The following is a sermon delivered in Muelder Chapel, Boston University School of Theology, on Tuesday, Feb. 12, 2008. This sermon was prepared for the weekly interdenominational celebration of Eucharist. The reading was Matthew 4:1-11, the lectionary Gospel reading for the First Sunday of Lent.
There is a song we sing every Sunday at Common Cathedral, the outdoor church for homeless persons, and it goes like this:
Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and God’s righteousness
And all these things will be added unto you
Allelu, Alleluia
I know that it is Lent, and as a good Catholic I know that, technically, we are not supposed to sing any alleluias during Lent, though I just did. You see what attending a progressive Methodist seminary has done to me … it’s made me a liturgical maverick. Anyway, I’ll leave it to Professor Westerfield Tucker to decide whether the inclusion or omission of alleluias is more theologically appropriate, and I will seek absolution for my liturgical transgression in a Catholic confessional at the earliest possible occasion. In the meantime,
Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and God’s righteousness
And all these things will be added unto you
Allelu, Alleluia
This, to me, is the moral of today’s Scripture reading. These words come from Matthew 6:33, deep in the heart of the Sermon on the Mount. Wise words from a brilliant teacher. How do they sound to you? Coming from my tongue, surely not as astounding or as profound as they must have sounded coming from Jesus, the one who taught with authority. How do you suppose the great crowds of people who followed Jesus from Galilee to Judea knew he spoke with such authority? How do you think they could tell? What did they feel? I don’t think it was by the healings alone that they were convinced of his authority. Rather, they believed what he taught because they saw Jesus embodying this holy wisdom in his own struggle to be faithful to God. And his struggle was just like theirs. There is a freshness and immediacy to the wisdom of the Sermon on the Mount that I believe comes right out of Jesus’ experience of testing, from the beginning of his ministry and throughout his ministry, up to the cross.
I want to focus on the beginning of his ministry, and this brings me to Matthew’s account of Jesus’ temptation. The narrative comes to us in the form of a haggadic tale and resembles the challenges given to Jesus by the scribes and Jewish leaders later in this Gospel. All of these stories were crafted in such a way as to demonstrate the continuity of Jesus’ ministry with the ministry of Moses and the prophetic tradition of the Israelites. While Matthew has an axe to grind against the Jewish authorities, especially Pharisees, it should be kept in mind that the evangelist was positively emphasizing the Jewish roots of Jesus. His quotation of Deuteronomy in the dialogue with Satan is in keeping with Matthew’s desire to prove Jesus’ saving fidelity to Yahweh’s covenant with us. And this covenant faithfulness is exactly what is at stake in the temptation narrative. Would Jesus, proclaimed at his baptism God’s own Son, who had passed through the waters of his own Exodus, rely on God and God wholly and completely? Where generations of Israelites before him failed to hold fast to the providence of the Lord, could he endure courageously, faithfully in the wilderness of sin and doubt? Would he seek first the kingdom of God and God’s righteousness?
Jesus is led by the Spirit into the desert to be tested by God and tempted by the devil. Now let me be clear: I don’t think this is another case of divine child abuse. The plain sense of the text tells me that Jesus let himself be led by the Spirit of God. But this does not mean the Spirit of God tempted Jesus or was pleased to see Jesus suffer. He was tested by God, and to this testing he consented, but the temptation was not of God. God leads us always back to God, even if the journey leads us into tests and trials, but God does not lead us into temptation. God does not seduce or deceive us with the world God created to be good. Only we can do that; we let our natural desires be distorted into mindless passions, and we become acquainted with the demons. So testing and tempting are different things. God led Jesus into a confrontation with temptation, and Jesus found himself face to face, as do we all, with the devil’s seductions.
