Thinking through thanksgiving for us Samaritans

In getting ready to send out another round of support requests for CropWalk, I'm thinking about Sunday's gospel and what it has to say to us Samaritans. Do you know what I mean? Do you sometimes have the sense that, of all people, it was you who received some blessing of healing, or forgiveness, hope, or restoration? You, the one person that you are certain had no claim on God's kindness, or human kindness for that matter, but it came anyway? And here you are, healthy, or happy, or with a full belly, and with so much suffering around you.

Healing of the Ten Lepers, by Jesus Mafa, Cameroon
(Vanderbilt Divinity library, Art in the Christian Tradition)

That's what it's like for me. And the gospel today sort of brought that home to me. Do I think that the other nine weren't happy and grateful that they were cured of their disease? Of course not! They did what they were told, and went to show themselves to be clean to the authorities. But the gospel says that the Samaritan leper, the one who caught Jesus's attention a second time, walked back to him to give thanks. It took another journey, maybe a risky one, if he was breaking Jesus's command to go to the priests, but it was a journey of his heart's certainty. This Samaritan had probably known some pain, insult, and bad treatment in his days. He knew a blessing when he got one, and its source was home now, and real life. 

Gratitude for blessing translated into action. That's why I walk in the Crop Hunger Walk, and that's why I'm not ashamed to ask for your help and support. Real people, just as worthy as we are, are still hungry in this country and in every nation on earth. We can do something about it. This is one small way. It's a way of turning gratitude into grace. Will you join me?

Click here to donate to 2019 Crop Hunger Walk in Barrington.

No ordinary player - Paul Simon turns 72

Maybe Paul Simon has Impostor's Syndrome, too. In the song "Outrageous" on his 2006 CD Surprise, he asks:

Who's gonna love ya when your looks are gone?
God will,
Like he waters the flowers on your windowsill.
Take me.
I'm an ordinary player in the key of C.
And my will was broken by my pride and my vanity.


Maybe he's being dissembling or ironic, I guess, but the music doesn't sound ironic. Not that there's not plenty of irony and smiles in Surprise, which is full of provocative lyrics that refuse to be considered metaphysical. Simon is reflective, but he seems to be reflective only on his experience of life-as-it-is, and not on any religious or simplistic nostalgia. He seems to really mean here that grace, whatever that means, surprised him in spite of his perceived shortcomings, and at this point in his life he finds himself to be what he is. It's pretty remarkable, I think.  In his songwriting he's always been serious about his experience, in a sense, sometimes wistfully, regretfully, sometimes with his tongue in his cheek, sometimes with a force that only the economy of a poet and art of a songwriter can achieve.

Surprise seems related to me to his previous collection, You're the One, which I thought was under-appreciated. "Old" and "Outrageous" are cut from the same cloth, or as Simon might ask, "why deny the obvious child?" Hardly any other songwriter can mix emotions with such tenderness and humor as Simon, a quality that comes through in "Darling Lorraine" from the earlier CD, as well as in songs like "How Can You Live in the Northeast" and "Father and Daughter."

Who but Paul Simon (and maybe Joni Mitchell) would be able to write and sing a couplet like this one?

A teardrop consists of electrolytes and salt.
The chemistry of crying is not concerned with blame or fault.


But the Surprise is full of moments like that which stop me in my tracks and leave me shaking my head with admiration. And the songs have plenty of mystical, spiritual moments that are more honest than most religious songs you'll hear on Christian radio or in the church:

All about hard times, the thing is, what are you gonna do?
Well, you cry and try to muscle through.
Try to rearrange your stuff,
But when the wounds are deep enough
And it's all that we can bear,
We wrap ourselves in prayer.


Lest we think that he's too religious, there's the amazing lyric of "I Don't Believe," which contains some lines like this:

Acts of kindness, like breadcrumbs in a fairy tale forest,
Lead us past dangers as light melts the darkness.
But I don't believe, and I'm not consoled.
I lean closer to the fire, but I'm cold....


