Repent for the Kingdom IV: Trusting the Promise (4th Sunday in Lent)

1 Samuel 16:1-13; Psalm 23; Ephesians 5:8-14; John 9:1-41

The metaphor of baptism as acceptance into the community of Christ continues to flow through the stories from the Gospel of John, chosen for these readings in Year A. In the ancient world, anyone born with an infirmity was assumed to be paying the price for ancestral sin. Jesus sees a blind man along the road, and decides to use him to make a different point: “. . . [H]e was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.” Jesus then proceeds to use earth and water to cover the man’s eyes, and tells him to go to the pool of Siloam in Jerusalem and wash away the mud. When the man does so, he comes back able to see. The song, Amazing Grace, comes to mind. But in the story of the man born blind, the question seems to be, who exactly is the sinner? The blind man’s parents? The blind man himself? Jesus? Or the Temple Authorities, who have promised to expel from membership anyone who “confesses Jesus to be the Messiah”? After 2,000 years, the answer is obvious: it’s those nasty “Jews,” the Temple authorities, whose spiritual blindness is inexcusable. “If you were born blind,” Jesus tells them, “you would not have sin” of your own. “But now that you say ‘we see,’ your sin remains.” Cherry-picked pseudo-Paul agrees. “Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. For it is shameful even to mention what such people do secretly. . . .”

To interpret John’s story as literal dogma is disastrous on many levels. Certainly local and international, political and religious anti-semitism is one. Another is the idea that someone was born with a disability “so that God’s works might be revealed” through encounters with that person. This idea is pervasive, especially as a pious response meant to give comfort either to the disabled person or to the family; but it transforms the God of distributive justice and love into an interventionist monster that deliberately causes suffering in order to enhance “himself.” The person with the disability is cast into an equally horrible role either as hapless victim or pious example. The one is diminished and disempowered personally, socially, and politically; the other risks becoming a kind of interpersonal, passive-aggressive blackmailer. A third evil that can and does arise from such interpretations is to deny the means to rectify the disability, either through prohibiting birth control and therapeutic abortion, or by preventing access to liberating medical care because the condition is “God’s will.”

I have an idea that the writer of John’s Gospel would be appalled at such literal misinterpretations of what may be ecstatic mysticism, but is most likely meant to encourage a second-century community of believers in a fight for institutional survival. What is more powerful than metaphors of earth and water, light and darkness, sin and salvation?

Perhaps the power of those metaphors is what prompted the Elves to pair John’s story of Jesus healing the man born blind by anointing his eyes with mud and the story of the prophet Samuel anointing the shepherd boy who became the great King David, the direct ancestor of Jesus. Certainly the reading that connects the two in terms of metaphor is the beloved 23rd Psalm: “Even though I walk through a dark and dreary land, there is nothing that can shake me. She has said she won’t forsake me. I’m in Her hand” (version by Bobby McFerrin, 1990; Ancient Mother, Spring Hill Music, 1993).

Taken out of context, the revelation to Samuel of God’s new choice for king over the Israelites seems to foreshadow the gradual realization of John’s man born blind that Jesus is the Christ, the anointed one. Jesse presents seven of his sons to Samuel, but none of them is accepted until Jesse admits that his youngest son is still out tending the sheep. “Now he was ruddy, and had beautiful eyes, and was handsome,” gushes the Hebrew teller of the tale, “The Lord said, . . . this is the one.” One wonders what the older brothers were like. . . .

Contrary to Christian custom, the Old Testament story is where the real power lies in this series of readings, but we have to pre-empt the Elves and insist upon including the entire story of Saul and Samuel, Saul’s beloved son Jonathan (who became David’s beloved companion), conquest, Covenant, blood sacrifice, imperial violence, and ego-driven failure to trust in God’s word. Despite the fact that we are supposed to wait until Year B, please read 1 Samuel 8-17. You might want to pop some corn first or throw another log on the fire. It’s a saga worthy of Shakespeare.

