The parable of God's Name (C3L)

"Jesus Christ is the face of the Father’s mercy. These words might well sum up the mystery of the Christian faith." Misericordiae Vultus, 4/11/2015, Pope Francis

The Lord is kind and merciful. Full stop.

Is there any word from beyond which we need to hear any more during Lent? In these days when we are more aware than ever of how how impossibly vain we are and how futile our attempts to do good are, how far we are from what the gospel calls us to do and to be, what's more important to hear that those six words from the psalm Sunday? Or these, from the first reading: "I know well what (my people) are suffering. Therefore I have come down to rescue them."

Of course we want God to come down to rescue people from their suffering, and when triaging that, we hope God gets to us first, however self-focused and petty our misery. Meanwhile, we tend to carom between amazement and blame when we witness the suffering of others, still convinced in our heart of hearts that the Deuteronomist was right, that those who suffer are being punished for their sins, or for being infidels, or for being born in the southern hemisphere, and that those who are doing well are the blessed and chosen.

In these readings for the third Sunday of Lent in year C, it seems to me that we have a couple of parables of God's mercy, one from Luke and one from Exodus. We see, as it were, God's Son in one and God's name in the other, and from both of those there radiates the tenderness and compassion we hear proclaimed for our violent, exploitative, and recidivist race, the spark of whose interior life nevertheless shines with the very image and likeness of the creator.

Reports come in to Jesus asking for his judgment on an item heard on Herod-the-Fox News, about an abomination perpetrated by the sadistic Roman governor, apparently murdering some Galileans in the middle of some religious rituals. Quickly losing patience with their bewilderment, Jesus throws in another story making the rounds, about the deaths of eighteen people when a tower collapsed at a site near Jerusalem. His point was not to shock the crowd into silence, but to make them stop wondering whether the victims were somehow at fault for what happened, more worthy of their terrible fate than other Jews including his listeners. The question is, how did he get from their misfortune to "unless you repent, your fate will be the same"? Is he saying that repenting of sin will render the penitent immune from disaster?

It's hard to think so, looking at the arc of history and the rest of the gospel kerygma. But what if by "repent" he continues to mean "get your meaning and destiny from God," and start believing and living in the kingdom? Stop believing in Rome, and start believing in your own God, in solidarity, community, and social equality. Start believing in a God who doesn't prevent disaster but is present to disaster, and become agents of God's presence with your healing and hospitality.

Jesus turns to a parable, as he always seems to do when discursive language isn't enough. When we hear this parable, we often want to turn it into an allegory. Who does the fig tree represent? Who is the planter? Who is the gardener? The trouble with an allegory is, if you get a character wrong the first time around, it blows the meaning of the whole story. Are we the fig tree and is God the planter? (Psalm 80 and other scriptures could support this reading.) Maybe. That might fit the "angry God" theory, as though Jesus and God disagreed on the fate of the world, and Jesus talks God out of chopping us down. Is that how we want to think of God? Is it possible for the Father and Son to be so out of sync with each other? I can't imagine it.

But maybe the planter is just "the way everything is." The planter is the law of entropy. Everything deteriorates to chaos. The planter is "might makes right" and "survival of the fittest" and the Pax Romana. The planter is the way all of us look at the wreck of our lives, at the destruction wrought by our culture, when we take the time to assess it and admit our complicity. The planter is the voice that says, "It was worthless anyway, throw it out. Let them die. They deserved it. Life is futility, chaos. We bring order. Rip it all out and we'll try something else." And maybe, just maybe, God, and therefore Jesus, is the gardener. When we turn back to the values of our culture for the thousandth time, when we refuse to believe in peace and equality, when we work and vote and support terrible, divisive ideas that take life away from people, that steal from the poor and give to the rich, even after decades of listening the gospel and singing the songs and going through the rituals, and we're right at the place where no one would blame God or Jesus or anyone else from throwing the book at us and letting us experience some of the very suffering we've caused the world, God steps between the victim and the axe, the culture and its victims. Christ the gardener takes the maligned tree tenderly in infinitely merciful fingers and says, "Wait a minute. Here I am. Let me work with it again." Here's someone, finally, who can make something out of nothing, a world out of the dust that we are. Someone believes that we have possibility. Can we remember that touch?

In the Exodus story, God sees the way things are, the "normalcy of civilization" in Crossan's wonderful phrase, and comes to Moses in a sign that breaks open the possibility that "normalcy" isn't the way things are going to be any more. There is a bush. It is on fire. And it is not burning. There's something you don't see every day. God sends Moses, a renegade slave hiding from a murder rap, back to the seat of power, to Pharaoh, to demand the release of the Hebrews. The conversation around the name of God, which Moses thinks would be a good idea to know, since the Egyptians know so many gods that they're bound to ask him which one sent him, is exasperating in how little it reveals. In other words, it tells the truth. "You don't know me. You can't even imagine my name." That's one way of reading the unpronounceable, unknown name Moses receives. Another way, one excellent article suggests, is that the text is in the future tense: "I WILL BE THAT WHICH I WILL BE." The (Jewish) commentator says that the future tense is used in the Hebrew, which the commentator finds interesting because it's the only form of the verb that doesn't specify gender. "The people will come to  know God through their unfolding experiences together...(The name) seems to tease us, saying, 'You want to know my name, just wait and see!' While God is absolute, there are no divine absolutes; each of us, in our own time, will come to know God in our own way." (The article is here.) (And another good one.)

In the gospel, Jesus reminds us that repenting is for everyone. And Jesus doesn't mean beating our breast and being miserable: he means turning in another direction, he means turning toward the Father, and he has already said that he is showing the direction ("follow me"), ditto his honor-bestowing mother ("Do whatever he says") and Father ("Listen to him.") The baptismal message of Lent is: God keeps coming after us. Stick together. Wash off the "way things have to be" and start living in the new world. Stick together. Take care of each other. Make peace through your just living.

See, God is the protagonist in the universe. It is God who is acting from utterly beyond all knowing but more intimately than we can imagine. We are players in God's world. Or would be, if we weren't constantly being distracted by the counterfeits of peace, safety, and power that are being pushed on us by "the way things are," the normalcy of civilization. That is Egypt. That is Rome. That is empire.  Our refusal to turn, or blindness, or fear, whatever it is, is what is making us so unhappy. The "other god" demands unanimity or destruction, cooperation or the cross, submission or slavery, participation or marginalization. The One who reveals self in action, "I AM WHO I SHALL BE," invites us to walk through the cleansing water to the margins of civilization and do something new. Together. With Jesus, the "face of the Father's mercy," we place ourselves between the fig tree and the axe, and ask for a little time to work on things.

Here's what we're singing this weekend at St. Anne:

Entrance song: Lead Me, Guide Me

Kyrie: Daigle-Kendzia "Lead Us to the Water"

Psalm 103: The Lord Is Kind and Merciful (Cotter)

Gospel acclamation and General Intercessions: Mass of Christ the Servant (still in beta)

Preparation Rite: Be Merciful (Haugen)

Mass of Creation

Lamb of God: Mass of St. Aidan

Communion: Christ Be Our Light

Closing: Amazing Grace

Life without Alleluia

Literally burying the Alleluia at
Fraternity of St Joseph the Guardian
 in La Londe-les-Maures, France

My friend and uber-musician from Long Island, Christopher Ferraro, posted on Facebook a quotation from Dom Prosper Gueranger’s masterworkThe Liturgical Year. Gueranger was a French monk, the abbot of the Solesmes monastery for nearly four decades in the mid-18^thcentury. The classic 15-volume work ($459 on Amazon--cheap!), written over the years from 1841 until his death, was left unfinished. Ferraro’s quotation concerned the “Suspension of the Alleluia” during the season of Lent:

"That indifference for the liturgy of the Church, which is the strongest indication of a weak faith, and which now reigns so universally in the world, is the reason why so many, even practical Catholics, can witness this yearly suspension of the Alleluia, without profiting by the lesson it conveys. A passing remark, or a chance thought, is the most they give to it, for they care for no other devotions but such as are private; the spirit of the Church, in her various seasons, is quite beneath their notice.…Why be indifferent in this present instance? Why deem of no interest to piety this suspension of the Alleluia, which she, the Church, considers as one of the principle and most solemn incidents in her liturgical year?”

