Category: Practical Theology

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When the Walls Fall Down

Overlook

Twenty-Sixth Sunday after Pentecost | Luke 21:5-19

We don’t always get what we want, and even when we do, it is never clear which is better.

Blessings turn into cages, and what we thought were our failures may turn out to be gifts. We keep revising our opinions of the past and of events that brought us to where we are. Perspective, like prophecy, is a tricky thing. Just when we think we have a grasp on either one, it shifts.

You will be betrayed, Jesus says. Some of you will be killed, he says, yet not a hair on your head will perish.

Well, which is it? That seems a reasonable enough question, given the plain contradiction. Are we talking metaphorically? The things he describes don’t seem to be metaphors.

This isn’t the happy Jesus of bumper sticker Christianity. It’s not warm and fuzzy theology, and this isn’t the passage one would choose to read to new converts.

Or maybe it is precisely the right passage. They would know what they were in for. It would match up with what life brings them. A gospel life is not a trouble free life, and blessings are not magic. In Christian theology, all paths lead to the cross.

Rocks in StreamAll the stones will be torn down, Jesus says. All of them will be torn down, with not one left on top of the other.

All of the stones were torn down, of course. The Romans destroyed the temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD, purposefully reducing the stone walls to nothing but rubble, making the sort of point that Rome was so very good at making in the face of rebellion.

Today many Christians read this passage as a word of prophecy from Jesus, telling the crowd about things that would happen. Some say that this Gospel was written after 70 AD, when the author of Luke already had experienced the destruction of the temple and seen political persecution of Christians, and so the writer put these words into the mouth of Jesus. That last view is not particularly infused with faith, true enough, but it’s out there, and it’s possible. Still, who knows? God can work with anything, perhaps even a crafty gospel writer.

The meaning and the value of what Jesus is saying doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the temple in Jerusalem, or with stones in actual walls, or the persecution that played out in ancient courts. All of it could apply equally well at any time to our interior landscape, our inner life, our real lives, regardless of what is going on in the world.

Jesus knew that sooner or later our walls fall down. The stones crack and our building blocks get scattered. Maybe we call it depression, or cancer, or the loss of a loved one, or the lack of someone to love. Maybe it’s war, displacement, a flood, loss of work, loss of the ability to work. Our walls fall down. Our temple, our heart, where we cherish the things we have come to love, is broken, and we are cracked open, torn apart.

One of my favorite words is in the last verse of this passage. It is usually translated as patience or endurance, and I have written about it on other occasions: by your endurance you will gain your souls. Endurance. Patience. ὑπομονῇ. Hypomone. Taking this compound word literally, the meaning is remaining under. Living under. Dwelling in all of what life piles onto us.

It is a word of hope, but not the sort of word that most people want to hear. It is a word of being delivered in our troubles, but not out of them, and it does not match up with popular theology. It is the sort of thing understood best by people who have lost something, or who never had it to begin with—the poor, the troubled, the disenfranchised, those who understand that they live in the Exile, like strangers in a strange land, and knowing they may never see the Exodus in this life.

Fallen RocksSooner or later we are all exiles. Every single one of us. It may last a week, or a season, or the rest of our lives, but our walls crack and fall and we are left in the rubble.

The gospel hope is in the presence of a God who does not reside just in high places and in the palaces of a heaven we have not seen. The hope of Christianity is in a God who did not refuse or flee when we chose to kill rather than embrace the incarnation of God.

Yes, that sounds stark.

Christians are used to hearing words like sacrifice and redemption. It is the language which we in the Church use in part to explain and in part to distance ourselves from the event of the crucifixion. The simple fact of the gospel story is that we, or our counterparts from long ago, wanted this Jesus fellow gone. The presence of this god-man, if that is what he was, made us uncomfortable, so uncomfortable that we wanted him dead. Executed. Maybe a few of us would have stood faithful at the cross with John and the three Marys, but most of us can make no such claim. Not if we are honest.

The gospel story tells that God permitted us to kill even God. Perhaps that is what it took for us to grow to the next stage of humanity—killing the God we thought we knew, that we might grow to know the God who dwells among us like a stranger in a strange land. The resurrection story tells us of a God we had never truly known, and a new way of living in the presence of a God who stops at nothing, not even death, to remain present with us.

