"Who Sinned?"

John 9:1-41

March 26, 2017

I.

Jesus and the disciples come across a man who had been blind from birth.  This man represents all of us.  For there is a strong sense in which all of us are “born blind.”  That is, from the moment we are are flushed into the world we cannot see the world as it truly is; we see, perceive, think, and feel according to the defenses and projections that our egos immediately begin constructing.  We become conscious that we are small, limited, vulnerable, weak, dependent, and apparently separate from everything else.  And our brains shift into panicked overdrive, trying to figure out where and who we are, and how to survive in this new environment, which we intuitively sense is unsafe.

The first thing the disciples say when they encounter this man who was born blind, is “Who sinned, that he was born blind?”  Whose fault is it that this happened to him.  Who is to blame?  It couldn’t be his own fault, could it?  Were his parents particularly bad people, and is his disability a punishment on them from God?

This question misses the point on many levels.  The disciples are treating the man, not like a person, not like someone with whom they share a common humanity, not with empathy or compassion… but like an objective theological specimen.  They think he is some kind of impersonal lesson on God’s justice.  They think he is not exactly like them.  They think that they can see quite well themselves, and their seeing separates them from the man.  The way they see allows them to imagine distance between them and the man.  He is over there, and we are over here, looking down on this other person and making evaluations about his situation.  Like he is an inanimate thing.

They care nothing about the man himself.  They are only theorizing about the larger circumstance which caused him to be born blind.  It would be like having a hungry child come up to you, but instead of giving her something to eat, you prognosticize about the irresponsibility of her parents, or the inadequacy of the economic system, or her own imprudence, or our responsibility to her, or whatever else avoids the issue and places you in a position of superiority.  Most of all you maintain your separateness, piously moaning perhaps about how “there but for the grace of God go I,” and how great it is that God does not allow you to be hungry.  You examine her even more carefully, and discuss her predicament and how she got that way and who is to blame for it… as you chew thoughtfully on a sandwich.

Jesus, of course, has exactly zero patience for such heartless nonsense.  He snaps at them in frustration over their callous cluelessness, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.  We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work.  As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”  It’s not about who sinned, you numbskulls!  Why is it always about blame for you guys?  You’re looking for the answers in the past and not seeing this person right in front of you.  Most of all you don’t see that you are as blind spiritually as this man is physically.  How he got this way is unimportant; what is important is the witness he will make when he realizes that I am the light of the world.

II.

Then, wasting no more time on castigations or explanations, he spits on the ground.  He mixes the saliva and dirt with his fingers to make a dark, gritty paste, and he begins to spread this mud with his thumbs on the man’s eyes.  It is an act reminiscent of the creation of the first human, in Genesis 2, whom the Lord God formed “from the dust of the ground.”  We are made of mud; we are made of the stuff of the planet itself.  Jesus is just applying to the man some of the substance of what we all already are.  It is a new creation, a kind of rebirth.

But this is not the end of it.  We might expect the man to open his eyes now and be able to see.  Instead, there is one more step.  Jesus instructs the man to “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam.”  The gospel writer then informs us that the word “siloam” means “sent.”  Jesus has just referred to himself as sent from God.  Now he in turn sends the blind man to Siloam.

Being sent means, first of all, that you act on someone else’s behest.  It is an act of obedience and trust that you go where you have been sent.  It is not on your own initiative.  The man could have washed his face in the pool of Siloam numerous times before, to no effect.  You have to understand yourself to have been sent.  Being sent makes all the difference.

This is a bit beyond our understanding, as Modern Americans who value individual initiative.  To paraphrase an old song, we go where we want to go and do what we want to do with whomever we want to do it with.  There aren’t too many pop songs that romanticize going where somebody else sends you, or about taking what you are given.  If Jesus did this to us I wonder if we wouldn’t complain about being smeared with spit-mud by a stranger, and when instructed to wash in the pool of Siloam, responded by saying, “who’s gonna make me?”

Hence, we remain blind.  Because the only way out of our blindness is obedience to Jesus Christ.  If the blind man could have healed himself by some self-improvement scheme, he would certainly have done it by now.  Having been born blind, though, he would not even have the ability to imagine what sight is like.  And neither can we.  We live in our own bubble of limited consciousness, thinking that this is the only and true world and who we think we are is who we really are, not even recognizing the possibility that it might be otherwise.  It is what it is, we say.

Even Jesus’ word and example that we may have another, deeper, truer, brighter life, is insufficient, though it might be enough to plant the idea in our head.  Only obeying, following, understanding ourselves to have been sent, and going where we are sent, will make us realize the truth of who we are.

