Open thou mine eyes (Lancelot Andrewes)

Open Thou Mine Eyes
(Lancelot Andrewes) 

Today is the Feast day of one of my true heroes, Bishop Lancelot Andrewes.  A deeply knowledgeable and skilled scholar of Hebrew, Aramaic, Latin, and Greek, as well as a profoundly devout man of humble prayer, Andrewes was one of the foremost Caroline Divines, the writers of theology and spirituality of the period of James I and Charles I.    His sermons were known for their scholarship and high degree of polished rhetoric; his scriptural arguments against Roman Catholic critics of the Elizabethan settlement on the one hand and against puritan fundamentalism on the other in large part created the "Middle Way" (Via Media) that is identified as the hallmark of Anglicanism.  He was chairman of the project that produced the Authorized Version of the Bible produced under James I in 1610, the "King James Bible."  He personally translated about a third of the KJV Old Testament, and edited most of the entire version.   One of the greatest writers in the history of the English language, it was he that produced the version of Psalm 23 most known by English speakers through the ages ("The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want...").   His commitment to the catholic tradition and faith of the Church, to sacramental life in Christ and private prayer, and his service as King's Almoner (managing funds for the poor) and as a pastor and Bishop were all exemplary.  

His Preces Privatae ("Private Prayers") include the following words, in a prayer for grace: 

Open Thou mine eyes that I may see,
incline my heart that I may desire,
order my steps that I may follow,
the way of Thy commandments.

O Lord God, be Thou to me a God,
and beside Thee none else,
none else, nought else with Thee.

Vouchsafe to me, to worship Thee and
serve Thee in truth of spirit,
in reverence of body,
in blessing of lips,
in private and in public. 

Here is a setting of the text by John Rutter. 

Grace and Peace,  Fr. Tony

God's Business--Applying Peter Drucker to Church (Mid-week)

God’s Business

Applying Peter Drucker to Church

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

September 24, 2014

The other day, I came across a summary of several of Peter Drucker’s “quotable quotes” about innovation and creativity in business.  Drucker was the management theorist whose ideas did much to revolutionize how companies and non-profits were run in the 1980s and 90s.  I was struck that several of these quotes still apply a great deal to what we do and see in Church: 

·      “Doing the right thing is more important than doing the thing right.”

·      “There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all.”

         We often get very tied up with doing things right.  We want to get the liturgy just right: the right music, the right flowers, the most beautiful vestments, the right prayers and sermons, the perfect bulletin, and the right mix of traditional and new.  We want to get our parish and diocesan life just right: the proper rules of order in meetings, the right process of governance, the tight observance of the canons.  Drucker here reminds us that doing things right is meaningless, and downright counterproductive, if in fact we are doing the wrong thing in the first place.  This is the idea behind Jesus’ parable of the Rich Fool:  If you make a pile of money, that won’t help you at all if the night you are going to cash it in turns out to be the night you die. 

         Also implied here is the idea that in searching and trying to do the right thing, you may have to get it slightly “wrong” for a while; you may have to work out the bugs by doing the right thing even if you can’t get it perfect to begin with.  The good often turns out to be the enemy of the ideal, since doing the wrong thing well is seen as preferable to trying the messy process of getting to the right thing, and then gradually learning to do it well.    Doing things right is not a bad thing: it actually is one of the things about Episcopalianism that many of us find attractive.  But finding the right thing to do is what it means to be a Christian, and a group of Christians. 

·      “If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old.”

         There are costs involved in changing and growing.  One of these is that we have to be willing to let go of old habits and ways of doing things.  This is, I believe the point of Jesus’ parables about the new wine in old skins (they burst!) and a new cloth patch on an old garment (it rips!).  You have to be willing to let go of the old. 

·      “People who don't take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year.”

·      “Results are gained by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems.”

·      “So much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to work.”

Change and growth means willingness to take risks.   They mean being on the lookout for needs and places of service, places where we can share God’s grace effectively with others, and then going for it.   Caution—whether to preserve the Church facility, a good balance sheet, the Church’s reputation and social standing in the community, or even maintaining the appearance of a happy little church without conflicts or differences of opinion—caution usually tells us to limit people’s engagement, creativity, or clarity of expression.   Ministry is service, and service means being present for others where they are and helping empower them in their ministry to others.  It does not thrive in cautious, cramped environments where “no” is the default position.  It thrives when we say “YES” to God and God’s love, and turn over results of things to God’s grace. 

