Love Your Enemies (Interfaith Thanksgiving Service)

Coyote Marie Hunter-Ripper of Cherokee descent opens interfaith gathering at the First United Methodist Church in Ashland. 

Photo courtesy John Darling/Ashland DailyTidings

Love Your Enemies

Remarks prepared for Ashland Interfaith Ministries

Thanksgiving Day Interfaith Gathering 

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D. 

November 27, 2019

The best sermon I ever heard in my life was given in Beijing in the late summer of 1989, in a House Church, on Jesus’ words, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who abuse you.” (Matthew 5:43-47)

During the somewhat liberal period of openness in China prior to the June 4, 1989 massacre, local Chinese had begun attending services with expatriates. After the crackdown, the Chinese security came down hard on Chinese Christians and other groups seen to be too close with foreigners.  Old anti-religion rules still on the books started to be enforced with a vengeance.  Members disappeared for weeks, only to return with marks of terrible physical abuse.  It was unbearable.  Finally our congregation decided that the local people and the expatriates in our little congregation would have to go their own ways and worship separately.  It was very hard on all of us.  We were close friends.       

One of these Chinese members of our congregation spoke at the last service together. He said he had always thought that “love your enemies” was a little over-dramatic, “for why should Christians have enemies?” He said he now understood the passage much better.    “If I could be so bold, I’d like to refer to a passage in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.”  Most of us shifted uncomfortably, thinking of the listening devices in the walls.

He told the story:  Solzhenitsyn is in the labor camp system in the Soviet Union.  He becomes more and more dehumanized by his torment, but then, in a chapter called ‘Resurrection,’ regains his faith and starts on the road back to life.  He realized at that critical time that no matter how tightly his interrogators constrained him, he always had a choice—though they always eventually could force him to say what they wanted, he could do so willingly or unwillingly, cheaply or expensively in terms of the suffering he endured before giving them what they demanded. 

He also realized that they too were constrained to do what they did, and that they too had a choice in how they did what they were constrained to do.  In a system where all were compromised and all were victims in one degree of another, he realized the great truth that the line between good and evil is not found between one country and another country, between one economic class and another, between one political party and another, between one religion or another, or one race and another.  The line between good and evil is fine but very definite, and runs down the middle of each and every human heart.  It is found in that space of the heart where we exert our choices, no matter how constrained our choices may be. 

My friend concluded: 

“So Solzhenitsyn realized that he needed to pray for his interrogator, and for all of God’s creatures, even Stalin. It is where my faith begins as well.  This is the reason, I believe, that we must pray for our enemies.  They, like us, are in God’s image, and have that line down the middle of their hearts, no matter what decisions they have made before, no matter how distorted the image of God may have become in them, or how constrained the options left to them might be.”

“We must pray for them–not that they be like us, not that they treat us more favorably, not that they choose what we wish they would choose, but that in whatever way God wants they might opt for the good in their hearts and not the evil.  We share with them in our hearts the capacity to do great evil or great good.  Without such a belief in my solidarity with all my fellow creatures, even those who abuse me and what I believe is good, I would not have hope that God might work miracles in my own heart.  That is why I must pray for even Premier Li Peng, who imposed martial law, and Deng Xiaoping, who ordered the massacre.”

And so the congregation divided, and our Chinese friends managed to do church on their own. My friend was held hostage in his own country for two years to buy the silence of his wife, an outspoken Peking University professor who fled China for Germany in the turmoil after the massacre.  Finally, at the intervention of the German premier, he was allowed to leave China.   But the words of his sermon stayed with me, and remain so to this day.  The most recent Chinese crack down on all religions, and outright horrendous persecution of Uighur Muslims in China’s far west have made it all the more pertinent to me. 

We are all God’s creatures and all bear God’s image, no matter how we may have distorted and twisted it. A call to love our enemies is not a call to ignore horror and abuse, to paper over real suffering with facile statements of forgiveness, to docility without work for justice and amends, or pronouncing forgiveness for hurts suffered by others who rightly are the ones to forgive, not us. It is a call to continue to engage with those who hurt others.

