It is a Sin to Be Good
Showing posts with label First Church Somerville Podcast. Show all posts
Showing posts with label First Church Somerville Podcast. Show all posts
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Sunday, December 6, 2009
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Texts of Terror
Rev Molly Phinney-Baskette
I hate horror movies. Watching a movie where you spend half your time waiting for something terrible to happen, and the other half watching the terrible thing happen, is not my idea of a good time. I never liked garden-variety slasher films to begin with, but now even the new brand of intellectual, artistic gore-fest is off the table. The Coen Brothers, who I used to love, are forever ruined for me. Quentin Tarantino is in the doghouse. The reason for my newfound sensitivity? I had a kid. Having kids cracks you open in a way you’ve never been opened; it makes you vulnerable, and anything dark or violent in your immediate vicinity leaks into all the new fissures in your soul. It makes it impossible to watch the evening news, let alone The Lovely Bones. I manufacture enough daymares and nightmares in my imagination now, without any help from Hollywood.
I have never understood, in any case, what pleasure there can be in watching the same old horror movie motifs over and over again: the threat of pure evil on the innocent, the foolish choices of that innocent, who goes into the basement when they should go out of the house, into the woods when they should run toward buildings and people and light. T the failure of supernatural help, the ultimate failure of the innocents to live, leaving only one witness alive to tell the tale, to pass it on, as a warning.
Which is why I get why it might be so hard for some of you to open your Bibles. Because you see, particularly Genesis, Exodus, Joshua, Judges, and Daniel, it is one horror show after another. The prophet Daniel is thrust into the lions’ den, where many other Jews have gone before, their bone fragments lying about, the smell of blood still heavy in the air. Joshua, the successor to Moses, has his Hebrew soldiers march 7 times ‘round the Jericho city walls. The walls fall down, the soldiers storm in, and they slaughter every toddler in diapers, every little old lady, face to face. And these are just stories we tell our children. What else is in there?
Tamar is raped by her brother. Jael kills her enemy with a tent peg through the skull. Lot’s daughters are sent out to the mob to be gang-raped in lieu of the visiting angels.
But perhaps the worst “texts of terror,” as they have come to be known since feminist theologian Phyllis Trible published a book of that name in 1984, are the Biblical stories in which God instigates the violence. The classic text is the extermination of all but 8 human beings, and most other life on earth, in Noah’s Flood. And then there are two stories we’ll look at more closely today: two children, beloved and wanted, come close to dying because of God’s command. What could be worse than the death of a child? If God is good and merciful, how do we swallow these stories?
A recap, so we know what we’re looking at. In the first story, Sarah is barren, the worst thing for a Hebrew woman. She is less than nothing without children. In desperation, she gives her maid to Abraham as a surrogate, and Hagar becomes pregnant. Hagar is young and foolish, and struts obnoxiously around Sarah as her belly swells. Sarah, embittered, treats her like garbage, and Hagar runs away, but God sends her back. Ishmael, her son, is born. Then in an interesting twist God gives Sarah what she’s wanted all along, and even though she’s an old woman, she gets pregnant. Isaac is born, and there is much rejoicing. But when Sarah sees Ishmael playing with Isaac one day, something breaks open in her, and it’s not compassion. It’s rage. Mother-bear, genetic-code-protecting rage. She orders Abraham to send Ishmael and Hagar away, into the wilderness. God agrees it’s for the best, and tells Abe to listen to Sarah. Abe gives Hagar some bread and water, helps her get Ishmael on her back, and they go. They don’t make it very far in the desert, under that North African sun, a young woman alone and her child. Hagar knows what she’s up against. She can feel death, calling for her and for her child. She might as well be running into the woods, or into the basement. Slowly, slowly, she puts Ishmael under a bush, a reflexive act of protection that will do no good. She shuffles a couple of hundred yards away, she sits down, and she wails, loud enough for heaven to hear, because she cannot bear to see her child die.
In the very next chapter, is an echo of child sacrifice. Isaac, this time, the legitimate son of Abraham and Sarah, is to be put to death, simply to test the faith of Abraham. This story is a favorite of rabbis and atheists. Each of them use it to prove their point. Imagine Isaac, about 13 years old, going on a hike with his dad. Not only is he clueless about the danger that awaits, chattering on about pokemon cards and making star-wars sounds as he fights imaginary enemies, his dad actually puts the firewood that will burn his young body on Isaac’s own, skinny, pre-pubescent back. He is a young Christ, mounting Calvary.
There are a few different ways to read these stories. The one that brings the most relief is to read them as metaphors, etiologies, made-up descriptions of how things came to be the way they are. This isn’t a stretch, because it’s what, in fact, these stories were. Ishmael is commonly accepted as the mythical ancestor of the Northern Arab peoples—so his exile into the wilderness explains the fact of the Arabs’ wandering, nomadic nature. The struggle for succession and the right of primogeniture between Isaac and Ishmael also explains, and supports, the historic enmity between Jews and Arabs.
We can read the sacrifice of Isaac, and really, a lot of the carnage in the Old Testament, as a gloss on the many pogroms on the Jewish people through the ages, an etiology for why the line must remain ethnically pure, the people absolutely faithful to the Lord, the God of Israel, lest they disappear forever. And Sarah’s ability to get pregnant at the age of 90, foreshadows the rise of IVF in the late 21st century.
All this clever literary criticism might help us to feel better, feel as if we are living in a safe house of metaphor instead of in the painful reality of a world where women are demoted when they are infertile, where women still turn on women instead of on the patriarchal systems that oppress them, where children are still exposed on mountaintops or thrown into dumpsters, where child abuse and genocide still routinely happens.
Another solution to the texts of terror is to say that for Christians, the whole Old Testament exists as a foil for the New Testament—like, isn’t it amazing what God has done? How good of God to change His mind, to stop all that senseless violence, to stop it in the very body, the self-giving death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, all that nonsense come to an end at last. God is good. All the time. Except before 33 A.D.
But that is cafeteria Christianity, and a little anti-semitic to boot: to leave the God of wrath to the Jews, marry violence to their view of history, and to end up with Jesus, sweet of face, stringing daisies with the children. It’s dishonest, and it’s not true. Phyllis Trible says “to contrast the Old Testament God of Wrath with the New Testament God of Love is fallacious. The God of Israel is the God of Jesus: in both testaments, there is tension between divine wrath and divine love.” Just because God only almost permits the death of two innocent children—Ishmael at the mercy of the elements in the desert, Isaac at the mercy of his father on the mountaintop, doesn’t mean God gets to step in at the last second and play the good guy. “Oh, Hagar, I heard the child crying. Here’s what we’re going to do.” “Oh, Abraham, your faith is sufficient and complete, here’s a substitute.” God let His own son die, painfully, on the cross. The fact that he was resurrected doesn’t take away the pain and humiliation that Jesus experienced, which were real.
There are many tacks we could take to excuse God, and they are all worthy. We could say that the ways of God are inscrutable; that we are to God as the ant is to the human; we can’t possibly understand the fullness of the mind of God, we just have to trust that God knows what God is doing. But we can trust and love God utterly, and still feel that God has some explaining to do.
We could say that, in a sense, God grew up with us—just as in the Great Flood God realized another nature, and promised never again to destroy humankind by flood (gee, thanks God!), that God ultimately realized in the person of Jesus that only self-giving sacrifice would ever end the cycle of violence, so have we too matured, evolved, as a species. We have a better view of God.
