Author: KPB Stevens

Luke 14:1-24 The Death of Identity

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

We have talked about how the Christian response to fear and to the loss of political and social power is present-mindedness, superrational hope, and a willingness to enter into suffering.  Now we come to the final response and expectation, the release of identity. Again, Jesus is with the Pharisees, although now he’s banqueting with them, rather than arguing with them. He begins to critique their understanding of their own identities in the small sense.  He doesn’t question their overall identities as Jews and Pharisees at first, but he does question their status-consciousness. In their small circle of mid-first century Jews (not a large proportion of the world’s population by any means), and in the even smaller circle of Jews who consider themselves Pharisees, they are still worried about privilege and prestige.  Free yourself from the need for status, he says, and then he tells them how. Take the most low-status position imaginable. I should note that he says this after having healed the man with dropsy, breaking the rules and thus rendering himself low-status in the eyes of the Pharisees. And yet, obviously, he’s the guest of honor. So he’s confused all of the categories before he even begins his teaching, a teaching which is intent on confusing those categories even more.  

But the status we hold within our own little social and political groupings is only a tiny part of our identity.  Jesus continues his teaching, questioning those groupings themselves through his parable of the great banquet. Let’s let Peter Rollins provide his wisdom to us:

In this parable we are first introduced to the natural division that those who first heard this parable would easily recognize: namely, the division between those who should rightfully be at a wedding party and those who should not.  Like so many parables, this one begins with what people would understand and accept. But then it turns common ideas on their head and introduces the reader to something that cuts across what we take to be natural and right. A genuinely new, shocking, and distinctly unnatural division is presented to us – one that emerges between those who want to come to the party, despite their tribal differences, and those who exclude themselves by wanting to hold tightly to them…In this new type of party, “the good” refers to those who are willing to accept the invitation and stretch across party lines, while “the bad” refers to those who so tightly cling to their own identity that they are not willing to encounter others, listen to them, or allow them to be an instrument of their further transformation. (The Idolatry of God, pp. 111-112)

The Christian way is to try to free ourselves from all of those identities that would prevent us from attending the great banquet, to look past the divisions of us and them and not merely accept the other, but become the other.  This is exceedingly hard to do. We come to our identities early and hold onto them tightly. They are a kind of shortcut for understanding ourselves and our places in the world. When I was a teenager it was very hard to wake up every morning wondering who I was.  When someone offered me an identity, I accepted it with relief, because it eased the burden of authenticity. I have spent much of my adult life trying to unlearn this shortcut, to set it aside so that I can attempt to discover my soul.

On an individual level, these identities are dangerous because they are a tool that our egos use to keep us separate from God.  Rollins explains why:

By embracing…cultural, political, and religious narratives and by identifying so directly with them, we gain a sense of knowing the truth, of having a God’s eye perspective on the world.  These narratives [of identity] offer us a sense of mastery, a way of understanding things that might otherwise appear foreign, peculiar, and frightening. When we are faced with pain, these narratives offer us a way of understanding it and giving it significance.  They act as a type of compass that helps us navigate our world.

On the surface this might seem good and necessary.  But we are not masters of the world, and when we assume that we understand things that appear foreign, peculiar, and frightening, we shut them out and turn away from our own capacity for growth and change.  Rather than truly having a God’s eye view of the world, we exalt our ego and understanding to the status of God, and worship our identities.

These identities can be dangerous to individuals. Collectively, they can become disastrous for our collective life on this planet.  In times of crises we double-down on them, oppress others out of fear, or ignore their suffering because we tell ourselves that they are not like us.  Far from seeing through God’s compassionate eyes, we descend into the bunker of identity and hope that we’ll survive as the world burns above us.

And so Jesus calls us to let these identities die.  If we can’t, we won’t be able to taste the banquet that God spreads before us.  The parable of the banquet is not about us, from our position of high status, being kind to the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.  It is about us admitting that we are the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.  That everyone is. It is about setting our identities aside so that our egos can’t use them to assert mastery, and so that we, humbled, can learn to love like God loves.

 

Luke 13:22-35 The Narrow Door of Suffering

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Yesterday I talked about how Jesus’ teachings provided an alternative to the other types of Judaism being practiced at his time. In an anxious world that was predicting its own destruction, Pharisees worked at mutating their religion so that it could survive, Sadducees doubled-down on the old ways and traditions, Zealots sharpened their weapons and prepared for revolution, and Jesus looked and saw all of these choices and realized that they were united by one thing.  Each was an attempt to avoid the coming destruction, to somehow deflect the coming suffering. If only we follow the rules closely enough, the Pharisees said, we will not suffer. If only we maintain our power and privileges, the Sadducees said, we will not suffer. If we are successful in tearing down a corrupt and evil system, the Zealots said, we will not suffer. Jesus saw these beliefs as illusory. Suffering cannot be avoided, he said. The question is not whether we can escape suffering. The question is whether we can suffer and still love.