God loves us, each and every one.  So we must learn to love each other.  Not pretend to love each other.  Not practice passive aggression as we continue to despise each other.  Not silently disengage and passively submit, detached, to abuse.  But love.  And love as God loves, which means sometimes being a pain in the neck and almost always means challenging the beloved.

Grace and Peace. 

Gratitude as Spirituality (Midweek Message for US Thanksgiving Day)

 Wild Turkey male display, Lithia Park Ashland, photo courtesy Tom Grey 

Gratitude as Spirituality

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

November 27, 2019

“Almighty God, who has given us this good land for our heritage: We humbly beseech you that we may always prove ourselves a people mindful of your favor and glad to do your will. Bless our land with honorable industry, sound learning, and pure manners. Save us from violence, discord, and confusion; from pride and arrogance, and from every evil way. Defend our liberties, and fashion into one united people those drawn together here from every language, kindred, and nation. Endue with the spirit of wisdom those to whom in your Name we entrust the authority of government, that there may be justice and peace at home, and that, through obedience to your law, we may show forth your praise among the nations of the earth. In the time of prosperity, fill our hearts with thankfulness, and in the day of trouble, suffer not our trust in you to fail; all which we ask through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.” 

I think that gratitude is the emotion that best connects us with God.  Trust is a close second.  Both of these are in fact expressions of love.  And God is, in fact, Love Itself. Love, trust, and gratitude give us eyes to see God. At the very least they allow us to perceive the works of the hand of God.  

There are, I think, some basic rules of the road to feeling gratitude and expressing thanksgiving, to keep these profound feelings from leading us astray.   There are some too for feeling or expressing gratitude’s opposites, like resentment, disappointment, anger and regret.  Here are a few:

• When good happens, when beauty occurs, when grace arrives, feel gratitude.  Let yourself feel it fully.  Direct it to the giver, and know that when all is said and done, all good comes from God.  
• When good happens, do not feel that you deserved it, earned it, or were entitled to it.  Especially do not feel this if in fact you contributed in some part, large or small, to the arrival of the good.   Even if you made the good, recognize that whatever skills, attributes, and abilities you used in doing this were also gifts.  Admit that all good gifts come from God, because of God’s goodness, not the goodness of the gift’s recipient. 
• When good happens to other people, be sure to tell them how much they contributed to it or made the good possible.  Be lavish in praise.  But be careful not to suggest that somehow your good estimation of that person is based merely on their performance. 
• When bad stuff happens to you, do not blame God, or feel that it is punishment.  It you are responsible in whole or in part, accept the responsibility, but do not mistake the natural results of your actions as malevolent or willed harm from an angry deity.  
• When bad stuff happens to other people, do not attribute it to some punishment by an avenging or even just God.  Do not try to explain it away, or even say you understand.  Just say how badly it makes you feel. 
• Use gratitude and thanksgiving as a means of driving away negative feelings. Alienation, anger, hatred, jealousy, envy, fear, disgust—all of these feelings have a difficult time remaining in our hearts when our hearts are full of gratitude and thanks.   Make use of a gratitude list and be sure that your prayers have at least as many as many thanksgivings as petitions. 
• Know that joys and thanks shared with others are multiplied, just as sorrows and burdens shared are lightened. 

Trappist monk and mystic Thomas Merton once said this to a group of monastic novices:

“Life is this simple: We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and God is shining through it all the time. This is not just a fable or a nice story. It is true. If we abandon ourselves to God and forget ourselves, we see it sometimes, and we see it maybe frequently. God shows [God’s] self everywhere, in everything - in people and in things and in nature and in events. It becomes very obvious that He is everywhere and in everything and we cannot be without [God].  It's impossible. It's simply impossible. The only thing is that we don't see it.”

Being open hearted, open handed, and open-minded all depend on a sense of gratitude and thanks.   When all is said and done, so does any true faith in God.   