It struck me that, though I try to maintain the practice of figuratively “burying the alleluia” on the Sunday and (now) the Tuesday morning before Ash Wednesday, I’ve never actually put into words for myself why I ought to notice it, or why it is important enough that, through the changes of the Second Vatican Council, it survived in liturgical practice in Western Catholicism even though in the East the Alleluia continues to be sung through Lent. I came up with three thoughts we might ponder while we are not singing the Alleluia. (After Mass, of course…don’t be distracted from the homily!)

• Remembering God. Years ago, Walter Brueggemann, in his book Israel’s Praise: Doxology Against Idolatry and Ideology, reminded us that when we read and pray scripture, especially in the psalms, we should keep in mind that in Israel there was often too-close a connection between the court, which ruled Israel in the world, and the Temple, which preserved the presence of God and the memory that it is the just and merciful God who is the only true king of Israel. It is difficult to tell in the psalms just who is being enthroned and worshipped: the king or God? It was the job of the priestly class (and when they failed, the prophets) to be sure those lines were neatly drawn. Sometimes, as in Psalm 150, the line is completely obscured. It seems to be a litany of “Alleluia! Praise the Lord in the temple! Praise him in the sky! Praise him with all your instruments!”, on and on without ever saying why? When prayer gets like that, all "Alleluia, ain't life great," it becomes oppressive, a tool of the status quo, the ruling class and their interest. But other psalms, even some Hallel psalms (psalms with the words “Hallelu Yah” in them, “Praise the Lord”), are more deliberate. Psalm 146 is a good foil for 150. It encourages us to “Hallelujah” because God is always faithful, is just to the oppressed, gives food to the hungry, and so on. This “doxology” in the prayer is a reminder to the king that God is in charge, even of the king, and that the king should act like God, and “give bread to the hungry” and “set prisoners free.” So the first thing we could do when we miss singing the Alleluia is remember why we sing it in the first place: to help us remember that God, and the works of God in Christ, are the very reason we rejoice. The status quo isn't always good for everyone—it rarely is, but God is always good, has been in the past, and will continue to be into the future.
• Solidarity with those who live without an Alleluia. There continues to be a danger, there is for me, anyway, that my “Alleluia” is a word of worship of an idol, of a god who props up the prosperity and power of the rich and powerful (I include myself in this number when speaking about the world as a whole.) “Alleluia” in our worship as it announces the gospel and peppers our music can be a real cheerleader’s “RAH!!” for the first world. So on one level, fasting from the Alleluia during Lent gives an opportunity to see the world through the eyes of the poor, the persecuted, and the hopeless. The number of these people, our brothers and sisters in Christ, beloved children of the same Father, is nearly one in two in the world. Nearly one in four live in extreme poverty, on less than the equivalent of $1.25 a day. When we sing “The Lord hears the cry of the poor,” to paraphrase, possibly apocryphally, Tom Conry, we’re not singing about ourselves. Silencing the Alleluia for a while can help us remember that. At the same time, it can help us to remember those who are not living an “Easter” existence, even in a temporary sense. Brutally knocked down by loss of security, by sickness or death, many people whom we know have lost the Alleluia in their heart. Again, the silencing of the Alleluia for Lent can help us remember them and act on their behalf if we choose to do so mindfully.
• “If Christ is not risen, our faith is empty.” Finally, and certainly not least among these three, is the opportunity to reflect on what the world might be like if Jesus of Nazareth were just a rabble-rousing nationalist preacher and had been forgotten after enduring the sentence of capital punishment executed upon him by the Roman governor. What if God had not intervened, had left us to wonder, had not snatched Jesus from the grave to let the authority of his life give us a shining option to the normalcy of violence and “might makes right”? Christians hear and pray and sing “Alleluia” as our Easter song, as the anthem of resurrection and the proclamation that Christ is alive in the life and mission of the Church. Not singing the Alleluia for the duration of Lent gives us an opportunity to imagine the chaos of a world without the Sermon on the Mount, without the Good Shepherd and the Good Samaritan, without the good news of a God-who-is-with-us, a loving Parent for all, who calls us beloved children. It’s a bleak prospect, a dystopia in which love is even more fragile than now, without the hope that every act of self-giving imitates the One whose love formed the world.

One mystic (Abbot Rupert, quoted in Guéranger) speaks of the “Alleluia” as “a stranger amidst our other words. Its mysterious beauty is as though a drop of Heaven’s overflowing joy had fallen down on our earth…For this reason, the word Alleluia has not been translated. It has been left in its original Hebrew as a stranger to tell us that there is a joy in his native land which could not dwell in ours.” Perhaps "Alleluia" is the song of the "already-not yet" reign of God, and during Lent, we ponder the "not yet" of God's reign and our participation in with others who refuse to "hear the cry of the poor" by forgoing the "already."  

Preface 1 for Lent, in the previous translation, included these words: "Each year you give us this joyful season when we prepare to celebrate the paschal mystery with mind and heart renewed." During these weeks when we “fast” from singing or even saying the word “Alleluia” during our liturgical prayer, maybe some of these thoughts can help us find a place to take that sense of discomfort and maybe even loss to find an even greater joy when it returns to the liturgy at the Easter Vigil.

My Lenten Blog Posts, 2013-2017 - a resource

Greetings to all who read this blog!

As we get ready for Lent, I thought you might be able to use this index page for all the material I've written about Lenten Sundays (and a few weekdays), as well as material on the Rite of Election and Scrutinies. Blog posts on Triduum will have their own page, and I'll try to organize Easter later this year.

I apologize in advance for the dearth of material on weeks 3, 4, and 5 of Lent outside of Year A. We only use those readings at St. Anne when we don't have catechumens, and it hasn't happened very often! So good luck with those.

For now at least, I hope these may help give you ideas on music, preaching, and ritual as we head into Lent 2018. Thank you for your support.

Information about my book of Lenten Reflection, Change Our Hearts, can be found here, or using the link to Amazon.com. 