Now, why are the devil’s seductions temptations? Relieving hunger is a good thing. Self-sacrifice, when undertaken to realize a virtue or ideal, can be a good thing. Putting power in the hands of people whose hearts burn for justice is a good thing. But listen to Wendy Farley, who writes, “You see how tricky the demons can be. Wanting to be good, trying to be good—these are also temptations. There is a sense in which wanting and trying to be good can be good things, just as morality, self-sacrifice, and love can be good things. But all of these things are ways the demons try to get us to accept their bargain.” Farley is saying that in our insatiable desire for the good, we are blinded to the source of goodness, and we end up grasping at fragments of goodness, fragments of the divine mystery, and then we lose ourselves. Satan dares Jesus to seek fragments of God—God’s power, God’s protection, and God’s glory—for himself, not for God’s sake, or even for the sake of others. First, the devil provokes Jesus to turn stones into loaves of bread only to satisfy his own aching craving. Some commentators propose that the devil tempts Jesus to transform the stones in order to feed others, but this would only confirm Farley’s point that we are tempted by the good. Later, Jesus performs a miracle just as wonderful, multiplying a few loaves and fishes to feed the thousands, but there is a difference. There, he does so to satisfy the people’s hungry hearts, not only their hungry stomachs, and he does it to bring the masses closer to God. Neither Jesus’ appetite nor his desire for God and for others would have been satisfied had Jesus changed the stones in the desert, and Jesus would have lost sight of his Lord. Thwarted once, the devil then tempts Jesus to throw himself down from the Temple in order to be saved. Another temptation to the good—don’t we long to see some sign that God is powerfully protecting us, watching over and within us, supervising creation, gently but surely guiding us, rejoicing and mourning with us, deeply present with us in the face of suffering great and small? Wouldn’t a miracle rescue of the Son of God by the angels be just the awesome display of might that the Judeans needed, and wouldn’t that strike the hearts of the Roman occupiers with terror? Jesus would not give in to the devil’s delusions. This kind of self-sacrifice would be vanity and vexation of the Spirit, and it would be in vain: acts of faith can never be used to extort favor from God. Later, upon the cross, Jesus refused once again to give in to this temptation. In being raised upon the cross, Jesus let himself truly be thrown down, but not to save himself or Israel or even to prove he was the Son of God, but because he loved others, and by his pierced, crushed hands he would support others just as the angels supported him in the wilderness after being tested and found worthy. Finally, the devil offers Jesus the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. Jesus answers, “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.” He knew that to accept this offer would mean trading the genuine glory of God’s rule for the ungodly grandeur of empire. Instead of accepting the world for himself, Jesus Christ in his glory finally bestows the nations upon his disciples, fulfilling his own proclamation: blessed are those the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven, the reign of God; blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. He will give the world to the disciples so that all things may be given to their God. Jesus does not claim anything for himself except as granted to him by God whom he called his Father, and he offers even these things back to the Father in bestowing them to the disciples.
Satan insinuates that Jesus is being less than the Son of God if he does not demonstrate or lay claim to his divine power. “If you are the Son of God,” the devil begins twice, knowing full well who Jesus is and what Jesus can do. Farley says we are deceived into thinking we are worthless if we do not give ourselves over to the good we think we should be doing. In fact, we sell ourselves short, because we are denying the precious and beautiful persons we have already been created to be. And this is the basic temptation to which we always yield. That is one of the morals of the story of the Fall in Genesis. The man and woman, presented with the tantalizing possibility of being like the gods, of grasping the divine power, were in fact denying the spirit of God that was already within them. They could not delight in the gifts with which they had already been graced. They counted them of little worth, and as a result they suffered a wounding of their personhood and a separation from the divine Spirit.
But Jesus remembered. He remembered the covenant. He trusted in the Lord. He trusted in his own sacred worth and infinite dignity. He rejected the temptation to reject the reign of God within him and the justice of God around him. And his victory is our hope. God has drawn near to us in Jesus’ confrontation with sin, suffering, and doubt, and we can draw power from the person who we confess is the Son of God. Moreover, Jesus’ fully human struggle, in obedience to God and rebellion against the world, is not a distant cosmic ideal but our immediate flesh-and-blood model. So let us not seek the stony bread of security but the sweet bread and roses of solidarity; let us not seek terrifying and terrorizing displays of monolithic force but the constructive and healing exercise of communal power; let us not seek the consolidation of social, economic, political, cultural, and religious empires but the creation of the beloved community.
Jesus teaches us a simple but hard-won wisdom. Seek ye first the kingdom, the kindom, the reign of God, the peace of God. Don’t seek the power, the prestige, and the glory for its own sake. Don’t mistake the glimpse of God for some unfiltered beatific vision, for we see only in part, and what we grasp is but a filament in the strong web of interdependent being. And check yourself before you conclude that you are all right just because you believe you are seeking, glimpsing, and grasping these things for others. Don’t be tempted by false altruism; don’t be tempted the good. Seek ye first the kingdom of God. God will give us the power, the glory, and the miracles of love and justice we desire and for which this hurting world yearns when first we seek after the source of all good things. And this seeking is not so much a grasping for godliness as much as it is a growing into oneself and a growing into relationship with our God. Amen.
Showing posts with label reign of God. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reign of God. Show all posts
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Saturday, August 11, 2007
A Few Words About Kingdom Building
I work for the union ’cause she’s so good to me;
And I’m bound to come out on top,
That’s where I should be.
I will hear ev’ry word the boss may say,
For he’s the one who hands me down my pay.
Looks like this time I’m gonna get to stay,
I’m a union man, now, all the way.
