"The cost of such a radical response to Jesus is already in view when Mark prefaces the call of the first disciples with the notice that John has been arrested. But like impulsive lovers who commit themselves to one another while still wrapped in their initial mutual infatuation, a compelling love causes disciples to follow Jesus instantly. Just as a couple grows into love, and learns the costly self-surrender it takes to make that love continue to flourish, so too disciples learn the deeper conversion demanded as they grow in their radical love affair with the Holy One. It is then not so much the threat of destruction that moves us to convert our ways, but an irresistible love that turns our hearts."
Sr. Barbara E. Reid, O.P., America magazine, Jan. 19-26, 2009
Give me, oh God, irresistible love.
Seduce me, yes, let loose a heedless flush of the skin;
Make my hairs stand on their end from within,
Heating up and slowing down my breath
With every breath you blow upon my skin.
Make haste to make me less chaste.
Let me love you all the time.
Let me love you like there was no time to lose.
Let me love you like I had to lie about it.
The truth, come from my eyes, will never let them doubt it.
We won't have to fantasize or tantalize.
We'll grow down and get up with it.
Let us give the gossips a scandal to handle,
As you give me a bath and I loosen your thong
We will prove it is right when they say it is wrong,
How I warm you and need you and drink you -- feed from you,
As through me you think and you drink and you feed,
Together we'll take all the world to the top
As we bless and we bare and we bleed,
And complete in our death the way that we lived.
Give me, oh God, irresistible love.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Affirmations
(by Robert Fripp, a guitarist)
Affirmation One
The benevolence of the creative impulse is inexpressible.
We cannot know this benevolence, while accepting that Benevolence knows us better than we know ourselves.
Affirmation Two
Love cannot bear that even one soul be denied its place in paradise.
Affirmation Three
In desperate times, a reasonable person might despair;
but hope is unreasonable, and love is greater even than this.
Affirmation Four
Music is our friend, if only we might listen; if only we can listen.
Affirmation Five
The poverty of our nature is no limit to our aspiration.
Affirmation Six
Although I stumble and fall, each time I will rise again.
Affirmation Seven
Not even death can end the process of our becoming.
***
We cannot know this benevolence, while accepting that Benevolence knows us better than we know ourselves. In such words I hear this and this. Goodness finds us, and then we find ourselves. The benevolence of the creative impulse is inexpressible. But it is perceivable. Our moments of self-discovery are indispensable to the continuation of creation.
Love cannot bear that even one soul be denied its place in paradise. How unfortunate, then, that we conspire individually and collectively to deny souls, and whole hosts of souls, their place in paradise, building nightmarish republics of invisible men, women, and children.
We do this, most curiously enough, in the name of justice. Is that justice? Is that what justice warrants?
Those who shrink the circle must beware lest they fall outside the circle themselves.
Must we persist in opposing, fruitlessly, the rights of truth to the rights of persons? One may concede that error has no rights, but to undo persons in order to undo error is the greatest error.
In desperate times, a reasonable person might despair; but hope is unreasonable, and love is greater even than this. In this, perhaps, shades of Kierkegaard, and his meditations on the sacrifice of Isaac. And a touch of Paul.
The poverty of our nature is no limit to our aspiration. We are, to borrow a pregnant phrase, beggars on a beach of gold. We are finite creatures who have the capacity to imagine the infinite. This capacity is the source of our great misery but also the means by which we glimpse and touch glory.
Although I stumble and fall, each time I will rise again. A theology professor of mine once said that she believes there are many resurrections, and they happen all the time. Were this not true, I could not believe in the Resurrection.
Not even death can end the process of our becoming. Amen.
Affirmation One
The benevolence of the creative impulse is inexpressible.
We cannot know this benevolence, while accepting that Benevolence knows us better than we know ourselves.
Affirmation Two
Love cannot bear that even one soul be denied its place in paradise.
Affirmation Three
In desperate times, a reasonable person might despair;
but hope is unreasonable, and love is greater even than this.
Affirmation Four
Music is our friend, if only we might listen; if only we can listen.
Affirmation Five
The poverty of our nature is no limit to our aspiration.
Affirmation Six
Although I stumble and fall, each time I will rise again.
