn't going to have as many followers as leaders who use their power to make people their subjects.
And yet Christianity grew. Gentiles, slaves and women were especially drawn to this religion of love, where everyone is equal in the sight of God. A woman could be an apostle, a slave could be a bishop, Jews and Gentiles were both saved by God's grace through faith, not by their achievements. When Rome decided to wipe out Christianity through brute force and death, it had no better luck than when it killed Jesus. As he rose from the dead, so too faith in him lived by the blood of the martyrs. Pagans start to feel sorry for Christians, whom, they noted, went to their deaths with nobility. And when Christians stayed in Rome to care for victims of plague rather than flee, people began to admire the faithful. For more than 300 years Christianity was illegal. And during those same three centuries, Christianity spread throughout the Empire, so much so that tolerance of the faith was the best political option for Constantine when he becomes emperor.
After this, however, Christianity enters into an uneasy marriage with the state. It gains power and extends its influence but it loses much of its prophetic stance, it compromises its ethics and takes up the traditional role of religion in a society: the blesser of the status quo. And when it does find itself in conflict with the rulers of earthly kingdoms, it finds that few so-called Christian princes will submit themselves to its authority.
It is ever thus. When the church is too closely allied to the state, political power corrupts it. It gets used and when it is inconvenient, just like Pilate, politicians will sell out Jesus and try to kill the truth. In Romans 13, we are commanded to obey our national leader, to obey the laws and to pay our taxes. But as we see in Acts 5, when specifically forbidden to preach the gospel, we must obey God rather than men.
As Christians we are to live in this world but not to be of it. Our kingdom does not originate in the passions of this world but comes from the realm of God's Spirit. Finding a dynamic balance of expressing the spiritual in the physical realm is a difficult one. But we must always remember who has the last word and the final say: our true king, Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God. And we must follow his example. What he did was not what the rulers of this world would do. They would never show themselves to be vulnerable, nor sacrifice themselves or their power. He, by contrast, was never motivated by gaining power but by the truth he must express, the truth of God's self-sacrificial love for all those created to bear his image. Jesus was that truth incarnate and he has passed that mission on to us. Now we are to live out that truth. And in some ways it is harder today than it was when the faith was young. The first Christians had little or nothing to lose in a culture where they were a small illegal group. We are a large and prosperous portion of the population. If we live according to the commands of our king, we risk sacrificing our comfortable and respectable lives. And so we must ask ourselves: whom do we serve? This world or God's kingdom? The worshippers of power or the one who is the truth? And how do we prepare for the coming of our king?
Thursday, November 22, 2012
Recipe for Thanksgiving
Holidays are the hardest time to preach. They come every year; their purpose and reason are usually pretty clear and there's very little that you can add. Few preachers want to merely repeat what they've said before and what everyone already knows.
So I was toying with using this time to question whether we should have a Thanksgiving Day. After all, shouldn't we as Christians be thankful every day?
Then I saw an article on the internet about how one doesn't need to believe in a god to be thankful for one's life, one's good health, or one's successful career. I'm a bit of a stickler for the proper definition and use of words and I pointed out that while one could appreciate those good things in one's life, without believing in God, one couldn't be thankful. You thank a person for a gift or gracious act. You cannot thank blind, non-sentient chance. From a strictly non-theistic stance, one must acknowledge that you did not choose your parents; they did not choose which sperm and egg would unite to cause you; your DNA determines to a large extent your health and, according to some scientists, your personality. So there's no one to thank. Or if you are arrogant, and, ignoring both science and theology, think you really are responsible for all of your success, you could congratulate yourself. Either way, without God, Thanksgiving is just "I'm One Lucky S.O.B." Day, a celebration of smugness.
For thanksgiving to occur, there has to be a gift, there has to be a giver and there has to be a recipient who is humble and grateful. So you can and should be thankful to your parents for being good parents, to your doctor for keeping you healthy, and your boss for not firing you. But for being alive at all, for being in a world and universe that favors life, for able to articulate the concept of thankfulness, there is no one to thank, unless, as many non-theists do, you anthropomorphize a process, like evolution.
Without God, what is just is. Nothing is a gift; it is just a fact. It is not a sign of favor or disfavor, or of any kind of intention. You may be happy to have it or unhappy but you can't be thankful or resentful. You cannot thank God for your talents nor can you blame him for perceived deficits. You've simply won or lost a cosmic lottery. And if you seem to lose that lottery, if you are saddled with a bad family, illness or accident, or a disappointing career, there is no way you can be grateful for that.
With God, however, anything and everything can be seen as a gift. If you have a talent or a wonderful spouse or great children, you can thank God. You can also, and I have seen this, thank God even for the things in life that most would see as negatives, like a dysfunctional family or a failed business or being in jail. I've seen people who had a life-threatening illness tell me that it made them more grateful for their life, for their families, for the little pleasures and joys. It has helped them prioritize their lives, spending less time on work and more on loved ones. It has brought them into contact with people they otherwise may not have met: doctors, nurses, therapists, other patients and their families. Sometime they realize that they can use their experience to help others in the same circumstances.