LENTEN BLOG POSTS

1. General

• Fasting and almsgiving - a quick lesson from the Lenten lectionary
• My Lenten Manifesto
• A Repenting God
• Coming to Terms with the Cross (especially Year B)
• TBT - A vision of Lent (1999) with thoughts for each week

2. Ash Wednesday

• The shadow on the mountain
• I told Jesus it would be all right if he changed my name...
• My name is mud...That's not so bad
• Dust, ashes, cross, and water
• Seeking solidarity for a new start
• Second Thoughts: Ash Wednesday - the Pantry

3. First Sunday of Lent

• Lead Us to the Water (A1L)
• Election and baptism A1L
• O God, you were a warrior, but you set your bow in the sky (B1L)
• You will be like gods (C1L)
• Second thoughts - Remembering and Election (C1L)

4. Second Sunday of Lent

• Speaking the truth to power (A2L)
• Jesus, helping us lose our religion (A2L)
• Who will hold back God's hand? (B2L)
• Mount Tabor is everywhere C2L
• Second Thoughts: Transfigured by prayer—C2L

5. Third Sunday of Lent

• See below, "Where's Your Samaria"
• Of Wells, Women, and Song (A3L)
• The element of surprise (A3L)
• Second thoughts: Is the Lord in our midst or not? (A3L)
• Agape as flowing water (A3L)
• Christ at Jacob's Well and Emmaus (A3L)

6. Fourth Sunday of Lent

• "Believing is Seeing" (1) - the Man Born Blind
• Believing is Seeing (2) - the dark night of a liturgical soul
• Believing is seeing (3) - Turning can take a while
• "How were your eyes opened?" (A4L)
• John 9:9 and the co-creation of light (A4L)
• 
Rejoice! The Second Scrutiny! (A4L)
• Second thoughts: Through the eyes of love (A4L)
• Revising the “Family” Metaphor (A4L)
• The body of anti-Christ (B4L)
• All  your children, lost and found C4L
• Ambassadors of "love in humiliation" (C4L)

7. Fifth Sunday of Lent

• The Last Taboo (A5L)
• I will open your graves, and have you rise from them (A5L)
• Do you believe this? ((A5L)
• God and Death and James Alison (A5L)
• Second Thoughts: With Lincoln (and Lazarus) in the Bardo (A5L)
• He reached down and touched the pain (C5L)

8. Scrutinies and "The Mystery of Sin"

• Scrutinies - the mystery of sin and grace (another list with links)
• The mystery of sin (1) - Where's your Samaria? Who's that at your well?
• The mystery of sin (2) - Achilles’ heel, Kryptonite, and starry-eyed interns
• The mystery of sin (3) - A way out of hell

9. Palm Sunday of the Lord's Passion

• Who comes in the name of the Lord?
• A passion for Christ
• Psalm 22 and God's Passion

10. Lenten Weekdays

• The "sign of Jonah" and the "Queen of the South" 2nd Week of Lent, Wednesday 2L
• Random Lent thoughts: "Mighty deeds," and lost in Babylon
• Thoughts on today's readings (Tuesday, 2nd week of Lent)
• Preaching Lent on St. Patrick's day
• Jonah's tiff with Noah's God

11. Songs for Lent from "SongStories"

• Jerusalem, My Destiny (1989)
• Precious Blood (1995)
• Psalm 22 for Passion Sunday
• Covenant Hymn (1992, Vision; 1994,  Praise the Maker's Love, GIA)
• Christ the Icon (WLP, 2005)
• You Alone (NALR, 1984)
• Change Our Hearts (NALR, 1984; OCP 2000)
• Penitential Litany: Hold Us in Your Mercy (GIA, 1993)
• Create Me Again (Psalm 51) (Vision, 1992, GIA)
• Be Thou My Vision (Vision, 1992, GIA)
• Faithful Cross (OCP, 2011, music by Tom Kendzia)
• To You Who Bow (GIA, 2014)
• Do Not Fear to Hope (1986, NALR)
• Live the Promise (GIA, 1994)
• Palm Sunday Processional (1998, GIA Publications)
• Two litanies for the scrutinies (and lament)

Rising from the Dead 4: Easter spreads its Pentecost wings

 4. Easter Spreads Its Pentecost Wings


This is the day that people, mostly men, have made.

It is a day full of violence and images of violence. Beheadings and suggestions of beheadings. Lynching and dreams of lynching. Murder and threats of murder. War and rumors of war.

It is a day when strangers are presumed to be enemies, a day when those who look, speak, or dress differently from us are presumed to have it in for us. It is a day of mistrust and quarantine, deportation and isolation. It is a day of fear, and scarcity, and hoarding, class war and intellectual snobbery.


This is the day that we have made. Let us feel the oppressive weight of it, rue the energy we've spent demonizing our enemies, believing the lies of scarcity and death. We'd been warned. We know better.

There is another day, the day we've been living for the last fifty days in another reality, when we give our time to it, if we'd let it break out of its Sunday horizon. It is the day God has made, and it is beautiful to see.

Narrative and Counter-narrative. The world has always belonged to the death-dealers, the lynchers, beheaders, the masters of exile and forced labor. And there has always been another story, rising up from that dark narrative like light seeps through a crack in a wall. It is a new narrative of shared plenty, of freedom and equality, of rest and abundance for all. The story takes place in this world, transformed by justice. The forces of the quick fix, of might-makes-right, of manifest destiny have always tried to assimilate this counter-narrative, to marry it to the property of the rulers. But it will not be held captive for long. "There is no imprisoning the word of the Lord." Its story makes fools of its captors and shows them for the duplicity and opportunism of their revisionism.

In the days following the murder-by-capital-punishment of Jesus of Nazareth, there was confusion and fear among his inner circle. But as dark and final as the narrative had turned, the counter-narrative was as sudden and bright as creation, a "big bang" that threw unimagined light in every direction. The tomb of Jesus was found to be empty, and the frightened folk who had been his companions suddenly found voices and power to say something extraordinary, without fear of reprisal: Jesus, whom they had seen die, was alive. Their experience, during the reorientation to the new light of Easter that was the empty tomb, the experiences of Mary, Peter and John, Thomas, Clopas and his companion, and finally the other disciples, was that the divine mission undertaken by Jesus in their lives had been passed on to them, ordinary Jews, to spread to the world.

This couldn't have happened overnight, and might not have happened at all except for the extraordinary change wrought in a fiery Pharisee evangelist named Saul by a vision of the risen Christ. His narrative, too, was overturned, reinterpreted, and given back to him, so that the Law and the prophets meant something utterly new, not to be enforced and defended by threats and violence, but by persuasion and table talk. Even more important, the deep sense of mutual belonging to God that had formerly been a covenant only with the children of Abraham came to be understood by him to be offered in a new way, through Christ, to the whole world. In a similar, more gradual way, the same insight seems to have sunk in with Simon Peter after some interactions with a Roman official and his family. The preaching of the twelve, at least as recorded in Acts half a century later, reveals continued meditation on Jewish scriptures but with a new narrative in mind that slowly begins to include everybody in the parental love of God through adoption in Jesus Christ through the working of God's love in the Holy Spirit.

We who have been part of the Easter liturgy over the last 50 days have heard this story retold over the din of counter narrative being noisily and angrily, violently, mortally preached by ISIS, Donald Trump, Putin, Duterte, and their spokespersons and minions. While the voices of death and isolationism and domination preached their dysangelion, we have heard how a handful of inexperienced fishermen and artisans voyaged around the known world, often reviled and ridiculed, subject to shipwreck, shunning, hunger, threatened with prison, stoning, and exposure to Roman arrest and revenge, took a message not of threat or exceptionalism but of welcome and the all-encompassing love of God to the world.

What kind of fire? What kind of fire would turn these men and women of no particular influence, means, or talent into a peaceful force that called such diverse people to unity in the crucified Jesus and their own transformed Jewish story of a world created by God for freedom and equality?

After fifty days, after ninety days, after two millennia, what kind of fire would convince us to ignore the narrative that says "there's only enough for us," "only our way for the world," "enterprise before the earth," "violence will be met with deadlier, unremitting violence," and "one race above all others"?

Christ still announces his simple message: Turn around. Stop listening to those angry, lost voices. Believe in love because it is the life of God. Follow me. Love your enemies. Call God "our Father," everybody in the family. If you have two, give one away. Lead by serving others. Treat everyone the way you'd want to be treated.

How's the other way working out for you? Happy with the way things are? Jesus says, Turn around. They're lying to you. You're going the wrong way.

