White Meeting House Blog

A week ago Friday, in the aftermath of the Iranian elections,  the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei preached an Orwellian sermon, to borrow David Brook’s characterization of it, where he reiterated the total control the theocratic arm over the quasi democratic arm of the government.  That control would be asserted by bloody crackdown upon the protesters who dispute the counting of the votes in the election 2 weeks ago.  David Brooks wrote in a curious coincidence with my own recent reading:

The Iranian regime has always been fanatical of course. During the war with Iraq they recruited groups of children to march across the battlefields to set off the landmines. But over the years religious insanity has cooled and it has been replaced by a more traditional autocratic insanity.
I use that word — insanity — advisedly. In “The Origins of Totalitarianism” Arendt deciphered the way autocratic regimes, and the people under them lose touch with reality. Everything becomes suspicion. Conspiracy theories fester. No one can trust one another. Words lose their meanings.

Today’s gospel story comes as a kind of coda to Jesus’ description of himself as the good shepherd.  This self-portrait is unique to John.  The other gospels do not speak of Jesus this way.  But John’s writing is also of a different kind from the three synoptic gospels.  In John, words lose their literal meanings.  John’s Jesus is imaginative and poetic.  Water becomes wine, Nicodemus struggles in the middle of the night with the meaning of life, bread from heaven feeds the multitudes.  The good is no longer wrapped up in the temple religion — it belongs to the people — they are gods.
When we read the gospels, we recognize that words are slippery – and that in that elusiveness, they are powerful. The question is always whether that power is used to heal divisions, to expose the dark corners of humanity to the light of criticism and love or to stir up the mob and lead us on the procession of endless capital and power accumulation – the origins, suggests Arendt, of totalitarianism.
But just this is a problem.  Jesus’ poetic words challenge people’s hold on power, challenge their claim for unlimited control over the lives of some people. And Jesus’ enemies demand to know how he can so liberate.  Bu because the idea of humanity Jesus poses is so radically free, so deeply connected to the needs of the other,  they cannot understand and they are threatened. They seek to kill him.   People are really upset.  In the encounter with Jesus this happens.  His demand for a decision based on inward authority and grounded in one’s own radical freedom no matter who they are, slave or free, jew or gentile, straight or gay, drives people from the church today.
Of course, Jesus’ demand for a decision, is only accepted as one experiences his generous ideal of humanity — a New World is ours for the embrace — but we must become like babies.  It will not be taken by force — nor will it forcefully take those who preach against it.  Nevertheless, it offers something else — peace to those who are poor and persecuted, happiness to those who forgive those who hurt them.  Its risks are great — your life may be threatened.
But now I’m getting ahead of myself.  Let me backup a bit and mention why I refer now to the Gospel of Thomas.
The reason most scholars look to the gospel is that it appears to be a sayings source for the four gospels in the New Testament, meaning that unlike the other odd gospels discovered in the last 75 years, Thomas has enough shared material to be obviously related.  And the fact that it is arranged is a collection of short, pithy sayings, half of which or not found in any other gospel, leads us to believe that it may have been used by other gospel writers as a source for their works.
It is also quite interesting that it contains no stories of Jesus’ life, and no stories of his death and resurrection.
Why does all of this matter?  In part because it helps us think about how to read the gospels.  There was not just one early version of Christianity — there were many.  And the people who emrbaced these different versions had diverse sets of beliefs and practises — and yet nevertheless, shared a common essence.
Stating what that essence is, is always fraught with difficulty.  Someone will no doubt complain, after I do, that I’ve missed something important.  Nevertheless, and in the context of the incredible struggle for a responsible, open society in Iran, let me offer the following:  The essence of Christianity is that through Jesus people discovered, and still do, a possibility of faith in God’s love as a radical freedom that is both a gift and a demand.  I use the word radical in its old sense, meaning the most basic — something which is in no way derivative.  The freedom Jesus revealed, or re-presented is not unique to Jesus, but is the possibility of faith in God as the expression of pure, unbounded love, and as such theoretically open to Christian and non-Christian alike.
When I heard about the martyrdom of the Iranian woman we all know by her first name, Neda — I was refused to get on youtube and watch it.  I did not want to watch another human being die, and be a part of an internet voyeur crowd curious to see what that might look like.  I’ve seen that.  And its hard.  But yesterday morning, I heard an Iranian woma
Our reading from Thomas today, nicely illustrates how the gift and the demand which is the essential characteristic of the freedom God’ offers as pure unbounded love, works. The idea of the baby expresses the pure gift of freedom which is not shrouded by the self’s drive to power accumulation.
When the disciples don’t understand that Jesus uses words poetically, he tries another approach. He outlines the demand, hoping that if they get what he is asking from them, they’ll get what he is offering — the two are connected. Because we’re free, by the mystery of the love of God which actually makes a difference to us in our creative futures, we’re free to treat women and men as humans alike. We’re free to behave honestly, we’re free to respond to the body language of another. We’re free to be free, and to use the power of words to make for freedom.
When I heard about the martyrdom of the Iranian woman we all know by her first name, Neda — I refused to get on youtube and watch it. I did not want to watch another human being die, and be a part of an internet voyeur crowd curious to see what that might look like. I’ve been there. I’ve seen that. And it’s hard. But yesterday morning, I heard an Iranian womanon the news who’d had the same reaction.  This woman later realised that this was a film of unprecedented importance — the body language of all of those involved in that traumatic moment translated the body language of a nation struggling against the Philosophy of Hobbes, a nation struggling to be human within a regime that excludes in principle the idea of humanity.  The video clip is in no way voyeuristic, it is heart-wrenching, but not cheap.  Somehow, watching video clip and despite the tears of sorrow, I was moved to feel that common origin of the human race and of our great responsibility, the demand that comes with the gift of freedom, to do away with the philosophy of Hobbes, to do away with all that could possibly move a people to act like Hobbes’ Leviathan, to do away with all that could explicitly or implicitly contribute to a situation where the protection of power and wealth is paramount, even over life and freedom in it.
Perhaps, you’re thinking that since you don’t know what Hobbes’ Leviathan is, that I couldn’t possibly be talking to you.    Again, without getting to heavy for a summer Sunday morning let me quote Hannah Arendt who reminds us that

