A Hammer or a Twenty-Pound Bag of Sugar

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It’s tricky. We want to be seen as “good” (but we often mean nice). We know that we are to speak the truth. But, sometimes, we want the person we are dealing with to know that we know what’s really right and good and true. And other times, we want to avoid dealing with things. Being both caring and honest is a challenge. It takes practice.

Love and Truth go together. One without the other leads to disaster. If a relationship is important to us, we need to risk holding love and truth in the dynamic tension that they generate, and offer them carefully joined, but without fear.

Life is all about relationship. Love presupposes a relationship that fosters mutuality and openness. A loving relationship is nurtured by direct, open, honest communication, through dialogue. Fundamental to love is respect/reverence for our self and for others.

Truth without love is a weapon. We can hammer others with our righteousness. If we care more about being right than about the other, what does this say about this relationship? Of what value is an uncaring relationship?

Love without truth is saccharine sentimentality. It has no depth, no viable future. We often try to avoid difficult, messy or unpleasant situations. We can hide behind excuses: “I don’t want to hurt their feelings.” or “They can’t handle the truth.” There is no respect for the other’s capacity to grow or to change if we can’t be truthful with her/him. Of what value is a dishonest relationship?

One possible way to handle this kind of courageous conversation is: Before speaking, STOP, and consider: How can I communicate my love, care, concern AND clearly, simply say what needs to be said? This requires practice. Maybe we begin with an apology: This is hard for me. I don’t know how to say this well. I care deeply about you, and I feel that there is something important I need to say to you.We have no control over the reaction or response this will evoke, but it’s very important to take a chance on the intimate relationship between Truth and Love.

 

Which Leaven Do We Choose?

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At the beginning of Chapter Eight of the Gospel according to Mark (Mark 8:1-21) there are a series of interconnected events. First, Jesus facilitates the feeding of a crowd of 4,000 people. After this, Jesus and the disciples get in boats and cross the Sea of Galilee. When he lands on the other shore, some Pharisees come up to Jesus and demand that he provide them with proof of his credentials from God. “Give us a sign from heaven!” This is a test of Jesus’ legitimacy. Who do you think you are? Where do you come from? What right or authorization do you have to do what you are doing? Show us! Now! Jesus simply replies, “No sign will be given to this generation.” Jesus gets back into a boat with his disciples and leaves those Pharisees to wonder, or to gloat at their ability to get under Jesus’ skin.

When they are away from shore, Jesus gives a warning to his followers (which means us, too). “Beware of the leaven of  the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod.” As happens so often, the disciples (us?) jump to conclusions and miss Jesus’ point. They (maybe because their stomachs are growling?) assume that Jesus is chiding them because they have only one loaf of bread on board (and what is that among so many hungry people – sound familiar?) This misunderstanding leads, once again, to a deeper, fuller teaching.

Remember that immediately before the Pharisees challenge Jesus, he had orchestrated the operation that fed 4,000 hungry people. Doesn’t that, by itself, hint that God is at work in and through Jesus? The disciples had been there, had participated in that gracious experience. And you, my close followers? Don’t you see? It’s not about bread people! So, what is Jesus warning us against?

Jesus used leaven as a parabolic example of the tiny, subversive, and potent action that brings about the Kingdom of God. But, in popular Israelite culture, leaven had another connotation. Leaven came to signify an agent of corrosive action – indicating an invasive, pervasive source of evil. The leaven of the Pharisees, as Jesus frequently pointed out to them, was their hypocrisy. They had powerful influence, but used it in a way that made things worse for others – especially the little, ordinary people. The leaven of Herod was manifested in his ruthless and amoral behavior – greed, lust, domination, control… He, too, used his role, which might have brought about much good, to make lives more difficult.

This type of leaven is seductive – to use your role, power, influence to try to manipulate or control others. Often, fear, threats, coercion are employed to get your own way. This leaven cannot build anything positive, much less God’s Kingdom. Fear is a powerful influencer. Jesus bet his life that love was even more powerful. Which leaven do we choose?

The god Who Is On Our Side

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Do you ever wonder, when two sports teams are vying for victory against one another, and their ardent fans (on both sides) are praying for their side to win, who does God listen to and grant favor? All those cheering for Notre Dame University (for example), and all those cheering for Southern Methodist University, as their teams meet in some athletic contest, hands folded, eyes raised to heaven, cry out to God. The more fervent their loyalty is, the more they petition God to intervene on behalf of their beloved athletes – and for the pride of their school. They make their peace of mind, their wellbeing, their happiness dependent on the outcome of a game. Who is God attending to with blessing, and who does God choose to ignore?