I don't know what it means "to rise from the dead." I have no grasp of what resurrection life is. But I see something worth following here because it changed people from being afraid of death to embracing it when it became unavoidable because they were certain from their experience that it was not the end, that something full of life, something greater than life, was coming, and coming in this world, because it was here that they experienced the resurrection. It is for everyone. No one is excluded, no one gets less than everything. No one has to fight, argue, or kill to get it. It's gift. No one offers anything better. So I choose to believe in "Follow me."

Follow me into the fire that is Life. I'll go first.

Summary: Rising from the dead means finally breaking out of the cocoon that is the safe and familiar: family, community, faith, nation, into God's wide universe of the whole human family, the earth. We've been raised in a world that has given us too small an identity and crippling allegiances with no future. The gospel and the resurrection offer abundant life, for everyone, in this world, and more. "Only God could make this day. It is beautiful to see." (Psalm 118:23) "Lord, send out your spirit and renew the face of the earth." (Psalm 104:30)

Rising from the Dead 2: You will never wash my feet

2. "You will never wash my feet."

I guess I've spilled a lot of ink, as have others, on John's version of just what "Do this in memory of me" means. What caught me ear this year though was Peter's line, repeated in our song during the foot washing, and, strangely, addressed in a throwaway line between the rite and the intercessions by our pastor, a line that could have been an entire homily. (I don't remember the line, I only remember that the way I received it stuck with me.) The idea was this: Peter was appalled by Jesus's action, but not so much by the fact that Jesus washed his feet, but that, as a disciple, he was going to have to do so as well. He saw that in the action, before Jesus had said anything to them.

We had just finished working through some of the ideas in Crossan's book How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian: Is God Violent? An Exploration from Genesis to Revelation, and I had cross referenced some of the ideas there with two other books. One was Derek Flood's Disarming Scripture: Cherry-Picking Liberals, Violence-Loving Conservatives, and Why We All Need to Learn to Read the Bible Like Jesus Did (are these titles too much, or what?) and books by Bernard Brandon Scott and Borg/Crossan on St. Paul and his metamorphosis-though-literary-assimilation from a radical disciple of Jesus to an apologist for accommodation to the Roman empire. The book about Paul, in short, make the case for Paul the Jewish Christian, and for distinguishing between the actual letters and letters edited or written under his name by others. They note the sharp distinctions between the radical Christian equality in Paul's texts that proclaim that in Christ there is "no Jew or Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, (Gal. 3:28)" and then in other (assumedly not Pauline) places make clear distinctions in all cases. That's all by way of background, because I want to focus on "neither slave nor free," and bring in the Letter to Philemon here, along with the words of Galatians quoted above.

So in the Last Supper story in the gospel of St. John, "Jesus took a towel," stripped, and washed the disciples' feet. We say this over and over again. We act in out in our Holy Thursday liturgy, and pick liturgical nits about who is qualified to get their feet washed by the slave. But we don't really deal with the reality being expressed here. The master, the one who has led the trek from Galilee to Jerusalem over the months and years of his ministry, the healer, the spell-binding story teller and teacher, the paterfamilias at the table of the disciples, does something so radical that, in our much more egalitarian society, we cannot imagine. The one at the top of the honor system among their peers, the one whom every apostle and disciple, apparently, right up to his death and even afterward, thought to be the promised Messiah who would deliver Judea and Galilee from Roman occupation, literally takes the social position of a slave, removes his outer garments, and washes the feet of (at least) the twelve. This stomach-churning reversal must have blind-sided them. The unfiltered Peter, in John's account, can only blurt out, "You will never wash my feet."


This event is not mentioned in any of the synoptics, nor is it mentioned in any of the Pauline or universal letters. However, Bruce Chilton in Authenticating the Activities of Jesus (Brill Academic, Boston, Leiden 2002) cites a "criterion of coherence" with several strains of "greatest/least" and "servant/master" sayings in the synoptics, and with Pauline themes like the hymn in Philippians 2 about the kenosis of Christ. Chilton (and others) see Jesus, and later, the church, as symbolically taking on and ultimately subverting the class distinction that is slavery. Jews were allowed to have slaves, but recall that their foundational experience, whether you start from the captivity and work backward or Egypt and work forward, is one of slavery, and so within the ethical memory of the nation there is an antipathy to slavery, the same one from which the sabbath proscription on work arose.

Along with the Galatians assertion of "in Christ, there is neither slave nor free," we have the happy little letter to Philemon to which to look for insight as well. In that letter, Paul exhorts a friend, one of his own, to manumit the slave Onesimus, and perhaps to let him (Paul) keep him as an assistant. The whole story is only understood, we don't have all the details. But Onesimus apparently did something legal, i.e. go to his master's friend, Paul, to plea with his master for his freedom. While with Paul, Onesimus was converted to Christianity, which put everybody in a bind. So Paul is attempting to persuade (not bully or guilt-trip) his friend into freeing Onesimus as a brother in Christ, thus being able to keep an assistant and save the former slave from punishment, even death.

This is all to say that slaves were a very low form of humanity in these times, lower than servants (The Greek word doulos translates both "slave" and "servant" as well as other meanings in a complicated, often subjective, process.) Servants were trusted household employees, in some cases, almost members of the family; slaves, not so. No Jewish slave would be allowed to wash feet (see footnote to John 13:5 in NABRE.) And in the household narrative of the Last Supper, there were tasks servants would do as part of the meal preparation and service as well as guest hospitality, but the work of washing feet was solely the work of slaves. Paul's famous use of a pre-existing Christian hymn in Philippians uses the word doulos to describe Jesus taking "the form of a slave." Indeed, John sees the humiliation of Jesus in the washing of the feet as a sign pointing both to his humiliating death and to his "descent" from divinity to "pitch his tent among us." Thus there is that "criterion of coherence" that resonates with us who try to imitate the master, and who hear his word from other gospel accounts that "whoever wants to be first among you must be the slave of all," and "the greatest among you must be your servant."

So imagine Peter, getting his feet washed, but having grown up in a world with slaves, and servants, and masters, and probably having some commerce with all. Imagine Peter, in Jesus's inner circle, having given up his fishing business in Galilee and putting his hopes on this itinerant rabbi, who might be the Messiah who would overthrow Rome: what might be in it for him? I'm sure there was danger in the air: maybe Jesus arranged with Judas for the meeting with the Sanhedrin, willing to lay down his life rather than risk a riot during the holiday, who knows? Certainly the parabolic entry into Jerusalem amid the crowd ahead of Passover, and the little dust-up in the Temple would have put the disciples on edge; the secret arrangements for the upper room read like a Cold War setup for an encounter among spies. And now, in that context, at a meal on or near passover, Jesus the master washes their feet, acting for all the world like a slave. Peter has signed on as a disciple, and if the stories are to be believed, had blustered his faithfulness with the best of them. Now the master is acting like a slave. He doesn't even have to verbalize the conclusion, which they all would have seen as he did it:

So when he had washed their feet [and] put his garments back on and reclined at table again, he said to them, “Do you realize what I have done for you?
You call me ‘teacher’ and ‘master,’ and rightly so, for indeed I am.
If I, therefore, the master and teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to wash one another’s feet.
I have given you a model to follow, so that as I have done for you, you should also do.i
Amen, amen, I say to you, no slave is greater than his master nor any messenger greater than the one who sent him.

If the Master does it, the disciple does it. Peter's horror isn't about the humiliation of Jesus: it's about the humiliation of Peter, who has a few more lessons to learn before the end of the narrative. The difficulty of Peter's conversion will be attested throughout Acts of the Apostles, especially when he waffles on the question of circumcision in the inclusion of Gentiles at the Council of Jerusalem. But these lessons serve him well, as he learns to serve at the feet of the master, the Lord who serves as a slave.