By Rama (Commons file) Leonard Cohen in 2008.
Leonard Cohen in 2008.

We may lose everything. All our stones may crack and fall, not one left piled on top of another. We may be betrayed by those we love, killed outright. Jesus gives us the promise of being present, that he will give us the word we need at the right time, the right place, to offer an answer and a reason for our lives. And when a wall falls, there is something on the other side. By our endurance we gain our lives.

As the late Leonard Cohen put it, “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”

 

 

Overlook

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The Seven Samurai, er, Brothers

Trees in Autumn

Twenty-Fifth Sunday after Pentecost  |  Luke 20:27-38

It is a queer tale, odd, to our modern ears, this business of seven brothers marrying the same woman one after the other as each died and left her a widow, each trying to leave a son to carry on the name of the first brother in the line who died childless. It is a story based in a society so removed, so alien to us that it makes little sense.

In modern western culture, where married women often do not change their surname and where single parents are not an oddity, we cannot fathom these ancient thought processes. We don’t get the idea that producing an heir, even a surrogate one, was more important than the wishes of the brothers or the rights of the woman. The men and the woman were all, albeit unequally, bound by an archaic set of social laws that we cannot fathom.

These archaic religious practices weren’t even the point of the story. Luke only uses the doozy of a riddle posed by the Sadducees as the setup for Jesus’ answer. Still, it’s worth a little reflection.

Trees in SunsetThe Sadducees did not believe in eternal life nor any resurrection of the dead. This life is it, and when it is over, it’s over, a view that did not lament mortality so much as hold our brief lives all the more precious. They weren’t poking sticks at the notion of a string of brothers and one beleaguered woman following an odd bit of Mosaic law. They were trying to debate the notion of resurrection, the idea of life continuing beyond this life, by holding it up to ridicule.

We might struggle with both parts—the riddle and the answer.

We view the ancient religious marriages as peculiar, serving an end that we no longer understand, treating a woman as inheritable as any family heirloom—cherished, maybe, but property nonetheless. We might stop to view it from the perspective of the Garden of Eden.

After all, there are other views of the creation narratives of Genesis than the explanations of mainstream Christianity. One alternative to seeing the expulsion from Eden as punishment is to view this first exile experience, and the prescription of child bearing and work, as representing a passage into the adulthood of humanity, the realization of mortality, and the appreciation of the only two things that remain after us—our work and our children.

From that perspective, we might appreciate the ancient idea of a man fathering a surrogate son for a brother who died childless. Dying childless was to die indeed. A child meant that one’s life continued generation by generation. (There was also the transfer of property to consider, though the question at hand is life, not the deed to the farm.)

The answer Jesus gave should do more than enlighten us about the afterlife. He didn’t offer it, and Luke did not bother to record it, just so that we could dangle his words in the face of modern Sadducees: see, Jesus said there is an afterlife.

For that matter, I don’t think it is ever safe to use the words of Jesus to prove what we believe. There are lots of reasons, but the best one is this—we’re probably wrong, as wrong as the Sadducees, the Pharisees, the Romans, the disciples, as wrong as every single group that comes along in the gospels. It’s what all of them had in common—being wrong. It is likely the single thing that all of us have in common.

fallpumpkinsChristians, particularly American evangelicals, like to be right. Right about gay rights, human rights, pro life rights. Right about who can marry whom. Right about sex, drugs, alcohol, music, art, literature, movies, and political candidates. As right as the Sadducees, who were very good people. As right as the Pharisees, who were also very good people. More right than most of the disciples, who were fairly good people most of the time.

At the end of this gospel passage, Jesus says something interesting about God and about people who died in ages past. “Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living, for to him all of them are alive.”

To God all of them are alive. Not right. Not voting for the right candidate, opposing the right (or wrong) positions. Alive. Which suggests there is something more important that being right: being alive in God is the point.

As I write these words, I see a tree, the leaves slowly turning from green to orange and brown for autumn. It is not bothering to sort out the people around it, the birds, or the squirrels. It is simply alive, alive to them, alive to the sunlight, alive to the shifting seasons, and it is alive to God. It is not giving a great deal of thought to the future spring, that final spring, when no green leaves will emerge from its branches.