All these lyrics are copyright © 2006 by Paul Simon

I was going to write a lot more about all that Simon's music has meant to me over the years, but it's Sunday and I have other work to do. But like Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, he's a songwriter with whom I've literally grown up. I remember playing "The Sound of Silence" and "Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme" in high school, and every couple of years it was some new song or songs that became part of the repertoire. No one else that I know of has that humorous irony in his lyrics. Joni and Zimm are surely as reflective and poetic, but Simon's gift is the half-smile he wears as he dances with the ordinary, the sense that "sometimes even music is no substitute for tears," and the hope that underlies his vision of humanity, hope that he mines from his experience of the goodness of ordinary people and what he perceives to be a mostly benevolent universe.

For today, consider auditioning Surprise. If nothing else, it's truth in packaging.

Thoughts about lyrics - 2

Stock photo. No, I'm not the kid on the right.

Yesterday, I started to tell you that there are always things one regrets as one evaluates one’s own music and time goes by. I confessed in my piece on “Triaging All That New Music” that if the lyrics of the piece I’m auditioning from a publisher (assuming that it’s an original text here) don’t do something new with old ideas, or have some fresh insight, if they don’t avoid clichéd rhymes and over-earnest churchspeak, I throw them into the garbage without even listening to the music. I also confess that I feel like I might be one of the only people in the universe who cares about the lyrics of a song—most people don’t really mind anything as long as the music is somehow moving to them. But I find that that is a kind of seduction, and that it can become anything from an open door to heterodoxy to idolatry. It’s for this very reason that some theologians, including St. Augustine, who loved music, mistrusted music in the liturgy. Augustine feared people’s love was misdirected by the beauty of the art away from the love of Christ in God and toward love of the “earthly” music itself. Some Christian traditions even today, though none with any great following, forbid the playing of musical instruments in worship for exactly this reason.

Since I work in a parish and am kind of busy on weekends, I don’t get to hear what other parishes are doing so much. The place where I bump up against this the most is at national Catholic conferences for this or that, mostly within the religious education area, and we’re singing at events together. Now, I understand that there is and should be a lot more leeway at religious education events in the kind of music that can be sung than there is at liturgy. Sometimes the line does get blurred at these things, and God knows with so many different people involved, in really catholic situations, different cultures, language groups, even national churches involved, that there are a lot of demands on the preparers for a wide variety of music. I get this. But don’t the lyrics of the songs actually have to say something in a coherent way? Sometimes I almost literally choke on the words I’m being asked to sing, occasionally because I just don’t believe them, but more often because they’re so poorly constructed.

At this point, I’m going to further admit that as I’ve been thinking this over, I understand in some nascent way that the kind of grammar and syntax I learned might be a kind of cultural imperialism, that is, from within my white middle-class educational and economic background I’m judging as somehow inferior other cultures and backgrounds. That might be true. I suppose that even to judge someone else’s music who is a white middle-class person may be somewhat elitist, I don’t know. But I do feel that some kind of discernment, since we share this faith together, is required. We can’t be asked to sing in ways we don’t believe in. And right now there is a really good chance that, with at least two-thirds of the music published for the American church, no serious theological or linguistic editing is done on any music submitted for publication. There is a sense in which, if the tune is nice and the voice leading works and it sounds good on a recording, the song will be unleashed on the public.

I hesitate further to say much about this, because I know almost all of the people writing church music today, and I know that they don’t make a lot of money from what they do, and that they are people of good will and strong faith. I’m sure that it’s possible that God can bring good out of liturgical “Sugar, Sugar” or “Two Less Lonely People in the World.” (OK, this latter song might have meant that they are now indeed “less lonely” than they were before they met, but that is damning with faint praise. It probably meant “two fewer lonely people,” which is a nice idea, but doesn’t sing as well.) I don’t think the kingdom is going to be blocked by a few mixed metaphors or dangling modifiers or bad rhymes. The empire of God, if it can’t be stopped by the empires of earth, probably can’t even be stopped by sung theologies that perpetuate theocratic wishful thinking about power and glory as signs of God’s presence, rather than kenosis and service. But they can’t be helping much, either.

