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Where your security lies

Sunday, March 14th, 2010

I’m having trouble focusing on things today. My friend’s death has stirred up a lot of difficult stuff.

I’m reading Francis of Assisi by Leonardo Boff. It’s a heady book. But I’m finding it worth the wade. for example:

How, beyond the mysticism of gentle and compassionate identification with the poor and the Crucified, did they make sense of their want?  No one lives by mysticism alone. Life has demands that cannot be opposed permanently. How did they humanize this objective dehumanization that is poverty? It is precisely within the context of poverty that Francis places the problem of fraternity.  Each one’s  poverty implies for others a challenge, in order, to their care, gentleness, and the creation of an atmosphere of openness and security, denied by radical poverty. For Francis, having has been toppled from its pretension of granting security and humanization to persons. Only care for one another truly humanizes life…. Care is the way of being human.

Leonardo Boff, Francis of Assisi: a Model for Human Liberation. (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2006), p. 66.

I can’t describe what happened to me as I read these words. Of course!! I thought. This is it!!

My African brothers and sisters know this principle, because they live it. “Nobody’s poor here, unless they’re alone,” they said. Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement also knew it.

Jesus did exactly this: he invested in people, flesh and blood, fallible people, like Peter and Mary Magdalene.  If they failed, he failed.  If they succeeded, he succeeded.

I don’t know the specifics for me yet.  But I do know the principle: our ultimate security lies, not in bank accounts or IRAs, but in caring for one another, as God cares for us.

Your Father knows what you need before you ask him.

Matt 6:8 (NRSV)

Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you.

1 Peter 5:7 (NRSV)

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Skeletons in the Closet

Friday, December 4th, 2009

Women in Jesus’ Genealogy (Matt. 1.1-17)

Matthew begins with 17 verses of “begats.” Mostly we skip it. There are theological insights hidden there, however, like Easter Eggs in a  DVD.

Three groups of 14. In gematria, the Jewish system of number symbols, 14 is David’s number. D is the 4th letter in the Hebrew alphabet, W (V) the 6th. Add the numbers, you get 14. So each group announces Jesus’ relation to David. The breaking points are highlights of Israelite history, starting with Abraham, then David the stellar king, and after the deportation to Babylon.

The list includes five women (except Mary, each of them a shady lady in some respects): Tamar (v. 3), Rahab and Ruth (v. 5), the former wife of Uriah (v. 6). This week our Bible study groups looked at Tamar, Genesis 38.

Tamar’s story interrupts the saga of Joseph, just as he was going down to Egypt as a slave. Judah had three sons; he married Er the eldest to Tamar. But Er died. Judah told son #2 Onan to do his duty and raise up an heir for his brother. (This is levirate marriage, see Deut. 25.5-10.) Without knowledge of the resurrection, you needed offspring to keep your line going. Onan, however, didn’t want an “heir” of his elder brother’s to inherit 2/3 of his father’s estate; so he practiced a crude form of birth control to prevent pregnancy. Onan also died.

Many biblical interpreters have used Onan’s story as a way to discourage boys from masturbation, but that’s a misuse of scripture. The issue here is that Onan refused to follow the law and raise up an heir for his brother.

Judah didn’t want to lose his third son Shelah to a “black widow.” He shelved his daughter-in-law in her father’s house. When she realized he was not going to let her keep her dead husband’s name alive in israel, Tamar took action.

She disguised herself as a temple prostitute, a woman involved in Canaanite worship through ritual sex. Not knowing who she was, Judah had sex with her, but not before she secured tokens from him that would identify him at a later date. (A comparable act would be giving her his driver’s license and VISA card, until he brought cash payment.) But when his friend returned with payment, the so called temple prostitute had disappeared.

Family discovered Tamar was pregnant, and planned to burn her. (Double standard! No sweat for the man.) But she produced the items belonging to Judah, proving she had acted only to secure an heir for her husband, and keep the line going.

Since it is the line eventuating in the Messiah, God also wanted to keep the line going. Her loyalty and hutspah served not only her husband, but Almighty God as well! In that way “she was more righteous than Judah.” (Gen 38.26)

Tamar took grave risks of being maligned, even being burned, to accomplish what in her time and place was an honorable goal. As a single woman, she had no power. Yet she confronted the head of a clan, successfully.