The voices on our televisions, computer screens, radios, churches, government, grocery stores, and even in our heads can tell us a great deal about who is right (usually us) and more about who is wrong (usually them.) That tree can tell us more about being alive to God.

If we get the part about being alive to God, the rest will take care of itself.

Trees in Autumn

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Bigger on the Inside

Stained glass window in the the protestant Christ church in Korntal in Baden-Württemberg. “Hurry down, Zacchaeus”

Luke 19:1-10 | Twenty Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

The TARDIS from Doctor Who
The TARDIS from Doctor Who

Doctor Who is a BBC television series that began in the 1960s. The stories are about the adventures of the Doctor, who travels time and space in a machine called the TARDIS–Time And Relative Dimensions in Space. On the outside, the device looks like an old fashioned British police call box, a blue telephone booth. On the inside, it is enormous, with uncounted rooms and passages. I can’t think of a show that I would recommend more wholeheartedly for kids. For that matter, there are few shows that can match it for grownups.

Zacchaeus of this gospel passage is like the TARDIS—bigger on the inside. No doubt plenty of people before me have made a great deal of Zacchaeus’ small stature, but so did Luke. The Gospel story is insistent, recording that he was a small man, that he climbed a tree to see over the crowd, and pointing out that when he responded to the criticism of the crowd, he took care to stand up before speaking. Plenty of people stand, we might say, but Luke is particular to tell us that Zacchaeus did.

Being from the South, there are aspects of the story that are difficult for me to imagine. Our sycamores, when we find them, are very large trees with no figs. Our figs may be called trees, but no one other than the smallest child could climb in one, let alone see over the heads of a crowd from the branches. The tree in the story sounds like a sycamore fig, a variety native to Africa that grows in the Middle East—a larger tree by far than our figs, and fruit-bearing.

By Reinhardhauke (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Zacchaeus on stained glass of Église Saint-Pierre de Neuilly-sur-Seine
Something else is peculiar about the story. In calling Zacchaeus down out of the tree, Jesus says, “I must stay in your house today.”

A must. A necessity.

Is this the same compulsion that drove Jesus toward Jerusalem? Does he mean that by staying with this chief of tax collectors, a man despised for his position and his wealth as well as for his small stature, that something needful for the kingdom of God is being accomplished?

The kingdom of God. The Gospel. The life of Jesus. These are things that are also different than they appear, things that are bigger on the inside.

Zacchaeus hears the crowd, their grumblings and their insults. Many of us know what that is like, to hear the insults of people who hide behind anonymity or mutter at the edge of our hearing. Many of us have also taken our place in the crowd, mumbling and insulting with the worst of them.

Zacchaeus stands as tall as he is able, and he shows them his real stature. Half of his wealth he gives to the poor. Anyone he has defrauded, he promises to repay four times over—and out of the half of his wealth that he has remaining. We have to wonder at that second promise. If he were the scoundrel that the crowd seem to think he is, he would need more money to meet the claims. Maybe that second promise is more of an indictment—if any of you want to make me out a crook, come prove it so. Sometimes we need to speak for ourselves.

Zacchaeus didn’t let the crowd deter him. When he couldn’t see who Jesus was one way, he chose another. The challenge didn’t stop him, and the jeers of a crowd who watched a tiny man climb a tree like a boy didn’t stop him. The opinions of other people didn’t stop him. Rejection didn’t stop him.

When he saw Jesus, when he heard Jesus calling him down and saying in front of everyone that he was going to Zacchaeus’ home, he didn’t hesitate.

Hearing the reaction of the crowd, he responded in a surprising manner. Where many of us would rage against the insults or attack those who were mocking him, Zacchaeus responded with a great heart and deep faith. His critics must have left that scene feeling that Zacchaeus was a bigger man than they.

Climbing that tree so that he could see was a choice, and so was clambering back down as everyone gaped at him. Giving to the poor and making amends were choices. Welcoming Jesus was a choice.