We could say that all these stories are fallible, told from a human perspective, and that we attribute dark motives to God when they are, in fact, ours. For all we know, it was Abraham who dragged Isaac up the mountain of his own accord—Isaac, after all, was thirteen, and what parent hasn’t been thrown into a murderous rage at least once by their teenage child? Perhaps God was saving Abraham as well as Isaac.
But it is not our responsibility to make excuses for God to others, or justify these stories to ourselves. Perhaps, in the end, the point of these stories is much more basic. To make us feel, fully and poignantly, the value of each human life. To prevent us from forgetting Rwanda, Darfur, Dachau, to force us to bear witness to the continuing reality of all that Sarah and Hagar and Isaac and Ishmael represent: the runaway, the stepchild, the single welfare mother, the aging wife made superfluous by the mistress, the bag lady, the refugee, the child dying of diarrhea for lack of clean water in the wilderness. All of these people are real, not ancient, not fairy tale characters; they live, and they breathe, and they fight, and they die. We know because we see these people; and we know because we are these people. Will we be broken open, are we willing to feel what they feel?
Perhaps, Trible suggests, the reason these stories remained embedded in our sacred text is to be a thorn in our sides, a reminder of our own dark natures, until we have finally and completely learned to live together without jealousy, ambition, the eternal violent struggle for resources and land and status.
When I went to worship at other churches this summer, I noticed a curious trend among trendy churches. None of them called what we do on Sunday morning “worship.” It was always “Worship Celebration” or “Gathering of Joy.” All very peppy and upbeat. Except, the thing is, it’s not always celebrating that we need to do on Sunday morning. Sometimes, we need to cry. Sometimes, we need to shake our fists at heaven, and where is the room in a Gathering of Joy to do that? Maybe that’s why these stories are here. Great wracking sobs shaking Hagar’s body, Abraham’s hand trembling above his son, his only son, whom he loved. Sometimes you just have to face the darkness, and live with the sadness. And yes, sometimes, God does swoop in at the last second to make things come right, or at least, more right than they were. As someone put it, “everything turns out all right in the end. If it’s not all right, it’s not the end.” Will we refuse God’s help, however, and whenever, it comes?
Because another way to read these stories, is to say: we don’t know what would have happened IF. The big IF being: if people hadn’t listened to God, hadn’t trusted God utterly. IF Hagar had stayed with Sarah and Abraham, Sarah might have gone postal on Ishmael one day, a bloodbath. IF Abraham hadn’t raised that knife over Isaac, maybe neither Isaac nor Abraham would have gone on to lead and protect the many people in their care in the precise way that they did. Sometimes, only almost dying will teach you what life is worth. Walter Brueggeman, after he’d read Genesis cover to cover, and tried to make sense of these stories, said, “Faith is nothing other than the trust in the power of the resurrection against every deathly circumstance.”
And maybe, just maybe, the point of the pointy, difficult stories in the Bible is to remind us that we do not live in a tame universe, that our God is not a tame God. The feminist sci-fi novelist, Ursula LeGuin, said it this way: “Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it’s not poison, and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle.”
I hate horror movies. Watching a movie where you spend half your time waiting for something terrible to happen, and the other half watching the terrible thing happen, is not my idea of a good time. I never liked garden-variety slasher films to begin with, but now even the new brand of intellectual, artistic gore-fest is off the table. The Coen Brothers, who I used to love, are forever ruined for me. Quentin Tarantino is in the doghouse. The reason for my newfound sensitivity? I had a kid. Having kids cracks you open in a way you’ve never been opened; it makes you vulnerable, and anything dark or violent in your immediate vicinity leaks into all the new fissures in your soul. It makes it impossible to watch the evening news, let alone The Lovely Bones. I manufacture enough daymares and nightmares in my imagination now, without any help from Hollywood.
I have never understood, in any case, what pleasure there can be in watching the same old horror movie motifs over and over again: the threat of pure evil on the innocent, the foolish choices of that innocent, who goes into the basement when they should go out of the house, into the woods when they should run toward buildings and people and light. T the failure of supernatural help, the ultimate failure of the innocents to live, leaving only one witness alive to tell the tale, to pass it on, as a warning.
Which is why I get why it might be so hard for some of you to open your Bibles. Because you see, particularly Genesis, Exodus, Joshua, Judges, and Daniel, it is one horror show after another. The prophet Daniel is thrust into the lions’ den, where many other Jews have gone before, their bone fragments lying about, the smell of blood still heavy in the air. Joshua, the successor to Moses, has his Hebrew soldiers march 7 times ‘round the Jericho city walls. The walls fall down, the soldiers storm in, and they slaughter every toddler in diapers, every little old lady, face to face. And these are just stories we tell our children. What else is in there?
Tamar is raped by her brother. Jael kills her enemy with a tent peg through the skull. Lot’s daughters are sent out to the mob to be gang-raped in lieu of the visiting angels.
But perhaps the worst “texts of terror,” as they have come to be known since feminist theologian Phyllis Trible published a book of that name in 1984, are the Biblical stories in which God instigates the violence. The classic text is the extermination of all but 8 human beings, and most other life on earth, in Noah’s Flood. And then there are two stories we’ll look at more closely today: two children, beloved and wanted, come close to dying because of God’s command. What could be worse than the death of a child? If God is good and merciful, how do we swallow these stories?
A recap, so we know what we’re looking at. In the first story, Sarah is barren, the worst thing for a Hebrew woman. She is less than nothing without children. In desperation, she gives her maid to Abraham as a surrogate, and Hagar becomes pregnant. Hagar is young and foolish, and struts obnoxiously around Sarah as her belly swells. Sarah, embittered, treats her like garbage, and Hagar runs away, but God sends her back. Ishmael, her son, is born. Then in an interesting twist God gives Sarah what she’s wanted all along, and even though she’s an old woman, she gets pregnant. Isaac is born, and there is much rejoicing. But when Sarah sees Ishmael playing with Isaac one day, something breaks open in her, and it’s not compassion. It’s rage. Mother-bear, genetic-code-protecting rage. She orders Abraham to send Ishmael and Hagar away, into the wilderness. God agrees it’s for the best, and tells Abe to listen to Sarah. Abe gives Hagar some bread and water, helps her get Ishmael on her back, and they go. They don’t make it very far in the desert, under that North African sun, a young woman alone and her child. Hagar knows what she’s up against. She can feel death, calling for her and for her child. She might as well be running into the woods, or into the basement. Slowly, slowly, she puts Ishmael under a bush, a reflexive act of protection that will do no good. She shuffles a couple of hundred yards away, she sits down, and she wails, loud enough for heaven to hear, because she cannot bear to see her child die.
In the very next chapter, is an echo of child sacrifice. Isaac, this time, the legitimate son of Abraham and Sarah, is to be put to death, simply to test the faith of Abraham. This story is a favorite of rabbis and atheists. Each of them use it to prove their point. Imagine Isaac, about 13 years old, going on a hike with his dad. Not only is he clueless about the danger that awaits, chattering on about pokemon cards and making star-wars sounds as he fights imaginary enemies, his dad actually puts the firewood that will burn his young body on Isaac’s own, skinny, pre-pubescent back. He is a young Christ, mounting Calvary.
