God at Work Where We Least Expect (Epiphany 4A)

  

God at Work Where We Least Expect

30 January 2011

Fourth Sunday After Epiphany Year A

Micah 6:1-8; 1 Corinthians 1:18-31; Matthew 5:1-12; Psalm 15

"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 

Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.

 Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so people persecuted the prophets who were before you.” 

Matthew 5.3-12

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

I have been looking a lot at the mass media recently, including advertisements and public affairs talk programs.  What do they tell us about what we want?   Or about what others expect us to want?  What images are chosen as attractive?  What is seen as desirable and what is looked down on or outright scoffed at?   If we were to make a list of “blessed are” statements like those in today’s Gospel reading, but base them on the values and perceptions of the these media, what would the list look like?  For good or for ill, some might say:

Blessed are the wealthy; whoever dies with the most toys wins.  Blessed are the young; dying then beats rusting and growing old.  Blessed are the fashionable, for they can look down on the less hip.  Blessed are those with the best electronic gear, for their lives are enjoyable and easy. Blessed are big bosomed blondes, for they will attract men. Blessed are guys with six-pack abs; they will find whatever lovers they want.Blessed are celebrities; they are the beautiful people. Blessed are the hip; their Facebook posts go viral. Blessed are the thin; they are never the butt of fat jokes.  Blessed are the powerful, for they have their own their way.   Blessed are the well armed, for they can defend themselves. Blessed are the violent, because no one will mess with them.  

The beatitudes, or macarisms, at the start of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew are so well known that often we unfortunately miss what they actually are saying. When we hear them, we tend to quickly lapse into a happy, warm feeling of devotion and stop listening. Familiarity with these sayings breeds not so much contempt as it does inattention. We usually find the beatitudes vaguely comforting or reassuring without much thought of the content being conveyed.  We are like the people at the back of the crowd in the Monty Python film, Life of Brian.   They struggle to hear the Sermon, but at the end leave, saying, “oh, that’s nice … blessed are the cheesemakers. Good chaps, they.”

But these sayings were spoken in the context of a culture that praised things, and called certain people happy or blessed, just like our culture praises things, and calls certain people blessed. And Jesus’ sayings turn many of these platitudes on their head.  “It’s a good thing to be hungry, it’s a good thing to be poor, it’s a good thing to mourn, to be excluded,” he says.  Really?

A little less familiar to most people is the version of statements found in Luke’s telling of Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain, as a result, some of these jump out at us in their forceful clarity: 

"Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.

Blessed are you that hunger now, for you shall be satisfied.

Blessed are you that weep now, for you shall laugh.

Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you and revile you, and cast out your name as evil, on account of the Son of Man!  Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven; for so their ancestors did to the prophets.   

But woe to you that are rich, for you have received your consolation.

Woe to you that are full now, for you shall hunger.

Woe to you that laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep.

Woe to you, when all people speak well of you, for so their ancestors did to the false prophets.”

Luke 6:20-26

It is clear that whatever it was that the historical Jesus said here, it troubled his followers, as it should trouble us.  Each author, Matthew and Luke, has adapted the series of “blessed are” statements in their shared sayings source for his own purpose. 

Matthew has “spiritualized” the sayings, turning “hungry” into “hungry for righteousness,”  and “poor” to “poor in spirit.”  Jesus just can’t be talking about the literal poor or the literally hungry can he?  So Matthew turns the sayings into a series of moral nostrums, of ways of being that we should strive for. 

In contrast, Luke adds a “now” to the misfortune being marked as “blessed,” and a “then” to the good thing God will do in the future to fix the problem, turning the sayings not into moral nostrums, but affirmations of the coming completion of the Reign of God whose inauguration Jesus has come to announce.  Luke also adds the woes that counterbalance the “blessed are” statements, placing them all in the second person, “blessed are (or woe to) you,”  thus working the eschatological contrasts of his version of the sayings into his overall Gospel story of everyday faith of everyday Christians.   These woes may or may not have been listed together before Luke wrote.   Since several separate “woes” are found on the lips of Jesus in multiple early Christian sources, I think that Luke is probably reflecting something close to what the historical Jesus actually said.  

The non-canonical Gospel of Thomas preserves some of these sayings—both macarisms and woes—separately as well, and also adapts them for its own purposes, sometimes esoteric in a pronounced degree.   