All of us are Zacchaeus. Sometimes we’re smaller than we think. Sometimes we’re bigger. We get to choose. The trick is lifting our eyes to see the difference.

Stained glass window in the the protestant Christ church in Korntal in Baden-Württemberg. “Hurry down, Zacchaeus”

Stained glass window in the the protestant Christ church in Korntal in Baden-Württemberg. “Hurry down, Zacchaeus”

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Contending with Contempt

Children and families trying to reach a UNHCR camp for refugees. Image from http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/

Luke 18:9-14  |  Twenty-Third Sunday after Pentecost

He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt…

Well, that really says it all, doesn’t it? Except we still have the notion that the words are aimed at other people. Like Trump supporters. Or Hillary people. Or even Bernie folk.

There’s nothing quite as satisfying as being right, unless it is the certainty that other people are wrong. That’s particularly true when we think we have God on our side.

Except that God doesn’t take sides. Not yours, not mine. Not the side of those people over there.

That seems to be the point of the gospel message, that God takes no one’s side, or maybe takes everyone’s side, but most of all that God invites us, expects us, to take God’s side. Not that we are to be right. Not that we tell others that they are wrong.

The point of the gospel is that we are all instruments of grace, which isn’t ours to keep or give away.

When we see people hungry, we are supposed to feed them.
When we see people without a home or clothes, we are supposed to find homes for them. We’re supposed to clothe them.
When we see people ignorant and without skills or opportunity, we are supposed to teach them and prop open the door.
When we see them sick, we’re to bring them balm. And doctors. And clean water and mosquito nets. We’re supposed to make sure their children don’t die of a disease we’re not even exposed to anymore. We’re supposed to make sure their children don’t get shot trying to walk to school.
When we forgive others, we’re supposed to do it the way we’d like to be forgiven.

Hey, that’s pure gospel. Blame Jesus. And no, we don’t get an escape clause if the hungry people are part of a different religion, or have a different skin color, or don’t conjugate their verbs well because of poor education, or don’t speak English at all.

A health worker with a woman. Image from www.gatesfoundation.org
A health worker with a woman. Image from http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Who-We-Are — click on the link or on the photo to visit their website and learn more about what they are doing in the world.

The only thing the overwhelming majority of needy people ever did was to get themselves born in the wrong place. Let’s think about that. When we see needy people, we might consider what brave and brilliant and wondrous things we did to be born to a better life.

Yes, work is important. And responsibility. And making something of yourself. And ‘God helps those who help themselves’ must be written somewhere, just nowhere in scripture.

So is grace important. And opportunity. And human decency, let alone Christian compassion.

“I thank you God that I am not like other people,” said one fellow, the one Jesus held up to ridicule.

Admit it. We think the same way as that fellow. On some level, when we see the homeless or the poor or the dispossessed, we think something like the same thought, and we think we are being grateful. We think we are being faithful and humble. The last thing we think is that we are precisely the people Jesus was talking to.

I’m afraid that this is genuine gospel stuff. It’s not the popular kind, but it is the kind Jesus taught. It’s the kind of thing that made people want to crucify him. If we Christians don’t like it, maybe we should try a different religion.

If we’re tired of just being right, and want to do right, there are plenty of opportunities, probably starting in our own homes and neighborhoods. Faith isn’t what we say. It’s what we do.

Here’s a great place to start: http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/

Children and families trying to reach a UNHCR camp for refugees. Image from http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/
Children and families outside a UNHCR camp for refugees. Image from http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/  Click on the link or on the photo to visit the website and find out more, including ways you can help people whom you may not even have known existed.

 

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Judges, Crones, and Charlie Brown

Luke 18:1-8  |  Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost

Charlie Brown kept trying to kick the football, even though he knew Lucy would pull the ball away every time. He kept trying to fly his kite, even though both Charlie Brown and we knew that the tree was going to eat it.

That kind of persistence is admirable, but on some level watching it makes us a little uncomfortable. We like Charlie Brown, or most of us like him anyway, and we would like to see him succeed at least once—kick the ball or get his kite past that malevolent tree—because it would mean that we might manage to do whatever the thing is that we would most love to do one day. At least once.

