Galatians 5:1; 13-23
Luke 9:51-62
I want to proceed this morning by making a few comments about the first reading from Paul’s letter to the Galatians and then a few comments about the lesson from the Gospel of Luke. I want to do this in order to help us make an important distinction that I think is necessary if we are to respond to the Gospel call honestly and without reservation.
Like most letters, and certainly most ancient letters when paper was precious and transportation slow, this letter was more than a friendly greeting, it had a point or two to make. We do not have the luxury of knowing what these early church communities wrote when they presumably did asking Paul for help. We have to infer the Galatian questions from Paul’s response. Paul spends the first two chapters greeting them and reasserting his credentials. He responds in chapter 3. And it is strong. He writes, “O foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you?” He calls his own beloved Galatians anoheytoi -which may also be translated inconsiderate, unintelligent, and unwise people.
Those are strong words from a pastor to his congregation. Why such anger? Apparently, they had been duped by Peter. Peter had been foolishly trying to cozy up to the powerful Jews in the community, and, fearful that the rich and the powerful would deny him if he consorted the the poor Christian Gentiles, turned his back on them. Paul is angry at Peter for what he did, but even more angry at the Galatians for forgetting that no one has the power over them to make them feel insignificant. They have experienced the freedom which set their hearts soaring because it was the freedom not from themselves or their government, but from God. Why turn back on that? Why be awed by Peter? He’s apparently fool too. Judge for yourself. Continue reading “June 27 — Faith and Noncompossibilities”
Category: Sermon
Faith Saves
Instead of a sermon this morning, I’m going to read the scripture lesson from the Gospel of Luke in line-by-line style and invite you to reflect with me on some of the questions that arise as we read it.
But before we do that, I want to provide a direction for your thoughts – they don’t have to go that way, but it might be helpful for our conversations in the chapel in a few minutes if we think about what the story might offer 21st century Christians, such as ourselves, who find themselves stretched thin between the demands of work, family, church and other civic organizations. Central to the lesson seems to be a relation between action and faith. How are they related? Is there a priority of one over the other.
But let’s begin at the beginning, at the home of a Pharisee.
One of the Pharisees asked Jesus to eat with him, and he went into the Pharisee’s house and took his place at the table. We learn later in the story that the Pharisee’s name is Simon. Not to be confused with Simon Peter, one of the 12 disciples. This is important for picking up on what might be some sarcasm later in the story. Also, to set the scene properly we should realize that Jesus is not sitting at a dining room table, but reclining on a couch. This is important because the action in the story involves a woman washing Jesus’ feet. In other words, she did not crawl under the table. In fact, she may have been reclining with him on the same couch. We’ll get to that in a few verses.
Enter the woman: Continue reading “Faith Saves”
May 30–Supra-Nationalist Moral Imagination
When I was a boy, I was really interested in the physical sciences. I set up a lab in my bedroom where I did experiments on all sorts of things. I remember being fascinated by the flammable qualities of birch-bark. Much, I’m sure, to the horror of my parents. I burned holes in my clothes from the sulfuric acid, but never burned the house down!
Perhaps those little experiments with birch bark as a fuel, prefigured my later interests. When I was in high school, and college, I turned my attention to a course of study designed to make a biologist out of me. I was particularly interested in environmental sciences. In the seventies, during the height of the oil crisis, I was an impressionable seven or eight year old who thought that we were destroying thewonderful outdoors that I so loved with our gasoline addiction.
Later in college I realized that my interests, relative to that birch-bark experiment, had to do with ideology. Even then, as a 10- year old, I recognized, if only implicitly, a basic philosophical flaw in our thinking, and I wanted to be a part of thinking around it. I also recognized that I gained my first inkling of that flaw in our thinking by having been raised in the church, by having been exposed every week to the notion that our highest given task is to transcend our inclination to think only about ourselves, that much of ethics was about the nurturing the ability to have a moral imagination that does not stop at the borders of my body, my family, my community, my country, even my species. That, at least, was how I heard the great commandment. Continue reading “May 30–Supra-Nationalist Moral Imagination”
May 23 – Pentecostal/Democratic Spirit
Tis the season for baptisms, it seems. Three in the last three weeks. Funny how things run in streaks. I like baptism streaks more than funeral streaks.
