It's Pentecost and Trinity so lets mix the two. John 3 is one of the readings for Trinity. I have to admit that I much prefer talking about the close of the reading, 16 and 17 than addressing the famous "You must be born again." Yet while I was worshiping with the delightful seniors at the PCH on Thursday, I realized something.
We didn't ask or take part in being born the first time.
Really, it just happens. I'm sure if you polled babies minutes after they were born that they would be very unhappy with the situation. They feel cold and separated from their mother. Light hurts their eyes, and it isn't long before hunger makes its presence felt. Yet we breathe and get on with life.
When we are born the second time, it happens the same way. We aren't asked. There is no poll or tick box saying "Do you want to be born of the Spirit?" It just is, and it already is. There is no formula, no prayer, no attitude. The only thing required of us is to breathe and get on with our lives.
But now we are not breathing just air. We are breathing God.
Friday, May 25, 2012
Friday, April 13, 2012
The Fear of Doubt
We give Thomas a hard time. It wasn't his fault that he was out buying groceries, or whatever reason he wasn't trapped by fear with the others in that room. Maybe he just wasn't as afraid.
Thomas, from the little we know of him, was the practical one. He was the one, when Jesus said they were going to Bethel to see dead Lazarus, "Let's all go and die with him." It might very well be that Thomas was just getting on with his life. It was really too bad that Jesus died, horrible really, but he was gone and and the cupboard is empty....
So Thomas wasn't there that first Easter Sunday evening when Jesus appears to the rest of the gang. He shows them his wounds, eats fish and generally set their minds at ease. This is real. When they tell Thomas, he wants the same level of proof that the others got. It's only fair. Jesus seems to think so. The next Sunday he shows up again and gives Thomas exactly what he asked for.
There is a fundamental shift in Thomas' perspective. He drops to his knees and cries out "My Lord and My God." I think this is the moment of his real call. Up to this second he was on board because it was the logical thing to do. He wanted to change the world and Jesus looked like a good bet. It would explain his lack of fear the week before. It wasn't that he didn't care, but it wasn't personal.
When Jesus shows up with his wounds and his knowledge of Thomas' doubt, the world shifts and suddenly Thomas is following is Jesus the person, not Jesus the idea. It is at this point that a lot of us get hung up. We are dedicated to Jesus the idea. Either the idea is not a very powerful one and it doesn't move us past our intellectual coolness, or the idea is a very emotional one and we need to protect it fiercely against all threats so that it doesn't get lost.
In either case doubt is a problem. If we are just intellectual Christians, than doubt is immaterial. We can change and shift our idea so it still matches what we want from it. We can even give it up and follow a different idea because it doesn't connect with the rest of our being. It never becomes more than an idea.
With the emotional connection to the idea, doubt is a threat. If we doubt, question, probe the idea maybe it will lose its power and our connection to it will fail. So the idea never really gets tested.
Either way we are a people who hate doubt. We want to know with exactitude. We have polls and surveys. We bring up statistics. We create scientific models. We argue, but we rarely doubt, we rarely question ourselves in the midst of screaming questions at other.
Doubt is a powerful pathway to faith. Thomas doubted and the resolution of his doubt changed him. He brought Christianity to India. He was driven, not by pragmatism, but by his relationship with the person Jesus.
Doubt pushes us to go deeper, past the intellectual, past the emotions to a place where we don't find certainty, but a person.
Thomas, from the little we know of him, was the practical one. He was the one, when Jesus said they were going to Bethel to see dead Lazarus, "Let's all go and die with him." It might very well be that Thomas was just getting on with his life. It was really too bad that Jesus died, horrible really, but he was gone and and the cupboard is empty....
So Thomas wasn't there that first Easter Sunday evening when Jesus appears to the rest of the gang. He shows them his wounds, eats fish and generally set their minds at ease. This is real. When they tell Thomas, he wants the same level of proof that the others got. It's only fair. Jesus seems to think so. The next Sunday he shows up again and gives Thomas exactly what he asked for.
