The General and the Centurion (Luke 7:1 - 10)

I might've called this “A Tale of Two Healings, Part II,” after a sermon I gave a few weeks ago.  Luke asks the same thing of us here as John did in the passage that sermon referenced: to compare two instances of miraculous healing.  In John’s case, it was two back-to-back healings in his own gospel; here, it's a healing of Jesus and one of the prophet Elisha’s, described in the passage from 2 Kings that Lee read.  Naaman was a powerful man, head of all the armies of Aram, and he’d become more powerful because, 2 Kings says, God had given him victory over Israel, no doubt to punish them for some infraction or another.  The centurion, for whom Luke provides no name, was far less powerful, commanding as he did at the most a thousand men.  But both were enemies of the Israelites, and they're healed anyway: Naaman through Elijah’s successor Elisha, and the centurion through Jesus.

And a major reason Luke wants to compare the two is to make a case for Jesus standing in the prophetic line.  After all, a major function of his gospel is to try and illustrate just who and what Jesus was, and nothing says “prophet” like a healing, especially one that echoes one of the bone fide prophets from Israel’s past.  But Luke’s point goes beyond that: if he stands in the prophetic line, he is greater than Elisha, at least: while both healings were at a distance, a thing almost unheard of to folks who understood such things, Elisha required Naaman to wash himself seven times in the Jordan. Jesus healed the centurion’s slave with just a word, and who else do we know does things with just their word?

But like John's comparison, there are other things to learn from Luke’s, and they revolve around the characteristics of the principles.  They were both used to command: whether a thousand or tens of thousands, both expected their orders to be obeyed.  But Naaman bore a particularly nasty temper, and a peremptory way with those he considered his inferiors.  When he heads out to Israel’s king to seek the prophet who could heal him, he took gifts: ten silver talents, ten thousand gold shekels, and ten sets of clothing.  So when he handed the letter from his King requesting he be healed to the Israelite King, he doubtless expected to pay for it handsomely.  But the Israelite suspected a trap: “Who do I look like?  God?  How am I supposed to heal him?  He's trying to goad me into refusing so he can attack.”  And he tore his clothes in chagrin.

But when Elisha heard of all the dramatics, he sent a servant to the King saying “what's the big deal?  Have him come to me, and I'll show him what it wants to be a prophet.”  So Naaman showed up at Elisha’s place, with all his horses and chariots and money and garments, and a servant met him at the gates and told him to go bathe seven times in the Jordan River, and he'd be healed.  And we can see there's a little gamesmanship going on here: Elisha, who certainly knows just who Naaman is, doesn't let him into the house, he doesn't meet him at the gates. He sends a servant to do it.  A servant!

And it infuriates Naaman, head of all the armies of the King of Aram, manly in bearing and mighty in battle, that he'd be treated so shabbily by some, by some . . . Prophet person.  “I thought for me he’d surely come out and wave his had over me and invoke his God and I’d be cured.  If I'd have wanted a bath, I could have taken one in one of the rivers of Aram, which are much better than this Jordan you prattle on about.”  And he turned and stalked off, in a rage.

But his servants came  up to him—after he'd cooled down, of course—and cajoled him to reconsider.  “If he'd told you to do something hard, like stand in one foot while whistling the Aramean national anthem backwards, or reciting the 3^rd chapter of the third Book of Ba’al from memory, you'd do it, wouldn't you?  Well then, this is much easier. And we're already here and everything, so you might as well . . .” And Naaman ended up doing what Elisha asked and Behold! His leprosy was cured and he had the skin of a man half his age.

Now.  Compare that to the centurion, whose request for healing wasn't for himself, but for a slave he valued, who was near death.  Now chattel slavery, that involved buying and selling of human beings like in the pre-Civil war South, didn't exist in Palestine at the time, but debt-slavery did, as did slavery as a form of punishment.  Because the centurion was a soldier, likely that the man was a prisoner of war, a common fate for someone taken in battle.  And Luke's comment that the centurion valued him highly referred to monetary value was unlikely, given he couldn't be sold, and it's likely that the man was valued for the work he did as a member of the centurion’s household.  It's also possible the soldier thought of him fondly as well.

But however his value was counted, he was deathly ill, so when the centurion heard that Jesus was nearby, he sent a delegation of Jewish elders to ask him to come and heal the man.  And this in itself was unusual, for the centurion was an enemy, being a very visible sign of an occupying force, but what the elders told Jesus was downright amazing:  “He is worthy of having you do this for him,” they said, “for he loves our people, and it is he who built our synagogue for us.”  The centurion was embedded in the Jewish community, and he loved them and respected their faith enough that he built them a house in which to practice it.  Compare that to Naaman, who came as an outsider, loaded with gifts, prepared to pay for the prophet’s services.