Affirmation Seven
Not even death can end the process of our becoming.
***
We cannot know this benevolence, while accepting that Benevolence knows us better than we know ourselves. In such words I hear this and this. Goodness finds us, and then we find ourselves. The benevolence of the creative impulse is inexpressible. But it is perceivable. Our moments of self-discovery are indispensable to the continuation of creation.
Love cannot bear that even one soul be denied its place in paradise. How unfortunate, then, that we conspire individually and collectively to deny souls, and whole hosts of souls, their place in paradise, building nightmarish republics of invisible men, women, and children.
We do this, most curiously enough, in the name of justice. Is that justice? Is that what justice warrants?
Those who shrink the circle must beware lest they fall outside the circle themselves.
Must we persist in opposing, fruitlessly, the rights of truth to the rights of persons? One may concede that error has no rights, but to undo persons in order to undo error is the greatest error.
In desperate times, a reasonable person might despair; but hope is unreasonable, and love is greater even than this. In this, perhaps, shades of Kierkegaard, and his meditations on the sacrifice of Isaac. And a touch of Paul.
The poverty of our nature is no limit to our aspiration. We are, to borrow a pregnant phrase, beggars on a beach of gold. We are finite creatures who have the capacity to imagine the infinite. This capacity is the source of our great misery but also the means by which we glimpse and touch glory.
Although I stumble and fall, each time I will rise again. A theology professor of mine once said that she believes there are many resurrections, and they happen all the time. Were this not true, I could not believe in the Resurrection.
Not even death can end the process of our becoming. Amen.
Monday, January 19, 2009
While Waiting
Waiting: meanwhile, in the waiting,
Seeking to live.
When does waiting to live
Become ceasing to live?
Fear of death makes us ask.
We do not need to die in order to live.
We have already died.
We need to see how we have died
In order to live.
Fear of death makes us ask if we have ceased to live.
If we answer honestly,
We will put fear to death,
And then God will put our death to death.
Seeking to live.
When does waiting to live
Become ceasing to live?
Fear of death makes us ask.
We do not need to die in order to live.
We have already died.
We need to see how we have died
In order to live.
Fear of death makes us ask if we have ceased to live.
If we answer honestly,
We will put fear to death,
And then God will put our death to death.
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Musing
A proof of God: When I feel rejected, when no one can be my companion, when the most dearly sought affections are denied and no one can fill the void because they all have made the void -- then I am most mercifully embraced, then I am enveloped by warmth, then someone breathes into all my pores and heat courses through my body, throbbing at every extremity; and I am loved: at that moment of crushing absence, God appears and I am loved.
And with this love I can love.
The single person and the celibate, perhaps, know this love better than any contented couple, and maybe better, too, than the discontented couple. The love that appears when all others have gone -- or never arrived; the love that appears when life has gone, or never came to be; the love that appears when love is gone. This is the eternal love, the indivisible love, the love within which existing loves run their course, the love that grounds these loves, the love from which they spring forth and return.
There are two kinds of people: those who have a call to love this world to life, and those who have a call to love this world into the world to come. Each of us is a little of both kinds of people, but we are mainly one or the other person. Let no one diminish incarnational love, the love that shows us who we are, the love that shows the goodness of who we are: the love seen in life partners and friends. But some of us are destined mainly to model eschatological love, the love that shows us who we are becoming, the love that shows the absolute horizon of our destiny.
Love is both figure and ground. Incarnational and eschatological. In this world and not of this world.
God loves us, and God teaches us to love. God gives us the experiences of love by which we come to love in our distinctive and different ways.
Human nature is less fixed then we imagine. Sexual vocations may not be permanent. But I think married couples best model incarnational love, while the single person and the celibate best model eschatological love.
There is some doubt in my mind about this, but I believe I am called chiefly to model eschatological love. If that is so, then let me be a loner in a world of absent lovers.
***
I have learned from the homeless men and women of Boston. I have learned how to be at home without a house, how to discover my sense of place without claiming property. They have "house-broken" me. They have undomesticated me.
But I still need a personal, even a private, sacred space. Communal, or communitarian, space is of course personal, but a person needs an individual space, an intimate space for one's true becoming-self.
