I'm back, and listening

I've been away from this blog for too long now, and I have to accept the reality that I won't ever get to that promised third part of "Evolution and original sin"... I got too busy and there seems to be no end to that. In a nutshell, that third part would have been about the parallels between the idea that there is a brokenness inherent in the ways we live life, and the notion that we treat the earth as something to exploit. I leave that thought for you to explore...

In the meantime, I led worship again at our beloved little UCC community, and I took over webmastership of our site, so now I post my sermons on there, rather than here on the blog. Check out my most recent sermon here and have a look at the posts that I sprinkle the site with irregularly. 

I also attended an "Academy for Leaders" retreat run by the Center for Courage and Renewal, who base their work on the Quaker tradition. That was sort of my treat after finishing my PhD and reorienting myself. Part of what we did over there was deep listening to one another. And I realized that there is an affinity between listening to others and listening to the Eternal Silence we call God in prayer and meditation. That insight sparked a poem.

Listening

A new realm, brimming with sparks, with stars
Encircling our beings in the deep.

Us, but moving dots on lesser days
Now joining the Eternal.

Have you experienced listening as a sacred exercise? Maybe as you found yourself attending to God's voice in the silence, or as someone shared their deepest selves with you? You are invited to relate your experience below--I'm listening.

Sowing grace

...and another sermon, which I gave last Sunday. (The last installment of the "Evolution..." series will be coming. Sometime. Soon. I promise.) The lectionary passages were Isaiah 55:10-13, Psalm 65:9-13, Romans 8:1-11, and Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23.

If you live much of your life online, like I do, you have probably noticed that Texas Tech has made worldwide news these past few days. More precisely, one of our cheerleaders. She’s an avid hunter, and she has posted pictures on Facebook that show her with her quarry. Not bucks and deer, but lions, elephants, and even a rhinoceros. She has made many a trip to Africa to hunt those down.

These photos have caused worldwide outrage, and an immense outpouring of hatred. People all over the internet proclaim that she is heinous, that they are disgusted with her, and I have even seen a call to kill her. And I can’t help thinking, there is something wrong with this.

Not with the fact that there is an immense interest and compassion for these large animals. That is wonderful. We’ve come a long way from the times where animals were seen as objects. But if that compassion is turned into blind and misinformed hatred, something has gone awry.

For here is the thing: you could make the case that she has done nothing wrong. Yes, some of the animals she hunted are endangered. However, all her hunts were legal, organized by local agencies. She paid all due fees, she paid the people who worked for her. She gave the meat to villagers in the area, and she even gave toys and goodies to local children.

I’m not saying I’m condoning her actions. I do think there is something morally wrong with hunting animals just for the sake of hunting. Especially endangered or rare species.

But then, I am not exactly standing on moral high ground myself. I eat meat, I wear leather shoes, I consume products made from animals, and all those animals I consume probably had worse lives than the ones the cheerleader shot. And I am pretty sure the same is true for over 90% of the people who say they hate her.

And yet, everybody claims moral superiority over her, explicitly or implicitly. So what is going on here?

It’s precisely what Paul describes in today’s verses from Romans. We are following the law of sin and death. We live in the world of condemnation. We are dead in the flesh—not our bodies, mind you, but our inborn tendency to curve in to sin.

Usually, those words are taken to describe our relationship with God. But I have come to believe that they describe our relationship with life and one another. Here is what happens. We receive the law: a set of rules that tell us how to live. We try to follow the law, for it is good and makes sense. But then we realize we cannot live up to it. We will always fall short of perfection. 

Take the Sixth of the Ten Commandments. “Thou shalt not kill”, so it is said. Many take this to mean murder, but I believe it actually talks about all killing. If all life is sacred, as I believe, then it would make sense to have a prohibition against taking life.

And we would love to live in a world without killing, wouldn’t we? Except when we try, we realize how difficult it is. Let’s not even talk about human life right now. Let’s just talk about animal life. Sure, we can go vegetarian or even vegan. We can avoid any products that use animals or are tested on them. 

But inevitably, we bump into the limits of our efforts. We are part of an industrial society that destroys the environment and kills life in the process. We pay taxes that are used, among other things, to subsidize farmers who practice factory farming. We don’t want roaches in our kitchen. And so on. Bottom line, we cannot claim innocence.

