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Luke 7:1-35 Faith and Repentance

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

The centurion is a man of faith.  He is able to trust, and trust blindly.  He hasn’t even met Jesus, but he trusts that this new figure, this new healer and preacher, can help his beloved servant.  And he trusts in his own actions, that they will get results, even though he describes himself as not worthy. None of us are ever worthy when we set out to act on behalf of others, but the essence of faith is to act and trust without needing to rely on a sense of our own perfection, or even of our own readiness.

It’s no accident that Luke brings John the Baptist back into the story at this point.  John’s whole mission was to preach repentance from sin, and to baptize those who repented.  The Greek word for sin that’s used in the Gospels is hamartia, which was used in the theater to describe a hero’s tragic flaw.  It could also be literally translated as “missing the mark.” By using this word, the writers of the New Testament were saying two things: all of us have tragic flaws and are, like the centurion, unworthy; and, because of that flaw, when we try to do good, we will miss the mark (as Paul put it, “I find it to be a truth that when I try to do good, evil lies close behind).  John offered baptism to people who had missed the mark and become aware of their own inherent flaws. But his baptism was one of repentance, which meant that those he baptized weren’t supposed to sit in a zero gravity, antiseptic state of inaction. They were supposed to take aim and try again.

John reveals the basic spiritual action – try, fail, repent, and try again.  Jesus reveals the content of our attempts, the things that we should be trying for.  “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard,” he says to John’s disciples. “The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have good news brought to them.”  These are the things we should be attempting: seeing the world as it really is; trying to heal the world; returning people to our communities; hearing the truth in compassion and love; continuing along the path of our own deaths and resurrections; and being in active relationship with poor people.  

We can’t do it without repentance.  To add another Greek word into the mix, repentance is our translation of metanoia, which means “be of a higher mind.”  To repent, we must move beyond our small, personal concerns, hopes, and worries, and try to see the entire world through the eyes of God.  The Gospels assert that God cares for every hair on our heads, every flower of the field, every sparrow that flies and falls. If we were to look through God’s eyes, we would be as compassionately engaged with everything as God is, and we could treat nothing lightly (although we could, and should, treat it joyously).  

Faith is the trust that we can do the things that Jesus tells us to, and even see through the eyes of God, even if we’re unworthy.  It’s the hope that leads us to attempt an imitation of Jesus’s healing and teaching, because we see the fragility and beauty of everything.  Such faith is, as Jesus points out, going to be derided and misunderstood. And we will fail many, many times as we try to live it out. But as we repent, and try again, our conversion will continue, and our tragic flaws, which may never leave us, will slowly be redeemed.

Luke 6:27-49 Give to Everyone Who Begs From You

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Jesus is still talking directly to the disciples, although he’s also surrounded by a crowd of people who have come for miracles and healings.  But his words are about discipleship, about what it means to truly follow him, and more, what it means to imitate him in the hopes of being able to heal and bring peace like he does.  Since his actions and words are revolutionary, he is laying out a revolutionary model for his disciples, one that will overthrow all of their societal assumptions about what is good and what is right.

We barely get three sentences in to these instructions before we confront one of our own deeply held societal assumptions.  “Give to everyone who begs from you,” he says. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard Christians quibble with this injunction.  People tell stories of giving money to a beggar and then seeing him enter a liquor store or drive away in a nice car. Wouldn’t it be better to simply give to some honorable charity, particularly if we afraid that we’re feeding people’s addictions or letting them get one over on us?  Jesus’ answer is no. Give to everyone who begs from you. He insists on this because giving is spiritually transformative. In a way, its not about the person who is asking you for money. It’s about whether you can cultivate a spirit of generosity, and hold your wealth and possessions loosely.

“Do good,” he says, “and lend expecting nothing in return.”  We might agree with everything surrounding these statements. We might concede that loving our enemies is important, and that we shouldn’t sit in judgement on others.  But many of us openly rebel against the idea of giving freely, with no expectation of anything in return, and not only that, giving to people who might be unworthy.  

But Jesus tells us to imitate God, and God is profligate.  If we are to be imitators of Christ and perfect as our Father in Heaven is perfect, then we can’t be scared, overprotective people.  Ronald Rolheiser describes God as “joyous, happy, playful, exuberant, effervescent, and deeply personal and loving” in Wrestling with God.  For us mere humans, exuberance, love, and joyfulness require a strong willingness to set fear aside and trust in goodness and beauty.  Profound, unsuspicious generosity is a key spiritual practice that will help us do this. We give to everyone who begs from us because we are invested in becoming more joyful, playful, effervescent people.

Luke 6:1-26 Blessings and Woes

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Jesus upends the lives and thoughts of the Pharisees, and they respond with anger.  He sees that they’re angry, but instead of trying to assuage their anger, he ignores it and continues in his world-altering actions and teaching.  He chooses disciples, and although he’s surrounded by a crowd of people, he begins his Sermon on the Plain by addressing them directly. And what he says is almost a repetition of the Magnificat.  Those of us who wish to be disciples should hear these words directly addressed to us. We have a choice when we hear them. We can respond with the anger of the Pharisees, or we can give ourselves to Jesus’ message, even while admitting that discipleship is going to be hard.

“Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the Kingdom of God.”  We know that Jesus has been preaching about the Kingdom of God in the synagogues of Capernaum, but this is our first chance to hear the content of that teaching.  We’ll hear about the Kingdom of God more and more as the Gospel goes on. It will never be exactly defined, just described in a myriad of different ways. This first description isn’t really about the Kingdom, but about those who have access to it – the poor.  Why the poor and not anyone else?

Mostly because they’re the ones who can see it.  The Kingdom of God is that sense of divine reality that pervades all things.  Anyone can see it, but only if you stop to look for it. God sees it all of the time, and in order to see it we must align our sight with God’s, and see reality as alive with a shimmering beauty and goodness, free of contest and envy and anger, humble and simple, yet abundant in its riches.  We can’t see it when we’re full of the kind of pride that wants to convince us that we control the world and know what its like. The concerns of power and prestige have no place in the Kingdom of God, and if those are our concerns, then we’ll reject the Kingdom when we catch a glimpse of it. Jesus addresses this first phrase of the Beatitudes to the disciples as a way of telling them what their training is going to be like.  As followers of Jesus, they will learn to set aside their need for control and power, their fears and their jealousies, and embrace both physical and spiritual poverty.

At the same time, he acknowledges that this is going to be difficult.  You will be hungry. You will weep. But he also reassures. You will be filled.  You will laugh. And his third acknowledgement and reassurance is both the most frightening and the most humbling.  People will hate and revile you for rejecting the things that they feel are so important. But you will experience joy.  

As I said at the beginning of this study, Luke believes that joy is central to Christian spirituality.  And since we’re describing the undefinable, let’s spend a moment with C.S. Lewis, one of the great describers of joy.  He calls it “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.” Joy, for him, is

a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure.  Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again.  Apart from that, and considered only in its quality, it might also equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want.  I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But then Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is.

Lewis is very nearly equating joy with longing, a kind of holy longing that is given to us by God.  Anyone who has ever experienced this longing knows that it’s better to have it than to not have it. Without it we pursue our pleasures but they feel ashen, we acquire but the things we own are merely junk, rather than loved possessions.  Such longing is like a kind of swooning romantic love, with all its risk and fears. And if you can experience that kind of love generally, if you can swoon over trees and buses and people’s faces, then you’re very close to experiencing what its like to see through God’s eyes, and with God’s heart.  This can easily become painful, because if you love the world, you don’t want to see it suffer. And that’s why there’s a strong note of social revolution within Jesus’ spirituality. Once you’re truly looking, and seeing the glaring and amazing divinity in everything, you can’t turn your back on suffering.  You are hurt with those who hurt, you are poor with those who are poor. And you want those who are closing their eyes and closing themselves off from this dangerous joy to get to experience it, too, even if that means that they have to give up their wealth and their illusions of power and control to do so.

 

Luke 5:17-39 New Wine Skins

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Let’s pause for a moment and take stock of just how radical things are about to get.  Jesus is beginning to articulate the overthrow of systems – both outer systems of oppression, and inner systems of spiritual complacency and false allegiance.  From the beginning of Luke’s Gospel, we’ve heard about the mighty being brought down low and the lowly lifted up, the hungry being filled with good things and the poor sent away empty.  That is, in fact, the content of Mary’s song, The Magnificat, and it’s indisputably radical. For some, it’s hard to take. I once heard Barbara Brown Taylor preach on The Magnificat.  She talked about having heard a contemporary version of it sung on Christian radio, in which the poor were lifted up and the hungry filled, but all of Mary’s lines about the mighty being brought down and the rich sent away empty were left out.  Obviously, the singer and the station’s listeners couldn’t stand to hear about loss of power and prestige. But Taylor pointed out that these words are only threatening if we believe that no spiritual good can come of losing power or experiencing hunger.  What if God wants the mighty to be cast down and the rich sent away hungry for their own spiritual good?
If we’re honest, many of us will react to this possibility with fear and anger, rather than joy and hope, particularly if we’re people of relative wealth and comfort.  If we do, then we should pause and acknowledge some sympathy with the scribes and pharisees. They are correct in sniffing out Jesus’ radical agenda, and we can hardly blame them for having the same qualms that we do.  Because when Jesus forgives sins and heals, when he eats with sinners and societal outcasts, he is essentially saying that the whole program of his culture is wrong. They care about, and get angry about, the wrong things.

Peter Rollins in his book The Idolotry of God offers the same critique of our culture, particularly of our religious culture.  He writes that the good news of Christianity

is sold to us as that which can fulfill our desire rather than as that which evokes a transformation in the very way that we desire.  Like every other product that promises us fulfillment, Christ becomes yet another object in the world that is offered to us as a way of gaining insight and ultimate satisfaction.  Jesus is thus presented as the solution to two interconnected problems: that we exist in a state of darkness concerning the meaning of the universe and that we are dissatisfied with our place within that universe.