Here are some examples, from each of the three major publishers. I’m not going to identify titles or composers; I wish there were a way to further shield the authors, as I’m not trying to embarrass anyone personally, just make a point that I’ve already admitted to regarding my own work. Just take these at face value, and don’t go looking for anyone to blame, OK? In a way, it’s all of us, always looking for what’s new and groovy, and bringing consumer mentality into worship music.

“Stand in the light of love shining in our hearts

And illuminates our lives.”


This one doesn’t go by in a hurry, it’s in a refrain, and it’s repeated over and over. If the light is shining in our hearts, how can we stand in it? But more importantly, what is the subject of “illuminates”? If the word were “illuminating,” which could have been done in a simple editorial gesture, adding another subdivision in the rhythm, I probably wouldn’t be having a cow.

Forty days to wander

Forty days to die to self

Forty days to grow stronger

as faith breaks open the gates of hell

the jubilee is over,

but grace is far from gone

in the hearts of the faithful,

broken on the wheels of love.


Color me flummoxed. “Broken on the wheels of love”? Like a catherine wheel, as in torture, Mel Gibson movie stuff? The jubilee is over? Jesus Christ is our jubilee. I never got the message he was “over.” I’m not sure about faith breaking open the gates of hell, either; are we going in, or out? I know how I feel when I read these lyrics. There’s more:

‘Cause in the desert of temptation

lies the storm of true conversion...
where springs of living water bind and break you.


Once again, I confess I don’t get it. This must be a generation Y experience, unavailable to us old fogies. Living water “binds and breaks” you? How does living water do that? Is it good or bad?

You probably know I’m not a big fan of obscurantism. I don’t think that complexity or opaqueness is necessarily either a good symbol or pathway to mystery. If it were, we could all just pray in Aramaic or Kiswahili or Latin, and thus be confident we were in contact with the divine. I’ve even wondered whether my own occasional forays into more complex referents and allusions weren’t too much for liturgy, as in “As We Remember.”

Show us your mercy, show us your mercy,

Your mercy, harsh and lovely as the sea.

Windfall of waybread, scattered on sand,

Lavished by love we cannot understand.


T.S. Eliot and John Donne wrote great metaphysical and even theological poetry (and Herbert, and Hopkins.) That doesn’t mean they would make good liturgical song lyrics. I remember when a good friend of mine, someone whom I respect as a colleague and musician, once asked me, years after I had written this song and when it was fairly popular in Phoenix (though it was being used as a fraction rite, and irritating the previous bishop) what “windfall of waybread” meant. I thought he was kidding, because to me it was obvious. But it’s not obvious, obviously, or this thoughtful and active Christian wouldn’t have asked the question. Sometimes we plant the seeds of our own “truth” too deeply, I guess. The “harsh and lovely” mercy was lost on people, too, who, I guess, had not read or were not familiar with the writings of Dorothy Day, who wrote that “love in reality is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams,” or something to that effect. I think I wrote about that before, and remember she was quoting Dostoevsky, from The Brothers Karamazov.

Evermore I’ll sing your praise

Evermore through endless days

God of all seasons, right and reason,

Lord of love and endless grace.


OK, no one ever needs to rhyme “praise” and “days” again, unless you have something new to say, and the redundancy of “evermore” and “through endless days” is barely excusable, except as liturgical hyperbole. The third line of the strophe is a cheap rhyme, one can barely eke a bit of sense out of it. It’s churchspeak that adds nothing to our appreciation for or love of God, and sets us back a bit because of its tautology and jargon. Also in the “God beyond all meaning” department:

Far beyond all dreaming, far beyond the place of despair,

Far beyond believing you will find God’s love if you dare.
Far beyond riches that fade, far beyond this very day.