The idea expressed in the literary form used in these sayings is more than a simple “Happy are they who,” or “How blessed are they who…”   The idea is more like  “How favored by God (or honored) are the ones who.”  “Woe to those who” in Luke is more like “Shame on those who,” or “How outside God’s grace are those who…” 

Jesus is turning conventional values of what is desirable on their heads.  Some things just on the surface of them are bad:  starvation, hardship, sorrow at a loved one’s death, social exclusion.   Some things just on the surface are good: having enough food and money to provide for your family and (to quote some of the rabbis) to have the leisure to study scripture.  But Jesus is not so sure. 

Some of Jesus’ contemporaries taught an ancient version of modern day “Gospel of Wealth.”  They said, “God blesses the righteous and punishes the wicked.  Since rich people are obviously blessed, they must be close to God; the poor must really be rejected by God.”  But Jesus knows that bad things can happen to good people and that sometimes evil people prosper. 

He says, “You’ve misunderstood what a blessing from God is.  It is the poor who are blessed by God, not the rich.”   If those around him say,  “Religious and respected people are close to God,” he says, “No, actually, it’s the people who have been excluded because people think that they are unclean or evil who actually are closer to God.”   

Announcing the coming of God’s reign, he sees God busy at work exactly where we usually expect least to find God: hunger, yearning, dependence, and vulnerability are all signs of God’s active presence and saving work, not marks of God’s curse or punishment.

It is an important idea, and profound theology.  He is not trying to belittle suffering, or say, “it’s not all that bad.”  He is not like the hero of The Life of Brian, who when on the cross, bursts out into the cheery song, “Always look at the bright side of life.”   He knows that hunger, grinding poverty, misery, deprivation, grief, and the deadly exclusion inflicted on marginalized people by the so-called righteous are all truly horrible and not a bit of what God wants for his creatures.  

When he says that God is at work in these horrors, that God’s favor can be found there, Jesus is not seeking to minimize or trivialize people’s sufferings.  He is seeking to magnify the grace of God.  God is the answer to, not the source, of horror.

St. Thomas Aquinas developed this idea into the doctrine of the Deus Absconditus, a term taken from the Latin version of Isaiah 45:15, “Truly you are a God who has been hiding himself, the God and Savior of Israel.”  God may be hidden, but if you have faith in God, it is God that you must wholly trust. Martin Luther developed the idea further by placing it in the broader context of his doctrine of Grace.  A modern way of expressing Deus Absconditus is “God is where you least expect him.”

The implication of both Aquinas and Luther’s doctrine of the Deus Absconditus is this: horror and evil in the world are not evidence that God does not exist.  Rather, the fact that we revolt against and find horrible the evil in the world is one of the strongest evidences of God, since the very desire for justice and the right cannot come merely from this messed up world we live in.  Rather, it comes from God himself, imprinted in the creation God made, in the creation of human beings, where it is written on our hearts.    Immanuel Kant expressed the idea differently when he said that he found evidence for God not just in the order he saw in the workings of the stars, but also in the workings of the human heart and mind.  

Where Buddhism tells us that the source of suffering is desire and the solution is getting rid of all desire, and becoming detached and truly apathetic to world around us, Christianity teaches us that while we must learn acceptance and patience, it is alright to be dissatisfied with wrong.  In fact, it is essential because God made us thus.  

Each of the macarisms includes some point of dissatisfaction: hunger, grief, need.  Jesus thinks it’s O.K. to be not O.K.  Mourning means unhappiness at the loss of a loved one.  It does not describe a state of acceptance or serenity.  "Blessed are those who mourn."  Neediness and hunger do not describe satisfaction, but desire for something different that what we now have. 

Reinhold Niebuhr's great "Serenity Prayer" is not a prayer only for serenity to accept the things we cannot change.  It also prays for courage to change the things we can.  It also asks for wisdom to know to distinguish between the two.  

The idea of God at work in the day-to-day things of life, even its horrors is a key part of Jesus’ message announcing the arrival of God’s Reign. 

Putting the idea into modern words and references, we see the point Jesus is trying to make.  And the point should shock us into recognition of God at work in all sorts of situations where we normally only see horror: 

God favors those with AIDS; he is at their bedside and in their prayers.   

God favors outcasts, because he will include them.    

God favors the abused, because he will make them whole.

