Tag: Transformation of the World

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 19:28-48 Oppression and Transformation

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

There’s a very real way in which Jesus’ actions as he enters Jerusalem are political theater.  He stages an entrance that is very similar to a Roman triumph, when a returning general would parade his troops through the streets and show off his captured enemies.  And the people of Jerusalem were used to these triumphs, having been conquered many times. The Macedonian king Alexander the Great had entered Jerusalem in triumph in 332 BCE.  The Roman general Pompey entered Jerusalem in 63 BCE. And on the same day that Jesus entered Jerusalem, Pilate brought up troops from Caesarea Maritima and processed them through the city.  Jesus’ procession was meant as a kind of protest to this display of Roman Imperial power. Pilate processed as a prince of war. Jesus processed as a prince of peace.

His actions in the temple were also political theater.  The temple was the place where people came to be reconciled to God, which they did by paying for the priests to sacrifice live animals on their behalf.  In this way, the temple controlled access to God. But the temple also collected taxes for the Romans, and stored the records of debt. So the temple was both a bank and a place of worship, and it was presided over by a High Priest who was in the Romans’ pocket.  So Jesus’ driving out of the money changers was an act of protest against this whole system. He didn’t think that we need anything to mediate between us and God, and he protested the system of economic and political domination that the temple had come to represent.

But what, if anything, does political theater have to do with the spiritual life?  It’s often the domain of activists, and while some of them are deeply spiritual people, some are not.  Some are more guided by anger than love. Yet Jesus makes clear that following him includes following him to Jerusalem, a place where oppression and political evil cannot be denied, a place where a once beautiful idealism has rotted.  How can a contemplative, who is driven by a deep affinity with God’s love for the world, encounter and protest oppression without going astray?

Gerald May, in his book The Dark Night of the Soul, which is primarily about Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, has some useful thoughts about this:

Instead of looking into social and political dynamics specifically, Teresa and John keep returning to the experience of the individual soul in relationship to God.  I have found this to be true of other contemplative writers as well. It is not that they are unconcerned with social liberation and justice, but that they are convinced such transformation will happen only through the changing of individual hearts.  The Dalai Lama put it starkly in 1991: “Although attempting to bring about world peace through the internal transformation of individuals is difficult, it is the only way.”

Jesus’ theatrics is not meant to bring the temple system down – he knows that it will fall under its own weight fairly soon.  His actions are meant to bring into question the very suppositions that the temple system is based on. Do we need to purchase God’s forgiveness through sacrifice?  Do we need our relationship with God to be mediated by a religious or political system? When we’re faced with a controlling and dominating person or group, is our only recourse to control and dominate in return?  His actions confront the many assumptions that get in the way of transformation. As long as violence, dominance, and oppression go unquestioned, the world can’t be transformed. But more than that, as long we refuse to question those forces in our spiritual lives, we can’t be transformed, and the transformation of the world depends on our internal work.

 

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

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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.

Luke 2:22-52 Age and Youth

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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 1:1-56 Suddenly the Spirit is Talking to Everybody

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

The Holy Spirit pours into the beginning of Luke’s Gospel, embodied by angels and the singing, leaping responses that human beings make to them.  When the angels arrive its with a wildness and strangeness that has mutating effects on the people who encounter them. An old man falls silent, an old woman becomes pregnant, a virgin conceives and sings a song that anticipates the reordering of the entire world.  Luke is telling us that encounters with the divine will transform our lives, and that people with transformed lives eventually end up participating in the transformation of existence itself. This is the opening trumpet blast announcing Luke’s spirituality, which is about divine encounter, surrendered conventionality, and the remaking of human existence.

Elizabeth and Zechariah are both old when an angel appears with its revelations.  They are both Levites, descendants of Aaron, born into the priestly cast, their position in society assured since birth. They do their duty, get along with their neighbors, and act rightly in all circumstances. The only thing about them that could cause anyone to talk behind their backs is the fact that they have no children. Elizabeth feels this keenly. She refers to it as a disgrace, and maybe she thinks about Sarah, that great matriarch of her people, who also reached old age in a childless condition.

So where is the note of unconventionality that could lead them to raise an iconoclast like John the Baptist?  Maybe there is some wildness inside of them, carefully repressed through all their long years. But I suspect that John’s wildness is the result of Zechariah’s encounter with the angel. It’s hard to find a good image of this encounter. Baroque and Rococo paintings show very human looking angels, naked and floating suspended in swaths of cloth, descending on a startled looking old man who is, somehow, surrounded by onlookers, even though the Gospel tells us that Zechariah was alone in the Holy of Holies. Angels in art are rarely weird enough for the story that’s being conveyed in scripture. Contemporary art does a better job at capturing their essence. In paintings by Alexander Roitburd and Wassily Kandinsky they are riots of color, deeply abstract, and there’s nothing quiet or restful about looking at them. The angel of the Lord who appears to Zechariah is terrifying, and not very patient.  Poor Zechariah gets struck dumb for voicing only the tiniest of doubts, and really its a doubt that’s more about his own unsuitability than it is about God’s intentions.

We’re not told if Elizabeth learns about her husband’s encounter with the angel. He certainly can’t tell her about it. But she gets pregnant pretty quickly, and she has no trouble believing that its happening. In fact, both women in this first chapter of Luke’s Gospel fare better than the men. When the Angel Gabriel appears to Mary, she questions divine revelation, just like Zechariah did. But Gabriel is a more patient divine messenger, explains things more thoroughly, and doesn’t strike her dumb. Instead, she gets to sing, and gives us the words of the lovely and challenging Magnificat, which we can sing, also. It’s through the words of this hymn that we come to understand that a transformation is about to take place, that the world is about to be remade.