Could you be loved?

Jeremiah 31:31-34
Psalm 119:9-16
Hebrews 5:5-10
John 12:20-33

By the time I knew who Bob Marley was, it was too late.  Funny thing was, I had my chance to see him.  On November 4, 1979 he played two shows at Memorial Auditorium in Burlington, Vermont.  You can buy an original poster for the concerts for a thousand dollars on the internet.  But at the time the tickets sold for $7.50.  I was a sophomore in High School, not quite fourteen years old, and not yet in the habit of going to rock concerts.  And Bob Marley was not a rock musician, exactly.  He and his band, the Wailers, played reggae, music from the urban slums of Kingston, the capital of Jamaica, that fused American Soul, Gospel, and Rhythm and Blues, with traditional folk music from the countryside with deep roots in African culture. 

I read about that in the free weekly paper, the Vermont Vanguard, which published an interview to promote the concerts.  It was the first I’d heard of him, and I was intrigued.  But I didn’t drive yet, and neither did any of my friends; there was no bus out to where we lived, 15 miles from Burlington, and the 4^th of November was a school night.  So I didn’t go, but I might have made more of an effort if I’d known then what I soon came to know.  I didn’t know that Bob Marley was a legendary live performer who was on his way to becoming a global superstar.  I didn’t know that the following year my brother Ben was going to go away to boarding school and come back for Christmas a fan. 

When I found out about that, I bought Ben a cassette tape of the album Survival and put it under the tree, but it turned out he already had it, and he gave it back to me.  I still remember putting it into a little portable tape player one Saturday morning to listen to while I did my weekly chores.  It was unlike any music I’d ever heard before, and I didn’t know what to make of it at first.  But I kept listening, and pretty soon I was playing it over and over again.  It wasn’t long after that I went over to my friend Fred’s house and discovered that his mother had a bunch of Bob Marley and the Wailers records.  So I rode my bike to Burlington the next weekend, and bought a bunch of blank cassettes, and I taped every one of those albums.  Over the following months I spent the money I earned mowing lawns at the record store, filling in the rest my collection. 

I might have made more of an effort to get to the Bob Marley concert that night if I’d known he was about to die.  I was on the staff of the high school newspaper by then, and I wrote a heartfelt obituary and we published it, bordered in black.  The chance I’d missed, to see him in person, would never come again.  But in the long run, his impact on my life wasn’t any less because of it.   Unlike most of the music I was a fan of in those days, I still listen to Bob Marley.  It makes me proud and happy that now my wife and daughter like him, too.  I guess that’s because the messages that made his songs so meaningful to me when I was a teenager still matter to me today—loving and giving thanks to God, brotherhood and sisterhood with all human beings; outrage and sorrow at violence, injustice, and war; faith in the power of truth to overcome greed and delusion; championing the right of the poor to stand up and resist their oppressors; joyful celebration of love, culture, community, and the basic goodness of life.

The Gospel of John doesn’t say whether the Greeks who came to Jerusalem for the Passover ever got to see Jesus in person.  It seems like they didn’t.  And maybe in the short run, it felt to them like a missed opportunity and a grave disappointment.  But events were moving quickly for Jesus at that time, according to a different agenda than the one those Greeks had in mind.  The time when they asked to see him was exactly the moment for Jesus to begin the final movement of his destiny.  The things that those Greeks were hoping to get from him—new insight into the working of God in the world and in their lives, a transforming experience of the power of truth and love to overcome alienation and despair—these things were about to become available to them and to everyone, in a new way that did not depend on being in his physical presence.

But in order for that to happen Jesus had to die.  Why that is, and how that works, and what that means, are questions that never go away.  They are involved with the questions about why there is so much evil and suffering in the world, and what is the purpose of human life, and why things never measure up to the potential we can see they have.  I think the church has sometimes done a disservice with its overly tidy explanations for all of this, and how it is that Jesus’ being “lifted up” on the cross speaks to the heart of the matter.  We have held these questions at a safe distance, for philosophical analysis and theological speculation, or we have smothered them with pious sentimentality. 