There are a few different ways to read these stories. The one that brings the most relief is to read them as metaphors, etiologies, made-up descriptions of how things came to be the way they are. This isn’t a stretch, because it’s what, in fact, these stories were. Ishmael is commonly accepted as the mythical ancestor of the Northern Arab peoples—so his exile into the wilderness explains the fact of the Arabs’ wandering, nomadic nature. The struggle for succession and the right of primogeniture between Isaac and Ishmael also explains, and supports, the historic enmity between Jews and Arabs.
We can read the sacrifice of Isaac, and really, a lot of the carnage in the Old Testament, as a gloss on the many pogroms on the Jewish people through the ages, an etiology for why the line must remain ethnically pure, the people absolutely faithful to the Lord, the God of Israel, lest they disappear forever. And Sarah’s ability to get pregnant at the age of 90, foreshadows the rise of IVF in the late 21st century.
All this clever literary criticism might help us to feel better, feel as if we are living in a safe house of metaphor instead of in the painful reality of a world where women are demoted when they are infertile, where women still turn on women instead of on the patriarchal systems that oppress them, where children are still exposed on mountaintops or thrown into dumpsters, where child abuse and genocide still routinely happens.
Another solution to the texts of terror is to say that for Christians, the whole Old Testament exists as a foil for the New Testament—like, isn’t it amazing what God has done? How good of God to change His mind, to stop all that senseless violence, to stop it in the very body, the self-giving death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, all that nonsense come to an end at last. God is good. All the time. Except before 33 A.D.
But that is cafeteria Christianity, and a little anti-semitic to boot: to leave the God of wrath to the Jews, marry violence to their view of history, and to end up with Jesus, sweet of face, stringing daisies with the children. It’s dishonest, and it’s not true. Phyllis Trible says “to contrast the Old Testament God of Wrath with the New Testament God of Love is fallacious. The God of Israel is the God of Jesus: in both testaments, there is tension between divine wrath and divine love.” Just because God only almost permits the death of two innocent children—Ishmael at the mercy of the elements in the desert, Isaac at the mercy of his father on the mountaintop, doesn’t mean God gets to step in at the last second and play the good guy. “Oh, Hagar, I heard the child crying. Here’s what we’re going to do.” “Oh, Abraham, your faith is sufficient and complete, here’s a substitute.” God let His own son die, painfully, on the cross. The fact that he was resurrected doesn’t take away the pain and humiliation that Jesus experienced, which were real.
There are many tacks we could take to excuse God, and they are all worthy. We could say that the ways of God are inscrutable; that we are to God as the ant is to the human; we can’t possibly understand the fullness of the mind of God, we just have to trust that God knows what God is doing. But we can trust and love God utterly, and still feel that God has some explaining to do.
We could say that, in a sense, God grew up with us—just as in the Great Flood God realized another nature, and promised never again to destroy humankind by flood (gee, thanks God!), that God ultimately realized in the person of Jesus that only self-giving sacrifice would ever end the cycle of violence, so have we too matured, evolved, as a species. We have a better view of God.
We could say that all these stories are fallible, told from a human perspective, and that we attribute dark motives to God when they are, in fact, ours. For all we know, it was Abraham who dragged Isaac up the mountain of his own accord—Isaac, after all, was thirteen, and what parent hasn’t been thrown into a murderous rage at least once by their teenage child? Perhaps God was saving Abraham as well as Isaac.
But it is not our responsibility to make excuses for God to others, or justify these stories to ourselves. Perhaps, in the end, the point of these stories is much more basic. To make us feel, fully and poignantly, the value of each human life. To prevent us from forgetting Rwanda, Darfur, Dachau, to force us to bear witness to the continuing reality of all that Sarah and Hagar and Isaac and Ishmael represent: the runaway, the stepchild, the single welfare mother, the aging wife made superfluous by the mistress, the bag lady, the refugee, the child dying of diarrhea for lack of clean water in the wilderness. All of these people are real, not ancient, not fairy tale characters; they live, and they breathe, and they fight, and they die. We know because we see these people; and we know because we are these people. Will we be broken open, are we willing to feel what they feel?
Perhaps, Trible suggests, the reason these stories remained embedded in our sacred text is to be a thorn in our sides, a reminder of our own dark natures, until we have finally and completely learned to live together without jealousy, ambition, the eternal violent struggle for resources and land and status.
When I went to worship at other churches this summer, I noticed a curious trend among trendy churches. None of them called what we do on Sunday morning “worship.” It was always “Worship Celebration” or “Gathering of Joy.” All very peppy and upbeat. Except, the thing is, it’s not always celebrating that we need to do on Sunday morning. Sometimes, we need to cry. Sometimes, we need to shake our fists at heaven, and where is the room in a Gathering of Joy to do that? Maybe that’s why these stories are here. Great wracking sobs shaking Hagar’s body, Abraham’s hand trembling above his son, his only son, whom he loved. Sometimes you just have to face the darkness, and live with the sadness. And yes, sometimes, God does swoop in at the last second to make things come right, or at least, more right than they were. As someone put it, “everything turns out all right in the end. If it’s not all right, it’s not the end.” Will we refuse God’s help, however, and whenever, it comes?
Because another way to read these stories, is to say: we don’t know what would have happened IF. The big IF being: if people hadn’t listened to God, hadn’t trusted God utterly. IF Hagar had stayed with Sarah and Abraham, Sarah might have gone postal on Ishmael one day, a bloodbath. IF Abraham hadn’t raised that knife over Isaac, maybe neither Isaac nor Abraham would have gone on to lead and protect the many people in their care in the precise way that they did. Sometimes, only almost dying will teach you what life is worth. Walter Brueggeman, after he’d read Genesis cover to cover, and tried to make sense of these stories, said, “Faith is nothing other than the trust in the power of the resurrection against every deathly circumstance.”
And maybe, just maybe, the point of the pointy, difficult stories in the Bible is to remind us that we do not live in a tame universe, that our God is not a tame God. The feminist sci-fi novelist, Ursula LeGuin, said it this way: “Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it’s not poison, and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle.”
Sunday, October 4, 2009
How Do You Read Me? Let Me Count the Ways
Rev Molly Phinney-Baskette Preaching
Last week Laura Ruth kicked off our sermon series on the Bible with a whirlwind tour of the 66 books of the Old Testament and the New Testament. She did a remarkable job of summing up the WHAT of the Bible, and began to get us into the HOW. HOW should we read it? Is there a right way, a wrong way?
My doorbell rang in the middle of the weekday last week. I am an extrovert when I’m out, but an introvert when I’m in, and I live in dread of the doorbell ringing, jealous of any intrusion into my monkishness. But since sabbatical, I’ve been trying to be more open, to be attentive to the divine in each moment, and that means rolling with it, and answering the doorbell. You never know who it might be.
This time, it was a young man with beautiful black curly hair and an intense gaze beaming out of his brown face. A deep scar raked his forehead, impossible to ignore; this was a man with stories. He began to speak quickly in broken English, the Brazilian Portuguese occasionally cutting through, and gesticulated wildly at my roof. After looking anxiously to make sure that there were no cat-burglers or low-flying planes up there, I listened. I got enough of what he was saying to learn that he was by trade a chimney-fixer, and had gotten a good look at the state of Parsonage chimney, and was rescuing us from certain chimney-apocalypse. I explained that the house was in fact part of the church’s property, and I would need to consult with them about his services. His eyes lit up at the word “church” and he asked me if I went to that church, and did I love Jesus? How do you answer that to someone with limited English skills? I said yes, yes, that is my church, and I’m the pastor, and I love Jesus, very much. He became excited, and began to tell me about his own church, gesturing vaguely away from my chimney and toward the other side of Davis Square, a good church, with a good pastor, all of which he found when he arrived in Somerville from Brazil with no money, no job, no family. They had saved his life, he said, praise Jesus.