I am so thankful for so many things.  I am grateful for my family, especially my life’s companion Elena, and our children.  I am thankful for having been given the privilege of serving my country overseas for most of my adult life, and for the blessing of a late-in-life call to the priesthood in Christ’s One, Holy, and Apostolic Church.  I am thankful, so very, very thankful, to be serving this gifted and faith-filled group of friends at this time, here, in the Rogue Valley.    I am thankful for the wonderful music here, and for our commitment to service and justice.  I am thankful for the opportunities for education and personal development my family and I have had, and for the abundance and liberties we enjoy here in the United States.  I am thankful for health and for the natural beauty around me here.  I am thankful for so many, many things. 

I hope that you take time during the holiday to sit back a few minutes in quiet and reflect on what you are thankful for, what makes you bless God and love the world.   

Grace and Peace. 

Image of the Invisible (Christ the King C)

Image of the Invisible

Last Sunday before Advent, the Solemnity of Christ the King (Year C)
24 November 2019--8:00 a.m. Said, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

The Rev. Fr. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)

Jeremiah 23:1-6; Psalm 46; Colossians 1:11-20; Luke 23:33-43

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

take away our hearts of stone

 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

It’s been a rough two weeks in our nation.  The impeachment hearings have revealed just how profoundly our national fabric has been rent, how deeply our common life has split, and how sharp a divide there is between those who support the President because in him they find hope for an America restored to greatness and those who want him to be removed from office because they see him as a corrupt and hateful stooge of Russian Intelligence Services and their efforts to rob legitimacy from our elections, rule of law, ideals of justice and fairness, and unity as a people.    

Dr. Fiona Hill and Mr. David Homes.   Courtesy Getty Images. 

Both sides were, at various times, outraged or inspired by the hearings: only at different times.  I have friends from High School, my extended family, and a parish Church where I once lived, cheering on representatives Nuñes and Jordan, as others of us gasped in horror.  Some of us were inspired by the self-sacrifice and loyal duty my old Foreign Service colleagues while my friends gasped in horror.  Our poor, poor, country!

 Royal Visit to Aberfan in The Crown Season 3

This, of course, was going on as most of us were enthralled watching the most recent season of Netflix’s The Crown.  And that fictional account of modern Britain’s royal family includes some gems about why monarchy remains attractive to many, even in this age of democracy and egalitarian opposition to class and nobility: 

Queen Mary says, “Monarchy is God’s sacred mission to grace and dignify the earth. To give ordinary people an ideal to strive towards, an example of nobility and duty to raise them in their wretched lives. Monarchy is a calling from God.”

Elizabeth II herself says, “The people look to the monarchy for something bigger than themselves.”

And that spoiled princeling who turned his back on the crown, Edward VIII, says as an old, embittered and exiled Duke of Windsor, “Who wants transparency when you can have magic? Who wants prose when you can have poetry?” 

The Crown, of course, recounts in soap-opera like excruciating detail how such aspirations more commonly than not are foiled by the ignoble humanity of the nobility, the un-regal failings of the royals.  As the real-life Elizabeth said, “Like all the best families, we have our share of eccentricities, of impetuous and wayward youngsters and of family disagreements.”  For her, it is the aspirational, hope-filled determination to live into the ideal of monarchy that justifies the continuation of such an institution.  For monarchists, the Queen is not merely a symbol of the people’s hope for leadership that transcends party and self-aggrandizement, but more importantly the embodiment of self-sacrifice for the common good.   The fact that Prince Andrew could be just as involved, apparently, in Jeffrey Epstein’s wickedness as Bill Clinton or Donald Trump, does the monarchy no favors. 

I think all of us have had the experience pinning our hopes on a charismatic and convincing leader who knew how to play the right chords of our hearts, and how to inspire our hope.  And then we had the experience of that leader failing us, dashing our hope, and sometimes, even disgusting or frightening us.   One of my mentors as I was preparing for ordination told me his wakening as an adult Christian came when he experienced such a disillusionment.  He had as an idealistic young missionary in Nicaragua eagerly supported and worked for religious socialists (including priests) to help break the endemic corruption and oppression in the country, thinking that in some real way he was helping usher in the Reign of God.  But once in power, these religious Marxists turned out in office to be petty tyrants, corrupt as any of the officials that had gone before.  And because of their ideology of class struggle, vanguard party leadership, and suspicion of the Church, they actually ended up in some ways more broadly violent and oppressive. 

