Journey Toward Wisdom – 9/27/09 – Matthew 11:25-30

Week four on this Wisdom theme.  I’m not sure how much wiser everyone is feeling, but hopefully this has been a chance to ponder a little more deeply the way of wisdom and the important place it is given in the scriptures.  Wisdom as the first of all God’s creations, calling out to us.  I wasn’t here last Sunday but had the chance to listen to John’s sermon and Thanks to John for bringing in his perspective into the mix.

The question I’m still asking has to do with how do we actually become wise?  What does a person becoming wise look like?  I want to know.

Richard Rohr is a Franciscan priest who has done a lot of work on spirituality and wisdom and lived right here in Cincinnati for quite a while before moving out to Albequerque New Mexico to start the Center for Action and Contemplation.  He addresses this question of the journey toward wisdom and I’d like to use an outline that he has created that speaks to this that I’ve found pretty helpful. 

So this outline in the bulletin insert are the points that he lays out.  He calls these the Stages of Consciousness, and I’ve written beside that the Journey Toward Wisdom. 

We’re starting these Journey Groups up this fall, meeting together and focusing on spiritual journey, so maybe this can be suggestive of where that journey is taking all of us.

So let’s look at this together, try this on for size, and feel free to make your own notes in the space provided if you find that helpful.  This is one way of talking about what a movement into wisdom looks like.

1. INFORMATION STAGE

So the first here is the information stage.  This is where we all start.  This has to do with the gathering and accumulating of facts and data and formulas, and this is a process that keeps going through all of life.  So small children begin to learn their native language and alphabet and start to know names for things.  And adults continue to learn names for things, and we study about things that interest us like foreign countries and world history and sports and recipes and the things that make life interesting and exciting for us.

This is what our era of history has become so incredibly efficient at recording and detailing.  We have amazing access to all sorts of information.  We turn on the news and we get information.  We open the newspaper and we get information.  We go to the library or jump on the internet and we have access to worlds of information.  And if we have a decent memory or if we are just skilled at knowing how to access this information when we need it, we can use information for all sorts of things. 

In our religious development this starts with learning Bible stories, memorizing scripture passages, maybe studying church history a little bit.  Muslims memorize whole chunks of the Qur’an and the 99 names of God.  We start with faith as an accumulation of information about God and following certain formulas. 

And this is a starting point.  Learning information is important for growth, but in itself it is fragmented, incomplete, and if we focus just on accumulating information it can inflate the ego.  The apostle Paul says that “knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.”  We are right or righteous because we have gathered the most facts or Bible verses or whatever it may be.  We have to move beyond just information.           

 

2. KNOWLEDGE STAGE

And this is what Richard Rohr calls the Knowledge stage.  Out of the raw material of information that we are bombarded with daily, knowledge comes when we start to connect pieces and bits of information into larger wholes.  We start to see patterns and make judgments about how different parts relate to each other.  We’re starting to build something, starting to construct something that makes sense and has meaning.  So the amateur engineer within us starts to help things work together in a coordinated kind of way. 

We get little glimpses of how things relate to the big whole, but we’re still working on a small scale.  Information takes on a context and is no longer as scattered and fragmented.  And we begin to interpret information based on the context that we’re able to read it coming from.

With knowledge, we start to be able to tell a narrative, to fit things together into a story that makes sense and to see other pieces of information through this lens.  Faith begins to incorporate lived experience and not just propositions. 

Knowledge puts us on a path toward what is referred to here as Intelligence which is divided into two parts and is where an important crossover happens.

3. ANALYTIC INTELLIGENCE

So this moves into analytic intelligence, which is a deeper and more filled out form of knowledge.  Analytic intelligence is when we make bigger connections and see bigger patterns.  The great scientist or the great thinker or artist who can synthesize experience and knowledge into beautiful theories or inventions or pieces of art that communicate new insights.  This includes an ability to think outside the box or to question the patterns that others assume as the only way there is.  One can grasp and sometimes create systems and analyze them for their effectiveness. 

Up to this point it looks like this journey could just be a matter of getting smarter.  We move from information to the ability to piece it together to the ability to assemble massive constructs of meaning and to manipulate the natural world for our own needs.  So if this is what it’s all about then the higher ones IQ, or the more degrees one has, then the closer one is to wisdom. – this heavy left brained activity of the logical, linear mind.  And Rohr points out that the use of analytic intelligence can still be ego based and doesn’t imply any integration of heart, ethics, communion with God, or sense of awe and wonder with the world.  He says that this will still emphasize form too much because one has not yet experienced the formless, or confronted mystery.         

So this is really a crossover point, when one becomes open to this next kind of intelligence.

This is a good place to bring in the words of Jesus from Matthew 11.  “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and intelligent and have revealed them to infants; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will.”    So the crossover happens through this other kind of intelligence, which brings one back to the mind of the child.

3.5 INTUITIVE INTELLIGENCE

Intuitive intelligence, the intelligence of the heart, happens when one begins to meet reality rather than just measuring it or observing it.  There is a sense of being able to feel the whole and to have some initial experience of unitive consciousness where one encounters God in the other.  Non-dual thinking begins to happen when head and heart start to work together.

This is where spirituality comes to life.  Meeting reality rather than just measuring it.   

A good analogy here, I think, would be the difference between looking at a map or a postcard of a place and actually visiting that place, or, even better, becoming native to that place.  So one can know lots of facts about a place, but until one has been there and been shaped by that place, one can only have a limited type of knowledge about it.

In our family this comes into play with the expansiveness of the skies of Western Kansas.  Most people just see Western Kansas as a place to drive through on their way to the mountains, but if you grew up there like Abbie did, and when you go back to visit, there is this identification with the open expansiveness of the land.  The external has become, in a very real way, part of the internal landscape.  And one can feel this in one’s being.  This recognition when the inner resonates with the outer.  At least, that’s sort of how Abbie describes it.  It’s intuitive.  It’s sensed, it’s felt, it’s known in one’s soul.    

There are two more stages here that Rohr talks about and I guess I might as well say that anywhere beyond this point don’t be fooled too much if I sound like I know what I’m talking about.  It’s kind of difficult to wax eloquent about the upper stages of spiritual consciousness when one is still trying to learn the basics of love, joy, and peace.  So try and imagine with me just what it might look like for a person, or a community, to be moving toward wisdom.    

4. UNDERSTANDING

With understanding, one is now connecting the smaller wholes into The Whole, and holding together the fragments of experience and intuition into an integrated worldview.  We “begin to be part of the entire ‘great chain of being’, visible and invisible, inner and outer, form and formlessness, matter and spirit, which are seen as one.”

We develop the contemplative mind, which produces in us kinship and affinity instead of distance and otherness.  Rohr calls this co-naturality. We are of the same nature with reality and meet it on its own terms, “without a need to categorize it, control it, explain it, or even understand it.” ‘It is what it is.’  We understand it not just intellectually, but because it has become a part of us.  We understand that God is grace because we have come to experience and to practice that grace, and we become more childlike in how we receive grace.

And we become more comfortable with accepting God on God’s terms, the name of God revealed to Moses at the burning bush. “I am who I am.” 

And when we live the teachings of Christ, like spending time with the poor, or working toward forgiveness for those who have harmed us, then our consciousness expands into understanding.  We start to know the gospel and actually start to be the gospel.  Co-naturality, of the same nature.    

5. WISDOM

So what is wisdom?  Wisdom is what you get when all of these previous parts of the journey can be included, honored, held together into a unitive whole, and, we also come to completely relax into the acceptance of mystery, grace, paradox, and seeming contradictions.  There is room for all this and we recognize that it is not so much us holding it all together, but we who are being held together.  Everything has a place.  There is room for suffering, room for celebration, room for deep sadness and joy.  Ecclesiastes says, “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.” (3:1) We let go of cynicism, and we approach everything and everyone as a teacher, an opportunity to learn.  We become humble.  The mind of the child and the mind of the mature adult.  We finally know that we don’t know, and we are OK with just being known.   As my dad has said, “I used to know a lot more than I do now.”

This is also a return in many ways to simplicity.  Ronald Rolheiser, who is another priest, not to be confused with Richard Rohr, talks about the difference between himself and Mother Teresa talking about God’s love.  He knew Mother Teresa and he says that when she would get up to speak in front of people all she would have to do is to say “God loves you,” and people who begin to cry.  He said when he talks about the love of God he has to talk for 20 minutes, and have this complicated outline and different examples and stories and metaphors and scriptures.  She just radiated love and her presence and few words were all that was needed for this to be communicated.  And maybe this is one of the best ways to think about wisdom.  Rather than lots of words and examples and a nice outline…. wisdom is communicated from the presence of those who continually allow God to have God’sway with them, and over time love, humility, and wisdom become who they are.  That sounds like a beautiful journey to me.    

** Outline and quotes taken from a handout given by Richard Rohr distributed in York, UK, “On the Edge” conference, 1-3 June 2007), posted HERE on the web.

 

Humility and Authority – 11/09/08 – Philippians 2:1-13, Matthew 21:23-32

Scholars believe that verses 6-11 of Philippians chapter two were originally lines from a hymn that had been written by the early Christian community.  The hymn would have been composed by someone or a group of people whose names are long lost to us, and the song would have become known by different little Christian communities that were popping up in cities all over the Roman Empire.  As Paul is writing to the church in the city of Philippi he comes to a point in his letter when he is talking about humility.  He writes this: “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves.  Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.”  Paul invites this community into something that he calls being “of the same mind.”  He says, “Be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind.”  He goes on to say, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.” 

When he gets to the point of describing, elaborating on humility, and what it means to be of “the same mind” as Christ, he changes gears.  He stops writing in the form that he had been using and turns instead to the poetry of this hymn – as if what he is trying to say is best expressed through the beauty of a song.  All we have left of the song are the words here in this letter, but we can imagine some kind of melody behind them.  So, he writes “Do nothing with selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves.  Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.  Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.”  And then, the words of the hymn:  (have soloist sing from HWB #333) “Christ, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.  And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross.  Therefore God highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” 

The hymn speaks of humility as authority and power; self-emptying as actually filling the whole universe with praise – something not easily communicated.  When the early Christians were trying to capture the specialness of Christ and the meaning of his life, they felt the need to go beyond rational explanation and description.  One of the ways that they did this was by putting together this hymn and singing it together.  The mind of Christ.  Humility as authority – a strange and wonderful song to sing. 

When I read this about being of the same mind, or being of the mind of Christ, and think about the life of the mind, I think about a speech that I watched online recently. (Click HERE for to see video.)  At www.ted.com there are all sorts of interesting videos of speeches by some of the best thinkers in their field, talking about how what they are discovering can contribute to a better world.  One of these is by a brain researcher Jill Bolte Taylor who had the unique experience being a brain scientist who had a stroke, and while she was having her stroke she had the awareness of mind to reflect on what it was that was going on with her, and since her recovery has been able to share her insights into her experience.  She describes these insights in physical neurological language, but also in spiritual language. 

The brain, she notes, has two distinct hemispheres, which function almost like two different minds.  The right hemisphere is filled with an awareness of the present moment.  It is always right here and right now.  It thinks in pictures and images and learns through all of the senses and movement of the body.  It is constantly taking in the energy of the world and registering what the world sounds like, looks like, feels like, smells like, tastes like, and turning that energy into explosions of information and images.  The consciousness of the right brain is one of connection to all that is, and knows no boundaries between things or individuals.  You and I are all part of the one energy field and we are of one mind.

The left hemisphere of the brain, she describes, is a very different place.  It thinks linearly, and is filled with an awareness of the past and the future.  It organizes and sorts and files information from the right hemisphere.  It collects the information that we take in from the present and associates it with all that we know of the past, and projects it into the future as we think about possibilities and options.  The images get turned into language and it speaks to us with words.  It differentiates between what is this and what is that and what isn’t this or that.  This is a piece of paper, and this is a lectern and this is a shirt.  And, most importantly, she says, it gives us a sense of personal identity.  This is me.  I am.  It sets us apart from our environment and tells us that we have boundaries between what is me and what isn’t me.  I am Joel.  I am married to Abbie and live at 4233 Brownway Ave. and am the pastor of Cincinnati Mennonite Fellowship.         