Yes, this is an exaggeration, but our human tendency to curry God’s favor and use God against those who, we believe, oppose us, is very real. We want a god who takes care of us, and who brings about the defeat and disgrace of our enemies – a god who is on our side. Sports team against sports team, party against party, warring nation against warring nation, denomination against denomination, religion against religion, and so it goes. We pray for our side to win, to be right, to be number one. The outcome determines who God really likes – who is good and right and justified.

But what if the outcome, the result, has nothing to do with who God favors, or considers to be good?  Jesus describes God, in a most un-partisan way, allowing rain to fall on good and bad alike, the sun to shine on the just and on the unjust (Matthew 5: 43-45). Is it possible that God desires, as much as possible, that any and all opposition ends in some kind of win-win situation  – that all enemies discover their commonality, and realize the terrible waste of hostility? So much more can come from cooperation for the common good than from ego-driven claims of superiority over others. Whose side is God on? God is on our side – as long as our OUR is big enough to include enemies as well as friends.

Love is ……………. Inconvenient!

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How many weddings have incorporated the passage, 1 Corinthians 13:1-13, to focus on the dynamic which will (they hope) guide and empower the life together of the new wife and husband? St. Paul uses a Greek-style eulogy of “the greatest virtue” to point out the primary place of love in the life of all who follow Jesus the Christ. We know the descriptive flow… Love is patient, love is kind, love is… But there’s (at least) one element of love that Paul omits. Love is inconvenient.

To put it simply: love involves personal relationship; personal relationships are messy and unpredictable. Once we allow another person to have access to our heart, we can count on our life being out of (our) control. Our time, our attention, our care are no longer mine alone – they are ours. Love is always a call to ecstasy – standing outside of one’s self – caught up in the gravitational pull of the other. Love demands availability. My plans, my program, living life on MY terms, all this is up for grabs. How inconvenient! 

We have this ego-tendency to think that I have the right to set my own course, to determine my own fate, to “do it my way.” This might have been true if I was the only creature ever brought into existence……but probably not. J. P. Sartre said it best (from this point of view), “Hell is other people.” We are all (in-laws, outlaws, ancestors, aliens..) in it together. And we need to care for each other, love one another, otherwise there’s no future for anyone. Talk about inconvenient!

Here’s a troubling thought. We believe that God is love (1 John:4-16).  Love is particularly inconvenient. It follows, then, that God is inconvenient. God, who invites all into relationship – who, as our lover, claims the right to break into our lives whenever, however love requires – is notoriously bothersome, refusing to leave us alone to stumble forever in the dark. God asks things of us that totally disrupt our “best laid schemes.”  What conveniences do we need to lay aside in order to experience more fully the warm, all-embracing, inconvenient love that is God?

 

The Gift of Sabbath

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Where would we be, if not for a break now and then from the work of staying alive, of loving, of trying to do good and to make things better? Our Jewish ancestors in faith were on to something! Realize the need for regular time off, and use God’s work of creation as its justification. Make a calendar with space just to be, every seven days. God rested. We rest. We need this. 

It seems that we have forgotten this healthy rhythm. We run non-stop from activity to activity, from one all-absorbing doing to another all-absorbing doing. We collapse, get less than enough rest, get up and race off to the next busyness. What are we afraid of? What are we running from? Is our world any better because of our intense, foot-on-the-accelerator lives? What would happen if we stopped, if we gave ourselves a break, as God proposed?

While we seem to have Sabbath-amnesia, in Jesus’ day, there was often another kind of Sabbath distortion. The religious leaders among the Israelites back then, afraid that the people’s lax, or partial, following of the Law, would bring God’s disfavor again – to the point of losing even more of their religious privileges grudgingly conceded by their oppressors – insisted, demanded, strict compliance. The Sabbath was to be a day of complete rest from any and all work, or from anything that could possibly be viewed as work. It got to the point where ordinary people felt constrained from living their lives on the Sabbath. It was impossible for many to adhere to the various rules used to explain the Law, and they faced condemnation from the authorities.  

Remember how many times the Sabbath was thrown in the face of Jesus, and used as concrete proof that Jesus could not be from God? One instance is found early in the Gospel of Mark (Mark 2:23-27). Jesus and his disciples are walking through a grain field on a Sabbath. The disciples are clearing a path as they pass through, and picking grains to munch on – to the leaders this equals trail-breaking and harvesting. They are working. When the authorities call Jesus on this, another egregious defiling of God’s holy day, Jesus reminds them that David, God’s chosen ruler, had taken the loaves of bread offered in the Temple, which were only for the priests, and ate them, and even shared them with his companions (literally bread-sharers).