The Band, “King Harvest (Has Surely Come)”
In the name of Christ, I vowed to do anything for the Justice at Smithfield campaign this summer. Whatever the leaders of United Food and Commercial Workers wanted to be done, I would work my utmost to make it so. If the union believed that sending a few small interfaith community delegations to supermarkets every week would bring Smithfield Packing to the table, then I would support the union. And if the union opted for a more ferocious (but peaceful) public demonstration, then I would be there to support the union in that course, too. Naturally, I was prepared for a slugfest (figuratively speaking!) in Boston.
Imagine my surprise, then, when it turned out that victory in Boston came with relative ease, and imagine my astonishment when the union recently decided to lower the scale and volume of its public actions in the run-up to the Smithfield shareholders’ meeting in Virginia.
How to deal with this, when we expected to take the kingdom by force? For me it comes down to this. Knowing ahead of time that these plans weren’t really up to us but to the union, and having signed up to support its organizing efforts by bringing in faith groups, and not knowing any better how things “ought to be done,” what else could I do but to support the union organizers? It’s not that I put my ultimate faith and trust in them as I would in God, but since I allied with them in this righteous cause and godly struggle, what I could do was act gracefully and offer to them all my creative powers within the often frustrating constraints that bound me.
I was sorry to learn that my co-worker in Nashville, Jason Sikma, was not going to be able to give hell to Paula Deen, the TV celebrity chef and family-friendly face of Smithfield Foods, when she visited on her tour. It would have been a great scene, I know. Sometimes I wish that Smithfield was doing some flagrantly filthy-rich business up here in Boston so that we could have more delegations and stir up talk and trouble. But in Massachusetts the ends did not require stupendous means. Besides, the objectives were modest and incremental: get the pork off the shelf, make the company come to its senses, and give the union the leverage it needs to win recognition so that the workers can operate in a less unequal power infrastructure. And if it was destined that all this could happen with a whimper instead of a bang ... well, sometimes God doesn’t pass by in the heavy wind or the earthquake or the fire, but in the tiny whispering sound.
I heartily agree with my co-worker in Chicago, Nathan Brink, that Smithfield is not ultimately in control. Neither is the union, of course, and certainly we interns are not! That’s a good thing. We ask God for God’s kingdom to come, and I constantly remind myself that no earthly institutions can create it or thwart its coming. And though I can create an environment fit for meeting God and God’s reign breaking into our world, I cannot build that kingdom myself—it would be blasphemy and idolatry to say that I can bring about God’s reign! But I can witness to it, I can testify to it, and I can tell others to get ready for it, because like it or not, it’s coming. It’s still coming!
Corn in the fields.
Listen to the rice when the wind blows 'cross the water,
King Harvest has surely come.
May the Lord’s peace and justice and mercy be ours and for the Smithfield workers in Tar Heel, N.C., and for their friends and enemies.
And I’m bound to come out on top,
That’s where I should be.
I will hear ev’ry word the boss may say,
For he’s the one who hands me down my pay.
Looks like this time I’m gonna get to stay,
I’m a union man, now, all the way.
The Band, “King Harvest (Has Surely Come)”
In the name of Christ, I vowed to do anything for the Justice at Smithfield campaign this summer. Whatever the leaders of United Food and Commercial Workers wanted to be done, I would work my utmost to make it so. If the union believed that sending a few small interfaith community delegations to supermarkets every week would bring Smithfield Packing to the table, then I would support the union. And if the union opted for a more ferocious (but peaceful) public demonstration, then I would be there to support the union in that course, too. Naturally, I was prepared for a slugfest (figuratively speaking!) in Boston.
Imagine my surprise, then, when it turned out that victory in Boston came with relative ease, and imagine my astonishment when the union recently decided to lower the scale and volume of its public actions in the run-up to the Smithfield shareholders’ meeting in Virginia.
How to deal with this, when we expected to take the kingdom by force? For me it comes down to this. Knowing ahead of time that these plans weren’t really up to us but to the union, and having signed up to support its organizing efforts by bringing in faith groups, and not knowing any better how things “ought to be done,” what else could I do but to support the union organizers? It’s not that I put my ultimate faith and trust in them as I would in God, but since I allied with them in this righteous cause and godly struggle, what I could do was act gracefully and offer to them all my creative powers within the often frustrating constraints that bound me.
I was sorry to learn that my co-worker in Nashville, Jason Sikma, was not going to be able to give hell to Paula Deen, the TV celebrity chef and family-friendly face of Smithfield Foods, when she visited on her tour. It would have been a great scene, I know. Sometimes I wish that Smithfield was doing some flagrantly filthy-rich business up here in Boston so that we could have more delegations and stir up talk and trouble. But in Massachusetts the ends did not require stupendous means. Besides, the objectives were modest and incremental: get the pork off the shelf, make the company come to its senses, and give the union the leverage it needs to win recognition so that the workers can operate in a less unequal power infrastructure. And if it was destined that all this could happen with a whimper instead of a bang ... well, sometimes God doesn’t pass by in the heavy wind or the earthquake or the fire, but in the tiny whispering sound.
