Month: February 2024

Refracted Hope

It’s Friday morning and after a hectic week I finally turn my thoughts to today’s readings for the second Sunday in Lent. Bereft of helpful insights – I scratch my heard as I read that Jesus tells us – his modern-day disciples – to deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow him – that the cost of saving our lives lies in our willingness to risk losing them?

Nightly images numb me further into acquiescence and resignation as I watch in real time as the civilian population of Gaza is bombed into a stone age wasteland of wretchedness beyond belief.

News from Oklahoma of a young trans person’s death as a result of a bathroom incident between fellow students in a school – further evidences the unleashing of politically sanctioned persecution of trans and nonbinary persons in large parts of this country.

In States governed by legislatures no longer committed to the basic principles of representative democracy – where power is maintained through gerrymandered electorates – legislatures pursue their anti-liberal agendas – and the courts continue to hand down insane rulings that impose increasingly cruel and unusual punishments that further restrict the basic civic freedoms to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness enshrined in the Constitution. We’ve reached the ludicrous situation where the courts defend freedom of speech protections that allow the right to incite hatred but strictly policing student hairstyles.

I hear a voice in my head cautioning me to stop it! Stop what? Well stop funneling down the rabbit hole of rage and despair. Forty years of experience reminds me that this is no good way to begin a sermon reflection.

At the root of my despair is my rage that the world is not fair, that wrongs seem seldom righted. Everywhere I look the appearance of things leads me to conclude that despite my frequent protests to the contrary, might is often right and wealth is the primary influence on power. It’s into this slough of despond I hear Jesus speaking to Simon Peter: Get thee behind me Satan. The words of the King James Authorized Version – a translation I hardly ever read – remain indelibly imprinted on my mind as is probably true for most English-speaking Christians.

To fully appreciate the searing impact of Mark’s account of the encounter between Jesus and Simon Peter we need to go back to verse 27 of chapter 8 where Mark reports Jesus on his way to Caesarea Philippi. Along the way he asks his disciples what are people were saying about him? Reporting the general gossip – the disciples tell him: Well Rabbi, some say this, and some say that. To which Jesus asks: But you – who do you say I am? His question provokes Simon Peter to declare: We know who you are, you are the Messiah! But giving the correct answer doesn’t necessarily mean understanding what that answer means.

Today’s text picks up at verse 31 with: Then he began to teach them —. But what Jesus teaches them is not what they want to hear. Simon Peter – with his Jewish conditioned misunderstanding of messiahship confronts Jesus. Taking him aside he rebukes Jesus with what I imagine probably went like this:

What on earth are you talking about, Jesus. What nonsense are you spouting about suffering and death. You are the Messiah – the great king sent by God to get us out of this mess of Roman occupation and restore us to our status of a chosen nation. So, let’s hear no more of this defeatist nonsense about suffering and death. Can’t you see the undermining effect on our morale when you speak like this?

Jesus fixes Simon with a steely gaze and with a heart stopping authority commands: Get behind me Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.

This is a hard saying. Trapped within our human perspective we look out at the appearance of things – unable to see beyond our limited perceptions to the larger picture. So much of the divine action remains hidden from our view.

Can we with any honesty speak in a community like ours about Jesus’ prediction of suffering and death? Like Simon Peter, suffering and death as the cost of discipleship are not on our agenda – no matter how darkly at times we may view events in the world around us. Unlike Peter we don’t even have the courage to protest the point. We just tune out – preferring to think the choice is ours whether to follow Jesus or not. We may choose to follow Jesus, but always on our own terms – at little cost to ourselves.

Like Simon Peter and the Disciples we want to filter Jesus’ messiahship through the prism of our own desires and fears – the things of our human priorities.

Prisms. Now here’s an interesting fact. The thing about prisms is that they don’t filter light – they refract it. White light enters as a beam to become refracted into the seven-color constituents of the spectrum. Our desires and fears – our human priorities enter the prism of Jesus’ messiahship as a tight beam of white light and emerge refracted to reveal the divine priorities in a multi-stranded, Kodachrome cone of ever-widening dispersion.