Summary: Resurrection is the transformation of our past, a "new song," because God is creating, "doing something new." The risen world in Christ is utterly egalitarian, no male nor female, Jew nor Greek, slave nor free.

The two books about the radical (i.e. "original, real") St. Paul:

The Real Paul: Recovering His Radical Challenge by Bernard Brandon Scott

The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon, by Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan

Second Thoughts: With Lincoln (and Lazarus) in the Bardo (A5L)

Note: Second Thoughts is an ongoing if sporadic series of posts on Sunday readings and motifs that occur to me after the liturgical experience. Most of what I do as a blogger, because of how my work is organized, is necessarily prior to the Sunday experience, but as most of us have come to understand, the liturgical event itself often shapes our receiving of the scriptures on a particular day. To see other "Second Thoughts" posts, use the "Labels" function on the right, and select that topic.

I wrote about it a little bit two weeks ago, but now it appears that the novel I was raving about then may be a better metaphor for the life-giving, in-breaking love that is the heart of Easter faith and therefore of conversion and initiation than I said even then. That illuminating novel, and it's a first novel to boot, is Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders. Having experienced it as an audio book with a cast of over a hundred characters including Nick Offerman, Megan Mullaly, David Sedaris, Susan Sarandon, and many others, I had been dying to talk to someone else about it for weeks. Terry did finally get a chance to read it and she thought as I do that it's a deep and beautiful book on many levels. Without overstating the religious resonances, there is much to contemplate with regard to ultimate things in life: transcendence, what matters to us, how we relate to each other as human beings, how we deny death and put too much of our energy into things that don't matter, how understanding and mutuality help us break out of those patterns.

I don't mean to give a review or summary of the book here, but there are interesting parallels between what goes in the bardo in Saunders' novel and in our lives interpreted by the Lazarus story in the fourth gospel. For my purposes (and Saunders has taken liberties, by his own admission, with the concept from Tibetan Buddhism in applying the scenario to his novel), the bardo is a place of shadowy life between death and whatever is beyond death, a place which appears to be very much like the surroundings in "real life," but devoid of color and reason. Souls of the dead are circumscribed and defined by unfinished business from their former lives, seem doomed to repeat decisions and actions from their lives, and are encumbered by "physical" transformations of their bodies corresponding to their issues as well: extra eyes, legs, and arms, for instance, and in once particularly prominent case, one character has an oversized, tumescent penis.

But the really strange thing about the bardo is that the inhabitants are unaware that they are dead, and as they accustom to their environs and begin to suspect that all is not right, they enter into a complex denial of their reality and not only won't admit their situation but have an elaborate vocabulary of circumlocution.

Enter into this alternate reality, in February of 1862, the tiny, kindly soul of the innocent Willy Lincoln, who has succumbed to typhoid in the White House, a second child lost in the house of Lincoln. His death completely unhinges his mother, and father Abraham is distraught and inconsolable at a time when he is barely able to clear his head about the weighty problems of the intensifying Civil War. The historical record, which is cited in long chapters of excerpts from contemporary letters and memoirs, indicates that the President went to the rented crypt that housed Willy's body at night to visit with the corpse of his son. It's this event that provides the crisis and forward motion for the occupants of the bardo.

These souls are trapped in the world of their own unreality, unable to see or admit that they are dead, and unwilling to let go of the illusion of the appearance of "life" that they have, lest they lose the illusion of hope that they can reverse some wrong or achieve some goal left unaccomplished. Driven primarily by necessarily selfish preoccupation and trying to put the best face on their situation, even episodes of anger, lust, and murder amount to epiphanies of ennui, to be repeated over and over without change of outcome. Occasionally one or more inhabitants of the bardo will move into another (higher?) plane of being in a flash of light and sound. We're never really sure where they've gone to, but my probably prejudiced feeling is that the beings who sometimes come among them as "angels" are indeed moving them by persuasion toward greater light by encouraging them to imagine themselves forgiven and offered the resolution of their past problems.

Lincoln's entry into the graveyard and the crypt that houses Willy, the exposure of the souls to Willy's confusion and wonder and Lincoln's unabashed grief, along with the bardo inhabitants' previous experience of children's souls (like a memory of compassion) moves some to action. Let me just say that in trying to help the elder Lincoln let go of his grief and leave the cemetery the souls within go to great lengths to achieve their goal, including the occupation of the same space, getting "inside" each other and eventually "inside" Abraham Lincoln, and in doing so achieve new compassion and insight unavailable to them before.

What all this has to do with Lazarus and Jesus may not be clear to you. In fact, it's not crystal clear to me. Lazarus needs help. He's dead. He seems beyond help, though probably not to himself. The occupants of the bardo need help too, they're unaware that they're dead, and unable to progress beyond that unfulfilling stasis between actual life and some kind of afterlife. They need someone to break their silence, tell them to stop pretending that they're alive, and admit their real problem: death. It is Willy who is finally able to break through to the largest number of them, and that because of their intervention with Lincoln.

We all lie to ourselves and each other about our participation in death. We think of ourselves as alive, but our life is really a house built on the suffering of others. We cooperate with death in ways of which we aren't even aware; we've built structures of empire and security that depend on the exploitation and subjugation of others. Somebody has to tell us that we're dead, or we're just going to stay where we are, repeating the patterns of our counterfeit lives, and reinforcing the unjust structures that entomb the poor and marginalized.

Scripture scholar Dominic Crossan's description of the economy of "salvation," or how things get "fixed up" in the end, is "collaborative eschatology." It's as though, he says, we have sat around for four thousand years waiting for God to make justice happen in the world, and at the same time, God is waiting for us. He repeats Archbishop Desmond Tutu's adage that "Without God, we can't. Without us, God won't." God in Jesus has stood at the door of the tomb where the world insists on living and called us to come out. The least God expects us to do, the easy part, it ought to be, is to untie the burial cloths. Christ has done the heavy lifting. It's our job to roll away the stone, and let people go free. If we're unwilling to do that, we're still trapped by death.

Prophesy to the bones! Prophesy to the breath!

That is the urgent invitation God makes to Ezekiel, paralyzed with grief, fear, unknowing, and self-doubt upon the desolate desert plain of Har-megiddo, surrounded by the sun-dried bones of King Josiah and all of his fine young warriors. All Ezekiel has to do is open his mouth, and tell the bones that God can do it. Just that little bit of the prophet's breath would set in motion the possibility of a people's restoration.

I will open your graves, and have you rise from them. 

Amid the worst that life can do, the lies, the brutality, the broken promises, the unfulfilled hopes, amid the missiles, the sarin gas, the drone strikes, the closed borders, the deportations, amid the decapitations in foreign lands, the neglect, abandonment, and ultimately executions of the mentally disabled in this one, amid the eyes-averted from famine and genocide, and the preferential option for capital, there is still power in us to tell the truth, to 'prophesy to the bones,' and to hear the splatter and crunch of bones, sinew, blood, and breath as what was dead comes to unimagined life. It seems we need to be forced to look upon the death that our perfidy has caused, even if the spirit needs to carry us by the hair to the battlefield, hospital, or detention center and command us to look at it.

I have spoken, and I will do it! Oracle of G-d.