I heartily agree with my co-worker in Chicago, Nathan Brink, that Smithfield is not ultimately in control. Neither is the union, of course, and certainly we interns are not! That’s a good thing. We ask God for God’s kingdom to come, and I constantly remind myself that no earthly institutions can create it or thwart its coming. And though I can create an environment fit for meeting God and God’s reign breaking into our world, I cannot build that kingdom myself—it would be blasphemy and idolatry to say that I can bring about God’s reign! But I can witness to it, I can testify to it, and I can tell others to get ready for it, because like it or not, it’s coming. It’s still coming!
Corn in the fields.
Listen to the rice when the wind blows 'cross the water,
King Harvest has surely come.
May the Lord’s peace and justice and mercy be ours and for the Smithfield workers in Tar Heel, N.C., and for their friends and enemies.
Monday, March 12, 2007
Boylston Street Letter #8
One in an occasional series of reflections on homelessness and my duties as a pastoral intern at St. Francis House, a daytime shelter on 39 Boylston St. in Boston (http://www.stfrancishouse.org).
The week of March 5-9, 2007
The kingdom of God has been proclaimed, but it has not yet come. Lord, am I aware that it has not yet come! When competition defeats cooperation, when contract nullifies covenant, I know the kingdom has not yet come. When I know sin, I realize that the kingdom has not yet come. When I am sin, definitely I know that the kingdom has yet to come.
But the kingdom has been proclaimed. I’ve heard it! Sometimes I, too, have spoken words that heralded the Word that makes of everything a new creation. It really happens, and the optimist in me believes that it happens with us as often as it happens in spite of us.
Every man, woman, and child who practices social ministry ought to imagine standing between the times: between life as it is and life as they believe it will be. We begin where life is as it is, and we move toward life as it will be, and those in the Church are at the boundary of time present and time future. Or, picture another image for the Church: an isthmus. The Church is the land bridge between two great continents, the present world and the new creation. All of humanity from all time has been on a great migration from the first creation to the final creation, and it is our generation’s turn to cross from one to the other, guided safely over via the isthmus.
What does this have to do with the shelter?
I experienced two moments on the boundary of time, or along the narrow land bridge, on Friday. First, during Bible study, a guest (let me call him Deacon Jones) who joined us for the first time used the hour to offer his own catalog of Augustinian confessions. I knew Deacon Jones nominally before this; I knew only that he was one of the most well-mannered gentlemen I’ve met in the shelter. After hearing Jesus’ teaching about repentance in Luke 13:1-9, he testified both to the wretchedness of his circumstances and the glory of God transfiguring him. It is easier to believe we are simul justus et peccator after hearing Deacon Jones speaking gently but intensely about the misery and mercy of homelessness: the sleeplessness, the hunger, the cold, “snapping” on the streets, being held at knifepoint; yet also praising God for surviving another day on the streets, finding plenty in spite of sinful scarcity, and stepping out on faith to break up lethal fights. His witness shames me into silence. Have I forgotten the meaning of penitence? When a truly impoverished person testifies, you get the impression that none but the poor are genuinely remorseful about failing to pray to God or read the Bible. Trust that impression. His kind of faith sharing does not happen all the time, so you must be ready to listen. It was all I could dare to do. All mortal flesh must keep silence in the presence of Christ and his saints. Deacon Jones was a saint in that hour. Looking back on that morning, I’ve concluded that it is a good thing to study the written Word, but it is a far better thing to study the man or woman who becomes a talking book, a living Word.
Second, the transgender student Mallory fell down, but she rose again. She called me early in the afternoon to apologize for deciding to quit our weekly GED tutorials, offering that her life was complicated, and she needed time to sort it out. However, less than half an hour later, she called back and changed her mind: she wanted to continue, after all. That afternoon was the most productive of all our tutorials. She was getting the hang of reading, comparing, and adding decimals despite no prior experience with anything but whole numbers! So delighted was Mallory by her accomplishment that her melancholy had all but disappeared by the end of the afternoon. I had never seen her so proud of herself! And it made me regret having to tell her I could not attend her graduation from the Moving Ahead Program on March 16 because I will be in Washington. But I know she will be waiting for me when I return: we have to work on reading comprehension and writing skills. She insisted on it.