This is a situation C. S. Lewis called complex good. It is a good that can only exist because of evil. Love, sharing, and beauty can exist in an unfallen world. Compassion, forgiveness, reconciliation can only exist in a fallen one, because they are good reacting to and overcoming evil. And some people come to be grateful for the hardship or darkness that made it possible for them to grow intellectually, physically, emotionally and spiritually stronger and more mature.
Without God, there is no giver. There is no intention that you receive something. Some non-theists like this. They don't wish to be indebted to anyone. But it also means that there is no one to question, ask guidance of or complain to when you receive something you'd rather not. You can decide to make it a learning experience but there are no expectations that you do so. You can let it make you bitter and angry if you wish. In an indifferent universe, you are free to imbue it with any meaning or none at all. You cannot expect consolation, though. Or compensation or wholeness or healing in either this life or any other. There is literally no promise of a happy ending or justice and thus there is no reason for hope.
Hope is the consequence of having a loving and faithful God. Trusting God allows us to see this world, this life and everything that goes with it, pleasant or not, as a gift. His promise of a good outcome for a life spent serving him helps us through the rougher times. And we can expect his help with understanding and using his gifts properly, the way a parent or grandparent will help a child ride the bike she received or learn a game he has unwrapped. God's presence is also a gift. We are not on our own and that both gives us hope and makes us grateful.
Without God, there is no recipient. Pleasant and unpleasant stuff just presents itself to you. There is not rhyme or reason to it. You can try to reject it or just accept it or, irrationally, feel entitled to any good fortune that comes your way. But that deprives you of the benefits of cosmic gratitude.
Science has been studying gratitude of late. The findings are remarkable. Gratitude has been linked to good health, decreased anxiety and depression, increased quality of sleep, kinder behavior towards others, and higher long-term satisfaction. It improves marriage, decreases pain and lowers one's blood pressure. It makes one less aggressive, more optimistic, less materialistic, more spiritual and less self-centered. Gratitude increases your energy levels, helps you relax, makes you more likely to exercise, and lengthens your life. Psychologists call gratitude the forgotten factor in happiness. They've found that keeping a daily gratitude journal makes you happier longer than winning the lottery.
And, yes, you can and should be grateful to the people in your life for all they are and do. And for the fact that they exist and that you exist and that the sun exists and all things good, both simple and complex, exist, you can and should be grateful to God. And for the fact that your sins are forgiven and that you are reconciled to God and that you are now a child of God and that you have eternal life, you can and should be grateful to Jesus Christ. And for the fact that Christ lives in you and for the fact that you are being transformed into his image and for the fact that you have access to God and for the fact that you are being guided into all truth and for the fact that you have a guarantee of resurrection and for the fact that you can bear the fruit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control, you can and should be grateful to the Holy Spirit.
For Christians all is gift and grace; everything flows from God's undeserved, unreserved goodness. He gives us gifts that we might share them with each other. And if anyone lacks anything, it is because we have tried to hoard his gifts rather than share them, or because we have not devoted the same resources, energy and ingenuity that we show in getting what we want. But those abilities are themselves gifts from God. God's generosity should move us to reciprocate. As Jesus said, "Freely you have received; freely give."
And so maybe there was some truth in my first sermon idea. Thanksgiving should not be restricted to one day. We should be thankful to God everyday for family, friends, our creation and redemption, for the good news of God's love and for the privilege of serving him. Science shows that gratitude is vital to our mental, physical and spiritual health. In other words, we were created to be thankful. So from this day forward, let us rejoice in the fact that we have countless reasons to be thankful, beginning with our overwhelmingly generous God.
So I was toying with using this time to question whether we should have a Thanksgiving Day. After all, shouldn't we as Christians be thankful every day?
Then I saw an article on the internet about how one doesn't need to believe in a god to be thankful for one's life, one's good health, or one's successful career. I'm a bit of a stickler for the proper definition and use of words and I pointed out that while one could appreciate those good things in one's life, without believing in God, one couldn't be thankful. You thank a person for a gift or gracious act. You cannot thank blind, non-sentient chance. From a strictly non-theistic stance, one must acknowledge that you did not choose your parents; they did not choose which sperm and egg would unite to cause you; your DNA determines to a large extent your health and, according to some scientists, your personality. So there's no one to thank. Or if you are arrogant, and, ignoring both science and theology, think you really are responsible for all of your success, you could congratulate yourself. Either way, without God, Thanksgiving is just "I'm One Lucky S.O.B." Day, a celebration of smugness.