The disciples assume that they’ll be saved from suffering. After all, they belong to Jesus’ in-group. And, since the Kingdom of God is a vision of the world where there’s no suffering at all, it’s easy for them to assume that they can follow Jesus around the suffering. That the Kingdom of God is, for them, a kind of escape hatch. Yet when someone asks him if only a few will be saved, he tells them that there are no guarantees. “Try to enter by the narrow door,” he says, and then he goes on to talk about his own coming suffering in Jerusalem. The narrow door is cross-shaped. It is not an escape from, but a journey through, suffering, and not everyone is very good at accepting and living through suffering. Many will try to escape it, like the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Zealots do.

I am one of those who is not very good at accepting suffering. Suffering always feels like an insult to my capacity for control. When I suffer, my prayer practices tend to fall away. I grow sad and angry. I eat too much. I know this about myself, yet it always takes me by surprise. I pray through the good times, dedicated to my devotions, and I expect them to support me in the bad times. They don’t. This is mostly because they are mine, an effort of my own will. My ego is involved in them, and suffering strips the ego away. I strive to enter through the narrow door, but in the end, it is only grace that brings me through. Far from being the first, I am invariably the last to come to terms with suffering and let it shrive me.

Our world right now abounds with Pharisees, Sadducees, and Zealots. They’re entwined in our political and religious lives. I am often one of them, or at least I let my mind travel down hallways of expected self-perfection, authority, and dominance. Yet these are the very things that have to be stripped away if we are to enter through the narrow door. We all journey to Jerusalems of our own making, and our crosses will find us eventually. There is no just and loving way around suffering. There is the only the passage through it.

Luke 13:1-21 Sympathy for the Pharisees

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I have a lot of sympathy for the Pharisees. They were trying to create a new kind of order in a world where the old orders had grown thin and been proven corrupt. Theirs would be the surviving Judaism, after the temple was destroyed for the second time. They led the jews of the diaspora in keeping the tradition alive in different ways, no longer sacrificing animals to God but studying and singing and praying throughout the day.  And the change they wrought on Judaism was successful, seeing the Jewish people through progroms and persecutions and holocausts. During Jesus’ lifetime they were in the midst of creating this new way of being Jewish, even while insurrections and oppressions were going on all around them. They can be sympathized with. We can understand why they thought that any rift in their carefully devised and tenacious system could be utterly destructive.

I have, since my childhood, known their anxiety. When I was a child we believed that we could be annihilated by nuclear war at any moment. It was our presiding fear. Now I wake up every morning afraid of environmental catastrophe. News outlets show me charts and graphs and maps of what the world will be like as the temperature rises, of how we will suffer, of how many species will go extinct. It is intense and overwhelming. Most of the nuclear weapons are still around, but the deep fear we felt in the seventies and eighties has shifted. And our hope becomes ever more fantastical. Perhaps there are alternate universes where humanity will survive. Perhaps there are other planets we’ll manage to reach, after having destroyed our own planet so recklessly.

We have all the same swirling terrors as the people of Jesus’ time, and we seek the same kinds of solutions. We have traditionalists like the Sadducees, who think that if we just keep doing what we’ve done before somehow everything will work out all right. We have Zealots who are eager to take up arms and attack whatever political force they deem repressive. We have Pharisees, who believe that our problems can be solved by greater and greater self-discipline, by a fervent following of the rules, and, when the rules prove too hard, by defensive and angry lip-service paid to them.

The Jesus movement of first century Palestine refused to engage in any of these strategies. Jesus and his followers resisted the very powerful impetus to despair, and insisted on the value of hope. Something new and beautiful can grow, even amidst the world’s ugly carnage. This is what they said, and Jesus illustrated it with metaphors.  Something small like a mustard seed can create a whole world for the birds of the air to settle in. Something small and invisible like yeast can transform what already exists and provide fecundity, nourishment, community.

When their community tried to be like mustard seeds and yeast, they did so by focusing on the present moment, and showing fearlessness about the future. They walked and talked in a temple that would be destroyed soon. They healed people there. They traveled widely across an empire that was slowly unraveling, and befriended those whom the empire had no use for. When they were victimized by the same disasters that were victimizing everyone else, they prayed and sang songs of joy, even as they were being fed to lions, burnt on stakes, and hung on crosses.

When I wake in the morning, and am tempted by despair, I am not soothed by the idea of alternate universes or flights to the stars. I don’t find solace by subscribing to rigorous disciplines which I self-righteously claim as a kind of heroism that will save the world. I am not tempted to take up arms against those whom I think are corrupt and evil. I try to remember the mustard seeds in my life, the tiny things that I have faith in, that I believe will grow into something beautiful and magnificent. My child. My love for my community. My kindness to colleagues and the people I meet on the street. These things might seem less than heroic, gestures that are far too small to meet the current crisis. But if I invest them with hope and love, I am assured by the gospel that they will be like mustard seeds.