We’ve come too far to turn back. We must go forward. The kingdom is not yet here, but it is on its way, and it graces every dream Deacon Jones, Mallory, and I have.
The week of March 5-9, 2007
The kingdom of God has been proclaimed, but it has not yet come. Lord, am I aware that it has not yet come! When competition defeats cooperation, when contract nullifies covenant, I know the kingdom has not yet come. When I know sin, I realize that the kingdom has not yet come. When I am sin, definitely I know that the kingdom has yet to come.
But the kingdom has been proclaimed. I’ve heard it! Sometimes I, too, have spoken words that heralded the Word that makes of everything a new creation. It really happens, and the optimist in me believes that it happens with us as often as it happens in spite of us.
Every man, woman, and child who practices social ministry ought to imagine standing between the times: between life as it is and life as they believe it will be. We begin where life is as it is, and we move toward life as it will be, and those in the Church are at the boundary of time present and time future. Or, picture another image for the Church: an isthmus. The Church is the land bridge between two great continents, the present world and the new creation. All of humanity from all time has been on a great migration from the first creation to the final creation, and it is our generation’s turn to cross from one to the other, guided safely over via the isthmus.
What does this have to do with the shelter?
I experienced two moments on the boundary of time, or along the narrow land bridge, on Friday. First, during Bible study, a guest (let me call him Deacon Jones) who joined us for the first time used the hour to offer his own catalog of Augustinian confessions. I knew Deacon Jones nominally before this; I knew only that he was one of the most well-mannered gentlemen I’ve met in the shelter. After hearing Jesus’ teaching about repentance in Luke 13:1-9, he testified both to the wretchedness of his circumstances and the glory of God transfiguring him. It is easier to believe we are simul justus et peccator after hearing Deacon Jones speaking gently but intensely about the misery and mercy of homelessness: the sleeplessness, the hunger, the cold, “snapping” on the streets, being held at knifepoint; yet also praising God for surviving another day on the streets, finding plenty in spite of sinful scarcity, and stepping out on faith to break up lethal fights. His witness shames me into silence. Have I forgotten the meaning of penitence? When a truly impoverished person testifies, you get the impression that none but the poor are genuinely remorseful about failing to pray to God or read the Bible. Trust that impression. His kind of faith sharing does not happen all the time, so you must be ready to listen. It was all I could dare to do. All mortal flesh must keep silence in the presence of Christ and his saints. Deacon Jones was a saint in that hour. Looking back on that morning, I’ve concluded that it is a good thing to study the written Word, but it is a far better thing to study the man or woman who becomes a talking book, a living Word.
Second, the transgender student Mallory fell down, but she rose again. She called me early in the afternoon to apologize for deciding to quit our weekly GED tutorials, offering that her life was complicated, and she needed time to sort it out. However, less than half an hour later, she called back and changed her mind: she wanted to continue, after all. That afternoon was the most productive of all our tutorials. She was getting the hang of reading, comparing, and adding decimals despite no prior experience with anything but whole numbers! So delighted was Mallory by her accomplishment that her melancholy had all but disappeared by the end of the afternoon. I had never seen her so proud of herself! And it made me regret having to tell her I could not attend her graduation from the Moving Ahead Program on March 16 because I will be in Washington. But I know she will be waiting for me when I return: we have to work on reading comprehension and writing skills. She insisted on it.
We’ve come too far to turn back. We must go forward. The kingdom is not yet here, but it is on its way, and it graces every dream Deacon Jones, Mallory, and I have.
Boylston Street Letter #5
Continuing backtracking ... see Boylston Street Letter #4.
The week of Feb. 12-16, 2007
The Moving Ahead Program celebrated the graduation of its 69th class on Friday, and I attended the ceremony at the Boston Center for Adult Education on 5 Commonwealth Ave. I walked there from the shelter with Mallory, the transgender student whom I was supposed to tutor that afternoon. We decided it would be a better use of our time to cheer on the men and women who were stepping out of the shadows of shame, disenfranchisement, and hopelessness into new lives.
As usual, the testimonies from the graduates were moving and steeped in gratitude. Several staff members and current MAP students paid tribute to these persevering graduates, and even Mallory stepped forward to give thanks for their example. A small but sumptuously catered reception followed, the kind of banquet that Jesus saw fit to use as a metaphor for the reign of God in heaven and earth.
Here, at these graduations, you see hope fulfilled. However, I felt strangely detached from the proceedings. Maybe it’s because I work at the periphery of this program and have not been touched by these children of God. Maybe it’s because I was thinking about school, my classes, and my love life. Maybe it’s because I felt sleepy.
Maybe it’s because while these men and women are moving ahead, I’m also moving on.