III.

The man does what Jesus says.  Jesus doesn’t even make any promises; he doesn’t tell the man what will happen if he goes and washes in Siloam.  The man obeys without such assurance.  He has to.  He can’t possibly understand sight in the first place.  He just does it.  Maybe even simply out of curiosity and the lack of anything better to do; maybe it just breaks up the monotony to go to the pool.  He has nothing to lose, except his prime pan-handling spot on the sidewalk.

We do not obey Jesus because we have any clue about what we are going to receive.  We go because staying where we are is intolerable and unsustainable.  We go because life has become unmanageable under the current circumstances.  We go because we realize in truth that we really don’t have anything better to do.  We have nothing to lose.  We have become open to possibilities we can’t even imagine because life-as-we-know-it is not working for us.

As long as we think everything is okay, we stay where we are.  We accept as normal that we are sitting here accepting whatever coins passers-by drop into our lap.  We assume our limited, broken, alienated existence is all there is.  “No thanks!  I’m good!” we say to any offers of unheard-of alternatives.

The pool of Siloam represents the water of baptism, which itself represents the water of creation, liberation, and deliverance.  The pool of being sent is a pool you have to be sent to in order to see.  Just as God sends the Word into the emptiness and creates the universe, and just as God sends the Word into that creation in Jesus, and just as God sends the Spirit into the church, which is Jesus’ body, so God sends each one of us on a journey of renewal and wholeness, beginning with and symbolized by baptism.  Baptism is where our eyes are opened.  It is our second birth.

The man comes back from Siloam able to see.  “His neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar began to ask, ‘Isn’t this the guy who used to sit and beg?’  Some were saying, ‘It is he.’  Others were saying, ‘No, but it is someone like him.’  He kept saying, ‘I am the man.’”

He kept saying, “I am the man.”  I am.  Apparently, Jesus doesn’t just give new sight to this man.  He gives him himself.  He gives him nothing less than his union with God, enabling him to say the same words Jesus says about himself repeatedly: I am.  In restoring the man to his true humanity, which he shares with Jesus, Jesus also restores him to his true relationship with and in God.  He becomes a “participant in the divine nature.”  He still doesn’t know where Jesus is because he has never actually seen Jesus.  But he receives from Jesus Jesus’ own relationship with God.  In obeying Jesus he receives from God by grace what Jesus Christ is by nature.  

IV.

The rest of the story is the panicked, hysterical, paranoid reaction by the human religious authorities whenever someone wakes up.  Nothing so threatens the leaders of the blind as someone who can see.  They drag the man and even his parents into court, the ultimate venue of hopelessness and exploitation.  And through it all the man calmly and confidently sticks to his story: “One thing I do know,” he states, “that though I was blind, now I see.”

Later, Jesus tracks the man down and asks if he believes in the Son of Man, the Human One.  When the man realizes who Jesus is, he worships him.  To see is to trust, obey, believe in, and worship Jesus… not as an object out there from whom we are separate; but as the Truly Human One, the One with whom we share a common humanity, the One through whom we participate in the same I am which is God’s very nature, alive, at work, and animating all the world.

+++++++

"Everything I Have Ever Done"

John 4:5-42

March 19, 2017

I.

Jesus and his disciples are walking through Samaria.  They stop at a famous well in the town of Sychar.  The disciples go off to find something for lunch, Jesus stays by the well, and a local woman comes for some water.  Completely inappropriately, breaking all rules and boundaries, Jesus starts talking to her.  

Their conversation is about the water, but it’s almost like flirting.  She’s talking about literal water, but he’s talking about water that will make you live forever, which is to say, symbolic, metaphorical “water,” the water of his Wisdom and teaching, which does lead to new life.  

And it continues this way until it gets personal.  Jesus says, “Go, get your husband, and come back, and I’ll tell you more about my magic water.”  The woman answers, “I have no husband.”  If Jesus were hitting on her this would all be going according to plan so far.  But then Jesus says, “Well, you got that right, you’ve had 5 husbands, and you’re not even married to the one you have now.  At least you’re honest.”

I imagine here a period of dead, if not deadly, silence.

The tone… changes.  A bit.  All playfulness quickly drains out of the conversation.  She decides to change the subject, and move to a topic that was guaranteed to generate animosity: the issue of where it was appropriate to worship.  It was one of the many things that Jews and Samaritans would regularly go to the mat over.  

Jesus says, “It’s not about which of these rocky hills God wants us to worship on.  Real worship doesn’t depend on places; it’s about the heart.  God is Spirit, and those who worship God must worship in Spirit and in truth.”