And we know that, deep down in our hearts. So deep down in our hearts, we condemn ourselves for being less than perfect. And this self-condemnation hurts: a burden of pain we carry around every day. And from this place of pain we lash out whenever we find someone who seems to be even more reprehensible morally than we find ourselves. That’s what Paul means when he says we are dead in the law. The law is made powerless by our pain.

This is why the law doesn’t work. All it does is invite sin. In fact, it creates two types of sinners: those who break it, and those who use it to put themselves above others. We know those two archetypes as sinners and Pharisees. But it is safe to say that both live within each of us.

The only thing that can free us from this suffering is grace. The forgiveness that tells us, “you are accepted, exactly the way you are, despite all you could have done better, despite the fact that you will never be perfect. You are accepted.” 

This is the message that Christ brought us: in the healing of the sick, in the embrace of the outcast. On the cross, he took our all our wrath, our self-loathing and our judgmental anger on himself to make us understand that we are redeemed to life. That in all our imperfection we have never been anything but forgiven.

If we realize that, then the word has accomplished its purpose. As the prophet puts it: The mountains and the hills burst into song, the brier turns into myrtle, and the pastures of the wilderness overflow.

As Pastor Kate told us last week, we don’t have to do anything to earn this grace. In fact, we can’t do anything. But of course, that’s not the way we roll. Inevitably, once we have experienced this renewal of our spirits, we ask ourselves, what is next? What am I going to do with this tremendous freedom? How can I share it with others?

Today’s Gospel passage tells us how. Spiritual progress, says Jesus, is akin to sowing seeds on rocky soil. We sow our seeds of love wherever we can, but some will be taken away or choked by those with ill will. Others will fail to take root. But the good news is, we don’t have to judge anyone for that. Not ourselves, not others. 

For we have been liberated from the demands of perfection. We are free to keep on sowing, quietly, confidently. And eventually, some of our efforts will take root. And we are promised that they will yield a hundredfold crop.

Unfortunately, no one seems to be paying attention to Jesus’ words these days. The cheerleader incident is just one example. Even true compassion can turn very ugly when we add judgment to it. The same is true on all levels, from our personal lives all the way up to politics and theology. The left and the right, progressives and conservatives are interlocked in a deadly battle of petty legalism and mutual condemnation. 

The days where political divisions created energy and progress are over. The nation is tearing itself apart. Christianity is tearing itself apart. We are going down in a spiraling dynamic of mistrust and judgment, and this dynamic has to stop. And the only place where we can put some brakes on is right here. We have to start with ourselves.

I have a dream for our little congregation. I would like us to be visible in our community, not as a stronghold of progressive opinion, but as sowers of love and of mutual respect. I would like us to work for understanding between the left and the right, Democrats and Republicans, conservative Christians and progressive Christians. 

I would like this beautiful, simple little church to be a sanctuary for people who are asking questions. Who don’t know where they’re going, who may be suspicious of any ready-made directions—including ours!—and who need a space where they can discover a path to call their own. I would like this to be a safe space where people can explore and disagree, in matters of ethics, of religion, of politics.

I believe this is the only way we can share the bounty we have been gifted.

Slaves to grace?

I know, I still haven't gotten around to post part III of "Evolution...". Had a lot of things going on in my life in the here and now--among others, filling in with a sermon at our beloved little congregation. Here it is; the lectionary passages were Jeremiah 28:5-9, Psalm 89:1-4, 15-18, Romans 6:12-23, and Matthew 10:40-42. My main focus was on Romans, where Paul uses the metaphor of slavery to describe our bondage to sin, but also, paradoxically, to the grace that frees us from sin.

Around the year 1200, there was a young man in Italy who lived the carefree life of a rich man's son. He worked in his father's business, attended parties, and eventually went to war. But all the while, he kept having spiritual experiences and visions of Christ. In 1205, on his way to another battle, he had another vision that made him turn around. He began a life of spiritual simplicity and care for the poor. His name was Giovanni di Pietro di Bernadone, but today we know him as St. Francis of Assisi.