We chatted for a few more minutes, about chimneys and about Jesus, and he asked, “Do they preach the Bible at your church?” “Sure, sure, we preach the Bible,” I said lamely. But I felt like a hypocrite because I suspected the question he was really asking, if he’d had the language for it, was “Do you preach the inerrancy of Scripture? Do you believe that every single word of the Bible has proceeded directly from the mouth of God, and is literally true?” And, because my inner monk was calling me back into the office, and because I didn’t know how to say it in Portuguese, and because even I, after 3 years of seminary and eleven years of pastoring dread these conversations of theological one-upmanship, I said yes, yes, we preach the Bible. His ravaged face melted into an expression of fierce joy to hear that answer. “I could see, I could see you have Jesus in your heart. I have Jesus in my heart, too. I’m so glad for you, for this church. You know,” he lowered his voice conspiratorially, “there are churches that don’t preach the Bible. They not like your church and my church. Listen, I love your church; I come do the work for free. You call me, you CALL me!” he said, and he pressed his number into my hand, and went on his way.
Last Sunday, during the prayers, a woman I’d never met before stood up and spoke gently, fluidly, about the Bible. She said, the judgment against us unspoken, that the Bible was not fairy tales or fantasy, that every word was true, and that when she was ill, several years ago, it had saved her life. Then she blessed us, and walked out of worship slowly, with great dignity. No one knew what to think or say—should we feel sorry for her, for her obvious mental illness that led her from church to church, monomaniacally preaching inerrancy? Should we be angry that she had disrupted worship in this way, that she had shaken the dust off her sandals at us? Judge not, lady, and ye shall not be judged. Or perhaps we should feel corrected, take her words to heart—could she have been Jesus in disguise?
That man at the door, with Jesus in his heart; that woman in our church, who shook the dust from her sandals: are they really saying that if we don’t take the Bible literally, we have no place in the kingdom of Heaven? If it is so, that is just the kind of ‘you’re in or you’re out’ theology that has driven so many people away from Christianity entirely. And yet, these two people were full of love and gentleness, full of testimony to how God and God’s word had changed their lives. Doesn’t a part of you want what they have?
The culture wars over Christianity in the last 40 years have set us up for a false choice, between taking the Bible literally on the one hand, or taking the Bible as literature on the other. As for taking the Bible literally, I wouldn’t know how to begin to do that. In seminary, we read the Song of Solomon, a love letter. My professor handed out a representation of the author’s lover, with her neck like a stone tower of Lebanon, her teeth like lambs, her breasts like two gazelles, and we all had a good laugh. Clearly, the Bible’s authors used figures of speech to texture their language, to give it layers and depth, as all good writers do. So when I am told that I have to take the Bible literally, it’s not that I disagree per se—I just have no idea on earth how I would do that, even if I wanted to.
But on the other side of the scriptural football field, rooting for their team, are those who would reduce the Bible to literature, literature good or literature bad. When I was a younger, greener preacher, I’d get myself into a lot of trouble with my mouth. I once preached a sermon debunking the Nativity story as a fiction: there was no star, no corroboration of Caesar’s census near that time; even the dating of Jesus’ birth was wrong: my Harper Collins Study Bible notes that Jesus was likely born in the year 4 BC, that is, four years Before Christ. In the sermon I extolled the beauty of the Nativity as story: allusion, alliteration, chiasmus, o lovely chiasmus! The point of the sermon, if I remember correctly, was something about how the stories of the Bible don’t need to be historically true to have power for us, to be, spiritually true, the way a poem is. What I didn’t realize, while I preached it, was that I was stripping away the naïve faith of many who sat in the pews. It was worse than taking Santa away from them. One woman was angry at me for a whole year before she found the courage to tell me: simmering with anger at me through every coffee hour, every deacons’ meeting.
Of course, once that innocence is gone, it’s gone. And who among us would want to un-eat the apple? Our ability to interpret, digest, draw conclusions, our critical faculty is as much a gift from God as our childhood faith. But when we read the Bible only as literature, we find out that something precious is missing, the mystical experience. Because I can’t help but fit things into my own tidy dualisms, I might put it like this: literalists take the Bible as all mystic, no mind; literary types as all mind, no mystic.
So how are we to read it, bringing, as we do, our biases and our thickheadedness and our unique perspectives? Augustine, one of the great saints with feet of clay, said this about scripture. He said that if ever we read the word of God and in it we seem to hear judgment and hatred, we are to read it again. We are to look at it again, and again, until all we can see is love, because that is the sum total of God’s message. (reference Luke, turn to it) At least the lawyer testing Jesus got that part right: he answered Jesus’ question about the most important part of the Law with the Great Commandment, “To love the Lord your God with all your heart and mind and soul and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself.”
Augustine gives us another example, which might help us understand when to take the Bible literally, and when to take it figuratively. It involves the letter to the Romans, which, incidentally, you can read with friends at New Old Fashioned Bible Study with Althea after worship today. Augustine tells us that when Romans says in Chapter 12 (verse 20) “if your enemy is hungry, give him something to eat; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink,” we are to take that part literally, we are to literally tend to the physical needs of our enemies. But when scripture goes on to say, “…for by doing so you will heap burning coals upon his head,” we are not to take that literally, because then someone might have to call the authorities; plus it would defeat the purpose of feeding our enemy to begin with. Augustine goes on to say “We cannot even take the expression figuratively, but unlovingly—as meaning that our act of goodness will shame the enemy, but rather, ‘love should call us to generous action, so that you understand the coals of burning fire to be burning sighs of penitence that heal the pride of one who grieves that he was an enemy to the one who relieved his suffering.” In other words, we are to love our enemies, because our love will be a refining fire that transforms them into friends. Everything in the Bible should be read in this light: read and read and read again, until our reading finally produces an interpretation that contributes to the reign of love.
If Augustine is right, if any way you slice it the only message in the Bible is love, how do we get past all of the other stuff, to that message?
Here is the thing. The Bible won’t yield its loveliness unless you love it. It won’t be trustworthy until you trust it. I love people, but I strive to love God above all people, to love God better than people, so that I may love people better, too. And I love books: I’d rather read than eat. But I love this book that God gave us above all books, so that the wisdom and insight it offers me may shed light on wisdom from every other book. The Bible is like any person—it will only reveal its secrets to you if you trust it; it only gives itself up to the person who pursues it in love. Maybe that is what the chimney-man and our guest in church last week were talking about.
There’s a phrase that has never let me go since I first hear it. It’s not from the Bible, but from a Bible wanna-be, another Gospel that the early church fathers chose not to include in the canon, the Gospel of Thomas. In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus was given to mystical statements about himself, and one such statement is, “Split a piece of wood, and I am there.”