And Jesus is so impressed with the man’s love for Jews that he goes with the elders, perhaps to see this rare specimen for himself.  But the centurion sent some friends—the man had friends in the community!—to say “Lord, do not trouble yourself, for I am not worthy to have you come under my roof; therefore I did not presume to come to you.”  And compare that to Naaman, who not only presumed to come to Elisha, but expected the prophet to come to him!  And rather than trying to dictate how he was healed, as did Naaman—come out to me and call on your God and wave your hands over the spot—he was quietly sure that Jesus’ voice could heal him, and that at a distance: “Only speak the word,” he said “and let my servant be healed.”

And Jesus was amazed at all of this, at the man's humility—in one who commanded a lot of men—but most of all at his faith.  For this kind of long-distance healing was unheard of in ancient times, it always involved something like what Naaman had contemptuously called waving your hands over the spot.  But not only had the centurion not been upset by the long-distance healing, but he’d requested it.  And Jesus told the bystanders that not even in Israel had he seen such faith, and by the time the centurion's friends returned to him, his servant was healed.

Jesus attributed it all to the centurion's faith, and we can see what that is, at least on the face of it: his faith was an assurance that Jesus could and, equally important, would heal his servant.  If he thought it outside the realm of possibility that this Jesus would heal the man, would he have bothered to send first the elders then his friends?  His faith was in the goodness of Jesus, the goodness of the God he represented.

Last week, we spoke of being open to the self-emptying Trinitarian flow.  And I think the centurion illustrated this fundamental principle quite graphically: he was, open to Jesus’ kenotic  love.  And not only was he open to it himself, he didn't block it, dam it up.  He let it flow through him: he loved the Jewish community, provided for it out of his own funds, out of himself.

And Jesus commends the man for it, not just for the openness to receiving—Naaman was open to that—but to the whole arrangement.  When he heard that the man loved the community—and they were not his own people—he went with the elders.  When he heard of the man’s humility, that the healing was to be for a slave, and not for himself, that sealed the deal.  The centurion’s faith encompassed all of that, it was greater than anything he’d found in Israel, which was notoriously tribal and concerned only with themselves.

We often think of faith as an individual thing, as a personal faith in Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, as the saying goes.  But this incident shows that it encompasses how we treat others, and not just those within our own community.  Congregations often get into the “take care of ourselves first” trap, because, as the presumption goes, if you don’t take care of your own community, how can you take care of anyone else?

But I suggest that it's just the opposite: Jesus said that the centurion's faith was greater than any he’d seen in Israel precisely because it wasn't about himself, precisely because he loved and did for the Jewish community in which he was embedded, a community of which he certainly was not a member.  If he'd “taken care of his own” first, would Jesus have commended him so strongly on his faith?  I’m not so sure.  Amen.

Standing in the Flow (Trinity Sunday - Year C)

A lot of pastors, and other ne’er-do-wells like theologians, don't know what to do with the Trinity.  So the passages we’re offered in the Lectionary readings for Trinity  Sunday tend to be like the one I just read*: they mention all three members of the Trinity in more or less the same breath.  Any actual information about the matter is incidental.  That's because, of course, the doctrine isn't in the Bible, a fact that allows groups that are nominally Christian, such as the various Churches of God of various places, to not “believe” in the Trinity, whatever that means.

And though our passage from Paul is nominally about suffering, it does mention the activities of each member: “we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ”—that is, we are “saved” or justified through him—and hope doesn't disappoint because “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”  We are saved through Christ and powered by (the love of) the Holy Spirit.  It’s a classic formulation of the Trinity.  And notice that it makes no mention of one in three and three in one, no mention of persons or substance, it is based on the lived experience of the early Christians.  It describes the activities of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the world, their interactions with us in salvation history, sometimes called oikonomia, literally “economy,” and translated sometimes as God’s “plan.”

Exciting stuff, really . . . We're made right with God through our faith in Christ, and our hope, our life, our becoming more and more like God, is powered by love, by the love of the Holy Spirit.  And we’re right there in the mix . . . it is not only through Christ but through our faith that we are saved. In a way we don't fully understand, we cooperate in our own salvation.  The oikonomia, the economy, the plan of God sent God's divine Son to become one of us, to experience all that creaturely life has to offer, and it brought the Holy Spirit, that blows where it will, strong as a gale, light and playful as a zephyr, to power our Christian endeavor.

And this is how the New Testament consistently speaks of what would become the Trinity, and if it had been left at that, it might not have become the moribund, dead-end idea that it was for over a thousand years.  Unfortunately, the great early theologians got ahold of it, in the great quest to figure out just who this Jesus Christ we worship is.  You see, there’s a problem: we are monotheists, and yet we professed to worship this Jesus fellow in addition to God, whom Jesus called Abba.  Doesn't sound very montheistic to me. And to make matters worse, in the plan of God, Jesus Christ is clearly subordinate to God’s own self, because God sent him, and the sender is always subordinate to the sent.

