Tag: Kingdom of God

Acts 25:1-22 The primary world of the Kingdom of God

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

The profound anticlimax of Acts continues, with more bureaucratic jostling by Roman officials whose names begin with the letter F. As a reader, I find myself longing for the beginning of Acts, those wonderful forty days when the risen Jesus was with the disciples, teaching and interacting, and everything was miraculous, bathed in a golden light. Where, oh where, have those days, and that feeling of miracle, gone? Luke seems to be structuring his two books using an ancient Hebrew literary convention, or at least a modification thereof. Stories like the Jacob cycle in Genesis start and end in similar fashions, and the most important part, the climax, if you will, is what happens in the middle of the story. So it is with Luke and Acts. Luke begins, and Acts ends, with nods to the administrative and political structures of their times (consider the listing of authorities in Luke, ch. 3). They both have significant sections spent outside of Jerusalem (at the beginning of Luke and during Paul’s travels in the second part of Acts). And Luke ends, and Acts begins, with the disciples in Jerusalem. The resurrection is the hinge point, the thing that happens in the middle that everything points to.

The resurrection invokes the Kingdom of God. I don’t think it’s going too far to say that the Kingdom of God is the resurrection world, the reconciled and healed creation. It is the place where miracles happen, where people are healed, where our small selves disappear so that our large selves can find expression, and where we can see, know, and walk with God.

J.R.R. Tolkien once gave a famous lecture about primary and secondary worlds(1). For Tolkien, our everyday world is the primary world, and the world of his stories (and the stories of others that often get described as science fiction or fantasy) describe a secondary world. He used these two terms, primary world and secondary world, because he wanted to make sure that his audience understood that his stories couldn’t be dismissed as mere trifles. Instead, he said, people respond to a well told story with the same emotions, passion and hope with which they respond to a factual, historical narrative. Our capacity to love and learn from characters from the secondary world is at least as strong as our capacity to love and learn from characters from the primary world.

I of course love and honor this claim by Tolkien, and have often felt, when reading or watching a movie or show, as deep an involvement with the people I meet in the story as I feel with the people I know outside the story, in ordinary life. Sometimes, I feel a deeper involvement, because I’m privileged, in a story, to know the inner lives of the characters in a way that I don’t know the inner lives of my friends.

This might seem like a long digression, but as I’ve thought about this distinction of Tolkien’s, I’ve begun to wonder if, for Luke, the Kingdom of God, the resurrection life, isn’t the vibrant, beautiful secondary world that sparks our imaginations and ignites our hope. I’ve even found myself quibbling with Tolkien’s use of the two terms, because it is the resurrection life that feels primary to me, and the drab, everyday world of corrupt officials and petty injustice that feels secondary. The end of Acts is rather a slog, but I think Luke knew what he was doing. He is providing a contrast between this secondary world of Paul’s imprisonment, and the bright, shining, miraculous world at the beginning of the book, when Jesus walked with the disciples.

I was reminded of this by my friend Sarah Iles Johnston’s wonderful new book, The Story of Myth.

 

Luke 23:26-43 The Sudden Enlightenment of St. Dismas

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Now we come to the passion, and I feel tempted, like a great many Christian writers before me, to start talking about atonement theories, spilling ink, or in this case bytes, over that cosmic something that happened when Jesus died on the cross. But my intent with this blog has been to present Luke’s gospel through a contemplative lens, and heady atonement theories sometimes distract us from the love affair that the soul has with God, which is, to me, the great subject and interest of the Christian life.  So I invite you, dear reader, to go read some of the many, many books, articles, and blog posts that are interested in atonement theory, and then return here, if you’d like, for a strange little digression into St. Dismas, the penitent thief.

The contemplative life is not really a progression, although sometimes those who talk about it make it seem like it is.  It is true that as we grow in prayer and understanding, we feel ourselves transformed. But transformation can also happen in an instant, since all transformation is a gift of God’s grace, and God can decide to grace us or not at any moment. As I’ve written, I think there’s a purpose to our transformation. We are transformed so that we can live within the Kingdom of God, which means seeing all of creation with God’s eyes, caring and hurting for it with God’s compassion, and rejoicing in it with God’s joy. We listen to John the Baptist and Jesus when they tell us to be of a new mind, to let the old, broken habits die and to hold onto new habits lightly, always waiting for the presence of the Holy Spirit to disrupt us and letting processes of forgiveness and community remake us. I believe that this transformation is the purpose that our souls were made for, and we can learn to give ourselves to this purpose as we live out our lives. And yet it’s striking to me that the penitent thief who dies with Jesus achieves this transformation in an instant, by doing nothing more than attesting to the innocence of Jesus as he dies on the cross.