God favors the powerless, because he will empower them. 

God favors the homeless, because he will give them shelter. 

God favors the addicted, because he relieves them of cravings and obsessions.

God favors the solitary, because he brings them into family and community. 

God favors “nobodies,” because he knows them each by name. 

God favors sinners, because he forgives them. 

God favors women, because she knows what they go through. 

Shame on you who have big houses, because you will lose your estates. 

Shame on you celebrities, because you will be forgotten.

Shame on you powerful, because your fall will be great. 

Shame on you Empires, because you will go bankrupt fighting your wars.

Shame on you so-called righteous, because everyone will know your secret sins. 

Shame on you beautiful people, because you will grow ugly and die like everyone else.

Shame on you fashion plates, because you will have to be naked.

Shame on you brilliant minds, because you will go senile. 

So what applies here to us?  First, remember that God expects us to be dissatisfied with things that are just plain wrong.  We should be part of the social and moral conscience of our peer group, our colleagues, and our age.  Next, remember that God expects us to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.  His grace must work through us.  Third, in our prayer life and meditation, let us more fully empathize with those suffering, and let us redouble our efforts at the corporeal acts of mercy and organizing for social justice to alleviate hunger, poverty, persecution, and disease. 

“You think I’ve gotten things upside down?” Jesus says.  “Look around you and tell me who is getting things backward.”  If we love God and trust God, we too must actively engage with evil, in  order that grace more fully abound. 

In the name of Christ, Amen. 

The Wisdom and the Power (Epiphany 3A)

 

The Wisdom and the Power

23 January 2011

Third Sunday After Epiphany Year A

Isaiah 9:1-4; 1 Corinthians 1:10-18; Matthew 4:12-23; Psalm 27:1, 5-13

For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God … Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ on the Cross: something that trips up Jews and impresses Gentiles as mere stupidity.  But to those whom God is calling, both Jews and Greeks, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God. (1 Corinthians 1:18, 22-24)

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

When I was in graduate school, I found myself often regretting that I did not have more time.  I  was father of a young family, trying to work nights to pay the bills, volunteering in my local church, and sometimes found my time to prepare for class was constrained.  One day, I made the mistake of trying to explain my lack of preparation for an advanced Aramaic course taught by Fr. Joseph Fitzmyer, a Jesuit priest and one of the world’s finest Aramaists.   I said that my time that week had been very limited and that was why I had run out of preparation half way through class.  To this Fr. Fitzmyer innocently replied, with knowing eyes, “You know, Tony, you have all the time there is.  Literally--there is no more time than the time you already have.  It’s not that you have no time, but that choose to use your time differently than in preparing for this class.”  I realized that he was right, as hard as this view seemed to be when I first heard it.    In any given week, we all have exactly the same time.  It all depends on our choices, on how we truly desire to use our time, and this despite all the various pressures and constraints we may feel coming from outside ourselves.   

What we truly desire is sometimes not clear to us, due to our own lack of self-awareness or self deception. In the book Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, the young student wizard comes across the mirror of Erised—which shows the viewer what is the most ardently held desire of his or her heart.    Harry’s mentor, Professor Dumbledore, tells him that it is not good to merely stare into such a mirror yearning, for a person could waste away their life lost in the vision rather than living one’s life.  He does note, however, that learning what it is we most desire can be helpful in knowing oneself.

Recognizing what it is we truly desire can be of great use in ordering priorities and establishing values.  If we find that our deepest desires are unworthy or wrong, such knowledge can help us sort out the issues and reorder our desires.  If we recognize what we truly desire and find that our use of time and actions day to day are totally at odds with this desire, it can lead us to correct our course.

Saint Paul says that the idea of Christ on the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but the power of God to those whom God calls.   He later says it is the power and the wisdom of God for those experiencing God’s grace.  Such starkly different perceptions—“this is idiocy” or “this is the power and wisdom that makes sense of our lives”—reveal for Paul where our heart is.  It is a kind of mirror of Erised, telling us what we truly desire.  Paul sees the difference as rooted in the misperceptions and self-deceptions that most of us suffer.

The juxtaposition of the two ideas is stark: “Christ on the Cross,” that is, the desired Jewish figure of salvation, the Messiah, or ideal king of the future who would set all things right (that’s what the Greek word “Christos” means), dying on a Roman instrument of public torture, shaming, and slow death.  The Messiah was supposed to fix all the bad in the world, not be overwhelmed by it.  No wonder most people find it foolish! 