Grace and Peace,

Fr. Tony+

The Parable of the Bad Personnel Policy (Proper 20A)

 

Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard, 11th century Byzantine illustration

 

The Parable of the Bad Personnel Policy

(Proper 20A)

8:00 a.m. Said; 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

21 September 2014

Parish Church of Trinity Ashland (Oregon)
Jonah 3:10-4:11 Psalm 145:1-8 Philippians 1:21-30 Matthew 20:1-16

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

Day laborers have always had it rough.  Just go by that parking lot in Talent where they congregate each morning during the agricultural season from planting to harvest, or the warm dry season for building or yard work.  Look and really see what is going on.  They wait there, patiently, until someone asks them to come and work.  Wages are negotiated on the spot.  They usually take whatever they are offered.  They have no union to represent their interests collectively.  Day laborers are and have always been been easily exploitable.   Throughout history, in almost every economy, the number of people needing work has almost always exceeded the number of jobs available, and this has meant that employers could keep wages way low.  A simple case of supply and demand:  with too many workers for too few jobs, the value of unskilled labor was low, very low. And most societies placed a very low value on the unskilled laborers themselves.  Many societies see them as lazy, idle, and not worth better paying jobs, though if you look carefully you normally see that the poor unskilled workers in most places are among the most willing to work hard, and are ingenious and inventive in making a little money and making that little money go a long way.  

In Jesus’ time, day laborers were peasants who had been pushed off the land.  Most lived in hovels in the towns and cities, and had no means of support other than whatever they could get by working on a day-to-day basis.    They lacked all job security.  Indentured servants, and yes, even slaves in large enlightened households, had more security and hope for the future.    Religious leaders belittled and reviled day laborers, calling them the “Am Ha-aretz” (the people of the land), unclean and worse than Gentiles, just as our elites often call those people waiting for work at that lot in Talent “illegals.”  As if any person could be illegal, as if any person could have so little worth. 

Today’s Gospel is a parable of Jesus about such day laborers.  I think it should be called the parable of the bad personnel policy because it deals with how angry the laborers get when they believe they have been treated unfairly by a well-meaning land-owner, but one oblivious how his actions might be perceived by the laborers.  Like the king in last week’s parable of the unforgiving servant, the landowner here is one of the careless rich, oblivious to the realities of the people of the land, the illegals.  

The way the story is told, it is clear that the landowner can’t be bothered to go through the math of prorating the workday.  As little as he is paying these guys, it is simpler and cleaner just to give all the workers the same wage, whether they have worked a hard eight hours in the heat of the day, or whether they worked only an easy hour at the end of the day in the crush to get the harvest in before sunset.   And that is in fact what lies behind the all-day workers’ reaction—they are being paid such a pittance that the landowner is willing to throw their entire day’s wage at the newcomers for convenience sake only.  They want more.  The revolt of those who have born the heat of the day is a revolt against what they see as an unfair and demeaning personnel policy.  

The fact that there are plenty of people at 5 p.m. still waiting at the marketplace for work underscores the context in which this story unfolds.  There is such an overabundance of people needing work that the landowner can pay as little as he finds convenient, and as much as he finds least troublesome.  

Jesus’ parable asks us to wonder about what is fair.  Is fairness determined by a mathematical formula that prorates worth by number of hours worked and hardness of the time spent in work?  Or is fairness determined by recognizing human need and the dignity of each person?  It most certainly is not determined by devaluing others, or treating people all the same simply because that is easier.   One of the underlying assumptions in the story is the need for a living wage for all who seek and need work. 
 
The Gospel of Matthew takes this parable and turns it into an allegory.  Those who have worked long and born the heat of the day represent one group of people, the newcomers another, and the landowner perhaps God.  Those who have born the heat of the day are seen as stingy and heartless to the newcomers.   It is part of Matthew’s preaching to his own community’s Jewish members to accept newly believing Gentiles.  “Don’t be stingy with God’s grace to others and don’t question it if God is easier on others than he has been on you!” is the lesson Matthew takes from the parable. 

I am not sure if such allegorizing does justice to this simple story that presents so many questions.  But the way Matthew tells the story, does make us ask how stingy we are with God’s grace to others.  And in this, it is wholly in line with Jesus’ idea that we mustn’t demean or objectify others, belittle their efforts and hopes, or base our ideas of fairness on a mathematical formula that determines worth by the marketplace rather than by need.   