There is a fundamental shift in Thomas' perspective. He drops to his knees and cries out "My Lord and My God." I think this is the moment of his real call. Up to this second he was on board because it was the logical thing to do. He wanted to change the world and Jesus looked like a good bet. It would explain his lack of fear the week before. It wasn't that he didn't care, but it wasn't personal.
When Jesus shows up with his wounds and his knowledge of Thomas' doubt, the world shifts and suddenly Thomas is following is Jesus the person, not Jesus the idea. It is at this point that a lot of us get hung up. We are dedicated to Jesus the idea. Either the idea is not a very powerful one and it doesn't move us past our intellectual coolness, or the idea is a very emotional one and we need to protect it fiercely against all threats so that it doesn't get lost.
In either case doubt is a problem. If we are just intellectual Christians, than doubt is immaterial. We can change and shift our idea so it still matches what we want from it. We can even give it up and follow a different idea because it doesn't connect with the rest of our being. It never becomes more than an idea.
With the emotional connection to the idea, doubt is a threat. If we doubt, question, probe the idea maybe it will lose its power and our connection to it will fail. So the idea never really gets tested.
Either way we are a people who hate doubt. We want to know with exactitude. We have polls and surveys. We bring up statistics. We create scientific models. We argue, but we rarely doubt, we rarely question ourselves in the midst of screaming questions at other.
Doubt is a powerful pathway to faith. Thomas doubted and the resolution of his doubt changed him. He brought Christianity to India. He was driven, not by pragmatism, but by his relationship with the person Jesus.
Doubt pushes us to go deeper, past the intellectual, past the emotions to a place where we don't find certainty, but a person.
Monday, March 26, 2012
April Fools
Palm/Passion Sunday falls on April 1st this year. This is appropriate for a number of reasons.
I write regular articles about ethics, religion and sometime technology for IEET.org. I am tolerated as a curiousity - a religious person who kind of makes sense. Still it isn't my primary goal in writing these articles to make sense, but rather to offer glimpses of another kind of sense that isn't easily accessed by the world we live in. Sense in this world is about balancing rights and needs, profit and responsibility. Worshipers of the bottom line say that it is just unreasonable to expect companies to reduce profits to feed those who are starving. Food prices go up, people are moved off of land that used to feed them, and the number of hungry increases.
The sense I offer is the foolishness of God. That love, that attitude and action of care, can - must - has triumphed. We just need to recognize the power of rejecting power, the wisdom of counting ourselves as fools, the audacity of thinking of ourselves as more than somewhat intelligent apes.
It is that foolishness of God that comes to mind as we look at the juxtaposition of Palm Sunday and Passion. Here we have Jesus riding in triumph into Jerusalem. It is a victor's parade, his steed shows that he is a peaceful King, but still there is no doubt he is a King. When the pharisees tell him to quiet the crowds, Jesus replies that if the crowds were quiet the very stones would cry out.
This is success as we understand it. If the life of Jesus were written by Hollywood, the movie would end here. There would be a fade out as the adoring fans of Jesus cover him with praise and his enemies are defeated.
Yet this isn't Hollywood and we know that life rarely gives that kind of victory. In little less than a week that victory will turn into the bloody, painful death of crucifixion. There are many theories about what happened. Why did Jesus die?
Atonement suggests that Jesus died for our sins. He was the ultimate sacrifice; choosing to give his life to reconcile God with humanity and erase the sin that blots our life by the shedding of his blood. People look at this these days and think eewwww. Few folks understand sin anymore never mind the need for sacrifice to atone for them. They just see a cruel God who demands that His Son die to pay for something that they only have the vaguest idea about. The other problem with the atonement is that it doesn't explain the entire life of Jesus. He wasn't about purity and piety. He was all about justice and relationship.