“Beyond believing,” eh? What does that mean? This sounds like textbook gnosis. It’s precisely in believing, this very day, that one can find God, which is the meaning of the core proclamation of Jesus: Turn away from sin, believe in the gospel. The empire of God is here now.”

OK, I got it off my chest. We’re all a little afraid that the bishops are going to come down with some narrowly defined codex of music we can use at mass, and honestly, if that happens, it’s partly because of unchallenged omnipresence of texts like the above, and not because of the smarmy comments of the hyper orthodox about the theology in songs like “Gather Us In” and “Sing a New Church.” I don’t even think we ought to start talking about theology until we get the grammar, syntax, and meaning cleared up. 

Gandalf famously says of the palantir something to the effect that "he who breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom." Separating a liturgical song into its component parts (lyrics and music) might be doing exactly that, but even more so, taking it out of its essential context, that is, liturgical prayer, may be even less wise. If glossolalia itself is essentially meaningless praise that arises from the experience of worship, who am I to talk about meaning in someone else's words? Ultimately, meaning is made not inside the liturgy but after it and before it, in life on the streets, in the home, at the market. Still, I think something like this more critical thinking needs to be done, ending with the confident prayer, "and may God have mercy on my soul."

The above are examples from all three major RC publishers. The analysis, such as it is, is only my opinion, and not the gospel at all. I’m not trying to diss anybody. We just need to take it a little more slowly, and put some discerning and firm editorial eyes between the creativity of artists and the prayer of the faithful. The former may indeed be inspired, but not every spirit is the Holy Spirit, and even the Holy One’s inspiration is not always inspiration for the church’s public worship. I mean, really, do you want to sing Mt. 1:1-17? Come on, everyone, you know the words! "Judas begat Phares and Zara of Thamar, O yeah! and Phares begat Esrom; and Esrom begat Aram, praise those crazy days!"

"As We Remember" - download on iTunes

Thoughts about lyrics—1

I was remembering a wide-ranging conversation from a few years ago with a colleague from another diocese who asked me what song I used for the foot-washing on Holy Thursday. I replied that it was one he probably would not know, a song called “Faithful Family” that was originally recorded on the album Do Not Fear to Hope in 1985, and anthologized on Change Our Hearts in the early 1990s. “Faithful Family” is based on the Latin hymn Ubi Caritas in the verses, with a refrain that echoes the end of Ephesians 4 and the beginning of Ephesians 5:

Be like our God, who chose to live and learn our ways,

And die in deep, unbounded love.

Forgive each other tenderly,

The faithful family of our God.


I did not “stump the band” with this song at all; this fellow is a great supporter of my music and was very familiar with the song, in fact, he had a question to pose about the lyric that I was glad to hear someone articulate. The reason I was glad is that I had had second thoughts about the phrase for years, and wondered if anyone else had thought about it, or more likely, even noticed. The phrase happens at the end of the first verse, where I use the phrase “island ways” to describe individualistic living, an allusion to John Donne’s famous Meditation XVII. It is there that Donne, reflecting on the tolling of funeral bells in the distance, reflects on the mortality of people but their intimate connection to one another in life:

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.” 

At the time, I was learning much about the ministry of reconciliation from James Lopresti, S.J., in workshops we were doing called Remembering Church, attempting to recover aspects of the Order of Penitents to revitalize the Rite of Penance and form new bonds between penitents and the community of the Eucharist. Merton’s surprise urban experience of human solidarity in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, the ur-text of Matthew 25 (“whatever you do for one of these least ones, you do for me”) and this text of Donne’s were really working on me at the time, and found their way into a number of songs I was writing, I think best-integrated in “One Is (the Body)” from Vision.

The text in “Faithful Family” is this:

Wherever there is charity, 

Selfless, giving care,

Surely our God is there.

There love of Christ has gathered us

To one from island ways.

Let us sing for joy all our days.