On the day of her stroke it was the consciousness of this left side of her brain that she lost.  It started with a pounding pain behind her left eye, and then she started to lose a sense of being in her body.  She watched her arms and legs as they became undifferentiated from what they were holding on to and touching.  She thought this was rather bizarre but then when she lost the ability to move her right arm she realized she was having a stroke.  She would get flashes of consciousness from her left brain that enabled her to make sense out of what was happening.  I’m having a stroke.  I need to call someone for help.  Then she would lose that consciousness and have to wait until she regained it back to figure out what it was she was doing.  Eventually she called for help and was on the ambulance getting taken to the hospital.  And she describes her experience of recognizing that this might be her time to die, and of feeling herself expand beyond her body as the left side of her brain shut down, losing all sense of personal boundaries and limits.  She says that she came to the point where she surrendered her spirit and felt total peace.     

And then, after however long, she realized that she was going to live, that the doctors had been able to save her.  And as she is realizing this she is wondering how this expansiveness that she felt in her spirit, this connectedness and harmony that she felt to all that was beyond herself, would ever fit back inside that little body that she had.  And then she had what she calls her stroke of insight.  She felt like she had to keep living because she believed she had something that she wanted to share with people.  Something important to teach about how we go about our lives.  And so this was a great motivator for her to recover.

She ends her talk by asking the question “Who are we?” and challenges her listeners to recognize that we have access to both hemispheres of the mind.  We are one, single, life force, a part of the same energy field, connected and interdependent, emptied of ourselves, and full of the whole world.  We are each unique individuals, persons with personalities and identities and differences.  She doesn’t use the word humility, but her message is a call for a great humility in how we live.  To have the kind of humility that recognizes that we as separate individuals, also share in one mind, and that in the one mind, there is no need for the unnecessary pride and arrogance that tend to define so many of our relationships.

I don’t mean to say that the Apostle Paul and Dr. Taylor are saying the exact same thing when they talk about being of the same mind.  I don’t mean to reduce being like Christ to a proper proportion of left and right brain activity.  But I do feel that this scientific model of how our minds work help sheds light on what we are being invited into as imitators of the mind of Christ.  “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.”  What is the mind of Christ?  How is it different than the one we are socialized into?  According to this hymn, it is a mind that is both connected to the eternal God, and aware of its own fragility.  Christ gained fullness by emptying himself.  He humbled himself and submitted himself to death.  The consciousness of the right mind and the left mind were in perfect harmony with each other and it allowed him to be in the world in a way that opened up a new path.  There was no conflict between the ego and the spirit.  The I of Christ and the I of the Father were one, even though Christ was also separate, in his body. 

The hymn presents all this as bearing great authority.  Humbled, yet exalted.  Submitted to death, yet raised up to life.  This is an authority made up of humility.  The power of humility isn’t the power of forcing us into anything, but the power of drawing us to itself out of the beauty that we see in it.

  This authority that Jesus carried with him was something that caught the attention of people around him and also brought him scrutiny.  At one point early in his ministry, we are told, “(The people) were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes” (Mark 1:22).  One day toward the end of his ministry when he was in the temple, teaching, the chief priests and elders of the people came up to him and asked “By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?”  The temple was a place where there were supposed to be clear lines of authority.  The chief priests carried the authority of being appointed to this position.  They could wield the authority as they saw fit.  A significant part of the authority of the elders and the scribes came from the family that they were born into.  And Jesus comes onto their turf without any of this, but with some obvious power behind what he is saying and doing.  Where does it come from?  What is it?  It was coming from a different place. 

In classic Jesus style, he doesn’t answer the question directly as it is asked of him, but comes at it sideways.  He says: “I will also ask you one question: if you tell me the answer, then I will also tell you by what authority I do these things.  Did the baptism of John come from heaven, or was it of human origin?”  At first glance this may appear that Jesus is just punting to the other team.  You tell me and then I’ll tell you.  But what it actually gets at is the very nature of authority that Jesus carries that the chief priests don’t have.  The question sends them into a huddle where they start discussing their options of how to answer.  They know that they have rejected John as a true prophet from God, so they aren’t able to answer that his authority came from heaven, otherwise they’d be admitting that they should have believed what he had to say.  But they know that if they answer that there wasn’t anything special about John then they had a fear for the crowds because they all felt that John was a prophet.  They get stuck in their calculating minds.  They are acting out of fear.  They don’t want to appear to be rebelling against God or rebelling against the people.  Their main concern is trying to protect their good name.  We might say that they are operating out of the limitations of the left brain.  Trying to establish their self over and against other selves. 

Not seeing a way that they can get out safe with option A or B, they opt for choice C, “We do not know.”  They supposedly carry with them great authority, yet they are motivated by fear and self-preservation.  In other words, they carry no real authority.  They don’t get Jesus’ authority because it is the opposite of their own.  Jesus is able to possess authority without being authoritarian.  There’s no coercion and there’s no manipulation in how he relates with people.  He’s not grasping on to anything, not even his own life.        

“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.”  This way of being human is not something that comes naturally for us.  We have to be converted into the way of Christ – rewired and remade.  Our pathways have to be rerouted.  The way of Christ is foreign to our system.  Hopefully, we don’t have to have a near death experience in order to get it, although scripture does talk about our baptism as being like a death where we are brought back to life.  Hopefully there are ways each day when we can allow God to shape us and form us into the mind of Christ.  Humbling us.  Emptying us and filling us.

I come back to this useage of the hymn in the letter to the Philippians.  Sometimes in order to get something, we can’t be changed by a logical argument, but have to experience it in a special way.  We have to be confronted with it in a way that breaks through our rational, calculating mind.  We have to sing it, put it into poetry, in order for it to make its way into us through the side door.  The path of humility is one that we can’t just think ourselves into.  We have to sing it, feel it vibrate in our throats and our bodies, be a part of a chorus that is surrounding us and singing it together in order for it to make any sense.  We have to experience it coming at us from others.  That’s part of what I see us doing together in our times of worship.  We sing about strange and wonderful things that we may not be able to experience if they weren’t put to music.  We let our minds be filled with the thoughts of Christ and watch as they slowly change us into new people.  We bring our individual selves, but also let ourselves be expanded to include the whole community, to be not just separate isolated bodies gathered together, but to be the body of Christ.  The body of Christ, learning to have the mind of Christ.

 

Laboring in the Vineyard – 9/21/08 – Matthew 20:1-16

Sometimes the best way to study a scripture is to take a field trip. 

In Matthew 20 Jesus tells one of those parables that starts out “For the kingdom of heaven is like…”  The main players in the parable are a landowner, and laborers who get hired at different points in the day to work in the landowner’s vineyard.  At the end of the day each laborer gets paid the same amount, even though they clock in different amounts of hours.  The message of the parable is summed up at the end: “So the last will be first and the first will be last.”  The kingdom of heaven is like that.

What first catches my attention about this parable is that it involves a whole class of society who are in last place in the workforce.  The laborers in this vineyard aren’t full-time employees of this landowner, but day laborers.  A typical story of a day laborer would have been that they were former landowners of their ancestral land who had been forced into debt by heavy taxation, a poor growing season, or poor health.  As a way of getting out of debt they would have sold their land to wealthy landowners and looked to support themselves by selling one of their few remaining assets – their labor.  Many such laborers moved to urban centers to hire themselves out, a day at a time, to whoever needed their work.  Day laborers were vulnerable to abuses and had little control over their day to day work situation.  For a day laborer, the regular practice was to gather in the morning at the marketplace, the town square, and wait for somebody to come and give them work for the day.  If it was harvest or planting season, there was a good chance their work would be needed.  If it was in between these seasons, labor was in lower demand and they could wait hours or all day without anyone hiring them.     

In the parable, the landowner goes out early in the morning to hire laborers.  He meets up with them and agrees to pay them the typical going rate for a day’s work, a denarius, which was enough to feed a large peasant family for a day.  There’s nothing extra here for opening a savings account, but the workers have little bargaining power and are satisfied to have the work and the pay for their family to keep their stomachs full.  So they head out to the vineyard. 

But the landowner isn’t done hiring for the day.  He goes out three hours later, now 9:00 and sees others in the marketplace, still unemployed for the day.  He tells them also to go out and work for him.  This time there is no wage agreed upon.  He simply says, “You also go into the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.  Figuring that some pay is better than no pay, these workers head out to join the others.    

My field trip was prompted by my sketchy understanding that the practice of day labor still exists today.  I didn’t know to what extent, what it was like, who these day laborers are, or what their average day is like.  How has it changed and how is it similar to 1^st century Palestine?  What would it be like to read this parable from the perspective of a day laborer?  I did have some foggy memory of there being a group in Cincinnati that advocates on behalf of day laborers and a quick Google search showed that the Day Labor Organizing Project, one of the projects of the Cincinnati Interfaith Workers Center, meets every Wednesday morning at 9:00 at Our Daily Bread in Over the Rhine.  So I closed the Bible commentaries and headed down to see what kind of living and breathing commentary might show up at this meeting. 

When I arrived and found the meeting room there were two others already there, both volunteers at the Interfaith Workers Center.  Over the next 20 minutes five others would come in before the meeting started and during that time I was able to introduce myself and ask questions about their work with day laborers.  There were a couple things they mentioned up front.  The first was that there is both informal and formal day labor.  Informal happens below the radar of the official economy.  It can happen in the parking lot of a Lowes or Home Depot with a person hanging around offering their services for installation of whatever a person just bought at the store, or it can happen in a more underground organized way with certain locations being meeting up points for people looking for work, and contractors who need their work for the day.  Informal day labor has its own set of issues, especially as it relates to undocumented immigrants, but it’s not the one this group was meeting about.  Formal day labor is technically legal, is run out of labor halls throughout the city, and is a lucrative business for the day labor companies who provide a steady stream of workers for different businesses around the region.  This is the focus area for this advocacy group. 

The other thing they felt it was important to say initially was that it is a misperception that this Day Labor industry is demand driven – companies temporarily looking for more workers with seasonal work or when they have a spike in demand of their product, much like the situation in the parable.  The truth is that over the last decade or two day labor has become a regular part of the work force of some companies.  In other words, some companies are structured such that they always have a certain amount of their workforce as day laborers.

Here are some other things I learned throughout that meeting.  Rather than the vineyard owner/ worker, direct hiring, there is now a third player in this exchange, the day labor companies who run the labor halls.  A business looking for laborers can contact the day labor company, request a number of workers, and pay the day labor company.  The day labor company in turn hires workers who come to the labor hall, delivers those workers to the work site, and provides the workers their paycheck, often at the end of each day.  The system is set up for abuses.  Day labor companies may charge businesses say $15 an hour per worker, which saves the business money since they don’t have to provide benefits since the worker is technically not their employee.  The day labor company then takes a large cut of that and pays its workers minimum wage.  The workers have little to no bargaining power as they can easily be bypassed for the next worker in line.  The day labor companies guarantee on-time arrival of their workers to the job site, so riding the company bus is required for the workers.  It isn’t uncommon for them to be charged up to $10 for this bus ride, with the money taken out of their pay check at the end of the day.  Workers have also been charged for equipment that they use on the site that they need to do their jobs, also coming out of the pay check. 

The more I heard the more questions I had and the more dubious modern day day labor seemed.  I wasn’t all that pleased to hear that a couple personal pastimes of mine are dependent in part on day labor.  Going to Reds games and recycling.  Have you ever wondered how the stadium is all clean when you walk in even though you know that after the game the night before it was littered with Peanuts and Cracker Jacks?  Part of the answer, about 40% of those cleaning the ball park, is day labor.  Or, more accurately, night labor.  During every home game at 10pm a bus delivers workers from the Central Parkway labor hall to the stadium.  If there is a rain delay or the game goes into extra innings the workers wait to begin, sometimes without access to water or bathrooms.  Up until two years ago the workers wouldn’t begin to be paid until the time they started cleaning, meaning by the time they got to the labor hall, waited for the bus, rode the bus, then waited at the stadium, they could put in three to four hours before getting any pay.  A recent campaign by the Day Labor Organizing Project secured their guarantee of pay starting at 10pm.  The people at the meeting also said that the bus always delivers them to the stadium, but sometimes does not pick them up.  When they finish at 2-3 am it’s up to the workers to find their own transportation home.