I don't know what that space is like. I've forgotten, if indeed I have ever known it. I've known houses of creaturely comfort and felt suffocated and numbed in them. I've known houses of hospitality and still felt lost in the city.
I feel at home without a home of my own. But my spirit knows that if all space is personal, then nothing is personal. And then my soul hazards hubris, daring to claim all space as sacred space when it actually condescends toward domesticity and the practices of consecrating the very places where it rests.
***
Religious liberty is a convenient cover for spiritual apathy.
***
Posing for photography makes my soul feel vulnerable. This feeling has nothing to do with superstition and everything to do with the diversion of energies. If I'm at a social function I'd rather not pause my activity or conversation to look at a camera. And I dislike putting on appearances even for the sake of helping others to preserve benign memories. (Trust your memory more!) So do not ask me to smile for the sightless lens. Better to catch me unaware, smiling at someone. But I won't smile for the camera. For the person behind the camera, maybe, and only rarely. My advice to the photographer is to kiss the joy as it flies.
***
Remember to pray for peace and for all good things. Remember to pray as your parents and elders taught you, as your friends in faith would have you pray.
Remember to pray for all the correct things for which we should pray. Even remember the formulas you have been given, for they are helpful when the words fail you.
But remember also to pray for Eleanor Rigby, and the Brothers Karamazov. Pray for the sun and moon, the earth and the water. Pray for the saints and the prophets. And for the love of God, pray for yourself.
And with this love I can love.
The single person and the celibate, perhaps, know this love better than any contented couple, and maybe better, too, than the discontented couple. The love that appears when all others have gone -- or never arrived; the love that appears when life has gone, or never came to be; the love that appears when love is gone. This is the eternal love, the indivisible love, the love within which existing loves run their course, the love that grounds these loves, the love from which they spring forth and return.
There are two kinds of people: those who have a call to love this world to life, and those who have a call to love this world into the world to come. Each of us is a little of both kinds of people, but we are mainly one or the other person. Let no one diminish incarnational love, the love that shows us who we are, the love that shows the goodness of who we are: the love seen in life partners and friends. But some of us are destined mainly to model eschatological love, the love that shows us who we are becoming, the love that shows the absolute horizon of our destiny.
Love is both figure and ground. Incarnational and eschatological. In this world and not of this world.
God loves us, and God teaches us to love. God gives us the experiences of love by which we come to love in our distinctive and different ways.
Human nature is less fixed then we imagine. Sexual vocations may not be permanent. But I think married couples best model incarnational love, while the single person and the celibate best model eschatological love.
There is some doubt in my mind about this, but I believe I am called chiefly to model eschatological love. If that is so, then let me be a loner in a world of absent lovers.
***
I have learned from the homeless men and women of Boston. I have learned how to be at home without a house, how to discover my sense of place without claiming property. They have "house-broken" me. They have undomesticated me.
But I still need a personal, even a private, sacred space. Communal, or communitarian, space is of course personal, but a person needs an individual space, an intimate space for one's true becoming-self.
I don't know what that space is like. I've forgotten, if indeed I have ever known it. I've known houses of creaturely comfort and felt suffocated and numbed in them. I've known houses of hospitality and still felt lost in the city.
I feel at home without a home of my own. But my spirit knows that if all space is personal, then nothing is personal. And then my soul hazards hubris, daring to claim all space as sacred space when it actually condescends toward domesticity and the practices of consecrating the very places where it rests.
***
Religious liberty is a convenient cover for spiritual apathy.
***
Posing for photography makes my soul feel vulnerable. This feeling has nothing to do with superstition and everything to do with the diversion of energies. If I'm at a social function I'd rather not pause my activity or conversation to look at a camera. And I dislike putting on appearances even for the sake of helping others to preserve benign memories. (Trust your memory more!) So do not ask me to smile for the sightless lens. Better to catch me unaware, smiling at someone. But I won't smile for the camera. For the person behind the camera, maybe, and only rarely. My advice to the photographer is to kiss the joy as it flies.
***
Remember to pray for peace and for all good things. Remember to pray as your parents and elders taught you, as your friends in faith would have you pray.
