From a Different Angle

Delwin Brown is dean emeritus of Pacific School of Religion and former professor of Christian Theology at Iliff School of Theology. A Methodist layperson and the author of many books and articles, Brown published What Does a Progressive Christian Believe? just last year. In a chapter that deals with evil and suffering that he titles "Sin: Failing and Hiding" Brown summarizes the discussion with these bullet points:

• Modern discussions of sin have not been very useful. Sin-talk has been anti-world, anti-sex, anti-female, anti-pleasure, and opposed to equality and self-affirmation, just to mention a few of its drawbacks.

• In classical Christian theology, sin takes two forms, pride and sensuality. Already our hackles are raised! We are all very supportive of pride, and why should anyone think sensuality is a sin?

• By "pride" the tradition meant excessive self-regard in relation to others, assuming for oneself more than that which one is entitled. ""Sensuality" meant the opposite failure, thinking of oneself less highly than one ought to think.

• Viewed in terms of the two great commandments, sin is loving too much or loving too little any part of the inter-connected web of life, from God to all of those whom God loves and in whom God is incarnate.

• The more insightful Christian traditions ask, "Why is our failure to love as we ought so persistent and pervasive?" The answer it gives has to do with self-deceptions, hiding the truth from ourselves.

• Sin is not simply the failure to love properly. It is that failure, accompanied by the pretense that we have loved as we should. We hide our failure, even from ourselves!

• The doctrine of "original sin" is not a denial of human goodness, and it is not about sex. It is about layers of evil -- racism, sexism, consumerism, egotism, etc. --structured into our existence. We begin our lives in the midst of these.

• Christian tradition "suspects" that we rather happily acquiesce to the evil structures in which we find ourselves. Our failings build into unjust and self-serving structures....and we find them to be quite comfortable!

from Delwin Brown, What Does a Progressive Christian Believe? A Guide for the Searching, the Open, and the Curious (New York: Seabury Books, 2008).

Evil, Suffering, and A Loving God

The theme of our November conversation will be one about these irreconcilable things that people of faith struggle with all the time. For me, there is no one who has addressed the dilemma more clearly (even if he offers absolutely no satisfactory answer) than Frederick Buechner. From his little book Wishful Thinking:

God is all powerful.
God is all good.
Terrible things happen

You can reconcile any two of these propositions with each other, but you can’t reconcile all three. The problem of evil is perhaps the greatest single problem for religious faith.

There are numerous theological and philosophical attempts to solve it, but when it comes down to the reality of evil itself, they are none of them worth very much. When a child is raped and tortured, the parents are not apt to take much comfort from the explanation (better than most) that since God wants us to love him, we must be free to love and thus to rape and murder a child if we take a notion to.

Christian Science solves the problem of evil by saying that it does not exist except as an illusion of mortal mind. Buddhism solves in terms of reincarnation and an inexorable law of cause and effect whereby the raped child is merely reaping the consequences of evil deeds it committed in another life.

Christianity, on the other hand, ultimately offers no theoretical solution at all. It merely points to the cross and says that, practically speaking, there is no evil so dark and so obscene – not even this – but that God can turn it to good.

The Power of Intention

From two popular thinkers/writers...

First. psychologist/spiritual director/NPR-pledge-time-television host Wayne Dyer talks about “the power of intention,” defining intention as something that emanates from God, something that more traditional theology calls “the will of God.”

Second, Peruvian Carlos Castaneda, in the voice of his fictional Yaqui shaman Don Juan, writes:

In the universe there is an immeasurable, indescribable force which the shamans call intent[ion], and absolutely everything that exists in the entire cosmos is attached to inten[ion] by a connecting link.

I wonder if it is safe for us to assume that we are living a life in consonance, in sync, with “intention” when we find ourselves embracing and visualizing creativity and kindness and love and beauty and growth and plenty and openness to newness.

If that’s the case, then “sin” might well be described as being “closed off,” separated, quarantined, and isolated from creativity and kindness and love and beauty and growth and plenty and openness to newness, reminiscent of how Martin Luther described the essence of sin: "das Herz drehte ganz sich innen auf sich” – "the heart all curved in on itself.”.

Rather than looking at faithfulness as following a list of inviolable rules, the suggestion is that a life that follows Jesus not because it has to but because it wants to will be one that turns its attention and its intention, away from itself and toward others. That life will be the life that is most rewarding and most “in rhythm” with the “intention,” or the “will” of God.