What is clear and indisputable is that Greeks did embrace the Gospel of Jesus, by dozens, and then by hundreds, and thousands, and hundreds of thousands.  And so did Romans and Syrians, Egyptians and Mesopotamians, Ethiopians and Arabs, and Irish and Mexicans and Chinese.  Why a religion that centers on the agonizing public execution of its founder could spread across the world like this is another puzzle that people like to try to solve.  They explain it in terms of social psychology and cultural anthropology, comparative religion and politics.   But maybe the most satisfactory explanation is the simplest one—that people simply recognize it as true.

The death of Jesus tells us something true about this world we live in and about ourselves.  It tears away the veil from the ruler of the world, revealing the terror and violence behind the lofty propaganda, idolatrous religion, and mockeries of peace and justice.  It shows us how we acquiesce to these manipulations, how we crave the security of the herd, and love to be told that we are the ones who play by the rules, and so we are the ones who deserve the rewards.   It shows us how the spirit that lays false claim to rule the world holds sway in our own hearts, seeking to be admired and honored, seeing rivals and enemies everywhere, loving to play the game of blame and shame, because the humiliation of another is the best defense against our own.  The cross is this world’s moment of truth, and as much as we might want to shrink from it, there is something in us that recognizes it for what it is.

This attracts us, because deep down we long to be free.  And the world’s captivity to sin and death is only part of the truth that Jesus knew.  The other side of the truth is that the world is worth dying for.  Because all pretensions of the false ruler of the world aside, it is God’s creation.  God, who is the only source of its life and light, loves this world and means to save it.  The Gospels tell us that the Jesus understood this and gave himself completely to the truth of it, letting the Spirit of healing, liberating, and recreating the world be his guide in all things.  It wasn’t like he wanted to be crucified, but he knew what he was up against well enough to realize that that was where he was headed.  And he was willing to go, if that was what it would take to show the world that only love and truth and faith in God can save us.

Jesus tells the crowd that “now is the judgment of this world” but that hour is always now.  He is the seed that fell into the ground and died, so that he would bear fruit in countless men and women like you and me.  He is always lifted up before us, drawing us to himself, calling us to see the true glory of the world, which is his path of love and service. The choice is always ours.

 In the immortal words of the great Robert Nesta Marley,

“Could you be loved?  Then be loved.”

   

Something to do with Jesus

Numbers 21:4-9
Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22
Ephesians 2:1-10
John 3:14-21

I’ve been leading a class for the past six weeks or so on a book called the Wisdom Jesus.  It puts forward an image of Jesus as a teacher of the way of inner transformation that leads to higher consciousness.   A lot of people have responded very positively to this book, and the attendance at these classes has been the highest of any I’ve done at St. John’s.   We’re now in part 3, which presents contemporary approaches to ancient wisdom practices—some things you can actually do to follow in the way that Jesus taught.   And we’ve been spending a good part of each class doing these practices—not just talking, for instance, about Centering Prayer meditation, but practicing a twenty minute period of silent meditation together, and then having a conversation about our experience.

Last Sunday we did a form of Lectio Divina, a traditional way of slowly and sensitively digesting the scriptures.   And through the week as I was preparing to teach the class, I came back a few times to the problem of which scripture to pick for us to read.  I thought in passing about some personal favorites, but I didn’t have a lot of time to spend on making this decision, so, finally, I decided the best thing would be to just go to the Lectionary Page and write down the chapter and verse numbers of the Gospel lesson for the following Sunday, and read that. 

So that’s what we did.  We sat and meditated for a few minutes and then a volunteer read aloud the same verses from John that I just read to you this morning.  Now keep in mind, this group has been buzzing with enthusiasm for weeks about a portrait of a Jesus who is not exclusive, one who teaches a wisdom that is quite compatible with that of other traditions.  This is a Jesus who does not appeal to an external, dogmatic authority, but to our own inner capacity to recognize the truth.  But here we have one of those Gospel passages that seems, on the surface at least, to defy every attempt to make it universal.  So I have to admit I was a little nervous about how this was going to go. 