Jesus finishes with the statement, “The Sabbath was made for humanity, not humanity for the Sabbath.” Rules, even the Law, were intended to help us to live well, not to force us to jump through ever-tightening hoops. The Sabbath was a gift to humanity to help us to live more humanely. It is meant to give us space to rest, to remember God and our relationships, to savor creation, to do good, and to engender joy, not to stifle it. We need Sabbath, regular times and spaces of rest, awareness and appreciation, built into our lives, to be fully human.

The Prosperity god

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It’s pretty simple. If you are prospering, God is on your side, If you give God a percentage of your gains, God will increase your wealth multiple times, proving, once again, that God is on your side. God wants you to do well, whether you (as Fr. Pat Dolan would say) are doing good, or not. Even if you are cruel, small-minded, insufferable, God can’t help but make sure you are saturated with riches. It’s divinely guaranteed!

So, the opposite must also be true. If you’re poor, suffering, struggling, sick…, God has turned away from you. Even if you are doing good in the world, if you are just getting by, God has no time for you (or for any such losers!). God’s favor (or lack thereof) is clearly shown in each person’s life. A version of this distorted image of God has been with us for millennia. This self-serving theory keeps coming back with new energy in every age, it seems.

The wisdom from various spiritual traditions is: It’s not what you have, or how much you have, that matters, as much as what you do with what you have. Having too much can be spiritually perilous, as can having too little. Either extreme can turn our hearts away from God and in on ourselves. We can become possessed by what we have, and by what we do not have. God becomes a second thought, or ceases to have any place in our lives.

How radically refreshing is the approach of Jesus! God loves you. If your circumstances are difficult and your resources are few, God does not turn away from you. If your circumstances are easy and your resources are copious, God does not put you ahead of others. God-loves-you! Keep God number one, That’s the most important thing. Trust God. Share what you have been given with those in need. Prosperity can be a blessing, or it can be a curse.  God knows.

Tracking God Across Our Lives

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Our ancestors, who sustained themselves through hunting, often depended upon those in their communities who had a special gift for discovering and following the tracks of the prey which they hunted. These trackers had highly developed senses, and well-honed skills for discerning the slightest signs – a bent stalk of grass, a small stone dislodged, a partial print in some soft earth among rocks, a hair caught in the bark of a tree where their prey had passed. They were frequently responsible for the success of the hunt, and the feeding of the people. Is it possible to track God? What are the signs to be attentive to?

In a world which we experience as defined by death, and many times marked by suffering and sorrow, there are surprises hidden in plain sight: moments of wonder and joy, unexpected gifts of kindness and true concern, a deep level of peace and serenity that comes from acceptance of reality in the face of the agitation and frenzy of so much of our lives. Are we sensitive to these signs of goodness and graciousness?

What we may notice, before anything else, is beauty. We are surrounded by nature that displays its works of art in both grand, majestic scale and in tiny, intricate detail. And there are those among us who are particularly gifted to channel this beauty through works of sight and sound and smell and taste and touch. Did this all not begin with the divine Artist?

Many people, outstanding in our history as a people on this planet, have chosen the narrower way of courageous integrity – true to themselves, their relationships, their values, their commitments. There are so many seductions that  whisper around us to give up, to betray, to compromise, to settle for less than what we are made for. If some things are right and true, does this not point toward One who is completely True?

Then there is the underlying unity and coherence behind the unfolding of creation. How inexplicably amazing is the coming together of innumerable elements to form complex beings, and to engender life in all its various forms! We humans have this innate sense that we are meant to gather, and to all work toward common, good goals and objectives. This asks for, and leads to, communion. Is not God behind this?

It seems to me that the greatest, and rarest, of the signs around and in us is love. Love is what we are made for, yet it requires that we grow beyond selfishness to fully live in love. We need to put aside ego to give ourselves freely, completely, with no conditions, no expectations, no self-referencing. Love is among us. And it flows from absolute love. 

Perhaps we have gotten off track. Perhaps we have convinced ourselves that this hunting is a thing of the past, unnecessary, something we’ve outgrown through our sophistication and science. The signs are still all around us – goodness, graciousness, joy, peace, unity, truth, integrity, wonder, beauty, love. We need to relearn how to read them. It takes practice, and its worth it.

 

This New Year Embrace Hope

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Did you happen to notice that the Gospel chosen for New Year’s Eve is the Prologue to the Gospel according to John (John 1:1-18)? I hadn’t. Is this on purpose, or is it just the next Christmas-related scripture in line? These first 18 verses were added to this Gospel later, and placed before the traditional beginning where John the Baptist comes on the scene. These verses set the stage for the drama of Jesus’ life by inserting his life into a timeless, cosmic context. 