Remember to pray for all the correct things for which we should pray. Even remember the formulas you have been given, for they are helpful when the words fail you.
But remember also to pray for Eleanor Rigby, and the Brothers Karamazov. Pray for the sun and moon, the earth and the water. Pray for the saints and the prophets. And for the love of God, pray for yourself.
Saturday, January 17, 2009
After the Transfiguration
Why don't I look into your gentle eyes?
I'd climb the mount to see the sun arise
Before us all, but that is not my call.
A man, but not a hero, longs with you.
I'm flinching, for the work I need to do
To see a face attends me in the place
I live or leave. There's nothing to be "found."
Do we forget that love is all around
And sin upon the Spirit long since come?
I need the spirit of a Blake or Beat,
The hip and punk, for all my sight to meet
The cuckoo clouds that shield the poor from proud
Right now. A mystery, a vision? Please!
When I can greet my neighbors, enemies
And demons with a kneel, it will reveal.
A humbler man than I would be less vexed,
Give smile for smile and laugh for laugh,
Then rest in peace because his sorrows find surcease.
Our ends have been foretold. To hear it once
Should strip us free of envy of the ones
So God-gone lucky, Peter, James, and John.
But what do you do when nothing's going on?
***
This is a poem I wrote on Aug. 8, 2002, three days before leaving New York for Baltimore, to begin a year of volunteer service with other young adults under the supervision of the Capuchin Franciscan friars. This poem, despite its flaws, remains a song of myself. It is, in uncanny ways, still a sharp statement of my personal identity, my religious aspiration, and my spiritual desire.
I'd climb the mount to see the sun arise
Before us all, but that is not my call.
A man, but not a hero, longs with you.
I'm flinching, for the work I need to do
To see a face attends me in the place
I live or leave. There's nothing to be "found."
Do we forget that love is all around
And sin upon the Spirit long since come?
I need the spirit of a Blake or Beat,
The hip and punk, for all my sight to meet
The cuckoo clouds that shield the poor from proud
Right now. A mystery, a vision? Please!
When I can greet my neighbors, enemies
And demons with a kneel, it will reveal.
A humbler man than I would be less vexed,
Give smile for smile and laugh for laugh,
Then rest in peace because his sorrows find surcease.
Our ends have been foretold. To hear it once
Should strip us free of envy of the ones
So God-gone lucky, Peter, James, and John.
But what do you do when nothing's going on?
***
This is a poem I wrote on Aug. 8, 2002, three days before leaving New York for Baltimore, to begin a year of volunteer service with other young adults under the supervision of the Capuchin Franciscan friars. This poem, despite its flaws, remains a song of myself. It is, in uncanny ways, still a sharp statement of my personal identity, my religious aspiration, and my spiritual desire.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Seek Ye First
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.
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.
Sunday, September 2, 2007
The Work of the People
The following is a sermon delivered at First Parish in Cambridge, Unitarian Universalist, on Sunday, Sept. 2, 2007. This sermon was prepared for Interfaith Worker Justice's Labor in the Pulpit program.
The readings were Isaiah 58 and an excerpt from Martin Luther King's Letter From Birmingham Jail.
***
Greetings and blessings to you from Boston University School of Theology, where I am a seminarian. With me I bring the greetings and blessings of my fellow students and my professors, who are my brothers and sisters in the Spirit, and my dear friends.
But I have come this morning particularly to bring you the greetings and blessings of a specially chosen and beloved group of men and women. I bring you the salutations of Selida Pol, a janitor who works three jobs, in downtown Boston, Cambridge, and in Chinatown. Selida works 15 hours a day; she gets hardly any sleep, and she supports herself and her family in her home country.
I bring you the greetings of Vanessa Reeves, who worked for three years at Smithfield Packing in Tar Heel, N.C., butchering hogs. She was injured when a 200-pound hog carcass fell on her, and because of this she suffered a miscarriage. Her doctor said the miscarriage was caused by the stressful pace of the assembly line or from the hogs hitting her. While she was in the hospital she wasn’t thinking about work at all. But Smithfield fired Vanessa for not calling in. She was fired when she was in the hospital and she lost her baby.