The story about the persistent widow, a cranky old crone who keeps coming to a disinterested and unjust judge, wearing him down until he gives her justice, also makes us uncomfortable.

We’re used to the image of God as judge. It is so pervasive that we have difficulty getting around it. Plenty of people are turned off anything having to do with religion or faith precisely because of the way this image of God is pushed on them.

Creation of the Sun, Moon, and Planets by Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel, c.1511
Creation of the Sun, Moon, and Planets by Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel, c.1511

Luke isn’t much help. The judge in the story doesn’t even care about people. He only acts on behalf of the widow because she is bothering him with her incessant requests. We draw a parallel between the unjust judge and God and between the widow and ourselves—of course we do. It’s disturbing. While it appears that Luke sees the judge as a contrast to God rather than a comparison, we still worry. After all, many of us have laid requests in front of God over and over and over, only to be met with silence.

A word of caution. Many people seem to think that the teachings of Jesus were meant to reassure us, to make us feel good about ourselves and each other and God and life in general, but those people are not paying attention. Jesus did offer words of comfort and reassurance, but he also worked in plenty of unsettling things. Jesus was not satisfied with the status quo, neither that of society nor that of our mindsets.

This is one of the few parables to come with an explanation. Now he was speaking a parable to them about the necessity always to pray and not to lose heart…

We get that it is an argument from the lesser case to the greater—this unjust human will eventually do the right thing if you bug him long enough, therefore how much more will God?

Still. We may be forgiven for remaining uneasy.

A word of definition. Theodicy. Merriam Webster defines it this way: “defense of God’s goodness and omnipotence in view of the existence of evil”

If we haven’t seen an answer to our prayer, does Jesus mean that we have not persevered long enough in asking? How long is long enough? Worse, how about the folks who seem to get nothing but bad despite their good? How about the whole story of Job, to name an example?

When we watch children drown in the Mediterranean, innocent people bombed in Aleppo, poor girls kidnapped in Africa, simple and decent people having their homes destroyed by hurricanes or floods, it begs the question of why. And of who hasn’t prayed long enough. And of whether God is paying attention.

Parable of the Unjust Judge by John Everett Millais, c. 1863
Parable of the Unjust Judge by John Everett Millais, c. 1863

Plenty of people answer the problem by saying there is no God. It is an effective answer, neatly addressing the apparent lack of supernatural intervention.

The rest of us, and maybe some of the atheists as well, keep struggling with the question.

One answer—and not one that I condone—is that the people meeting such disaster had it coming: the God is judge and those people are guilty approach. It is simple-minded rather than simple, and it makes God into a monster who condemns children and innocent people for the supposed sins of others. The prophets threw out this approach centuries before Jesus told the story of the judge and the widow (try out Jeremiah 31 or Ezekiel 18), and yet it finds advocates today. It seems to be a view most often held by people who have not yet ventured into one of the ‘those people’ groups. Eventually, life and time change their circumstance along with their views. Nothing changes us like experience, and none of us should ever pray for what we deserve.

Another answer, one that works part of the way, is that God is present among us. When we suffer, God suffers. I like this approach much better, and it is more comforting. It also presents God in a much better light. At the same time, we are left with questions of sovereignty. We are usually more interested in God fixing things than in God suffering with us.

There are as many answers as there are theologians, I suppose, and some of the answers are more satisfying than others. None of them feels complete.

charliebrownAnd so we return to Charlie Brown, who not only keeps trying to kick the ball, but who keeps trusting Lucy to hold it for him. There is so much grace in his trust in a proven adversary, and there is so much faith in his persistence. While our eyes are on the ball, Charlie Brown seems to realize something larger is at work, and that the moment at hand, this kick, is both an eternal thing and just a passing moment.

When the tree eats his kite—again—it is only a momentary affliction. It will pass, and Charlie Brown will make another kite, and another, knowing that his doing of these things is more important than the outcome. On some level, if Charlie Brown managed to kick the ball and fly the kite, on that day he would cease to exist. He would become someone else, still Charlie Brown but now the one who kicked the ball and who flew that kite.

Maybe that is Charlie Brown heaven. I don’t know. I do know that the grace of this parable is not in the judge’s answer. The grace of it is in the widow’s persistence.