So perhaps the crucifixion was a political murder. It was the leadership that Jesus challenged that set him up to die. They were the ones that maneuvered the trial to end in Jesus' death. They were the ones who manipulate Pilate into giving the death warrant. It is true that Jesus challenged authority. He put people ahead of cultic religion. The same cultic religion that practice the atonement sacrifices that we talked about above. The political murder theory also doesn't cover all the bases. It explains why Jesus died, but not why he had to die. Jesus knew he was going to die. As soon as the disciples get that he is the Messiah, Jesus starts talking about death, like his death is an inevitable part of his ministry.
There are parts of both these theories that work, and there are a lot more too. The one I want to talk about this week is that God is playing an April Fools joke on the world. Here we have a guy who is a King, who rides into the city in triumph. People are thinking that now they will see a change. This guy is going to do something. All the time God is thinking. You have no idea what is coming.
What is coming is the utter humiliation of that person. Kenosis means emptying. Jesus emptied himself of everything. All his plans, all his preaching, all his followers, all his power, all his personality, all, all all of it gone. He hangs on a cross dying. Why? Because he chose to be there. He chooses to be there so that we will meet him when we experience the darkest places of our lives. We want to blame God, judge God for not running the world properly. There he is, on the cross, subject to our judgement. We demand death for his failure and we mete it out. We kill our neighbours, we kill our faith , we kill love. God weeps and bleeds for us not to cover our sins but His. Sin is separation, and God is separated from us, separated by our pride, our need to blame, our need to be right. So God dies.
Jesus is there on the cross utterly empty and we can't take our eyes off of him. His very emptiness compels us. We realize that this world we depend on is empty. We are empty. We are lost. We have killed Love.
But that isn't the end, the punchline isn't the cross, it comes three days (more or less) later when women go to the tomb and find that it is empty. Empty of death, empty of guilt, empty of sin. God is laughing with joy because this is the joke. Here is the point. Love wins. It isn't about sin, except that it is forgiven, it isn't about politics and power, except that they have no lasting power. Love wins. Jesus emptied himself so he could be filled, so we could be filled with the only thing that is eternal
Jesus died because he loves us, even when we don't. This God, She isn't about blame and sin and the games of guilt and shame. She is about welcome and hope, and most especially Love.
It is good to weep on Good Friday, it makes the laughter on Easter all that sweeter.
I write regular articles about ethics, religion and sometime technology for IEET.org. I am tolerated as a curiousity - a religious person who kind of makes sense. Still it isn't my primary goal in writing these articles to make sense, but rather to offer glimpses of another kind of sense that isn't easily accessed by the world we live in. Sense in this world is about balancing rights and needs, profit and responsibility. Worshipers of the bottom line say that it is just unreasonable to expect companies to reduce profits to feed those who are starving. Food prices go up, people are moved off of land that used to feed them, and the number of hungry increases.
The sense I offer is the foolishness of God. That love, that attitude and action of care, can - must - has triumphed. We just need to recognize the power of rejecting power, the wisdom of counting ourselves as fools, the audacity of thinking of ourselves as more than somewhat intelligent apes.
It is that foolishness of God that comes to mind as we look at the juxtaposition of Palm Sunday and Passion. Here we have Jesus riding in triumph into Jerusalem. It is a victor's parade, his steed shows that he is a peaceful King, but still there is no doubt he is a King. When the pharisees tell him to quiet the crowds, Jesus replies that if the crowds were quiet the very stones would cry out.
This is success as we understand it. If the life of Jesus were written by Hollywood, the movie would end here. There would be a fade out as the adoring fans of Jesus cover him with praise and his enemies are defeated.
Yet this isn't Hollywood and we know that life rarely gives that kind of victory. In little less than a week that victory will turn into the bloody, painful death of crucifixion. There are many theories about what happened. Why did Jesus die?
Atonement suggests that Jesus died for our sins. He was the ultimate sacrifice; choosing to give his life to reconcile God with humanity and erase the sin that blots our life by the shedding of his blood. People look at this these days and think eewwww. Few folks understand sin anymore never mind the need for sacrifice to atone for them. They just see a cruel God who demands that His Son die to pay for something that they only have the vaguest idea about. The other problem with the atonement is that it doesn't explain the entire life of Jesus. He wasn't about purity and piety. He was all about justice and relationship.