Jesus must have known the stories about his mother, and have felt the sting of slurs against himself as a “bastard.” When he was confronted with the woman taken in adultery (John 8.1-11), did he think about Mary’s suffering?

The Messiah’s genealogy includes the most powerless, poorest people of the society—single women, and not even the “respectable” ones! Surely, we too need to think of women who are left out and lost by our society, if we are truly to be part of Jesus and Mary’s household.

Next: The Miss Kitty and the Longbranch of Jericho, Rahab (Joshua 2)

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Hollow cake

Thursday, November 12th, 2009

I tried my baking skills the other day. I had an orange-cranberry muffin mix, which called for an added cup of water.

Flush with the success of earlier efforts, I added a protein booster whey powder, a couple eggs, and two tablespoons of oil.

After 25 minutes in the oven, the knife came out clean.

We cut the cake the next day to store it. It consisted of an outside ring, inside ring and center.

The outside was perfect, a dream of a cake.

The inside was still semi-liquid, doughy.

The center was empty.

T. S. Eliot:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Wow! What an image of spiritual life!

It is critical for our spiritual lives to be real, nourishing, whole.

Not cream puffs without cream.

And, when you’re starving, a good hearty piece of bread is better than a pastry.

I’m reading Dom Helder Camara in the Orbis Books series Modern Spiritual Masters. I was intrigued that I never heard of him before, yet the blurb identified him as a major player in Vatican II and an archbishop (?) who implemented changes to move the Brazilian and Latin American church toward ideals of Poverty and Service.

He embodied the bishop Victor Hugo described in the opening pages of Les Miserables. Fluent in French,  he must have known that book well. The Brazilian dictatorship of the 1960s silenced him in the country, but could not outside.

Conservative, fervent anti-Communist pope John Paul II dismantled most of his accomplishments. His writings are largely in Portuguese and housed in Recife, I believe. Orbis is doing world Christianity a great service in bringing the riches of his thought to light.

I confess I  got a flyer offering them at half off. I purchased:

  • Dom Helder Camara
  • Pedro Arrupe
  • Thomas Merton
  • Evelyn Underhill
  • Simone Weil
  • Writings on Contemplation and Compassion, ed. Robert Ellsburg.

Easily a year’s worth of reading and reflection.  I was introduced to the series by the volume on Dorothee Sölle, the German theologian. That led me to read her magnum opus The Silent Cry, which I’ve written about.

Reading is a way out of despair for me. It helps me in these increasingly dark days. Advent is around the corner, my heart cries out for light, light, light!

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Thou shalt love, not hate

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009

I had occasion to think about Sodom and Gomorrah tonight. The prophet Isaiah addresses the leaders  and people of Judah, the Southern Kingdom, as “you rulers of Sodom, you people of Gomorrah.”

They must have been shocked, because then, as now, Sodom and Gomorrah smelled bad.

Though not for the same reason.

The modern mind equates S & G with gay sex. That’s been so for about 1600 years. (But not before that.)

According to Genesis 19, however, the men of Sodom were as willing to gang rape Lot’s virgin daughters as his strange visitors.

The issue is gang rape, violence against persons to whom is owed the sacred obligation of hospitality and the protection that comes with it.

It’s not homosexual people.

Ezekiel 16 is the only place in scripture that spells out the sin of S & G (the “you” addressed is Jerusalem):

This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy. They were haughty, and did abominable things before me; therefore I removed them when I saw it.  Samaria has not committed half your sins; you have committed more abominations than they, and have made your sisters appear righteous by all the abominations that you have committed.

Ezek 16:49-51 (NRSV)

Sodom and Gomorrah were condemned for pride, selfishness, indifference to the suffering of the poor.

I know the arguments about homosexuals get hot and heavy. The prospect of gay marriage bothers many folk.

We live in a society that promises every individual “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” What’s more basic to human happiness than freedom to build a life with the person you love?

Jesus built his life on loving God and neighbor. Isn’t he more offended by loveless arguments and loveless lives than by who we choose to love?