One of the baptisms I did recently was not really a baptism. It was instead a family gathering, on a weeknight, where we celebrated with AR, a young woman who grew up in the church in the 90’s, the birth of her son, and the gift he is to everyone involved with him. Because it was not done as part of a worship service, with a full worshiping community gathered ’round, we did not call it a baptism. But that is essentially what it was.
This idea that there is an essence behind the things we do, that we can call something essentially the same as something else, comes from the Greeks. Aristotle took Plato’s ideas of the forms that all of us, even with the most minimal background, have heard of, and moved it from grand concepts like beauty and the good, to the individual, the center of the soul and called it, to ti en einai, or “the what it was to be.”
Over the centuries, Christians have had an off-and-on relationship with this idea. That off-and-on relationship, I will suggest is indicative of the need we have to recognize traps in either extreme as it relates to this question of understanding ourselves in relation to an eternal essence, to a ground of being, that is to say, to God.
II.
Philosophers have names for these extremes, and it will be helpful to mention at the outset – nominalism on the one hand and realism on the other. Don’t get frightened by the isms. I’ll try to explain them simply, and move on to why the ideas are relevant to us, without ado.
Nominalism is the idea that the name we give a concrete something has no corresponding universal or abstract value or reality associated with it. (wait) The preeminent nominalist is Humpty Dumpty. Carrol Lewis, perhaps mocking the nominalists, engages Alice in a conversation with Humpty Dumpty about her birthday. Humpty Dumpty makes fun of Alice using the word glory in an odd way. Alice asks him what he means by using the word glory like that.
`When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
`The question is,’ said Alice, `whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
`The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master – – that’s all.’
This is nominalism, and while it may certainly be argued that Humpty Dumpty is the only completely thoroughgoing nominalist out there, the prevalent philosophy of the modern, secular world is nominalist.
The matter of the relation between church and state is a case in point. Secularists will argue that democracy exists because there is no general aim toward which the state should move. In other words, for the secularist, the purpose of democracy is to test the wind periodically and chart the country’s course ahead. We may not have Humpty Dumpty’s out there, but nominalism is alive and well in the sense that most believe that there is no room in democracy for a spirit of truth. My guess is that a good many of us liberal Christians are nominalists in this sense at least.
(big breath)
Realism, on the other hand, holds to the idea that something is what it is because it corresponds to the way things really are. I also think that most of us, in this room, are realists. We believe, for example that the claims we make about love, about genuineness, about the possibility of community, are worthy claims to be made because they point to something which exists beyond our own making of the claim.
We do not presume to be masters of meaning, but to be discoverers of meaning.
There is a danger here too. In the grand adventure of discovery, we risk, in our excitement, in our passion, in our zealousness, depriving others of that same thrill of discovery by becoming, no longer seekers of meaning but now the guardian of it. I’m talking here about religious radicalism. The belief that democracy exists only in error because there is nothing to vote about – we have the truth, we know what it is, and by hook or by crook, we’ll convince you of it.
It’s a fine line between nominalists who would argue that meaning is what you make of it, with no reference to truth and realists who might argue that they know what the truth is — both become masters of meaning.
III.
I am more and more convinced that of utmost importance to any of us who would attempt to speak of God, or who would desire to worship, as the gospel of John puts it, “in spirit and in truth,” that we do so with a fundamental awareness of what it means to be human; to be a human who can not, nor ever will, have a complete grasp of ultimate matters. In other words, central to our life as people who worship God is the claim that we are fully aware that we may be wrong about who we worship and how. Let’s just call that awareness that lies at the heart of anything we do, whether in work or in worship — fallibilism. We are fallible.
A genuine fallibilism is hard to maintain when you are trying to talk about God, or witness to the power of God in your life, or even when you are worshiping. We deal, in worship, with the enthusiastic tendency to swing worship from exploration and adventure, into a less uncomfortable, more sure venture of ritual and set behaviors. And for an excuse for our calcification, we suggest that to do otherwise is to garner God’s displeasure.
IV.
Of course the implicit question behind all of what I’ve said this morning, is whether we can be genuinely fallible? Can we genuinely worship in spirit and in truth and avoid the practice of making claims that are not open for discussion, such as there is no other truth than the truth that Jesus Christ is the only Son of God? Or, and I’m sure you’ve heard this before — “Have you been touched by the spirit?” meaning, are you truly religious like I am?