For thanksgiving to occur, there has to be a gift, there has to be a giver and there has to be a recipient who is humble and grateful. So you can and should be thankful to your parents for being good parents, to your doctor for keeping you healthy, and your boss for not firing you. But for being alive at all, for being in a world and universe that favors life, for able to articulate the concept of thankfulness, there is no one to thank, unless, as many non-theists do, you anthropomorphize a process, like evolution.
Without God, what is just is. Nothing is a gift; it is just a fact. It is not a sign of favor or disfavor, or of any kind of intention. You may be happy to have it or unhappy but you can't be thankful or resentful. You cannot thank God for your talents nor can you blame him for perceived deficits. You've simply won or lost a cosmic lottery. And if you seem to lose that lottery, if you are saddled with a bad family, illness or accident, or a disappointing career, there is no way you can be grateful for that.
With God, however, anything and everything can be seen as a gift. If you have a talent or a wonderful spouse or great children, you can thank God. You can also, and I have seen this, thank God even for the things in life that most would see as negatives, like a dysfunctional family or a failed business or being in jail. I've seen people who had a life-threatening illness tell me that it made them more grateful for their life, for their families, for the little pleasures and joys. It has helped them prioritize their lives, spending less time on work and more on loved ones. It has brought them into contact with people they otherwise may not have met: doctors, nurses, therapists, other patients and their families. Sometime they realize that they can use their experience to help others in the same circumstances.
This is a situation C. S. Lewis called complex good. It is a good that can only exist because of evil. Love, sharing, and beauty can exist in an unfallen world. Compassion, forgiveness, reconciliation can only exist in a fallen one, because they are good reacting to and overcoming evil. And some people come to be grateful for the hardship or darkness that made it possible for them to grow intellectually, physically, emotionally and spiritually stronger and more mature.
Without God, there is no giver. There is no intention that you receive something. Some non-theists like this. They don't wish to be indebted to anyone. But it also means that there is no one to question, ask guidance of or complain to when you receive something you'd rather not. You can decide to make it a learning experience but there are no expectations that you do so. You can let it make you bitter and angry if you wish. In an indifferent universe, you are free to imbue it with any meaning or none at all. You cannot expect consolation, though. Or compensation or wholeness or healing in either this life or any other. There is literally no promise of a happy ending or justice and thus there is no reason for hope.
Hope is the consequence of having a loving and faithful God. Trusting God allows us to see this world, this life and everything that goes with it, pleasant or not, as a gift. His promise of a good outcome for a life spent serving him helps us through the rougher times. And we can expect his help with understanding and using his gifts properly, the way a parent or grandparent will help a child ride the bike she received or learn a game he has unwrapped. God's presence is also a gift. We are not on our own and that both gives us hope and makes us grateful.
Without God, there is no recipient. Pleasant and unpleasant stuff just presents itself to you. There is not rhyme or reason to it. You can try to reject it or just accept it or, irrationally, feel entitled to any good fortune that comes your way. But that deprives you of the benefits of cosmic gratitude.
Science has been studying gratitude of late. The findings are remarkable. Gratitude has been linked to good health, decreased anxiety and depression, increased quality of sleep, kinder behavior towards others, and higher long-term satisfaction. It improves marriage, decreases pain and lowers one's blood pressure. It makes one less aggressive, more optimistic, less materialistic, more spiritual and less self-centered. Gratitude increases your energy levels, helps you relax, makes you more likely to exercise, and lengthens your life. Psychologists call gratitude the forgotten factor in happiness. They've found that keeping a daily gratitude journal makes you happier longer than winning the lottery.
And, yes, you can and should be grateful to the people in your life for all they are and do. And for the fact that they exist and that you exist and that the sun exists and all things good, both simple and complex, exist, you can and should be grateful to God. And for the fact that your sins are forgiven and that you are reconciled to God and that you are now a child of God and that you have eternal life, you can and should be grateful to Jesus Christ. And for the fact that Christ lives in you and for the fact that you are being transformed into his image and for the fact that you have access to God and for the fact that you are being guided into all truth and for the fact that you have a guarantee of resurrection and for the fact that you can bear the fruit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control, you can and should be grateful to the Holy Spirit.
For Christians all is gift and grace; everything flows from God's undeserved, unreserved goodness. He gives us gifts that we might share them with each other. And if anyone lacks anything, it is because we have tried to hoard his gifts rather than share them, or because we have not devoted the same resources, energy and ingenuity that we show in getting what we want. But those abilities are themselves gifts from God. God's generosity should move us to reciprocate. As Jesus said, "Freely you have received; freely give."
And so maybe there was some truth in my first sermon idea. Thanksgiving should not be restricted to one day. We should be thankful to God everyday for family, friends, our creation and redemption, for the good news of God's love and for the privilege of serving him. Science shows that gratitude is vital to our mental, physical and spiritual health. In other words, we were created to be thankful. So from this day forward, let us rejoice in the fact that we have countless reasons to be thankful, beginning with our overwhelmingly generous God.
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