My friend was asking me something that bothered me about my own text probably as soon as I wrote it down. I wanted so much to use the word “island” because to me it conjured the mystical Donne’s negation of the human condition as so, well, insular. But the use of the phrase “island ways” might be understood as a criticism, say, of the ways of the Hawaiian Islands, or the British ones, for that matter. I can see how this would create a cognitive dissonance that might jar a singer out from the very kind of unitive thinking the song is trying to foster. It is, probably, a mistake in writing. My friend was kind enough not to put it that way, but the fact that he brought it up was enough to make me think it would be worth revisiting if I thought anyone were paying attention to it.

This made me reflect on other texts that I’ve had second thoughts about over the years. Virtually every one, at one time or another, I’ve wished I could edit again, or had taken more time with. You always see the flaws better from a distance, and I’m not even someone who rushes from the paper to the recording studio or publisher, either. I use pretty much everything I write for months, sometimes years, in worship and workshop until I think I have it right, but even that doesn’t mean that, as I change and see things differently, or experience language differently, I wouldn’t do it better. One example I’ve used before is the use of “imperative” language, or putting the song in the second person imperative, creating mild commands rather than invitations in the language of prayer. Looking, for instance, at the titles of the songs in my second album, beginning with the title song itself, we would find the following:

• Do Not Fear to Hope

• Save the People

• Come to Us

• Cry for Justice

• Seek After Peace


Add to this the refrain of “Faithful Family,” which begins, “Be like our God...” and you see that there was a good deal of enthusiasm here for the gospel, but maybe a little bit of a power issue? At least, a power issue about God! I didn’t even notice that in 1985 when I was writing the songs. Not all the texts were mine, I guess, and they were influenced by  the language of scripture, but one should never confuse one’s interpretation of Scripture with the urgency of the gospel message itself. Now, it’s very clear to me that imperative language should be used carefully and occasionally, well-surrounded by the language of invitation and welcome. More importantly, second-person imperatives distance the singer from the message - “Do this,” we are singing to one another, with no apparent accountability to the text ourselves. I’ve begun to feel more nuance is required. I prefer indicatives and subjunctives, though I am not at all averse to using imperative language in address to God, who seems perfectly capable of taking it with a chuckle .

In general, I have to say that it is alarming how little attention is paid to the lyrics of songs we sing at mass, and that in fact is the subject of this blog entry, if I ever get around to it! I think I’ll continue the thought tomorrow. What I really want to say about this is much bigger than about my own music and lyrics. No one really wants to talk about it, we don’t want to hurt each others feelings. And that's for the best, really, because people who are writing songs write them out of a sense of faith and urgency. My ability to absorb their musical message is mediated by my own experience. The very least I can do is try to be tolerant and articulate some principles, rather than fire indiscriminate critical salvos in every direction. Still, some lyrics harmonize with the gospel, some are dissonant; some stumble on more obvious stones, like grammar and rhetoric. Sometimes we say too much in our songs; more often we don't say enough. 

I've said too much today already. We all have work to do. Tomorrow's another day.

Download "Faithful Family"

Harvesting gratitude

Patty, Mike, Kristen and Craig lead the way.

I am to Bono what Peter Griffin (in Family Guy) is to George Clooney: a fat, suburban caricature.
However, like him, I’m a musician, and I’m not above begging a little.

There is more information available now than any of us wants to hear about hunger. The Hunger Facts page at the Bread for the World website repeats the litany that we have all heard a thousand times, that hunger is an epidemic, and that we have the ability, here and now, without any divine intervention, to feed the world, but we are choosing not to do it. Instead, for instance, we’re making a commodity out of corn, patenting seeds, and paying farmers not to grow it. The same reference states that “The United Nations Development Program estimates that the basic health and nutrition needs of the world's poorest people could be met for an additional $13 billion a year. Animal lovers in the United States and Europe spend more than that on pet food each year.” I don’t have a pet, but I’ll bet there’s something else I’m buying that could help the hungry, so I’m part of the problem, too. Ice cream. I spend almost a billion dollars in my lifetime on ice cream, and another $500M on chocolate syrup. As you know, I'm a church musician, so that is a good chunk —nearly half — of my salary.