As it turned out, I need not have worried.  As we listened to the reading a first and then a second time, we did hit the uncomfortable verses.  And we could have seized up, and forgotten to listen to the rest of the reading because we were stuck, back arguing with verse 18.  But we stayed with it.  We stayed still and kept breathing, and trying to hear what the passage might be trying to tell us.  And when we started sharing what we’d found, it turned out there was a lot.  There was a lot in this passage that spoke to people’s hearts, that stirred their love and their longing for God.  So it is in that spirit of the faith that if we keep working, and look deeper, we will find there is more to these texts than at first meets the eye, I want to circle back now and take another look at the things about this reading that are hard to hear and hard to understand. 

 

After all, Jesus himself introduces this saying by telling us it will be a tough one to swallow.  He does this when he brings up the serpent in the wilderness.  As we heard in the reading from Numbers, Moses makes a bronze serpent as a kind of medicine that heals by making you look at the thing you are most afraid to see.   And Jesus says things in this passage that we don’t want to look at, things that might turn and bite us with a poisonous sting.  First he gives this incredible that about the grace of God, who loved the world so much, and who sent his Son not to judge the world but to save it.  But then he starts to talk about condemnation.  “Those who believe in him are not condemned,” it says, “but those who do not believe are condemned already.”  I quoted this passage at a talk I gave last fall, at an interfaith panel on peace and nonviolence, in order to illustrate a paradox that has been at the heart of the Christian religion throughout its history, and when I read those words, the Muslim Imam who was also on the panel winced and shook his head.    

Now some might say, “who cares?”  To them this passage is simple to understand: our religion has the right beliefs, and everyone else’s has the wrong ones.  We will be saved, they will be condemned, and its just too bad for them.  But a brief look back at our history tells us all we need to know about the poisonous snakes that lie along that path—wars of conquest and wars of religion, witch trials and inquisitions, pogroms, and genocides.  In a world of religious pluralism, especially in a place like California, where Jews and Christians, Muslims and Hindus, and Buddhists and Sikhs, Neo-pagans and Atheists all live side-by-side, this interpretation has lost its credibility—especially for the young, who have no memory of life in an ethnically and religiously homogenous community, and no desire to go back there. 

Because it’s no longer credible to say that the Christian church is in sole possession of the truth, even about religion.   We know too much about the world’s other faiths to continue to pretend that they are all false and misleading paths that take people to hell.  Even if their practices and doctrines seem alien to us, we can’t ignore the evidence of their saints.  People hear the Dalai Lama say “my religion is kindness” and they compare it with the self-righteous sectarian contempt preached in so many churches every Sunday.  Needless to say, it's not a favorable comparison.  So if we believe that God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, who came into the world not to condemn it, but that the world might be saved through him (and I take my stand on the position that the world needs, more than ever, people who believe this), we have to start see how that might be true exactly because it doesn’t require that everyone convert to Christianity.

That means having a different kind of faith, one that is broader than we’ve had before, but also deeper.  It means having an imagination of what God is doing in the world in Christ that is no longer limited to what happens in churches, or with people who profess the Christian faith.   And it means embracing a new kind of Christian discipleship, one that is less defined by our belonging within the rigid boundaries an exclusive social group, where people think and act and look more or less the same.  It means being less concerned with believing the right things, and more with doing what Christ is asking of us to help him save the world.

I think that’s actually more in line with what the Gospel means by “believing,” anyway.  The Greek word that our Bibles translate as “believing in” Jesus doesn’t just mean “accepting as true certain ideas about him.”  It means to put our trust in him, to trust him enough to let him change the way we live.  Believing in Jesus means following his lead, doing the things he said to do.  And today’s text emphasizes that point very strongly.  “The light has come into the world,” it says—not into the church, you notice, or into the hearts of Christians—“and the people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.”  “But those who do what is true, come to the light (they come out into the world), so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”   The truth, says the Gospel, the truth that really matters, is not something that you think, or something that you say, it’s something that you do.

Overcoming temptation

Genesis 9:8-17
Psalm 25:1-9
1 Peter 3:18-22
Mark 1:9-15

On Friday night, my daughter went to a sleep-over birthday party at a friend’s house, and so my wife and I went out for dinner and a movie.  In the car on the way downtown the subject of possibly enjoying some ice cream later came up, but we decided against it, after a brief discussion, in which the observance of Lent was a deciding factor.  We got to the cinema, purchased our tickets, and, as we were going in we saw, by where the ticket taker stood, a little placard advertising a particularly delicious brand of locally-made ice cream on sale at the concession stand.  And Meg turned to me and said, “Temptation is everywhere.”