In late 1934, a traveling businessman and hopeless alcoholic named Bill Wilson was admitted to a hospital to recover from a bout of drinking. Wilson had been drinking for nearly twenty years. He had ruined his reputation and career, and been told by his doctor that he would either end up dead, or permanently locked up. But during this stay, something happened. One night, after crying out for God in despair, Wilson experienced a bright light, a feeling of ecstasy and serenity. He never drank again, and he went on to become the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Both men, St. Francis and Bill Wilson, were slaves to sin and then became slaves to righteousness, as Paul puts it. So we can use their life stories to learn something. For the passage from Romans is difficult for us to understand in many ways. We're not really sure what sin means, what grace means, and we're uncomfortable with the metaphor of slavery. It's almost offensive to our ears as we're still struggling with the legacy of actual slavery. And what does Paul even mean by "enslaved to God"?

First, let's think about sin. What is sin? Of course, it's not a list of things we're not supposed to do. Our faith has to move beyond such childish notions, and I assume for most here it already has.

The best definition I've come across is this: life curving in on itself. Martin Luther used this definition, and he may have gotten it from St. Augustine. In this view, sin is the suffering we feel when we sever the natural ties we have to all of life. This is not a new-agey idea. Science tells us that there is a seamless continuation from the first living cells to ourselves. Science also tells us that empathy is built into our mammalian nature. We even have so-called mirror neurons in the brain whose sole function is to make us feel what someone else feels. And caring for one another is one of the things that propelled human evolution. You can't raise a human child in an environment as selfish as, say, a chimpanzee horde.

So, our natural state is to be intimately connected to life in multiple ways. We are a continuation of the biological genes and the cultural memes passed down to us through countless generations. We are part of a larger whole in joy and in pain. Wherever people suffer, it is suffering that could be ours. Whenever we suffer, we bear witness to the suffering of the world. So when we divvy life up into things we do and we don't care for, we effectively cut some of our ties with life. And that has consequences we see and feel daily: in the fissures in our society, in the exploitation of people and nature, in our own divided souls where we act as manipulative parents to ourselves, rejecting some aspects of who we are while cherishing others.

Sin, then, is an inner motion, a movement of the heart and mind by which we say we don't care about life as a whole, only about our own little territories. And we take those territories so seriously that we even expel parts of ourselves from them.

There's another thing we can learn from this. Sin is not moral failure. St. Francis didn't choose to be a rich man's son. He was born into a lifestyle that entailed luxury and a lust for adventure. Likewise, Bill Wilson didn't choose to become a miserable alcoholic. He started drinking to overcome his natural shyness and awkwardness in social situations. He might never have been a successful salesman without alcohol. He might have never had a reputation to ruin.

The same is true for all of us. We are all born into a situation we have to cope with, and we do so to the best of our ability. Sometimes we behave morally along the way, and sometimes we don't. Sin is an inevitable part of what it means to be human. We can't help curving in on ourselves, even when we earnestly wish not to do so. And paradoxically, when we try to be perfectly good, we actually commit yet another sin: the sin of the Pharisees, the sin of pretending we're above the human condition.

So it makes sense to say we are slaves to sin. What is slavery? You are taken from your rightful home, you are placed in captivity, no longer free to make your own decisions, and you toil away while you get nothing in return. Being subject to sin pretty much sums that up. Slavery is an apt metaphor for our spiritual condition.

This situation would be hopeless if it weren't for grace. Grace is the good news of forgiveness, of restoration to wholeness and communion. Sometimes grace seeps into our lives slowly, as it did with St. Francis. His spiritual maturity grew over years and years in which he had encounters with beggars, with death and imprisonment, with illness and visions. Eventually he devoted himself to the spiritual path. At other times, grace bursts into our lives unexpectedly and changes us radically. This was the case with Bill Wilson. In either case, grace came and freed them from their slavery to sin.

What happened next is fascinating. For both men, grace wasn't the endpoint of their journey. It was the beginning. Both went on to do great things, and hence they set themselves up for more failure. We don't know much about St. Francis' personal flaws. Back then, people didn't scrutinize spiritual leaders as we do today. But we can learn from the lives of a few more recent saints. It turns out that Mother Teresa had a temper. Gandhi, the great proponent of non-violence, beat his wife until he had a tearful moment of repentance when he realized he wasn't living up to his own values. And going back to Bill Wilson, he was sober for the rest of his life, but he was a heavy smoker, experimented with LSD, and some say he had an affair. Bottom line, when we talk about people as godly or even saintly, we're not saying they're perfect but rather that their light outshines their darkness. Both are part of the wholeness of their human condition.

