Author: KPB Stevens

Luke 11:14-54 An Empty House Swept and Put in Order

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

I went to visit a woman who had been found on a park bench and brought to our shelter by the police. A shelter worker became her advocate, and helped her get the five years of social security back pay that she was owed by the government. The worker helped her find a small apartment, and when I went to see her she was living there with her little dog. It was February, and the glass patio door was open. I and the little dog shivered, but the woman seemed immune to cold. She smoked and the smell of burnt tobacco mingled with the cold air. She was taking her medications, and in recovery, but there was something eerie about the chilled stillness of the room. Within months her illness would reassert itself and she would begin attacking her friends, full of anger and paranoia.

As I sat with her, part of my unease was for myself. I saw her relapse coming, and I recognized it in myself. I have not suffered from mental illness, but I have attempted multiple resets of my life, all of which have failed to a greater or lesser degree. Incrementally I’ve gotten better, become more peaceful, less compulsive. But compulsion is still there, waiting for my weak moments. Old habits have force, they awaken and overwhelm, and in my weakest moments I don’t put up much of a resistance.

When Jesus says that the unclean spirit returns to a swept house and finds no resistance, he is speaking simple psychological truth. This is what makes real amendment of life so hard. We know what we want to banish from our lives, but we don’t know what we want to fill our lives up with. So we banish the bad things and then sit within empty, cold rooms, doing nothing, until our banished brokenness returns.

Which doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to exorcise our demons. Jesus is harsh to those who question the effort, reversing his previous stance and saying that, in this matter, whoever is not for him is against him. We have to make the effort of amendment. But it can’t just be scattering. The emptiness that our demons leave behind has to be filled. We need to invite the divine into our empty houses.

How?  By turning the eye into a lamp, so that we can look out at an enlightened world.  By looking sharply and distinctly, and inviting the things we see to move us. By taking on new habits, new practices of attentiveness, that let the blessing in. By listening hard to people as they tell us about their lives, and not sitting in judgement on them. By honestly mourning the people we loose along the way, and celebrating the people we find.

 

Luke 11:1-13 The Holy Spirit will be given to you

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When my mother was in the hospital, I disliked the chaplains who came to pray beside her bed. Some of them were friends, and they only meant to do good, to be loving and kind.But they kept asking God for things. For her healing, for guidance for the doctors – all practical and needful things. Still, I had a bad feeling. Although there were constant spikes of hope, I guessed that she was going to die. Hope was timorously held onto, but every day there were new setbacks, and she slipped away from us more.

What should the chaplains have asked for? Doesn’t Jesus tell us to ask, and it will be given unto you, to seek and ye shall find? Aren’t we supposed to approach prayer like a man in the night, knocking for bread at a friend’s door? Yes, we are. But, curiously, Jesus doesn’t say that we will get the things we ask for. In response to prayer, we are promised the Holy Spirit, and little else.

This is the same thing that Paul is saying in Philippians chapter 4, verses 4-7.  

Rejoice in the Lord always.  I will say it again: Rejoice! Let your gentleness be evident to all.  The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.  And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Jesus Christ.

We are told, very clearly, to present our petitions to God, but again, we will not be answered by a fulfillment of our wishes. Instead of getting the things we ask for, we’ll get the peace of God, which transcends all understanding. We’ll get a sense of the Holy Spirit abiding with us, and filling us, and quieting the raging of our hearts.

So why do we pray, and pray for specific things? We pray to lay our own desires bare, to be entirely honest about what we want and think we need. Voicing our prayers is a form of self knowledge, a clearing away of the anxieties of the self so that we can stand quietly and experience the peace that God provides as an answer to our prayers.  

My friends the chaplains were not wrong to ask for my mother’s healing, or guidance for her doctors and nurses. They were simply stating what we clearly wanted. It was hard, there in the ICU, with machines beeping and the susurrus gasp of her labored breath, to sense the Holy Spirit, and to find peace with what was happening to my mother. But the prayers were answered. Not in the moment, and not because of a miraculous recovery, but in the months and years since, when peace and a sense of the Holy Spirit have become more and more present in my life.

 

Luke 10:21-42  There is need for only one thing

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If I could look through the eyes of God, I would see each person completely.  I would know their sorrows and their fears, and, tellingly, all their little mundane moments.  I would know the smell of them and the way their body feels when standing, and would ride the currents of worry and joy that run through their minds.  I would know every hair on their heads. And seeing and knowing all this, I would love them with the complete compassion and understanding that now, limited and human, I only offer to those I know most intimately.  

It is not God’s great intelligence that stops me in my tracks and forces me to wonder.  It is God’s everlasting compassion. The three Os don’t matter here. God may or may not be omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent, seeing all, everywhere, and able to act with all power.  It’s God’s omnipassion that matters, that silences or enhances these other attributes. Compassionate of all, God doesn’t see to judge, isn’t simply present without caring, doesn’t act to reward or mete out punishment.  Our problem as human beings is not that we can’t know like God knows. It’s that we can’t love like God loves.

For God, everyone is neighbor, and more than neighbor, beloved.  The Good Samaritan is another flawed being trying to love like God.  Able to see past his social identity, able to act beyond the confines of his tribe, he is still limited, as we all are.  He is not Jesus, who is and was the human being who can see through God’s eyes and feel God’s complete compassion for everything.  When Jesus talks about the Good Samaritan, he is simply providing a model of what’s possible for the lawyer whom he’s talking to. Sometimes we catch little glimpses of God’s infinite compassion.  None of us get to live in it all the time. But all of us can sketch what we glimpsed in our own moments of limited, flawed compassion. All of us can be like the Good Samaritan.