The woman rolls her eyes perhaps and just says, “Whatever.  When the Messiah comes he will let us know about the theology of it.”

To which Jesus says, “I am the Messiah.  I am the One you have been waiting for.  And I am talking to you right now.”

Anyway, the disciples come back loaded down with pita bread, hummus, and olives.  And I imagine they’re like, “Oh crap, he’s talking to a woman.  I told you somebody should have stayed with him.”  

But the woman scampers off back to the village, even forgetting about her water jar, leaving it there unfilled.  When she gets to the town she excitedly tells everyone she meets, “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done!  He couldn’t be the Messiah, could he?”  And somehow, this unusual evangelistic elevator speech is remarkably effective, so that the whole village goes out to see Jesus.  They even beg them to stay for a few days, which is unheard of.

In the end, the Samaritans realize for themselves who Jesus is: the Savior of the World.

II.

The woman does not get it until she sees herself through Jesus’ eyes.  When he says that bit about her 5 husbands, her whole demeanor changes.  It’s like he holds up a mirror to her and she sees herself in a new way.  And it isn’t pretty.  She sees that her life is a train wreck of ruined relationships, dashed hopes, crushed joy, disappointment, disillusionment, cynicism, and despair.  She wants an idealized Messiah to proclaim all things to her; all she repeatedly gets is these lame, human men who didn’t work out.

She’s been going through this ego-centric existence, doing what she wants according to how she has learned to cope in the world, with her defenses and her strategies… and it’s hasn’t worked.  She’s left a string of broken promises, broken relationships, and broken people in her wake, including herself, the most broken of all.

The woman represents all of us, normal humans, sleepwalking through life, going back to the same old well for the same old stale water, which is to say habitually relying on the usual sources of information and entertainment, advice and satisfaction, going through the motions; having basically given up hope for a better life; now afraid even to make another commitment because they all fail, they all fall apart, they all end in tragedy and pain.  She ends up alone and isolated, locked in her own routine with no apparent way out. 

And it’s only when this stranger, this foreigner, this traveler shows up, who talks in riddles and images and metaphors, on some other level, about some other kind of water that you don’t have to keep coming back to the well for but which somehow he will give you in such a way that you find welling up within yourself.  Which just sounds like poetry, or psychology, or philosophy, having no traction in real life for women having to lug real water back to their houses to wash real clothes and use to cook real food.  But then he exposes you to yourself, forcing you to look at yourself in brutal honesty.  And you realize that your life has become unmanageable, intolerable, unsustainable, and you can’t keep doing this.  This is not working.

It’s kind of like when an addict “hits bottom,” which is usually pretty horrible.  If they don’t actually die, they realize they have a choice, which is to turn their life around or die.  Which makes addicts who hit bottom and survive sort of lucky in that they have the benefit of this 2 by 4 upside the head that wakes them up and at least gives them the opportunity to change.  Most of us don’t get that, yet we still have the same choice: turn your life around or die!.  But we don’t know it.  We think our life is what it is.  We never get the benefit of some guy mysteriously reminding us about our 5 spouses and how missed-up that is.  Without some kind of shock, it never occurs to most of us that it doesn’t have to be this way.

Jesus comes into the world to give us this existential shock, and if that’s not how we experience Jesus, then I wonder if we have experienced him at all.

III.

Near the end of the movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, after George Bailey has his transformative encounter with the angel who tells him everything he ever did, he goes back to his home where the bank examiners are waiting to arrest him, and he says something like “I’m going to prison!  Isn’t it wonderful?!”

The people there think he’s nuts, of course.  But this can be the effect of hitting bottom.  You break through to another life, another set of possibilities, another reality.  Your old self gets smashed, but this releases your new and original and true Self.  You let go of everything you had been depending on, everything you thought you were, and you find yourself strangely, marvelously, miraculously held.  You find that you are and always were somebody else, and didn’t know it.

So when this woman goes back to her town and says they should come see this man who told her everything she ever did, and they say, “You do realize that everything you ever did is pretty bad, right?”  And she says, “I know, right?  Isn’t it wonderful?!”  It means that everything she ever did is not going to hold her back anymore.  

By mentioning it and showing it to her Jesus removes everything she ever did from off her back.  The One who takes away the sin of the world, has taken away hers as well.  That is, all the behaviors to which she had been addicted, and which expressed the fear, violence, anger, shame, and delusion indicating a separation from God and from her true Self, are removed.  Now she can look back on everything she ever did and not be crippled by it.

