Tag: Injustice

Luke 16:19-31 No Better Crucible

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

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 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 3:1-20 Everything We Know About Power, Undone

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Gardner Taylor, the great preacher and Civil Rights leader, began a sermon on Luke’s third chapter by slowly reading the names and titles of the authorities.  “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high-priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas.”  Then Taylor paused and said, slowly, letting the words resonate, “and you would think that everything there was to say about power had been said.” But no, Taylor said, for here is John, son of Zechariah, in the wilderness, and he is the one who receives the word of God.

For Taylor, Luke isn’t simply using the names of emperors, governors, kings and priests to put a date on the moment that John’s ministry began.  Luke is holding John in contrast and opposition to these powers. What is real power? How is it expressed? For Luke, it comes only from God, and it can come to anyone, and title and privilege have nothing to do with it.

As we examine Luke’s spirituality, we should never lose track of the fact that he has as much to say about opposing the powers and principalities of the world as he does about individual spiritual development.  For Christians, mindfulness, while important, is never enough. John, as he grew up in the wilderness, had plenty of time for mindfulness. There was little to do but watch the sky and the sands, to notice the little skittering animals as they darted to and from their holes in the ground, to listen to the shush of the wind through oasis trees, to lay beside the river as sunlight glinted off of the water.  These things, the things we notice and give our hearts to, are so beautiful that we can, indeed, become lost in them. But John didn’t stay in the wilderness. He took his wild self to the banks of the Jordan and began to preach, and people came flowing out of Jerusalem to listen to him, and to be baptized by him. He wasn’t calling them to a mindfulness retreat, but to repent, to turn back to God, to convert their hearts and their ways of being.

John’s choice of the Jordan River for his baptisms is important.  It is the boundary that the Chosen People crossed as they entered the Promised Land.  They were supposed to be a new people, and to model a new way of being human, holding a deep ethic of welcoming the stranger, forgiving debts, setting aside their land and their wealth for the benefit of the poorest among them, and being guided, always, by their sense of the divine.  Something went wrong along the way, and John is asking them to cross the Jordan again, to turn back to that original vision of justice and harmony.

Spirituality without conversion is simply a hobby.  It might make us feel good in the moment, but we should ask ourselves whether its changing our lives, and, just as importantly, the lives of those around us.  If we have a vision of justice, then those things that are unjust come into stark relief. And if we name them, we start to empty them of their power. Luke starts by naming the powerful, the instruments of injustice in his world, the shadows that fall flat and heavy when the vision becomes bright.  Part of Christian spirituality centers on naming the principalities and powers of our own world, of stating honestly those things and ways of being that are corrupting us, and that we need to turn away from.