An event of ultimate significance occurred this week – shedding some light on this incident in Mark. I refer to the death in suspicious circumstances of Alexei Navalny -the courageous Russian dissident and now martyr for the democratic cause. Many of us still find it incomprehensible that he chose to return to Russia knowing the fate that awaited him. It seems that in this action, with his mind no longer focused on his own concerns – Navalny understood the cost of discipleship as inseparable from fidelity to the path of discipleship – which for him was the cause of democratic freedoms.

I am not in any way conflating Alexei Navalny with Jesus. I don’t know whether Navalny was a Christian believer or not. My point is – Navalny emulates Jesus in action. They both knew that being faithful to their cause would cost them nothing less than their life. They both wielded the most powerful weapon in the confrontation with evil – that of nonviolent resistance.

Like Pontius Pilate before him, as the representative of empire, Vladimir Putin understands well the necessity of killing the leader of a movement for nonviolent resistance. Like Pilate and countless other brutes of history before him – Putin fails to understand that non-violence is an idea that only strengthened in killing its leading proponents. As with Jesus, the concentrated white light of Alexei Navalny’s life has now been refracted through the prism of his death into a broad Kodachrome spectrum of ever widening hope. But hope comes at a cost and when the cost is paid – hope strengthens.

What will it take for us to discover what the disciples eventually came to understand – that the fruit of discipleship is inseparable from its cost?

The cost of discipleship is paid in the currency of hope’s confrontation with evil. What will discipleship cost us? This is Jesus’ 21st century discipleship question to which the life and death of Alexei Navalny reveals one possible answer.

Discipleship is unlikely to cost us our lives. But it does require our death to self – a death to our self-preoccupation – a dying to our exclusive focus on merely human things that lead us to despair and acquiescence to helplessness.

As we enter upon the journey of another Lent – a season in which we are called to face-down the temptation to acquiesce in the face of the evil that holds such sway in the world around us. Lent is a season when the white light of despair is refracted through the prism of discipleship into the broad color spectrum of faith, courage, and love – to name but three stands in the spectrum of hope. But be under no illusion – the path of discipleship is a costly one – as Navalny’s death confirms. And the encounter between Peter and Jesus in Mark 8 is where for us the journey of discipleship begins. It’s from here we reset our compass needle towards the resurrection.

0

Love’s Meat

In those days, Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my beloved Son, with you, I am well pleased.” Mark 1:9-15

And so, this is how it begins in Mark. In seven concise verses in his first chapter Mark covers the period from Jesus’ baptism by John to the momentous event of John’s arrest – a sequence that Matthew takes four chapters to relate. Similarly, Mark covers Jesus’ time in the wilderness in two sentences – And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angles waited on him. Admittedly, reporting in much greater detail, nevertheless Matthew’s account of Jesus in the wilderness takes him eleven long verses to relate.

Mark is not only concise but he punctuates his accounts with dramatic images. For him at Jesus baptism, the heavens are torn apart – schizomai is the Greek word he uses – meaning to rip, to tear apart in a way that cannot be put back together again. Compare this to Matthew and Luke’s milk toast image of the heavens merely opening – of clouds lazily parting.

Mark reports that at Jesus’ baptism the voice from heaven thunders you are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased. Note here God’s direct address to Jesus – you– God declares – leading later commentators to wonder is Mark inferring that it’s only Jesus who hears God’s voice? By contrast, in Matthew and Luke, the curtain of heaven gently opens and the voice from above is of God addressing the bystanders – declaring to them that this this is my Son, the Beloved in whom I am well pleased. And following the baptism Mark tells us that immediately, the Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness. Just as schizomai carries the strong meaning of tearing irreparably apart so here, Mark’s use of the Greek ekballei – as in the Spirit expelled Jesus into the wilderness conveying a strongly energetic action. Compare this striking image with Matthew and Luke’s use of anechthe – meaning to lead up, to bring up – and one gets the impression of Jesus, leisurely strolling at the Spirit’s direction into the wilderness – a much more sedate movement.

And so, it is with Mark. There’s no long and colorful description of Jesus’ birth as in Matthew and Luke. With Mark, Jesus emerges from obscurity onto the scene as a fully grown man – not born into his Sonship but adopted into it at baptism.  We shouldn’t miss the implication in Mark – as with Jesus so with us – like him we too are adopted by God through baptism.

