Tag: Love

Luke 21:1-38 Be Unprepared

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

We want to be prepared for disaster. We stockpile food and clean water, learn survival skills, build bunkers. Well, I don’t, but some people do. Disaster-preparedness is seen as a positive good in our society, and maybe it is, but it’s worth asking what it costs us. Jesus is very confusing about preparedness in this chapter. On the one hand, we are to be like the poor widow, giving everything away, and when we are dragged before the authorities because we are followers of the way that Jesus is trying to show us, we aren’t supposed to prepare our defense in advance. On the other hand, we are to be on our guard and alert, not dissipated by drunkenness or the worries of this life. Is he saying that we should be attentive, but unprepared?

This passage from Luke parallels similar passages in Matthew and Mark, passages that are known as the “little apocalypse.” The Revelation to St. John is the “big apocalypse” of Christian scripture, but there are Jewish apocalypses, too, such as the Book of Daniel. To quote Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan in The Last Week, their book on the passion and resurrection, an apocalypse is “a kind of Jewish and Christian literature that reveals or unveils the future in language loaded with images and symbols.” The word apocalypse literally means “unveiling.” And Jesus’ little apocalypse truly does unveil the future. Within a hundred years of his saying these words, the people rose up in insurrection, the temple was destroyed, Jerusalem itself was destroyed, and the tenth legion camped in its ashes.

The things he predicted came true, and it is entirely possible that some of the apocalypses that are being predicted now will come true. But in this passage Jesus doesn’t advocate circling the wagons and stockpiling provisions. For him, the answer to apocalypse is open-handedness, awareness, and deep trust. The problem, as always, is control. Fear makes us want to control our circumstances, to pretend that we can be protected. But, as always, Jesus isn’t interested in control. He is only interested in love. Love must be our response to apocalypse. It is love that leads us to try to avert apocalypse, and love is the posture that we must adopt when apocalypse comes. We tend to think that our temples, our lifestyles and traditions, are all important, that we cannot survive without them. Yet as soon as they are gone, we find new traditions and lifestyles. It is all right to grieve the past, and to be concerned about the future, as long as we manage to practice love in the present.

Luke 20:1-47 Beware the Scribes

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

As Jesus teaches in the temple, many of Luke’s themes of power and control, and the way that these things contrast with the dream of the transformation of the world, come to the fore. It’s no accident that John the Baptist’s name comes back into the narrative. As you’ll remember from the beginning of Chapter 3, it is John who stands against the power of caesars and high priests, whose voice cries out against their abuses. Now Jesus sits within the sphere of their power, and the chief priests with their minions, the scribes, come to dispute with him.

The direction of their attacks tell us much about the spirituality of power and control that they have adopted. Their opening gambit is to attack Jesus’ authority, since they understand authority as something that you inherit due to class or standing in society. In our society, authority is often assumed to adhere to white men, whether they’ve done anything to earn it. Jesus counters with the authority of John, which was not inherited but earned. John had authority because the people followed him. The priests and scribes can recognize that this kind of authority exists, but they don’t except it. They’re afraid to say this, because whether they except it or not, the crowds do.

So they move on to their second attack. Surely Caesar has authority. Isn’t paying taxes a de facto way of accepting a government’s authority? Jesus’ response is a shrug. It is, but that kind of authority matters so little that it really makes no difference whether you pay taxes or not. These forms of authority that the priests and scribes care so much about are illusory. To the mind of God, they do not matter at all.

Finally, the Sadducees show up, and essentially try to mansplain to him about why there can be no resurrection. Their authority is that of the precocious teenager who thinks he’s got it all figured out. They assume that the resurrection Jesus believes in is just a reiteration of this world, that things will continue pretty much like they do now, only better. Of course people will still be married in the resurrection. Won’t all of our social and political structures be pretty much the same?