 Oy vey.  What's a theologian to do?  Well, what they did was develop the doctrine of the Trinity, where God subsists as three hypostases—that’s the Greek word  we rather unfortunately translate as “person”— where God subsists as three persons in a Godhead.  And in that Godhead, God the Father is of the same substance as God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, no subordination there.  But in the economy of the Trinity, in its activities in the world, the Son is still clearly subordinate to the Father. But only in the actions: in the actual theology of the Trinity, all are equal.  In fact, they are considered one God in three persons.

And as the first millennium progressed, the gap between the two ways of looking at the Trinity—the economic, dealing with its members’ actions in the world, and the immanent, dealing with its internal structure and dynamics—the gap between the two grew ever wider, until it became absolute.  The economic Trinity became subordinate itself, shoved aside in favor of the immanent (or theological), and the intra-divine life was declared impenetrable, the nature of its members and their interrelationships unknowable, and thus it became walled away in its hermeneutic shell.  And if an idea is like that, if it's completely opaque, of what interest could it possibly be?  Of what good could it possibly be?

Then along came Catherine LaCugna, who in 1991 published the book “God For Us: The Trinity and Christian Life.”  Miraculously, it didn't sink into oblivion in some academic publishing house, but it was published by Harper Collins, and with that one book, she changed the course of Christian theology.  It opened the flood-gates of Trinitarian research, and single-handedly restored the Trinity to its rightful place at the center of our faith.  She did this by restoring the Trinity to one thing, by demonstrating that the economic and immanent Trinities were really one and the same, linking its activities in the world to its intra-divine life and relationships.  Suddenly, the notion of the Trinity as a dynamic, ever-changing picture of the divine was restored, along with renewed research and thought that continues to this day.

Meanwhile, in other theological news, another notion gaining increasing traction is one realized by the Mystics thousands of years ago: God is nothing.  Zip.  Nada.  But hold your cards and letters and pitchforks.  I didn't say God doesn't exist, but that God’s not a thing, as in God’s “no-thing” or nothing.  Since the time of Augustine, 1500 years ago, the notion that God is a substance has held sway.  Not that God is matter, but that God is some-thing nevertheless.  Further, though God indeed has substance, it ain’t nothing like what you and I have.

But increasingly, it looks like good ol’ First John had it right, lo these many years ago: God is love, and though it's hard to say exactly what love is, one thing it's not is substance.  You can't pick it up and bounce it off the wall, or give it out like a sandwich, or steal it like a car.  And the New Testament bears this out.  Although it does talk about love as a noun—the familiar agape, of course—it uses it as the verb agapaow more than three times as much.  In the New Testament, love is first and foremost an action verb, and to say that God is love is to say that God is action, God is activity.

But what kind of activity is God?  What constitutes this “love?”  Well, let's look at it in our own, earthly life, specifically in a relationship between two individuals.  Each partner typically has to adjust his or her life for the other, they have to give up some of their independence, they have to let their partner know where they are all the time, for Pete’s sake, what time they’re going to be home, and etc.  You have to give up some of your favorite foods for the sake of meals together, compromise on where you want to live, what to watch on TV, and these seem trivial, and perhaps they are, but the point is, love is giving up, surrendering things that we consider ours for the sake of the other or the relationship.

How does it go?  God so loved the world that God gave his only begotten son . . . note that little old verb “gave,” as in “to give.”  God gave of God’s own self, God's own flesh and blood or, as Paul put it, “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.”  And the Gospels show that the incarnate Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, demonstrated this self-emptying, this surrender of part of himself in every practically every interactions know of: every healing, every demonstration of the kingdom, every refusal to retaliate, to fight his way enemies, leading up, of course, to the ultimate surrender, giving up of his life.  (In one story, he actually felt part of himself –his power—leaving as he healed the hemorrhaging woman.)

So.  We know what God is, God is love, and like Forrest Gump, we know what love is—at least in the context of the divine—it's emptying, or surrender, of self.  And so taking out the middle-man—the word love—we can say that God is self-emptying surrender.  God is “no thing”—not a thing, nothing—and is instead an activity, an action, a movement, and that movement is self-emptying, or the surrender of self.

So Catherine LaCugna—remember her?—seems onto something when she says the Trinity is relationship in action and motion.  And that action, it seems, is self-emptying surrender.  In other words, love.  And so a profitable image of the Trinity is a big circle dance, where self-emptying love is poured like life-giving water between the members.  The Father empties himself into the Son, who empties himself into the Spirit, who empties herself into the Father, and round and round, love flowing between the members, who are not substance but love themselves, round and round through all eternity, without beginning or end.