Yes, there are a few “Thou shalts” and a few “Thou shalt nots.”

Keeping two people from promising to love each other, and no one else, for a lifetime, however, has nothing to do with “Thou shalt” or “Thou shalt not.”

It has to do with hate.

Which, last time I looked, is at the top of God’s  list of “Thou shalt nots.”

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Whom do you fear?

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009

Isaiah's_Lips_Anointed_with_Fire

 

 

 

 

Left: Isaiah’s lips anointed by the angel (Isaiah 6.7)

 

 

Isaiah, the greatest of the writing Hebrew prophets, lived in the eighth century BCE. His children become signs, acts of God incarnate.

Here are some names for your baby book:

  • Shear-jashub (a few will come back)
  • Maher-shalal-hash-baz (swift the spoil, prompt the plunder)

No?

Perhaps this one suits you better:

  • Immanuel (God with us)

Isaiah 7.14. Isaiah, the fifth gospel, predicts the virgin birth of Jesus. Right?

Matthew understood it that way, and used the Septuagint (the Greek KJV of the ancient Jews and Christians), which read, “A virgin (parthenos) shall conceive…” Matthew understood it to be a prediction of Jesus’ birth of Mary “who knew not a man” 700 years in advance.

Trouble is, the king to whom Isaiah delivered this prophecy-child—Ahaz (735-715 BCE)—didn’t give a flip about his own kids:

He even made his son pass through fire…

2 Kings 16:3-4 (NRSV)

He put his own son to death. Why would he care about a child born 700 years later?

Isaiah’s family

Nobody’s questioning Matthew’s coopting this text for his purposes later.

What you miss if that’s all you see is Isaiah’s children, named above. For, Immanuel, the child promised by Isaiah, is good old Maher, born to Isaiah and his unnamed wife the prophetess shortly after this prophecy.

Before this child reaches the age of accountability, the foes Ahaz dreads will be smoke and cinders:

For before the child knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land before whose two kings you are in dread will be deserted.

Isaiah 7:16 (NRSV)

Ahaz ignored Isaiah’s warning, and turned to Assyria for help. By 721 BCE  Assyria would help itself to the entire Northern Kingdom, and threaten the South, Ahaz’s country, as well.

Eventually Isaiah shut up, entrusting his message to his children, his disciples (Isa 8.16-18).

Isaiah’s fear

If you see a snake on the highway, you’re scared, right? But if an 18-wheeler comes barreling down that highway toward you at 80 mph, you run for your life!

The kings plotting against Israel are the snake. God is the 18-wheeler.

Fear God!

That’s Isaiah’s message.

Do not call conspiracy all that this people calls conspiracy, and do not fear what it fears, or be in dread. But the LORD of hosts, him you shall regard as holy; let him be your fear, and let him be your dread.

Isaiah 8:12-14 (NRSV)

“Fear of the LORD” is a Hebrew idiom for the faith of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses in Yahweh.

But, though it doesn’t mean “to be scared of,” it does admonish us “to have a healthy respect for, to reverence.”

Since 9/11 our government likes to bandy about words like “terrorism” and “national security.”

No doubt these matters need attending to. But far more critical to the health of the nation is the state of our faith. In the powerful Message paraphrase, Isaiah puts these questions to you and me:  

Why this frenzy of sacrifices?” GOD’s asking. “Don’t you think I’ve had my fill of burnt sacrifices, rams and plump grain-fed calves? Don’t you think I’ve had my fill of blood from bulls, lambs, and goats?

 When you come before me, who ever gave you the idea of acting like this, Running here and there, doing this and that– all this sheer commotion in the place provided for worship?

“Quit your worship charades. I can’t stand your trivial religious games: Monthly conferences, weekly Sabbaths, special meetings– meetings, meetings, meetings–I can’t stand one more!

Meetings for this, meetings for that. I hate them! You’ve worn me out! I’m sick of your religion, religion, religion, while you go right on sinning.

When you put on your next prayer-performance, I’ll be looking the other way. No matter how long or loud or often you pray, I’ll not be listening. And do you know why? Because you’ve been tearing people to pieces, and your hands are bloody. 