Temptation is everywhere.  That’s also the thesis of the prayer that began the scripture readings in this morning’s service, the Collect of the Day: “Come quickly to help us,” we prayed, “who are assaulted by many temptations; and, as you know the weaknesses of each of us, let each one find you mighty to save.” 

Now it’s hard to see how that prayer applies to the kind of temptation we met at the cinema.  Unless we have some kind of life-threatening disease, seeing a sign for ice cream, is not that big a deal.  It might cause our self-control to waver for a moment if we’ve sworn off sugar for Lent.  But it’s hardly a situation that calls for God to intervene in might.  Is our salvation really at stake in choices like this?  Isn’t the worst that could happen that we’d have to admit our willpower is not what we’d like it to be?  We’d take a little hit to our pride, but that might even be a good thing.  Pride, after all, is our greatest source of temptation.

I don’t mean pride like “Gay Pride” or “Black Pride,” an antidote to a long history of suffocating under a blanket of shame.  I’m not talking about a healthy sense of self-esteem.  Pride, in the classic terminology of Christian moral thought is actually the opposite of that—it’s a kind of inflated sense of oneself that masks a crippling insecurity.  Out of fear of what we truly are, pride hoards the God-given energy of love.  It turns it backward toward a false image of the person we like to think we are.   Cut off from the ever-circulating flow, love grows cold.  Afraid to break and take new shape pride hardens the personality into a rigid form.  The virtues we admire most in ourselves become distorted counterfeits of the original gifts.  And the places where we are most open to healing connection, our weaknesses, are where we build the strongest defenses against knowing the truth of ourselves, of others and of God.

Whether or not we eat ice cream during Lent doesn’t really make a whole lot of difference to God, or to us, one way or the other.  But the Christian tradition understands that all our temptations taken together, small and large, yours and mine, are the multifarious devices of a single great tempter.  And the purpose of this enemy is to flatter, distract, entice, bewitch, seduce, threaten, madden, frighten, and cajole us—whatever it takes—into denying who we really are as children of God.  And how we respond to this assault over time, through our thoughts and actions, does make a difference.  Because these temptations really do have the power to destroy us, in the sense of turning us away from the very source of our lives, and their true purpose.  They can lead us away from the path of life that really is life, to a place of desolation, where we are helpless in the face of the stark and inexorable power of death.

The Bible considers the temptation to pride a serious danger, not only to us as individuals, but also to societies.  We moderns like to tout the amazing advances of technological and industrial civilization, whose medical science has prolonged our life-expectancies well beyond the traditional three score years and ten.  We point with pride to the cornucopia of goods and services, pleasures and therapies, entertainments and comforts, that are available to us as never before.  We can enjoy ripe summer fruits airlifted from Argentina in the dead of winter.  We can watch live TV in the back seat of the car on a device the size of a checkbook. 

It scarcely troubles our self-satisfaction that the system that provides us with these delights still fails to meet even the most basic needs of the great mass of the world’s poor.   We take what we have and seek to have more, as ours by right of superiority—the blessings of our ingenuity, industry, and thrift.  The desperation of the shantytowns and migrant camps of the poor is a sad commentary on them, but has nothing to do with us.    

But the poor know something that is still mostly hidden from the fortunate few—that the consumer society, whose production of endless novelty and momentary gratification seems to us so innocent, convenient, and fun, is destroying the earth.  As this truth impresses itself upon us more and more, casting a strange and somber light on all our harmless little temptations; it pulls back the veil on the pride of the human race. 

We call ourselves homo sapiens, the undisputed masters of the species of the earth, entitled to take what we want without regard for the “lower forms of life.”  And yet we are at precisely that moment in history when we are waking from our dream of domination, to see that our own survival and flourishing is inseparable from that of the larger earth community.  We are indeed a unique and extraordinary species, which can be a temptation to despoil, or a sacred trust of wise and loving care.