This phrase says something to me about the elemental nature of God: that whatever Jesus embodied, we can see, encoded in all the bits of Creation, at a molecular level. And I’ve always experienced this in the Bible, too! That in spite of the surface contradictions and errors and widely diverging viewpoints; it has its own integrity, an order, a single Word underneath all of those words. If I could only take an electron microscope to the Bible, if I could just look deep enough, I would see a kind of cosmic code, not a series of zeroes and ones, but a single word, repeated over and over, the best word you can think of, a word that if said aloud would bring peace to the nations, cast out all fear. The word that says it all, that makes it all come right, all come clear.
Last week Laura Ruth kicked off our sermon series on the Bible with a whirlwind tour of the 66 books of the Old Testament and the New Testament. She did a remarkable job of summing up the WHAT of the Bible, and began to get us into the HOW. HOW should we read it? Is there a right way, a wrong way?
My doorbell rang in the middle of the weekday last week. I am an extrovert when I’m out, but an introvert when I’m in, and I live in dread of the doorbell ringing, jealous of any intrusion into my monkishness. But since sabbatical, I’ve been trying to be more open, to be attentive to the divine in each moment, and that means rolling with it, and answering the doorbell. You never know who it might be.
This time, it was a young man with beautiful black curly hair and an intense gaze beaming out of his brown face. A deep scar raked his forehead, impossible to ignore; this was a man with stories. He began to speak quickly in broken English, the Brazilian Portuguese occasionally cutting through, and gesticulated wildly at my roof. After looking anxiously to make sure that there were no cat-burglers or low-flying planes up there, I listened. I got enough of what he was saying to learn that he was by trade a chimney-fixer, and had gotten a good look at the state of Parsonage chimney, and was rescuing us from certain chimney-apocalypse. I explained that the house was in fact part of the church’s property, and I would need to consult with them about his services. His eyes lit up at the word “church” and he asked me if I went to that church, and did I love Jesus? How do you answer that to someone with limited English skills? I said yes, yes, that is my church, and I’m the pastor, and I love Jesus, very much. He became excited, and began to tell me about his own church, gesturing vaguely away from my chimney and toward the other side of Davis Square, a good church, with a good pastor, all of which he found when he arrived in Somerville from Brazil with no money, no job, no family. They had saved his life, he said, praise Jesus.
We chatted for a few more minutes, about chimneys and about Jesus, and he asked, “Do they preach the Bible at your church?” “Sure, sure, we preach the Bible,” I said lamely. But I felt like a hypocrite because I suspected the question he was really asking, if he’d had the language for it, was “Do you preach the inerrancy of Scripture? Do you believe that every single word of the Bible has proceeded directly from the mouth of God, and is literally true?” And, because my inner monk was calling me back into the office, and because I didn’t know how to say it in Portuguese, and because even I, after 3 years of seminary and eleven years of pastoring dread these conversations of theological one-upmanship, I said yes, yes, we preach the Bible. His ravaged face melted into an expression of fierce joy to hear that answer. “I could see, I could see you have Jesus in your heart. I have Jesus in my heart, too. I’m so glad for you, for this church. You know,” he lowered his voice conspiratorially, “there are churches that don’t preach the Bible. They not like your church and my church. Listen, I love your church; I come do the work for free. You call me, you CALL me!” he said, and he pressed his number into my hand, and went on his way.
Last Sunday, during the prayers, a woman I’d never met before stood up and spoke gently, fluidly, about the Bible. She said, the judgment against us unspoken, that the Bible was not fairy tales or fantasy, that every word was true, and that when she was ill, several years ago, it had saved her life. Then she blessed us, and walked out of worship slowly, with great dignity. No one knew what to think or say—should we feel sorry for her, for her obvious mental illness that led her from church to church, monomaniacally preaching inerrancy? Should we be angry that she had disrupted worship in this way, that she had shaken the dust off her sandals at us? Judge not, lady, and ye shall not be judged. Or perhaps we should feel corrected, take her words to heart—could she have been Jesus in disguise?
That man at the door, with Jesus in his heart; that woman in our church, who shook the dust from her sandals: are they really saying that if we don’t take the Bible literally, we have no place in the kingdom of Heaven? If it is so, that is just the kind of ‘you’re in or you’re out’ theology that has driven so many people away from Christianity entirely. And yet, these two people were full of love and gentleness, full of testimony to how God and God’s word had changed their lives. Doesn’t a part of you want what they have?
The culture wars over Christianity in the last 40 years have set us up for a false choice, between taking the Bible literally on the one hand, or taking the Bible as literature on the other. As for taking the Bible literally, I wouldn’t know how to begin to do that. In seminary, we read the Song of Solomon, a love letter. My professor handed out a representation of the author’s lover, with her neck like a stone tower of Lebanon, her teeth like lambs, her breasts like two gazelles, and we all had a good laugh. Clearly, the Bible’s authors used figures of speech to texture their language, to give it layers and depth, as all good writers do. So when I am told that I have to take the Bible literally, it’s not that I disagree per se—I just have no idea on earth how I would do that, even if I wanted to.
But on the other side of the scriptural football field, rooting for their team, are those who would reduce the Bible to literature, literature good or literature bad. When I was a younger, greener preacher, I’d get myself into a lot of trouble with my mouth. I once preached a sermon debunking the Nativity story as a fiction: there was no star, no corroboration of Caesar’s census near that time; even the dating of Jesus’ birth was wrong: my Harper Collins Study Bible notes that Jesus was likely born in the year 4 BC, that is, four years Before Christ. In the sermon I extolled the beauty of the Nativity as story: allusion, alliteration, chiasmus, o lovely chiasmus! The point of the sermon, if I remember correctly, was something about how the stories of the Bible don’t need to be historically true to have power for us, to be, spiritually true, the way a poem is. What I didn’t realize, while I preached it, was that I was stripping away the naïve faith of many who sat in the pews. It was worse than taking Santa away from them. One woman was angry at me for a whole year before she found the courage to tell me: simmering with anger at me through every coffee hour, every deacons’ meeting.
Of course, once that innocence is gone, it’s gone. And who among us would want to un-eat the apple? Our ability to interpret, digest, draw conclusions, our critical faculty is as much a gift from God as our childhood faith. But when we read the Bible only as literature, we find out that something precious is missing, the mystical experience. Because I can’t help but fit things into my own tidy dualisms, I might put it like this: literalists take the Bible as all mystic, no mind; literary types as all mind, no mystic.
So how are we to read it, bringing, as we do, our biases and our thickheadedness and our unique perspectives? Augustine, one of the great saints with feet of clay, said this about scripture. He said that if ever we read the word of God and in it we seem to hear judgment and hatred, we are to read it again. We are to look at it again, and again, until all we can see is love, because that is the sum total of God’s message. (reference Luke, turn to it) At least the lawyer testing Jesus got that part right: he answered Jesus’ question about the most important part of the Law with the Great Commandment, “To love the Lord your God with all your heart and mind and soul and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself.”