Anyway, every year the Church World Service sponsors the  Crop Hunger Walk, a community 5-10K walk in towns and cities all over the country to raise awareness and money to fight hunger. For the last several years, I’ve tried to do my part along with my village and parish, and we raise money with Church World Service by walking for the hunger. So if you would like to do something to help with this grassroots effort to end hunger, go to my donation page at the Barrington CropWalk website, and make a little pledge. Or a big one. Then help keep the fire burning by advocating for justice with your congressional representatives to make the eradication of hunger a legislative priority.

I once heard Jack Jezreel tell a story about the difference between charity and justice that stuck with me for nearly twenty years, maybe it will illumine things for you, too. He said that there was once a man who had a farm by a river. Working on his land one day, he began to notice bodies floating down the river near his land. Charity, Jezreel said, was retrieving and burying the bodies. Justice is going up the river to find out what was killing the people. 

Everything we do helps to save the world and give people a chance at life they might not otherwise have. We can give something out of our own bounty or sustenance, and then work to change the structures that keep people hungry. The price of doing nothing is just too high, don’t you think?

Make a donation, please. Click here. 

The fleshpots of empire

Scary Jesus: Christ Pantocrator at the Basilica in DC

You don’t see mainstream spiritual writers following the via negativa much, the possibility that most of our thoughts about God are wrong, and that coming at it from another direction, or starting again from the beginning, might be more revelatory. It seems to me that we’re much too dogmatic in what we say that we think we know about God, and try to reconcile in God all kinds of opposites: power and meekness, judgment and mercy, anger and love, forgiveness and the demand for redemption. It’s not that I have a problem with dichotomies and dialectics. It’s that they make me wonder whether we made a mistake farther back in our calculations, like we’re doing this big crossword or sudoku and more and more answers aren’t making sense, and it’s because we put a wrong word or number in a few rounds ago.

I got the title of this entry thinking about the saying from the book of Exodus (16:3)

The Israelites said to them, "Would that we had died at the LORD'S hand in the land of Egypt, as we sat by our fleshpots and ate our fill of bread! But you had to lead us into this desert to make the whole community die of famine!"


And I was thinking about Jesus’s preaching of the empire of God, and how it was offered as a specific alternative to the empire of Caesar Augustus and his line, and to the oppressive collaboration experienced by the people of Israel by the chief priests and scribes colluding with Herod. The pax romana, after all, was only good if you were romana, and the rest of the world experienced it as iron-fisted oppression at the point of the sword. The very fact that Jesus called the realm or dominion of God by a word that put it in competition with another regnum or imperium is important, I think, and also the fact that while he does this, he does not refer to God as emperor, but as “Abba.” This seems significant to me, because it describes some of the attributes of God’s empire that put it in opposition to the empire of Caesar.

And yet, ultimately, I think language failed Jesus, because we hear “empire” or “kingdom” and we think of emperors and kings as we know them. We, and the disciples who came before us, starting with the twelve and seventy-two and continuing through history, imagine that God’s empire is meant to give us power, meant to give us some kind of victory over our enemies, whoever they may be. Victorious emperors must be what God is like! Power to do anything in any way, the ability to vanquish the foe with greater force, to rout out evil and destroy its memory from the earth: this is where our thinking generally goes when we imagine God and God’s empire. For a persecuted Christianity for the first two centuries of the church’s existence, the powerlessness of being hunted, betrayed, and fed to wild animals in the Circus must have been a horrible experience, and one can imagine that their eschatological longing for the return of the Lord would have included some butt-kicking of the people who had harassed and killed them for so long. But in the face of all that, the gospel kept calling the church to peace and surrender: love your enemies, do good to those who hate you. Blessed are they who suffer persecution for the sake of righteousness. And there was the example of the master, killed as a seditionist on the cross, and silent before the judgment of Caesar’s minions in Judea.