I appreciate the chance to recycle and its handy to not have to sort out glass from paper from plastic.  Put it in the green bin and it magically disappears.  But it does have to get sorted at some point, and for that Rumpke recycling hires 25 day laborers every day.  They get to wade through the broken glass and not-quite cleaned out cans of beans and all the other items that get placed in the green bins.  One of the issues with Rumpke is that because they have a large contract with the city they are required by the city’s living wage ordinance to pay their workers $11 an hour, but continue to hire day laborers who receive minimum wage.  This is an ongoing focus for the Day Labor Organizing Project.

So who are these day laborers?  Where do they live?  How long have they been doing this?  How do they survive on such little pay?  One of the exciting things I discovered was that these very questions are being explored by a professor at UC named Colleen Mctague who has already surveyed over 500 day laborers in Cincinnati.  Because the day labor operation flies so low under the radar, and is scattered in different labor halls around the region, there is little known about it.  Professor Mctague has hired two former day laborers and paired them up with UC students and is sending them out in teams to the labor halls to interview day laborers and record their findings in a survey.  I called professor Mctague in her office on Wednesday and liked her immediately.  I introduced myself and said I am doing a sermon on day labor this Sunday and she said “Get out!  I could talk about this for hours.  What do you want to know?”  One of the more interesting pieces she talked about was what she was learning about the typical day of a day laborer.  The typical day laborer would be in line at the labor hall at 3:30-4 in the morning.  The hall opens between 4-4:30 and people then get their ticket for their job that day.  They wait for the van or bus, which comes between 7 and 8:00 to deliver them to the worksite.  After eight  hours of work, the van takes them back to the labor hall where they wait for their check for the day.  Some labor halls have the money ready.  Some can make a person wait an hour or two before they receive the money.  Some then offer check cashing services for a fee, or the person can go out and cash it themselves.   Some workers don’t get back to their apartment, or their shelter since they can’t afford an apartment, until 8-9pm.  Professor Mctague called day laborers “the most powerless people in our society,” and noted that they can’t raise issues or complaints about their work or they get a Do Not Return notice.  She also talked about how much her work with this has changed her and her students and how much she’s grown to admire the workers she is getting to know and becoming friends with those working with her on this project.  I sensed hopefulness in her, but she also talked about the weight of responsibility that she now has to these workers.  To get their stories out and to be an advocate.  Look for releases of their findings sometime in the future.  

“The kingdom of heaven is like….”  Well, it’s like this vineyard owner who has a lot of power and who we might suspect as being a rather shady character.  He starts out typically enough, hiring workers early in the morning to work his vineyard.  He goes out again and looks for more workers who don’t have work yet.  He tells them he will pay them what is right, at which the workers probably nod in agreement, but scoff under their breath that yeah, they’ve heard that one before.  And then this vineyard owner keeps going out looking for more workers.  After 6:00 and 9:00, he goes out at 12:00, 3:00, 5:00.  Who is still around?  Who hasn’t found work yet?  Come work for me.  Come into my vineyard and I’ll pay you what is right.  At the end of the day, when the workers are lining up for their pay there are some who have just barely broken a sweat and some who have been out all day.  The only ones promised a living wage are the ones who worked the full day.  Everyone else is no doubt unsure and uneasy about getting paid whatever this landowner thinks is “right,” maybe regretting that they’d agreed to work without first agreeing on a wage.  And then something unexpected happens.  Everyone gets a full day’s wage.  Even if they didn’t work the full day, even if they were just able to work a couple hours, they get a full days wage.  Expecting the landowner to use his power to extract as much as he can out of them for as little expense as possible, instead they find someone who pays the last the same as the first and asks that none be upset by this generosity.        

Well, viewed from a strategic business model perspective, this might not be a good way to run a vineyard.  Surely word will get out that this owner is a push-over, nobody will show up at the marketplace until late in the day, now expecting to get a full day’s wage for not much work, no work will actually get done, and the vineyard will go to ruin and the vineyard owner will go bankrupt from having no crop and too much overhead with labor costs.  Sounds like a pretty lousy way to run a business.    

Or maybe there is something more going on here.  Maybe we are seeing a picture of a God who is interested in searching the marketplace all day to see that everyone has work to do.  Who goes out every morning early, looking for workers.  Who’s up? who’s ready? who’s in the marketplace ready to work?  Who keeps going out repeatedly during the day.  Who’s still here?  Who’s willing to work for me?  Who goes out even late in the day searching and calling out for anyone who is still available to work in God’s fields.  At the end of the day those looking for great rewards for their work might be disappointed.  All they get is what they were promised.  Their daily bread.  Like mannah – not too much, not too little.  Not a lot of glory, not much more than what they need to live on for that day.  But enough.  And everybody gets enough.  Everybody who wants to work for this master will find good fulfilling work to do. 

And maybe it is a good business strategy after all.  Maybe the generosity of this vineyard owner begins to be well-known.  People want to buy from him or her because she has just and generous labor practices.  Pretty soon demand is outpacing supply and the owner needs to buy more land and hire more people.  She builds up loyalty with her workers who now have the security of full-time employment with some benefits on the side.  They’re able to not only feed their family for the day, but also able to save up a little money and become part owners in the operation.  Soon they’re helping make decisions, gaining new skills, and together improving the quality of the vineyard and the whole community. 

There is a lot more about day labor to be learned.  There is a lot more about the kingdom of God to be learned.  One thing I am sure of is that our work for this generous, surprising, just God leads us in the direction of those for whom work is not just.  That God’s overflowing abundance and desire that all have enough somehow flows into our lives in such a way that we become agents of justice in our relationships.  And that we allow ourselves to get turned around and spun upside down by a God for whom the first will be last, and the last will be first.

 

Reverse Revenge – 9/14/08 – Matthew 18:21-22

How do you know when you’ve forgiven someone?  On Thursday morning I met with the group of Ohio Conference Mennonite pastors who get together once a month and one of them asked this question.  Our official meeting was actually over and we were eating lunch together before we went our separate ways.  We were having a casual conversation, and then this pastor asked us all how we would answer this question on forgiveness.  The question had actually come from a member of his congregation, directed at him, just a few days before.  This member was familiar enough with forgiveness, but wasn’t sure he knew how to think about it.  The member had told the story about how his mother had worked for many years to forgive someone who had wronged her, had even begun praying for that person, and tried to speak well of that person and say that she wished them no harm, but whenever she would speak about this person her hand would begin to shake.  When has she forgiven them?  When she decides to wish them no wrong in return? When she prays for them?  When she feels it deep enough in her body that she no longer has a visceral, nearly uncontrollable bodily response at the thought of this wrong that has been done to her?  How do you know when you’ve forgiven someone?  Well….how do you know?

If forgiveness is equal to forgetting, then we can have a fairly clear answer to this.  The degree to which we have successfully stopped remembering an incident where we have been wronged is the degree to which we have forgiven.  The stronger that deadbolt is holding up in the compartment of our brain where we have put up a sign “Do not enter,” then the stronger our forgiveness.  Whenever we have thoughts of anger or depression or a sense of injustice about the situation then we have relapsed in our forgiveness.  If this were what forgiveness were all about then it could be easily calculated and measured.

But if forgiveness has more to do with a new way of remembering, a different way of seeing a person and a situation, then it is quite a bit more fuzzy.  How do we measure that?  How do we know we’ve forgiven from our heart?

We do know Jesus taught forgiveness.    He taught it often.  He taught his disciples to pray that their sins be forgiven, even as they forgive others.  He taught that to ask forgiveness of God one must first be willing to live one’s prayer by forgiving others.  He lived forgiveness in his final hours, by telling Peter to put away his sword and not retaliate against the soldiers who were arresting him.  Some of his closing words on the cross were “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”      

I appreciate the wisdom of all the world’s religions and find many commonalities between great teachers and spiritual leaders, but one thing I’ve discovered is that nobody does forgiveness quite like Jesus.  You won’t find the same kind of front and center emphasis given to forgiveness in other traditions.  Which makes me wonder all the more what Jesus was getting at in all this.   

Forgiveness is the topic of conversation with Jesus and Peter in Matthew 18.  This is right after last week’s scripture when Jesus taught the disciples to confront someone who has wronged them and be willing to forgive them.  Peter has a way of being the one to speak up in these kinds of situations and he asks Jesus a question that probes deeper into what Jesus might mean by forgiveness.  Here’s how the exchange goes: “Then Peter came and said to him (Jesus), ‘Lord, if my brother or sister sins against me, how often should I forgive?  As many as seven times?’  Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.’”

Peter appears to be trying to quantify forgiveness.  How many times should I let a person off the hook before I really start counting it against them?  He has a pretty generous offer.  Seven times?  This is far more lenient than the three- strikes- and- you’re- out rule.  If we would take the three strikes, then double that, and then add one more for good measure then surely we are being merciful people.  Jesus answers with another figure, but one that is intended to do away with any kind of calculating and score keeping.  “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.”  The problem isn’t that Peter has selected too low of a number, it’s that he’s chosen a number in the first place.  Forgiveness, Jesus seems to be saying, is not a calculation.  It’s not a matter of quantifying mercy.  It has no end.  It goes on and on.   

That’s part of the nature of forgiveness for Jesus.  But there is another story behind these numbers seven and seventy seven that gives this conversation between Jesus and Peter greater weight.  The story behind the story being accessed here helps fill out how big a role forgiveness plays in the way that Jesus is offering.  Something fundamental to the coming about of a new creation, a new way of being human that begins to unwind the tangle of sin and wrongs that have accumulated over the millennia.  The story behind this story happens just after the first creation and sets the stage for human history and puts in on a certain trajectory.  It’s a story we could call, “A brief introduction to vengeance, according to Genesis.”

Here’s how it goes:  After the human creatures leave the garden of Eden, there is immediate conflict between the two brothers Cain and Abel.  In Genesis 4, Cain, the older, brings his younger brother Abel out into a field, and murders him.  The portrayal of the first murder as a brother killing a brother is a way of showing that all murder is fratricide.  To kill another human being is to kill a brother or a sister.  God hears the innocent blood of Abel crying out from the ground and comes down to have a talk with Cain.  God asks, “Where is your brother Abel?” to which Cain answers, “I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?” to which God could have answered, “Uhh..Yeah!”

At the beginning of Genesis, God seems to be learning right along with humanity about how all of this is going to work out.  These creatures God has created are turning on each other.  Now that Abel is gone and Cain is a known murderer, how can Cain be protected against those who want to take his life in avenging Abel’s death?  If Cain killed Abel, then Cain should die in a one for one exchange.  God’s idea is that Cain will be protected through the mark of increased vengeance.  God says, “Whoever kills Cain will suffer a seven-fold vengeance.”  So now the person who would kill Cain must recognize that the stakes have been raised.  None of this one life for one life business.  Cain’s potential murderer is putting himself and seven of his family members in risk of being avenged.  At first it appears that this deterent is working well.  Maybe the humans will realize that the cost of violence is too great and will live peacefully.  Cain marries, has children, and grandchildren, and there is no report of his life being sought by others.  But several generations down the road, just several verses after the declaration of seven-fold vengeance for Cain, we get an update on the direction things are going.  A descendent of Cain’s named Lamech, says this.  This is 4:23-24, “I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me, If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-seven fold.”  The logic of vengeance gets taken one step further in Lamech seeking to protect his own life.  If anyone were to seek his life, he essentially declares all out war on their family.  If seven-fold vengeance wasn’t enough of a deterent, then surely vengeance times seventy-seven is.  But as the story goes, soon the whole earth is filled with violence and God is sorry to have begun this whole humanity project in the first place.  The mark of Cain has failed to protect the human family from each other and has actually served to exponentially increase violence.  The story of vengeance seven times and then seventy seven times set in motion one trajectory of human history.  A trajectory that is inherently self-destructive.  Soon enough God starts a parallel story with the calling of Abraham and Sarah.  Their mark, their mission, is to be one of exponential blessing.  Through this one family, all peoples of the earth will be blessed.  This is the calling of the people of Israel and all people who claim Abraham as a spiritual ancestor.    