I for one am happy that we celebrate Christ the King and not Christ the President, Christ the superstar, and certainly not Dogma’s “buddy Christ.”    Presidents, even the best, fail.  Superstars and buddies even more so.  Kings and Queens fail too, but Monarchy does not have self-serving human failure built in as part and parcel of the ideal. 

Another thing in the last two weeks has drawn this clearly to mind for me, a very personal one from my life as a principal caregiver of a disabled spouse, who has told me it’s okay for me to share it with you.

Elena’s aggressive Parkinson’s Disease causes freezing of voluntary muscles.  Sometimes this means she cannot open her eyes.   I gently can pry them open, but they will not stay open, unless I call to her and say gently, look at me.  It is only when she stops worrying about opening her eyes, and focuses on something beyond the almost impossible task at hand, on me, that miraculously, she is unfrozen and has her vision restored.  

Looking beyond our self is key in having any clear vision.  It is only when we stop worrying about the task at hand and suddenly go into the zone of doing that we relax and can accomplish hard things. 

That’s why it is important to have Jesus as our ideal King, our shepherd, the lover of our soul, and our loving brother and comrade. 

It’s why Colossians today uses that impossible metaphor: Jesus is the image of the invisible God.  If something’s invisible, no vision or image technically is possible.  But hope and trust in the one who is Truly God and Truly Human squares that circle, and makes the impossible part of real life. 

If we look to Jesus, we see our ideal and our hope.  We see, God helping, ourselves once we have changed and followed Jesus into that great ideal beyond. 

One of the episodes of the Crown tells the story of the 1966 disaster at Aberfan Wales that killed 144 people, 116 of them children in an elementary school, more than half of the village’s children.  At the funeral of the children, the coal mining villagers sing spontaneously and a capella the old Wesleyan hymn,  Jesu Lover of my soul.  It is this outpouring of desperate faith that finally elicits tears in private from the Queen, who has returned to Aberfan many times over the decades since to visit with the bereaved.  Charles Wesley wrote the hymn while he was hiding in a Milk House closet from a lynch mob in County Down Ireland intent on silencing his preach­ing.  Set in the UK to the haunting Welsh tune Aberystwyth, it expresses the core of what it means to say that Christ is King:

Jesu, lover of my soul,
Let me to Thy bosom fly,
While the nearer waters roll,
While the tempest still is high:
Hide me, O my Savior, hide,
Till the storm of life is past;
Safe into the haven guide;
O receive my soul at last.

Other refuge have I none,
Hangs my helpless soul on Thee;
Leave, oh, leave me not alone,
Still support and comfort me.
All my trust on Thee is stayed,
All my help from Thee I bring;
Cover my defenseless head
With the shadow of Thy wing.

Thou, O Christ, art all I want;
More than all in Thee I find;
Raise the fallen, cheer the faint,
Heal the sick and lead the blind.
Just and holy is Thy name,
I am all unrighteousness;
Vile and full of sin I am,
Thou art full of truth and grace.

Plenteous grace with Thee is found,
Grace to cover all my sin;
Let the healing streams abound;
Make and keep me pure within.
Thou of life the fountain art,
Freely let me take of Thee;
Spring Thou up within my heart,
Rise to all eternity.

 Treorchy Male Voice Chorus -- Jesu Lover of My Soul

Brothers and Sisters, I invite all of us this week into a practice:  take a few minutes each day and in quiet contemplation, make a vivid picture of Jesus in our minds.   And then compare this, gently and without judgment, with pictures of ourselves at our best and our worst moments, and with our various political and social leaders at their best moments and their worst.   When the comparison breaks down, or troubles us, take mental note, and then go back to the image of Jesus.  Try again, perhaps with another person for comparison.  After a few minutes of such contemplation, put the exercise aside for that day.   Then, throughout the day, occasionally think back on your reactions and try to learn what this might say about our own failings and strengths, as well as those of those who would be our princes.  