Luke 12:22-59 Consider the Lilies of the Field

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“Consider the lilies of the field,” I told her as she sat in my office, agonizing about grad school. She was a college senior, diligent, intelligent, able to do many things. She had always held herself apart from the life of parties and play that most students indulged in, so she seemed a little strange to them – tall, bony, her curly hair riding her head like a question mark. I liked her, even though I didn’t know her well. “Consider the lilies of the field,” I told her, and she told me I was insane.

I was close enough in age to her that I understood her reaction right away. Everything in our lives as young people had been about answering three great questions. Who will I love? What work will I do that will give my life meaning? What place will I call home?  We had been trained to ask these questions by concerned parents, and we had sought educational attainment and emotional stability so that we could answer them well. Yet Jesus, in the twelfth chapter of Luke, tells us that these questions are meaningless. Don’t worry about home, he says, God will take care of you. The only work you should care about is my work, the work of spiritual transformation. The only love that really matters is the love of God. No wonder the disciples balked at this and assumed that, as disciples, they could be held to some different standard.

If the student in my office had taken Jesus’ advice, she would have been going against the wishes of her parents, her teachers, and her peers. To really give up everything for the sake of God is deeply countercultural, and I don’t know anyone who has really done it. I certainly haven’t. The people I’ve known who have come closest to this standard are monks and nuns, and there’s a reason why most of them are elderly. We put a burden of stability and success on the young, and we’re not the only culture that does this. In Hinduism, the ashramic cycle of life assumes that the first twenty years of adulthood will be devoted to providing for your family and community through hard work. Indeed, if the whole world followed Jesus’ advice, we’d all starve. And knowing this, it’s no wonder that he follows up the beautiful reassurances of God’s love for ravens and lilies with a dire warning about division in families and the collapse of civic culture. He knew where his counterculturalism would lead.

The student in my office couldn’t give up the life plan that she had created for herself. To do so would be to disappoint all of the other people who had loved and molded her up until that point. Yet it was causing her profound anxiety. She, like myself, like the disciples, like everyone else, would not live up to Jesus’ strict standards. The most we can try to do is to let go of the worry. To pursue love, and home, and work, but also try to cultivate inner peace at the same time, and to be okay with letting certain dreams for our own futures dissipate and be replaced by something else. I don’t know what became of the student, whether she got into the grad school she wanted and fell in love and found her life’s vocation. But I know my hope for her. It’s the same hope I have for myself, and for everyone. That we may sometimes fail, and sometimes not get what we want, but be at peace.

 

Luke 12:1-22 Is there a place for fear in my faith?

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

When Jesus tells us that we should be afraid, what is it that we should fear?  “Fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell,” he says. “Yes, I tell you, fear him!”  He is pretty obviously talking about the devil, but what does the devil mean to us? It makes sense to be skeptical of horror fiction versions of the devil, and suspicious of historical attempts to label people as demonic.  But there is evil in the world, and it stems from our furious need to control. There is a drive for domination that causes people to rape and beat those they claim to love, psychopaths to murder children, political leaders to advocate for and authorize genocide.  This is why Jesus talks about God’s deep love for us immediately after inspiring us to fear the devil. You think you need to dominate and control, but you don’t. God can show you how to let go of this hellish control, because God has let go of control out of love for you.  God will not dominate you, but will advocate for you. The Holy Spirit will visit you.

The thing to fear, then, is our egos, our false selves, the personas we wear, the identities we insist on.  They are all forms of the same dominance that destroys innocence and corrupts nations. Thomas Merton puts it better than I ever could:

There is an irreducible opposition between the deep transcendent self that awakens only in contemplation, and the superficial, external self which we commonly identify with the first person singular.  We must remember that this superficial “I” is not our real self. It is our “Individuality” and our “empirical self” but it is not truly the hidden and mysterious person in whom we subsist before the eyes of God.  The “I” that works in the world, thinks about itself, observes its own reactions and talks about itself is not the true “I” that has been united to God in Christ. It is at best the venture, the mask, the disguise of that mysterious and unknown “self” whom most of us never discover until we are dead…”Hell” can be described as a perpetual alienation from our true being, our true self, which is in God.

And that’s where fear can enter into a healthy spirituality.  I don’t fear God, but I fear my separation from God. I fear that I will be content within illusions of myself.  I fear that I will convince myself that sin is somehow justified, that doing wrong is part of a process of conversion.  It’s not. It is separation from God, and the conversion that Luke points us to is a union with God, an imitation of Christ that doesn’t show us our true selves, but is our true selves.  

 

Thomas Merton quote from New Seeds of Contemplation, https://www.powells.com/book/-9780811200998.