Briefly, the people of Israel want a King. All the other people in the neighborhood have Kings. Why not us? And besides, Samuel is old, and his sons – who were supposed to act as judges and continue Samuel’s work – have betrayed the work instead, have turned away from God, and generally screwed up. God does not want the people to have a King, because Kings are notorious for imperially ignoring God’s laws about distributive justice-compassion and for presiding over the inevitable march of the normalcy of civilization into oppressive Empire. The prophet Samuel agrees with God on this, but then God tells him to go ahead and listen to the people and give them their king. Only when they have one will they realize what a mistake it is. So Samuel finds and anoints Saul. Saul does a great job for about 2 years, then one day when Samuel doesn’t show up in time (maybe he couldn’t get the donkey started, or a boulder had rolled into the path), Saul takes it upon himself to take matters into his own hands and performs a sacrifice to God. This was bad enough, but then when Saul proceeds to eliminate the Amalekites – as directed by God – he decides to save for himself the best of the flocks and the cattle “and all that was valuable,” including – presumably – the King of the Amalekites, perhaps intending to exchange him for ransom later. God is so angry at Saul’s disobedience that he tells Samuel, “I regret that I made Saul king, for he has turned back from following me and has not carried out my commands.” This is terrible. Saul has caused God himself to change his mind. Such a breach of Covenant can only be rectified with the ritual sacrifice by Samuel of the King of the Amalekites – who was supposed to have been killed by Saul in the first place. “Then Samuel went to Ramah,” his home – to which he had been trying to retire for 8 chapters and several years of disaster on the part of Saul. “Samuel did not see Saul again until the day of his death, but Samuel grieved over Saul. And the Lord was sorry that he had made Saul king over Israel.” 1 Samuel 15:34-35.

What a cautionary tale for an election year.

Time after time, Saul takes matters into his own hands instead of following God’s command (and the laws of the land). And what is God’s command – from Samuel to Isaiah to Jeremiah to the great commission at the end of Matthew’s gospel to Paul’s letter to the Romans? Justice. Distributive, unconditional, free gift, grace-filled justice. But doesn’t the violence in this story fly in the face of all that? God wants Saul to destroy all traces of the Amalekites – women, children, old people, men, cattle, sheep – maybe even scorch their earth with fire and sow it with salt. Instead of pardoning or rescuing the captured king Agag – which would have been a serious enough personal and political rebuke to Saul – Samuel cuts him up into pieces as a human sacrifice “before God”; and Agag knows he has met his own judgment: “Surely this is the bitterness of death,” he says.

But it’s not about political execution in the service of Empire. Samuel’s act restores the Covenant the people of Israel had with God, which their king Saul had dishonored. Samuel’s act is an echo of the earlier challenge that Saul had righteously and graphically delivered to the people who had agreed to surrender to a pagan enemy, and refused to join Saul’s army against the Ammonites. In that case, the people had broken the Covenant with God. Saul chops up a yoke of oxen and carries the pieces around to all the camps, saying “Whoever does not come out [and support] Saul and Samuel, so shall it be done to his oxen!” So should it have been done to Saul.

Breaking Covenant with God brings war, famine, disease, death, economic, political, personal disaster. Instead of acting from radical abandonment of self-interest (love), which brings the restoration of God’s rule, where the lion and the lamb lie down in distributive, balanced, justice and peace, civilizations are normally built through victory, whether military, economic, political, or personal, and only after such victory are justice and peace discussed. Justice in normal civilization is retribution: an eye for an eye. In Samuel’s bloody, graphic demonstration, Saul’s imperialism, which he chose for himself, is ransomed life-for-life. God himself regrets ever choosing Saul as the people’s king, and Samuel’s personal grief is profound. The only recourse for God is to overturn convention and choose a lowly shepherd, the youngest of eight sons – David is not even the magical number seven.