The clincher for her is when Jesus affirms directly that he is the Messiah.  “I am he, the one who is speaking to you,” he says.  Whenever Jesus says “I am” it is a reference to God’s name.  Remember that when Moses asks God for God’s name, God simply says “I am.”  God is the One Who Is.  God is the Truth.  God is the Fully Real One.  We are only real to the extent that we realize our participation in God’s reality.  

And God is the One who speaks the universe into being at the beginning, and here he speaks to this woman as well, as if by speaking he remakes, reforms, renews, reimagines, and recovers this woman, allowing her to enter into her own true Self.  He speaks to her, to who she really is, to the Image of God in her, and by doing so he embraces her in his own I am, regrounding her own identity, separating her true Self from the false self expressed in everything she ever did.   

The villagers apparently notice that this isn’t the same woman who left an hour ago to fetch water.  This new person has joy and hope and peace about her, as she gushes about this odd stranger at the well.  “He can’t be the Messiah, can he?”  It is an open-ended invitation to “come and see” for themselves.  This isn’t the imaginary, ideal personal savior she’s been waiting for, to which her former relationships didn’t measure up.  I mean, on the one hand she is telling them she “met somebody,” but on the other she is encouraging them to go meet him too!  This could be the Savior of all of us!  Samaritans, Jews, everybody! 

IV.

This is the effect that meeting Jesus has on everyone who is able to open their eyes and see whom they are dealing with.  If we are willing to allow his light to shine into our own lives, revealing every confused, deluded, secret, twisted fact, every broken relationship, every bad decision, every harm done, every self-destructive, and unbreakable habit, he shows us that it doesn’t and never did have to be that way.  

For he speaks to a part of us we never thought was there; he speaks to himself, God’s own Image, within us at the deepest core of who we are, the true humanity we share with him.  He tells us everything we have ever done… and he does not hold any of it against us, but allows that to fall off of us like the old skin falls off a snake, revealing this shiny new Self we didn’t know we had.

And maybe he also tells us everything we have ever done in the sense of revealing to us how our true Self in him really has been there all along.  Maybe there are things good things we have done and not realized it.  Maybe God has been working for good even in everything we have ever done.  And maybe having that pointed out to us inspires us to let go, and let God emerge in and through us.

+++++++

     

    

Nick at Night.

John 3:1-17

March 12, 2017

I.

A Jewish leader and teacher named Nicodemus comes to Jesus.  He comes in secret or at least inconspicuously.  Jesus has just created a disturbance in the Temple which would have made it dangerous for Nicodemus to meet him openly.  And they have what Nicodemus thinks is going to be a rabbi-to-rabbi conversation.  He starts out by recognizing that, based on the signs Jesus has done, Jesus is a teacher sent from God

Jesus responds by stating that “no one can see the Kingdom of God without being born from above.”  Later he says it a little differently.  “No one can enter the Kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit.”

So this Kingdom of God, which is the theme of Jesus’ ministry, is something that we do not see or enter in our present, normal existence.  It requires some change in us so comprehensive that it is analogous to a second birth.  Our first birth is of the flesh, that is, physically.  It is what we usually think of as being born.  We emerge from our mother’s womb and begin an apparently independent existence in the world.  And for most of us, that is the only kind of life we know, experience, or think is real.  

But Jesus suggests there is another kind of life, life in the Spirit, which is as different from the life we know now, as life in the womb was from life after birth.  And we come to this new kind of life by means of a second birth, a birth in, through, and from the Spirit.  

To be born of the Spirit is not something that we see with our physical eyes.  To be born of the Spirit, or wind (the Greek word is the same for both), is to be like the wind in the sense that it is not visible directly, but has great indirect, invisible, subtle power.  Just as we can see the effect the wind has on things because they are blowing around, so also we can see the effect on a person, and on the world, of having been born of the Spirit.  We can hear the sound of the wind, says Jesus, but we have no idea where the wind came from or what it’s going to do next.  

People who are born of the Spirit are like that.  We know them by their fruits, their actions, by the way they move things in the world.  It is similar to other images that Jesus uses for life in him: like leaven, light, and salt.  We see these things largely because of the effect they have on the things they touch.

At first Nicodemus apparently takes rebirth literally, and asks if it is about somehow climbing back into his mother’s womb, which is ridiculous; but that may have been a rabbinic way of pressing Jesus to be more precise.  Later Nicodemus is baffled by the wind imagery.  Maybe he thinks people born of the Spirit become disembodied spirits or ghosts, invisibly and mystically flying around messing with people.  It would make logical sense for him to assume this, anyway.  In any case, here he just says in bewilderment, “How can this be?”