But we are so enamored of power! Here we have a God whose image in Christ is of the eternal Logos taking flesh and becoming one of us, pouring himself out completely in love. As a human being, the Master becomes a servant. He turns the tables on our mores, castes, and legalisms, our games of oneupsmanship, cult, and in-groups. He gives us, in himself, a path for a people’s journey to a different way of living from the grasping, hoarding, violent ways of the empire of Caesar, and we desert him while Caesar hangs him on the gallows. And even when he is vindicated by God in the resurrection, we prefer Caesar. It’s only a couple of centuries before the transformation is complete, and the persecuted church becomes the ruling class, the emperor becomes a Christian, and different kinds of pogroms and new castes and cults and grasping arise. We were offered the promised land of the empire of God, and we settled, and continue to settle to one extent or another, for the fleshpots of Egypt, of Caesar’s empire. And because the term “kingdom” works so well, we kept it, and because “heaven” sounds far away we substituted it for the empire of God, moving safely out of this world into the next, so that we can keep this one as a place of commerce and accumulation for the elite, and for the rest, God and religion are...opium?


For all its blustery promises, power doesn’t work out. It always is exercised against someone else. It’s not an equitable way of operating, not in the sense of imperial power. The “power of God,” or power in the empire of God, must mean something different from the power that an emperor would use. There’s something in our faith that God is somehow “trinity,” that power is shared, that power is self-gift, that power is other-directedness, that is at the heart of power in empire of God. But still, like the Hebrews wandering in the Sinai desert, we long for the fleshpots of empire. Jesus offers us the freedom that comes from being like God, and walking in love, and we want to go back to where we were comfortable slaves, subjects to other powers, and exercising petty force over one another. 

But built into the preaching of Jesus are the parables, which subvert our imagining of an earthly empire, and make us think new thoughts about what God’s empire is like. And we have the words of the gospel, the actions of the Lord, and the writings of the apostles which also ameliorate the damage of words like “Lord,” “King,” and “empire” or “reign.”

One of my favorites, having read Crossan and Scott, for example, on this subject, is the parable of the leaven. 

"The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed with three measures of wheat flour until the whole batch was leavened." (Mt. 13:33)


While some commentators are quick to point out that this parable is about the church (if Jesus spoke this parable, the church didn’t exist yet!), if we examine the details we find that it’s something else entirely. First, the “kingdom of heaven,” or in Crossan’s and Scott’s more striking translation, the “empire of God,” is not the church. Not even the Church thinks that. Second, it’s like yeast kneaded into flour. We need to remember that the “kosher” bread of the time, the pure bread that was used for ritual, was unleavened. Leaven or yeast was considered a corrupting agent. So this parable might be about the ability of something small to change something big, but it doesn’t seem to be the church, or the religious establishment. Third, it’s a woman that is doing the kneading, in other words, in cultural context, corruption piled upon corruption. But this is what the empire of God is like - the overturning of what is clean and good from everything that is expected. 

The parables themselves are leaven - they will help to corrupt the large measures of scriptural and theological flour we have gathered to bake our liturgical bread. They will, eventually, help us to re-imagine Jesus as the herald of the empire of God, a legitimate alternative to the temptations to power and greed that are the hallmarks of political and economic empires to which we generally pay our taxes. We just have to keep listening with fresh ears - as Jesus said, “Whoever has the ears to hear, let them listen.” We hear the term “kingdom of heaven” and we hear “a far away place in the sky where there’s a God who is like a king,” but what if, when Jesus said it, he meant, “there’s an alternative to the kingdom of Caesar, and it’s right up the road, and it’s a place where your enemy might be your savior, where things aren’t the way you’ve been told they are about God, and people of all kinds can sit at the same table and live in peace.” If we could find a way, by the way we live, to make that place clear, to make that empire shine, then maybe others would have the courage to leave the fleshpots of empire, and start the journey to a new land of milk and honey.