Since, with Humpty Dumpty, I’ve established a literary theme here’s another one that at first blush seems close to Humpty Dumpty’s insistence that words mean what he wants them to mean. It’s a short poem by Rae Armantrout called “Scumble.” The poem is about words too. But not about how they mean or don’t mean things — but about how they sound. And about the adventures they can take us on. Armantrout calls it a hot poem. Indeed her poem is erotic. It is the eroticism of discovery and play, of desire and of mystery, of union with the other and the reality beyond the word without which the word is meaningless and dull.
Scumble
What if I were turned on by seemingly innocent words
such as “scumble,” “pinky,” or “extrapolate?”
What if I maneuvered conversation in the hope that
others would pronounce these words?
Perhaps the excitement would come from the way the
other person touched them lightly and carelessly with
his tongue.
What if “of” were such a hot button?
“Scumble of bushes.”
What if there were a hidden pleasure
in calling one thing
by another’s name?
What if, indeed! What if the story of Pentecost that we just read from the Book of Acts was really about this hidden pleasure in calling one thing by another’s name? The hidden pleasure of, as Audre Lourde put it in her essay on the erotic,discovering the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person and which forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them.
What if the story of Pentecost is not some rite of passage that a Christian must experience, not some litmus test of being touched by the spirit, but rather an expression of the democratic spirit of genuine discovery? And what if we could take that spirit and build unto it into a community where people are not islands unto themselves but connected, part of the great stream of life.
Well, then we might call it the kingdom.
Perhaps the story of Pentecost might help us to see again that the essence of the beloved community, the kingdom of God, about which Jesus could not stop talking, is given to us in all our various flavors to work out in all our various communities. Is a call to a spirit of genuineness, a spirit led by the power of the erotic, hand in hand with a spirit of fallibilism, into community of genuineness and extraordinary hospitality. Amen.
May 16 — Health and God
Texts:
Then Job said to the Unnamable:
I know you can do all things
and nothing you wish is impossible.
Who is this whose ignorant words
cover my design with darkness?
I have spoken of the unspeakable
and tried to grasp the infinite.
Listen and I will speak;
I will question you: please instruct me.
I had heard you with my ears,
but now my eyes have seen you.
Therefore I will be quiet,
comforted that I am dust. – Job 42:1-6 (Trans. Stephen Mitchell)
In German a doctor will begin by asking ‘Na, wo fehlt’s denn?’ or ‘what’s the matter with you then?’, literally, ‘what are you lacking?’ This is a question which we as patients can address to a doctor who is about to examine us or give us advice. Is it not an extraordinary thing that the lack of something, although we do not know precisely what it that is lacking, can reveal the miraculous existence of health? . . . It is only now, in its absence, that I notice what was previously there, or, more precisely, not what was previously there but that it was there. This is what one calls well being. We also say, ‘I am fine.’ Here we encounter wakefulness and being-in-the-world as authentic presence.
– Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Enigma of Health
I tend to subscribe to the old adage about preaching — “There is no I in it.” That preaching can easily become lost in the power of the ego unless careful attention is paid to the real point of it.
That said I feel I owe it to you, this first Sunday back preaching since February 28 to speak a bit about what has happened to me and what seems to be the thought about my recovery and prognosis.
I’d like to conclude by briefly reflecting on the point of it, as hinted at in our two readings today.
I will not bore you with all the details. This is the sketch It all began at our Lenten Lunch, held here in our dining room on March 3. Lunch didn’t go so well for me. Little did I know that at that point, things were starting to go haywire in my body. By the next morning, I was bleeding from my adrenal gland into my abdomen and the pain kept me in bed on Advil. Two trips to the ER later and I was admitted to the hospital on Friday. The following day they took me over to the ICU were I continued, as they say, “to go downhill,” though it didn’t feel anything like coasting downhill to me. It felt more like pedaling up a mountain.
The rest for me, and now luckily for you, was a bit of a blur. Sunday night they transferred me from the ICU in at CVH to the ICU at Fletcher Allen — hoping that they could stabilize me and whatever it was that was wreaking havoc in me. The short of it is that the defense systems that we all have to keep us safe from germs, became, in my case, the invaders and began destroying my blood cells to the extent that I had to be on 6 liters of oxygen in order to have enough oxygen saturation in my blood to support life.