Augustine gives us another example, which might help us understand when to take the Bible literally, and when to take it figuratively. It involves the letter to the Romans, which, incidentally, you can read with friends at New Old Fashioned Bible Study with Althea after worship today. Augustine tells us that when Romans says in Chapter 12 (verse 20) “if your enemy is hungry, give him something to eat; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink,” we are to take that part literally, we are to literally tend to the physical needs of our enemies. But when scripture goes on to say, “…for by doing so you will heap burning coals upon his head,” we are not to take that literally, because then someone might have to call the authorities; plus it would defeat the purpose of feeding our enemy to begin with. Augustine goes on to say “We cannot even take the expression figuratively, but unlovingly—as meaning that our act of goodness will shame the enemy, but rather, ‘love should call us to generous action, so that you understand the coals of burning fire to be burning sighs of penitence that heal the pride of one who grieves that he was an enemy to the one who relieved his suffering.” In other words, we are to love our enemies, because our love will be a refining fire that transforms them into friends. Everything in the Bible should be read in this light: read and read and read again, until our reading finally produces an interpretation that contributes to the reign of love.
If Augustine is right, if any way you slice it the only message in the Bible is love, how do we get past all of the other stuff, to that message?
Here is the thing. The Bible won’t yield its loveliness unless you love it. It won’t be trustworthy until you trust it. I love people, but I strive to love God above all people, to love God better than people, so that I may love people better, too. And I love books: I’d rather read than eat. But I love this book that God gave us above all books, so that the wisdom and insight it offers me may shed light on wisdom from every other book. The Bible is like any person—it will only reveal its secrets to you if you trust it; it only gives itself up to the person who pursues it in love. Maybe that is what the chimney-man and our guest in church last week were talking about.
There’s a phrase that has never let me go since I first hear it. It’s not from the Bible, but from a Bible wanna-be, another Gospel that the early church fathers chose not to include in the canon, the Gospel of Thomas. In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus was given to mystical statements about himself, and one such statement is, “Split a piece of wood, and I am there.”
This phrase says something to me about the elemental nature of God: that whatever Jesus embodied, we can see, encoded in all the bits of Creation, at a molecular level. And I’ve always experienced this in the Bible, too! That in spite of the surface contradictions and errors and widely diverging viewpoints; it has its own integrity, an order, a single Word underneath all of those words. If I could only take an electron microscope to the Bible, if I could just look deep enough, I would see a kind of cosmic code, not a series of zeroes and ones, but a single word, repeated over and over, the best word you can think of, a word that if said aloud would bring peace to the nations, cast out all fear. The word that says it all, that makes it all come right, all come clear.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Monday, July 20, 2009
Creative Expressions on Race, 4 of 4
This is part 4 of 4 of the Creative Expressions on Race program held at First Church Somerville. Part 4 features the vocal stylings of First Church's own Pete Shungu aka Afro DZ ak and all in attendance singing "We Shall Overcome."
As part of its Sacred Conversations on Race Project, First Church Somerville invited artists to show and to perform works that illuminate and further our conversation on race and racism. This evening, which included spoken word, music, poetry, and visual art was called “Creative Expression on Race,” and was held on Sunday, March 22, 2009 at First Congregational Church of Somerville, 89 College Ave, Somerville, MA 02144.
www.firstchurchsomerville.org
As part of its Sacred Conversations on Race Project, First Church Somerville invited artists to show and to perform works that illuminate and further our conversation on race and racism. This evening, which included spoken word, music, poetry, and visual art was called “Creative Expression on Race,” and was held on Sunday, March 22, 2009 at First Congregational Church of Somerville, 89 College Ave, Somerville, MA 02144.
www.firstchurchsomerville.org
Creative Expressions on Race, 3 of 4
This is part 3 of 4 of the Creative Expressions on Race program held at First Church Somerville. Part 3 features the music of the First Church Somerville Choir Ensemble directed by Thom Whittemore and the poetry of Elizabeth West.
As part of its Sacred Conversations on Race Project, First Church Somerville invited artists to show and to perform works that illuminate and further our conversation on race and racism. This evening, which included spoken word, music, poetry, and visual art was called “Creative Expression on Race,” and was held on Sunday, March 22, 2009 at First Congregational Church of Somerville, 89 College Ave, Somerville, MA 02144.
www.firstchurchsomerville.org
As part of its Sacred Conversations on Race Project, First Church Somerville invited artists to show and to perform works that illuminate and further our conversation on race and racism. This evening, which included spoken word, music, poetry, and visual art was called “Creative Expression on Race,” and was held on Sunday, March 22, 2009 at First Congregational Church of Somerville, 89 College Ave, Somerville, MA 02144.
www.firstchurchsomerville.org
Creative Expressions on Race, 2 of 4
This is part 2 of 4 of the Creative Expressions on Race program held at First Church Somerville. Part 2 features the music of Rev. Laura Ruth Jarret and the spoken word poetry of Vangile Makwakwa of Speak2BFree.
As part of its Sacred Conversations on Race Project, First Church Somerville invited artists to show and to perform works that illuminate and further our conversation on race and racism. This evening, which included spoken word, music, poetry, and visual art was called “Creative Expression on Race,” and was held on Sunday, March 22, 2009 at First Congregational Church of Somerville, 89 College Ave, Somerville, MA 02144.
www.firstchurchsomerville.org
As part of its Sacred Conversations on Race Project, First Church Somerville invited artists to show and to perform works that illuminate and further our conversation on race and racism. This evening, which included spoken word, music, poetry, and visual art was called “Creative Expression on Race,” and was held on Sunday, March 22, 2009 at First Congregational Church of Somerville, 89 College Ave, Somerville, MA 02144.
www.firstchurchsomerville.org
Creative Expressions on Race, 1 of 4
This is part 1 of 4 of the Creative Expressions on Race program held at First Church Somerville. Part 1 features a poem by Meck and the music of First Church Somerville's Children's Choir directed by Thom Whittemore and Assisted by Melissa Hines
As part of its Sacred Conversations on Race Project, First Church Somerville invited artists to show and to perform works that illuminate and further our conversation on race and racism. This evening, which included spoken word, music, poetry, and visual art was called “Creative Expression on Race,” and was held on Sunday, March 22, 2009 at First Congregational Church of Somerville, 89 College Ave, Somerville, MA 02144.
www.firstchurchsomerville.org
As part of its Sacred Conversations on Race Project, First Church Somerville invited artists to show and to perform works that illuminate and further our conversation on race and racism. This evening, which included spoken word, music, poetry, and visual art was called “Creative Expression on Race,” and was held on Sunday, March 22, 2009 at First Congregational Church of Somerville, 89 College Ave, Somerville, MA 02144.
www.firstchurchsomerville.org
Persevering up Heartbreak Hill, Racism Panel Discussion
Persevering up Heartbreak Hill is the Panel Discussion on Racism that was held at First Congregational Church of Somerville on April 30, 2009.
The speakers were; Elena Letona, who served as Centro Presente’s Executive Director; Somerville’s Police Chief, Anthony Holloway; our Associate General Minister of the national United Church of Christ, Edith Guffey; and Wellesley professor and the author of “The Knapsack of White Privilege”, Peg McIntosh will be our panelists. This panel of experts spoke about racism in Somerville, racism in religion, and racism in our congregations, amongst other things. The panel was moderated by Tim Duhamel and LaTayna Purnell.
The speakers were; Elena Letona, who served as Centro Presente’s Executive Director; Somerville’s Police Chief, Anthony Holloway; our Associate General Minister of the national United Church of Christ, Edith Guffey; and Wellesley professor and the author of “The Knapsack of White Privilege”, Peg McIntosh will be our panelists. This panel of experts spoke about racism in Somerville, racism in religion, and racism in our congregations, amongst other things. The panel was moderated by Tim Duhamel and LaTayna Purnell.