So perhaps the crucifixion was a political murder. It was the leadership that Jesus challenged that set him up to die. They were the ones that maneuvered the trial to end in Jesus' death. They were the ones who manipulate Pilate into giving the death warrant. It is true that Jesus challenged authority. He put people ahead of cultic religion. The same cultic religion that practice the atonement sacrifices that we talked about above. The political murder theory also doesn't cover all the bases. It explains why Jesus died, but not why he had to die. Jesus knew he was going to die. As soon as the disciples get that he is the Messiah, Jesus starts talking about death, like his death is an inevitable part of his ministry.
There are parts of both these theories that work, and there are a lot more too. The one I want to talk about this week is that God is playing an April Fools joke on the world. Here we have a guy who is a King, who rides into the city in triumph. People are thinking that now they will see a change. This guy is going to do something. All the time God is thinking. You have no idea what is coming.
What is coming is the utter humiliation of that person. Kenosis means emptying. Jesus emptied himself of everything. All his plans, all his preaching, all his followers, all his power, all his personality, all, all all of it gone. He hangs on a cross dying. Why? Because he chose to be there. He chooses to be there so that we will meet him when we experience the darkest places of our lives. We want to blame God, judge God for not running the world properly. There he is, on the cross, subject to our judgement. We demand death for his failure and we mete it out. We kill our neighbours, we kill our faith , we kill love. God weeps and bleeds for us not to cover our sins but His. Sin is separation, and God is separated from us, separated by our pride, our need to blame, our need to be right. So God dies.
Jesus is there on the cross utterly empty and we can't take our eyes off of him. His very emptiness compels us. We realize that this world we depend on is empty. We are empty. We are lost. We have killed Love.
But that isn't the end, the punchline isn't the cross, it comes three days (more or less) later when women go to the tomb and find that it is empty. Empty of death, empty of guilt, empty of sin. God is laughing with joy because this is the joke. Here is the point. Love wins. It isn't about sin, except that it is forgiven, it isn't about politics and power, except that they have no lasting power. Love wins. Jesus emptied himself so he could be filled, so we could be filled with the only thing that is eternal
Jesus died because he loves us, even when we don't. This God, She isn't about blame and sin and the games of guilt and shame. She is about welcome and hope, and most especially Love.
It is good to weep on Good Friday, it makes the laughter on Easter all that sweeter.
Friday, February 17, 2012
The voice of the weak.
Last Sunday we heard the story of Naaman being healed of leprosy. 2 Kings 5:1-14 Jesus at one point mentions Naaman in connection with the idea that a prophet has no credibility in their own community. Naaman was the General of the armies of Aram (around present day Syria). He has leprosy which will mean that he will no longer be able to lead the armies as lepers are forced to be separate from the rest of society. Naaman's wife has a servant girl from Israel who was captured on an earlier raid. This servant girl suggests that Naaman
could go to Israel and be cured. At this point we see the first miracle of this story. Naaman listens to her and takes her seriously. This girl is as close to being a non-person as you can get. She is a captive slave from a tiny country. It would be like a CEO taking advice from the girl who cleans his house.
Naaman goes to his King who not only allows his General to go, but sends him with a letter and a train of gifts. The King of Israel, who is unnamed in this story tears his clothes in despair and anger at the idea that he is supposed to somehow cure the uncurable. He decides that it is a ploy to start a war. Elisha hears of the visit and tells the King to send Naaman to him. Elisha is a bit of a conundrum. He is grumpy and anti-social, but his ability to heal in God's name is powerful.
Naaman arrives at Elisha's house expecting a show. He is after all an important man. What Elisha does is send a messenger to tell Naaman to bathe in the Jordan River. It would be like travelling across the world to meet with a famous doctor only to have the doctor send the receptionist out with a couple of pills. Naaman is furious. He sounds ready to start that war that the King of Israel was afraid of.