My friends, I bring you the greetings of all these working women and men near and far, your sisters and brothers in the Spirit, and mine. And on their behalf, and according to the commission given to me by Interfaith Worker Justice, I bring you a message of healing and hope. Let us dedicate ourselves in faith to work generously for the well-being of Selida, Vanessa, and the thousands of working poor among us so that we may be found by our God to worship in spirit and in truth.
Some Unitarian Universalists, I am told, would not characterize their Sunday morning service as worship. The term worship itself is problematic because of the hierarchical and patriarchal assumptions embedded in its meaning. In our public language, worship is used in an exclusive sense, as if what we did when assembled in sacred spaces such as these was exhaustive of the service we render to God and all that is holy. So allow me to offer another, more expansive word in its place: liturgy. It comes from the Greek leitourgia, a compound word which means “work of the people” and in its original secular context referred to work toward the common good of the nation or state, or to use a less hegemonic term, the public. In a theological context, leitourgia became the “work of the people” in public prayer, worship, and spiritual service for God and God’s holy people. The English word liturgy as it is used today is associated with public acts of worship in a church or other consecrated space, but reclaiming its older meaning it may also be applied more generally to ritual acts that bear witness to God and all that is holy, giving praise and thanks for divine favor and blessing.
With this expansive view of liturgy I affirm that what we do here is the work of the people, a people that is chosen, beloved, special, and holy. But it is not the only work. I also affirm that to march with Cambridge janitors for living wages, better health care benefits, and full-time employment is the work of the people—it is liturgy, and it is worship. To go on a hunger strike for underpaid security officers at Harvard University, as students did in Harvard Yard in May, is to worship in spirit and in truth. To meet with the manager of the Star Market in Mt. Auburn and urge the supermarket he runs to stop selling Smithfield bacon, packaged with the blood and sweat of five thousand exploited and abused workers in North Carolina—this is the work of the people, courageous and true. To return weeks later to the same manager with a letter of thanks because Star Market removed Smithfield’s product—this is worship, joyous and good.
And it is indispensable. In fact, without this kind of work, the worship we offer in this sacred space remains a soulless formality. Without leitourgia, our worship can still be technically competent, theologically politic, and even externally beautiful. But internally it is false and intrinsically alien to the divine Spirit of life and to all that we hold sacred and dear. We know this truth well in the head, but we do not treasure this truth fully in the heart, and we do not honor this truth fully with our hands, for truth is served only when truth is done.
This morning you have heard the words of Isaiah, one of the Hebrew prophets. And by prophet I mean one who is a fiercely passionate lover of the sacred and of all people. Isaiah delivers a stern message about true worship to Israel, God’s chosen and beloved people. I will skip the exegesis and get to the point, which is that external worship is no worship at all. The people of Israel stand accused, tried, and convicted of the insincerity of their service to God. Their liturgical practices are judged empty. Their worship is self-serving. This is not to say Israel’s fasting or any of its religious disciplines are wrong, but without the fasting from self-interest which these practices are meant to develop, these devotions enact a lie. Their work constitutes a betrayal.
And who has been betrayed? Israel’s God? No, because one’s God is not betrayed as much as denied. Then who has been betrayed? It is the hungry, the oppressed, the homeless. The people of Israel have broken covenant with their God because they have betrayed their poor. How I wish you could have heard the words of Isaiah 58 from the mouth of the Rev. Dr. William Barber, the president of the North Carolina NAACP, who preached full-throated and unsparingly on Wednesday at the First Baptist Church of Williamsburg. Eight hundred fifty of us gathered at this church in this historic town in Virginia because the shareholders of Smithfield Packing were in the city holding their annual meeting. We were electrified by Reverend Barber, who embodied Isaiah’s words when he said that work without justice is slavery. But even more do I wish you could have seen the Smithfield workers from Tar Heel, who were greeted with an ovation and given a place of honor in the front pews of the church. Vanessa was with them, and she told us how she lost her baby, and we were stunned into silence, worshipful silence. Behind her whisper, we could hear Isaiah bellowing, calling out to the executives of Smithfield: “Lo, on your fast day you carry out your own pursuits, and drive all your laborers.”