And here lies the key in understanding Paul's word of enslavement to righteousness, or to God. Grace is a gift. But we have to take responsibility for that gift, for we are still human. We are still fallible. We can't let the gift sit outside our door. It will get eaten away by the weather. We have to make use of it, even if we stumble and fail some more along the way.

And the astounding thing about grace is that if we don't use it, we betray ourselves. Grace permeates us to the core of our beings. Some even say it comes from the core of our beings, from an inner truth deeper than our individual consciousness. St. Francis couldn't have gone back to being a rich young warrior. Bill Wilson couldn't have gone back to drinking. They would have betrayed their own, deepest selves.

It is in this sense that we are enslaved to grace once we have tasted it: we are bound to it with the chains of spiritual fulfillment. Just like sin took us from our homeland of primordial communion, grace takes us from the wasteland we have come to call our home. It brings us to new life in shackles and commands us to toil for it without regard for reward. The reward will come: but if we expect it or even demand it, we are back to sinning. We can build a new house, but we can't force ourselves to feel at home in it. The most important rewards in life are beyond our control.

It now becomes clear what the prophet Jeremiah meant when he said that of all the prophets, the one who talks about peace is the real prophet. Peace doesn't come true by being full of uptight righteousness. We find it whenever we are given the strength to bear witness to suffering. To work with imperfection instead of judging it. To care for one another despite the carelessness of the world. This reassurance is the glory of our strength and the shield of our covenant. The glimpse of home we catch is our reward.

Sacrifice

In today's Stillspeaking Devotional, Rev. Fitzgerald recounts the story of sixteenth-century Mennonite martyr Dirk Willems, who was incarcerated for his faith by the authorities. He managed to escape across a treacherously frozen river but turned around when the guard who pursued him broke through the ice. Willems saved the guard's life, was captured again and later executed. "It is a great story", comments Fitzgerald. "But it is a Christian story. Which is to say it has a cross in it."

Duly impressed with Willems' sacrifice, I continued my morning tour of the interwebs, only to stumble on this insightful little piece: a list of seven "habits of happy people". Most of those are common, wisdom-laden spiritual fare (embrace impermanence, don't crave approval, see rejection as guidance), but the first one got me thinking. "Happy people", the author boldly proclaims, "put themselves first". They take care of their own needs before they cater to anyone else's.

At face value, these two bits of writing seem to starkly contradict each other, and to sum up the range of options our culture provides re dealing with our own needs. On the one hand, there is the much-admired, but somewhat gloomy, Christian ideal of giving up our own needs for those of others. Which, as we all know, hasn't created spiritually mature people, but mostly suffocated, sour-faced killjoys and co-dependents. On the other hand, there is the sheer hedonism (or so it seems) of the me-first culture, which comes with materialism, selfishness, and a general lack of compassion and connection. 

Faced with these options, overall cynicism about the human condition would be the best response. But there is an alternative, namely, to realize that things aren't as simple as they look in superficial readings of both approaches. Let's go back to Willems' story. And let's imagine he had put his own wish to survive before the guard's. What would his life have looked like?

To answer this question, we must dig deep into the human condition and ask ourselves, "What is the deepest need we have?" Turns that out our deepest longing is not survival or even well-being, but meaning. As long as we can make sense of life, as long as it is meaningful to us, we can cope with almost any condition. And rarely do we encounter a suffering more agonizing than the absence of meaningfulness. All religion, philosophy, and much common sense as well as common nonsense, revolve around ascribing meaning to our existence.

Willems found his meaning in faith, and his faith was based on nonviolence, and radical love of God and neighbor. If he hadn't turned around to save the guard, odds are his life would have been meaningless from that point. He would have given up what was most important to him. He would have neglected his deepest need: the need for meaning.

His sacrifice, then, was not what we usually take that term to mean. He sacrificed his freedom and his life, yes: but not to suit some higher ideal or abstract faith statement. He sacrificed them for the sake of his own, deepest self. A self rooted in a reality more profound than the world in which we put survival and comfort above all else. We have to imagine that he was at peace with his decision: an all-encompassing peace, welling up from this deeper reality, which would have remained forever elusive had he chosen to run.