 Isaiah 1.11-15 The Message

Isaiah’s fate

We don’t know for sure what happened to Isaiah of Jerusalem. He produced the most majestic Hebrew poetry in the Book. He foresaw more clearly than anyone else in ancient times the One who was to come.

It may have been, not himself, but one of his children, his disciples, who penned Isaiah 40-55 which called the exiles from comfort in Babylon to the rigors of faithful living in Palestine. (Scholars call this disciple “Isaiah of Babylon.”)

Yet another may have  produced the messages of Isaiah 56-66 and helped the disillusioned returnees to see God at work in their severe circumstances. This disciple, called “Third Isaiah,” described God’s chosen  fast, a life given to serving the poor and releasing the captive.

According to tradition, Hebrews 11.37, “they were sawn in two,” refers to Isaiah of Jerusalem, put to death by Manasseh, Ahaz’s grandson. About 60 years later, in 587/6 BCE the Southern Kingdom Judah was destroyed.

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Heating and Cooling 101

Friday, August 28th, 2009

We’re back in faith basic training. Now, just as the first hospital and medical bills begin to roll in, our heating and A/C has gone out.

Paul writes

I have learned to be content with whatever I have. I know what it is to have little, and I know what it is to have plenty. In any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of being well-fed and of going hungry, of having plenty and of being in need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me.

Phil 4:11-13 (NRSV)

I’m struggling to learn how to be content. I’ve never had to go without essentials and many extras.

 The Gk word autarkes means “self contained.” I heard Professor Glenn Hinson, our great saint, give a talk on it once that I’ll never forget. It’s self-sufficient, self-contented, in a very positive way. Paul had learned to be independent of his circumstances.

That famous verse Phil 4.13 really means “I can face all things…” It’s not the “master of my fate” activist self-confidence, so often based on it.

Rather, it means “I can deal with whatever comes; in the strength of Christ, I can handle it.”

So we are learning. And we abide in gratitude because

God will fully satisfy every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus.

Phil 4:19 (NRSV)

Not a blank check!

I downloaded budgeting software, and I’m learning about HVAC systems and EnergyStar standards.

All the houses in our neighborhood are the same age, so we have good references from neighbors.

Most important, Sandy’s feeling a little more stable these days. As she transfers from the dialysis center to home dialysis, it may still have ups and downs.

But it feels better.

It’s funny, you know, I’ve done so much thinking and reading about the two thirds world, the standard of living abroad.

The dollar figure for the new HVAC system translates into hours Sandy has to work, children that could be fed, pure water needed.

I find myself praying for God’s eyes, God’s wisdom.

We do have to live in North America. The new system will also meet the special requirements of home dialysis, which are stringent.

But it’s so clear to me, that in Africa priorities would be very different.

As I pray to be a world citizen, and to care about all the billions of people affected by our global economy; as I pray for liberation from North American white apartheid outlooks—at the same time, I’m checking out home loan interest rates and repayment schedules.

I wonder what Jesus would do.

Guilt is not an adequate response. It can be nothing more than  a way to assuage the rumblings of conscience without righteous change.

But, as we shelter in the climate of our new system in a few weeks,  I am thankful for God’s infinite bounty, and I  pray that our heart and home will be open to all humankind, at least in spirit, and whenever possible in person.

For now, perhaps, that will be enough.

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I don’t recommend films.

Tuesday, August 18th, 2009

I saw a film entitled

Latter Days.

Warning!

This film is

Sexually explicit

Gay friendly

In it God is a Girl

 Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

 It’s about a love affair between a Mormon missionary and a party guy.

Why do I say such a film is noteworthy?

  1. Many gay-lesbian teens suicide or attempt suicide. Homosexuality is a choice?  In this homophobic society, who’d freely choose a life of self-loathing, rejection, isolation, discrimination?
  2. The film deals with the question: how do religious families and churches confront homosexual kids? There’s more than a snicker in the name of the ex-gay detention center Davis is sent to after being ex-communicated, Dyer Treatment Center.
  3. Jacqueline Bisset (arguably the God or Christ figure) represents what I wish church could be.
  4. Steve Sandvoss, one of the stars, is Harvard educated. This is not fluff stuff.
  5. The missionaries do a lot of religious activity. They set an example of zeal for us more traditional “Christians.” But what counted most: the guy saw a woman in tears, stopped to listen, didn’t give any canned presentations, reached out in love. In the end that mattered most.
  6. One of the truth-tellers is the person living with AIDS. He says to the party guy: “Hey, you’re depressing me!? You gotta do something!”