And we marched out of the church onto the streets of Williamsburg, continuing our leitourgia. We sent a handful of workers and clergy into the Smithfield shareholders’ meeting, inviting the executives and stockholders to join in our worship, to hold back their feet from following their own pursuit of higher profits and production quotas, to stop seeking their own interests, to cease speaking of the workers and labor unions with malice. They did not join our assembly, but we will not withdraw the invitation.
Today we have also heard the deceptively familiar reflections of Martin Luther King, whom many would regard, in addition to being a pastoral and political leader, as a prophet, a Christian prophet. I say deceptively familiar because we are accustomed to reading his rhetoric and comforting ourselves with the knowledge that some of the victories for which he struggled have been achieved. But like Isaiah in the reading we heard, King had no intention of comforting the recipients of his letter from the Birmingham jail. As his letter states, throughout his campaigns for civil rights and economic equality, as he toured the churches of the South, King asked himself, “What kind of people worship here? Who is their God?” King knew the answers to these questions because the work of a people tells us what kind of people they are and who their God is. He asked them because he wanted his fellow clergy members, both his enemies in the flesh and friends in the Spirit, to hear the questions. Like Isaiah’s ominous interrogation of Israel, King’s questions call across forty-four years and hundreds of miles from that cell in Birmingham to us. These questions call across thirty-nine years and a hotel in Memphis, Tennessee, where King was staying during his stand in solidarity with 1,300 striking sanitation workers. Do we dare to recognize ourselves in the questions? Do we fear to recognize ourselves in the answers?
When people ask me why I came to Boston to study theology, I tell them it is because I want to know and love God better, and to know and love people better. As a person of faith I believe that knowing and loving God is somehow related to knowing and loving people. The better I know and love God, the better I know and love people, and the better I know and love people, the better I know and love God. I also believe the inverse is true: the less I know and love people, the less I know and love God.
I have concluded that it is impossible to know and love my sisters and brothers or my God unless I accept the invitation—a calling, if you will—to join the priestly, prophetic people of God fully in the work of the people. If I am a stranger to Selida Pol and Vanessa Reeves, then I am a stranger to the God I claim to worship. The gentle songs of sympathy I sing in the sanctuary are so much sound and fury, signifying nothing, if I do not join the choruses of the mighty songs of solidarity heard on the streets of Boston, Cambridge, Memphis, Tar Heel, Williamsburg, and elsewhere. For my failure to see the needs of my working brothers and sisters as my own, I seek forgiveness. I pray to the divine Spirit to help me remember that every time the families of our hard-working brothers and sisters suffer the indignity of involuntary material deprivation, a spiritual wound is inflicted upon us all. We cannot turn away from this wound. The wound is part of our history; our story is a story of a wounded and wounding people. But our story does not end with the wound alone. The story ends with healing and hope. It is the healing of this wound that Isaiah proclaims when he announces divine blessings to those who release those bound unjustly, untie the thongs of the yoke, feed the hungry, and satisfy the afflicted.
This is the hope of Interfaith Worker Justice. It is the hope of Selida and Vanessa and Reverend Barber. It is my hope, and I invite you to share this hope with janitors, security officers, meat packers, and hotel workers; with laborers who are African-American and Latino; with immigrant workers, documented or not; and with all who bear the heavy yoke for our enrichment, for despite our neglect of and estrangement from them, they are truly chosen and beloved.
I will not close with my own words of peace. Instead, please hear the peaceful words of two janitors who work in Cambridge, our brothers Elcides Perez, who comes from El Salvador, and Rafael Emilio Soto, who comes from the Dominican Republic.
The readings were Isaiah 58 and an excerpt from Martin Luther King's Letter From Birmingham Jail.
***
Greetings and blessings to you from Boston University School of Theology, where I am a seminarian. With me I bring the greetings and blessings of my fellow students and my professors, who are my brothers and sisters in the Spirit, and my dear friends.
But I have come this morning particularly to bring you the greetings and blessings of a specially chosen and beloved group of men and women. I bring you the salutations of Selida Pol, a janitor who works three jobs, in downtown Boston, Cambridge, and in Chinatown. Selida works 15 hours a day; she gets hardly any sleep, and she supports herself and her family in her home country.