No matter how you read the parable—as a criticism of the resentful workers or as a criticism of the landowner’s carelessness and lack of regard for the needs and dignity of his employees—the story is about generosity.  “Are you envious because I have shown generosity?” asks the landowner at the end of the story.  Literally, he says in Greek, “Is your eye evil because I am good?”

Jonah and the Gourd Vine, 1999, Jack Baumgartner

“Is your eye evil because I am good?” The evil eye here is what the Hawaiians call “stink eye,” giving a sour face at someone when you’re annoyed or angry at them.   Envy and jealousy are what today’s Hebrew scripture reading is about, the story of Jonah.  He is a bit of a drama queen:  “I don’t want to preach to Nineveh—I’ll run away on a boat to Spain!”  “The storm’s my fault!  Throw me overboard, feed me to the fish!”  And once back at work, he is still at it:  “If you don’t wipe out all those stinkers in Nineveh, it’s just too embarrassing for me!  I want to die!”  “You sent the vine borer that killed the squash bush that was giving me shade!  I want to die!”  This guy has the stink eye to end all stink eyes.  But the Book of Jonah is the reading from the scroll of the prophets assigned in the synagogue services for Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the most important day of the year, when God forgives his people.  It about not being able to escape God by running away, about welcoming God’s love and forgiveness and the occasional hardship that come from God, and welcoming grace and forgiveness for those we dislike as well.  

 “Is your eye evil because I am good?”  Generosity cannot be reduced to a formula; it cannot be squeezed into a template of worthy/unworthy or deserving/undeserving.  By definition, if it’s based on any of these, it isn’t generosity.  As social critic and satirist Marya Mannes said, “Generosity with strings is no generosity.  It is a deal.”  

“Is your eye evil because I am good?”  As in all things spiritual, the basic issue lies in where our heart is.  As a young man, for several years I went about with a chip on my shoulder.  Though I had learned for politeness’ sake not to say it, I often thought, “Why don’t people just give me what I deserve?”  Then I ran into life situations and problems totally beyond me, and I learned that the only way I could be happy or at least reasonably content was to accept things I had no control over.  Soon, things started getting better and I found myself thinking, “Thank God I am not getting what I deserve!”  It’s all a matter of where your heart is.   Where before I had often experienced Schadenfreude, or pleasure at the misfortune of others, I now experienced joy, true joy, at the triumphs and good fortune of others, even when I did not share in the good fortune. 

One of the reasons we talk so much with our sisters and brothers at Church is this simple truth:  a sorrow shared with others is a sorrow lightened.  A joy shared with others is a joy doubled.  This does not happen when we are jealous of others, stingy with grace, always trying to control, and self-seeking.  It happens when we let go of our concern about how we look or how people might see things, when we start loving our neighbors as ourselves and ourselves as our neighbors.
 
I invite us this week to let this parable work in our hearts.  Are there areas where we resent to good things that happen to others?  Are there places where our envy and jealousy cause us to be stingy?  Do we wish God were stingy too?  I invite us all to find ways for us to open our hearts and loosen our grip, whether on ourselves, others, or money.  This is not just the spirituality of good stewardship, but it is the spirituality of all abundant, joyful life.  

God is generous, perfectly so, and we too must be generous. 

In the name of Christ, Amen 

                                           +++


The concluding Collect that I used today for Prayers of the People, as world leaders prepare for the Summit on Global Climate Change and the U.N. General Assembly, was this:   

--> “Through greed, we have established an economy that destroys the web of life. We have changed our climate and drown in despair. Let oceans of justice flow. May we learn to sustain and renew the life of our Mother Earth. We pray for our leaders, custodians of Mother Earth, as they gather in New York City at the climate talks. May they negotiate with wisdom and fairness. May they act with compassion and courage, and lead us in the path of justice for the sake of our children and our children’s children.”  Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Day by Day (Mid-week Message)

 

 

Day by Day

Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message

September 17, 2014

“O most merciful redeemer, friend and brother,
may I know thee more clearly,
love thee more dearly,
and follow thee more nearly, day by day.  Amen.”