But wait just a cotton-picking minute.  How is that any less hermetically sealed than the static, person-based classical doctrine?  Where are we in the equation, what difference does this make for us?  Ah . . . that’s where the passage from John from a couple of weeks ago comes in.  Remember?  It was Jesus’ final prayer, in the upper room just before he was arrested, tried and executed.  And we noticed that it was in large part about union with each other and union with God.  Jesus prayed to his Father that his followers be one in the same way he and the Father are one, and as we have seen, the father and son, together with the Holy Spirit, stand in eternal, self-emptying relationship with one another. Further, because Jesus is in us and we are in him (I in you and you in me, he tells us), it looks like we stand right in the middle of that flow, receiving—and passing on—the self-emptying flow.  As creatures of a self-giving God, who are adopted as Children of God through Christ the Son, we are right there in the midst of it all, we are standing in the flow.

Cynthia Bourgeault has called the Trinity a “mandala of love in motion” and I, who can be as literal as the next person, said wait a minute: a mandala has four sides, and the Trinity only three, but then it struck me: we, along with the rest of creation, are the fourth side.  It's like Andre Rublev’s famous painting of the Trinity, which has a perspective that draws you in, and at one time had a mirror affixed to the canvas just where we would be.  We are part of the Trinitarian structure of reality, we are standing in the flow.

Richard Rohr says that this is the point of the incarnation, that we are invited into the great relational flow, into the great cosmic dance that is the Trinity-infused universe.  He says that the nature of sin is when we block the flow, when we refuse that mutuality, that relationality. How do we know when we’re blocking the flow?  Here’s what he says: “Whenever you find yourself being self-preservative, holding in, resenting, blaming, accusing, or fearing” you're blocking the flow.  You can actually feel it as a hoarding, a drawing-in energy, sometimes as a clenching of the gut.  When that happens, you can release it, you can surrender it, you can let it go.  And, of course, that is exactly the movement, the surrendering, the self-emptying.  When we let go of the self-preservation, the blaming, the resentment, we are restarting the flow within us, and fully taking our place in the great, Trinitarian dance.  And I say these things in the name of the God who creates us, the God who redeems us, and the God who teaches to pray with sighs too deep for words.  Amen.

*Romans 5:1 - 5

Spirit Movings (Pentecost 2016)

Spirit is a very special word, in the multiple languages of the church, anyway  . . . in Hebrew, it’s Ruach . . . that acccch  on the end is a consonant found only in the semitic languages, and it gives a breathy, almost whispery sound to the word . . . it’s a word that’s onomatopoeic . . . it sounds like what it means, and what it means is breath, it means wind it means spirit . . . Can it be a coincidence that it’s found in the very first scene of the very first book in Scripture?  “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind, while a spirit, while a ruach from God swept over the face of the waters.”

And what does this spirit do?  What does this breath make?  Order out of the deep, out of the roiling, rolling anarchy that was there before creation . . . and without that order, without the particles being organized in regular and useful configurations we call matter, humankind cannot exist, it cannot live, it cannot sustain itself . . . and so this spirit that swept across the waters, across that ancient metaphor of unrest, creates the very stuff of our being, the very order that keeps us alive . . .

And there’s another face to the metaphor . . . ruach means breath, and breath means respiration—res-pir-ation, itself made of spirit—the stuff of life . . . all of life, plants and animals, takes in oxygen and through a kind of combustion, a kind of fire, a kind of burning that produces heat, life motive force, it's motivated.  This force is nothing less than stored energy, in the form of ordered matter, that life needs to power itself, that it needs to function . . . and I hope you’re beginning to get the picture, I hope you are beginning to understand the depth of our spirit-metaphor, and why it is such a rich source of poetic force in the Judeo-Christian tradition.  Breath, spirit, ruach is the stuff of life’s existence, the power that makes us go . . .

And although it’s more romantic in Hebrew, more primitive and elemental, in Greek it’s no less meaningful . . . in Greek it’s pneuma, from whence we get the term pneumatic, of course, air-powered, air-filled, filled with the breath of God . . . and so the apostles gathered together on that first Pentecost encounter living metaphor, actualized experience of ruach, of pneumatic force rushing down upon them, an exquisite embodiment of what was happening to them . . .

Of course, they weren’t gathered there by accident . . . the apostles were gathered together for the Jewish festival of Shauvot, one of the three great pilgrimage festivals of the Hebrew people, traditionally calculated as fifty days (thus the “pente” in Pentecost) from Passover.  And although it originated as a festival marking the beginning of harvest—of the first fruits of the harvest—it had gradually, over the centuries, come to commemorate the founding of the Jewish people in the giving of the Torah, the law, the force that bound them together as a nation and a people.  And can you see where we’re going with this?  Can you see where we’re headed?  On Pentecost, on Shauvot, on the very day the Hebrew people celebrate their formation as the people of God, the spirit of God, the breath of the Lord, comes down upon the apostles, like the rush of a violent wind, and fills the entire house where they were sitting.