I bring you the greetings of Vanessa Reeves, who worked for three years at Smithfield Packing in Tar Heel, N.C., butchering hogs. She was injured when a 200-pound hog carcass fell on her, and because of this she suffered a miscarriage. Her doctor said the miscarriage was caused by the stressful pace of the assembly line or from the hogs hitting her. While she was in the hospital she wasn’t thinking about work at all. But Smithfield fired Vanessa for not calling in. She was fired when she was in the hospital and she lost her baby.
My friends, I bring you the greetings of all these working women and men near and far, your sisters and brothers in the Spirit, and mine. And on their behalf, and according to the commission given to me by Interfaith Worker Justice, I bring you a message of healing and hope. Let us dedicate ourselves in faith to work generously for the well-being of Selida, Vanessa, and the thousands of working poor among us so that we may be found by our God to worship in spirit and in truth.
Some Unitarian Universalists, I am told, would not characterize their Sunday morning service as worship. The term worship itself is problematic because of the hierarchical and patriarchal assumptions embedded in its meaning. In our public language, worship is used in an exclusive sense, as if what we did when assembled in sacred spaces such as these was exhaustive of the service we render to God and all that is holy. So allow me to offer another, more expansive word in its place: liturgy. It comes from the Greek leitourgia, a compound word which means “work of the people” and in its original secular context referred to work toward the common good of the nation or state, or to use a less hegemonic term, the public. In a theological context, leitourgia became the “work of the people” in public prayer, worship, and spiritual service for God and God’s holy people. The English word liturgy as it is used today is associated with public acts of worship in a church or other consecrated space, but reclaiming its older meaning it may also be applied more generally to ritual acts that bear witness to God and all that is holy, giving praise and thanks for divine favor and blessing.
With this expansive view of liturgy I affirm that what we do here is the work of the people, a people that is chosen, beloved, special, and holy. But it is not the only work. I also affirm that to march with Cambridge janitors for living wages, better health care benefits, and full-time employment is the work of the people—it is liturgy, and it is worship. To go on a hunger strike for underpaid security officers at Harvard University, as students did in Harvard Yard in May, is to worship in spirit and in truth. To meet with the manager of the Star Market in Mt. Auburn and urge the supermarket he runs to stop selling Smithfield bacon, packaged with the blood and sweat of five thousand exploited and abused workers in North Carolina—this is the work of the people, courageous and true. To return weeks later to the same manager with a letter of thanks because Star Market removed Smithfield’s product—this is worship, joyous and good.
And it is indispensable. In fact, without this kind of work, the worship we offer in this sacred space remains a soulless formality. Without leitourgia, our worship can still be technically competent, theologically politic, and even externally beautiful. But internally it is false and intrinsically alien to the divine Spirit of life and to all that we hold sacred and dear. We know this truth well in the head, but we do not treasure this truth fully in the heart, and we do not honor this truth fully with our hands, for truth is served only when truth is done.
This morning you have heard the words of Isaiah, one of the Hebrew prophets. And by prophet I mean one who is a fiercely passionate lover of the sacred and of all people. Isaiah delivers a stern message about true worship to Israel, God’s chosen and beloved people. I will skip the exegesis and get to the point, which is that external worship is no worship at all. The people of Israel stand accused, tried, and convicted of the insincerity of their service to God. Their liturgical practices are judged empty. Their worship is self-serving. This is not to say Israel’s fasting or any of its religious disciplines are wrong, but without the fasting from self-interest which these practices are meant to develop, these devotions enact a lie. Their work constitutes a betrayal.