So when Peter and Jesus converse about forgiveness seven times and then seventy seven times, it is a clarifying of this calling of blessing.  One that stands in direct contrast to the logic of vengeance.  As if Jesus would like us to think of forgiveness as revenge in reverse.  One unending practice of seventy seven to undo the other seemingly unending practice of seventy-seven that has been passed down through generations.    

This phrase, revenge in reverse, comes out of a recent article in the magazine The Marketplace put out by Mennonite Economic Development Associates.  The article tells the story of Harry Giesbrecht.  He was born in the Mennonite colony of Lichtenau in central Ukraine and was forced to flee when the communist party came into power.  His father was taken as a political prison and forced to work on the Trans-Siberian railroad and his mother fled on foot with him and her six other children.  Harry lived in povety for several decades and eventually made it to Canada where he became an engineer and business man.  In the mid 80’s he was one of the first western business men to work with Russia and he decided to commit his life to rebuilding the country.  On one occasion early in his time there he and other western business men were invited to a villa in the Caucus Mountains and during the festivities he gave a word to his hosts.  This is how he reports what he said: ““I told them I was going to say what was really on my mind. I said, ‘You probably know all about me. You know that you took my father away, that you destroyed my family. You took my oldest brother in 1937, never to be heard of again. You know all of this. And now you’re inviting me, as a businessman, to come and invest in your country. You know what I will suggest? I suggest you build a bridge across the Atlantic Ocean and that we meet on the middle of the bridge, throw our arms around each other, and say we are brothers. Our world is so small that it took Sputnik only 60 minutes to travel all the way around. Why are we enemies?” http://www.meda.org/NewsPublications/TheMarketplace/Archives.html   He says he thinks about his work as an act of forgiveness through revenge in reverse and that out of all of his many projects across the region he is especially fulfilled in the rebuilding of his home town of Lichtenau. 

It’s interesting that the subject of forgiveness comes up in the gospel reading on the same time that we observe the anniversary of the wrong done to our nation in the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentegon.  A response not even on the table as far as our nation was concerned.  Not on the table, not even in the room or in the building.  We readily accessed the religious notions of bringing the evil doers to justice and fighting for the righteousness of our cause….alright….but bypassed the also religious discipline of forgiveness.  I wonder what could happen among us if we live out this notion of forgiveness as revenge in reverse?  An active, engaging form of remaking our broken relationships. 

It’s a frightful thing to try and speak about forgiveness because there are some wounds that cut so deep that the possibility of engaging the guilty party is nowhere on the near horizon.  There is a whole process of inner work that we undergo right along the outer work of relationship that happens.  I started with that inner work and then moved to the outer work, and let me end by returning to that inner process that’s always going on in the act of forgiving.   

One of the comments at our pastors meeting that I found especially insightful was when someone compared forgiveness to the grieving process.  We know that there is a process, a cycle, that everyone goes through when there is a loss in their life.  There is initial shock and maybe some denial.  There is protest and anger, there is disorientation and emptiness, there is a reorientation to living with the loss and establishing new patterns of behavior.  These are often experienced in sequence but there can be any moment at any point when the initial loss and emptiness feel just as heavy and present as the very beginning.  The hope is to eventually settle into a more steady acceptance of the loss, and to find meaning in one’s new situation and new ways of relating with one’s community.  So, are you ever completely done grieving?  Are we ever completely done forgiving?  Doesn’t forgiveness also have to do with dealing with a loss?  Something outside of our control that has been taken from us?  And the best way to work through this is not by forgetting, but remembering in a new way — learning, slowly, to see with new eyes.  And eventually finding peace in our own hearts and engaging the world out of that peace.

I think one of the reasons forgiveness is so hard is that it works against the grain of most of human history in how we deal with injustice and loss.  It is more natural to will seventy seven times vengeance than seventy seven times forgiveness.  But that’s what is getting worked out in our lives.  This slow emergence of the new humanity that Jesus ushered in.  Through God’s grace, we will learn how to live as forgiven and forgiving people. 

 

 

At Home In Our Conflicted World – 9/07/08 – Matthew 18:15-20, Romans 13:1-10

Since we’ve been away from following the lectionary this summer I’ve been curious to see what the scripture readings would be when we picked back up starting today.  I’ve enjoyed the change of pace in following the theme of the summer and selecting scripture passages that fit around each topic.  With a topical kind of approach like this, one can choose just the right passage that illustrates what one would like to say about the subject at hand.  But when following the lectionary, the scriptures choose you.  They’re there, already selected, laid out in that three year cycle that so many different churches follow together.  Rather than allowing us to focus on just what we find most intriguing at the moment, the lectionary makes sure that we cover a wide variety of stories and teachings.

In reading through this week’s scriptures, I found them to be….difficult.  Matthew 18.  Conflict in the church.  A process for how to relate with someone who has sinned against and injured another person.  Hmmm.  Tough stuff.  Not sure if I want to go there.  But the good thing about the lectionary is that it offers choices.  Along with the gospel reading there’s also an epistle reading.  Romans 13, Paul’s instruction to the Roman church that they are to fulfill the law by loving their neighbor.  Coming just on the heals of his instruction to “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God.  Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed.”  Hmmm.  The divine right of governmental leadership.  Really not sure I want to go there. 

What the two passages share in common is that they are addressed to those living in the midst of conflicted relationships – conflict with other believers, and conflict with governing authorities and institutions.  What they also share in common is that they have been abused texts throughout church history, with both being used by those who have power – church leaders, kings – to maintain a certain kind of order that tends to harm those most vulnerable.  They’ve been used as “Stay in line, or else…” kinds of scriptures. 

So, with church history on my mind and an inward desire to avoid talking about conflict and controversy, I did an internal Jonah and ran in the opposite direction of the texts.  Mentally sailing toward the opposite side of the world, away from relational tension and the complexity of relating with government, I reached the far shore of peace and quiet and isolation.  Ah, surely something worthwhile to talk about over here.  Looking around a bit however, I found myself looking at a strange scene.  I met up with Simon the Stylite.

This past week marks the anniversary of the death of one of the more eccentric characters in church history.  Simon the Stylite died on September 2^nd, in the year 459, at the approximate age of 70 years old.  He died perched on top of a pillar in the Syrian desert, where he had lived for 37 years praying, sleeping, preaching to those who would venture out to hear him, and eating the meager diet of water and bread that was handed up to him by admirers.

Simon was a part of a stream of people of his time seeking to be faithful to God by moving away from the centers of civilization into the desert.  With the power structures of the church becoming more developed and at times corrupted, some sought the pure experience of God through the life of isolation.  Away from church and civilization equals away from conflict and controversy.  Simon was one of these solitary seekers and in his young adult life entered a monastery and dedicated himself to fasting and prayer.  Not content in the monastery he asked to leave and lived alone in a hut for three years.  After this he confined himself to a narrow space in a mountainside, but by this time he was becoming well known for his holy life and people came seeking him for counsel and prayers, interrupting his prayers and meditations.  So he went away from that place, discovered a pillar in the desert that remained from some ancient ruins,  built a small platform on top, and decided to live his life on top of the pillar.  It’s estimated that the first pillar he climbed up was twelve feet high, but over the years people constructed higher pillars for him and eventually he was perched 45 feet up in the air, on a platform about 12 square feet.      

He lived this way for 37 years.  In his own, rather bizarre way, he found a way to live in solitude for most hours of the day.  He was only a few miles off of a main Roman road and would preach twice a day to people who came to hear him, get food from those who would climb up a ladder to give it to him, and give counsel to those who asked.  He was called Simon the Stylite, with style being Greek for pillar.  Roughly translated, his name would have been Simon the Pillar Guy.  He inspired other stylites to follow in his example of being the solitary spiritual seeker who gets closer to God in a literal sort of vertical way.    

There’s not a whole lot left of Simon’s pillar these days as pilgrims have taken little pieces of it as relics over the centuries.  In my travels in the Middle East in 2000 I was able to see what’s left of the pedestal and the church that was built around it in honor of Simon.

I hadn’t thought about Simon a whole lot until this week when my imaginary travels away from the challenges of church and societal relationships took me back to him.  He’s kind of the perfect image of what you get when you choose to escape conflict.  He definitely had his own challenges, but he set up camp on the opposite shore of where we live on a daily basis.  In my encounter with Simon, I’m pretty sure I saw him standing on top of his pillar pointing back in the direction where I came, telling me to go back.  This is the world where I and Cincinnati Mennonite Fellowship are called to live. 

So now that we have this bizarre picture of isolation and solitude in our minds, here’s another bizarre image to take its place – the one that these two scriptures from Matthew and Romans speak to.  As strange as it is to think of someone experiencing God, by himself on top of a pillar for most of his adult life, it is also strange that we believe we can experience God through our relationships with each other.  That somehow through the church, and all the idiosyncrasies of the people who make up the church, and through how we relate with our neighbors and our government, that God is present with us and that we are the Presence of God to each other.

It’s bizarre for us to believe this because these relationships can be so challenging and complex and at times unfulfilling.  But that’s the strange place where each of us here is called to live.  Finding our way, receiving our daily bread, even – getting closer to God – on ground level, mixing and interacting with governments, grandparents, friends, family, enemies, strangers, sinners and saints.

I imagine Jesus knew this well, as did this Apostle Paul.  So what we get are some teachings from them, addressed to people in their own context, for what this may look like.

So let’s take a brief look at these two scriptures of the morning. 

With the Matthew passage, the last verse gives a sense for where Jesus wants to go with things.  Jesus says, “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”  This is the closest thing we get to Jesus’ definition of church.  Church happens whenever two or three come together out of a desire to fellowship in Jesus’ name.  In other words, wherever there is relationship happening, even if its just one relationship between two people, then Jesus shows up some where in the middle of that and you’re having church.  On Wednesday of this past week we had a Spiritual Leadership Team meeting in the evening and a couple of us arrived early and were sitting out talking on the church steps by Peace House.  As often happens in this neighborhood, someone soon came walking by.  He was a resident of the Find-A-Way building down the street and after we asked him how he was doing he took a seat next to us and talked for a bit.  We had about five minutes with him before our meeting started, but I take it from what Jesus is saying here that before our meeting even started we had already been having some church together. 

Now Jesus might as well also have said here that wherever two or three are gathered, there, eventually, you will have conflict.  This is what he highlights in the preceding statements.  It’s interesting that there are only two areas that mention the word “church” in the gospels.  They’re both in Matthew, and one of them is here in this passage.  On the rare occasion that church comes out of Jesus mouth, he’s already talking about how to work through some of the difficulties of relationships that can occur. 

Jesus outlines a three step process.  “If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two or you are alone.”  If there’s not progress made here, you bring in several other members of church into the situation.  If there’s still no progress, or acknowledgement of wrongdoing, it becomes not just a private issue but a church issue.

It’s been observed here that this process only works when there is a balance of power in the relationships.  Unequal power calls for a different approach, which is often the case.  The overarching theme of Jesus’ teaching is that wrongdoing should always be addressed and confronted, rather than hidden.  The whole community benefits when we are up front with each other in this way.  The goal is reconciliation, but if that doesn’t happen, or if the sin is so severe that it will take a long time to heal, then special attention needs to be given to the situation and to the offending party.  You treat them as a Gentile or a tax collector, which, as Jesus modeled, means that you treat them with extra compassion, even as you expect them to change their behavior.      

The church isn’t unique by having an absence of conflict, but hopefully we can strive to be unique in that we deal with conflict in a constructive and healthy way. 

And what about in how we relate with government?  Is there a healthy and constructive way to be found here?  Romans 13 is one of many different scriptures that talk about how the early church was working out how to relate to the Roman Empire.  Taken by itself it easily looks like these second generation Christians are losing their radical edge and going mainstream in how they relate with the governing authorities.  Jesus gets crucified on a Roman instrument of capital punishment for being a threat to the stability of the region, and now a generation later Paul is instructing the church in Rome to “be subject to the governing authorities” and not to resist the authority that God has appointed.  He then goes on to describe a government that rewards those who do right and deals justly with those who do wrong.  This is one of those cases when I have to scratch my head a little bit and wonder what’s really going on here.  What’s going on with these Roman Christians at this time that Paul is writing that he’s having to tell them to chill out and not resist the authorities?  It seems you don’t ask a group of people to allow themselves to be subject to the good of the law unless they’ve been getting out of line on a regular basis in inappropriate ways.  While other New Testament writings show the dangers of power and authority and how wrong they can go, here’s a case where the virtues of government are being spoken of.  It’s not all bad.  Government does serve an important role. 