And every time I see read this image, every time picture this in-rushing of the respirative ruach of God, I think of a tornado, and all of those reports of people who have survived them . . . what did it sound like?  They are asked, and invariably what they say is that is sounded like a rushing wind, like a freight train . . . and so the tornado of the Lord, the freight train of the holy spirit, the breath that gives us life as a people, came barreling down upon them, rattling the windows, shaking the eaves, raising the roof . . . but unlike a tornado, unlike some F5 monster from the plains of Texas or the depths of the Mississippi Piney Woods, it is not destructive, but creative, and it entered them, it powered them, it gave them respiratory life . . . it made them a people.

On the very same day that the Hebrew nation celebrates their people-hood, their coming together as a nation of the children of God, the apostles experience their own formation, and so . . . a new people is born, a new identity is forged . . . on Pentecost we celebrate the formation of the church and—mark this well—it is all dependent upon that rushing wind, that freight-train ruach, the holy spirit promised by Christ.  Fifteen hundred years later, Calvin would use an apt metaphor about the spirit, he would say that it binds us to Christ—just as the Law does for the Jewish people, just as respiration does for the cells of the living universe—it binds us to Christ and thereby to each other.  Without the breath we would not be bound together as the body of Christ.

The self-same breath of God, that created order out of primordial disorder, that self-same breath creates the order that is the church.  And that image has fed a stunningly deep well of meaning over the years . . . in Paul’s vision of the church as Christ’s body, it is the breath of God that animates, that in-spires, in-breathes that body . . . but that’s not the first bodily image of a people . . . remember those old dry bones of Ezekiel?  “I will cause breath, ruach, to enter them,” says the lord, “I will cause ruach to infuse them, to dwell within them . . . Come from the four winds, the four ruachs, and breathe on them, that they might live” . . . and the ruach comes into them, and they live and they stand on their feet, a vast multitude, a coherent people of God.

But there’s another metaphor at work here, as well, and it’s dancing around the Apostles there in the room where they gather . . . “Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them,” Luke says, “and a tongue rested on each of them.”  And this is where we get that red that’s in our banner and paraments, and in the stole hanging around my neck, and the image is of spirit as a fire that burns within us, that warms our hearts, that powers us like the flames of a coal-fired boiler.

But there’s another, less exciting figure of speech—no pun intended—here . . . tongue of course has a double meaning, we say “tongues of flame” to indicate the flickering, leaping blaze, but tongue has a more mundane connotation, as in a mouth-part, and indeed the next line indicates that that double meaning is in Luke’s mind as well “a tongue rested on each of them,” he says, and suddenly “all were filled with the holy spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.”  And the word our NRSV translates as languages is the same in Greek—glossais—as for tongue, so a more literal translation is “divided tongues appeared among them . . . and they began to speak in other tongues, as the spirit gave them ability.” And so this second image, of divided tongues, of divided languages is a quite graphic metaphor of the human tongue, split into multiple languages . . .

And so the coming of the Spirit, here in Acts at least (the Gospel of John has other ideas, of course), this coming of the Spirit revolves around two images, two movements, if you will: one a gale-force wind, strong and loud, which creates order from chaos, it binds us to one another, as the body of Christ . . . but what good is that binding if we cannot understand one another, if we cannot work together because we are so different, because we speak different languages, literally as well as metaphorically?  And so the second spirit move, the multiple tongues, the multiplicity of voices within the body . . . divided tongues, each division speaking a different language, a different dialect of the body of Christ.

But note:  it doesn’t say they all began to speak the same language!  It doesn’t say that everybody started speaking Greek or Aramaic or Hebrew, it doesn’t say they all began playing the same hymns, using the same translation of the scripture . . . all began to speak in other languages, ones they didn’t know, ones they weren’t comfortable with . . . and did they then go their separate ways?  Did those who spoke Aramaic go over here, Greek over there?  Did those who sang 5^th-Century lyre-chants go across town while the ones who played on tambourines stayed put?  No . . . they gathered together and they worshiped together, they respected the diversity and Luke tells us they were astonished at it.

I think there’s a lesson for our situation today . . . when an organization—a corporation, a denomination, a church—is in decline, the human inclination is to circle the wagons, to turn inward, to cling to familiar ways, comfortable ways . . . but brothers and sisters, that’s not the way the strongest churches are, and that’s not the way shown to us by the Spirit.  The fact of the matter is, diversity breeds strength, not weakness . . . the strongest organizations are those with the most diverse interests, for they are the ones that can stand the vagaries of changing context, changing fashion, changing times.  And when those divided tongues—they were divided, people, they had components that were different from one another—danced around the apostles’ heads, and wove in and out of their company, that’s when they were the strongest, that’s when they were the most resilient, that’s when they were the most alive.