Exactly what went wrong with my immune system remains a bit of a mystery to us today, and we continue to monitor blood counts and test out various theories. The standard treatment for a thing like this is to administer steroids, beginning with a mega dose over three days in an attempt to suppress the immune system and to bring my system back into some normal equilibrium. After that mega dose of steroids, I was put on a high dose of which would gradually be decreased over the next six months. What I have learned about this is that while steroids saved my life, they are also dangerous and life-shortening when used at high levels over time. But you can’t just stop using them either since the steroids I’m on cause the adrenal glands to stop working. The adrenal glands need to be slowly brought back online through a slow taper of the drug to avoid a life-threatening condition called Addisonian Crisis.
I describe all of this because it is part of my recovery reality. As much as I don’t like the prednisone — it makes me hungry all the time, it gives me the shakes, it makes me tired, and leads to muscle wasting, which is a problem since I already lost 25 pounds of muscle in the hospital — I have to go off of it slowly. I have to accommodate accordingly. My schedule, for the time being at least, is one thing in the morning, one thing in the afternoon and a big long nap in between. That makes getting around to everything I’d like to do, next to impossible. I’m learning again, the lesson that we all learn again and again at various points in our lives, that the things we think are so essential that we do, really are not. That the world keeps on spinning, people keep on living and relating and working with one another.
I do not take for granted what has happened here in the months that I was unable to prepare worship, unable to conduct funerals, unable to help people out either with a listening ear or a check from the Good Neighbor Fund. In fact it is so remarkable, that I am still in awe when I reflect on the way myriads of people literally from across the state pulled together to help us out.
When I first got out of the hospital, I had a ton of mental energy, and not much physical energy. For a guy who likes to read and write, I was OK. I ordered some new books and started to do some thinking about the relation of health, theologically. That’s when I discovered this little book called The Enigma of Health by Gadamer from which we read an excerpt today.
Gadamer’s essays on health are interesting to me for the simple reason that the awakened sense of gratitude I was feeling for being alive, seemed to be germane to a point that Gadamer wanted to make and about which our reading today is exemplary. When we are healthy, we do take our health for granted. I think this is why Gadamer calls it our “miraculous existence of health.” But does he call it that because he cannot or will not try to explain how it is that life should be good, and not nasty, brutish and short? Is this background of goodness, in which we live and move and have our being something like Kant’s noumena, theoretical but not observable? Something we can suggest should exist, but which we can no more talk about than prove?
I wonder, can this miraculous existence of health, not only be miraculous, but also rational, something upon which we can reasonably base our lives? Ultimately Kant’s idea that these things are simply beyond our experiencing, beyond our reasoning was his undoing.
In another essay in the same book, Gadamer hints that he wants to say more. In that essay, he notes the irony around the invention of the phrase “the search for quality of life.” He calls attention to it, because its very language indicates what has been lost, indicates that we can indeed say something about the unsayable. The phrase implicitly betrays the grounding of human life in a transcendental good.
Gadamer won’t go there, though, because he denies that we can talk about this implicit ground of our being at all.
Perhaps he won’t go there because so much of our traditional language about God and health verges on the ridiculous. A case in the point is the mistranslation that arose around the final verses of Job. When the divines of King James translated the Book of Job they did so from a medieval metaphysical framework — that is with a view to a mighty, easily angered, must-be-placated-God-in-order-to-live-in-God’s-graces, kind of God. And so even though a more appropriate translation was available to them, one that fits more with the poetic progression of the book, they chose to make Job grovel before God. And to portray the God human relationship as the anti-thesis of what a relationship ought to be, if it is to be defined as good. This medieval image of God and human has defined, and thereby ruined it, for a great many of otherwise interested seekers of the meaning of the background of life, of God.
To me, when we get to experience the ending of Job as Stephen Mitchell has translated it, a whole new, and welcome meaning comes to light. The tale still tells of human suffering, but instead of having to blame it on God, we see a long struggle to see God as God. God is no more the one who must be placated, as Job assumes in the prologue to the book. But equally God is no more the cursed destroyer as Job thinks in the middle dialogues. Job is changed to see God as the whole meaning of everything, including his own cursing and questioning.
Job is now truly religious, where before he was only pious. He sees himself and accepts himself as fallible and fragmentary, but that does not, cannot, will not preclude him from saying something about God. Ultimately, to be alive, in the Jobean sense, is to worship — to love God with whatever it is one has to love. And to find rest in it. Amen.