Much later, as the writer of John’s gospel tells the story, God acts again to demonstrate to the blind people, who prefer the false brilliance of empire, how to restore God’s realm of distributive justice-compassion. This time the “king” is a powerless peasant who trusted the promise, even though it meant losing his life. But the community that John’s Jesus was addressing did not go far enough. Then as now, joining the new Covenant means going beyond identity as “belief” to identity as purpose. Whether the 1st Century or the 21st, acceptance of the new Covenant means choosing to participate in the program. That can only be accomplished by abandoning self-interest and trusting the promise. “If you were born blind,” John’s Jesus says, “you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘we see, [and you do not participate]’ your sin remains.”

We have no excuse.

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Third Sunday in Lent: Repent for the Kingdom III: Accepting Grace

Exodus 17:1-7; Psalm 95; Romans 5:1-11; John 4:5-42

Traditional Christian interpretation of how the “Old Testament” replaces the “New” is clear in the readings for this Sunday. The first reading is the familiar story from Exodus, where the Hebrew people complain that Moses has led them out of slavery in Egypt into the desert only to die of thirst. In order to satisfy their demand that Moses prove God’s promise is reliable, Moses uses his staff to strike a rock and produce a rush of water. The Psalm confirms the moral: “Do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah in the wilderness, when your ancestors tested me . . . For 40 years, I loathed that generation . . . Therefore in my anger I swore, they shall not enter my rest.” The portion selected from Paul’s letter to the Romans confirms the tradition: “God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Like a good story teller, the Elves return us to the opening metaphor, as John’s Jesus trumps Moses by supplying the enemy Samaritan woman not with physical water, but spiritual water – recalling last week's conversation with Nicodemus about the necessity of baptism for salvation.

Most traditional Christians don’t even need to read the text. We already know these stories and their traditional meaning. But the “tradition” has been in danger of diverting into false paths from the beginning. One of those false paths, which is all too easily found in John’s Gospel, opposes Christian “enlightenment” to the “darkness” of Jewish tradition. Another is the path that leads to collaboration with political empire. Both result from answers to what I pose as the “four questions of the apocalypse,” which have informed these commentaries since they began. The four horsemen of the apocalypse – War, Famine, Disease, and Death – galloping down the ages out of the Revelation of John of Patmos (not the author of the Gospel) – have brought humanity to the brink of extinction in the 21st Century. We continue to terrorize ourselves with their seeming inevitability. Whether or not that metaphor is the one that prevails depends upon how humanity (not just Christians) decides to answer:

1) What is the nature of God (or the Universe)? Violent or non-violent?
2) What is the nature of Jesus’ message (or any spiritual message)? Inclusive or exclusive?
3) What is faith? Literal belief, or commitment to the great work of justice-compassion?
4) What is deliverance? Salvation from hell, or liberation from injustice?

These are eschatological questions because the choices we make about each of these dichotomies determine not only the quality of our individual and corporate lives, but the sustainability of human life on the Planet. Indeed, to chose non-violence, inclusiveness, justice-compassion, and liberation directly challenges violence, exclusiveness, literal belief, and salvation, which define the seemingly inevitable development of John Dominic Crossan’s theology of empire (John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L. Reed, In Search of Paul: How Jesus’s Apostle Opposed Rome’s Empire with God’s Kingdom (Harper SanFrancisco, 2004) pp. 72-73; 288 ff).

The traditional interpretation of the stories chosen for consideration on the Third Sunday in Lent in Year A assumes that the answers to these four questions must be 1) Violent; 2) Exclusive; 3) Literal Belief; and 4) Salvation from Hell. Therefore, these readings need to be carefully unpacked and reclaimed, if possible, in the light of post-modern scientific and political knowledge, and post-Christian scholarship.