The ache and rigor of life, the unrelenting taskmaster of conscience when the heart is opened to the agony of the world, the paralysis and inertia of our (my) disconnectedness and alienation from any vision of a non-violent way forward, really forward-together, out of the desert of political impotence, all of this is the colorless bardo in which we wander, I wander, in a dreamy pretense of life that is nothing but a grave. How can I hear, and really, just as important, how can I become the echo of that voice that bellowed out of a roiling gut of lamentation, angry, untouchable, and fearless in the homeland of ruin, despair, and putrefaction:

LAZARUS! Come out!

Believe it or not, that's what the community of the baptized, gathered by the Spirit, the "breath" of God in the name of the deathless Jesus and the God of life, is called to do, to be. Baptismal water drowns the death of isolation and alienation and wakens to the life of a community for others. Is it any wonder we have Lent every year to get ready to renew the promises of baptism, to reject sin and believe the gospel of Christ? Is it any wonder that those who are called to approach those sacraments for the first time apprentice as Christians for months or years, and ultimately undergo three scrutinies for the purpose of purification (rejection of unrecognized or habitual evil) and enlightenment (the truth about ourselves and the gifts we have been given that strengthens us in the love needed to give ourselves away for others)?

Lincoln in the Bardo might need to become a go-to text for adult Lenten discernment, a kind of literary examination of conscience, a metaphor and maybe even an allegory for our spiritual lives, by which I mean an inventory of what is within us that activates and motivates what we do in the world. Those three classic gospels from John do their awesome work, particularly with good preaching, but for me, at least, Saunders' novel picked me up by the hair and set me down in front of a mirror, surrounded by the dry bones of the fine young armies of my heart, to use Leonard Cohen's unapproachably perfect phrase, "torn by what I've done and can't undo." For me this Lent, Leonard, and Ezekiel, and Saunders' Lincoln have been both Inquisitor and Paraclete.

Thanks, Art. I needed that.

 

Second thoughts: Through the eyes of love (A4L)

My heritage is Irish, and we tend even in our most generous moments to nourish a negative streak about human nature. Then of course there is the embarrassing but nevertheless unassailable truth that we tend to critique in others, and thus in the world at large, what we most dislike about ourselves, and so one's (my) self-awareness as a sinner of copious guilt and intent colors the way I see the world even when I'm trying my best to advertise grace and mercy. There is no way out of that box. It's the way we're made.

So when it comes to covering the scrutinies, as I read the scriptures and what is written about the scriptures, when I hear them preached, when I learn from fine scholars how the shape the faith of the church and the practice of our worship, I know that I have leaned heavily in my life toward the awareness of sin, especially when it comes to patterns of social sin that are so woven into American life that we don't even recognize, let alone acknowledge, the ironic blasphemy, say, of going to war in the name of God, or building a border wall, cancelling immigrants' visas, or repealing environmental and climate regulations while going to churches and singing hymns, and writing nasty (and usually non-factual) internet postings about the how America is a Christian nation that was founded to be "under God." I say all this self-critically, because being judgmental about all that is, in itself, as evil as anything else. It all boils down to loving one another, Jesus says, which is the same as loving God. When we stop loving one another, even if it's as simple and seemingly harmless as calling someone an a***ole, even if s/he deserves it, is a step on the road to murder, if we believe the Sermon on the Mount. And I tend to do so.

In my years working in catechumenate ministry with the North American Forum, it took me a while to begin to grasp this, and my early attempts at writing musical settings for the scrutiny prayers were heavy on the "purification" and light (as it were) on "enlightenment." When colleagues pointed this out to me, it was clear, and I was able to make changes in texts that were more balanced, and for every "From fear and isolation, deliver us" there was a "Strengthen us in solidarity and hope, kyrie eleison." Slowly, I hope, changing words will begin to change actions. I think that that is true. It's why we have liturgy.

So this is what I brought to the readings for Lent 4, even though we didn't have a scrutiny this year. It helped me to understand the entire set of readings in the light of that one wonderful line from the first reading, "Not as (human beings) see does God see, because (people) see the appearance, but the Lord looks into the heart." I was reading an article by Amy-Jill Levine about parables recently, when she was speaking about God's preferential option for younger sons. Starting in Genesis (Abel, Isaac, Jacob) and through the rest of the Hebrew scriptures, God favors younger over older sons. Dominic Crossan puts this to God's opposition to the traditions (habits) of civilization itself, which favor the eldest. God, in other words, sides with innovation and evolution, while civilization favors dynasty, routine, predictability. This predilection of the divine, Levine says, is traceable into the parables of Jesus in the Christian scriptures. So one aspect of God's vision is to see the gifts of people, regardless of their social position, as moving humanity forward in new and often chaotic, unpredictable, even unlawful ways.

The essential thing, though, the thing that brought up my conventional and Irish focus on sin and the scrutinies, is that the vision of God always sees good. It is the vision of a father or a mother (as Isaiah 49 reminded us this week at daily mass) that sees a beloved child when it looks at every human individual, no matter or graceful or sin-steeped we may be. Seeing as God sees is to see every person as the image and likeness of God, a beloved child, so to us, a brother and sister loved by a common parent whose love is completely unrivalrous and assuring of all love's bounty. It's that loving vision that allows Jesus to see that God wants the healing of the blind man even on the sabbath, when laws need to be broken to allow it. It's the vision of sin's dominance and the need for human repentance that keeps the opponents of Jesus from being able to recognize the hand of God in Jesus's action. The Deuteronomic code, in fact, almost predicts this outcome. Evil in the world must, Deuteronomy says, be the result of human disobedience, so repentance is a requirement for healing, freedom, and poverty. Even when wisdom literature, such as the book of Job, intervened on behalf of the God of Genesis, and should have left the Deuteronomist on the slag heap of history, human beings just seem to need to associate punishment with their bad behavior, and on we go with our legal codes, habits of violent child-rearing, and war.

But the over-arching tenderness of God, that premiere attribute of loving-kindness, is proclaimed from the first verses of Genesis. We still don't really believe it. What the pseudo-Pauline author of Ephesians calls "light" in the second reading is just that: the tenderness of God, the eyes of love that sing with the unknown rhapsodist that Ephesians quotes:

Sleeper, awake!
Rise from death!
Christ will be your light.

The enlightenment sought by the scrutinies is a share in that vision of the God of love that can only see us and our sin and foibles with the loving eyes of the Creator, the one who delights in the making, the sustaining, and homecoming of us all. I want to shaped by that vision. I don't want to see shadows of my own perfidy in every person who crosses me, in my church, and in my government. I want my vision of everyone, especially people whom I consider to be my rivals and antagonists, people who like me are trapped in the "be good or else" covenant of the Deuteronomist, to be enlightened and transformed by the vision of God. And I want their vision of me to be transformed, too, and of the earth, and of the poor, and of the economy. To accomplish this, though, I think conversion always needs to keep its eyes on the God of love and the reality of the human family that God wants. The light that the scrutinies and Lent throws upon the way things are in my life and in the world is God's love. "Everything that becomes visible is light," sings Ephesians. When we love, when we see as God sees, we become light, we become localization of the divine. That's what I want to be. That's how I want to be when I renew by baptismal promises at Easter. I want to shine. I want us all to shine, right here, right now, in my home, on my street, in my church, on my job, in this very world.

Second thoughts: Is the Lord in our midst or not? (A3L)

A couple of weeks ago, Terry and I did an evening of reflection with Jennifer Budziak and the wonderful musicians of Old St. Patrick's church in the city as part of OSP's Lenten mission. I began by speaking about growing up in a desert climate not unlike parts of Israel. I was a boy in Arizona, and went to high school and novitiate in California, so even before the twenty years I spent there between 1973 and '93 I had a long experience of being a desert dweller. Like the people of the scriptures, I had an appreciation for rain, rivers, and that rare exotic glimpse of a lake or ocean. Before I was twenty, I had had two very good friends who died from exposure to the unforgiving heat of the Mojave desert.