In applying what’s being said here to our time, a phrase that comes in useful is “insofar as.”  Insofar as our government is rewarding good behavior and dealing justly with poor behavior, let’s honor that and encourage it.  Insofar as our tax money is being used for programs of social uplift, let’s honor that and encourage it.  Let’s cheer on our elected officials for the ways that government is serving the common good.  But insofar as government is being unjust and leaving behind those most vulnerable, we subject ourselves to a higher authority.  The authority that calls us to speak up, address and confront the wrong, and call for another way.

The direction Paul takes this is the direction of us being continually committed to the well-being of one another.  “Let no debt remain outstanding, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.  (All) the commandments are summed up in this word, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.”  If we keep engaging in loving relationship with our neighbor, Paul seems to be saying, then our relationship with governing authorities will flow out of this.  If we realize that we are indebted to one another and each other’s well-being, then when the laws of the land serve this purpose we will gladly submit to them.

       I would guess that we all have at least a little piece of Simon the Stylite in our make-up.  There are times when we would like to escape conflicted relationships, find a peaceful quiet place, and let problems work themselves out without us.  I would also guess that none of us are going to take the pillar option for a very extended amount of time.  We get to live with our feet on the ground, trying to be church to each other, loving our strange and imperfect neighbors, and relating with the government as if our little voice and actions mattered.  My guess is that in doing this, we’ll encounter conflict in all these relationships, and that we’ll also encounter Jesus , who said he’d be there, somewhere, whenever relationship is happening. 

 

Be Still – 8/17/08 – Psalm 46, Matthew 6:1-8

In case you’ve not taken care to do so already, please be sure that all cell phones and pagers are in the mute or vibrate setting.  If you have any other electronic or noise making devices, kindly switch them to off.  If your ears are still full of the sounds and busyness of the week, kindly allow the volume to be slowly turned down inside your mind.  If your legs are still spinning from the hustle of the weekend, please allow them to relax into a coast and then come to rest with both feet planted firmly on the floor beneath you.  If you’re finding yourself being overly anxious about something coming up in the near future or if your mind is stuck reviewing something that has happened recently, gently let these thoughts be released.  For a short time take an exit ramp off of the hectic information highway and take a walk in the garden of peace.  Unplug yourself from the internet and be connected to the world wide web of fellowship and communion and worship.  Turn down the volume, slow down, take a deep breath, be still, be present, be silent.

Silence is hard work, much harder than speaking, much more difficult than being surrounded by any kind of noise.  If there was ever a golden age of silence when the noises of the world consisted primarily of wind blowing through the trees, birds chirping, and rivers flowing, that day is far behind us.  In our everyday experience the default mode is full of all types of sounds – the humming of the building that one happens to be in, the radio in the car or in the room, and traffic noises, to name a few.  And while these sounds are signs of the complex and interesting life going on around us, the fact that they are with us nearly everywhere, all the time, can pose a problem.  Especially since our inner world has a tendency of reflecting our surroundings.  The busier and noisier our external environment, the busier and noisier our spiritual selves.

There is a saying that starts by asking “Who discovered water?” to which the answer is “I don’t know, but it wasn’t a fish.”  The picture of being so surrounded and immersed in something that one is unable to even know it is there cuts a couple different ways.  On the one hand, this fits well into our experience of sound and activity.  If we are constantly swimming around in it, breathing it in and out, do we really know what we’re involved with and do we take time to be conscious of what is happening?  Is this river flowing in a good direction or do we need to swim against the stream?  Is this stuff toxic?  Are we slowly being poisoned?  Is it life giving and healthy and is there anyway for us to make it moreso?

The unaware fish in the water is also an image for our relationship with God.  While in Athens the apostle Paul quotes a Greek poet who said, “In God we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:27).  Our dependence and reliance on God are so wrapped up in our experience of being alive that we are rarely aware of how much God’s presence pervades every aspect of our lives.  And how is it even possible to always be aware of that which is the breath behind our own breath, the consciousness behind our own consciousness, the source of all energy and life?  We don’t have access to that kind of awareness all the time, but we get to keep moving around with our very being upheld by God.      

For us who are swimming in this strange environment that is filled with both persistent noise and the persistent Presence of God, there is a type of prayer that is needed to be practiced – the prayer of silence and stillness.      

The Psalmist says, “Be still, and know that I am God.”  The Psalm where this appears, Psalm 46, is not a calm, quiet ode to peacefulness, but a description of turmoil and even chaos.  It begins, “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.  Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea; though its waters roar and foam, though its mountains tremble with its tumult.”  The powerful shifting and quaking of the earth can be a literal description of something powerful and beyond our control, but also a figurative image of political and economic and emotional forces that feel larger than life.  The Psalm goes on to say, “The nations are in uproar, the kingdoms totter.”  One response to this could be sheer anxiety.  When the threat of chaos reaches level red, so do our fears and our willingness to do anything necessary to end the threat – usually something counterproductive.  But the Psalm takes us to another place.  It describes the actions that God wills to do in this commotion.  “Come, behold the works of the Lord; see what desolations God has brought on the earth.  God makes wars to cease to the end of the earth.  God breaks the bow, and shatters the spear: God burns the shields with fire.”  The instruments of destruction are themselves in the process of being destroyed by God.  This is where the Psalm says: “Be still, and know that I am God.”    I like the translation that the Jewish Publication Society gives here.  Rather than “Be Still” it says, “Desist.”  Stop. Hault.  For a brief time, look deeper, listen closer, and know that I am God.

Rather than talking on and on about silence and stillness, I’d like to lead us through one of the forms that silent prayer can take, called centering prayer.  In the 70’s a group of three Trappist Monks began holding retreats that taught and practiced centering prayer.  They based these retreats on the teachings of the Desert Father and Mothers, John of the Cross, and Teresa of Avila.  Since then different parts of the church have been helping to revive this ancient form of prayer.  Centering prayer is more about being than doing, and focuses on listening rather than speaking.  It is about making oneself available to God, available to the Presence of the Spirit and the small voice within us.  I also find it interesting that it is being discovered and used by those who consider themselves social activists.  There is a cycle of action and contemplation, action and contemplation, that helps sustain anyone who is actively involved in whatever form of work.  The habit of centering prayer can be a way of deepening ones relationship with God and restoring one’s inner self.   

If you’d like to walk through the basics of centering prayer and experience it some together I’ll lead us through that, or if you’d like to simply listen in on the process you’re also welcome to do that. 

Centering prayer starts with the decision to be still.  As one approaches the prayer, one comes as a listener, humble, open.  One doesn’t need to have any expectations for the prayer except that God will be present, whether felt or not.  You are here to receive.  As a way of signaling this you may wish to be in a body position that helps you be attentive.  Having your feet flat on the floor is one way of doing this.  Sitting up straight is another way.  Closing your eyes allows for the attention to go off of what is around you and be directed toward the prayer.   

The next act is to wait for a word.  You sit quietly, knowing that you’re in God’s presence, and let whatever sacred word comes to mind be the focus of the prayer.  This is the centering part of the prayer as you let all other words fall away and find this one as a centering point.  The word may be love, peace, grace, wisdom…or Jesus and Spirit.  You wait to see if any word appears as a center for you that may be especially applicable for you…..

This is where the prayer begins to get difficult as our first tendency is to want the word to come so we can be successful at the prayer.  But it’s OK to relax and not make a word come.  It’s OK to just listen.  It’s OK if a word comes immediately and it’s OK if no word comes……

If a word has appeared then let that word come to the center.  Let it be the voice of God speaking to you.  If no particular word has come up then you may wish to choose a word – hope, mercy, joy – or continue to wait.  Or you may wish to let your breath be the center of your prayer.  Be aware of your breathing and know that the Breath of God is breathing through you….

Let the word or the breath come and rest in the center.  As you let it come you can experience the word through your breathing.  Each in breath is a way of receiving this as a gift from God.  Each out breath is a way of giving this away as a gift.  You must receive before you can give away, and you must give away before you can receive.  You may wish to place your open palms on your knees as a sign of receiving whatever is being offered….

There are inevitably thoughts and mental wanderings that happen during the prayer.  There is no need to be judgmental about these thoughts as failing in the prayer.  As you come to notice the thoughts, simply acknowledge that they are there, and gently return to the center.  This is also hard work and takes practice.  If the thoughts are especially dominating and making it hard to focus, acknowledge that they are dominating.  Let the word start as a small seed and see if and how it grows.

There’s no other purpose except to learn what the teachers of this prayer refer to as God’s primary language.  The language of silence.  Being silent with God is enough.

I’m going to allow for five minutes of collective silence as we pray as a community.  There will no doubt be different sounds that you notice during the silence.  You can let them be.  They’re not your responsibility during this time.  Allow the word or the breath be what draws you back to the center.     After the five minutes I’ll return to speaking briefly about prayer…..

(five minutes)

Father Thomas Keating was one of the three who began teaching centering prayer in the 70’s and he continues to practice and teach it today in his 80’s.  He sees the prayer as being rooted in the gospels and the prayer teachings of Jesus, especially Matthew 6:6.  Jesus says, “Whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret.  And you Father who sees in secret will reward you.”  Father Keating has commented on that last phrase about being rewarded for the prayer.  Here’s what he says: “Actually, that word ‘reward’ isn’t very appropriate here.  Someone who’s praying – in secret, that is, having actually reached (a habit of contemplative prayer) – is not interested in reward.  I discovered in the Aramaic Bible that [the word translated as ‘reward’] really means ‘blossom’ or ‘flourish.’  This suggests that silence is the seedbed in which the Holy Spirit places the mustard seed of divine love.  It takes root, and grows, and you blossom.  What is blossoming?  The growth of faith, hope, and love – the virtues and especially the fruits of the Spirit listed in the Beattitudes and by Paul in Galatians 5.  Contemplative prayer is a process of activating the gifts that we received in baptism” (Sojourners Magazine interview, Dec. ’06, p. 35)    

Father Keating encourages that centering prayer happen in 20 minute blocks, so what we’ve done here is just a taste of that.

Centering prayer is one of many forms of prayer available to us.  It doesn’t have any instant rewards and it takes practice.  It will be more appropriate during certain seasons of life.  But it can be an opportunity for blossoming. 

Any form of a prayer of silence and stillness may be especially needed for busy and active people in a noisy environment.  Even if all we discover in these prayers is that our minds are on hyper-drive and full of conflicting thoughts, then we’re doing better than the fish who keeps swimming without knowing what surrounds it.  It makes us more humble, more aware of our own distractions.  If the practice of quiet prayer helps us see deeper, that not only are we surrounded by noise, but also the constant, abiding, pervasive Presence of God, then it is truly a gift.

 

Unpacking the Lord’s Prayer – 8/10/08 – Matthew 6:5-15

Packing for road trips has been an evolving experience over the years.  I have this freeze frame scene in my mind of heading out to Hesston College by myself, driving in my ’86 Ford Escort packed out to the max, containing all of my useful possessions that I would be living with for the coming school year.  Fast forwarding eight or nine years I remember Abbie and I packing the much roomier Oldsmobile for a Labor Day camping trip before my last year of seminary, getting to use some of our newly acquired camping equipment and strapping the bikes on the carrier on the back for some good trail riding.  Since we have added two kids to our family, packing for road trips has taken on a whole new flavor.  Depending on how long we’ll be gone and where we’ll be going there is a whole series of calculations that have to be done about what items to take and how many of each item will be needed.  This is already a little tricky when doing it for oneself and is multiplied with Eve and Lily. 

And although I’m getting more and more thankful that we have a gas-efficient little Honda Civic, there are times when the “little” feature of the car isn’t all that handy.