For several years in the early 1990s I volunteered with AIDS patients. In San Francisco, the Southern Baptist president had pronounced that “AIDS is God’s judgment on homosexuals,” and I couldn’t stand it! I had to do something to oppose such pornographic statements.

During the training sessions I sat in a sunlit room, the fellowship hall of Holy Comforter Church here in Richmond. I was literally bathed in light.

Back then, much less was known about the disease.

I started volunteering. My first visit was to a former pastor, who now weighed 90 pounds, who rolled on his bed in a DEPENDS moaning “Lord, have mercy! have mercy!” He asked for food, I mistakenly gave him a bit of cheese. He choked on it, and I had to reach my bare hand into his mouth and retrieve the cheese—or watch him choke to death.

When I got home, I washed my hands compulsively. I couldn’t stop shaking. I was terrified.

It took me several months to volunteer again.

This time I worked at an adult residence that was accessible. I was assigned to a man who had lived on the streets and done drugs. He had a bright mind and a broad smile. He’d learned to survive any way he could.

We were taught nonjudgmental acceptance. Another word for that is “grace.”

He made me laugh. Sometimes he tried using my white middle class guilt to get me to buy him some trinket or other. Once in awhile it worked.

He left the residence, returned to the street.

Then, months later, he called me. He was on his own but wanted to get clean again. I didn’t feel safe negotiating the area he lived in; by then my walking was significantly impaired. So I couldn’t help him.

But he turned to a humongous man, a pastor of a storefront Baptist church, from whom I learned later that before his death my friend was saved, baptized; and his parents gave him a key to their house on Thanksgiving. He never ”repented” of being gay—nor should he have done so.

One reason I wanted to work in AIDS ministry was to meet some gay people with commitment and spirituality.

There were many.

Like all suffering, AIDS teaches us all better than many life experiences.

I remember my friend wth gratitude. He enriched my life.

I don’t recommend films. But this one you should see. My friend would have loved it, too.

Check out the link to the right to The Blue Book. It’s a great source of info about homosexuality.

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What does it mean to “be in Christ”?

Thursday, June 25th, 2009

bonhoeffer

Left: Bonhoeffer

As I read A Testament to Freedom, Essential Writings of Bonhoeffer, I think I’ll wrestle with what I read here. I’ve completed the introductory life, and am struck again as I was when reading Bethge’s biography of the congruence of Dietrich’s life. He seemed to see clearly and earlier than many in the run up to the Nazi era that Christ called him to die. In the warlock’s cauldron of Nazi Germany,  his life was unified in the love of Christ.

What possible connection to such a life could there be with an ordinary life like mine? If he could have, Dietrich would have lived an ordinary life in the love of Christ; martyrdom was nothing he aspired to, the cult of personality he cosidered anathema.

I’ve read the selections from his dissertations. They’ll take several reads before I can grasp what he’s saying. In “The Communion of Saints” his 1930 dissertation he sees the church in Christ, not a socio-political entity, as the community of those who are in Christ, who live for Christ and for others in the world. I don’t think his views coincide with the emphasis on personal salvation that characterizes my primary faith tradition, Southern Baptists.

 (I no longer consider myself Baptist or Christian—the latter indicating the traditions and attachments to faith in the past two millennia; I aspire to be a “Christ-follower” for lack of a better term. I suppose the biblical name would simply be “in Christ.”)

“Act and Being” his 1931 dissertation requires more than one read. In the intro I highlighted this:

 “God’s Word becomes God’s revelation for us only in community.” (p. 65)

This is true. The word “solidarity” has become more common since the Polish labor union Solidarity successfully opposed the Communist regime. Most in the US, however, still pursue the individualistic capitalistic golden idol, and see no problem with individuals controlling vast wealth, while millions go without work, health care, food, shelter, personal safety, not to speak of the opportunity for self-realization that the middle class and well to do think of as a human right.