The late Thomas Berry, the thinker who achieved the deepest integration to date of the scientific story of earth evolution with the Gospel, described the urgent task of this moment as the “reinvention of the human at the level of the species.”  And this reinvention is the work of Jesus Christ.  He is the human person who masters the tempter through perfect obedience and loving acceptance of his rightful place in the order of things.  Jesus is not caught in between a death-trap world of temptations and a heaven he can aspire to but cannot reach.   In his story Satan is no one to fear, and temptation loses its menacing power.  The Gospel reveals that it is no more than the necessary process of purification, the tempering of character and will that prepares the human heart for the high calling of God.  

We are accustomed to thinking of temptation from within a dismal view of human nature.  The belief that we are basically rotten, that the image of God in us is lost, gives us a very modest notion of what overcoming temptation can achieve.  By the grace of God, one might manage, through great effort, not to be so terribly bad after all.  But at his Baptism Jesus discovers something else entirely.  “You are my Son, the beloved,” says the voice from heaven, “with you I am well-pleased.”  And the Holy Spirit comes upon him, and gives him a mission.  It sends him to Galilee and beyond, in truth and power, bearing the good news of God’s favor and love towards us all.  But first the Spirit takes him out to meet the tempter, to perfect his patience and humility.  There, in the place of hunger and thirst, of fear, and loneliness, Jesus finds paradise.  He accepts the fellowship of the wild beasts, and his dependence on the ministrations of heaven.   And so he restores the peace of the original human nature, before we succumbed to the tempter who played upon our pride.  

This is the work of Jesus Christ, and it continues when his forty days in the desert are done.  It is the way he follows all the way to Jerusalem, where he deals the tempter a mortal wound in his death and resurrection.  It is the same way we, who are baptized into that victory, are now privileged to follow.  In Christ we have the hope of being like Noah and his family, of one day emerging from the waters of the flood, of standing again on the ground, in the company of all God’s creatures.  In Christ we can imagine a day when we no longer war against each other or against the the earth, but have mastered ourselves and accepted our rightful place upon it, as witnesses and guardians of God’s covenant with all life.   

Mastering fear

Deuteronomy 18:15-20
Psalm 111
1 Corinthians 8:1-13
Mark 1:21-28 

“The fear of the Lord,” says today’s Psalm, “is the beginning of wisdom.”  But some of us might disagree.  Sure, wisdom might have something to do with God.  Seeking God, perhaps, or loving God, or knowing God—these we might accept as starting points for wisdom.  But fear?  We like to think that God is loving and good, compassionate and generous and forgiving, and indeed the Psalm describes a God like that.  So what is there to fear? 

It’s a good question, and I think that to find the answer we have to look at what “wisdom” is.  Because wisdom, if it really is wisdom, is not abstract or theoretical.  It is always applied.  Wisdom teaches us how to live, how to find our way through the real world, with skill, equanimity, and grace.  But if we’re going to be honest I think we have to admit that we find the real world to be a fearful place.  We might reject the notion that God is someone to fear, but that doesn’t mean we are not afraid. 

The truth is we live in a world haunted by fear.  News about the economy, just to take one example, is full of fearful language.  Wall Street has “jitters,” we read, or the Federal Reserve seeks to “calm investors’ fears.”  Sometimes it even has to intervene to stave off a full-blown “panic.”  On a more personal level, my wife is fond of reminiscing about her childhood and how she and the neighborhood kids would play together outside, in and out of each others’ houses, and up and down and around the block until they were all called home to dinner.  But in our neighborhood today, though we know there are children because we catch fleeting glimpses of them from time to time, they are not out playing in the street.   And if they were, we wouldn’t let our daughter join them, at least not without adult supervision.  “Times have changed,” we say, but what exactly it is that has changed is hard to put your finger on, except that we are more afraid than our parents were.

We are afraid of things that we do not understand and cannot control, but that gives them power over us.  It doesn’t really matter if the Ebola virus, or Islamist extremists, or home invasion robbers pose a real threat to our lives—the fear of them is enough—enough to make us do things we wouldn’t otherwise do, or to not do what we otherwise would.  The fear is enough to curtail our freedom and destroy peace. 