Probably the most important question to start with in considering these particular readings is whether “faith” means “literal belief.” Very few (if any) of the stories in the Bible are literally “history remembered.” Certainly the magical qualities of these particular stories should be suspect: Moses uses his magic wand to hit the rock and produce water. Jesus supernaturally reads the Samaritan woman’s entire sexual history when she lies, “I have no husband.” Taking these stories as literal, physical truth robs them of their meaning and power. Moses is reduced to a Wizard controlled by a vengeful, violent God, who holds a grudge for 40 years. Jesus is reduced to a New Age self-help guru, mobbed by clamoring fans.

The second most important dilemma to consider with these particular readings is whether God is violent or non-violent. Taken literally – as it has been for most of Christian theology – Paul’s language implies violence. “. . . while we were still sinners Christ died for us. Much more surely [therefore], now that we have been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath of God.” What most Christians listening on Sunday morning have no access to is the footnote in the Harper Collins Study Bible (NRSV), which explains that “The wrath of God” is not God’s anger – a human emotion – but “the rightful response to what humans have done” – i.e., rejecting God’s realm of distributive justice-compassion and embracing retributive justice – getting even – which is not justice at all. See Harper Collins Study Bible (NRSV) p. 2117, note 1.18. The Old Testament is chock full of cautionary tales about what happens when the people turn away from trust in God’s realm of distributive justice (where the rain falls equally on the good and the bad) and begin to rely on human systems.

Third, is the message inclusive or exclusive? At first blush, John’s story would seem to be inclusive. After all, Jesus – against all social taboo – speaks alone to a woman outside the town. Not only that, this woman is a Samaritan – the sworn enemy of the Jews. John’s Jesus also says to her, “. . . salvation is from the Jews.” But he goes on to make it very clear that “true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth,” presumably as opposed to Jewish tradition and religious law. “[F]or the Father seeks such as these to worship him.” John’s Jesus seems to be saying that while “salvation” may have come from the Jews, it has not stayed with them, and furthermore, God himself no longer seeks them out as true worshipers. This language is extremely dicey in today’s world. By contrast, the portion of Paul’s letter to the Romans says that “Christ died for the ungodly,” which means everyone. If the writer of John’s Gospel had access to Paul’s arguments, he did not agree.

The last choice – salvation from hell or liberation from injustice – only becomes clear when the words – especially Paul’s words – are translated correctly into contemporary language, and when the customary understandings of such First Century concepts as “sacrifice” and “reconciliation” are explained in 21st Century terms.

In the first century, “sacrifice” was a ritual act that served two functions, both having to do with the restoration of right relationship (reconciliation). One function was to restore the balance between human patrons and clients in the Roman world. Put in simple 21st Century social terms, if somebody invites me to dinner, I am then obligated to pay them back by inviting them to dinner. If hosting dinners (or picking up the tab) begins to fall on me too often, then I begin to resent it, and if the “friend” or colleague doesn’t get the hint that it’s his turn, I’ll stop inviting him. Newspaper advice columns are full of these kinds of conundrums. In the First Century Roman world (which included the entire Mediterranean area), the social system of patronage prevailed on a vertical, class, basis. Dinners were given by patrons for clients below them, and were accepted by clients of patrons above them. The banquet restored the balance between patrons and clients. This spilled over into the spiritual realm when the meat for the banquet was first ritually prepared as a sacrifice in the local temple. The animal was sacrificed (made sacred) by being first ritually slaughtered, then burnt on the altar to restore the balance of relationship with God (or gods – or in some cases with Cesar himself, as the ultimate patron); then a portion of the sacred meal was brought back to be shared among the people, or political, social, and business clients. As John Dominic Crossan points out, no one ever imagined that the animal that was slaughtered for the sacrificial – reconciling – meal, deserved to die, or was killed as a substitute for the person holding the banquet.