II.

Which gives Jesus the opportunity to clarify still further.  He focuses on an obscure story from the Old Testament Book of Numbers, about a time when the Israelites in the desert were dealing with a plague of poisonous snakes.  God tells Moses to make a statue of a snake out of bronze and fix it to a pole, and lift it up.  Everyone who was bitten by a snake would look at it, and this would somehow heal them.

Jesus then says that what he is talking about operates the same way.  The Son of Man will be lifted up like that metal snake, and whoever looks at him and trusts in him will receive eternal life from him.  The act of seeing, and trusting and believing, has the effect of transferring important qualities from the object to the one looking at it.   

Snakes have an ambivalent meaning in the Bible and ancient cultures.  Obviously, the snake comes off poorly in Genesis, and elsewhere is said to represent the devil.  Yet snakes also have this mysterious ability to shed their skin; some people even considered snakes, if not to actually live forever, to be a symbol of immortality or eternal life.  And it is precisely a kind of shedding of the old self, the self of flesh, and the birth of a new self, in the Spirit, that Jesus is getting at here.  

Jesus says that he, the Son of Man, functions like Moses’ bronze snake.  If we look at him truly comprehending who he is and what is going on when he is lifted up, we will receive his life in ourselves.  His life is imputed to us.  On the cross and in his resurrection and ascension he represents us, we identify with him, and he kind of carries us along with him.  

This reminds me of the psychological phenomenon called transference.  It happens in therapy when the patient transfers feelings from a childhood relationship to the therapist.  But it happens in a more general way at other times as well. This is why we cry at the movies; we have transferred our personal feelings onto a character.  This is why I feel personal satisfaction and triumph when some guy from Cuba who happens to be wearing a blue-and-orange uniform hits a homerun.  It happens in relationships all the time, as we unconsciously work out with our spouse issues relating to people from years or decades before.  

We relate to each other instinctively and naturally.  Advertising wouldn’t work if we did not see ourselves in that poor guy who’s losing his hair, or that woman who needs car insurance.  It even works with animals; we transfer our feelings onto them.  Or machines or trees or rivers or just about anything.  It is com-passion, our ability to feel-with others, and we identify with them.

I wonder if there isn’t more to this than merely a psychological thing happening in my own brain.  I wonder if it isn’t an example of the ways we really are connected to each other and to all creation.  Unless we are some kind of psychopath, we feel with and relate to each other and everything.  And it’s a good thing.

III.   

So, if we are stuck in our shallow, narrow, limited, unconscious existence, and we look at Jesus, and we see him hanging and dying on a Roman cross; and if we see in him ourselves, our old selves, our flesh, our, little egocentric, self-centered, fearful selves; and if we can identify with him in his suffering, and then see how his lifting up in death continues in resurrection to new life, and ascension into a state of ever presence in the Spirit… that may jar our consciousness enough to make us aware that maybe there is more to us than our old selves.  It may occur to us that maybe we can follow Christ and lose those old selves with him, and realize a second birth, in the Spirit, of new selves.

This is what Paul means when he says, “if we have been united with him in a death like his we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.  Our old self was crucified with him” and we are free to live forever with him in the Spirit.  Paul indicates that it is what is going on symbolically in baptism, and Jesus here also says this new birth happens by “water and Spirit.”  Baptism is like a performative version of what Jesus is talking about.  We too are raised up when we emerge from the water of baptism.

Now, for lots of folks, they hear the story, or look at the cross, or even a crucifix, and it has no effect on them.  They don’t — as we say — get it.  Just some guy being tortured to death, which is kind of gross, and I’m glad it’s not me!  Just some hapless loser.  They don’t automatically identify with others.  They don’t empathize.  

People can be pretty hard-hearted, actually.  We hear about a war, or a famine, or an earthquake, or human trafficking, or a murder, and we don’t necessarily have compassion for the people undergoing such horrors.  Especially if it is far, far away or happening to people we have been taught don’t matter that much, or are our supposed enemies.  Especially when we hear so much of this sort of thing, it is hard to get up the compassion for them all.  We would be paralyzed by grief and sorrow.  But to have a lack of all compassion to the point that Palestinian, and Syrian, and South Sudanese children don’t affect us at all, that attitude will kill us in a way that does not resolve in resurrection.  To be that dead to another’s suffering is to stay dead, in the end.