--from the Prayer of St. Richard of Chichester

The Psalmist sings, “Seven times a day do I praise thee; because of thy righteous judgments” (Ps. 119:64).  From this sprang the tradition of monastic prayer throughout the day.  Just as the year is marked with seasons and the liturgical calendar reflects this with different colors, themes, and moods, our daily personal prayer life and spiritual practice is marked by the rhythms of the day and different prayer hours.   Following ancient Jewish practice, the liturgical day began at sundown the day before: “the evening was, and the morning was, the first day” (Gen. 1:5).  Thus the basic shape of the monastic prayer services (or “offices,” since they were seek as a duty or work required of the monks) was: 

         Evening:       Vespers

         Bedtime:       Compline

         In the night:  Vigils or Nocturns

         Sunrise:         Matins or Lauds

         Morning:       Prime or Terce

         Noon:            Sext

         Afternoon:     None (rhymes with “bone”)

When Archbishop Thomas Cranmer wrote the first Book of Common Prayer at the English Reformation, he simplified these complex monastic offices for use by the laity into two simplified services:  Daily Morning and Evening Prayer.  But the desire for monastic spiritual practice and prayer life continued, as seen in the family of Anglican Deacon Nicholas Ferrar ordering its life with ongoing prayer throughout the day at the house in Little Gidding in the first decades of the 1600s. Though not professing vows, they were called by Puritan detractors as "protestant monks and nuns." 

Our current prayer book thus not only has Morning and Evening Prayer, (BCP pp. 75ff and pp. 109ff) but also several short offices: for noon (pp. 103ff), vespers (pp. 109ff), and compline (pp. 127ff).  In addition, it gives us “Daily Devotions for Individuals and Families” (pp. 137ff), short five-minute offices for the morning, noon, early evening, and close of the day.   This wealth of prayer forms gives us all the chance to begin or enhance our prayer life at any level, and allows us to continue observing some form of the daily offices even when our schedules change and do not allow full length prayer offices.  

Anglican priest John Wesley (whose followers later became the Methodists) preached on the pattern of the day in our spiritual life this way: 

 “Our wise creator [has] divided life into these little portions of time, so clearly separated from each other that we might look on each day as a fresh gift of God, another life, which we may devote to his glory; and that every evening may be as the close of life, beyond which we are to see nothing but eternity.”  —“Sermon XXVI: Upon Our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, Discourse VI”, in Wesley’s Works (New York: Emory and Haugh, 1831), p. 242.

Prayer and short meditative practices throughout the day help keep us centered and focused.  They empower us, comfort us, strengthen us, and give us joy.  They bring us together.  As Anglican priest and hymn writer John Keble wrote,

“New every morning is the love
our wakening and uprising prove;
through sleep and darkness safely brought,
restored to life and power and thought.

New mercies, each returning day,
hover around us while we pray;
new perils past, new sins forgiven,
new thoughts of God, new hopes of heaven.

If on our daily course our mind
be set to hallow all we find,
new treasures still, of countless price,
God will provide for sacrifice.

Old friends, old scenes, will lovelier be,
as more of heaven in each we see;
some softening gleam of love and prayer
shall dawn on every cross and care.

The trivial round, the common task,
will furnish all we ought to ask:
room to deny ourselves; a road
to bring us daily nearer God.

Only, O Lord, in thy dear love,
fit us for perfect rest above;
and help us, this and every day,
to live more nearly as we pray.”

May we pray unceasingly in word and service, follow the cycle of each day in spiritual practice, and become closer to Jesus, day by day. 

Grace and Peace,   Fr. Tony+

 

Stingy Generosity (Proper 19A)

Stingy Generosity

(Proper 19A)

8:00 a.m. Said; 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass with Holy Baptism

14 September 2014

Parish Church of Trinity Ashland (Oregon)
Genesis 50:15-21; Psalm 103:(1-7), 8-13; Romans 14:1-12; Matthew 18:21-35

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

There are moments in our lives when a change in perspectives makes things very clear, and not always comfortably so.  This happened to me once when I was working hard on a budget submission to Congress.  I had spent a couple of weeks within the State Department bureaucracy arguing hard and long with various offices and bureaus over a budget line of $800,000, or .8 million as it appeared in the submission.  It was hard to get consensus over what my office and I felt was an essential, obvious, and prudent use of the taxpayers funds to enhance U.S. security and wellbeing in a long term program of building general good will in the East Asian Area.  It was a zero sum, and whatever went for my program had to be taken out of other programs, programs that their administrators thought were more worthy than mine.  Just after a successful submission, I was in an interagency discussion with colleagues from the Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency.  The subject came up and to my horror, they all said in unison, “You had to fight to get that level of funding?  $.8 million is a rounding error in our process and can be covered for a worthy project without much fuss!  It is budget dust!” 

 

Budget Dust!  This underscored for me not only the perverse priorities of our society and government, where war, deceit, and coercion are funded multiple decimal points ahead of programs for peace, understanding, reconciliation, and goodwill.   As LBJ famously said, you put together 500 million here and 3 billion there, and pretty soon you are talking real money. 