So the song we began, after an opening prayer hymn called "Be Thou My Vision," with "Your Mercy Like Rain," my setting of Psalm 85, a ritual prayer for prayer for good rain to bring a good food crop, that associates God's mercy and justice coming to earth with the rain that falls from the sky. It is a prayer that God make present for us the love and safety that we remember was given to our ancestors. "Let us see your kindness; grant us your salvation." But as interested as I am and was in that aspect of the psalm, it is the reference to water in the desert as a sign of God's promises kept and ongoing favor that I wanted to latch onto. Throughout the Hebrew scriptures, one of the most repeated signs of God's favor and the approach of God's reign is water in the desert: justice rolling like a river, and integrity like a flowing stream, the desert blooming like a garden, richly watered, a river flowing out from city of God, making all the surrounding countryside fertile.

We've picked that up in our Christian hymnody, as I'm sure you've already begun to recall. "Let Justice Roll like a River," we sing, "Down by the Riverside," "Shall We Gather at the River," "There's a Wideness in God's Mercy (like the wideness of the sea...)," "Come to the Water," "Lead Us to the Water," "Healing River." One of my songs from the late 1980s, "As We Remember," asks God to "show us your mercy, harsh and lovely as the sea."

All of that was fresh in my mind as I was hearing the readings Sunday, though I was admittedly distracted by a respiratory ailment I was fighting. In the first reading from Exodus, it is a lack of water that frustrates and panics the wandering Jews during their desert sojourn after the Exodus. Moses, also frustrated with them and understandably sympathetic a little irritated with the freedom they had received being so full of deprivation and scarcity, appeals to God for some help. The "something out of nothing" God, the God whose name turns out to mean something like, "none of your business", gives them a flowing stream of water out of rock. Health and safety (i.e., salvation) in the real world, just in the nick of time.

Flowing water is the subject of the gospel as well, although perhaps this water, quenching the thirst of the two involved in a cross-cultural courtship at a well already famous for its matchmaking, is more important for its meta meaning than its chemical nature or nutritional value. Here, water that quenches inner thirst is copious and flows from the heart of God; the sere and desiccated human desire to know and be known, to be released from all kinds of prejudicial judgment, is slaked from an ocean of living water that promises no thirst ever again. It is such a torrent of life that, in the case of this story at least, it is able to drown the enmity of rival cultures, that of Jew and Samaritan, in its sweet flood, and bring them together in a way never before imagined possible in the experience of the wide-open reign of God that was preached from the heart of this itinerant rabbi and his slow-to-learn Jewish disciples. So complete was this transformation that scholar John Dominic Crossan conjectures that it may even have been a Samaritan convert to Christ who was the author of the fourth gospel.

The key for me is that it is, in this story, not the Samaritan woman whose thirst opens up the conversation, but that of Jesus, the thirsty heart of God made flesh at the well in Samaria. It is God's thirst for us, God's mostly unrequited love for humanity, that opens up the conversation that reconciles the world of the Samaritan woman and her Jewish suitor, and previous rival. God's thirst for a people kept Israel safe through its desert sojourn. And St. Paul, in Romans 5, tells us in plain language what we need to know about that thirsty love: that it precedes our own, and makes our love and forgiveness possible.

And hope does not disappoint,
because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts
through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.
For Christ, while we were still helpless,
died at the appointed time for the ungodly.
Indeed, only with difficulty does one die for a just person,
though perhaps for a good person one might even find courage to die.
But God proves his love for us
in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.

It was nothing that we did that merited God's love and forgiveness. Nothing that we did makes it possible for us to believe, have hope, and love. It is "the love of God poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit" that makes that possible.

My "so what?" Well, it's something to imagine that the risen Christ, the one who awaits humanity at the well, who awaits me with all my needs and thirsts and prejudices and rivalries, is the very one who summoned "something out of nothing." The one who looks at me across the empty bucket, me, who get a lot of what I feel about myself from what others feel, who sometimes feel only as alive and worth knowing as other people see me, that one knows everything I've ever done and loves me, likes me, anyway. What's more important, Christ feels that way about everyone at the same time. I'm not in rivalry with anyone for God's affection, nor is there any rivalry in God for mine. Love is patient.

What does it mean for us to be loved with the regard of one who is "something out of nothing," who does not know either death nor scarcity, but is the source of abundance and possibility, whose love precedes any desire or asking for it? Well, for one thing, it means that those who preach scarcity and need and division are not preaching the same God. It means that they are failing to understand the simple truth that the only way to have enough is to make enough available to everyone. It means that those who cling and pander to prejudice and fear against others who are in need and asking for assistance are not in touch with any actual Christian idea about who God is, what God wants, and what Christ came for. To me, it means that fear is useless and vain, and the best way to get whatever we need to assuage our thirst is to give a drink of water to that nagging voice that is asking us for a drink, no matter what language the words are being spoken in, or what side of our border the words are coming from. It may be the voice of the perceived rival, maybe even enemy, that will awaken in me my own thirst, and giving water to the thirsty other will finally make me alive with an unquenchable life.

“If you knew the gift of God and who is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,' you would have asked him 
and he would have given you living water.”

This seems about as relevant to my life as anything in tomorrow's newspaper. Is the Lord in our midst, or not? It seems so. It just might be that God's voice sounds like that of someone we suspect is out to get us, wants our job or our best stuff, and is asking for something they really need. And the only way to get to God is to risk whatever bucket it might be we're grasping, risk alienation from our in-group, risk our identity as us-and-not-them, and give them what they're asking for. The conversation that starts when we're both sipping from the bucket we were hiding might turn us from burned-out phonies clutching the pursestrings of our ennui into surprise witnesses to something new happening: the appearance of "Something-out-of-nothing" right here among us, like a brook bubbling out of a rock.

Second Thoughts: Transfigured by prayer—C2L

St. Anne was privileged to have Bishop Joseph Tyson of the diocese of Yakima, Washington, present with us for the Second Sunday of Lent. Our parish's Lenten almsgiving targets a specific charity each year. We've recently partnered with a parish in the Congo, for instance, or with Nuestros Piqueños Hermanos, an organization that builds community-schools for orphans around the western hemisphere. This year, after a visit with Fr. Jack Wall to Yakima, our pastor chose the Catholic Extension Society as our communal almsgiving focus. Yakima is one of ninety-four dioceses in 37 states that benefits from CES.

Bishop Tyson preached at three of our five masses, so I was able to assimilate his message better than usual, even after having a particularly late dinner with him on Saturday evening and getting up to provide music for mass at the (literally) ungodly hour of 7:15 a.m. (God: "Enough with the racket. We're trying to sleep up here.") It was the way he articulated one aspect of the particularly Lucan transfiguration story that caught my ear and helped me to connect it with other ruminations through the week, particularly James Alison's about prayer, which was the focus of our Thursday evening gathering to hear and discuss Jesus the Forgiving Victim: Listening for the Unheard Voice. Bishop Tyson reminded us that Luke's account was the only one in which Jesus goes to the mountain to pray.

Jesus took Peter, John, and James
and went up the mountain to pray.
While he was praying his face changed in appearance
and his clothing became dazzling white. (Lk. 9: 28b-29)

While "coming down from the mountaintop" has become almost synonymous with "getting back to work" after an elating time of respite, the bishop reminded us that Luke 9 begins with Jesus turning from his Galilean ministry and "resolutely setting his face toward Jerusalem," the verse that originally inspired my song, "Jerusalem, My Destiny."