First of all, I am eager to plan a course of study for a Ph.D. or Th.D. in theology. Second of all, the novelty of ministering to homeless persons passed a while ago; and, in recent days, so has the feeling of guilt for not doing enough to lighten the lives of the least of Jesus’ brothers and sisters. The welfare of the homeless and the heartbroken does not depend on me. I have allowed myself to “let go and let God.” However, sanguinity poses its own risks. If anything, I am concerned that the familiarity of the shelter will breed complacency and inattentive behavior. Already there are indications of obliviousness in my morning shift. Sometimes my nose is stuck in a newspaper while guests wait at the hospitality desk for their daily bread; sometimes I linger in the photo room, where we produce guest identification cards, to check e-mail. One more confession: While I was running an errand for the shelter last Monday morning, receiving and delivering a donation of soaps, shampoos, and moisturizers I had secured for the shower room and clothing distribution, I was thinking about how much of a relief it was not to have to staff the hospitality desk during the peak hour of craziness.
“Only, we were to be mindful of the poor, which is the very thing I was eager to do.” When this internship started, I could not think of any better way to use my time on Mondays and Fridays. Now I can think half a dozen things that are good and needful and that have little to do with the poor, at least those of St. Francis House. (I decided to take President’s Day off.) Is it God’s will leading mine, or merely my own will?
The week of Feb. 12-16, 2007
The Moving Ahead Program celebrated the graduation of its 69th class on Friday, and I attended the ceremony at the Boston Center for Adult Education on 5 Commonwealth Ave. I walked there from the shelter with Mallory, the transgender student whom I was supposed to tutor that afternoon. We decided it would be a better use of our time to cheer on the men and women who were stepping out of the shadows of shame, disenfranchisement, and hopelessness into new lives.
As usual, the testimonies from the graduates were moving and steeped in gratitude. Several staff members and current MAP students paid tribute to these persevering graduates, and even Mallory stepped forward to give thanks for their example. A small but sumptuously catered reception followed, the kind of banquet that Jesus saw fit to use as a metaphor for the reign of God in heaven and earth.
Here, at these graduations, you see hope fulfilled. However, I felt strangely detached from the proceedings. Maybe it’s because I work at the periphery of this program and have not been touched by these children of God. Maybe it’s because I was thinking about school, my classes, and my love life. Maybe it’s because I felt sleepy.
Maybe it’s because while these men and women are moving ahead, I’m also moving on.
First of all, I am eager to plan a course of study for a Ph.D. or Th.D. in theology. Second of all, the novelty of ministering to homeless persons passed a while ago; and, in recent days, so has the feeling of guilt for not doing enough to lighten the lives of the least of Jesus’ brothers and sisters. The welfare of the homeless and the heartbroken does not depend on me. I have allowed myself to “let go and let God.” However, sanguinity poses its own risks. If anything, I am concerned that the familiarity of the shelter will breed complacency and inattentive behavior. Already there are indications of obliviousness in my morning shift. Sometimes my nose is stuck in a newspaper while guests wait at the hospitality desk for their daily bread; sometimes I linger in the photo room, where we produce guest identification cards, to check e-mail. One more confession: While I was running an errand for the shelter last Monday morning, receiving and delivering a donation of soaps, shampoos, and moisturizers I had secured for the shower room and clothing distribution, I was thinking about how much of a relief it was not to have to staff the hospitality desk during the peak hour of craziness.
“Only, we were to be mindful of the poor, which is the very thing I was eager to do.” When this internship started, I could not think of any better way to use my time on Mondays and Fridays. Now I can think half a dozen things that are good and needful and that have little to do with the poor, at least those of St. Francis House. (I decided to take President’s Day off.) Is it God’s will leading mine, or merely my own will?
Thursday, January 4, 2007
Babylon, Home, and the Kin(g)dom of God
Home is a “whole in the ground.” It is where we go to become complete. It is where we live most deeply. For Christians, “kingdom of God” is the ultimate expression of home, and while it is utterly unlike any home we have known, I think it is the ground and measure of every real home we have encountered. Any home we know is on the way to the ultimate Home prepared for us by God and to which we are guided by Christ and speeded by the Holy Spirit. So we are moving from home to Home.
I think that the kingdom of God is like a homecoming, only this is a traveling festival that comes out to meet you where you are. Here you find all the people are your kin, and you meet your many, many brothers and sisters, and all the maternal and paternal figures, too. Wherever Jesus went, there was the kin(g)dom of God, and all his brothers and sisters were with him, as well as his mother and father, much to the confusion of even his natural kin. Home, the ultimate Home, is where the Sacred Heart is.