It’s customary on the first Sunday in Lent for the preacher to focus on Jesus’ time of wilderness testing – after all isn’t that what Lent is supposed to be about for us – a time of testing -facing temptation and enduring privation? Yet, my attention is drawn to Mark’s assertion that before any testing takes place God proclaims Jesus as the Beloved. Being loved – now here’s a novel way to frame a theme for Lent.

Accepting unconditional love – love without strings – is in my experience a much harder thing to bear than having to pass the tests of temptation. I know objectively, that I am loved by God because I tend to believe what I am told – esp. if the Gospels are the vehicle for conveying this truth to me. Yet, knowing is one thing – actually experiencing is quite another. Do I experience myself being loved by God? My answer is mixed and equivocal – it’s yes but mostly, no.

For instance, I know that God loves me because looking back on my life I can see the loving hand of God guiding, sustaining, and blessing me through the ups and downs. Projecting forwards on the basis of past experience I know objectively, that God will continue to love me no matter what I do.  Yet, in the present moment, I often feel very detached from the direct experience of God’s love. I know I am loved but do I feel the love? I find that my shame interferes with the enjoyment of being unconditionally loved.

The real challenge of my spiritual journey has been – and remains – to experience the reality that God loves me with an unconditional love in the present moment. This requires me to see the unconditionality of God’s love through the thick veil of my shame. My spiritual struggle is not to be good – although I always believe I can do better than I’ve done. My spiritual struggle is to allow myself to be loved despite my shame.

The question boils down to how can I allow myself to experience God’s no-strings-attached-love when I feel the way I do – mired in my secret shame? My inability to love God as much as I feel I should reveals some pretty faulty logic here which goes – if I loved God more – I could reciprocate more – then might I not feel more of God’s love. In this context reciprocity is such a ridiculous notion. But the main source of my shame lies in my fear of being loved by God. Despite my longing to feel God’s love of me, the sorry truth is shame becomes a convenient excuse for avoiding – shying away from being loved. Shame is the disguise my fear adopts.

Being the one who does the loving – no matter how imperfectly – is easier than being the one who is loved – warts and all. My shame is actually, not that I am unworthy of God’s love – but that I am afraid of it. You see, while the lover chooses to love – the beloved has no control over being loved. The real source of my shame lies not in unworthiness but in the fear of being loved unconditionally. Being loved unconditionally exposes my fear of being the one who is no longer in control.

In his poem Love III, George Herbert describes our anguished experience of shying away from being loved. In response to God’s invitation to sit down and experience love, Herbert replies: I, the unkind the ungrateful? Ah, my dear, I cannot look on thee. Thank you, God, but no thank you! To be beloved of God is too intrusive and potentially demanding, too intimate an experience. I resonate with Herbert. Being loved exposes me to my shame – I am unworthy. But more to the point it exposes me to my vulnerability and fear of losing control. The lover chooses to love. But the beloved has no control over being loved. Between humility and humiliation – there lies the finest of lines.

We are in a continual negotiation around the shame of loving and being loved. God is no respecter of comfort zones. As the lover, God pursues us and has no intention of allowing us to set the comfort level for intimacy.

In his poem Love III, George Herbert in describing the struggle with fear and shame – our urgent need to shy away from surrendering to being loved – maps the process of surrender. Protesting his fear he cries out: I, the unkind the ungrateful? Ah, my dear, I cannot look on thee. Yet, Love outmaneuvers him by reminding him he need have no such fear:  Love takes my hand and smiling did reply, ‘Who made the eyes but I?’

But the struggle is not yet over. For Herbert complains: Truth Lord, but I have marred them, let my shame go where it doth deserve. And here Love delivers the suckerpunch for any good believing Calvinist. Love gently reminds him: And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?

Cowered and cornered, Herbert feints surrender to Love’s insistence with:  Ah, my dear, then I will serve. He feints surrender with a ruse. As with the one who loves – the one who serves paradoxically maintains control. But Love is not fooled by Herbert’s feint of humility. You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat. With nowhere else to hide, Herbert surrenders – abandons all pretence of having the power of choice. Becoming the one who is served – the one who surrenders to being loved -he whispers: So I did sit and eat. 

In the end, the only choice we really have is to surrender in the face of God’s relentless pursuit to love us. I can speak about my struggle to surrender to being loved by God because I’m not alone in this. We all know that when it comes to God’s love, it is not about earning and deserving but believing and receiving. Yet, so much of our identity is predicated on being worthy – which is just a way of dressing up the fact that we are afraid to lose control. If we are deserving of God’s love, we tell ourselves, it can only be to the extent of having somehow, earned it. In our desire to reciprocate we evade the humiliation of being the undeserving party.