It seems to me that so much of the stories of Jesus in the Gospels are all about two affirmations about the “power of intention” that are peculiar to Jesus and his followers. The first is that even though Jesus, and if Jesus, then God, forgives us and loves us, Jesus, and if Jesus, God, has very lofty expectations for those of us who want to follow him. One of those lofty expectations is that we will live not solely or even primarily for our own good, but also and most of all for others. Another is that, even though Jesus, and if Jesus, then God, forgives us and loves us, Jesus, and if Jesus, then God, holds us accountable, and that there are consequences for our behavior.

But maybe not at all like Dante’s Inferno or eternal punishment or anything of the sort, but consequences here and now. The consequences of being “all turned in on ourselves,” and away from “the power of intention,” – our callousness toward the needs of others, our insensitivity to the most vulnerable among us, our automatic embrace of officially sanctioned violence as the best tool for solving disputes among groups of people, tribes, nations, our inability to let go of “the fears that long have bound us,” our continuing insistence that there are different “kinds” of people and some are better and some are worse and some are loved more by God and some are despised – all of that is its own punishment. The bottom line is that when we insist on being “all turned in ourselves” it is impossible for us to approach what God intends for us. Turned inward, toward isolation, our lives are diminished, our relationship with God becomes nostalgic and imaginary and non-existent, and we deny the unity that the power of intention assumes.

God and Dog, by Wendy Francisco

Think Luke 15.

Oh, go ahead, look it up, and read those three parables, especially the last one.

No, no one is saying that God is a dog (go to http://www.godanddog.org/ and look in the left hand frame for the link "The thought behind the God and dog lyrics). It's just another parable. And while it's not likely to be a staple of some divinity school curriculum, I like it any way, particularly the lines:

"They would stay with me all day, I'm the one who walks away.
But both of them just wait for me, And dance at my return with glee."

and

"And in my human frailty, I can't match their love for me."

Agape, Jesus, and Church

It is pretty clear, at least to me. that Jesus never imagines anything that resembles at all what today we call “church.” Except for three quick “bleeps,” Jesus never even says “church,” and when he does, he probably only means something like “your neighbors.” That’s what the Greek word the New Testament uses for “church,” “ecclesia,” means when it shows up in places other than the New Testament, and it shows up in the Gospels only in Matthew when Jesus tells Peter that he’s the “Rock” on which he’ll build his “ecclesia” and when Jesus tells his followers that when there’s a dispute among them to take it to the “ecclesia.”

But Jesus in the Gospels says nothing about church. No institutional guidebook. No “best practices” handbook. Nothing about structure or discipline or clergy or lay or fund-raising or ministry or pastoral care or youth or outreach or denominations. Jesus never files an annual report, officiates at a funeral, performs a wedding, makes a hospital visit, intuitively responds to some unreported need, or brings covered dishes for a potluck. Jesus never envisions a Sunday School, a Woman’s Fellowship, a church bowling league, a church choir, a capital fund drive, or an entire academic discipline called “church architecture.” Jesus never sits on a committee, creates a budget, fills out a pledge card, or leads a stewardship drive.

In the Gospels Jesus tells us nothing at all about “church,” and people struggling to be faithful to what Jesus teaches need to lighten up a little bit about our notions that we are most closely in line with God’s plan for church. The truth is that we people struggling to be faithful to what Jesus teaches have been making this whole church thing up out of whole cloth ever since the first Monday after the first Easter.

Except for one thing. Though Jesus tells us nothing about church, Jesus models a faithful life of agape, a life that always finds itself giving itself away. Jesus invites his disciples and all within earshot and, across the ages, he invites you and me to join him in living this agape life. What Jesus imagines and models is an agape community, gathered not so much to meet its own needs, but to find ever more creative ways to give it self, to give ourselves, away.

And that’s it. That’s all Jesus gives us about church. No rules, guidelines or “if you’re going to be a church, then you’re going to have to do thus and so.” Just the imagination and modeling of an agape life, of a community formed so that it can gratefully give itself away.

Is God Love?

Spoiler alert! The Gospel text for this Sunday is the story of the rich young man who comes to Jesus asking what he needs for eternal life. Before Jesus delivers the punchline that is clearly both truthful and at the same time emotionally devastating to the young man, Mark says this simple, and simply profound, thing about Jesus: "Jesus, looking at him, loved him."