This is where we get the second miracle of the story. A servant talks to Naaman and suggests that he do what the prophet asked. If it had been some impossible task he would have done it, why not this simple prescription? Once again Naaman listens to the voice of the powerless and he goes to bathe and is healed.
This story is about the powerful hearing wisdom from the powerless. We in the church want to be powerful voices in the world. We want to have governments and corporations listen to us. Maybe what we need more than clout is humility. It is the voice of humility, of people who have no direct profit from change that will catch the attention of the people in power.
When I was working in Ontario I attended the semi-annual seminars set up by ISARC. There we heard about the need for secure income and housing for the poorest of the poor. Politicians of all parties came to listen, in part because we were not lobbying on our own behalf.
In this Sunday's Transfiguration reading the voice of God tells the disciples to listen to Jesus. Jesus who came to change the world through transformative love. Not by power, not by legislation, but by self giving love. We are called to reflect that illumination that comes from perfect love, and by listening to Jesus our Christ, become the weak that the powerful might hear.
could go to Israel and be cured. At this point we see the first miracle of this story. Naaman listens to her and takes her seriously. This girl is as close to being a non-person as you can get. She is a captive slave from a tiny country. It would be like a CEO taking advice from the girl who cleans his house.
Naaman goes to his King who not only allows his General to go, but sends him with a letter and a train of gifts. The King of Israel, who is unnamed in this story tears his clothes in despair and anger at the idea that he is supposed to somehow cure the uncurable. He decides that it is a ploy to start a war. Elisha hears of the visit and tells the King to send Naaman to him. Elisha is a bit of a conundrum. He is grumpy and anti-social, but his ability to heal in God's name is powerful.
Naaman arrives at Elisha's house expecting a show. He is after all an important man. What Elisha does is send a messenger to tell Naaman to bathe in the Jordan River. It would be like travelling across the world to meet with a famous doctor only to have the doctor send the receptionist out with a couple of pills. Naaman is furious. He sounds ready to start that war that the King of Israel was afraid of.
This is where we get the second miracle of the story. A servant talks to Naaman and suggests that he do what the prophet asked. If it had been some impossible task he would have done it, why not this simple prescription? Once again Naaman listens to the voice of the powerless and he goes to bathe and is healed.
This story is about the powerful hearing wisdom from the powerless. We in the church want to be powerful voices in the world. We want to have governments and corporations listen to us. Maybe what we need more than clout is humility. It is the voice of humility, of people who have no direct profit from change that will catch the attention of the people in power.
When I was working in Ontario I attended the semi-annual seminars set up by ISARC. There we heard about the need for secure income and housing for the poorest of the poor. Politicians of all parties came to listen, in part because we were not lobbying on our own behalf.
In this Sunday's Transfiguration reading the voice of God tells the disciples to listen to Jesus. Jesus who came to change the world through transformative love. Not by power, not by legislation, but by self giving love. We are called to reflect that illumination that comes from perfect love, and by listening to Jesus our Christ, become the weak that the powerful might hear.
Friday, January 13, 2012
God's Calling to speak and live
For the last few months I've been occupied with the ethics of responsibility and their intersection with human rights. See over here. This spawned an article at the Institute for Ethics in Emerging Technologies and some other discussion that crystallized my sense that God calls us to responsibility much more than she give us rights. I talk about this idea in depth at my other blog so I won't repeat it here.
This week's reading are about call. God calls Samuel to speak his word and Jesus calls Nathaniel to follow him. Samuel is given the word of God and Eli instructs him that he must speak that word even it means pain to Eli. This is when Samuel is still a child mind you. God doesn't tell Samuel "You have a right to live as you wish." Rather She gives him responsibility to chastise those who have mistakenly taken that right upon themselves. Samuel's first words from God are directed to Eli who has not taken responsibility for teaching his sons their responsibility as priests of the temple. It is this failure of responsibility that will result in the tragedy of Eli's son's death.