I also decided to jump around in the book, to avoid getting swamped in the super difficult sections like “Act and Being.” Therefore, I read

  • “The Church is Dead” and
  • “Learning to Die.”

But not all the dead are blessed; rather “those which die in the Lord,” those who learned how to die in time, who kept faith, who clung to Jesus up to the last hour, whether amidst the sufferings of the first martyrs, or in the martyrdom of a silent loneliness. (p. 267).

Back to the question of Dietrich’s relevance to ordinary life. I don’t think we live in ordinary times. Since Sept 11, 2001, the nation has been preoccupied with national security. Under Bush Cheney we violated some of our most cherished principles: at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, we imprison nameless people without trial indefinitely. We torture. In the emerging democracies of Eastern Europe the CIA (just like the Communists) set up a gulag where human rights were extinct. 

Now with the economic downturn, millions around the world have no work. The prosperity which cushioned many from the inequities of globalization has evaporated. Huge banks which oppose welfare for individuals accept tens, hundreds of billions of dollars from a government which simply prints more when needed. Some scientists wonder if we’re headed for another mass extinction event.

We view our circumstances as normal, whereas in World War II we realized we were in crisis. The church for the most part today has gone silent on all these  and many other issues, in relation to which being “in Christ” ought to bring about a beloved community where Christ is incarnate today through the metanoia and newness of life, not merely of the individual, but of the whole as one body in Christ.

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Policy: Never admit you’ve seen a Burning Bush

Thursday, March 26th, 2009

Rambling prose. Rabbits multiply. This rabbit took over the post.

Excursus: Medical Marvels

The mainstream culture — call it white male Western scientific — leaves no room for visions, angel visits, burning bushes, and the like.  It’s a Joe Friday, “Just the facts!  Wham bam, thank you, ma’am” outlook on life.

People like me get tossed in a box labeled “misfits and/or Looney Toons.”

It’s anecdotal but I heard this story as true: a patient in a mental hospital heard voices, saw things “normal” people don’t hear or see.  Otherwise, he was perfectly normal.  His staff counselor, who wanted him released from the hospital, advised him simply not to talk about what he heard or saw out of the ordinary.

In the health systems I’ve experienced there is an unwritten rule, you don’t chart things that are out of the ordinary— namely, religious or spiritual things. When you write up your program for the professional journal, remove all references to religion or religious personnel except those which confirm the Looney Tune prejudice.

Yes, friends, that really happened.

Of course, the one big exception is in marketing.  To attract new residents or patients or funding from churches, you train the marketing staff to emphasize the deep spiritual roots of the institution. 

Note: what I started to write you about will come next.

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Les Mis finished!

Thursday, March 19th, 2009

victor_hugo

Left: Victor Hugo

I just finished Les Miserables, 1260 pages in the Modern Library translation by Charles Wilbour.  If anyone has read the new translation published by the Vintage Classics, please comment.  I’d like to compare translations, because I’ve read that Wilbour’s was hurried.

I confess, after the death of Javert, I felt less motivated to read the remaining 100 pages.  So I speed read them.

You got to give me credit: I read all four chapters on the sewers of Paris.  Hugo, the patriot, wrote that the waste of the French was the best waste in the world.  I’m certainly glad to know that!

My guess is, however, that the sewers of Paris symbolize all the people discarded by society as waste, and other things as well.

The final 100 pages also reveal Hugo’s genius level insight into human nature (like the 1100 pages before them). Jean Valjean could not be free until he reconciled his own self-image as a convict with the reality of his saintly life.  Rejection by his son-in-law Marius paralleled his own self-rejection.

I recall a young Korean woman whom we met in Texas.  She had been rescued from a tormented life by a loving G.I. who married her and brought her to the States.  But she couldn’t accept his love or a happy life, because the scars of her suffering remained unhealed within.

Just as Javert could not accept Valjean’s transformation, Valjean himself could not— until he found acceptance in the hearts and the eyes of those he loved.

The incarnation means, I think, that God does many things through human beings.  When we accept people who feel unacceptable then they begin to feel accepted.  And by the way so do we.

More as I have the chance to reflect.

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