He further explains what he means by contrasting what he sees as the deepest desires of the two largest ethnic groups he lives among: his own Jewish people and the gentile Greeks who surround them in the larger society and cities of the Mediterranean world.    Jews, he says, seek signs; while Gentiles seek what they call wisdom.    

He is referring to what the two groups base their values on, on what each demands as a warrant for authority, for meaning, for setting our priorities and ordering our life.  He says Jews base their world view on a demand for evidences of God’s involvement: “Jews demand signs” that  indicate God’s power, whether these are the miracles of Moses at the Exodus and establishing the Torah, or a call for obvious holiness and power on the part of prophetic figures or religious teachers.  He contrasts this with the Hellenistic Greek culture’s fascination with philosophy, or the love of Wisdom:  “Greeks look for wisdom.” That is, for the Hellenistic world, those claiming our intellectual and moral allegiance needed to demonstrate the internal coherence and consistency of their teaching and its congruence with accepted standards of prudence and wisdom. In the world in which Paul lived, people sought to find a reason for meaning and purpose in life seeking either evidence of God’s power or evidence of rationality and accepted moral prudence and wisdom.

To such standards of establishing value, Paul says, “we proclaim the Messiah on a cross.”  He says this is “a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.” And indeed it is a problem for anyone—regardless of religion or nationality—who don’t share Paul’s belief that God “constituted Jesus as the Son of God by his resurrection from the dead (Romans 1). 

Paul’s experience of the risen Lord told him that death on the cross was not the end of the story, the sum of meaning.   Rather he based his values and meaning on his experience of a Lord once horribly tortured to death who nonetheless was now more alive and vibrant than the living people he saw around him.  And this turned many things on their heads.   The legal demands of Scripture were no longer central.  The distinction between so-called “good” people and “bad” people no longer mattered much.  Death no longer held any terror.   

And so it is for us.  When we encounter the Risen Lord, our perceptions change, as do our desires.  Life, once ordered by questionable appeals to our modern equivalents to the Hellenistic world's signs or wisdom, finds its meaning and value in the life, teachings, sufferings, death, and glorious bodily reappearance of Jesus. Love becomes the controlling principle.   Hope, not guilt or fear, governs.  Engagement, not apathy or resignation, takes over.  Service, community, and worship in praise and thanks all of a sudden become very important. 

Sometimes our perceptions of specific things can totally change.  An example is how the author of the Gospel of John sees the crucifixion of Jesus itself.  Where the larger early Christian view seems to have been "Jesus died on the cross, was raised from the dead, and then was lifted high into heaven," John says that it was at the very moment of the crucifixion that Jesus entered into glory, when he was “raised up on high” and "lifted up for all the world to see."   It was this kind of shifted perception of the crucifixion that allows Paul to sum up his message as "Christ on the Cross."   God in Jesus redeems what otherwise appears to be irredeemable, makes sense out of what otherwise appears to be senseless, gives meaning to what otherwise appears meaningless.   When we encounter Jesus, things are no longer simply as they appear.  And we are not what we were.  That is why, for Paul, Christ on the Cross is a bellwether, a litmus test, a kind of Mirror of Erised. 

If we take just what we experience here as the basis for our finding our meaning and values, I believe, there is little if any room for justice, fairness, or possibility of hope. There is only meaninglessness, randomness, and despair. Bold, existential attempts at creating meaning and hope within an empty universe begin to appear rather hollow if we base our judgment only on what see here.

Christ on the Cross was followed on the third day by Christ raised from the dead. And that risen Lord, though now gone from our sight, still speaks and calls. He is the source of meaning and value.  When we hear his voice, everything starts to fall into place. He calls to us all. As we hear him, we begin to see what our deepest desires are.  We begin to let him mold us, change us, from the distorted and broken things we are now into what God intended when God created us, into our true selves, and into our true desires.   

The risen Lord is the ultimate sign of God’s intent, God’s love, and the universe’s meaning. He is the ultimate cohering principle and moral standard. "Christ on the Cross," says Paul, is "foolishness" to those who are perishing in a limited, hopeless world. But to those who hear God's voice, regardless of whatever limited standard of power or wisdom we once used, "Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God.”

In the name of God,  Amen.