Paul’s language about “justified by the blood of Christ” does not mean that believers’ lives are paid for with the murdered blood of Jesus. It means that everyone has been included in God’s realm of distributive justice-compassion, and are made just – become just – are restored or reconciled in their relationship with God because of Jesus’s death. In Paul’s culture, Jesus was the metaphor for the sacrifice that restores right relationship. If Jesus’s death is the metaphoric sacrifice, how is that sacrifice distributed to the people? Symbolically, through the ritual of the common meal; practically, through the acceptance by each person of the challenge and opportunity to participate in the ongoing, here-and-now, realm of distributive justice-compassion. That participation is the radical abandonment of self-interest, and Jesus’s life is the model. The result is salvation as liberation from injustice.

Given all this, does the story of Jesus’s encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well have anything to say to post-modern Christian exiles from the traditional belief? Only in the sense that what Jesus offers is Grace – free gift – automatic relationship with God in God’s realm of distributive justice-compassion. Grace is not “pardon” for sinning with six husbands; Grace is not letting anybody off the hook for petty trespass. Grace is the free gift of citizenship in God’s Realm extended to all, not just those who worship on the mountain or in Jerusalem. Grace is the free gift of eternal life, realized through trust in the nature of God’s realm – where there is no death, only transformation. “I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor,” John’s Jesus says. “Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.”

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Second Sunday in Lent: Repent for the Kingdom II: Choosing Trust

Genesis 12:1-4a; Psalm 121; Romans 4:1-5, 13-17; John 3:1-17

Christian dogma is in full bloom in these readings: Abraham gained eternal life as the father of many nations because of his “faith” in God’s promise, according to the story in Genesis, and the corroboration in Paul’s letter to the Romans. The lawyer (teacher/leader) Nicodemus sneaks off to talk to Jesus in the middle of the night and finds out that the only way to “see the kingdom of God” is to be born again, by water and the spirit, and to “believe in the name of the only Son of God.”

“Faith” is clearly “belief” as far as the writer of John’s Gospel is concerned. “Trust” in God’s promise – the Old Covenant – has been replaced with “belief” in a violent God that sacrificed his only son in order to save humanity from darkness and evil. But that action apparently was not enough even for John, because his Jesus says, “No one can enter God’s domain without being born of water and the spirit,” i.e., baptism. In the synoptic gospels (Mark, Matthew, and Luke) Jesus says that the way to God’s realm of distributive justice-compassion is open to anyone with eyes and ears; Paul insists that God’s realm of distributive justice-compassion has arrived with Jesus’s death and resurrection, and we are invited to participate in that realm here and now; in John’s interpretation, the way is blocked by water as effectively as the return to Eden is blocked by guardian angel fire.

Does “repentance” mean baptism, or a conscious, continuing struggle through the flames for distributive justice-compassion? The war between the worlds that defined Jesus’s life and teachings has been joined.

The Elves that concocted the Revised Common Lectionary should have continued the speech John has Jesus say to Nicodemus. That might have pointed to a possible dialogue with Paul’s treatise on justification by faith (trust) in the free gift (grace) made possible by Jesus’s death and resurrection, discussed in the readings for last week (Romans 5:12-19). After declaring all those who don’t “believe” in him as condemned already, John’s Jesus continues: “And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds [works?] were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. But those who do what is true [works?] come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in [as part of] God.” So there are good works and evil works. But John, where is the trust that God – through Jesus – has acted in the world to restore justice-compassion? Where is the invitation to join the risen Christ in the ongoing program?

John uses mystical language, which barely succeeds as metaphor in the 21st Century because so much of it has already been interpreted to make Jesus’s message exclusive. If John had Paul’s letters to refer to, he either misunderstood them or rejected the argument. John clearly does not agree with Paul that “to one who without works trusts him who justifies the ungodly, such faith is reckoned as righteousness.” What has become conventional interpretation (which began before John’s gospel was written) would insist that “the ungodly” are those who do not believe either in the Jewish God or the Christian Messiah. Paul is saying that whoever trusts the message – whether Pagan or believer – is made “righteous” [saved] through the free gift of God’s grace. John insists that the “free gift” comes with a price. Repentance – turning away from “pagan” ways – is accomplished by water and the spirit in the ritual of baptism. Only then is grace bestowed and the realm of God found.