The acquired skill, the key these days, is packing just what’s needed for the time while we’re gone such that we maximize the storage space in the car, while still having comfortable room for everybody to have some space during the trip.  If we pack too much, it either won’t fit or it makes for too scrunched of a ride.  If we pack too little, then any sort of scenario could come up where we either have to do without or have to go to the store and get what we need.  So the question that has to be asked before each trip now is, out of all that we have, what are the essential items?     

When the disciples come to Jesus and ask him to teach them what to pray they’re having a very similar experience, asking much the same question.  By this point Jesus has already given them a catalogue worth of teachings and they have witnessed him on many occasions restoring the sick, debating with religious leaders, sharing meals with people of all levels of society, even begin to speak of his own death.  They’ve been following him around, sometimes observing from the sidelines, sometimes involved, rarely clued into the moment and, it seems, barely able to take in the full measure of what they’re witnessing.  In short, they’re disciples, Jesus is the master, and they’re on a steep learning curve.  Like other master/disciple relationships of the time, these disciples would have expected Jesus to give them a condensed summary of all his teaching.  It was common for rabbis and teachers of the time to give their followers this summary in the form of a prayer.  The prayer would contain all of the major elements that the master emphasized in their teaching and would have been a kind of Cliff Notes version of what that teacher stood for.  So when these disciples ask Jesus what they should pray, it’s as if they’re saying, “Hey Jesus, what’s your prayer?”  How would you boil all this down for us?  Of all these words and images and teachings that you’ve been giving us, what are the essentials?  If we had one suitcase, and could only pack just what we need for this journey ahead, not too much and not too little, what would it be?  To this, Jesus responds by teaching them the prayer that we’ve come to call The Lord’s Prayer.   

What Jesus actually said when he taught them this prayer is lost to us.  He would have spoken in Aramaic and given them this prayer in the Aramaic language.  What we have are Greek translations of that prayer that would have been used by the Greek speaking early church and recorded in the gospels of Matthew and Luke.  Luke provides a more abbreviated version of the prayer and Matthew includes the whole prayer that we know and is most familiar to us.  Matthew’s version is strategically placed in the center of the Sermon on the Mount, another signal that this summarizes Jesus’ mission, teachings, and relationship with God.

As a way of experiencing this prayer, what I’d like to do is something like taking these words out of their stuffed suitcase, giving each of them some space of their own, letting them be separated and unrolled and unfolded so we can give them room and take a look at them.  When one packs something in tight one can tend to treat the whole package as one big dense lump and miss all the variety and textures and of the unique items inside.  So we’ll take some of these articles out, hold them up, turn them around, and let them breathe some on their own.     

We’ll be following through the prayer as we have it in Matthew’s gospel, so you’re welcome to turn your Bibles to Matthew chapter 6:9-13.

Let’s begin with the first word and keep on working our way through the prayer.

Our – Interesting way to begin a prayer.  Our.  Immediately the prayer becomes something larger than just me, more than just mine.  It is we, us, our.  Placing us in a broader family.  A community.  Extended bonds of relationship.   To begin in this way is to begin with a connectedness to others.  We have this thing that we do in our worship together where we take time to share joys and concerns that we may be experiencing.  We listen to each other, we pray for each other, and we try to be mindful of these throughout the week.  I see this as one way this congregation experiences prayer as our prayer.  One’s concern becomes our concern.  One’s joy is shared by others.  The weight of a grief or the anxiety of a struggle or the gratitude of a blessing become owned by the community.  And we need community.  Prayer is one of those gifts that enables community to continue even when we are not physically together.  Whatever form our prayers take individually, they enable us to join together with each other and with this great big “us” of God’s family all over the world.  How does it affect our prayers to know that when we pray, even if we seem to be alone, we are being welcomed into a world-wide chorus of Spirited community? 

Father – Prayer includes the big “us,” but very quickly it is clear that prayer is about more than us.  It’s about our connectedness to the Spirit the undergirds our very being.  And what kind of Spirit is this?  It’s a Spirit Jesus names as Father.  This is one of the points where scholars are pretty certain they know exactly what the Aramaic would have been that Jesus spoke.  The word was Abba.  Meaning father, but in the familiar form, maybe better translated as “Daddy.”  A term of intimacy, naming both a respect and a closeness of spirit.  It’s been kind of a trip these last couple years starting to get called by this name and coming to know in a deeper way what it means to refer to God in this way.  Desiring what is absolutely best for the child.  That this is a name of intimacy is far more important than the particular gender it carries with it.  This does not mean that God is a male and doesn’t mean that we are not able to call God by other names.  Father is one of many metaphors for the God who cannot be captured or contained by any single image and name we have.  In Scripture God is also portrayed as a mothering Spirit.  Isaiah 66:13 says that “As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you.”  But neither is God reduced to human gender roles.  God is also rock, fortress, hiding place, eagle, fire, water, and dove.  When Jesus was teaching this prayer, and in his entire ministry, his message wasn’t that God must be known by any certain one of these images, but that the Divine energy that brought the world into being can be conversed with as an intimate.

The next series of words that follow Our Father begin and end with the same words — “in heaven” or “in the heavens.”

Our Father in the heavens Hallowed be your name.  Your Kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in the heavens —  The prayer is directed to “the heavens,” the beyond, the unknown, the unfamiliar and even unimaginable.  There is a great distance being spanned here — and God is intimate parent, but also deep mystery.  The Bible portrays heaven as a realm where God rules with righteousness and is rightly honored, like a just king in a kingdom where the weak are make strong and the proud are brought low.     

And this is the point where the prayer starts to get dangerous.  In Matthew’s gospel Jesus speaks often of the kingdom of heaven.  Giving parables and teachings and performing healings that illustrate what it’s like.  Only for Jesus, this kingdom of heaven wasn’t just something distant, something in a far off ideal realm, something that was only possible at a future date, but something that is breaking in right now.  The kingdom of heaven is among you, is near you, is at hand, Jesus preached repeatedly.  And this message is here in this prayer.  Your Kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.  It’s dangerous because the prayer starts to move both ways.  Prayer isn’t only earth being directed toward heaven, but heaven being directed toward earth.  Such that whenever we ask of God, God asks of us.  We can’t pray that God’s will be done without also being ready to be part of that will.    

Give us this day our daily bread  – The repetition of day/daily, highlights the focus of these words.  “This day,” “Daily bread.”  This day, daily bread.  It keeps us centered on where God would have us live.  Right now, right here, with enough.  Having daily bread is enough.  The food, the energy, the kindness, the clear mind, the creative ideas that we need to do well in a day are daily gifts to be received with grateful hearts.

Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us

Of all the lines in the prayer, this is the one that Jesus provides some immediate commentary on.  Right after he is done teaching the prayer, he says this: “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”  What do you make of this?  Are we to take this at face value?  Is this a threat, is it an encouragement, it is a bluff, is it a riddle?  Or is it an extension of what has already been established?  That when we ask of heaven, heaven also asks of us.  That the way that the kingdom comes is through the one praying.  Including the act of forgiveness and reconciliation.  That forgiveness is such a freeing, such a liberating gift that God is so willing to give that God would not want anyone to live without having themselves forgiven.  That God loves us dearly enough that God does not let us off the hook, but slowly, patiently allows us to experience the same kind of forgiveness for others that we know we need from God.  And so we pray with trembling hands, “forgive us our sins, even as we forgive those who sin against us.”    

And do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one, with some on the ancient manuscripts also including for the kingdom and the power and the glory are yours forever.  Amen. 

The final articles coming out of this suitcase.  I’ve had some funny conversations with different people recently about Mennonites and conflict avoidance.  Keith recently told me that he says he’s not really a pacifist, but more of a passiveagressivist.  Some of us Mennonites, and others too, I’m sure, are highly skilled at avoiding external conflict only to realize that the conflict has been internalized and has to be dealt with in some way.  In other words, it’s not a matter of whether or not we enter the time of trial, as if we could avoid it, but how we deal with it.  Trial, conflict, and struggle is situation normal for us, just as it was for Jesus and his followers.  But somehow Jesus was able to be a bringer of the kingdom of healing and wisdom and reconciliation in the midst of the trial.  The kingdom and the power and the glory that he spoke of were not the power-plays and the glory seeking ways that are standard fare.  In praying that the real power and the real glory take their character from God’s kingdom, forever, one is freed up to live the Jesus’ way in the midst of trial.

These are the words Jesus gave in teaching his followers how to pray:

These words aren’t meant for storage and they aren’t just for lugging around.  And we can’t stop at unpacking them and looking at them sprawled out over the floor.  We’ve got to try these clothes on, walk and run around in them.  Get a feel for how they let us move, how they shape our actions and thoughts and other words.  We’ve got to get comfortable with how they feel on us, and maybe also uncomfortable with what they ask of us.  This is a prayer to live with on the road trip of life’s journey.

  

 

Working Parables – 7/13/08 – Matthew 13:1-17,45-53

Matthew chapter 13 begins: “That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea. Such great crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat there, while the whole crowd stood on the beach. And he told them many things in parables.” It goes on to say, “Jesus told the crowds all these things in parables; without a parable he told them nothing.” (v.34)

Nothing without a parable.

As Matthew describes it, great numbers of people, crowds of people, gathered around Jesus to hear nothing but stories. Stories whose meanings weren’t always entirely clear at first listen but in some imaginative and new way made connections between the everyday world of the people listening and the holy world of the kingdom of God.

The stories themselves weren’t all that mysterious. They were quite ordinary. One notable thing about Jesus’ parables is that they often are drawn from work settings – Day laborers working different hours and all getting the same pay, a merchant discovering a great treasure, a baker who mixes yeast through a whole batch of flour until all the flour is leavened with that little bit of yeast, peasant farmers doing their seasonal planting of seeds.

The mysterious part came in when Jesus would hint that there was more going on in these stories than just common events. The most important word in Jesus’ first parable, the parable of the sower and the four areas where the seeds fall, is the first and last word, which is the same word. Jesus begins this story with the single word. “Listen.” After telling the story, he ends by saying, “Let anyone with ears, listen.” The story is simple, with no kind of interpretation or “faith,” “God,” “kingdom of God” language to be found. Typical of any farmer of the time, a sower sows seeds and tosses them all over the field. They land in different areas and grow with different degrees of success. But listen, Jesus notes. Do you see anything else going on here? Do you hear anything besides a common story? There’s something more.

Embedded in each story was this idea that these ordinary events, such as the domestic and public work we do every day, are full of wisdom and the aliveness of the kingdom of God. We experience the stories everyday, and our challenge is to listen closely to the parables we are living.

So if we take Jesus’ teachings to heart, then it would appear that work is a key place where parables happen.

Rather than go more in depth with the parables of work that Jesus taught, I thought it would be interesting to hear some Cincinnati Mennonite parables. So recently I asked a few CMF folks if they would be willing to listen closely to their work. To listen for parables. I asked each person to reflect on a way that the work they do throughout the day connects with faith, or wisdom, or joy, or an insight they have gained. You’ll notice that these don’t sound like typical parables. They don’t start out “The kingdom of God is like…” and they aren’t trying to tell an allegory about this representing this. They’re reflections.

What makes for a good parable is that there is a connection being made between a story and something deeper, something more, and I have found these all to be insightful parables in that way.

The words all come from these four individuals, but I’ve taken the liberty to give them each a parable-like name and to give a parable-like opening and closing call to “Listen.”

As you listen, perhaps you will experience what Jesus intended for his audiences when he told his parables – that your imagination will be sparked to hear the kingdom of God present in a new way, and that you will see something you didn’t see before, especially as it relates to listening to your own work.

So here they are – Four Working Parables.

—————

The first one comes from Ron Headings. I might call this The Parable of the Grandfathers and Grandson.

Listen. “The nature of work has changed a lot in the past 60 years. If you compare my job today at P&G to the one my grandfathers had as farmers in central Kansas 30 years ago, there are a number of interesting differences.

· My primary tool is a computer, my grandfathers’ primary tool was a combine.

· My primary materials are data and processes, my grandfathers’ materials were plants and animals.

· My hours are governed by the needs of the business; their hours were driven by weather.

· My customers are retailers; theirs were grain elevators and slaughterhouses.

· My job required a post-graduate degree; theirs required eighth grade and some basic common sense.