Jesus is identified as the Word of God that speaks creation into existence. God speaks. It happens. And it is all very good. Before any unfolding, or evolving, or developing. there was God, there was God’s Word. Then God speaks, and that is the beginning of all else, of all that will come. 

This adds to, and contrasts with, the stories of creation in the Book of Genesis. In Genesis, there is some primordial chaos, over which the Spirit of God, the breath of God, hovers. God says, “Let there be…,” and it happens. God brings forth order, and progressively introduces the principal pieces that we human beings recognize as created reality.

John points out that the Word, that takes on flesh in Jesus, has been part of everything since before the beginning. It is God’s Word, the divine, effective Word. This Word is the source of life, and manifests itself as light – which was the first outcome of creation.

This Word becomes flesh, moves in with us, and offers us a choice – the light of belief, or the darkness of unbelief.We can pretend, against all scientific evidence, that creation always was, or just randomly came about (lucky for us!). Or we can accept that God’s desire from before the beginning was that we have all that we need to live well, and to be well.

On the cusp of a new year, we are offered this wonderful message: God wants, and has always (as in eternally) wanted to manifest the fullness of divine love for all of us, for all creation – to the point of entering into creation and becoming one of us. No darkness, real or imagined, has ever, or can ever, overcome the light offered to us. This truth is the source of our hope. Welcome the New Year! May it be abundantly good and richly blessed for all!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Born to You this Day…

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“Every normal human birth is a miracle!” Fr. Graves, my college biology professor, would repeatedly exclaim. Think of all the cells, systems, chemical processes interacting and developing according to a pattern embedded in each and every component to bring an infant, alive, whole, well and able to the moment of birth. Life, from onset, is pure gift. Every newborn child is an embodiment of promise, waiting to be nurtured and formed in order to reveal its unique mission and contribution to humanity, to us.

Christmas Eve. We know the story – perhaps too well. Advent has done its best to prepare us, recalling to our mind Isaiah, John the Baptist, Mary, Joseph. God has acted. God is acting. God will act. It is God’s promise and God’s absolute fidelity that give us hope. But, do we realize, really, the love behind the Incarnation? 

God makes a home among us, within an occupied people and nation, in the home of a tradesman and a young maiden. If you were God, is this the matrix you would have chosen?  Not wealth, palatial estate, privilege, entitlement, every possible advantage of education, advancement and career path to success? What was God thinking?

Even this child’s name, Yeshua, is permeated with promise: God saves! Not with armies, force of power, manipulation of history, but through a tiny baby who is loved into fullness of humanity by us, ordinary folks. By being with us (Emmanuel), as one of us, God offers us a path to healing and liberation – the way of love. In Jesus, God saves.

 

The Santa Claus is Coming to Town god

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This festive time of the year brings with it at least one popular, yet disturbing, distorted image we might have of God. A popular Christmas song begins with a warning: You better watch out! Don’t show any of your true feelings (pout, cry shout), because Santa Claus is coming to town. This fantastical elf is all-seeing and is noting down everything about you. And, you will pay the price for any misbehavior. You are being weighed in the balance. Don’t you dare get caught lacking whatever level of comportment this Santa set as the bar for you to achieve.

This Santa is not far from an image of God that is derived from an exaggerated and literal interpretation of the Old Testament: God the ultimate Judge, ready (eager?) to punish any transgression, or to reward compliance with the law (as determined by the experts of the law). This ancient and inadequate image of God is a great tool for controlling the behavior of others, especially children – or the childlike. It relies on fear: fear of punishment, pain, banishment (excommunication), to force submission and to manage the masses.

But are we meant to grovel in fear before God? I don’t think so. Yes, God is just, and has turned the responsibility for judgment over to Jesus. Jesus is our brother, one like us in all things, except sin. He understands what we live, because he has shared our life – to the full, to the end. He gave himself over to us completely in love. We rejected his offer. He was raised from death, and continues to offer us his love. Our response, especially in how we treat the littlest and the least among us, is the basis for any judgment. We are totally loved. Freed from any divine expectations, we can become all that God fashioned us to be. How do we deal with this? Are we even aware of this? 

Bottom line! God is not some morality judge, police officer, or accountant. God desires that we know, in the depth of our being, how precious and beloved we are. God invites, coaxes, our response of love for one another. Jesus is willing to cut us all kinds of slack. He left us with only one commandment: love one another as I have loved you. This is much more challenging than trying to obey a set of rules that we humans have projected onto God. Give it all you’ve got! But we do need to continually allow God to transform us through love – the greatest power in the universe.