Today, the Spirit, not Jesus in the flesh, finds us where we are and brings us from home on to Home. That spiritual journey need not be a literal peregrination, but it has been for millions, and that includes me. And this is where I may say with some pride, and a little irony, that Babylon was the origin of my pilgrimage toward the kin(g)dom. What I find lacking in this community today cannot diminish the wealth of what I received when I was younger and not far along in the process of becoming.
And what riches! I got educated. I discovered reason. I acquired morals and a conscience. I was given responsibilities. Again, the Spirit finds us where we are. It may be the mind or the heart or the hands, wherever our being is centered. My family taught me to learn, and the home that Babylon once was prepared me to think. Therefore, the Spirit that stirred my spirit first touched me by the mind.
But no person is merely a thinker. Sometime, somewhere, we’ve got to feel and experience. The Spirit wants to be—has to be—in our heart and hands, too. Living in Babylon, I could never develop a discipline of the heart and the hands, and the Spirit was not going to touch me in those parts of my being there.
And so the Spirit moved, and it moved me out of Babylon.
Living and studying at Cornell University, I honed the discipline of the mind, struggling with questions that life in Babylon only barely foreshadowed. Having thought my way past unbelief, God opened another way, and the mind gladly gave way to the discipline of the heart. And for the first time I called Ithaca my home.
But I was untimely ripped from Ithaca when I graduated, prompting a spiritual crisis. When I returned to Babylon, I claimed faith and the faith tradition mislaid by my family years before. Now I fought my way past the dead end of cynical irony, and, for a time, by force of will, Babylon became a home again. This time around I found men and women of faith willing to walk slowly, with wonderful patience, with the person dying to become a new being. Nobody knew or cared if I was smart or intelligent. They looked at my heart, beating like an infant’s.
Yet for all their nurture, I could not shed my tough shell, I could not flower among them, and I could not join their community of natural hearts. Instead, I lived in contradiction, with one eye on the will be and the other on the was. Too often I found myself breaking rocks, expecting to find living springs within them, only to find devils and dust. When I was not looking, my own heart continued to petrify. Left to my own devices, I could not keep myself from being hardened. I prayed to be lifted out of the quarry and planted into fertile soil.
I thought that soil would be a seminary or a friary. It turned out to be a ghetto.
Living and teaching in the inner city of Baltimore, I honed the habits of the heart. I loved and hated and praised and envied and rejoiced and sorrowed more deeply than I thought myself capable. With more fecklessness than wisdom, I claimed Baltimore as my home.
But after two years of so much feeling without an equal knowing for my moods, the Spirit left me, and my spirit was emptied. Determined to live in poverty in Baltimore, I got all the banal wretchedness I wanted, but it was not pleasing to God’s children and of no great significance to God. And I was wasting all my talents. Living in Baltimore, I could never develop a proper discipline of the hands.
The Spirit moved me to consult experience a little more seriously, and it moved me out of Baltimore, but not before I had a little epiphany. Providentially, it happened one weekend in Ithaca, during my college reunion … a homecoming. Here, where all my cares were taken from me, I realized it was time to integrate the disciplines of the mind, heart, and hands: to think, to feel, to act, to experience all at once! Theology was the answer to a question it took so long to ask correctly, and the signposts pointed to Boston, the epicenter of American Christian theology.
Knowing I was destined to move on, I returned to Babylon for a short time to prepare for this new journey. These thirteen months felt like exile. Looking back on yesterday’s glories in Ithaca and Baltimore while my eye was training on tomorrow’s possibilities in Boston, I neglected the present moment. In Babylon, I was merely a boarder on the border of a transformation. In light of the present, I hope all has been forgiven.
Living, studying, and serving in Boston, I think that for the first time I am honing all three disciplines in good measure. Thanks be to God, and forgive my faults, kind reader, because it’s certain that my thoughts sometimes go astray; my heart isn’t always in the right place; and my deeds fail to meet the promise of my words.
It should not disturb you or me that Babylon or any place that was a home becomes not a home. The Spirit wanders, and we with it. Besides, none of these present homes are the Home that is symbolized by the phrase “kingdom of God.” They reveal and occasionally manifest what that Home is like, but that Home is yet to come. To find the kin(g)dom of God, you must first leave home.
I remember this distinctly. Once upon a time, when I was still a high school senior on the verge of starting college, the superintendent of our hometown’s public schools told me in words to this effect, “You’ve done all you could possibly do in West Babylon, and West Babylon has done all it could do for you. Now it’s time for you to move on.” He said more than even he knew.
I think that the kingdom of God is like a homecoming, only this is a traveling festival that comes out to meet you where you are. Here you find all the people are your kin, and you meet your many, many brothers and sisters, and all the maternal and paternal figures, too. Wherever Jesus went, there was the kin(g)dom of God, and all his brothers and sisters were with him, as well as his mother and father, much to the confusion of even his natural kin. Home, the ultimate Home, is where the Sacred Heart is.