But you say “Preacher”—I get called that a lot, you know—you say “Preacher, what’s to keep us from fightin’ amongst ourselves over the diversity?  What’s to keep us from shakin’ apart over what kind communion to do—intinction or in-the-pews?—or where to spend that ten thousand dollars extra we may have—on paint for the fellowship hall or a mission trip for the youth—or how often to use guitars in the service.  What’s to keep us from fighting like banshees over these and other questions?

Ah . . . that’s where the breath comes in . . . that’s where that creative force, that wind like a freight train that binds us together in Christ.  The spirit we celebrate is what creates order out of chaos, that sustains that order, that nourishes it and maintains it . . . it’s the infrastructure that maintains the house, the glue that ties us together.  The very spirit that brings on the diversity, that lights us up with with those divided tongues, is the same spirit that can hold us together as a body.  We just have to let it.  Amen.

Mystic Sweet Communion (John 17:20 - 26)

Our passage is from the last prayer of Jesus before his arrest; it's also the last part of what scholars call the Farewell Discourse, that great teaching at his final Passover, there in the fire-lit upper room.  And make no mistake: our passage is a teaching, even though at the same time a prayer.  Jesus apparently didn't have any teachers who told him not to preach in a prayer, like I did in seminary.  If he did, he ignored it, as I occasionally do as well.  Rules, sometimes, are meant to be broken.

The entire discourse, including the prayer, has the sense of the final teachings of someone who knows he’s going away, and would never see his followers again.  Indeed, Jesus knows that is the case, he knows he's heading shortly to his death on a cross, he knew it before they sat down at dinner, before he washed the disciples’ feet, before good old, literal Peter vehemently refused, and then just as vehemently recanted when he learned you couldn't get into the kingdom without it, saying “well if that's the case, wash my hands and head as well.”

Jesus knew it was his last supper before he handed Judas the bread, before he explained that it was all over but the shouting, that he had been glorified, though only he seemed to know exactly what he meant by “glorified,” that it wasn't in any way shape or form what society thinks of as “glory.”  And because he knows what is coming next, his last words take on additional significance, additional weight, as last words usually do.  And that final teaching is all about “being one.”  In this, the final section of his final prayer in his final sermon, he prays to God that his followers may be one.

In the first part of the prayer, he asks for protection for the ones that God has given him, I.e., the twelve disciples.  Minus, of course, Judas, who has slunk off to do the deed, and whom Jesus calls “the son of destruction,” though our translation renders it, inexplicably, “the one destined to be lost.”  Jesus asks for God, whom he calls Father, to take care of them, that their joy in him would be complete, and that God would “sanctify them in the truth.”

In our part of the prayer, he shifts his focus from the twelve to those who would come after.  “I ask,” he says, “not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word,” through the original disciples’ preaching of the Gospel.  And he asks “that they may all be one.”  Much of the rest of the prayer is elaboration on this idea: as you are in me, he says to God the Father, and I am in you, may they also be in us . . . He tells God the Father that the glory given to him, he has given to his followers, so that they may be one, just as he and the Father are one, Jesus in them and the Father in Jesus, that they may become completely one . . .

And the placement of this request at the end of Jesus’ earthly life gives it urgency, and its theme, that Christians be one, has resonated with fractious congregations, theologians and church leaders almost from the beginning.  In the fourth century, John Chrysostom, Bishop of Constantinople, paraphrased this passage, saying if disciples would but keep the peace among themselves that they had learned from him, the people around them “would know the teacher by his disciples.”  He went on to suggest that their quarrelsomeness would cause others to deny that they are followers of a God of peace and not believe that Jesus has been sent from God.

Modern interpreters have suggested that the prayer for oneness has the same urgency and application today that it had 20 centuries ago.  They are no doubt thinking of the doctrinal squabbling and controversies over marriage and ordination standards, the authority of scriptures, and the sufficiency versus the necessity of Christ that have divided congregations and denominations for many  years.  They pray, like Jesus did, for God to make us one, just as Jesus and the Father are one.

And it's when I read that last qualifier that I begin to question the standard interpretation of this prayer as a call for unity among believers, as a fervent desire that, as Rodney King might have put it, we all just get along.  Don't get me wrong: I believe we are called to do that, I believe we are called to share in the peace of Christ, to work together in spite of our differences, that the old tension of purity versus unity must be weighted heavily toward the unity.

But through this prayer, we are called to be one just as Jesus and the Father are one, and so we have a model of what this oneness is to be like: it's to be like that between the Father and the Son (forgive the patriarchal language . . . I’m speaking of the formal relationships within the Trinity).  And that oneness goes far beyond just getting along, or working together for the Kingdom of God: it is an absolute oneness, a mutual indwelling, a non-dualistic wholeness where the Son is not the Father and not not the Father at the same time.  In other words, if we are to be one as Christ and the Father are one, it is not just unity we are talking about, not just getting along despite our differences, but union, one with another, as Christ and the Father.