· My work is mostly mental and my play time is mostly physical; their work was mostly physical and their play time was mostly mental.

· My favorite mode of transportation is an airplane; their favorite mode of transportation was a pickup truck. (My close second choice!)

· I often leave the country for work; they rarely left the county.

This list of day to day aspects of our respective work seems so different, unbelievably changed over the course of only two generations…until you start looking at the values, the things that my grandfathers and I have in common across our vocations, things they taught me without saying a word, and things for which I am forever in their debt:

· The personal fulfillment and sense of accomplishment that we get from our work

· The pride in a job well done, a job beyond expectations

· Achieving a proper balance of work, family, church, and play

· Choosing the right priorities, even when that choice has consequences

· Having a deep passion for work and its intrinsic rewards, and

· Striving to leave the world, including our workplace, as a better place because we were there.

Come to think of it, ALL the truly important things about work, I DO have in common with my grandpas.”

Let those with ears, Listen.

———

Parable #2 that I’ll call The Parable of the Teacher Who Learns Through Teaching, by Mary Stucky

Listen. “The Germans have a word for accepting – “bejahen” (buh YAH en). I learned early on that the ability to accept another person is integral to being an effective teacher. Young singers simply do not learn from instruction alone. The following true story illustrates this:

Susie had a magnificent voice, and a very “over-the-top” energetic personality to go with the voice. She had the problem of a tight tongue, and would not loosen it, in spite of my instruction. She sounded like she was singing with a peach in her throat! She, of course, could hear herself better when she did this, and she was not about to let me loosen this control device. Out of frustration one day, I stopped the lesson and asked about her friends and her weekend activities. She was DELIGHTED to tell me all about her latest party, the most recent “love of her life”, the shopping spree she was going on the following day, her love for Nietzsche….you name it! After the hour was over, she went away happy, and I was frustrated. However, the next lesson she was transformed. She was cooperative, and was willing to make any technical changes I asked for.

All I did was accept her (“be-jah” her) where she was.

This also relates to my growth in Jesus. Knowing that He accepts me as a person, with all of my tendencies, my faults, and my personality, makes me more willing to be molded by Him and his Way.”

Let those with ears, Listen.

————-

The next reflection comes from Bob Wells. This would be The Shampoo Parable:

Listen. “New Acquaintance: “Where do you work?”
Me: “P&G”
New Acquaintance: “What do you do at P&G?”
Me: “I create the New Improved shampoos and conditioners.”
New Acquaintance: “Oh”

It’s not easy to explain that this pursuit can at times be exciting and rewarding. Not all the time, but enough to have kept me working there longer than most people. And not rewarding as you might expect, such as by getting your “improvement” into a shampoo in stores. Not rewarding either for the pay, wellll, maybe that is important. I’ll get back to how it’s really rewarding in a bit.

It’s exciting when you make a guess, a hypothesis, about something and then are able to show that it’s correct, or when you think you know how to fix a problem that is keeping a product from working well and you try your solution and it works. Or when you learn something that is really new — like would you believe that when you put a shampoo on your hair in the shower and the water dilutes it, the intensity of the fragrance can get stronger. It should get weaker! It’s being diluted! It turns out that some perfumes (not all) will actually get stronger from a shampoo when the shampoo is diluted and discovering this and discovering why is exciting. The perfumes that become stronger when a shampoo is diluted have a structure that allows them to be trapped inside bunches of cleaning molecules in the shampoo. When water dilutes it they are released. You can explain it to your peers and managers to impress them and that’s rewarding.

So, being able, once in a while in your work, to do something really well and to know that others recognize this is what makes work fulfilling for me.”

Let those with ears, Listen.

———-
The final reflection comes from Judy Herbold. I would call this The Healing Hands Parable.

Listen. “My mother was hospitalized in state psych hospitals 50+ years (since I was 6 yrs old). I was her caregiver and overseer of sorts; definitely a reluctant caregiver. Her illness (paranoid schizophrenia) baffled me. It was just in the last 15 years of her life that I began to understand my feelings (fear, sorrow, helplessness, anger) most of which belonged to her. It was so hard to be a loving daughter. Her illness terrified me, her smell and appearance were repelling to me. I felt so ashamed that I responded that way, and on the other hand understood that I was forgiven so I kept searching for a way into the Margaret that I knew to be kind and loving and intensely intuitive and who I knew held me in her heart as if I were The Madonna.

I so wanted to hold her and love her as I would anyone else who were suffering so and who had lost so much. But most of the time that I touched her she would decompensate and start screaming and swearing at me and I’d have to leave.

THEN one day I visited her and told her that I was in Massage School to become a massage therapist. She was courious about what that was and as I reached out and stroked either side of her face, down her neck and shoulders, arms and hands she transformed before me….into a beaming smile that lit her eyes into soft brown pools and her body softened as she slowly uttered “oh, that feels so good”.

From that point on she allowed me to touch her. And our most profound moments were in silence with me stroking her face which she loved the most.

I consider my work to be an affirmation of the Kingdom on earth. When I touch someone through bodywork I am in the presence of their Spirit, physical & psychological self. It is my job to honor the invitation, to be clear about the invitation and to maintain good physical, psychological and spiritual boundaries.

I believe we all have a healer within that when given the gift of total focus will come forth in it’s own perfect time to begin the shift back to balance.

This work has taught me to be more still than I thought possible and totally present without having control. It’s also taught me that when “what my heart wants” gets in the way it’s time to step back and remind myself that what I want for my client is what I WANT. My job is to open the door to the possibility of healing then stand in the breech (keep watch) empty, be still, trust.

Jesus was always touching people through his words and laying on of hands. I believe touch is essential to life. Of the few times there has been a shift, or healing I believe it’s because the client was receptive and believed in the healing power of touch. I don’t believe I heal, I do believe I am a facilitator of that healing.

Let those with ears, Listen.

———- In Scripture, Jesus only gives further commentary on his parables when the disciples come up and ask him to, so if you want to hear more you’ll have to speak to the parable givers. Like every good parable, I have found each of these reflections to help me see and hear the world in a different way, and to think more deeply about the parables that are happening in my own work.

As a way of bringing closure to our reflections on Work, I think it’s appropriate that we offer each other a blessing. Printed in your bulletins you’ll find a blessing that we’ll read together after we sing the response song. Please stand for the song and remain standing for the blessing.

 

What to Give Someone Who Already Has Everything – 5/25/08 – Matthew 6:22-34

A week ago Abbie and I had a chance to go out on a supper date and as we settled in and looked through the menu we were faced with something that is one of the defining characteristics of the age we live in.  It was a similar situation a couple days later, this past Monday, when we decided we were going to paint our kitchen and were talking about the color we’d like to use.  Pretty much the same experience I had later in the week spending some time at Amazon.com and following links to different authors and titles that looked interesting, reading through some of the book descriptions and reviews.  Same thing going to the library to get a movie.  And shopping for groceries.  And considering what we might do as a family for the July 4^th weekend this summer.

One of the defining characteristics of the age we live in – something that we live with everyday, is multiplicity – a great variety of options always in front of us, and the constant task of choosing from those options.      

On the menu at Wild Ginger we could choose from a long list of appetizers, then have one of 40 or 50 main dishes that were available, each one able to be ordered with pork, beef, chicken, duck, shrimp, or tofu; with spice level 1-10 and several different kinds of rice, or noodles, as a base.  This kind of variety, wonderful variety, is the norm at restaurants.   

Knowing for some time that we were wanting to paint the kitchen, Abbie and I had kept our eyes open for different colors that may work well.  At Lowe’s and Home Depot there are large racks filled with sample cards of every paint color imaginable that one can take home and decide exactly which one goes best with room and décor.  We had tried doing this a while back but didn’t get very far.  This week our decision process was greatly simplified when we thought we would go to Ace Hardware and see what colors of half price mistints they had available.  There was just one that was in the blue/gray/slate category we were looking for and it turned out to be a good fit.

The diversity of consumer options that we have are only one aspect of the multiplicity that we live with.  At another level there are also an incredible amount of ways to spend our time and energy.  On any given evening one may be needing to decide, Do I put in more time at the office to get up to speed on that project that’s coming due next week? Do my partner and I go to that play we’ve been wanting to see and is only running for another couple days?  Do I attend this community event that addresses an issue about which I feel strongly?  Do I visit my neighbor in the hospital? or Do I go home and be with family? 

Should I serve on this committee?  Should I volunteer with this organization?  Should I nurture this relationship more?  

Do I read this magazine or that magazine, or do I skim them both?  Do I keep ordering these magazines or do I save money and look through the online version?

These kinds of options point to an even deeper multiplicity that involves our very identity as human beings and communities.

The diversity of the external world is also now present in our internal world.  We even have options when it comes to our own personality — the type of person we present ourselves as being in different social settings.  The recent movie “I’m Not There” uses six different actors in different settings to play the part of Bob Dylan – each representing a different stage or dimension of his persona.  He is a young Woodie Guthrie ready to sing the world to freedom, a born again Christian singing gospel songs in a church, an aging Billy the Kid figure fighting in a wild west town.  He once said, “All I can be is myself, whoever that is.”  The film implies that Dylan, and perhaps we ourselves, are multiple persons, with different parts coming into prominence at different points throughout our life.  Trying on different personalities, experimenting with identity.

As we become more aware of other religions and worldviews we realize that there are many underlying narratives that communities live with that give life order and meaning.  Our own North American Mennonite Christian identity is one of many traditions existing side-by-side with various other Mennonites, Methodists, Lutherans, Roman Catholics, Evangelicals, Jews – Orthodox, Conservative, and Reformed, Muslims and their many subgroups, Buddhists, atheists, or any number of groups people choose to identify themselves with.  There is the challenge of sustaining one’s own identity while also staying open to the humanity and wisdom of other traditions.          

In its best sense, multiplicity can be wonderfully freeing.  We have options and we’re not stuck in one way of experiencing the world.  There are many good ways to use our time, many narratives to learn from, many diverse expressions of beauty and wisdom.  We are not Hebrew slaves under the rule of Pharaoh having our every move dictated to us and having no say in how we go about our lives.  We’re in the promised land that the industrial, scientific, and information revolutions have brought us into.  The menu of food for supper and paint for the kitchen is full, and we are free to choose what we desire out of the great variety.       

But there is a flip side to multiplicity.  In a word, we could call it “anxiety.”  Rather than being freeing, the presence of abundance and plenty and the many can enslave us.  All these options can be paralyzing, when it comes to what to purchase and when it comes to who we are becoming.  Allowing ourselves to be defined by so much otherness that we lose a sense of who we are.  Our energy and our focus can become scattered.  We’re pulled in multiple directions, unsure where to commit, how much to give here or there, what to include in our lives and what to exclude.  In the middle of the 20^th century poet WH Auden wrote a Pulitzer prize winning poem called “The Age of Anxiety,” referring to this present time, when we have more than ever before but have not been able to find ourselves, or find peace with God.  “Now is the age of anxiety,” he says.         

Maybe our condition is best summarized by the great philosopher Jerry Seinfeld.  He’s a TV guy, so here’s what he says about our relationship with TV, which plays out in all our other relationships.  He says that people don’t watch TV because they want to see what’s on, they want to see what else is on.  The abundance of options can sometimes leave us in a frantic state of constantly flipping through the channels, never quite content with what we’re seeing in front of us and always wondering what it is we may be missing should we commit ourselves to this one particular choice. 

One response to this kind of unease is a turn to fundamentalism.  In many ways, fundamentalism is a natural survival instinct against the overwhelming nature of multiplicity that we are faced with.  Rather than getting lost in the sea of ambiguous variety, fundamentalism establishes a sure footing on which to stand.  It does this by rejecting all other options to make it such that there is only one true path, one true choice, one way of being human.  We’ve seen this happen in the last half-century with religion in Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.  But there are also fundamentalist atheists – Richard Dawkins being one of the better-known names now – who claim that their path is the only way without leaving any room for nuance or other perspectives.  Fundamentalism has the same underlying structure no matter what the brand, and it’s often willing to defend itself with violence.  One solution to the anxiety caused by multiplicity is to toss out complexity, the grays, the in betweens, the voices that don’t fit your mold, and cling to a rigid philosophy and set of rules. 