It is a short hop that requires no thought to arrive at the conclusion that the only way to be saved from sin is through baptism. Once “sin” became equated with “sex,” and the dogma that all humanity is fallen beyond redemption because the only way that human life is transmitted is through sex (original sin), baptism became the only way that infants could be saved from eternal hellfire and damnation. The final act at the closing end of life became the words of absolution, and anointing with oil. What went on in between (faith as belief versus good work) was the subject of heated debate among theologians, and the source of constant, nagging doubt – if not despair – on the part of the people of ever being allowed into the realm of God. By the fourth century, this debate and doubt had become attached to political power, and the course was set for western civilization into piety, war, victory, and uneasy peace.

John equates darkness with evil, and light with good. But post-modern, post-Christian mystics know better. Only by embracing and living through the darkness can the turn be made once more to the light. Twelve-step programs (“tough love”) hang all their effectiveness on the fact of human psychology that only after hitting bottom can people trapped in addiction – whether medical, chemical, or behavioral – begin to come back. Any artist will be happy to witness to the universal experience of creativity: the novel, the painting, the idea, the solution – comes from the darkness, from nothing. God’s realm – the natural earthly world – teaches very clearly that only after a time of incubation in the dark earth does the seed sprout into life. Matthew Fox calls it the via negativa, in his countering theology of original blessing. That theology (Creation Spirituality) got him into permanent trouble with the current pope (then Cardinal Ratzinger, in charge of church doctrine – the former Inquisition), and ultimately thrown out of the Dominican Order. John’s Jesus did have it partially right. The church still prefers deliberate scientific ignorance that attempts to keep people in darkness about God’s realm. But in Fox’s words, “Christ is the light of the world, which we now know is made only of light. Flesh is light and light is flesh. We eat, drink, sleep, breathe, and love that light” (Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh (Harmony Books, New York 1999) p. 271.

Paul argues, “the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith [trust].” Paul is not talking about Roman law in this instance. He is talking about religious law, which demands an outward sign of an inward covenant, such as baptism or circumcision, to separate “them” from “us.” But separation, and hierarchy, are anathema to Paul, as they should be to Christians today. Once one joins the ongoing program, which is the great work of distributive justice-compassion, there is no longer any distinction to be made between male or female, slave or free, Jew or gentile, or any of the other means by which humans determine who is “in” and who is “out.” So even though the community that John was writing for may have been in a struggle for survival that demanded a litmus test for membership, such a requirement flies in the face of Jesus’s open and inclusive ministry.

Christian tradition that demands an outward sign to prove one’s status as “saved” such as being “born again” through the “baptism of the holy spirit” or the public declaration that Jesus is your personal lord and savior, commits the same error as the Corinthian and Roman Christians that drove Paul crazy. “For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God. . .” whose free gift is there for all without qualification.

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Repent for the Kingdom I: Choosing Justice

First Sunday in Lent

Genesis 2:15-17; Genesis 3:1-7; Psalm 32;
Romans 5:12-19; Matthew 4 :1-11

The five weeks of Lent in Year A explore the concepts of sin, salvation, and justification in Paul’s letter to the Romans (and a diversion into pseudo-Paul’s Ephesians), and the long theological discourses that John’s Jesus engages in. Tradition defines “sin” in terms of conventional morality – especially sexual morality – and petty trespass. “Justification” usually means “rationalization” as in, “Anyone would be justified in demanding the death penalty in these circumstances”; or “abortion can never be justified under any circumstances.” Even though the root of the word is “justice,” and the true meaning is “to be made just,” the usual understanding is less about reconciling transformation and more about coercion and retribution. Likewise “repentance,” as pointed out in the Ash Wednesday meditation, has come to mean “feel sorry about” – i.e., cheap guilt to accompany petty trespass – rather than “turning around and away.” Real crime, such as murder, earns its own conventional retribution, so doesn’t enter the discussion. Murderers and other so-called “capital” criminals may indeed “repent” of their crimes, but “justification” for them is impossible on the earthly side of death – or so we have been taught for the past 2000 years.