We’re going to get through this hard and bitter division.  I pray and hope we will find a way to being one united, if diverse, people, renewed in our commitment to our best values. 

In the name of Christ, Amen. 

Realized Eschatology

Realized Eschatology

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

November 21, 2019

“The Hour is coming and is now here when true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth.” John 4:23

“Very truly, I tell you, anyone who hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life, and does not come under judgment, but has passed from death to life.  Very truly, I tell you, the hour is coming, and is now here, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live…  the hour is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice and will come out.”  (John 5:24-29)

As we wrap up the end of Ordinary Time, the great green liturgical season that stretches from Pentecost to the start of Advent, our Sunday readings in recent weeks have spoken more and more about the end times (Greek: eschata).  When asked about when the end will happen, Jesus replies that no one knows, only the Father.  When asked about signs going before the end times,  he says that there always will be shocking crises like earthquakes, wars, plagues, and disasters, but that what truly presages God’s setting things right are the glimmers of hope and trust that we see in the world about us.  “Signs of the times” for Jesus are not harbingers of disaster, but little glimpses of love behind and beneath our world. 

Apocalyptic was the main literary tradition during Jesus’ life that spoke of the end times.  This mysterious and highly dramatic treatment of how rotten our world is and how God will set it right is the writing of those suffering from Traumatic Stress,  encoded with various numbers, signs, beasts, and disasters to keep its message away from the secret police of the Empire in charge.  New Testament scholar Ernst Käsemann referred to Apocalyptic as “the mother of Christian theology.”  When Jesus proclaimed that God’s Reign had come near, he was saying that the hopes of Old Testament prophecy for God setting the world right were being realized and fulfilled in his ministry and person.  This “realized eschatology” was challenged by his death; but it then was endorsed and embodied by his coming forth from the dead.   Earliest Christians believed that when Jesus came back from heaven, he would bring the fulfillment of all the parts of OT prophecy that seemed to not have been fulfilled in his life, death, and resurrection: thus the “future eschatology” of the “little apocalypse” of Matthew 24, Mark 13, and Luke 21, as well as the Apocalypse of John.  

Hope and fulfillment are two of the deep themes of scripture.  The interplay between the two is subtle, as shown in the quotes above from the Gospel of John:  the hour is coming, and is now here. 

In our current political and religious climate, eschatology and apocalyptic are much abused, by so-called Evangelical rapturists, Christian dominionists, or cult-like followers of grim “Left Behind” fantasies.     Followers of Jesus, however, see that at heart, love, truth, and justice are already here present in the Cross and Resurrection.  God is already at work in the world about us.  The kingdom of lies and accusation is already being undermined and put to flight.  In the words of the Good Friday Solemn Collect, “things which were cast down are being raised up, and things that had grown old are being made new, and all things are being brought to their perfection by him through whom all things were made.” 

As we ready for Advent, it is important to remember that this season celebrates the once and future coming of our Lord, and his reign that “is coming, and now is.”    

Grace and peace,

Fr. Tony+

Positives, Negatives, and Gratitude (midweek message)

Positives, Negatives, and Gratitude

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

November 13, 2019

“Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God.”

― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ

In recent weeks, I have seen examples of people claiming Christian faith arguing positions of bitterness and confrontation: the Rev. Franklin Graham calling on the faithful to pray that God confound the enemies of President Trump, Cardinal Raymond Burke condemning Pope Francis’ call for greater empathy for gays and lesbians and perhaps permission (gasp!) for married men in some regions to be ordained as priests, labeling these as profoundly disturbing and troubling to the faithful, and an Episcopal monk online condemning as bigots and “unwoke” mutual acquaintances who hesitate to use a plural pronoun for an individual identifying as non-binary in gender. 