The truth is we are be-loved. We are all be-loved because God’s love is gifted to us without strings. Surrender to being loved is the only healthy response we can choose to make.

Lent’s call to a deeper self-reflection allows us to see more clearly into our struggle to be the ones who must surrender to love. In our resistance we want to use shame to distance ourselves from the experience of being loved by God. In the struggle to surrender to love we turn to Lent’s reminder of the disciplines of worship, prayer, and self-denial – the latter having little to do with privation and more to do with having the courage to listen beyond the cacophony of our self-preoccupations.

Mark ends his first chapter with Jesus returning from his time of preparation in the wilderness to find John has been arrested. The time he says is fulfilled, the Kingdom of God has come near, repent and believe the good news! Lent reminds us that the only time is now -that there’s no time to lose!

We will be familiar with Love III as part of a series of metaphysical poems written by the 17th-century Anglican divine, George Herbert. Less familiar to some may be that in 1911, the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams took Herbert’s poems – setting them as his Five Mystical Songs within which the poem Love III is the third in sequence. 

Love (III)
George Herbert - 1593-1633
Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
            Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
            From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
            If I lacked anything.
"A guest," I answered, "worthy to be here":
            Love said, "You shall be he."
"I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
            I cannot look on thee."
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
            "Who made the eyes but I?"
"Truth, Lord; but I have marred them; let my shame
            Go where it doth deserve."
"And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame?"
            "My dear, then I will serve."
"You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat."
            So I did sit and eat.
0

Self-Transcendence

At the heart of the transfiguration of Jesus on the mountaintop lies an experience of a transcendent reality normally hidden from ordinary perception. The disciples are shown Jesus irradiated with the glory of the divine nature flowing through him.

I want us to focus less on the nature of Jesus’ experience of transcendence – after all we get the message it’s meant to convey. The event of the transfiguration of Jesus is also a profound experience for the disciples. We see them struggling with an experience of self-transcendence. One moment they are infused with a glimpse of something that literally blows their minds. For a moment they are transported beyond the boundaries of normal imagination before falling back again into their self-preoccupation – expressed in their desire to capture and hold onto the experience.

Transcendence – a reality beyond rational perception – now here’s a tricky subject for the post-modern-21st-century imagination. We are prisoners of rationality that rejects the possibilities of transcendence. We have become mired in immanence -a state of ordinary perception limited to sensory experience. We find ourselves struggling with the cognitive dissonance of no longer believing in a transcendent reality beyond ordinary perception while desperately, hungering for it. We search frantically believing mistakenly, that we will find it through our pursuit of an ever-elusive state of happiness.

Margaret Wheatley highlights our predicament in contrasting the emotional experiences of happiness with those of joy and sorrow. In writing of joy as an experience of connection, communion, presence, and grace within the immanence – the ordinariness of our daily experience – she offers what I think is the clearest contemporary definition of self-transcendent experience.

In contrasting joy and sorrow with happiness – she notes how in both moments of joy and sorrow we find the qualities of self-transcendence – an encounter with a deeper and more expansive connection, communion, presence, and grace within the immanence of the boundaries of our daily lives.

She notes that joy and sadness are both states that embrace us with an energy that take us beyond a sense of our solitary selves. Whether laughing or crying – it doesn’t matter. Faced with a birth, a wedding, an anniversary – we are captivated by joy. In the face of a death, a disaster, a tragedy of personal or epic proportions, sorrow and sadness capture us as we suffer with, console, and love one another. Joy and sorrow are both experiences of self-transcendence –experiences not to be found in our pursuit of happiness.

It’s one of life’s great paradoxes that we crave self-transcendence through our pursuit of happiness which only further estranges us from the very transcendent experiences we crave. The pursuit of happiness rather than leading us to self-transcendence entraps us in an all-consuming preoccupation with ourselves.

The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor – to my mind one of the towering figures in contemporary philosophy – contrasts the year 1500 when it was impossible not to believe in God with the impossibility of such belief for many today. He charts the route of travel as the culture of the West moved from the impossibility of unbelief to the impossibility of belief.