And it’s here that the strangeness of Jesus’ vision of authority really comes to the fore. For him, authority depends on our closeness to God. In the resurrection, we will all be entirely close to God, almost inseparable from God. And God, who loves everyone equally, will invite us into that love. Our preferences will fall away. The loves we hold now are great training for this – if we allow them to, they will form us in love, increase our capacity for love. But they are a mere glimpse of God’s love, and when we are transformed into pulsations of that love, we will forget the particularities that formed us. Since the priests and scribes and sadducees rely on a different understanding of authority, one based on power rather than love, they cannot understand this. And Jesus warns us to beware of anyone who cannot understand holy love and who resist any formation in it.

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

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

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 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.

Who will I love, and how will I love them well?

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Two events led me to start thinking about, praying with, and making art in response to the Song of Songs. The first was a Bible study during a clergy quiet day. We were reading Jesus’s Parable of the Dishonest Manager (Luke 16:1-13). As we sat in a circle, annoyed and shocked that Jesus would tell his disciples to “make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth, so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal habitations,” I began wondering whether I had ever done exactly that. My mind traveled to the early days of my relationship with my future wife. We met when we were twenty-two and still in college. Neither of us really knew who we were, and we acted out different social roles, imitating our peers or images in the media or, at best, some vision of who we hoped we would be someday. There was something dishonest about the way we presented ourselves to each other – not in a conniving way, just in the fact that we didn’t know who we were, and therefore didn’t have much chance of being authentic in our relationships with anyone. It was through falling in love and being faithful to each other that we learned who we were, and everything that’s real in our lives and relationships now is the result of our patience with each other as we fumbled around and made mistakes and presented ourselves falsely. Reflecting on this as I sat in that circle of priests, I realized that my wife is my dishonest wealth, and I felt how miraculous it is that she should love me, and I her, a true gift of patience and luck and grace.

The second event that led me to the Song of Songs was a planning meeting. We were at the Edge House in Cincinnati, the Lutheran campus ministry that serves UC. A trapeze company had set-up in the park across the street, and as we talked young people were flinging themselves into the air. We were trying to decide on a theme for an autumn retreat, and we started by asking ourselves which questions our students were really asking. After a considering pause, one of our group said, “Well, I think they’re wondering who they’ll love, and how they’ll love that person well.” This was so basic and obvious that it was astounding that we had never addressed this question with our students. We turned to our Bibles and leafed through them, wondering whether scripture really spoke to this question at all. Maybe in Genesis, in those scenes when Isaac meets Rebecca, and then later Jacob meets Rachel, at the well. But more obviously, and certainly more extravagantly, in the Song of Songs.
It’s a primal question – “who will I love, and how will I love that person well?” The way we answer this question will affect not only our earthly relationships, but our relationship with God. This is what the early and medieval commentators on the Song understood so well. Until the Enlightenment, the Song of Songs was the second most preached about and commentated on book of scripture, surpassed only by the Gospel of John. It was treated as an allegory for the soul’s relationship to God, in both the Christian and Jewish traditions. To this day, many Sephardic communities chant the entire Song of Songs before Shabbat services every Friday. For Origen, and Teresa of Avila, and Bernard of Clairvaux, it was a text for celibates, a passionate enactment of human/divine relationship that could take the place of any earthly need for sex. But the Enlightenment, and the 18th and 19th century Biblical scholarship that followed it, put an end to this reading. The Song might be any number of things – wedding choruses, songs for fertility rites, court poetry – but it was, decidedly, not about God.

Last summer I led an adult forum on the Song of Songs, and when we came to those passages that compared a woman’s breasts to twin gazelles and bunches of grapes, one of the participants asked “should this even be in the Bible?” It seems so lascivious, and it is. But the fact that it is in the Bible should tell us something. It seems possible, and even likely, that those who compiled and canonized scripture understood that the Song of Songs is about God, while understanding that it’s also about sex. Perhaps they knew what we’ve forgotten, that the passion we bring to our earthly relationships is a training ground for the passion that we will, through much prayer and worship, eventually bring to our relationship with God. “Who will I love and how will I love that person well?” The Song of Songs suggests that the way we answer that question in our human relationships has everything to do with how we’ll learn to love God. Perhaps, through fidelity and patience, we might all come, eventually, to recognize and give thanks for the dishonest wealth we receive as we form each other in relationship, and through this recognition, come to dwell, spiritually, in eternal habitations with God.