Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Pluck and throw



 
Every weekday morning I drive my daughter to school before coming to my office.  We’re supposed to leave the house at 8 o’clock, but it’s usually closer to 8:10 before we finally get breakfast eaten and shoes on, and the backpack and the lunches, the laptop (mine, not hers), the clarinet and the music stand, and whatever else we need for the day ahead into the car, and pull out of the driveway.  Then we have to make our way through the streets of Petaluma, crowded with other people in their cars, buses, motorcycles, trucks, and even trains, all of them in just as much of a hurry as we are to get where they are going.  Finally, we have to find a place in the crowded drop-off zone in front of Risa’s school, to pull over and safely let her out onto the sidewalk.
The thing that makes it possible for us and everyone else to make that journey every morning is that there are rules.  There are the ones that are codified into state and local ordinance, the traffic laws and the rules of the road.  And then there are the unwritten rules that each person makes for him or herself about how far above or below the posted speed limit it is okay to travel, or how long one should wait at a four-way stop when the driver you thought had the right-of-way isn’t going ahead.
 I wish I could stand here and tell you that I make that drive every day in a state of perfect composure, and that I have nothing but patience and respect for those people who don’t interpret the rules exactly the same way I do.  I’d like to say I have a generous tolerance for drivers who are more cautious and conservative, or more bold and aggressive, than I would be.  But the truth is that Risa gets to see a side of me on our morning drive to school that she might never see otherwise.  She gets to hear words come out of my mouth that she might otherwise not have known were in my vocabulary.
I’m not proud of this, and Risa likes to point out, when I lose my temper with another driver, that it is for doing something I might have done myself, and probably have.  As a person who is supposed to stand for peace, love, and understanding, I’m well aware that my own morning commute is a daily betrayal those ideals.  I can’t really claim that if everyone drove to work the way I do, we would all find ourselves in the Kingdom of God.
And this is true even though, on the face of it, I’m not breaking the law.  Which brings us to the point I’ve been getting to, which is that the rules by themselves are not enough.  Not if we want more out of life than the bare minimum standard of getting to school in one piece, and close enough to on-time.  Not breaking the law is not going to be enough if we want a world where we live together in real harmony and contentment.  That will require something more, something that goes beyond what we do on the outside to how we are on the inside.
In the reading from Deuteronomy this morning, we can see the emergence of this kind of understanding of the law.  It is not something arbitrary set up by God to test his people’s obedience.  The law’s real purpose is to change them.  It is to convert them into a people who live together in a way that really is worth living.  The law is the constitution of a different kind of nation, where human existence is more than a miserable brutish struggle that leads directly to the grave.  Keeping the commandments of God, Israel will achieve a kind of greatness not measured by the extent of her territory, or the wealth of her rulers.  Their own little slice of land will be enough for them, because of the greatness of the life they will live there, in unity, prosperity, justice, longevity and peace.
Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom of heaven is radically new, but is built squarely on Israel’s vision of the best way to live.  It is a call to conversion, to receive the abundant life envisioned in Deuteronomy, only present and active now in the person and teaching of Jesus.  Today’s passage from Matthew is really a commentary on last week’s gospel where Jesus says that he has not come to abolish the commandments, but to fulfill them. 
Now it might seem from what he says next that this fulfillment means adding new and even more demanding and restrictive rules to the ones already in force.  But I think this reading misses the point.  I think what Jesus is really saying is that the kinds of behavior that cause so much needless suffering in the world, and tear apart the fabric of community, do not come about because people decide to break the rules.  They are really more pervasive and insidious than that, and the difference between truly egregious sins and the seemingly harmless little foibles that we secretly indulge in the privacy of our hearts, our homes, or our automobiles, is a difference of degree, but not of kind.
Because both involve a denial of our real interrelatedness, for all of us are equally, utterly dependent on God.   And God has made each one of us equally worthy of honor, equally deserving of love.  This denial is not something we choose to do—but it is planted very close to the center of our very sense of self, and the whole structure of our personality has grown up around it.  And as Jesus tells us in the gospel today, the more power it has over our lives, the closer we get to hell.
But we can choose to admit this, to stop pretending that we’re better than we are.  We can start to pay more attention to how it works in our own lives.  We can stop blaming other people for our habitual self-inflicted wounds.  And we can stop blaming our bodies.  All my life I’ve struggled with this passage about how if your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and throw it away.  Clearly it’s rhetorical, but for a long time I misunderstood what kind of rhetoric it is.  I used to think it was hyperbole—that Jesus was exaggerating to impress on us the severity of sin, and our responsibility for it.  But now I think it’s also irony.  It’s a joke, pointing out the absurdity of self-mortification.  Because who in the world ever really stumbled because of his eye, or her hand? 
No, what we really need to pluck out and throw away are our thoughts, all that endless cascade of mean little thoughts we have about ourselves and other people.  The ones that tell us what a raw deal we’re getting, and how much better off the neighbors are.  The ones that are always ready to fasten on what is less than perfect, and so slow to give thanks for the miracle of sharing this existence.  What we need to tear off and throw away are our self-pity, and envy, our prejudices and power trips, and fantasies of domination and revenge.  These are the members that get us thrown into hell.
So we throw them away, knowing they’ll be back.  But we throw them away again, because repentance is not a one-and-done catharsis, but a life-long conversion.  And the more we pluck them out and throw them away, the less power they have to define us.  At the same time, we start to find ourselves strangely attracted to thoughts of an entirely different kind, thoughts like “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.  Blessed are the merciful, for they will obtain mercy.  Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.” 
And we start to wonder what it would be like to go through the world with that kind of trust, that combination of confidence and tenderness.  And maybe in time we start to see that at the very beginning another seed was planted in our hearts, one that’s not off center at all.  The shoot that sprouted from that seed has been growing in secret all the time, and is completely intertwined with that anxious, grasping, craven self we thought we really were.  Its roots go down deep into the goodness of life together on the earth.  Its leaves spread high and wide above, to receive the grace that streams from heaven.  And the Christ-life sways and dances in all of us together, not because we follow the same rules, but because we move to the breath of the same Spirit of love.


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About Me

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Petaluma, California, United States
I am a priest in the Episcopal Church, and have been (among other things) an organic farmer and gardener, and a Zen monk. I have a lifelong interest in social and spiritual renewal on the basis of contemplative discipline, creative nonviolence, and ecological practice. In recent years my work has focused intensely on the responsibility of pastoral ministry in the humanistic, evangelical, and catholic branch of Christianity known as Anglicanism. I'm married with a daughter, and have three brothers and two parents.