Author: KPB Stevens

Luke 17:11-37 Apocalyptic Being

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When I was in seminary, someone asked why we couldn’t simply get rid of those parts of the Bible that don’t make any sense anymore. After all, if we accept that the Biblical canon was created by people, we should also accept that it can be uncreated by people. The professor gave a very wise answer. She said that we never know how the world will change, and the things that seem meaningless to us now might be rich with meaning a year from now. For a long time, the eschatological parts of scripture have seemed meaningless to me. I grew up in the seventies and eighties, when we were afraid of nuclear armageddon. But then the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet bloc broke up, and that fear dissipated and became like a half-remembered nightmare. Even after September 11, 2001, fear seemed manageable to me. Yes, it was possible that I and my loved ones would die in violence, but that’s always been possible – car accidents are violent, storms are violent, even heart attacks are violent. Fear of personal violence wasn’t as bad as fear that the world might end. It’s only in the past few years, when dire warnings of coming environmental catastrophe have grown so loud, that I’ve again become afraid like I was as a child. Apocalypse and eschatology went away as a spiritual concern, and now they’re back again.

I’m trying to decide whether I find Jesus’s apocalyptic discourse comforting or upsetting.  The comfort comes from the idea that the Kingdom of Heaven is already surrounding us. God’s great beauty and presence is here, now – it’s not something we need to wait for. We need only pay attention, and learn to peacefully align our minds with God’s mind, God’s compassion. And there is no preparation we can make for anything else – no bunker will keep us safe, we can plan for no post-apocalyptic utopia. Our endings, whether individual or collective, will find us in the midst of life. We’ll be sleeping, we’ll be doing kitchen chores, and then we’ll be gone. If we lose our lives now, giving ourselves up to the praise and love of God, if we allow ourselves to become lost in the vast environment of God’s love, then we already have everything we can or could ever need. Time disappears, and we subsist in the eternal now of the divine, and endings, if there are endings, become unimportant.

I can accept, and even rejoice, in this for myself. I have a harder time accepting it for my daughter. I do believe that I can never lose her, that no matter what happens, I will be with her within the mind of God, outside of time and the fears of the everyday. As John of Patmos says in his Revelation, God will wipe away every tear from our eyes. Yet I love the way she’s grown and changed, and am excited to see who she will become. My love of her roots me to time. This is probably what Jesus meant when he said that we must turn away from our loved ones for the sake of the divine. Perhaps he does want us to hold our interpersonal loves lightly, so that we can expand our love for everyone and everything. But I find that I can’t do it. The great loves of my life – my love for my daughter and my wife – root me in this world, this existence, this sweep of time.

Given this, maybe the most that apocalyptic thinking can do for me is to help me focus on the present moment. I don’t know what will become of my loved ones, but if I let my worries for their futures infect my love for them, if I turn from joy to fear in the way that I relate to them, then I will have lost a kingdom for nothing. I cannot hold my love for them lightly. But I can hold my sense of the future lightly.

This is not nihilism. I have no intention of giving up, of despairing of the possibility of averting environmental catastrophe. But my reasons have changed. I believe that God grieves for the species that go extinct. They are part of God’s abundance, and their absence wounds creation. God also grieves for all of those whose lives have already been disrupted or destroyed by environmental change. If God grieves for them, because God loves them, and loves them intimately, then I, if I am truly aligned with God, must grieve for them, too, and try to help them. But my motivation must grow out of this love, this collusion with the divine, and not out of fear.

 

Luke 17:1-10 We Will Find Ourselves in Communities of Forgiveness and Grace

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Jesus issues a duo warning in this passage. First, when you fail (and we are all bound to fail), don’t lead anyone after you in your failure. Second, the surest guard against failure is the encouragement and forgiveness of community. If we are to accept the schema of self that I’ve talked about previously in these posts, we must ask what role community plays in our efforts to strip away ego and grow close to God. And it must be admitted that identity is not necessarily bad, just as its not necessarily good. We saw, in the parable of the heavenly banquet, that clinging too strongly to our identities prevents us from joining in the banquet that God is preparing for us. But it isn’t really possible to be part of a community without taking on an identity. As soon as you say “I belong,” you are necessarily claiming an identity in the group that you belong to. Identity cannot be entirely wrong or bad. As long as we hold it lightly, and don’t confuse our identities with our souls, we are helped by it, because we are helped by the communities we belong to.