For the first Sunday in Lent, according to the orthodox interpretation of the first reading from Genesis, the evil snake seduces the naive woman who in turn traps the all-too-willing man into disobeying God. In the last reading, the One who is to save humanity from the consequences of that original sin is made a similar offer and declines. In between is the Apostle Paul in one of his more inscrutable arguments. But if we let go of tradition and listen to scholarship, these readings take on a very different meaning that can provide leadership into a true and lasting repentance for this season of Lent and beyond. These stories are not about sex, nor are they about conventional morality and petty trespass. They are about human consciousness, and the choice each person has to make about whether or not to participate in God’s ongoing program of distributive justice-compassion.

Non-human inhabitants of the natural world don’t spend their time agonizing over “the problem of evil.” So far as humans know, the rabbit does not have a last regret as her neck is broken by the fox’s jaws. Justice in God’s Realm is profoundly distributive. To eat and be eaten is the eucharistic law of the universe. But thanks to the Trickster in God’s garden, humanity was given the ability to make value judgments about whether the rabbit “deserved” to die, and whether the fox’s action is “violent.” While what the snake told Eve is true on the surface (“if you eat of the fruit of tree of knowledge of good and evil you will not die”), in pure Trickster reversal, that knowledge brings the kind of death that separates us from God’s realm, where the lion and the lamb lie down together in trust that the Universe provides for equal life in balance – the radical fairness of distributive justice.

So into the fray of Paul’s tortured language (Romans 15-16): “But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died through the one man’s trespass, much more surely have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many. And the free gift is not like the effect of the one man’s sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brings justification” (emphasis mine). The free gift (charis) is the grace of God. One human (Adam/Eve) chose to live outside the distributive justice of God’s realm (sin/trespass), thereby bringing injustice to humanity because of the human demand for retribution (payback) instead of the fair distribution of sustainable life. But God’s distributive justice-compassion (righteousness) is freely available in God’s realm – the natural world where there is no “good-evil” dichotomy because all inhabitants of the Universe (God’s realm – the natural world) live in a fair balance that sustains life for all. That is the free gift of grace – distributive justice-compassion – returned to humanity by Jesus, if humanity chooses to accept and use it.

Where modern and traditional theology loses its way is in the misunderstanding of death. Jesus did not come so that people would no longer die, or so that people might die now but be brought back to life later when Jesus comes back again to finish what he failed to do the first time. Death is a fact of life – even (or especially) in God’s realm. Every being in the Universe, from eucharyotes to sabertoothed tigers to dwarf stars and planets has a life cycle that continues so long as there is a sustaining niche for it. As soon as the niche evolves away from sustainability, the life form dies – whether it is animal, vegetable, mineral, or gas. However, the good news from the scientific point of view (and surprisingly from the Apostle Paul’s ecstatic mystical insight) is that matter cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be transformed. That continuing, eternal transformation is something that humanity participates in, whether individuals choose to believe it or not. That is God’s free gift of eternal life.

But what Jesus was talking about was not the natural order of the evolution of the Universe. Jesus was talking about how humanity can replicate the distributive justice-compassion found in God’s realm. Back to Romans 5:17-19: “If, because of the one man’s trespass, death exercised dominion through that one, much more surely will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness exercise dominion in life through the one man, Jesus Christ. Therefore, just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all. For just as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.” Now Paul shifts to free gift as righteousness – as being made just (justification). If humanity is to replicate God’s distributive justice it can only be in this life here and now, as radical fairness – consciously choosing radical abandonment of self-interest (love) – as Jesus taught by the example of his own death at the hands of Roman imperialism. Jesus taught that radical abandonment of self-interest as the way to live in the kingdom of God in this life. Whether Jesus or anyone lives in the kingdom of God in another life before or after this one is irrelevant. The non-human inhabitants of God’s realm do not have the need or the ability to choose radical abandonment of self-interest. Only humans on Planet Earth (so far as we know) have that ability and – more of the Trickster’s irony – the need, if humanity is to continue for much longer as a conscious life form. The free gift of distributive justice is there, all we have to do is accept it and live it.