And who has been betrayed? Israel’s God? No, because one’s God is not betrayed as much as denied. Then who has been betrayed? It is the hungry, the oppressed, the homeless. The people of Israel have broken covenant with their God because they have betrayed their poor. How I wish you could have heard the words of Isaiah 58 from the mouth of the Rev. Dr. William Barber, the president of the North Carolina NAACP, who preached full-throated and unsparingly on Wednesday at the First Baptist Church of Williamsburg. Eight hundred fifty of us gathered at this church in this historic town in Virginia because the shareholders of Smithfield Packing were in the city holding their annual meeting. We were electrified by Reverend Barber, who embodied Isaiah’s words when he said that work without justice is slavery. But even more do I wish you could have seen the Smithfield workers from Tar Heel, who were greeted with an ovation and given a place of honor in the front pews of the church. Vanessa was with them, and she told us how she lost her baby, and we were stunned into silence, worshipful silence. Behind her whisper, we could hear Isaiah bellowing, calling out to the executives of Smithfield: “Lo, on your fast day you carry out your own pursuits, and drive all your laborers.”
And we marched out of the church onto the streets of Williamsburg, continuing our leitourgia. We sent a handful of workers and clergy into the Smithfield shareholders’ meeting, inviting the executives and stockholders to join in our worship, to hold back their feet from following their own pursuit of higher profits and production quotas, to stop seeking their own interests, to cease speaking of the workers and labor unions with malice. They did not join our assembly, but we will not withdraw the invitation.
Today we have also heard the deceptively familiar reflections of Martin Luther King, whom many would regard, in addition to being a pastoral and political leader, as a prophet, a Christian prophet. I say deceptively familiar because we are accustomed to reading his rhetoric and comforting ourselves with the knowledge that some of the victories for which he struggled have been achieved. But like Isaiah in the reading we heard, King had no intention of comforting the recipients of his letter from the Birmingham jail. As his letter states, throughout his campaigns for civil rights and economic equality, as he toured the churches of the South, King asked himself, “What kind of people worship here? Who is their God?” King knew the answers to these questions because the work of a people tells us what kind of people they are and who their God is. He asked them because he wanted his fellow clergy members, both his enemies in the flesh and friends in the Spirit, to hear the questions. Like Isaiah’s ominous interrogation of Israel, King’s questions call across forty-four years and hundreds of miles from that cell in Birmingham to us. These questions call across thirty-nine years and a hotel in Memphis, Tennessee, where King was staying during his stand in solidarity with 1,300 striking sanitation workers. Do we dare to recognize ourselves in the questions? Do we fear to recognize ourselves in the answers?
When people ask me why I came to Boston to study theology, I tell them it is because I want to know and love God better, and to know and love people better. As a person of faith I believe that knowing and loving God is somehow related to knowing and loving people. The better I know and love God, the better I know and love people, and the better I know and love people, the better I know and love God. I also believe the inverse is true: the less I know and love people, the less I know and love God.
I have concluded that it is impossible to know and love my sisters and brothers or my God unless I accept the invitation—a calling, if you will—to join the priestly, prophetic people of God fully in the work of the people. If I am a stranger to Selida Pol and Vanessa Reeves, then I am a stranger to the God I claim to worship. The gentle songs of sympathy I sing in the sanctuary are so much sound and fury, signifying nothing, if I do not join the choruses of the mighty songs of solidarity heard on the streets of Boston, Cambridge, Memphis, Tar Heel, Williamsburg, and elsewhere. For my failure to see the needs of my working brothers and sisters as my own, I seek forgiveness. I pray to the divine Spirit to help me remember that every time the families of our hard-working brothers and sisters suffer the indignity of involuntary material deprivation, a spiritual wound is inflicted upon us all. We cannot turn away from this wound. The wound is part of our history; our story is a story of a wounded and wounding people. But our story does not end with the wound alone. The story ends with healing and hope. It is the healing of this wound that Isaiah proclaims when he announces divine blessings to those who release those bound unjustly, untie the thongs of the yoke, feed the hungry, and satisfy the afflicted.
This is the hope of Interfaith Worker Justice. It is the hope of Selida and Vanessa and Reverend Barber. It is my hope, and I invite you to share this hope with janitors, security officers, meat packers, and hotel workers; with laborers who are African-American and Latino; with immigrant workers, documented or not; and with all who bear the heavy yoke for our enrichment, for despite our neglect of and estrangement from them, they are truly chosen and beloved.
I will not close with my own words of peace. Instead, please hear the peaceful words of two janitors who work in Cambridge, our brothers Elcides Perez, who comes from El Salvador, and Rafael Emilio Soto, who comes from the Dominican Republic.
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