Jesus says “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us . . . "  And I am reminded of that other place in John, near the beginning of the Farewell Discourse, as a matter of fact, where the disciples—minus Judas—are told “you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.”  And this mutual indwelling is a characteristic theme of John.  A bit later in the discourse, in the metaphor of the vines, Jesus tells us to abide in him as he abides in us, and that those who abide in him and he in them bear much fruit, and further, the Spirit, the Advocate, will abide in them as well.

And here in our passage, God the father is entreated to make us one—you and me, John and Bob, Betty and Pam—just as are God the Father and God the Son.  And so—unless the Father somehow refused the prayer, saying “Sorry Son, I don't think so”—I suspect we are one in the same way that they are, whether we know it or not, indeed, whether we like it or not.

In a couple of weeks, when Trinity Sunday rolls around, we’ll explore some of the ramifications of this—if we are in Christ, Christ is in us, and we are one with each other, do we not all stand directly in the Trinitarian flow?—though we’ll explore some of these issues then, what about the remarkable conclusion that we are one with each other as are God the Father and Son?  That each one of us both is each one of us and is not each one of us at the same time?

Well, mystics would say that it only seems weird because the phrase “each one of us” is inapplicable: there is no such thing as “each one of us.”  Oh, there is a thing we think of as an “each,” as an individual, but that’s what Thomas Merton called the “false self,” though the term “lesser self” is more accurate.  Jesus said we must die to this lesser self, this idea that our differences in hair color, gender, income, achievements, weight, mortgages, even our DNA, defines who we are, is our true identity.  Our true identity lies in our divine, innermost quality of aliveness, where what is us is intertwined inextricably with what is divine.

It is there—if it can be said that there is a “there”—that Jesus abides in us, in the full, intimate sense of “abiding.”  And because divinity is at the core of each of us, there is no individual in the truest sense, no “I” and “thou,” we are all one—in the most literal sense—in Christ Jesus.

And though Christian unity should flow from death to the lesser self, and the divine union at our core, what I’d like to leave you with is something else that flows from it as well.  James Finley—trauma therapist, theologian, and one-time student of Thomas Merton—puts it like this: our dying to our lesser self reveals to us, makes it undeniable that in even our apparent brokenness, we are invincibly precious in our being.  Amen.

A Tale of Two Healings (John 5:1 - 18)

The lectionary, as you know, is a cycle of appointed scripture readings followed by much of the Christian world.  It is a wonderful thing.  No … really!  It offers four passages a week over a three-year cycle, and helps keep preachers honest.  It helps keep us from choosing our own little favorite corner of the scriptures and staying there Sunday after Sunday, world without end, amen.  It makes us preach passages we may not want to preach, that make us—or others—uncomfortable, or are just downright boring.  But the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, and sometimes the lectionary does us a little bit wrong, and this is such a time.  The lectionary passage was verses one through nine, and if you read only that, we see just another miracle account, of a kind that’s repeated over and over in the gospels.  Ok, ok, we know Jesus performed miracles, I’m always tempted to say, so what else is new?

It’s only when we go beyond the bounds of the lectionary, on either side of verses one through nine, that we begin to see the larger picture, where this fits in with what John—and God!—are trying to teach us.  So I read verses nine through eighteen, but in the interests of not reading all day skipped the passage before, as it is equally important.

  That’s because there are actually two back-to-back healings, this one and the one in the passage just before it, and as you know, it’s common for the gospels to place stories back-to-back, that create new meaning by their placement.  Thus, we should ask the question: what does the preceding healing story tell us about this one?

Well . . . the first one is about the royal official who, when he heard Jesus was in the vicinity, goes and begs him to heal his son.  Jesus, who especially in John is leery about belief based on viewing miracles—says to him: “Unless you see signs and wonders you will not believe."  But the man persists: “Sir,” he says, “come down before my little boy dies.”  So Jesus says: “Go; your son will live.”  And when the man’s slaves meet him on the way home, they tell him that the boy recovered, just at the hour Jesus said it.  And as a result, he believes, along with his whole family, thus making what Jesus predicted come true.  He saw signs and wonders, and believed.

Contrast that with the present story:  Jesus comes up to Jerusalem at festival time, and for some reason comes to the Sheep Gate, where there’s this pool, surrounded by porticoes, full of invalids.  John says they were blind, lame and paralyzed.  Now, you might notice that verse four is missing; most scholars think it was a later inclusion, added by some helpful scribe.  The best Greek manuscripts don’t have it, but it does provide more information:  seems that an angel would come down and stir up the water.  Whoever first stepped into the pool would thus be healed.  And this guy had been there 38 years—just two short of a long time—because every time the waters were stirred, he’d been beaten to the punch.