Today, the Spirit, not Jesus in the flesh, finds us where we are and brings us from home on to Home. That spiritual journey need not be a literal peregrination, but it has been for millions, and that includes me. And this is where I may say with some pride, and a little irony, that Babylon was the origin of my pilgrimage toward the kin(g)dom. What I find lacking in this community today cannot diminish the wealth of what I received when I was younger and not far along in the process of becoming.
And what riches! I got educated. I discovered reason. I acquired morals and a conscience. I was given responsibilities. Again, the Spirit finds us where we are. It may be the mind or the heart or the hands, wherever our being is centered. My family taught me to learn, and the home that Babylon once was prepared me to think. Therefore, the Spirit that stirred my spirit first touched me by the mind.
But no person is merely a thinker. Sometime, somewhere, we’ve got to feel and experience. The Spirit wants to be—has to be—in our heart and hands, too. Living in Babylon, I could never develop a discipline of the heart and the hands, and the Spirit was not going to touch me in those parts of my being there.
And so the Spirit moved, and it moved me out of Babylon.
Living and studying at Cornell University, I honed the discipline of the mind, struggling with questions that life in Babylon only barely foreshadowed. Having thought my way past unbelief, God opened another way, and the mind gladly gave way to the discipline of the heart. And for the first time I called Ithaca my home.
But I was untimely ripped from Ithaca when I graduated, prompting a spiritual crisis. When I returned to Babylon, I claimed faith and the faith tradition mislaid by my family years before. Now I fought my way past the dead end of cynical irony, and, for a time, by force of will, Babylon became a home again. This time around I found men and women of faith willing to walk slowly, with wonderful patience, with the person dying to become a new being. Nobody knew or cared if I was smart or intelligent. They looked at my heart, beating like an infant’s.
Yet for all their nurture, I could not shed my tough shell, I could not flower among them, and I could not join their community of natural hearts. Instead, I lived in contradiction, with one eye on the will be and the other on the was. Too often I found myself breaking rocks, expecting to find living springs within them, only to find devils and dust. When I was not looking, my own heart continued to petrify. Left to my own devices, I could not keep myself from being hardened. I prayed to be lifted out of the quarry and planted into fertile soil.
I thought that soil would be a seminary or a friary. It turned out to be a ghetto.
Living and teaching in the inner city of Baltimore, I honed the habits of the heart. I loved and hated and praised and envied and rejoiced and sorrowed more deeply than I thought myself capable. With more fecklessness than wisdom, I claimed Baltimore as my home.
But after two years of so much feeling without an equal knowing for my moods, the Spirit left me, and my spirit was emptied. Determined to live in poverty in Baltimore, I got all the banal wretchedness I wanted, but it was not pleasing to God’s children and of no great significance to God. And I was wasting all my talents. Living in Baltimore, I could never develop a proper discipline of the hands.
The Spirit moved me to consult experience a little more seriously, and it moved me out of Baltimore, but not before I had a little epiphany. Providentially, it happened one weekend in Ithaca, during my college reunion … a homecoming. Here, where all my cares were taken from me, I realized it was time to integrate the disciplines of the mind, heart, and hands: to think, to feel, to act, to experience all at once! Theology was the answer to a question it took so long to ask correctly, and the signposts pointed to Boston, the epicenter of American Christian theology.
Knowing I was destined to move on, I returned to Babylon for a short time to prepare for this new journey. These thirteen months felt like exile. Looking back on yesterday’s glories in Ithaca and Baltimore while my eye was training on tomorrow’s possibilities in Boston, I neglected the present moment. In Babylon, I was merely a boarder on the border of a transformation. In light of the present, I hope all has been forgiven.
Living, studying, and serving in Boston, I think that for the first time I am honing all three disciplines in good measure. Thanks be to God, and forgive my faults, kind reader, because it’s certain that my thoughts sometimes go astray; my heart isn’t always in the right place; and my deeds fail to meet the promise of my words.
It should not disturb you or me that Babylon or any place that was a home becomes not a home. The Spirit wanders, and we with it. Besides, none of these present homes are the Home that is symbolized by the phrase “kingdom of God.” They reveal and occasionally manifest what that Home is like, but that Home is yet to come. To find the kin(g)dom of God, you must first leave home.
I remember this distinctly. Once upon a time, when I was still a high school senior on the verge of starting college, the superintendent of our hometown’s public schools told me in words to this effect, “You’ve done all you could possibly do in West Babylon, and West Babylon has done all it could do for you. Now it’s time for you to move on.” He said more than even he knew.
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