What a community Jesus is describing! The community of his disciples is very different from many of the other communities we might belong to. To belong to this community is to be raw and exposed. This is a community that requires one to admit fault and abandon the need to be thought well of. In this community love, as the Apostle Paul puts it, does not insist on having its own way. And because one is exposed, faulty, and repentant, it becomes hard to lead other people astray in such a community.

At Youth Group a week ago, I said that I 95% believed in something. My daughter, who knows me well, and who has lived sixteen years listening to my opinions, asked me what I meant. I said that I always try to hold five percent back from any of my political or moral beliefs, because I always want to keep open the possibility that I might be wrong. I stand by that, even though it might make me seem wishy washy. But being one hundred percent certain is insisting on having things our own way, and I don’t want to lead children into this one hundred percent certainty mindset. When we embrace this mindset, it becomes much harder to admit our faults and ask for forgiveness. It also becomes harder to forgive, as forgiveness becomes associated with winning. “Of course I’ll forgive you, once you admit that I’m right.”

Such thinking is at the root of communities of dominance and exclusion, exactly the kinds of communities that create destructive, self-serving identities. But a community that has an ethic of repentance and forgiveness, and doesn’t misuse that ethic or turn it into a form of control, posits a different kind of identity, one that reduces the controlling needs of the ego and cultivates humility in its members. Living in such a community is easy and joyful. Laughter is heard often in such a community, and people feel free to play. It is in this passage that at least two of the main spiritual themes of Luke are realized, and we see how joy and forgiveness lead to beauty and grace.

Luke 16:19-31 No Better Crucible

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Now that we’re fully convinced of our need for grace and our utter inability to follow Christ without God’s aid, we are given a parable that is not about prayer or the honing of an interior state, but about action, or the lack thereof.  Traditionally this is known as the parable of Dives and Lazarus, Dives being the name of the rich man. He isn’t named in the text, but people have given him the name as they’ve read and retold this parable over millennia. Lazarus should be a familiar name to us.  In the Gospel of John, he is the friend whom Jesus raises from the dead, the brother of Mary and Martha. He both foreshadows Jesus’ own resurrection, and reassures the flawed and failing disciples that resurrection is possible for them. Perhaps this is a different Lazarus, and it was as common a name as Jennifer in Ancient Palestine.  But perhaps it was a name that got mixed in with the oral tradition, and associated with many stories that were all, vaguely, about the same thing. Because in this parable in Luke, Lazarus is resurrected into eternal life, and like all of us who hope for resurrection, his main personality trait is humility.

Encountering this parable, I can’t help see myself in both characters.  I want the humility of Lazarus, while also wanting to maintain the wealth and prominence of Dives.  And I believe that the purpose of the parable is to incite this confrontation within myself. I, like generations of readers, want to be a better, more generous version of Dives.  I don’t want to be Lazarus. I don’t want to be that humble. Or, I want to see Lazarus raised up to a place of comfort and health, while still somehow maintaining his humility. The story makes me want this. It is a crucible where two characters are combined. These two characters are elements of my own soul, and the work of the crucible is to melt them down and make them into something new. The humble person who isn’t in misery.  The person, rich with God, who notices suffering and works to alleviate it.

I borrow this language of crucible from Teresa of Avila, who says, in The Interior Castle, that “there is no better crucible for testing the genuine value of prayer than the effects and the actions that follow it.”  It is true that we cannot work to receive God’s grace and forgiveness, which is pure gift. But we do work, not because we’re trying to earn salvation, but because we are so delighted by the foretaste of salvation that God has given us that we can’t help expressing our joy through love and charity.  Grace is a glimpse through the eyes of God, a moment where we see the world entire, and allow our hearts to be wounded by compassion and healed by joy. Having seen through God’s eyes, disregard of other people becomes impossible. They are as precious and wonderful as we are, and we love them as we are loved.  And because we love them, we work for their good, and share our blessing with them.