A number of years ago I was in Tokyo, and found myself looking at a sixteenth century scroll painting by Kano Motonobu in the National Museum. The painting depicted Xiangyen Zhixian sweeping with a broom. It captures this zen master moments before a roof tile falls off a nearby building and causes his sudden enlightenment. That’s all it took for Xiangyen Zhixian. One moment he’s sweeping and unenlightened. The next moment the roof tile has fallen, and he is enlightened. The same is true of Dismas, the penitent thief. One moment he’s dying on a cross for crimes he knows he’s committed. He says a few words to Christ. The next moment he is alive within the Kingdom of God, and his fear and suffering is transformed into deep love and compassion. His soul is alive with God, and he dies, like Christ, in a moment of exquisite peace, the grace of God’s created cosmos blowing through his mind, the presence of the divine burning through the fibers of his dying body.

The Christian tradition has given Dismas a name and called him a saint for this and this alone.  He allows us to understand that anyone can come into the Kingdom of God at any time, that God’s love is so vast that it can sweep up the righteous and the unrighteous alike. Many of us, myself included, are on long, patient journeys, seeking and loving God and giving thanks for those glimmers of the Kingdom that offer us deep consolation.  But if we ever encounter someone who has simply leapt into sainthood, we should not be suspicious of her, or deride her. Perhaps suffering has allowed for that leap, and perhaps not. Perhaps repentance has allowed for it, and perhaps not. Maybe it’s best to realize that the leap itself is repentance, metanioa, and that we can rejoice, with God, in the repentance of any person, anywhere, at any time.

 

Luke 19:1-27 Zacchaeus and Rahab

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Location is everything in this fairly disturbing passage, and the potential for anti-semitism is rife.  So the first thing that must be said is that we should read it an internal critique, a Jew criticizing other Jews, and as we read it we should consider a mental parallel – what if an outsider Christian launched an angry critique against Christianity?  WIth those caveats, it is probably still unsafe to proceed, because there is nothing safe about this passage at all.

Let’s begin with the location.  Jesus and the disciples are on their way to Jerusalem, and they’re just passing through Jericho.  Jericho is significant because it was the first city that the Israelites conquered as they entered the Promised Land in the Book of Joshua.  At the end of the siege of Jericho (ch. 6), Joshua ordered that all of the inhabitants should be slaughtered, except for Rahab the prostitute, who hid two Israelite spies from the King of Jericho back in chapter 2, and then helped them escape by lowering them down from the walls on a rope.  Both she and Zacchaeus the tax collector were social outcasts who decided to help someone named Joshua (Jesus’ name, Yeshua, is just an altered form of the name Joshua). Both stories have the trope of salvation coming through descending from a high place to a low place.

The people of Jesus’ time would have known the story of Joshua and Rahab, and would have been able to understand these similarities when they heard about Zacchaeus.  To them, Jesus seemed like a new Joshua, renewing all of the promises that were made as the Israelites entered the Promised Land, and that were later broken. Many of Jesus’ listeners would have rejoiced at this comparison, because they were seeking renewal.  But their joy must have turned to anger as he got closer to Jerusalem. His followers believed that the Kingdom of God would appear immediately. The parable that he told them must have given them pause. The Kingdom of God might be about to appear, but not everyone was going to handle it well, and there would be cost to pay.

Luke’s version of this parable is difficult, to say the least, which is odd because Luke is usually the funniest and most easy-going of the evangelists.  But he was also a friend of Paul’s, and had been part of the arguments that broke out about baptizing gentiles and bringing them into the nascent church. We’ll hear much more about this when we start studying the Acts of the Apostles.  But Luke’s anger at those who would restrict Christ’s Kingdom is evident here. 

So, as Jesus nears Jerusalem, the long simmering arguments he’s had with Pharisees and Scribes heats up, and his rhetoric becomes sharper and sharper.  He is trying to take the anticipation of the Kingdom of God and make it efficacious in the moment. Shape up now, he says, before it’s too late. Don’t go around thinking that the Kingdom of God lies in the future – it’s here now, and if you can’t live in it now, you won’t live in it then.

 

Luke 2:22-52 Age and Youth

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Simeon’s song is sung at night, during compline.  When I first arrived as chaplain to Kenyon College, the students were saying compline together in the chapel every evening.  I was in my early thirties, only eight years older than the seniors, still young and trying to negotiate the questions that our culture imposes on youth: who will I love, what is my vocation, where will I call home?  I was married and a priest. The first question had been answered with great assurance, but the the second still felt electric, as I was unsure of my vocation even as I tried to live it out. And the third question was very present.  After a hard day, deep in the evening, I would often say to myself “I want to go home.” Sometimes I would say it while I was sitting in my house. And my daughter, as she grew and began to speak, would say it, too, especially when she’d been injured or was upset.  What was this home that we longed for, and why was I still so restless? These questions caused me to take great comfort in the Song of Simeon, there in the semi-darkness of the Chapel of the Holy Spirit. As I and the students spoke Simeon’s words together, it felt like we were part of a community of longing.  We all wanted the freedom and peace that God had given to Simeon in his old age.