Those Israelites, 1400 years earlier, looking up at Moses’ graven snake on a stick knew it was life or death because they had the venom inside them already!  That’s the urgency we need!  We have the venom of death already inside of us, and unless we identify with others’ suffering we will not identify with Jesus’ suffering, which means we will not participate in his life either.  We will, as Jesus says, “be condemned already.”  The venom, the poison of our own self-centeredness, will eventually take us.  Jesus is saying that we have to realize that the stake we have in others’ suffering connects us to him.  That’s  where he joins us in our shared humanity, in our suffering.

IV.

Of course, embedded in this passage are the most famous words of the New Testament, the summary of the good news.  “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that whoever believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”  It is all about God’s overwhelming love in entering our life, even taking on our flesh, to demonstrate that there is a way out of this existence of fear and violence, this blind, small, lame, constricted, terrified, and distorted way of life that is destroying our souls and the beautiful planet placed in our care.  There is another kind of life which is our true life, our original life as God’s Image, our real life, and it lasts forever.

And he, the One lifted up, is the Way.  He is the Truth.  He is the Life.  And it is through following his path of self-emptying love that we release all that separates us from God and each other, and even from our true selves, and we are filled with him.  In following him in his humanity, we receive from him by grace even his divinity, and find union with and in God.

+++++++

Temptations.

Matthew 4:1-11

March 5, 2017

I.

After his baptism, with the spectacular appearance of the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove, Jesus feels the need to reflect.  So he goes into the desert on what the Native Americans might call a vision quest.  He fasts for 40 days, and in the end the devil himself appears to him, dishing out three difficult temptations.

These temptations ratify Jesus’ identity as Son of God and promised Messiah of Israel.  They are also issues that have tested every follower of Jesus, and the church as a whole, ever since.  How we respond to these questions determines the integrity of our discipleship and mission.  In each case, we may follow Jesus’ example; or we may cave in to the devil’s appeal to the lower, ego-centric, selfish, fearful side of our nature.  In each case we may do either what God wants, or what we want for ourselves.

In the first one, the devil suggests that Jesus make bread from stone in order to feed himself after his long fast.  Jesus says no; people don’t live on bread alone.  People live by God’s Word.  

I take that literally.  In the beginning, God creates everything by speaking.  The whole universe is like a condensation of God’s Word.  And God makes this whole planet as a place of abundance and goodness, with more than enough for all.  It is not made to feed just us, but all.  In this sense, everyone lives by God’s Word. 

But the devil is not concerned about everyone.  He just tempts Jesus to use his power to feed himself.  This is the temptation to focus mainly if not exclusively on what I lack, what I need, what I want.  It wants us to dwell on scarcity; we are afraid there won’t be enough.  It darkly ruminates on what we don’t have.

The Evil One always builds us up.  He wants to convince us that we are substantial, separate, independent individuals.  He wants us as little knots of personal growth, like cancer cells, that suck up all the energy around us, and grow perversely for the sake of growing.  He wants us to block the light of God so we cast a nice big shadow of darkness in the world. 

Bread also represents money and wealth.  Applied to the church, which is Christ’s Body in the world now, the devil presents the same temptation.  The church is tempted to “make bread,” that is, get rich, or at least acquire resources.  The theory is that then we can spread the wealth around and feed people!  It is as if the Evil One says, “You’re no good to anyone poor and hungry; eat!  Turn this creation into bread!  That’s why God put it here.  Then, when you’re fed, you can feed others!”  He knows that people never think they have enough, and very little will make to the others.   

Jesus himself makes bread when he feeds the 5000 later in the gospel.  He is certainly not averse to feeding and healing people; he ministers to people’s needs all the time.      

But he doesn’t do it by taking or getting or acquiring or keeping anything for himself.  Jesus does not feed himself, then turn and give others what is leftover.  He lets what he has received flow through him to where the need is.  He is radically other-centered, not self-centered.

By pointing to God’s Word in Scripture, and then enacting it in his own ministry, Jesus models for us an economy of sharing and giving, as opposed to one of buying and selling.  Jesus assumes not scarcity but abundance.  His is the economy of enough, where resources flow to those in need, and are not regulated, blocked, priced, or hoarded by people with the power to do so.

II.

In the second temptation, the devil concocts a somewhat bizarre scene in which Jesus would gain popularity by doing something publicly spectacular, in the process forcing God’s hand to do a miracle.  He is supposed to jump from the top of the Temple and since he is the Messiah God will send angels to save him.  The Bible says so.