This is the true meaning of faith, and the true meaning of sacrifice. Any sacrifice that is not authentic, that is less than a completely truthful expression of who we are at our deepest level, is not an act of faith, it's an act of showing off. One of those Jesus warned against. 

And now it becomes clear that there is no fundamental contradiction between the Christian path of self-emptying love, and the contemporary insistence on pursuing our needs and wants. For in this day and age, meanings are no longer simply handed down to us. We have to find them for ourselves, and we have no place to start but ourselves. Therefore, our journey begins with taking even our sillier whims seriously. 

Craving pie, a burger, a trip to New Zealand? Don't dismiss those in the name of some misunderstood idea of spiritual discipline. Make them your discipline. Pursue them without mistaking them for absolute truth or final fulfillment. Look into them without judging them. Over time, they will reveal their fleeting, finite nature, and make way for deeper and deeper layers of longing: for they aren't your true goals, only signposts for the journey. They will evaporate,and you will become ever more authentic in the process. Eventually, you will encounter your own deepest meaning, and you will find that you'll have sacrificed your whims along the way. 

And no one can tell you what shape your particular sacrifice will take. Some of us who make the journey trade an all-too comfortable life for dramatic encounters with sheer existence. Others give up constant drama and impossible dreams for the peaceful routines of a life lived simply and humbly. Some experience both. Whichever form your path may take, one thing is true for all of us: ultimately, "sacrifice" is not giving up what is important to us, but living up to it. Thus, the true meaning of the term isn't to rid ourselves of who we are, but to let go of who we are not. To uncover the truth, the power and the glory which has been lying awake at the ground of our being since the beginning of time.

Evolution, awe and original sin (part II)

Apart from a rediscovery of awe, there are two other things we can learn from Marcelo's piece, and which I'll deal with in this post and the next one. First, we can use his little cosmological epic to inquire into the actual difference between science and religion. As you'll see, it's not about evolutionary timelines (or at least it shouldn't be), it's about how we think of our universe at the deepest of all levels. 

Notice how Gleiser presents his account in a language, not only of awe but of life. His word animate and endow with intention processes that are, strictly speaking, wholly material and non-intentional: "our father/mother the universe"; "the furious pace of hydrogen fusion"; "oxygen that protects life"; "animals struggling to preserve their genes". 

These aren't scientific statements. Which is obvious enough in the father/mother metaphor, but language can color our perceptions in even subtler ways. Stars don't feel fury. Oxygen has no intention to protect life, and animals don't know anything about their genes. Marcelo knows all that, of course, and if I asked him why he worded it that way, we would probably end up having a delightful conversation about the limits of language and imagination. We would talk about why humans have to resort to animistic metaphor to convey awe, and about our ultimate inability to escape our own anthropomorphic inclinations. Our paths would touch, or almost touch.

And we would only disagree about things when getting to their most profound. He would likely insist that these limits of our talking and thinking are by-products of our evolution as humans, and that there is nothing more we need to say about them. I would argue that the very fact that we are aware of these limits is a faint reflection of a reality which lies beyond both our scientific and religious concepts, and which I happen to call God. 

At which point he might ask me if I'm with the "intelligent design" crowd, and I would reply "of course not". And I would spend the better part of an afternoon explaining why: Because I think intelligent design is an injustice to the adventure and the uncertainty that is life. Because I've become convinced that God is much better thought of as the animating force behind all of evolution: omniscient and omnipotent insofar as He or She is uncreated, but groping and straining and pushing into the dark just as we are as regards Creation: with no guaranteed outcome and no predetermined goal, other than the distant assurance that everything will go back to Oneness eventually. 

And, no, I would reassure him (if he were to wonder): I'm not a New-Agey "heretic". Such lines of thought have a venerable history in Judeo-Christianity, from Eriugena to Cusanus, and all the way to Whitehead, Tillich, and Jonas. 

At which point Marcelo would probably excuse himself with a nervous glance at his watch. But the point would have been made: just because science and religion are different ways of knowing, they are not exclusive. It is only when we read their respective languages with exclusivist rigidity that they seem incompatible. In reality, they come together in our living, breathing, exploring existence, our constant being on the move in this world of cells and molecules, of awe and values. It is one world.