Sunday, July 19, 2009
How To Practice
Rev. Laura Ruth Jarrett Preaches
We who were brought up in the church may be surprised by the thought that Christianity has spiritual practices like other religions we admire – like Buddhist and Judaism, to name two. Some of us thought the only practice of Christianity was the practice of belief. We were taught that the only way to be Christian was to believe.
Some of us have thought the stuff we were supposed to believe was crazy, ridiculous, hypocritical, evil! Trinity, virgin birth, died but resurrected, sins forgiven, a sacrifice of a son – what! These were offered as a set of facts or propositions, and our acceptance was supposed to happen instantly, magically. No!
I’m not even going to talk about stuff we couldn’t believe because our churches turned away the poor, the colored, the crazy, the queer, or because our churches taught that if you love Jesus, Jesus will help you get that Jaguar, that job, that distance from dirty.
Where I grew up, not believing was a big problem, and questioning that package of facts was dire. You were socially ostracized in this life and bound for hell in the next. Some of us turned ourselves inside out trying to believe, or else we found ourselves turning away from our home communities, we got the hell out.
Still, belief is important. Some folks have a gift for it, and some do not. For some, belief comes easily. For me, and maybe you, it doesn’t come instantly or at all.
Some of us have been and are inspired by Buddhism’s spiritual teachings, in my case, because Buddhism seemed to offer methods of spiritual practice, a way of coming to expanded knowledge and consciousness, a way of wrestling with belief. Sitting meditation may help us suffer less, may teach Buddha mind, truth mind. Practicing detachment keeps us from minding others’ business and keeps us focused on our own work. Practicing wishing all beings be well keeps us humble, wishing and working for wellness that includes community, the world, the universe.
I wonder, how did Jesus came to belief. Did he believe in God, or Judaism out of the shoot because, well, he was God? Did he believe in himself? But how did he learn how to marshall his energies, when to rest and retreat? When he was healing folks, how did he learn to let out the right amout of power so that folks were healed but not raptured or slain? How did he know when to raise someone from the dead (if we believe he did) and when to let folks lie moldering. How did he know or handle the fact that folks thought he was the Messiah? How do you learn how to do that, be the Messiah?
There is a body of legend, that says, during the years between his bar mitzvah at 12 in Jerusalem and taking up his “ministry” at about age 30 in the Galilee, he went to Persia, India and Asia, seeking the masters of spiritual practice.
In the novel Lamb: the Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal, Jesus, accompanied by his childhood pal Biff, goes first to the Wise Men from the East, Zoroastrians, to see if he can find out how to become the Messiah. The wise men helped him, then sent him on to consult and practice with Hindus, and Buddhists.
Our canonical scripture says nothing of this sort, and I don’t want to make too much of these stories, except to say that this novel is very funny and you should read it. But it’s interesting, isn’t it, to think about, that Jesus might have sought spiritual teachers to figure how use his spiritual gifts, how to live into his spiritual purpose?
Doesn't it make sense that we need spiritual teachers and practices to know how to channel our energies, to make some good disciplining choices to know how to use our spiritual gifts and live into who we are made to be?
So then, what would Christian practice be? What does Christianity have to offer that might help us expand our consciousness; deepen our awareness of what is truer than true, or that will at least help us through the night?
First I’d offer the idea that Jesus teaches ideas similar to Buddha. Buddhism, which precedes Christianity by 500 years, teaches living in the moment, worrying not about the past or the future. Jesus teaches that we should not worry about what we eat or drink. We should consider the lilies of the field. We should look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap, nor gather into barns, and yet God feeds them. The Buddhist practice is staying present and the Christian practice is staying present.
Here’s a list of only a few spiritual practices from Christian scripture. All these are from Jesus’ teaching or Jesus’ example.
• Pray
• Take care of children, don’t mistreat them.
• Come away and rest.
• Feed the hungry, clothe the naked.
• If someone mistreats you, doesn’t welcome you, shake the dust off your feet and leave.
• Take time to reflect, eat, and practice compassion, these from our today’s gospel reading.
• Don’t commit adultery.
• Don’t lie.
• Don’t throw your pearls before swine.
These may sound like commandments to you, but I want to ask you to think about this list as spiritual practices instead of commands.
Take for example, “don’t throw your pearls before swine,” one of my mom’s favorites. I think this means stop doing stupid stuff to make people like you, I mean me. I think it means, mind my dignity. When I’m unwell, I’d really rather have people like me, so I like to practice being well, practice honoring my dignity. When I do practice being well and being dignified, I often find myself centered, happy, with a wider vision that my tiny misery, such a relief, and a compassion for myself and for others, one of the ways I know I’m Christian.
Another practice that maybe you thought was a commandment: you shall not commit adultery. Not committing adultery is hard! It takes spiritual practice not to step out on your partner! Some of us prefer the thrill of indiscretion to the centered, patient, kind, sometimes painful, sometimes dull, working out of relationship, or the careful dissolution of relationship that no longer works. What we learn from relationships, we learn about ourselves and about our relationship with God. So, practice fidelity in relationships, a kind of fidelity you and your partner work out. It takes practice.
Take time to reflect, what - while Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice are on the radio? But what if we did reflect on our behavior or our love, and we made choices about how to do it different or the same tomorrow, or next time, think of the trouble or the love we’d save.
Don’t lie. Figuring out how to tell the truth takes a lot of practice, telling truth not as a weapon, but as a means of being in relationship – letting your yes be yes and your no be no. Hard, work! Not a thing done perfectly, or instantly. It takes a lot of practicing. Once we stop being attached to telling what we wish were true, we can become free. This is what Jesus teaches, the truth will set us free.
Our church asks us to practice these: come to services, participate in communion, pray, take retreats, learn what’s in your bible and what it means to you in this generation, be in covenant with each other, the earth, and with those who seek God.
So how do we find practices that are our own? Choosing a practice that is connected to our sense of our authenticity, and engaging in the activities that fill us with joy, or contentment, a certainty of right action or spiritual solidity, activities that we are so committed to that we practice for hours and hours, becoming expert, these are the practices that are right for us.
Here are some spiritual practices that you have told me about this last week. Some of us play drums, learn Arabic, play violin, feed the hungry every Monday and once a month on Wednesday and Thursday, plan and lead services on Sunday, Wednesday, Thursday, and tonight for the first time, on Sunday night. Read, write, spend time with friends, paint, sculpt, sing, oh sing, play the organ, the piano. Care for children, read the 23rd Psalm, lead Bible study, take kind care of our bodies and others’ bodies and psyches, walk in nature, put things in our pockets that remind us to pray. If you love to cook and grow a garden, this is what you should do.
Here’s why. When we practice, we find our rest in God. When we practice, our consciousness is expanded, we fall in love with God, we fall in love with humanity, we find that we are right-sized and we like that. We find serenity, a peace that passes all understanding.
But also spiritual practice leads us into belief, belief that little by little, or maybe very quickly, causes us to understand truths too large to be contained by our puny, valiant, striving, resilient, market saturated spirits, truths that attempt to be explained by the metaphor of Trinity, or virgin birth, life that does not end. Here is a spiritual practice. Try not to limit the work of God. Try not to make the vast mystery of God small. Try not to get tripped up by other people’s metaphors. Have patience and let God be revealed to you, allow yourselves to be opened. This is my prayer for you.