Their barely contained anger and resentment contrasted with my memories of a former mentor and spiritual director of mine:  a Buddhist nun in a small temple in the mountains north of Taipei Taiwan.  She was joyous.  I can’t think of a time when I did not see her smiling.  She clearly said and expressed her beliefs and opinions, but there was never a whiff of anger or resentment in her.  All she did was done with joy, gratitude, and empathy for others, especially those who disagreed with her. 

We are called to be Jesus’ disciples.  That means following him, and emulating him.  He had his enemies, to be sure.  And he said that in following him, we would have enemies also.  But he taught clearly: love your enemies.  It is clear that on rare occasion Jesus got angry or impatient with those who used religion as a means of oppressing others, spelling out in no uncertain terms where he thought they had gone astray.  But when I think of Jesus, I think of him with that gentle smile of deep joy of my Buddhist master, not with the condemning grimace of partisan purity. 

We often think that following Jesus means conforming to outward rules or higher principles, following his “commandments” and keeping his “ways.”   But if this is mere outward conformity of actions or inward thought-policing,  it misses the heart of the matter. 

Jesus invites us into metanoia, often translated as “repentance,” but better understood as “a change of the mind” or “a turning of the heart.”  Jesus invites us to close relationship with God, who in his mind was not a warring potentate or dour judge, but rather an intimate and loving parent.    Gratitude should be our default.  Gratitude drives out fear, alienation, and contempt.  It encourages empathy and forgiveness.  That is why he asks us to pray “forgive us our debts as we forgive the debts owed us.”   

The fruits of the spirit according to Galatians are “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (5:22).   If we think we are being touched by the spirit or spoken to by God, but what we get is anger, resentment, fear, and contention, we are probably mistaken.  Joy and peace are what the spirit give, what God inspires in our hearts, not partisan posturing or manipulation of others so that they give us what we want in a constant struggle for dominance of submission. 

Perhaps as a check on ourselves and the lies we tell ourselves, we should ask ourselves, throughout the day, “Am I smiling?”  “Am I trying to understand this person so different from me?”  “Am I thankful?”  When angry, we should ask, “What is it about me that makes me react in this way? What fears and insecurities?”  and not “why can’t that creep over there just change?” 

Grace and peace,

Fr. Tony+

Jesus' Focus on the Family (proper 27c)

Jesus’ Focus on the Family

Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 27 Year C RCL)
10 November 2019--8:00 a.m. Said, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)

Job 19:23-27a; Psalm 17:1-9; 2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17; Luke 20:27-38

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

take away our hearts of stone

 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

In the hallway of our home there’s a gallery of family photographs:  Elena and me and our four children over the years, our parents, siblings, cousins, grandchildren.    On occasion guests comment “What a lovely family!”  Elena and I smile politely in return.  For thankful as we are for our family and all the happy memories, we realize the photographs tell only part of a complicated story.  

We don’t hang some pictures because they are just too painful: those taken at funerals or during episodes of mental illness or drug and alcohol relapse of some family member, during estranged feelings, or after suicides, divorces, tragic accidents, and illness.  

I understand about idealizing the family.  I was raised in a religious tradition that celebrated an idealized, romanticized family, patriarchal and conservative. One of my mother’s favorite hymns used these images to describe it:

“In the cottage there is joy
When there’s love at home;
Hate and envy ne’er annoy
When there's love at home.
Roses bloom beneath our feet;
All the earth's a garden sweet,
Making life a bliss complete
When there's love at home.”

When I asked her once how she could stand such a saccharine picture, she replied, “Well of course that’s not how families ARE.  But it’s how I WISH they were!” 

That ideal had a nasty business edge.  When women wanted an equal say, the idealized family was a club with which patriarchs could beat them down.  The brutality was disguised by gentle, earnest “loving” voices, and such maudlin sentimentality extolling family and conformity to gender and sexual norms.

Idealizing the family is big business.   Witness over the years the success of “Little House on the Prairies,” “Father Knows Best,” “the Waltons,” and “Leave it to Beaver.”   The Rev. James Dobson’s “Focus on the Family” ministry attracts millions of people struggling for happier, better lives by seeking direction from what Dobson claims to be the teachings of the Bible. 