So here’s the question put to us:  How are we to live in a healthy way with the multiplicity without falling into either extreme of being consumed by anxiety or embracing destructive fundamentalism?

In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells his listeners – “Do not be anxious.  Do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear.  Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?”  To those who have little, and those who have much, Jesus is putting out an invitation to be free from being over-anxious because anxiety works at odds with the ways of the kingdom.  Precisely because it is paralyzing and scatters our God given energy.  

Kierkegaard said, “Purity of heart is to will one thing.”  We are conditioned to will many things, but the call is to will one thing.  This emphasis on the one thing is exactly where Jesus directs this teaching.

It begins with the eye, where we look and how we focus.  Vv. 22-23: “The eye is the lamp of the body.  So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness.”  The eye here takes on the role of being the point of exchange between the inner and the outer world.  The doorway that leads in and out of the self.  There is the light within and the light without.  Or the darkness.  When what we see of the outside world is scattered and blurred, our inner world also becomes scattered and blurred.  But if the inner eye can have a healthy focus, our lives have focus and more clarity.  In the ancient world it was believed that the eye not only received light from the outside, but it that it projected the inner light out into the world.  So Jesus can call the eye the lamp.  It’s what lights the way.  A healthy inner light has an affect on how we see and experience the world.    

And what makes for a healthy eye?

V.24.  “No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other.  You cannot serve both God and wealth.”  Jesus says it’s not a matter of having 20 or ten or five different things that we’re trying to will, or accomplish – areas where we focus our desires.  No one can even serve two masters.  There must be a center, and there’s not room for two in the center.  It is singular.  Centeredness of Being.  Willing one thing.

The message here is similar to one that Goshen College President Jim Brenneman gave at the last Central District Conference Annual Gathering.  His suggestion for a point of focus was Jesus’ response to the lawyer who asked him, Out of all the commandments, which one was the greatest.  The focal point for all the commandments, Jesus responded, is to Love God will all your being, and to love your neighbor as yourself.  This is another way of saying the same thing.  It is freeing to have this kind of center that holds us intact.   

Jesus has another way of saying this in this passage, “Therefore do not worry, do not be anxious, saying, ‘what will we eat? Or What will we wear? For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things.  But strive first for the kingdom of God and God’s righteousness.”  Again, a primacy of focus.  Seeking first the kingdom of God. 

Multiplicity and an abundance of choices can lead to being overwhelmed by anxiety, can lead to resorting to a fundamentalist stance, or can challenge us to find a center.  To will one thing.  The suggestion here is that at our core we are not multi-taskers, with our energy flying out in all directions every which way.  We are invited to trade in a life of multitasking for unitasking, serving God.  Seeking the Kingdom of God in all we do.  Now there’s going to be plenty of things rotating around that center and it could very well often involve doing more than one thing at once, especially if you have small children, but there is a singularity of purpose that gives us a focus.  And then this is when freedom of spirit comes into play.  When we have that center of seeking first the Kingdom of God in all things, we’re more and more freed up to engage this multiplicity in a healthy way.  When God is our center and not money, we’re free to possess money without being possessed by it.  The wonderful variety and diversity and differences and multiplicity around us become more and more a gift and not a threat.  The eye has a focus.

What does Jesus offers to the person, or the culture, who already has everything?  It’s that one thing, the center, that transforms how we relate with everything else.     

 

Resurrection Happens – 3/23/08 – Matthew 28:1-10

 As beautiful as spring can be, I have to admit that I’ve always been more of a fall guy.  I never sat down and decided that fall was going to be my favorite season, but for some reason it’s the time of year that I enjoy the most.  There’s something in the air then for me that makes breathing and walking and running a little more rich of an experience.  I think trees are most beautiful when their leaves are changing colors and falling.  I get more emotional in the fall, too.  I feel things deeper, feel an extra sense of connection to things.  I miss my family more in the fall.  I’m a pretty big fan of all four seasons, but as far as I’m concerned there’s the other three, and then there’s fall. 

 So I was a little surprised this past spring, a year ago, when I started to get really excited about our tulips coming up and the trees starting to bud.  This excitement and amazement may be something that some of you experience every spring, but for me it was something new.  It had never really affected me the way it did last spring.  Walking around the neighborhood and seeing things come to life gave this unexpected sense of relief that things were growing.  Never one to simply let myself feel something without trying to analyze why I’m feeling it, I did a little reflecting of why this spring would be different than others for me.  What I came up with was that there had been a lot of changes in the past year, and with the changes came a lot of new responsibilities.  Abbie and I were relatively new parents, with Eve just a little over a year old, and we were then already expecting our second – fatherhood.  We had moved out of the rental housing of the seminary and had bought our first home in a city we’d never lived in before – new homeowners.  I had gone from being a student to being a full time pastor, still navigating my way through the first year.  In short, we had crossed a threshold that landed us squarely in the world of responsibility.  And so more than ever, our lives were made up of managing, and caring, and planning, and creating, and seeing that things that needed to happen, happened.  These things weren’t overly burdensome, but they did involve constant thoughtful attention and care.

And then, when we’re right in the middle of this, spring happens.  Without any planning or managing on our parts, things start growing and flowering and I didn’t have to do anything to make it happen.  I didn’t have to write any emails or attend committee meetings, I didn’t have to get up in the middle of the night to make sure everything was OK with it.  Things were just blooming and there wasn’t anything I could do except enjoy it and receive it.  I think that’s why I got more excited than usual last spring.

There is a bumper sticker type phrase that I will appropriately slightly alter:  Stuff Happens.  Meaning Bad Stuff Happens.  It’s inevitable, no matter how many precautions one takes, no matter how much one tries to avoid trouble or danger or that snag that catches and tears your favorite pair of pants or that parked car that somehow got in your way when you were pulling out of the lot, or that wrong click of the mouse that deletes a document you’d been working on for hours — manage life all you want –  Stuff is going to happen.  Quite true.  Sad, but true.    

Also true, wonderfully true, is that no matter how limited our ability to hold everything together and control outcomes and manage results and make things grow – that spring does happen.  And so does resurrection. 

“After the Sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb” of Jesus.  In all of the gospels, it is women who are the first to witness the resurrection.  In church tradition Mary Magdelene is even known as the apostle to the apostles.  Matthew tells us nothing of these women throughout his gospel until a few verses before Easter morning.  Describing the scene at Jesus’ crucifixion, Matthew says in 27:55-56, “Many women were also there, looking on from a distance; they had followed Jesus from Galilee and had provided for him.  Among them were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of the James and Joseph, and the mother of the sons of Zebedee.”  “Following” Jesus, as we hear throughout Matthew, is a sign of discipleship.  Luke gives women an overall more prominent role in his gospel and provides a few more details of who these women were.  He notes in chapter 8 that Jesus “went on through cities and villages, proclaiming and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God.  The twelve were with him, as well as some women who had been cured of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, and Joanna, the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza, and Susanna, and many others, who provided for them out of their own resources.”  It turns out these women had been with Jesus all along.  And not only as disciples, but also as financiers of the whole ministry.  If you’ve ever wondered how Jesus and this band of wandering teachers ever made a go of it financially, here is a significant part of your answer.  There are some wealthy women, some even having connections to Herod’s household, who are investing significant resources in this upstart Kingdom of God project.  Their mention here with the twelve indicates that they were a part of the inner circle of Jesus’ band of followers.

They are with Jesus throughout his ministry, providing for him, they are at the cross when all the other followers have fled, and they are the first ones to visit the tomb after Jesus has been buried, bringing the ceremonial spices to anoint the corpse.  These women who had lovingly helped care for and manage the accounts for and provide for Jesus during his life, plan to do the same in his death.  They bore significant responsibility for making sure things ran smoothly while they were all out on the road, and now they’re doing what there is that’s left to do now that Jesus is dead. 

For those seeking an exact historical account of the events of Easter morning, the gospels are not overly satisfying.  Aside from the consistent theme of Mary Magdalene always being present and the tomb being empty, each account varies in how it tells the story.  There are different combinations of women who are at the tomb, different details about what sorts of angels were there, where they were, sitting or standing, how many there were, and what they said.  The women respond differently to the unexpected news of Jesus having been raised and the disciples react in different ways upon hearing the women’s testimony of what they did and didn’t see.  In this way I’m reminded of Keith’s sermon he preached a couple months back of how to tell a true war story, how to tell a true fish story – what details to include and what to leave out and what to tweek from a previous way of telling the story.  Each of the gospel writers are doing their part for how to tell a true resurrection story.        

In Matthew, resurrection is accompanied by an earthquake, a great shaking of the ground all around the women.  And of course there was an earthquake.  On their way to gaze at the place where Jesus was buried and care for his body, the two Marys find themselves a part of something much larger, much more powerful than themselves -  an apocalyptic event of cosmic proportions they didn’t plan, arrange for, or anticipate.  The earthquake then grows a mouth and speaks through the figure of the descending angel who roles back the tombstone as if it’s a little pebble and, for good measure, camps out on top of the stone to make his pronouncement.  Jesus isn’t here, hasn’t been here for a little while now.  Take a look for yourself.  He’s been raised and he’s already out ahead of you, ready to meet you back home in Galilee when you get up there. 

What they thought was winding down and coming to a close, was actually just beginning.  The life of Christ that they feared might have been just a flash in the pan was actually an explosion of light across the cosmos.  Despite their limited imaginations toward what was possible through the Spirit who is Master of the Universe, the women found themselves right in the middle of a startling reality: Resurrection happens, it blossoms up right in front of them.  All the powers that conspired to put an end to the life of righteousness and justice and healing and love that Jesus embodied are shown to have actually little power.  Even death cannot hold such a life captive.  The way of Caesar is winding down and coming to a close.  Christ is risen and is on the loose.  And the women leave the tomb with “fear and amazement,” given the task of somehow communicating this to the other disciples. 

To say “Resurrection happens” is to say something not just about a past event, but something about the way our world is.  Resurrection is and always will be at the heart of God’s way of being present with us.  Through the many deaths that we die resurrection is the gift that transforms those deaths into a life affirming reality.  I would imagine that we each have resurrection stories in our lives and in the lives of our friends and family.  These are important stories for us to tell each other.  And I would imagine we each also have areas of our lives where we are awaiting resurrection — deaths that have not yet been transformed into a life affirming reality.  These are also important stories to tell each other.   

If resurrection happens, then we continue to be in a place that inspires fear and amazement.  If resurrection happens, then you and I are right in the middle of something much bigger than our ability to manage and control and plan our way through.  We are recipients of this gift that comes to us sometimes as an earthquake and sometimes as a gentle, slow awakening and rebirth.  If we are God’s, then we are resurrection people.  Christ is risen, and we are witnesses.  

As a closing I want to read from an Easter Psalm that I discovered recently that I think communicates something fresh about resurrection happening.  It borrows from the language of science, although it’s not setting out to prove or disprove any particular theory like we normally think of science doing.  It does offers some honest reflection on our longing for resurrection hope and some creative metaphors for telling a resurrection story. 

E = MC2 Easter

Brother Einstein’s Easter Law

delights my hopeful heart

which wishes to never die.

For that quantum equation maintains

that matter taken to the speed of light squared

is turned into pure energy again.

My body, so subject to sickness,

to aging and death’s cold bite,

is a companion human body of Christ

who encountered the kiss of death

upon Good Friday’s consecrated cross.

 The lifeless matter of his once vibrant body

was carried away to the grave,

condemned to become a worm’s decaying dinner.

Yet, you who are Life could not stand to see

your beloved’s body decay,

so you carried out once again

your first and awesome act of creation.

You reanimated the matter of his body

and moved its molecules

at more than the speed of light,

and it was again transformed

into the Light of Lights,

into pure eternal energy.

In your infinite design

nothing dies;

it only changes form,

until it finally and forever changes

into your form,

into the energy of the light of love divine.

Take hope, my heart,

be firm, my feeble faith,

for the matter of the flesh and bone I call me

will also become an Einstein Easter Event.

 (Edward Hays, Prayers for a Planetary Pilgrim: A Personal Manual for Prayer and Ritual, Forest of Peace Publishing, Inc., 1989)