No more than our duty (C27O)

When you have done all you have been commanded, say,
'We are unprofitable servants;
we have done what we were obliged to do.'

There you have it. In a gospel chock full of uncompromising, disturbing, world-reversing statements and indictments of church life, it's one of the most chilling of all. Right up there, for me, with "Don't the pagans do as much?"

There is a theory in biblical interpretation when evaluating the historicity of a story or saying in the gospels that is sometimes referred to as the criterion of embarrassment. What this theory suggests is that the more likely it is that the event reported in scripture would have reflected better on Jesus or the community if it were left out, the more likely it is that it actually happened. The baptism of Jesus by John, for instance, falls into this category, and the slowness of the twelve to understand the messianic mission, especially in Mark. I believe that these sayings, the ones quoted above, fall into that category too, though I don't say that because I've checked with the Jesus Seminar. It's just that they are so difficult to hear, they ring so true to my experience of life with other believers in community, that they must have come from the mouth of Jesus himself. Jesus knew peoples' hearts, and it seems hearts don't change that much in a couple of millennia.

Sunday's gospel starts with Jesus' remarkable statement about faith, which is probably the core of what the liturgy of the word is "about" today. 

"If you have faith the size of a mustard seed,
you would say to this mulberry tree,
'Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you."

The first reading and psalm, and happily the letter to Timothy in the second reading, all orbit around an axis of persevering faith. Habakkuk tells the people that no matter the violence and darkness around, wait for the fulfillment of God's promise, because it will come. Psalm 95 recalls the impossibly thirsty trek of Exodus, again urging the singer to look to today's manifestation of divine presence, and expect deliverance without falling into the trap of grumbling and despair. St. Paul exhorts his young protégé to courageous faith, to claim the gift that is his by the laying on of hands.

When we begin to feel a sense of entitlement, like the rich man, for instance, in last Sunday's gospel, faith becomes irrelevant. Certainty, whether it arises from religious affiliation, wealth or health or good fortune, is the opposite of faith. Certainty begins to fashion a claim on God's goodness, "I have a lot, so God must love me." Or, "I am baptized person, so God must love me." Well, yes. God's love isn't the issue. But the manifestation of God's love isn't the accrual of strength, happiness, or money. It is the impetus toward becoming like God, that is, giving away the self for the safety of others. It is becoming creation and salvation for the other, not for the self. The rich man of last week's gospel can't even see the need of the poor man right at his gate. His entitlement renders him blind. He is not "blessed" in any permanent way. Even in death the rich man continues to ignore Lazarus by speaking to Abraham, telling Abraham to "send Lazarus" to his father's house. His sense of entitlement follows him into the grave.

Maybe that's what Jesus is getting at in the parable about the master and the servants. Do we make God into a servant whose job it is to wait on us, making life for us easier because we think we have God figured out? I absolutely count on God's love and forgiveness, but my faith in them has to take the form of service of other people, and the gospel is a gentle warning to me. when I've done everything that I've been commanded to do by the gospel, loved my enemies, forgiven a kajillion (77) times, sold all that I have and followed Jesus, I've done no more than my duty. 

Entitlement seems to be an act of the mind, drawing from the benevolence of current circumstance the conclusion that one is blessed by God. This inevitably distances me from those whose circumstances are dire, because the tempting conclusion is that they are not blessed and loved by God. Real faith, the lief in "belief", is love, is agape. It is action, a way of living, participation in God's being by doing, saving, creating, empowering, uniting, freeing. 

It is that kind of love that separates real faith from its counterfeits, especially entitlement. And I think it could help keep us from getting too full of ourselves and our parishes and programs. The criterion for judgment is fairly simple: are we doing what we do for ourselves, or for the weak and unprotected? If it's for us, "don't the pagans do as much?" And we have that mulberry tree, and Mark's mountain, by which to measure our real faith. If that damn tree or mountain is still in our way, we are probably praying to the wrong god.