So Jesus is to wow people with a miracle, again centered on himself.  And then, when everyone is gathered around, he can teach them.  But what is he supposed to teach after he does this circus act?  Can he deliver his gospel teachings about how we need to deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow him?  How is that going to work?  Wouldn’t following him mean… jumping off of buildings?  Doing whatever you want and imagining God will save you?  Drawing as much attention to yourself as possible? 

The first temptation was about wealth; the second is about fame, popularity, glamour, being a star, being attractive and a celebrity.  Instead of gaining money, this has to do with gaining attention, adulation, admiration, and even a shallow kind of love.  But it is still about gaining, which is what the devil is always about. 

What does this say about us if we reduce the church’s mission to snazzy worship and elaborate marketing strategies?  We say it’s all about Jesus, but Jesus himself does everything he can not to be popular.  He heals people, but tells them to keep quiet about it.  He deliberately says things that drive people away.  In the middle of a successful rally, he disappears to go off and pray.  At one point the people want to proclaim him king; but he proceeds to deliver such difficult teaching that all but his disciples desert him.

“Do not put the Lord your God to the test,” means don’t expect God to bail you out when your plan flops.  And it will.  Maybe not right away.  We can force growth and success according to the world’s standards; we know what makes for popularity.  But eventually, if you tie yourself to human values and standards, reality sets in and you start to lose.  Eventually your special effects wear off and you hit the pavement.  

But Jesus’ message is about repentance, change, and transformation; it is about letting go of your old self; it is about following God’s plan and living in the truth.  Taking up a cross is not an attractive message.  

The church is the church when it does the unpopular thing.  When it stands with hated and rejected people.  When it is, like light or wind, invisible, seen indirectly, only by its good effects.  When it points beyond itself to God.    

III.

In the third and final temptation, the devil offers Jesus the glory and power of secular government: kings, princes, police, armies, prisons, judges.  The first temptation was about money, the second about fame, and the third?  Power.

The church is not supposed to have any money; what it has it gives away.  The church is not supposed to have any fame; it is supposed to be subtle and almost invisible like salt, light, or leaven.  And the church is not supposed to have any coercive, dominating power.  It is a vessel or channel of God’s power, which is revealed in apparent weakness and service.  God’s is the inside-out power of continual self-emptying.  God’s power is the awesome torrent of goodness and blessing constantly emanating from on high and cascading into the world.

The church has repeatedly caved in on these temptations.  In this case we have with nauseating consistency turned to violence to impose our will, and supposedly our faith, on others.  Christians have used torture, slavery, war, and genocide, but the faith that gets spread by such means is not that of Jesus, but of the devil, as we see here.  For to grasp the splendor and the power of the kingdoms of this world is to give in to the temptation of the Evil One.

Bob Dylan once sang that we all have to serve somebody: “it may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but your gonna have to serve somebody.”  In every case, when we serve the devil we are serving ourselves and our own agenda for existence.  We are grasping for worldly success in terms of wealth, popularity, power.  We are reacting out of our fear of scarcity, our shame about not being loved enough, and our anger about being powerless.

But when the church serves Jesus Christ it becomes a vessel for God’s love which is always about reversal.  The poor are made rich, the last are made first, and the powerful have their power diminished or taken away.  Which means that we do provide bread to others in an alternative economy of sharing.  And we do act publicly in obedience of God in expression of God’s will in solidarity with the least, not as a temptation of God.  And we do advocate politically for God’s Kingdom of equality, peace, and justice.  This last thing is particularly essential in a democratic system in which the people are the rulers.

In other words, Jesus, in rejecting these temptations, is not saying that he and his followers will have nothing to do with these areas of life.  He is saying that in them we follow God, who directs us to serve others, and we do not follow the devil, who tempts us to follow ourselves and do what we think is best for us and ours.

IV.

The devil represents our own ego-centric, selfish, extractive, consuming nature.  The devil usually appeals to our sense of what we want, what we need, what would make us feel good.  The devil is the one whispering in your ear about getting something for yourself.  The devil is all about us, me, you as an individual.  He continually posits a world of enmity, competition, separation, hostility, and necessary violence.

The Lord, however, always — even in his extremely debilitated state after a long fast — rests on the word of God… because he is the Word of God.  And as God’s Word he is always about love, justice, peace, unity, and equality.  He comes to show us that we are one in him.  We share a common humanity and a common createdness in which our separate little self, what Paul calls the old self or the flesh, is subsumed under the new self in Christ and the Spirit.  In Christ and in the Spirit we know we are not isolated and independent entities who have to be out for ourselves in order to survive.  In Christ and the Spirit we know that we are all participants in each other, sharing in the same nature, children of the same God.