It is when we consider this intersection of fear and power that I think we start to understand what the psalm is saying about wisdom.  Because the point is not that the God of Israel is a terrifying God, though he certainly can be when he means to, but that wisdom begins when we understand that in this world only God is to be feared, because only God has ultimate power.  We who do not fear God, and reject the very idea of fearing God, no longer believe in the power of God.  We might believe in a God who makes us feel better.  That is why we have such a need to for a “nice” God—but we don’t believe in a God with the power to save us from the things we most fear.

In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus begins his ministry by walking into the synagogue at Capernaum on the Sabbath day with his four brand new disciples and beginning to teach.   Compared to the other gospels, Mark says very little about the content of his teaching.  He does summarize it right before today’s lesson, when he says,

“Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.””

That’s quite a message, but in the scene in the synagogue what is most important is the impact that the message has on Jesus’ audience.   They are astonished by its originality and by its power.  He speaks with authority, but it’s not the authority of being able to skillfully back up his arguments with quotations from scripture, which is what they are used to.  His teaching seems to come straight from the source of wisdom and truth.

Cynthia Bourgeault, whose book The Wisdom Jesus some folks at St. John’s are reading right now, speaks of the experience of hearing Jesus as a “recognition event.”  That is, his teaching isn’t about some religious beliefs or moral principles that exist “out there,” where you can hold them at arm’s length and turn them this way and that and decide what you think of them.  But it impacts people “in here,” in their own spiritual center, which stirs and comes alive, as if responding to a mother tongue once known but long-forgotten.  It is an experience of hearing the truth about oneself and about God, and recognizing what has always been known in the heart.

But the Gospel tells us there was one man in the synagogue that day whose spiritual center was not his own.  And while the others are moved by Jesus’ preaching, the spirit that has taken possession of this man recognizes Jesus’ person.  It sees who he really is.  It understands that his authority is not just a function of rhetorical genius or brilliance of insight, but of the identity and purpose given to him by God.  Jesus is on a mission, and his teaching is only one aspect of it; a mission to manifest the Kingdom of God, not only as a nice idea, but with power.  That kingdom is not going to come without a fight, and immediately, right from the start, the real enemies of God come out to do battle. 

I think it helps to understand what is at stake in this conflict if we consider why the Gospel refers to this antagonistic spirit as “unclean.”  In the Bible “clean” and “unclean,” are very important ideas, that do not mean what we might suppose.  They are not categories that pertain to hygiene, or to morality, but to religious worship.  They have to do with the way the ancient Hebrews perceived the world, and structured society, and lived their lives, so as to preserve the central place in all of it for God. 

And when they said that something was unclean it was not because they believed that it was hated by God, or outside of God.   God created everything that is, and pronounced that it is good.  But there are in our world objects and experiences that carry with them an intrinsic fascination and danger, things like blood, like the sleep and the death of the body, things like sex and childbirth. 

To the ancient Hebrew way of thinking, these things were unclean, not because they are “dirty” in some puritanical sense, but because they are powerful.  Someone or something that has been in contact with them needs to be made clean, to be purified by a religious act, to bring the numinous power of that contact back into its proper relationship with other things.  It needs to be realigned with the ordered world created by with God. 

And this was true not only of natural phenomena, and material things, but also of the spiritual world.  The Jews of Jesus’ time had a vivid sense of a world full of spirits, of unseen intelligences.  But some of these spirits refused their ordered place among the creatures of God.  Instead of worshiping before the heavenly throne, they preyed on human beings.  They fed on our fear, on our fascination with idols, with divination, sorcery, and human sacrifice, all our efforts to bend divine power to our control.  They sought to rival the angels, as if their power to dominate, to inflict insanity and sickness, to take possession of a person’s soul, were on a par with God’s power to heal, to bless, to give and preserve life.

Some people might say that modern materialistic science has made these ideas obsolete and irrelevant.  But what is at stake in Jesus’ conflict with the unclean spirit is not whether or not we believe in demons.  What is at stake is whether we believe there is anything more powerful than God.  Or let me put it a different way—of what in the world are you most afraid?  To what in the world do you turn to master the things that you fear?  How we answer those questions shows us where we still need to repent, and believe in the good news of God’s Kingdom.  It shows us where we still need Jesus to come in power.