Both Simeon and Anna are full of the Holy Spirit.  Anna is a kind of God obsessive, never leaving the temple, praying and fasting constantly.  In a later age, she would have been an anchorite, living in the walls of a church and peeking out through a tiny window at the services.  Her and Simeon’s lives have been guided by the spirit, and in Luke’s Gospel it’s the spirit that takes preeminence in these early chapters.   But what is the Holy Spirit? Is it a mood, a feeling, a noticing, an inspiration? The catechism in the Book of Common Prayer describes the Holy Spirit as God at work in the world and the church, and tells us that we’ll recognize it when we “are brought into love and harmony with God, with ourselves, with our neighbors, and with all creation.”  Such harmony seems ambitious and hard to attain. But it is attainable. I’ve experienced moments of it, and I don’t think I’m alone in that. And when I’ve experienced it, I’ve had a deep sense that I am home, that this spiritual place within the embrace of the spirit represents rest from my fear and longing.

Yet Simeon’s message to Mary and Joseph is not restful in the least.  He tells them that many in Israel will rise and fall because of Jesus’ life and ministry, and that these people’s opposition to him will reveal their inner natures.  And he tells them that a sword will pierce their souls. Because the Holy Spirit is only one part of the Trinity, and that deep sense of rest and home that it can bring us, that deep harmony with God, ourselves, our neighbors, and all of creation, is not enough.  Our hope is not to only have individual spiritual moments, although we need those to sustain us. Our hope is to see the repair of the world, the coming of the Kingdom of God, the moment when everyone and everything gets to experience the peace that Simeon sings about.

This is the message at the heart of Christian spirituality.  If we put all of our energy into working for justice, and ignore our need for spiritual rest, we will become controlling, embittered people who are constantly separating ourselves from God.  If we spend all of our moments pursuing beauty, looking at stones and flowers, trying to connect with the Kingdom of Heaven that’s all around us, we will become self-isolated, passive people who are implicit in the continuing corruption of the political and material world.  Somehow we must do both. We must work for justice in truth and love, and we must engage with the power and principalities of the world and strive to convert them. Grace helps us. The moments of harmony that we have with God, ourselves, our neighbors, and all creation prepare us for mission.  And when our hearts are pierced by the difficulties of the work and our disgust at corruption and cruelty, moments of harmony will renew us. We need the Holy Spirit to help us in our imitation of Jesus.

If I could, I would like to replace those three questions that our culture makes so important in our youth.  Who will I love? It’s a good question, but we might add to it and ask, who will I love and serve? What is my vocation?  We might change that to, what will my service look like, what shape will it take? Where will I call home? Perhaps we can simply expand this question’s meaning, to how will I seek harmony with God, myself, my neighbor, and all of creation?  We are restless beings, and there’s a blessing in our restlessness. It leads us to seek the repair of the world, to ensure that everyone has those moments of peace and prayer that allow them to seek and find the Kingdom of Heaven. The peace that we have been promised will come.  We’ll have moments of it when we open our eyes to see the salvation that already exists and is being proffered to us in our day to day lives. And at the end of those lives, our hope is that we’ll see the Kingdom all of the time, that we’ll be reborn into the pure beauty of divinity, allowed to sit in God’s eye and see everything with God’s sight.

Luke 2:1-21 Divinity Entangled with Humanity

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

The Gospels claim, and Christians believe, that divinity is entangled with humanity.  The evangelists go even further. When Jesus talks about the Kingdom of God, he is saying that creation itself is shot through with divinity.  Divinity is all around us, and it always has been. Poets and mystics alike attempt to see through the veil of ordinary existence to the extraordinary, pulsating life of the world.  This requires a deep spiritual practice. One of my favorite poets, Denise Levertov, describes this beautifully with a line from In Memory: After a Friend’s Sudden Death: “to heedfully walk and sing through dailiness noticing stones and flowers.”  We must be heedful in our noticing if we are to cultivate a spirituality of incarnational wonder.  And once you start practicing this heedful noticing, you find yourself spiritually aligned with the shepherds: accosted by angels, filled with joy and fear, ready to rush off and seek the miraculous.

The most surprising thing about the miraculous in the nativity story in Luke’s Gospel is that it takes the form of a newborn child.  Ephraim of Syria, a fourth century poet and theologian, wants us to dwell within this sense of surprise. “Mary bore a mute Babe though in Him were hidden all our tongues.”  Jesus, the miracle, the Word that dwelled before time and was active in creation, becomes human as someone who cannot speak. You might say, “well of course, that’s how all of us become human.”  But if all things are possible with God, then Jesus’ could have just shown up as an adult. His incarnation as a wordless, squalling baby is meant to tell us something. First, that the spiritual practice of noticing and participating in incarnation takes a great deal of care.  We need to attend to it like we would to a newborn. Second, that the spiritual life is a journey, just as physical life is, and that it will have moments of trial and error, success and failure, growth and senescence. We are figurative infants at the beginning of our imitation of Christ, and we would do well to remember that.  Babies lack control of words, of their bodies, of their relationships. They are humbly reliant on the people who surround them. And that’s how we should start. With humility and the acknowledgement that we are not in control.