Unfortunately, the Bible is not a particularly good place to find idealized families.  You only have to read it to realize how messy and twisted families can be.   If you idealize the patriarchal family, just look at the horror stories in the families of the patriarchs themselves: hatred, deceit, disloyalty, rape, and murder all appear. 

Rarely do people who claim to promote the “Biblical teaching on the family” refer to today’s Gospel reading.  But it is key in seeing what Jesus’ actual view of the matter was. 

Opponents approach Jesus: Sadducees, conservatives who accept only the Torah as scripture and are wary of later prophetic and wisdom writings and their new-fangled ideas like life after death.  

They ask: seven brothers die in sequence, each marrying the deceased brother’s wife in accordance with an obscure provision in the Torah.  “If there is a resurrection from the dead, to whom does that woman belong?”   For them, wives and children have the status of property. Women can ‘belong’ to only one man at a time, though men can ‘own’ several wives.  Since this woman clearly can’t belong to all seven, the resurrection is an impossibility, rather like a dirty joke. 

Jesus replies:  “She belongs to none of them, for in the resurrection no one owns anyone else. All belong to God alone.” 

The three great branches of Judaism at this time had completely different takes on the messiness of life and prospects for life after death. 

The Dead Sea Scrolls community hated the messiness of life and saw it as something to be defeated.  They believed in a form of the immortality of the soul and thought that those purified through strict obedience to the Torah and the Community’s ascetic practices would after death continue to live apart from their bodies and join with the purified living in the great army of the Sons of Light that would defeat the evil world and its Sons of Darkness.  They were this-life denying but future-life affirming. 

The Sadducees of today’s reading believed that the Law controlled life’s messiness, but rejected both immortality of the soul and a resurrection of the body.   Thoreau, when asked about the afterlife, famously said, “Please, one life at a time!”   The Sadducees would have agreed.  They were this-life affirming but future-life denying. 

The Pharisees too believed that the Law brought order to life’s messiness, but rejected the asceticism of the Essenes and the reluctance of the Sadducees to accept immortality and resurrection.  They were this-life affirming and future-life affirming. 

Jesus, close to the Pharisees here, affirms both this world and the world to come.   “Being as the angels in heaven, neither marrying or being given in marriage” is not an expression of ascetic contempt for the body and marriage.  Remember that story about Jesus turning water into wine at that wedding in Cana.  In the words of the Prayer Book, he thus “adorned” marriage as a “manner of life.”   He also showed he was no alcohol-eschewing ascetic.   He loves this world, this life, particularly the bits that give us joy, including love, marriage, family, work, and simple pleasures like wine and food. 

For Jesus, God’s love is revealed in the differences between this life and life in the age to come.  This age is messed up, the age to come, fully in accord with God’s will.  Here, we make exploitative contracts and unfair subordinating relationship, including marriage.  Men take wives as chattel.  But in the age to come, there will be a radical equality:  no exploitation, privilege, or abuse.  Only one subordination will exist, the one that binds each person equally to God: “[They] neither marry nor are given in marriage... because they are like angels and are children of God.” 

“In the resurrection all will have God as father”:  this implies that in the resurrection, unjust parent-child relationships will cease along with unjust marriage. 

Elsewhere, Jesus says, “call no one your father on earth since you have one father, your one in heaven” (Matt 23:9).  This is not a prohibition of calling a priest “father” or “mother.”  It is not about titles.  It is about real-life fathers. For Jesus families aren’t absolute, and even good fathers are defective when contrasted with the True Father.  

In Mark 3, Jesus’ Mother and brothers think Jesus has gone mad, and ask him to abandon his mission and return home.  His reply is biting:  “Who are my mother and my brothers?  Not you, but those who follow God along with me—they are my true family!”  In all of this, Jesus suggests that our earthly relationships—no matter how good and sweet—are dim reflections of the true relationships God created us for. 

Some people, triggered by experience of abusive patriarchy, object to Jesus’ way of referring to God: “father,” abba, or “Papa.”  Jesus clearly is not saying God is a biological male or our parent in any literal sense.  Elsewhere, Jesus uses feminine images for God: a nursing mother, a brooding hen.  All the same, he tells us to pray, “Our father.” 