it is significant that modern believers in power are in complete accord with the philosophy of the only great thinker who ever attempted to derive public good from private interest, and who for the sake of private good, conceived and outlined a Commonwealth whose basis and ultimate end is accumulation of power.

Arendt goes on to illustrate how the safety and security of the private individual is the sole purpose of the Commonwealth and how that purpose subtly undermines through the accumulation of capital and power, the notion of community that extends beyond borders, the notion of community that is necessary if we are not to continue on in a perpetual state of war. The final, logical progression of the people who conceive of life as a proces of perpetually becoming more powerful, is, sadly, no end to the Neda’s of this world.
When Herman Daley, a World Bank Economist who has written on environmental economics mentioned to some of his colleagues that the root of our problem is the economic model of unlimited expansion, and that he wanted to explore with them ways to bring third world countries out of poverty without bringing them into this trap of unlimited expansion, he was viewed as a pariah.  If we want to avoid Hobbes’ Leviathan, I suggest that we need to join Herman Daley, and think about ways to grow for the sake of the common good.
Iranian national poet Simin Behbahani has written two poems that I want to close with today.  The first, called Stop Throwing My Country to the Wind, is ostensibly directed to Ahmadinejad.  But it is better read by Westerners as a poem directed to us.  We too have a responsibility.
Stop Throwing My Country To The Wind

If the flames of anger rise any higher in this land Your name on your tombstone will be covered with dirt.
You have become a babbling loudmouth. Your insolent ranting, something to joke about.
The lies you have found, you have woven together. The rope you have crafted, you will find around your neck.
Pride has swollen your head, your faith has grown blind. The elephant that falls will not rise.
Stop this extravagance, this reckless throwing of my country to the wind. The grim-faced rising cloud, will grovel at the swamp’s feet.
Stop this screaming, mayhem, and blood shed. Stop doing what makes God’s creatures mourn with tears.
My curses will not be upon you, as in their fulfillment. My enemies’ afflictions also cause me pain.
You may wish to have me burned , or decide to stone me. But in your hand match or stone will lose their power to harm me.
Simin Behbahani — June 2009

That poem was a telling of the great responsibility that is ours — the demand that comes from the knowledge of the mysterious unbounded love of God that calls all of God’s creatures beloved.
The next is the poem of the gift of freedom — The gift that sets us free, even in the face of death.  It is “For Neda Agha-Sotan:”
For Neda Agha-Soltan

You are neither dead, nor will you die.
You will always remain alive.
You have an eternal existence.
You are the voice of the people of Iran.
Simin Behbahani

Neda happens to be the persian word for calling. And while her death is no more tragic than the thousands of others who have died in the Middle East in the past few years, many Iranians see her still calling all people to a common humanity – to an idea of peace according to which brown, yellow or black races are predestined not for war, but for commity and international cooperation.