And note that unlike the royal official, this guy doesn’t beg, or  even ask.  As a matter of fact, he seems downright diffident about it.  When Jesus asks him “do you want to be healed,” he doesn’t say yes, he just launches into the story of how he has no one to put him in the pool and how someone else gets there first.  But even so, even if the man doesn’t say he wants it, he heals him anyway.  “Get up,” he says, “pick up your sleeping-mat and walk around.”  And he does, and John makes sure we know it is on the Sabbath.

And so we have two contrasting miracle stories, two tales of grace being dispensed by Jesus in the name of God.  In one, the recipient begs for the healing, begs for the grace, and in the other, the recipient doesn’t ask for it, doesn’t beg, but is healed anyway.  And to further the distinction, John tells us that the healing made the first guy—and his whole family—believe.  But he doesn’t say that about the second guy, just that the healing occurred.  And that it was on the Sabbath.

So here we have two examples of grace being bestowed: one after being asked, and another where the recipient doesn’t ask for it.  Not only doesn’t he ask for it, he gives no indication he knows know who Jesus is.  What's more, he doesn’t even show any gratitude.  Just the opposite, in fact: when the Jewish authorities accuse him of working on the Sabbath by carrying his pallet, the man blames Jesus, saying “the man who did this said I could do it, he said I could walk around, carrying my mat.”  He passes the buck, just like Adam, who when God asked who it was who disobeyed, passed the buck to Eve, who did it again, saying “the serpent made me do it.”

And what’s worse, after he runs into Jesus again, and finds out who it was who healed him, he goes running back to the religious authorities, telling them who it was.  And because of that, because of this little ingrate telling on Jesus, the authorities begin to persecute Jesus, because he had healed on the Sabbath.

And so we have another tale of undeserved favor, of un-asked for grace.  Nobody deserves forgiveness, nobody can work for God’s grace.  In fact, the guy by the pool not only doesn’t ask for it, but is profoundly ungrateful about it, the little weasel.  He behaves rather poorly, and yet still gets the goodies.  Kind of reminds me of some of those Old Testament guys, who do all kinds of rotten things, and are still blessed. Like Abraham, who gives up his own wife to another man—twice!—save his own skin.  And he still gets to be the father of a great people.

Or Jacob the trickster, who scams his poor blind father into giving him his blessing, even though it belonged to his older brother Esau.  Who he’d already taken advantage of by making him give up his birthright for a measly bowl of stew. And yet, God gives him wives and slaves and flocks and twelve sons, who go on to found a great nation.  God does indeed give grace to the strangest people, people whom the world would lock up in jail rather than award one, thin dime.  And of course, that’s the nature of God’s grace, the scandal of it: none of us deserve it, none of us are worthy of it, we don’t even have to ask for it.  It is God’s gift to us, unconditional, un-looked for, undeserved.

And yet … just preceding today’s story is the one about the royal official, who begged him, pleaded with him, traveled to meet him, and when it works, when Jesus heals his little boy, is so grateful as to believe, taking his whole household with him.  And how inconsiderate can one god be?  How whimsical, how out-of-left-field, how unpredictable that is.  It should be one way or another, don’t you think?  Reliable, steady, decently, even, and in good order.  How can we tell what’s what?  How can we rely on things to be the same?  How can we put God in our little theological boxes if God insists on doing things one way one time, and another way the next.  How inconsiderate of God, how downright inconsistent.

But you know what they say: consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, and in comparison to God’s, if God can be said to have a mind, ours are pretty small.  But we persist in trying to pin God down, trying to tame the divine, trying to make it conform to our ideas of what’s fair and what is not, our ideas of what is just and what is not.  It’s what Paul might label a stumbling block—in Greek a scandal—about the gospel.  He might call it, in fact, a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks.

Esther de Waal, in Living with Contradiction, her marvelous little book on Benedictine spirituality, sees our lives as full of paradoxes like the one that informs our scriptures.  God’s grace, God’s largesse, comes both to those who ask for it, and those who do not.  It comes to those who work for it as well as those who do not.  It comes to those who are grateful for it, but in the end, to those who are not.  And for de Waal, it is our faith that enables us to live with these contradictions, these tensions, in ourselves, the world around us, and of course in our relationship with the divine.  She quotes a passage from Colossians we sometimes use as an affirmation of faith: “[Christ] is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created . . . all things have been created through him and for him.  He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”

Christ is the glue in the middle, the paste that holds us together, in all our messiness, all our brokenness, all our contradictions.  Christ is the ground of our being, the solid middle of our hollow shell.  Christ holds the universe together, and only in him is paradox stable.  Only through him do we have life.  Amen.