If you read my "Second Thoughts" piece for Ash Wednesday (The Pantry), you remember that Alison was teaching that "going to your inner room" was a process of disconnecting from the "social other," the voices of family, friends, political parties, nations, advertisers, and the whole matrix of reality that shapes our identity from the outside to create us for its own good. Prayer, he says, is a kind of detox from all those voices that want to keep us from being what we really might be, that is, part of God's recreated world, part of God's project of universal reconciliation and unity, in which we reject every attempt to define ourselves over against the weak or create scapegoats for our problems. In that "inner room," the larder or pantry Jesus refers to in Mt. 6, we disconnect from those voices and allow God to speak through our own inner longings, as St. Paul puts it in Romans, the Spirit prays for us. Alison, in fact, uses the example of the desert sojourn of Jesus as a specific example of this kind of "detox." The risk Jesus runs by his use of his marvelous gifts and transparently attractive persona is that he will come to want what the crowd wants for him. He will come to be run by their desire, rather than the desire of the One who calls him "my beloved son, my chosen servant." The story of Jesus's encounter with Satan in the wilderness is exactly about this kind of inner struggle for the self-identity of the Messiah.

My thoughts, then, this Sunday went to how prayer enables transfiguration. If we imagine that, in prayer, by finally disconnecting all those other influences (over time, of course) that want to run our lives and keep us bound into the competitive, ever-escalating rivalry of human desire, we are actually able to be "possessed" by Another who is deathless, beyond all rivalry, who only wants what is the very best for us, who loves us in our arrogant, sloppy, disaster-prone humanity, and who, right in the face of our hoarding and insurance-buying desperation against imagined scarcity, declares (Alison again, invoking Genesis) "Something wonderful out of nothing! Something wonderful out of nothing!", what might become of our visage, our age, our place in time, even our geography? If we were to encounter and be possessed in prayer by the Holy One, might transfiguration not only be possible, but inevitable?

And more important, don't we already know this? Aren't our lives full of encounters with people whom we call "holy," who radiate an inner light, and whose presence evokes memories of heroes and prophets from other times and places? The last two novels I've read, which can in no way be thought of as "Christian" or even specifically religious, contain just such characters both monks, one in The Glass Bead Game, by Hesse, and the other in the more recent Ishiguro effort, The Buried Giant. I met a man like this on an airplane flight two years ago, and was so moved by the experience that I wept in the airport after he left, or, really, disappeared. I wrote about it in "God's 'Mystic' Assignment" here. We instinctively know when a person's true self is shaped not by the adulation or scorn of the crowd, but by the loving desire of the Holy One that always creates in its own image, creating desire for the good of the other in each one who opens self to that possibility.

Until Jesus, God had approached us obliquely, as the author of Hebrews put it at the beginning of that letter:

In times past, God spoke in partial and various ways to our ancestors through the prophets;
in these last days, he spoke to us through a son, whom he made heir of all things and through whom he created the universe, who is the refulgence of his glory,
the very imprint of his being,
and who sustains all things by his mighty word...

For us who believe that the very human Jesus was somehow, mystically, the incarnation of this loving God, it is not hard to imagine that such a breakthrough in prayer, at this critical juncture of his life, after the baptism by John, after the voice from the clouds, after wonders of healing and exorcism, after fasting, after a turn toward Jerusalem and the opposition he fully expected to face from powers fully invested in another god named Tiberius and in the mechanism of temple sacrifice and accommodation to Rome, that such a breakthrough in prayer might cause a physical change, light, and the conjuring of ancient memories and cosmic allies. But even for Jesus, whatever happened on Mount Tabor, the experience was, however intense, momentary and relegated to the continuum of his days. The journey to Jerusalem continued for Jesus. For Peter, James, and John, as well as the other disciples, the journey to Jerusalem was not to be the end but another beginning. The encounter with Jesus, transformed by the prayer-encounter with the Holy One, while a future-shaping event that reordered their lives, did not cure them of doubt, nor did it give them clarity about the nature of this leader or the direction in which he was leading. They still saw him as Satan had desired, a charismatic wonderworker who might lead an overthrow of oppressive outsiders and clean up oppressive Jewish insiders. Like us, they too were plugged into the desire of the crowds, of their own families and their history. They too, though breaking bread with Jesus and sleeping around the same fire, needed to "detox" in the pantry, needed their own prayer and time away, in order for the Holy One to break through when they would, finally, open the door to a new story about themselves.

The same for the boy Saul, at the feet of the rabbi Gamaliel, burning with zeal for a shadow of the God he did not yet fully encountered. Paul, that missionary Jew who opened up the scriptural covenant of God's love to all nations along with the Jews, was ultimately able to write about faithfulness to another empire, about being a colony in Caesar's world of God's empire, awaiting change to its true self:

But our citizenship is in heaven,
and from it we also await a savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.
He will change our lowly body
to conform with his glorified body
by the power that enables him also
to bring all things into subjection to himself.

Those were my "second thoughts" on the transfiguration this Second Sunday of Lent. Encounter with a bishop can do that to you, especially one who does Sunday mass on Wednesday in the migrant camps with the obreros and their families, filling them with God's word, and being a sign of God's love through tacos and rice, and the sweet laughter of children crackling through the air like candy out of a piñata.
________________

I recorded Bishop Tyson's homily, which was very powerful, with his permission. There are two versions. The 9 a.m. version is about three minutes shorter, but the 11 a.m. version is a little more passionate. Both are excellent. Somehow my camera missed the last few seconds of the 11am homily, but you can hear he is winding down, saying some "thank yous" to the parish. Enjoy.

Bishop Joseph Tyson, 9 a.m. homily, 2/21/16 - Second Sunday of Lent
11 a.m. homily, same day.

____________________

You may also find this passage from Jesus the Forgiving Victim helpful in understanding how our general understanding of prayer (i.e., I somehow tell God what I am and what I want) is different from what prayer actually is (i.e., God inviting us into a project bigger than ourselves, that is way better than what we actually think we want.) I will never stop encouraging you to try Alison's wonderful "Introduction to Christianity for Adults."

"I remember standing on a hill overlooking Lake Titicaca and watching the local Yatiris, shamans or priests, plying their wares. You could go to them, and for an appropriate offering, they would then light candles around little portable shrines, burn incense, and say the requisite prayers or incantations, which were in an amazing mixture of Latin, Quechua, Aymara and Spanish. The prayers or incantations were for a fairly repetitive list of things: protection from a neighbour’s evil eye, quick riches, death of a troublesome mother-in-law, to get an unwilling prospective love-match to fall for me, various forms of vengeance. 

The pattern seemed to be simple: God, or the gods, are a sort of celestial Las Vegas slot machine, full of amazing bounty, but inclined to be retentive. So prayer is the art of conjuring this capricious divinity, by exactly the right phrases, repeated exactly the right number of times, into parting with some of its treasure. As if the priest were a particularly expert puller of the slot-machine handle, one who could ensure that three lemons, or five bars, line up and so manipulate the divinity into disgorging its riches.
What this presupposes is a pattern of desire where we are subjects who are in control, and God is an object who must be manipulated: we are back to the blob and arrow picture of desire.  

What Jesus is teaching is exactly the reverse of this. In Jesus’ picture it is God who is the subject, who has a desire, an intention, a longing, and who knows who we are and what is good for us; and we who are capricious and somewhat inert slot machines who are always getting our handles pulled by the wrong players. In this picture it is precisely because our Father knows what we need before we ask him that we must learn to pray: our Father’s only access to us, the only way he can get to our slot-machine handle, is by our asking him into our pattern of desire."