Budget Dust!  This also underscored for me the perverse truth that the less you have, the more you seem to forced to be stingy with it.    The old saw among scholars in academia describing infighting about funding of university departments and research describes it:  the level of acrimony in discussing academic finances is inversely proportional to the size of the stakes: The smaller the sums and the more limited the resources under discussion, the nastier and more cut-throat the infighting for them. 

F. Scott Fitzgerald, in his short story “The Rich Boy,” wrote, “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are …”  In his novel, The Great Gatsby, he describes the practical effect of this: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made . . . .” 

This fact of life is the source of some great witticisms.  Oscar Wilde once described the traditional amusement of the British aristocracy, that caricature of hereditary wealth and privilege.  He said the fox hunt was “the inedible being pursued by the unspeakable.” 

Such wit and clear vision about the distorted ways of the world are what lie behind today’s Gospel reading, the Parable of the Merciless Servant.    You mustn’t be misled by the context in which the story finds itself in Saint Matthew’s Gospel.  Nearly all scholars agree that the parable itself goes back to the Historical Jesus, but few think that this applies to Saint Matthew’s understanding of the parable as a simple illustration of our need to forgive others and what might happen to us if we don’t forgive. 

Matthew’s reading has a basic problem of logic to it:  his Jesus here is saying forgive.    Not just the seven times you’ve heard in tradition that I’ve said, but 77 times, that is, forever.  Keep on forgiving.  But then he tells a story where God does not forgive.  Even though the king lets the servant and his family off first time around because of their pitiful cries, in the end he’s so outraged with this servant that he hands him over to be tortured to death.  Not a good example of forgiveness by any stretch of the imagination. 

Jesus originally told the parable as a stand-alone story.   The king was not intended as a symbol for God.   This is a story to make you think about what’s going on in the world around us.    It supposed to make us see the world with new eyes, and with these new eyes, perceive what the world would be like if God were in fact in charge of things, perceive the Reign of God. 

The king is a petty local client king of the Roman Empire.  The servants or slaves are his court retainers, bureaucrats and enforcers of his revenue collection.  The first servant is a high ranking retainer in charge of big revenue collection.  He deals with Pentagon-sized budgets.  Though completely dependent on the King, though in reality the king’s slave, and poor in comparison with the king, this bureaucrat is high in the pecking order, and so himself is fabulously rich by the standard of ordinary people.  The second servant is one in charge of budget dust level revenues. 

The system was that retainers kept for themselves a modest percentage of what they raised for their bosses.   And so, like Tom and Daisy, the high level bureaucrat is rich, not like the rest of us.   The huge amount he owes the king, literally 10,000 talents, is worth about 100 million of our dollars in purchasing power. The problem is that he has gotten too greedy, and the extortionate squeeze he applies for his King and himself has started to have negative blowback for the King.  People are starting to talk about rebellion, or ratting the King out to the Romans.  So the King decides to make an example of the servant, and blame the harshness on him.  He throws him under the bus to save the appearance of legitimacy for his own rule.   He throws him and his family into prison with no hope of release—there is no way anyone in prison can raise this sum. 

But they beg for mercy, and the King decides on another strategy.  He will show what a big heart he has.  He is going to prove those naysayers and whiners wrong.  By a magnificent show of mercy—forgive a debt of 100 million dollars!—this ancient Bill Gates or Warren Buffet hopes to recover some public relations ground.  He releases the servant to show his generosity. 

And then what does that fool of a bureaucrat do?  Run out and immediately put the squeeze on a lesser bureaucrat.  This little bureaucrat owes the big one a much smaller amount that the big one had owed the King, literally a 100 denarii, less that 1/1,000 of the sum forgiven him by the king.  But this relative budget dust is still a huge sum for the peasants and artisans listening to Jesus: about 30,000 dollars by our standards.  

By average standards, both the king and the high servant can afford to be “generous.”  But the king’s generosity, as astoundingly huge as it is, is still a stingy generosity.  It’s all about manipulating people to keep the flow of money coming.  And the high servant’s lack of generosity stems from the logic of the system.  He doesn’t think he can afford it.  This blinds him to his boss’s motives for generosity.  And so for the boss, this guy “just doesn’t get it.”   So his stinginess forces the King to go back on his strategy, and even make it harsher.  He turns him over to the torturers as an example to all other retainers.  They must keep their greed and squeeze under control, and maintain a façade of benevolent generosity.    The Chinese have a proverb, “You must kill the chicken to scare the monkeys.”  This guy has to be the chicken.