There is, I admit, a difference between fact and fact. The actual external details are always a matter of controversy; and in this sense Lessing was perfectly right when he warned us against coupling matters of the highest moment with “accidental truths of history,” and hanging the whole weight of eternity on a spider’s thread. But the spiritual purport of a whole life, of a personality, is also an historical fact: it has its reality in the effect which it produces; and it is here that we find the link that binds us to Jesus Christ. It is a feeling which is one with devotion itself; and this is what the same Lessing meant when he spoke the word of deliverance: “Even though we may be unable to remove all objections that may be made against the Bible, nevertheless, in the heart of all Christians who have attained an inner sense of its essential truths, religion remains steadfast and intact.

I used to race sailboats on Wednesday evenings when I was a teenager.  These Wednesday races were a rather mellow affair.  Thirty or so boats on the water create a beautiful impression to the picnic-er on the shore, especially when the spinnakers go up on the downwind leg.  The lake was big, but the sailing was mostly for fun, though we did fight hard to win every night.  But that fight most often meant moving about on the boat as quietly and carefully as possible so as not to spill what little wind you had in your sails. For it is no different on a lake from in the mountains.  The sun starts to set, and the wind dies.

I’ve never been to the Middle East — but I have a hard time believing that the weather patterns there are different than the weather patterns here.  Thinking about this it dawned on me that this story is not like I learned it in church school.  There I learned that Jesus rebuked the wind.  That, of course, does not make much sense — rebuking the weather for being the weather.  But could it be that Jesus was rebuking the disciples for not being who they were, for forgetting their seasoned understanding of the weather?  They’re the sailors.  If they keep their head, they’ll know that  the wind won’t last long.