In the long 400-year emergence of the secular Western mindset, Taylor notes the gradual transition from the age of enchantment to the age of disenchantment. By disenchantment he has in mind a state in which we experience our loss of connection to transcendent experience – that which Wheatley defines for the modern imagination as connection, communion, presence, and grace within the ordinariness of our daily lives.

When our connection to the transcendent is lost, all we are left with is our solitary selves – isolated beings center stage – as it were – a place of great loneliness and disenchantment.

Drawing on Taylor’s distinction between enchantment and disenchantment helps us to view the Biblical narratives as the product of an enchantment mindset. To the enchantment imagination, God is often frighteningly present in the physical structures of the material world. Divine power not only inhabits objects and places, but infiltrates and disturbs the relational spaces between us. The enchantment mindset understands God’s presence in spatial terms of up and down, in and out. Thus, God inhabits sacred mountaintops, fills sacred spaces.

On the mountaintop Peter, James, and John experience an epiphany of Jesus clothed in his divinity as the Christ. This is a fleeting experience, no sooner glimpsed than it is gone – forever eluding their desire to capture and contain it. Then the disciples must negotiate the even more perilous path down the mountain carrying an experience about which they cannot speak. They must carry the remembrance of what they have seen and yet, at the same time, practice a kind of forgetting.

As they were coming down the mountain Jesus ordered them, “tell no one about the vision until after the Son of Man has been raised from the dead”.

It seems that spiritual peak experience is only a means to, and not an end in itself. Events on the Mount of the Transfiguration are the midpoint – a final epiphany or revealing before taking the long journey towards the culmination of Jesus’ ministry.

Unlike our ancestors we no longer look for God – or the presence of the divine – in material space-time. The acceptance by past generations, whose enchanted expectations of encountering God in material objects and places is now firmly rejected by most of us as supernaturalism. Nevertheless, we remain unsettled. The question for us today is not does a separate spiritual dimension still exist – but where and how is it accessible to our modern disenchantment minds?

Spatial references to up and down don’t any longer work in the same way for us. For us, God no longer inhabits the mountaintop. Heaven is no longer imagined as up there, or hell being down there. When Martin Luther King Jr. said he’d been to the mountaintop, no one assumed he had physically climbed a mountain. The mountaintop now becomes the metaphor for the possibility of a different order of experience, one that challenges our resignation to the absence of the spiritual in lives dominated by preoccupation with the self. We may no longer find God in and through the material world in quite the same way as our Biblical and generational ancestors did, yet, despite this – our desire for God remains.

The paradox is that while we reject enchantment as superstition and supernaturalism, no generation craves with a greater intensity a desire for self-transcendence than we do. Magical realism abounds in popular literature. Heroic superhero sagas dominate Hollywood’s works. Opioids, marketed as a solution for physical pain promise a solution to the increasing levels of spiritual pain left by the loss of transcendent experience.

In writing of joy and sorrow as experiences of connection, communion, presence, and grace within the ordinariness of our daily life – Wheatley offers what I think is the clearest contemporary definition of transcendent experience -self-transcendence that takes us beyond the limitations of our preoccupation with self and our pursuit of promised fulfilment in the achievement of personal success and happiness.

As 21st century people trapped in immanence in a world that denies transcendent reality we especially need a sense of purpose to take us beyond ourselves. Wheatley turns to the great 19th-century Bengali poet and spiritual teacher, Rabindranath Tagore who movingly wrote:

I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted – and behold, service was joy.

Life dreamed as joy becomes real through service and it is in service that we are surprised by joy.

The Transfiguration story is a halfway point in Mark’s account of the life and times of Jesus of Nazareth. It marks the transition point from his preaching and teaching in the Galilean countryside to his arrival on the wider stage as he begins his eventful journey to Jerusalem.

The Visit of the Magi and the Transfiguration bookend the Christmas-Epiphany season. From here on, we move into a different phase of the spiritual journey. The landscape becomes rocky and desert-like as we journey down the mountain into the season of Lent.

Lent is the season in which we revisit and take up again the disciplines that will open us beyond mere self-preoccupation – infusing our experience of immanence – the ordinary everydayness of our lives with intimations of self-transcendence in the rediscovery of experiences of connection, communion, presence, and grace – of joy through worship, prayer, and  service.

0

Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