What words does God give us responsibility to speak? Do we watch passively as other abuse their positions and trample on the rights that we have decided belong to every member of the human species? A call from God is a call to responsibility. That is a responsibility for action, but also a responsibility to speak clearly and prophetically. If we are going to claim to belong to God, then we also need to be ready to be open to speak the words and live the life that God gives. As it was with Samuel, the words that we may need to speak will very likely not be words of comfort, but words that chastise and challenge.
If our world is broken and far from God's plan for creation, then we need to speak, and live the hard truths. We as a species are responsible for how we live with each other and with creation. We are called to be prophets. Like Elijah, if we are given words to speak warning and we refuse, we are culpable. On the other hand we are also responsible to bring the words of hope that God give us and speak them to the world. Not as an exclusionary hope for those who believe as we do, but a inclusive hope that says there is a purpose to creation and all of us are part of that purpose whether we understand it or not.
Jesus' call of Nathaniel is around the idea that Nathaniel has no deceit in him. He is truthful. The implication is that being truthful, he will speak the truth. As a witness to Jesus' ministry his words will carry extra weight because he is known to have no deceit in him. Our challenge is to be truthful, not just about the Gospel we share, but about our failure at time to share it well. The more we take responsibility for our failures, the more others will acknowledge the possibility of our success. No one in the scriptures aside from the person of God is perfect, yet we in the church strive to present a face of perfection to the world and thus fail at our real task of pointing the way to reconciliation between God and human.
There is a ministry and an authenticity in failure that can't be achieved by an artificial facade of success. Our responsibility as disciples called by the Christ to witness to the gospel is to witness to God's success in using our failures to bring good into the world. As we allow ourselves to be human, we allow God to be God, and we open ourselves to God working through us to bring hope and love into a broken world.
This week's reading are about call. God calls Samuel to speak his word and Jesus calls Nathaniel to follow him. Samuel is given the word of God and Eli instructs him that he must speak that word even it means pain to Eli. This is when Samuel is still a child mind you. God doesn't tell Samuel "You have a right to live as you wish." Rather She gives him responsibility to chastise those who have mistakenly taken that right upon themselves. Samuel's first words from God are directed to Eli who has not taken responsibility for teaching his sons their responsibility as priests of the temple. It is this failure of responsibility that will result in the tragedy of Eli's son's death.
What words does God give us responsibility to speak? Do we watch passively as other abuse their positions and trample on the rights that we have decided belong to every member of the human species? A call from God is a call to responsibility. That is a responsibility for action, but also a responsibility to speak clearly and prophetically. If we are going to claim to belong to God, then we also need to be ready to be open to speak the words and live the life that God gives. As it was with Samuel, the words that we may need to speak will very likely not be words of comfort, but words that chastise and challenge.
If our world is broken and far from God's plan for creation, then we need to speak, and live the hard truths. We as a species are responsible for how we live with each other and with creation. We are called to be prophets. Like Elijah, if we are given words to speak warning and we refuse, we are culpable. On the other hand we are also responsible to bring the words of hope that God give us and speak them to the world. Not as an exclusionary hope for those who believe as we do, but a inclusive hope that says there is a purpose to creation and all of us are part of that purpose whether we understand it or not.
Jesus' call of Nathaniel is around the idea that Nathaniel has no deceit in him. He is truthful. The implication is that being truthful, he will speak the truth. As a witness to Jesus' ministry his words will carry extra weight because he is known to have no deceit in him. Our challenge is to be truthful, not just about the Gospel we share, but about our failure at time to share it well. The more we take responsibility for our failures, the more others will acknowledge the possibility of our success. No one in the scriptures aside from the person of God is perfect, yet we in the church strive to present a face of perfection to the world and thus fail at our real task of pointing the way to reconciliation between God and human.
There is a ministry and an authenticity in failure that can't be achieved by an artificial facade of success. Our responsibility as disciples called by the Christ to witness to the gospel is to witness to God's success in using our failures to bring good into the world. As we allow ourselves to be human, we allow God to be God, and we open ourselves to God working through us to bring hope and love into a broken world.
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