Matthew’s story of the temptation of Jesus now begins to take on a metaphor that has meaning in a post-modern, post-Christian world. When the Devil (the same Trickster as appeared to Adam/Eve, the first humans) appears to the One whom Christians consider to be sent as the reconciler between God’s realm and humanity, the Trickster offers all the ego-enhancing, self-serving powers and principalities of Empire, with its glittering theology: piety, war, victory, and – here comes the tricky part – uneasy, ephemeral, peace: i.e., retributive justice, which is injustice, that brought about Jesus’s undeserved, unfair, unjust death. Matthew’s Jesus says, “Get out of here, Satan! Remember, it is written, 'You are to pay homage to the Lord our God, and you are to revere him alone.'" Jesus chooses God’s realm, which is justice and life here and now. He is able to do it because of his extraordinary trust in God’s free gift.

We have the free gift (charis/grace) that brings justice and eternal life because we are part of God’s realm, whether we know it, believe it, or not. Jesus’s choice provides us with the way to begin the process – the program – of conscious participation.

It's That Time Again: Ash Wednesday 2008

Joel 2:1-2, 12-17; Isaiah 58:1-12; Psalm 51:1-17;
2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10; Matthew 6:1-6; 16-21
Ash Wednesday readings are the same for all three liturgical years – does that tell us anything?

The week leading up to Ash Wednesday culminates in “Fat Tuesday,” when everything containing fat must be either eaten up or discarded in order to prepare for the great 40-day fast called “Lent,” when not only is there food fasting, there is also fasting from entertainment, fun, and sex. It is time to “repent” of all the petty sins we may have done by omission or commission. But “repent” has come to mean “feel sorry about” rather than “turning around and away.” Maybe that’s why we have to continually repeat the process. Feeling sorry about something is no great motivation for changing – at least on a permanent basis. I’m sure that some of the folks who ate and drank to excess during the carnival season are “repenting” of that behavior today, but come next carnival the party will undoubtedly be joined once more.

Ash Wednesday is all about imperial piety, which means marking believers’ foreheads with a cross drawn with ashes, often made from burning left-over palms from the previous year’s Palm Sunday. This makes a nice tidy connection: the Palms we symbolically waved to celebrate the triumphal entry into Jerusalem of Jesus the conquering hero are now used to mark us like Cain with the evidence of our sin. Doesn’t all this fly in the face of Jesus’s scorn for those who “make their faces unrecognizable so they may be publicly recognized” (Matt. 6:16, The Five Gospels)? Never mind that Jesus never said any such thing, and that Matthew added this to his collection of Jesus’s sayings on his own. The point stands. Public piety does nothing but score points with the empire.

We might keep that in mind during this election year.

Ash Wednesday has its purpose, IF the paradigm is truly shifted, which a 40-day fast from the normalcy of civilization might possibly accomplish. Meanwhile, guilt is another word for cheap grace. Go ahead and eat your bread and soup meal this evening in honor of the illegal aliens who are denied basic humanitarian needs like food, shelter, and clothing – not to mention Iraqi children, refugees in Darfur, the list goes on and on. You can always go home and top it off with a bedtime snack (hmm... sounds like those awful Corinthians Paul was so mad at).

“God” is not going to listen anyway – as Isaiah makes clear. “Day after day they seek me and delight to know my ways, as if they were a nation that practiced righteousness and did not forsake the ordinance of their God.” They have the nerve to ask God why God pays no attention to their fasts. “Like DUH!” Isaiah says, “You serve your own interests on your fast day, and oppress all your workers! HELLO!”