 

Luke 16:1-18 Eternal Habitations

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I was sitting with other clergy in a Bible Study, and we were arguing about this passage.  After awhile I became indifferent to the argument, and began to think about the dishonest wealth that I had received in my life.  I took out a sketch book and wrote this poem for my wife:

Eternal Habitations

You are my dishonest wealth.
Close-faced when I met you,
we walked on snow as dry as sand.
I talked about North Africa.
I was so exotic.  You were very quiet.

Later we walked on grass.
I sang “My Funny Valentine” to you.
It was so exotic, this wealth of love.
I was still only half myself.
I lied and said, “I’m this, and this.”
Truth grew thin so I could replace it.

Years later she walked on grass,
our daughter, in blue overalls.
It was so exotic, the sunlight in her hair.
I was aware of how my pretense had allowed
our movement to a house, her birth,
our happiness the gift of how
I’d preened and postured –
on snow, dry as a desert,
on grass, with song, and all along,
we slowly saw through to each other.

I don’t deserve my wife’s love, and she doesn’t deserve mine.  We were so unformed when we met that we could only be dishonest.  We had no truth to tell, yet. We created the truth of ourselves together, the truth of who we were as individuals and the truth of who we are as a couple.   Our love for each other was a kind of grace – more than we deserved, but always there, and always shaping us. Because of our love, I understand the kind of dishonest wealth that Jesus is talking about.  I’ve been the recipient of it.

The wealth we receive from God is always dishonest.  We can do nothing to merit it, we can only accept it.  Once we’ve received it, we need to be faithful with it.  We need to cosset it and protect it and be grateful for it.  This is why Jesus’ seemingly random statement about divorce at the end of this passage makes sense to me.  If I know this dishonest wealth through my marriage, then I need to protect my marriage, to treat it as precious.  And this is true of any of the great, gifted loves. Not everyone is meant for marriage, and not every marriage is a form of dishonest wealth.  Sometimes they’re just dishonest. But when one receives the gift of love, from whatever source, one must be faithful to it. True riches, the riches that only God can give, will follow.

 

Luke 15:11-32 When He Came to Himself

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Starving, grimed with the dirt of the pig sty, the Prodigal Son came to himself. Maybe he hadn’t really believed in himself until that moment – believed that there was a real self, a soul, that was being obscured by all of the needs and wants of his false self. He had been living a life of sin, but not because he was spending his time on women, wine, and gambling. The root of his sin was a kind of atheism about who he was, the belief that he was nothing more than the jangling collection of his wants and desires. As Thomas Merton puts it, “all sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered (New Seeds of Contemplation, 34-35).”  

The moment when he came to himself was a theophany, a moment of encounter with God. It was the moment when he discovered his own soul.Merton, again: “there is only one problem on which all my existence, my peace and my happiness depend: to discover myself in discovering God.” This is not merely a story of a person changing his behavior. This is a mystical story, a story of profound transformation, a story in which God is revealed dwelling within the heart of a realized human being.

That is why the story has resonated for so many and for so long. Most people, if they’re honest, know that a change in behavior requires a change in perspective. Only transformed people can live transformed lives. This is why I’ve been so focused on the ego and identity in the last few weeks. Both the ego and identity are defensive masks. We wear them for ourselves as much as for other people. The Prodigal Son is a person unmasked. When you look at him, his soul is all you see. This is why his father is so excited, why he runs to meet this naked and exposed son. God embraces the person who has come to themselves. God, in fact, is already embracing our souls, is intertwined with the human soul in a double helix of love.

The elder brother continues to wear his mask. Unlike his younger brother, his is not a mask of self-license and foolishness. It is the mask of the upright, the person who refuses to acknowledge their own brokenness, the ego that believes that righteousness is enough.  The elder brother has not come to himself.

In order for him to do so, in order for us to do so, we need grace. Merton writes that “although I can know something of God’s existence and nature by my own reason, there is no human and rational way in which I can arrive at that contact, that possession of God, which will be the discovery of Who God really is and of Who I am in God….The only One Who can teach me to find God is God, Godself, Alone.”