And of course the story, the way I learned it as a child is not credible.  Humans may have an effect on the weather, but not by asking it to cooperate.  If we can get past our supernatural interpretation of the gospels where God functions to pull strings for the faithful and on their behalf intervene in the natural cycle of the world and life and try to see why the gospel writers might have written stories that are not as wild as we might have been taught to think, either by our upbringing, or by the popular misrepresentation of Christianity, then we have an opportunity to begin to engage them for the reason the writers wrote them in the first place — to tell something about their life changing encounter with Jesus.
After the weather dies down and the boat is still upright, Jesus asks them why they panicked.  How are we to take that question?  He may literally be asking them to reflect on the situation, to think about how dangerous it can be to lose your cool.
But the question might also have to do with the authors’ sense that the basic question in life is a question of participation and decision.  These people who tell the story, are people for whom society has little real use for — they are, in the terms of some New Testament scholars, the expendables — for them life was rather Hobbesian — tough, brutish and short.  But not only that — their lives didn’t matter to the power structures of the empire in which they lived.  If they were of any interest, it is because they could be taxed on their daily catch, almost to the point where it didn’t make sense to go fish — but not quite.
Their encounter with Jesus changed all of that.  Oh, it didn’t change the roman empire — but it did put new wind in their sails —  Somehow, when they spoke with Jesus, he gave them courage — a courage they called from God.  In other words, in Jesus they discovered a quality of life that was inward, and that could not be affected by rulers or storms, by taxes or by leaking boats, that they could only call God.  This courage bubbled up from a basic confidence in life — a sense that life is drama, as Gasset puts it in his philosophy — and that it requires, in order to be true and full, our active involvement in it.  One’s enemy would not have the power to strip one of the basic dignity of human living, of the hunger within to do something good in this world
Gasset notes that this life we live requires our active involvement in every moment deciding to do something about the circumstances in which we find ourselves.  Simply because we are competent in one situation does not mean that the element of decision is absent from a later, similar situation.  And since all decisions about our being are fundamentally decisions about our own individual beings — in each moment we are faced with our non-being — in other words, we may very well abandon it.  Gasset ponders what this means — He notes that if we decide not to abandon life then that is because we want to live.  And because life is something we find ourselves in, like a drama, not just something we think about or observe, because life only is life to the extent that an individual lives it, everything that happens to us, however difficult, however fraught with danger or conflict, happens to us because we hunger for it.  For the expendables of Jesus’ day, he literally re-presented to them their original confidence in life and awakened in them that hunger to live fully.
I ran across a story yesterday as I was reading  Seven Days at the coffee shop that perfectly illustrates what I’m talking about.  The story is about a taxi driver taking a woman from Burlington to Trapp Family Lodge.  His passenger is excited to be back in Vermont after nearly 50 years away.  Conversation revels that the woman used to work at the lodge when she was a girl.  The driver asks:
“Did you get to interact any with Maria?”
“Oh, yah, all the time — or at least when I got my courage up. You know, at dinner, she would sit and talk with every guest. The other thing I remember is how fast she drove around the property. One evening she must have mixed up drive and reverse, or something, and smashed her car into the side of the lodge. I remember we were instructed to never, ever mention it.” Sue paused and chuckled out loud, adding, “I don’t think I’ll get in any trouble at this point, wouldn’tcha think? The statute of limitations has surely passed.”
“That is a great story,” I said. “If I may ask, why is it you’re coming back now? Are you meeting people up there?”
“Yes, it’s a special event. One of the von Trapp grandchildren is getting married. It must be a big wedding, because I’m merely cousins with Lynn, the wife of Johannes, who is, I believe, the youngest of the 10 children. He actually met Lynnie the summer I worked there, on a trip down to Boston.”
For a while we rode in silence, broken only by the whooshing of the air through the slightly cracked rear windows. Behind us, the afternoon sun slid through the western sky. As we turned off the highway and began the trek north on Route 100, I got nosy again. “So, where’d you fly in from?” I asked.
“Oh, I’m from Minnesota. Yah, me and my husband — a couple of Norwegians.”
This was no surprise to me. Every since seeing the movie Fargo, I can pick out folks from the “You Betcha” State. I asked, “So, how’s life in Minnesota these days?”
“Well, I own a B&B, so that keeps me busy, then. Before that — for 25 years, actually — my husband and I had a farm. I think that was Ben’s greatest passion. He just loved the land. Farming gets a little much as you grow older, though, and neither of our daughters was interested in keeping it going.”
“Well, that’s real sweet,” I said. “You and Ben and the B&B. Sounds cozy.”
My customer’s face dropped. “Unfortunately, Ben’s had Alzheimer’s for a few years now. For a couple years, I was able to keep him at home, at the inn. I told the guests to lock their doors at night. ‘Ben’s harmless,’ I’d say, ‘but he does tend to wander a bit.’ But then he began to get aggressive. It’s so heartbreaking, because his whole life he was the sweetest, kindest man. He was a guidance counselor when we were first married, and how the kids loved him. Now he hardly knows who I am.”
“Oh, jeez,” I said. “I’m sorry. That must be tough on you. I can’t even imagine.”
My seatmate turned and smiled, bravely, for sure. This is the thing about life I cannot fathom, despite giving it a lot of thought. Bad things happen to bad people, it seems to me, at roughly the same rate as bad things happen to good people. . . .
We were on Barrows Road, passing Stowe High School, when my new friend from Minnesota turned and spoke again. “Ya know, sometimes the smallest thing makes all the difference in the world. Like, the last time I visited Ben, I walked into the lounge area and found him sitting in his wheelchair. His face lit up in a big smile and he announced, clear as a bell, ‘There is the love of my life.’”
The blue-eyed woman shook her head and choked up a little.
“Just that little thing,” she continued, her voice quiet but no longer quavering, “made the two-hour drive to Sioux Falls all worth it.”
Bad things do happen to good people.  It rains on the just and the unjust alike.  That’s not the question though.  The question Jesus wants us to ask, is whether or not these bad things make a difference to us where it matters most.  To panic in the midst of change and turbulence, to cry and not get up in the midst of loss, is to miss the chance hear again, in the silence of the inner calm, those words of love that come from a place no storm can touch and offer an unmatched confidence in living.  Amen.