In the end there is only one thing.  It is that ecstatic, beautiful, all encompassing compassion.  It is that ability to look through God’s eyes. Mary of Bethany knows it, and when she sits at Jesus’ feet, she is trying to see as he sees and hear as he hears.  Really, that’s all that matters.

 

Luke 10:1-20 Responding to Beauty and Mystery

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First, let me introduce you to Andrew Hudgins’ poem, “Two Strangers Enter Sodom.”

Two Strangers Enter Sodom
by Andrew Hudgins

Those who’d seen them told the others,
and we gathered at Lot’s doorsills
to watch them eat.  They had just dipped
their fingers into lentils

and their slender fingers glistened with grease.
Lot bathed their feet, small feet
just barely dulled with earth, releasing
light trapped beneath a sheet

of fine dust.  Slowly he released them,
each small foot oiled and dried.
“I want them,” someone whispered.  Another,
like an ardent echo, sighed.

Another said it openly.
“We want them!  Send them out!”
we shouted.  We’d seen unearthly beauty
enter a house, bathe, eat,

prepare to sleep.  Some might stop at looking,
but others, seeing it,
would reach out and, touching, they would take it,
even if taking it

destroyed what they desired.  We surged
against the strangers, screaming,
and the angels calmly struck us blind
with the light of our own dreaming.

Still reaching out, we touched each other:
coarse cloth, coarse hair, coarse skin –
and cringed from it.  We pawed cool air
for the lost celestial men,

whose footfalls faded lighter, lighter
till they were light’s own light
departing – or so it seemed to us
in our god-dazzled night.

Hudgins suggests that the sin of the Sodomites arises from them knowing only one response to profound beauty and revelation.  When heavenly messengers appear among them, they want to rape them. They want to assert power over them, to possess them, to subject them to carnality.  Their sin is famous because it’s an extreme response to a common instinct. Faltering before beauty and mystery, we seek to belittle it, control it, and reduce it to something we can understand.

For a moment in time, the seventy disciples have become heavenly messengers.  They go to the surrounding villages to declare the Kingdom of God through their words and through their deeds.  Something profound is seeping through the corners of the world. Revelation is appearing in the corner of the eye.  If the people were to turn their heads and look, they would find themselves transformed. Jesus prepares the disciples for an encounter with Sodom.  Some, he says, will reject this revelation and use the tools of violence and rape to repress it.

Yet when the disciples return, they have not encountered Sodom.  On the contrary, they return rejoicing, and in welcoming their joy Jesus is at his most poetic.  Cosmic results accompany their traveling, and the small, biting malevolence of the world begins to fall away.  Nevertheless, Jesus says, don’t rejoice that the spirits submit to you, but that your names are written in heaven.  It is not the disciples control over spiritual forces that is important. It is their participation in the revelation of the Kingdom of God.

When we encounter beauty and mystery, when we are moved beyond our understanding and catch a glimpse of revelation out of the corner of our eye, how do we respond?  Do we reject the glimpse, attempt to control the revelation? Or do we simply rejoice, and invite others to rejoice with us?

Luke 9:28-62 The Transfiguration

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When Jesus comes down the mountain, he is not meek and mild.  He seems to chastise a parent whose son is possessed. He rebukes the disciples for wanting to consume the Samaritan village with fire.  Set against this is his kindness to a little child, his refusal to ostracize exorcists who aren’t in the in-group. Finally, he is mournful at the end of the chapter, and unbending towards those who would be his disciples.  This is a section of Luke’s Gospel that challenges our understanding of what religious experience is like, and the ways in which it transforms us.

First, the Transfiguration.  The past is present in this moment, in the persons of Moses and Elijah.  They also stand-in for Jewish identity, for the understanding of God that has been argued about and slowly articulated over thousands of years as the Hebrew people are formed, settle, and strive.  We often think of these two things as the most constitutive of our human nature: the experiences that form us; and, the identities that we’re born into and the identities that we choose. Jesus is in conversation with these two things, yet he refuses to stay with them, even though the disciples urge him to do so.

Instead he comes back down the mountain and immediately encounters a man in the crowd who has a demoniac as a son.  The disciples have failed to exorcise the boy’s demons, even though they’ve recently returned from all the towns and villages where they had no problem casting out demons.  Why are they failing this time? Perhaps it because of their remaining allegiance to the past and to their identities. When Jesus says he will be betrayed into human hands, he’s speaking to this allegiance.  After all, it is those who cling most fervently to the power and prestige that their identities provide who send Jesus to the cross. And it is the experience of insurrection after insurrection that lead the Romans to agree to crucify him.

Then comes the episode with the little child.  The disciples, in their fear, are trying to claim status and prestige.  Jesus confronts them with the child, who has neither status nor prestige.  Children are born into a set of identities, of course, but these identities have to be learned over time, and aren’t as settled with children as with adults.  The experiences that settle such identities haven’t happened yet. And these identities really don’t matter to the work of the Kingdom of God. Non-disciples who cast out demons in Jesus’ name are permitted.  The Samaritans, who reject the work of God because of their own settled identities, are left alone.

Finally, we are left to reflect on what an identity-free life that is uninterested in the past looks like, and what it costs.  It’s a wandering life, more unstable than the lives of foxes or birds. It’s a life where our past relationships really don’t matter that much.  All of this is present in this section, yet I struggle with it, just like the disciples do. I can’t pretend that I’m not a person who is made up of memory, like everyone else.  Can I hold those memories lightly, so that they don’t control me, for good or for ill? It’s dangerous to pretend that I don’t have an identity, that I’m not a white, heterosexual male and privileged in all of the ways that my identity is privileged in our world.  I want to hold my identity lightly as well, but I can only do that after admitting that it exists. Jesus does converse with Moses and Elijah, after all. He just doesn’t stay with them.