I find it curious that the people who are most quick to urge us to always use peoples’ preferred names, titles, and pronouns at times seem to be the most resistant to using the designation for God that Jesus gives us:  Father.  Granted, its use may be merely an artifact of the patriarchal culture in which the Bible was written.  And granted, its use can be a trigger for some.  But Jesus uses the image again and again, even as he deconstructs oppression and toxic hierarchy. 

Expansive and inclusive language in our worship and our God-talk is necessary to break down patriarchy’s abusive oppression.  But we should not let our own triggers and justice agendas become obstacles to hearing what Jesus is teaching us here: that our relationship to God is like the relationship of a child to the best of all possible fathers: intimate, loving, and fully trusting.

Jesus’ response to the Sadducees is not that in the afterlife people are celibate or neutered, or that human relationships, including families, cease. His point is that all of life that we know will be changed for the better in the world to come.  Life will then fully embody what we were created for, and not be diminished and twisted by the brokenness we have come to see as normal. 

Jesus affirms both this life and the life to come because he believes that life—this messy, boisterous, and glorious life—is redeemable and transformable. This is part and parcel of his faith in the God whom he called abba.  It’s not just what Jesus taught.  It is what his birth, life, death, and resurrection are all about.   Incarnation demands that we see that all human life is redeemable.  

So what part of family life and relationships will endure?  Not the nasty bits, to be sure.  I suspect we will be very, very pleasantly surprised by what God actually has in store.  Whatever it is exactly, we can be sure it will make our sweetest joys here pale by comparison. 

The fact is, no family is “normal” or ideal.  We try our best to muddle along, and trust in God’s love and healing power.  On occasion in moments of mutual support and love, of cozy familiarity and even intimacy, we see glimpses of God’s ultimate good intentions for us.  And these glimpses are sweet indeed. 

Thanks be to God.   

William Temple on Incarnation and Justice (midweek)

 

 

Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message

William Temple on Incarnation and Justice

November 6, 2019

 

Today is the Feast Day of William Temple, archbishop of Canterbury from 1942 to 1944. The son of another Archbishop of Canterbury, Temple wrote passionately on the Incarnation of our Lord and what this means for our common life and ethics. He believed that Christianity was primarily about this life, this common life we share, not merely about some afterlife or our personal, private morality and actions. He believed that Christianity had become largely irrelevant to policy discussions and the public sphere because it had wrongly privatized and ‘spiritualized’ faith, compromising its beliefs about the incarnation:

 

“The primary principle of Christian ethics and Christian politics must be respect for every person simply as a person. If each man and woman is a child of God, whom God loves and for whom Christ died, then there is in each a worth absolutely independent of all usefulness to society. The person is primary, not the society; the state existed for the citizen, not the citizen for the state. The first aim of social progress must be to give the fullest possible scope for the exercise of all powers and qualities which are distinctly personal; and of those the most fundamental is deliberate choice. Consequently society must be arranged as to give to every citizen the maximum opportunity for making deliberate choices and the best possible training for the use of that opportunity. Freedom must be freedom for something, as well as freedom from something.” (from Temple’s Christianity and Social Order)

 

In this, Temple criticizes both the political Left (for not stressing the dignity of the individual enough) and the Right (for not realizing the need for social and community action to enhance the sphere of opportunity for individuals).  Other Temple aphorisms are often quoted:  "The Church is the only society that exists for the benefit of those who are not its members." "One who faces his own failures is steadily advancing on the pilgrim's way." "The worst things that happen do not happen because a few people are monstrously wicked, but because most people are like us."

The collect for this day is as follows: 

 

O God of light and love, who illumined your Church through the witness of your servant William Temple: Inspire us, we pray, by his teaching and example, that we may rejoice with courage, confidence, and faith in the Word made flesh, and may be led to establish that city which has justice for its foundation and love for its law; through Jesus Christ, the light of the world, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Grace and Peace,

 

Fr. Tony+