We who were brought up in the church may be surprised by the thought that Christianity has spiritual practices like other religions we admire – like Buddhist and Judaism, to name two. Some of us thought the only practice of Christianity was the practice of belief. We were taught that the only way to be Christian was to believe.
Some of us have thought the stuff we were supposed to believe was crazy, ridiculous, hypocritical, evil! Trinity, virgin birth, died but resurrected, sins forgiven, a sacrifice of a son – what! These were offered as a set of facts or propositions, and our acceptance was supposed to happen instantly, magically. No!
I’m not even going to talk about stuff we couldn’t believe because our churches turned away the poor, the colored, the crazy, the queer, or because our churches taught that if you love Jesus, Jesus will help you get that Jaguar, that job, that distance from dirty.
Where I grew up, not believing was a big problem, and questioning that package of facts was dire. You were socially ostracized in this life and bound for hell in the next. Some of us turned ourselves inside out trying to believe, or else we found ourselves turning away from our home communities, we got the hell out.
Still, belief is important. Some folks have a gift for it, and some do not. For some, belief comes easily. For me, and maybe you, it doesn’t come instantly or at all.
Some of us have been and are inspired by Buddhism’s spiritual teachings, in my case, because Buddhism seemed to offer methods of spiritual practice, a way of coming to expanded knowledge and consciousness, a way of wrestling with belief. Sitting meditation may help us suffer less, may teach Buddha mind, truth mind. Practicing detachment keeps us from minding others’ business and keeps us focused on our own work. Practicing wishing all beings be well keeps us humble, wishing and working for wellness that includes community, the world, the universe.
I wonder, how did Jesus came to belief. Did he believe in God, or Judaism out of the shoot because, well, he was God? Did he believe in himself? But how did he learn how to marshall his energies, when to rest and retreat? When he was healing folks, how did he learn to let out the right amout of power so that folks were healed but not raptured or slain? How did he know when to raise someone from the dead (if we believe he did) and when to let folks lie moldering. How did he know or handle the fact that folks thought he was the Messiah? How do you learn how to do that, be the Messiah?
There is a body of legend, that says, during the years between his bar mitzvah at 12 in Jerusalem and taking up his “ministry” at about age 30 in the Galilee, he went to Persia, India and Asia, seeking the masters of spiritual practice.
In the novel Lamb: the Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal, Jesus, accompanied by his childhood pal Biff, goes first to the Wise Men from the East, Zoroastrians, to see if he can find out how to become the Messiah. The wise men helped him, then sent him on to consult and practice with Hindus, and Buddhists.
Our canonical scripture says nothing of this sort, and I don’t want to make too much of these stories, except to say that this novel is very funny and you should read it. But it’s interesting, isn’t it, to think about, that Jesus might have sought spiritual teachers to figure how use his spiritual gifts, how to live into his spiritual purpose?
Doesn't it make sense that we need spiritual teachers and practices to know how to channel our energies, to make some good disciplining choices to know how to use our spiritual gifts and live into who we are made to be?
So then, what would Christian practice be? What does Christianity have to offer that might help us expand our consciousness; deepen our awareness of what is truer than true, or that will at least help us through the night?
First I’d offer the idea that Jesus teaches ideas similar to Buddha. Buddhism, which precedes Christianity by 500 years, teaches living in the moment, worrying not about the past or the future. Jesus teaches that we should not worry about what we eat or drink. We should consider the lilies of the field. We should look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap, nor gather into barns, and yet God feeds them. The Buddhist practice is staying present and the Christian practice is staying present.
Here’s a list of only a few spiritual practices from Christian scripture. All these are from Jesus’ teaching or Jesus’ example.
• Pray
• Take care of children, don’t mistreat them.
• Come away and rest.
• Feed the hungry, clothe the naked.
• If someone mistreats you, doesn’t welcome you, shake the dust off your feet and leave.
• Take time to reflect, eat, and practice compassion, these from our today’s gospel reading.
• Don’t commit adultery.
• Don’t lie.
• Don’t throw your pearls before swine.
These may sound like commandments to you, but I want to ask you to think about this list as spiritual practices instead of commands.
Take for example, “don’t throw your pearls before swine,” one of my mom’s favorites. I think this means stop doing stupid stuff to make people like you, I mean me. I think it means, mind my dignity. When I’m unwell, I’d really rather have people like me, so I like to practice being well, practice honoring my dignity. When I do practice being well and being dignified, I often find myself centered, happy, with a wider vision that my tiny misery, such a relief, and a compassion for myself and for others, one of the ways I know I’m Christian.
Another practice that maybe you thought was a commandment: you shall not commit adultery. Not committing adultery is hard! It takes spiritual practice not to step out on your partner! Some of us prefer the thrill of indiscretion to the centered, patient, kind, sometimes painful, sometimes dull, working out of relationship, or the careful dissolution of relationship that no longer works. What we learn from relationships, we learn about ourselves and about our relationship with God. So, practice fidelity in relationships, a kind of fidelity you and your partner work out. It takes practice.
Take time to reflect, what - while Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice are on the radio? But what if we did reflect on our behavior or our love, and we made choices about how to do it different or the same tomorrow, or next time, think of the trouble or the love we’d save.
Don’t lie. Figuring out how to tell the truth takes a lot of practice, telling truth not as a weapon, but as a means of being in relationship – letting your yes be yes and your no be no. Hard, work! Not a thing done perfectly, or instantly. It takes a lot of practicing. Once we stop being attached to telling what we wish were true, we can become free. This is what Jesus teaches, the truth will set us free.
Our church asks us to practice these: come to services, participate in communion, pray, take retreats, learn what’s in your bible and what it means to you in this generation, be in covenant with each other, the earth, and with those who seek God.
So how do we find practices that are our own? Choosing a practice that is connected to our sense of our authenticity, and engaging in the activities that fill us with joy, or contentment, a certainty of right action or spiritual solidity, activities that we are so committed to that we practice for hours and hours, becoming expert, these are the practices that are right for us.
Here are some spiritual practices that you have told me about this last week. Some of us play drums, learn Arabic, play violin, feed the hungry every Monday and once a month on Wednesday and Thursday, plan and lead services on Sunday, Wednesday, Thursday, and tonight for the first time, on Sunday night. Read, write, spend time with friends, paint, sculpt, sing, oh sing, play the organ, the piano. Care for children, read the 23rd Psalm, lead Bible study, take kind care of our bodies and others’ bodies and psyches, walk in nature, put things in our pockets that remind us to pray. If you love to cook and grow a garden, this is what you should do.
Here’s why. When we practice, we find our rest in God. When we practice, our consciousness is expanded, we fall in love with God, we fall in love with humanity, we find that we are right-sized and we like that. We find serenity, a peace that passes all understanding.
But also spiritual practice leads us into belief, belief that little by little, or maybe very quickly, causes us to understand truths too large to be contained by our puny, valiant, striving, resilient, market saturated spirits, truths that attempt to be explained by the metaphor of Trinity, or virgin birth, life that does not end. Here is a spiritual practice. Try not to limit the work of God. Try not to make the vast mystery of God small. Try not to get tripped up by other people’s metaphors. Have patience and let God be revealed to you, allow yourselves to be opened. This is my prayer for you.
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Sunday, June 7, 2009
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