Near the end of his fascinating survey titled The Evolution of God, Robert Wright talks about the nature of this love, and suggests a simple mental exercise when trying to answer the question "Is God Love?

Love, you might say is, is the apotheosis of the moral imagination; it can foster the most intimate identification with the other, the most intense appreciation of the moral worth of the other.

Sometimes love, in the course of leading to this moral truth, fosters more mundane truths. Suppose you are a parent and you (a) watch someone else's toddler misbehave, and then (b) watch your own toddler do the same. Your predicted reactions, respectively, are (a) "what a brat!" and (b) "That's what happens when she skips her nap." Now (b) is often a correct explanation whereas (a) -- the "brat reaction -- isn't even an explanation. So, in this case, love leads toward truth. So too when a parent sees her child show off and concludes that the grandstanding is grounded in insecurity....Love at its best brings a truer apprehension of the other, an empathetic understanding that converges on the moral truth of respect, even reverence, for the other...

Though we can no more conceive of God than we can conceive of an electron, believers can ascribe properties to God, somewhat at physicists ascribe properties to electrons. One of the more plausible such properties is love. And maybe, in this light, the argument for God is strengthened by love's organic association with truth -- by the fact, indeed that at times these two properties almost blend into one. You might say that love and truth are two primary manifestations of divinity in which we can partake, and that by partaking in them we become truer manifestations of the divine.

Then again, you might not say that. The point is that you wouldn't have to be crazy to say it.
(from Robert Wright, The Evolution of God, 2009)

Restoring Relationships Requires Relinquishing Righteous Rigidity

Over and over and over again in the Gospels Jesus hints, cajoles, teases, lectures, and otherwise encourages his followers to grasp one simple, but simply confounding basic premise:

to be able to love we have to have a sense of being forgiven.

In order for me to accept you as you are, I need to realize that God accepts me in my imperfection and brokenness. When we are so rigid about our perceptions of righteousness, no matter how in tune those perceptions may be with our covenantal history as Christians, we are quite unlikely to believe that God is anymore tolerant of us than we are of others. The most common misreading of Jesus has always been a misreading of God’s love as something that is earned by rigidly righteous behavior; the irony is that Jesus spends his entire ministry among us telling us that God’s love is poured out in spite of and because of our propensity for imperfection and brokenness, and not as “compensation” for “correct living.”

To be even more blunt about it, it may just be that those of us who are so rigid about our righteousness are simply deceiving ourselves; psychoanalysts will contend that rigidity comes not from an inability to deal with the “deviant” behavior of others, but from a refusal to recognize that even the most righteous among us harbor thoughts and fantasies that we would never admit to because they are so unrighteous.

The nagging sense of urgency we feel about some things in our lives has been explained, confronted, analyzed, dissected, overhauled, bemoaned, and celebrated, but it has never left us. Even the most arrogant among us are accompanied by a sense of dread that has been called insecurity, or a lack of sense of self-worth, or a fear or death, or the immaturity or fallenness of humanity, and no amount of psychotherapy or Tony Robbins or Dale Carnegie or “correct theology” or libraries full of self-help books seems able to shake it. So we become rigid about our righteousness, effectively denying to ourselves and anybody else that we are, too, are broken and in need of repair. We find all that hard to admit, so we find it difficult to believe that others whose are seem less concerned than we about the correctness of things deserve forgiveness.

We talk about this a lot with one another. Jesus' focus on forgiveness is not primarily about the person being forgiven, but for the one doing the forgiving. About whom do you carry that ancient anger? What ancient hurt do you carry around, do you revisit on at least a daily basis? What great things could you do with all the emotional and spiritual and physical energy you have invested in nurturing those angers and hurts? What if you and I would think of those great things instead of worrying about whether or not we let someone off the hook? Jesus' focus on forgiveness is not primarily about the person being forgiven, but for the one doing the forgiving.

So it kind of follows that when we are so rigid about our righteousness that we cannot be open to the notion that God forgives broken ones, even broken ones like us, we are also unable to share God’s love in any meaningful way. Though we may do all the “righteous things” connected with what loving people “ought” to do, we’ll still be utterly incapable of understanding a love that gives itself away.

And if we don't get our imaginations wrapped around the idea that we are indeed forgiven, and therefore can't get past our own notions of righteous rigidity, we often find ourselves unwilling to forgive, unwilling to be forgiven, wondering how all those others got all the goodies of life, and how we’ve been left standing with nothing more than our uneasy smugness.