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Fasting to Wake Up.

Luke 5:33-39

March 1, 2017 + Ash Wednesday

I.

Recently I saw some pictures of a few of the men of the church changing lightbulbs.  This prompted me to remember some of those old “lightbulb jokes.”  There were several about Presbyterians.  The one I want to recall tonight is: “How many Presbyterians does it take to change a lightbulb?  Three: one to change the lightbulb and two to reminisce about how much they liked the old one.”

Of course, the whole point of changing a lightbulb is that the old one has burned out.  Although these days we do change lightbulbs because the new ones last longer and use less energy.  A few years ago there was a little controversy about light bulbs, with some people steadfastly sticking with the old incandescents, even claiming that the switch to new-fangled fluorescents or LEDs was a sinister government conspiracy.  They were even hoarding incandescents as an act of protest.

We don’t hear from such people any more.  They have probably sheepishly decided that saving money was more important than their principles or paranoia.  

But I thought of that when I read Jesus’ words at the end here about how no one after drinking old wine desires new wine, but says “the old is good.”  Old wine is better because it has been allowed to age a bit.  (Old Scotch is even better than old wine, but I digress.)

He’s not talking about wine, of course, but religion and spiritual practices.  He was originally asked why his disciples do not fast like the disciples of the Pharisees and even John the Baptizer, his own mentor.  Jesus was known for his apparent laxity towards the Law.  He does not appear to have engaged with much asceticism, at least not after his strenuous 40-day fast in the wilderness.  

He uses a metaphor about a Bridegroom, basically pointing out that no one fasts at a wedding reception.  But if the Bridegroom, meaning himself, is taken away from them, that will be the time for fasting.  He means that while he is around it is party time!  But when he is taken away, his disciples will have to recover some of the older practices like fasting.  

He is taken away by the police and then executed by the Romans, events we remember at the culmination of Holy Week.  I have probably taken Jesus a bit too literally, but for years I have fasted from Maundy Thursday until Easter Sunday, when Jesus is symbolically most absent.  But isn’t Jesus really always with us in Spirit?  Is the Bridegroom ever really gone for us?  Why do Christians fast at all, then?

II.

But while Jesus is never actually gone from us or taken away from us… unfortunately, since his departure at his ascension, we habitually and chronically wander away from him.  It just feels like he has been taken away.  

Since we do not have the benefit the original disciples had, with Jesus physically, temporally next to them, we tend to slide off into thinking that the old wine really is better, and we fall back into the kind of faith he criticized: a legalist, moralist, patriotic, traditionalist, literalist religion; a religion of old incandescent lightbulbs, if you will, that were expensive and burned out quickly.  But we still think they were better.  They seemed somehow brighter and they came on instantly!  And that old wine was tastier too!  

When Jesus talks about the presence of the Bridegroom and the newness of the wine he is giving us metaphors for how awake we are to the truth of God’s Presence with us in him.  To say “the Bridegroom is here!” means we are perceiving how Jesus Christ by the power of the Spirit is with us now.  To talk about “new wine” means experiencing the vibrant, wild, even explosive awareness of the Spirit at work in the world.    

Most of the time we don’t see these realities.  Most of the time we only see the world, as Paul says, darkly, like in a defective mirror, though the distorted lens of our egos.  Most of the time we are completely unconscious of the Bridegroom, who seems to have been taken away.  And the new wine is not considered any good.  

When we are spiritually asleep we feel like the Bridegroom has been taken away.  Jesus says that when it seems like the Bridegroom has been taken away, that’s when his disciples will fast.  Ascetic practices like fasting have to do with waking us up and making us more conscious of where and who we are.  They are supposed to jolt us out of our lethargy and sleepwalking, and snap us out of our unconsciousness.

This is not something that is only necessary at certain times of the year.  it is necessary all the time, but at certain times of the year the church has chosen to give this special focus.  And Lent is the most significant of those times.  It is the season when we follow Jesus to the cross.  It is when we admit to ourselves systematically and intentionally how far we have fallen from being able to see the truth.  It is when we sense that the Bridegroom is gone, that he has been taken from us, that we are left in a dark existence, and need to be shocked awake. 

So we fast during Lent in hopes that we will be awake when at Easter the Bridegroom shows up again.  We put this moderate stress on our body, we break our habits, we deny ourselves and force ourselves to think about what we are doing.  Lent is when we want to be most conscious, so that when we get to Easter and we hear those stories and sing those hymns we will see most clearly and realize most profoundly how the Bridegroom emerges to be with us in resurrection.

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