We know very little about the early life of Jesus. Nothing was recorded in our gospels until this account we find in Luke. There are other stories recorded about Jesus, but they were never put in our gospels, probably because these later writings seemed to those early church fathers who set the gospels to go beyond the pale of gospel and into fantasy. The fact of the matter is that the early writers were not concerned about these stories – Jesus was interesting to them because his words and his deeds a mature man, mattered to them, changed them, somehow freed them to live wise lives themselves.
Clearly Jesus grew up and in the process said things and did that perhaps he shouldn’t have. We have the fairly innocuous statement to attest to that fact – Jesus grew up in stature and wisdom.
We can also surmise from Luke, without getting into too much wild conjecture, that Jesus’ early years of education and training “took.” For in our reading we learn that he wanted to stay in the temple, even after the parents had left, to talk to the elders. That Jesus astonishes the men in the temple may be fabrication, but it’s not to far out there to think that a child could be wise beyond her years and teach a little something to us adults. Some people have wanted to read this whole scene, from his instruction of the men to his response to his parents as a bratty kid feeling his oats. Maybe. It is simply unknown what was going on. But if the account is correct that he was about 12 then, he was dealing with issues that come up around the time of a Jewish boy’s rite of passage, the bar mitzvah. For some facing a such a passage, deep questions are not strange questions.  Questions about purpose and about meaning of life have an urgency in those years that they don’t seem to at others.
The part of the story that seems to get the attention these days is where Jesus talks back to his parents. But before we jump to conclusions, that he is being a rebel pre-teen, let us remember that Luke probably did not have any material to work with from Jesus’ pre-teen days.  He made this story up in order to make a theological point or two.   – to be a follower of Jesus is not just a matter of believing whatever pops into your head about Jesus, not just a matter of believing whatever your pastor tells you, it requires dedication, it requires education, it requires, in short, a kind of growing up,  a quality of learning that takes more into account than one’s own well-being.  I like what the Good as New Translation tells us a few verses earlier in chapter two, when Mary and Joseph bring Jesus into the temple as a baby Simeon and Anna are there and they recognize Jesus.  Luke writes that Anna pointed Jesus out to those who had their country’s best interest at heart.
Jesus did not simply grow older – he matured in this constellation of those who had their country’s best interest at heart.   Maturation and growing older are to different things. It may be impossible to be mature and wise and young but it is not necessarily the case that being older is the same as being mature and wise. In other words, it is growing up in a certain way that concerns us who, in one way or another embark on a new journey in our lives.
What do we need to grow as Christians? Wealth, prestige, a powerful experience? A good education at a fine school? While these things may be important to an easy life, they are not central to the life Luke is at some pains to portray is worth growing up into.
You have heard the story about the two twin women who celebrated their 93^rd birthday, with all their senses intact. The newspaper told the story and asked “To what do you attribute your longevity?” Their response, told deadpan, was “Time!
So too it is with the Christian – time presents the opportunity for growth and we may not waste it assuming that we will grow by the sheer fact of getting older. We cannot wait for those mountaintop experiences that seem to to be the ticket for spiritual growth – they’re not. We cannot wait for God to knock us off a horse – that was just a story told for drama – God works in more subtle ways.  Let us reject the calls from the fundamentalists who imply that if we’ve not had one of these experiences we are not Christian.
A divinity school friend who was somewhat hostile to religion – she was a scholar of eastern nihilistic religions – once remarked about Christianity that it was such a simple religion – that it’s stories were always the same. Nothing ever changed.
And we must admit – mustn’t we – that while we love to tell the old, old story, as that hymn has it – something in us rebells. Haven’t we something new to say? Haven’t we any new experiences of Jesus? Or did the experience of Jesus end when Jesus died? My friend was right. We talked of dying and being reborn. But our talk is often always the same.
But that is not to say that her finger was never on the pulse of Christianity – a pulse which surges anew in new times, a pulse that drives us away from the church and back into it, a pulse that leaves us longing for a leave-taking from the church, and a pulse that pulls us back into the church. The real matter of Christian growth is about a willingness to live in this creative moment, this two and fro, to see time as not only a sequence of events, but also, occasionally, as periods without sequence that birth a qualitatively different spirit in us.  We grow up in our Christian faith when we can let go — when we can see again that this journey we’re all starting out on today must both draw on experience from our pasts and synthesize them through creative interchange  with those who have the best interest of our community at heart.
Christian growth as a result involves knowledge and an ever-increasing supply of it. Things change and our understandings of these things with it. The increasing number of states who have affirmed the right of gay and lesbian partners to marry signifies not only a change in law, but a change in thinking. Headline news last week was the gay bishop of the New Hampshire Episcopal church suggesting that religion gets in the way of justice. How often have we let religion get in the way of clear thinking about matters of ultimate concern? In St. Paul’s greatest treatise on love he reminds  his audience that change happens – that we begin, in matters of religion, like a child, on milquetoast, but that we are called to put an end to childish reasoning. “As people face up to the fact that opposing gay marriage means disregarding the happiness of the people most directly (or even solely) affected by it, most of us come around.” –Jonathan Chait (The New Republic)
Here we get to the nub of the matter – that which is religious, is that which enables us to regard the other as indeed a human being after God’s image – which simply means able to speak the truth in love, able to drop our guard with each other and bridge differences with honest and hopeful (but not fearful) activity and dialogue. The hardest words we ever learn to say are, “I need you.” or “I love you” but it is just these words which give us the grace to see beyond our own noses. If we are to grow up, we do it by adventuring into the new world together, by leaning on each other’s arms, by acknowledging that we need each other in the journey.
So let us grow up, and grow together with arms and hearts and minds open to the gift of grace that calls us from loneliness to companionship, from fear to courage, from distrust to understanding, from isolation to communion.  Amen.