This parable is asking Jesus’ listeners and us to ponder on what sick societies we live in.  The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.  The rich are not like the rest of us.  They can afford to be generous, after a fashion, while the rest of us keep on struggling.  Most sociological studies of the ancient Greco-Roman world say that local client kings like the King in the parable were in the top 1% of the population, a group that controlled 95% of the resources.  Does that sound familiar?  Jesus is not saying wealth is bad, or that the rich are by definition evil.  But he is saying that, given the realities of how our world works, it is harder for a rich person to come under God’s Reign than it is to thread a rope through the eye of a needle. 

The fact is, generosity is a good thing.  Forgiveness is a good thing.  Even the super rich recognize that.   It just gets played out in different modalities, different motivations, and in vastly different scales of the size of the sums involved.  As we look out from this parable with new eyes on the world, we see that there is something seriously the matter here:  such good things as generosity and forgiveness have been distorted and corrupted by our societal structures.  If the Reign of God means anything, if God being truly being in charge, right here, right now, means anything at all, it means that our generosity and forgiveness must be redeemed and healed by genuine compassion.   It means that our priorities, where we place budget dust and where we place the real money must be reordered and fixed by concern for the welfare of others.    

Jesus elsewhere says be as smart as snakes and harmless as doves.  Be at least as street savvy as the local crook.  Be as tricky in building the Kingdom as an unscrupulous business manager can be when his retirement is threatened. At the very least, this parable of the Unforgiving Servant is telling us that we need to be as truly generous, as genuinely compassionate in our lives as the careless rich have the appearance of being when trying to show off or soothe their consciences. 

In the name of Christ, Amen

Through a Mirror, darkly (Mid-week)

 

Through a Mirror, Darkly

Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message

September 10, 2014

“There is no way that the scriptures, rightly understood, present God as an eternal torturer. Yet many Christians seem to believe this, and many are even held back from trusting God’s goodness because of this ‘angry parent in the sky’ that we have created. The determined direction of the scriptures, fully revealed in Jesus, is that God’s justice is not achieved by punishment, but by the divine initiative we call grace, which enables us to bring about internal rightness, harmony, balance, and realignment with what is.”  (--Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM, Job and the Mystery of Suffering, p. 57)

We have many false ideas about God and the world and many of these come from inadequate translations or misunderstandings of scripture.  There are bad ideas contained in the Bible, to be sure.   But when we come to learn to read the bad passages and ideas in light of the good ones, we start to see the overall message of the whole canon of scripture and many of our wrong ideas about God are corrected. 

Here are several ideas and phrases that many of us have gotten from the way we have heard scripture read and taught, followed by possible alternate phrases or ways of saying them that cohere better with what the whole of scripture teaches about God.  

Judgment, God as a Judge:  The basic Hebrew idea of shaphat (judgment) is the setting of things right.  That’s why the Book of Judges is not about guys in robes and white wigs sitting at a bench and rapping gavels.  It’s about military heroes who vindicate the oppressed.  The Day of Judgment is the day when all that is wrong is set to right.  When we say in the Creed that Christ will come to be our judge, we are saying he will come to set all things right. 

Flesh, the Desires of the Flesh:  This image, used by Paul, often is taken as something dirty, evil, and in absolute polar opposition to God and God’s plans for us.  But Paul knew as well as anyone that when God created us in creation, he declared it very good, and that our bodies are very much a part of what God intends in us.  He uses the stoic idea of “the flesh” as a kind of shorthand in opposition to “the mind.”  A better rendering of the idea in our age is “that part of us that opposes God,” or “the self that opposes God.” 

Sin, sinners:  We often think that this means only deliberate disobedience or rebellion against a command or teaching of God.   But it means anything that makes us fall short of what God intended when God created us, anything that alienates us from God, ourselves, or each other.  It is, in the words of the Enriching our Worship confession of sin, where we have opposed the will of God in our lives, denied God’s goodness in ourselves, each other, and the created world.  It is what enslaves us, the bad we have done ourselves or that done on our behalf, and the good things we have left undone, the skills and gifts not developed, the ideals not pursued. Sin thus conceived is not simply a crime for which punishment must be exacted (either from us or by proxy by some kind of transferred punishment), but rather an illness or weakness from which we must be healed, strengthened, and a disruption of relationship for which we must be forgiven. 

Grace and Peace,

Fr. Tony+