And he goes on to ask the question

what if we cannot grasp the manner in which Christ is the solution to the problem of our darkness and dissatisfaction precisely because he *isn’t*the solution?  What if, instead of being the solution (i.e., the one who offers a way for us to gain certainty and satisfaction), he actually confronts us as *a problem*, a problem that places every attempt to find a solution for these ailments into question?  To put this another way, what if Christ does not fill the empty cup we bring to him but rather smashes it to pieces, bringing freedom, not from our darkness and dissatisfaction, but freedom from our felt need to escape them?

Rollins challenges us to understand what the Pharisees actually felt.  Their quibble wasn’t with a misuse of tradition or a breaking of the rules.  We can’t dismiss them that easily. They correctly understood that Jesus was going to smash their entire way of looking at the world into pieces.  The things that had given them spiritual satisfaction wouldn’t any longer. The methods and practices that they used to look for that satisfaction would fail them.  All of their thinking and ways of beings had to be stripped away – they were old wine skins, and it was time to discover new wine skins that could be filled with something else.  What that something else was, they didn’t know yet, and that made it even more scary.

We should feel the same fear as we read Luke’s Gospel.  Our worlds really will be turned upside down. We really will be asked to embrace the unfamiliar.  And if we’re treating our religious beliefs as a commodity, if we feel that we can buy, sell, and own Christ, we’ll be disabused of that notion pretty quickly.  Jesus is not about self-help, or even simply self-transformation. Jesus is ultimately about divinity manifested on earth, and divinity is always more than our selves.  When we truly come to experience resurrection, the self falls away, and only love is left.

Luke 5:1-16 – The Call of the Deep

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

What needs to happen in our lives before we can hear and respond to a sense of call?  As Luke introduces characters, he often hints at their backstories. Zechariah and Elizabeth are given a fairly elaborate backstory, and their lives provide the backstory to John the Baptist.  The Annunciation and the Visitation give backstory to the Incarnation, telling us how this young girl came to give birth to the savior of the world. When we meet the apostles, we are also given backstory, although sometimes it’s shaded and less elaborate.

Peter’s backstory manages to be both subtle and extravagant all at the same time.  We meet his mother-in-law before we meet him – Jesus heals her at the end of chapter four.  So even before the scene on the Lake of Gennesaret (also called the Sea of Galilee), we have some inkling of what Peter is like.  He’s married, he owns a house, his mother-in-law lives with him, and he’s been hanging out with Jesus, and was probably among the congregants at the synagogue in Capernaum when Jesus preached there.  In a way he’s primed to hear and respond to a sense of call, because he already know something about Jesus (this is not true in the Gospels of Mark and Matthew). In another way, he’s primed to resist the call, because he’s a married person with clear responsibilities.  Maybe it’s because of this that Luke makes his actual moment of call so big and dramatic – a miraculous catch of fish after providing Jesus with a floating pulpit, sitting right in Jesus’s shadow as the crowds on the shore stared at the both of them. Peter is already singled out as special before his call, and the abundance of his catch probably helped assuage any anxiety he had about providing for his family if he were to go off and follow Jesus for real.

But what about our own sense of call?  When I use that term, I’m not talking about discovering a sense of vocation, which is how we often talk about call when it comes to work or family.  I’m talking about the call to enter seriously into the spiritual life, the first step on a spiritual journey that ends in resurrection. Adyashanti describes a sense of call as “that moment when the trajectory of your life begins to turn toward the mystery of life…that transcendent aspect of life that shines through the world of time and space.”  If we’ve experienced that sense of call – and most people who start attending a place of worship have – what is the backstory that prepared us to hear it?

For me it was Holy Hill, a monastery outside of Milwaukee that my parents took us to when we were children.  I was raised Methodist, so entering the basilica at the top of the hill filled me with a sense of wonder and mystery.  I remember it as being dark and gloomy, with cavernous side chapels and a bank of votive lights that shimmered against the wall.  People moved and spoke differently in that space, whispering from their knees, and there was something strangely intimate about the shush and the darkness.  There was an odd machine in the Undercroft, a mechanism that you put coins into, and when you did music would start playing, and a diorama of the halt and the lame, set on a turntable behind glass, would begin to operate, leading the little ceramic people on a continuous circle through the doors of a church and out of them again, into a slow passage through the world.  But the most powerful aspect of Holy Hill was the Stations of the Cross, which you walked by following a wooded path across the topography of the hill itself. The stations were larger than life size, made of carved granite and protected by grottos of piled stones. We would walk there in all seasons, sliding down icy stairs in winter, walking over damp leaves in autumn, or beneath flowering trees in spring and summer.

This was the backstory for my own sense of call.  Holy Hill provided a chance to gaze beneath the surface of things, to be moved by wonder and joy.  Not the kind of joy that can simply be confused for happiness, but the kind of joy that creates sharp and distinct memory, an experience of the divine that prepared me to recognize God in other experiences when they came.  Holy Hill was my own miraculous catch of fish. What was yours?