Caught Up in Love

THIS MONTH WE HEAR ABOUT God’s alluring wisdom, personified as the ultimate hostess, who invites us to a banquet in her glorious home with its seven pillars. The passage from Proverbs 9 always reminds me of an unforgettable moment in Lawrence of Arabia’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Once when he was in the desert, taking water from a spring, Lawrence saw coming toward him “a grey-bearded, ragged man, with a hewn face of great power and weariness.” When this man drew near the spring, he shut his eyes and then groaned aloud, “The love is from God; and of God; and toward God.”

This pronouncement would be a perfect summation of the “mystical core of the gospel,” worth holding in our hearts as we hear about Jesus as the bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world. Other scriptures will speak of the endemic folly that disconnects people from this love, of the new patterns of behavior that stem from embracing the saving love of God that reaches into our predicament to liberate us through Christ. It can remind us that the complaining pitilessly recorded in the Exodus narratives and the hostile reception to Jesus’ claim to be the authentic food and drink from God really stem from our fear of true intimacy with God, fear of becoming caught up in the love that is of God and returns to God with and in Christ.

[ August 5 ]

A Satanic Cloud

Exodus 16:2-4, 9-15; Psalm 78:23-29; Ephesian 4:1-6; John 6:24-35

THE TENDENCY OF churches to make our worship “lite” in the summer becomes harder to justify this Sunday. We worship under the cloud of the anniversary of the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, on Aug. 6, 1945, the horror that ushered in our nuclear age. We have gotten used to our “sane” leaders coolly considering the conditions in which they would unleash weapons that could make our—God’s—earth uninhabitable. Ours is a self-imposed wilderness exile in which, for those who are brave enough to look up, this lurid, satanic pillar of cloud by day and pillar of fire by night continually looms ahead, drawing us toward self-destruction.

The readings, with their theme of manna in the wilderness, recover their proper urgency under this cloud. God has no intention of merely giving us miraculous rations of grace to keep us going while nothing really changes. The bread that God sends is not a substance but a person, the Son, embodying God’s power to change, incarnating a way of being human that makes peace possible in the face of the apparent hopelessness of humanity’s suicidal predicament. “The bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world ... I am the bread of life” (John 6:33, 35).

In the reading from Ephesians, we are called to the arduous task of maturity. God’s liberating action to bring us out of our wilderness works through a church that is emphatically not meant to be merely “an institution with a message,” but a living organism, a pioneering community, that puts the new way of mutuality and compassion into practice as Christ’s body, continually being stretched by the Spirit to attain “maturity, the measure of the full stature of Christ” (Ephesians 4:13).

[ August 12 ]
Restless Whining

1 Kings 19:4-8; Psalm 34:1-8; Ephesians 4:25 - 5:2; John 6:35, 41-51

“DO NOT COMPLAIN among yourselves,” Jesus says in John’s gospel. “No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me” (6:43-44). The Exodus traditions about the complaints of the people of Israel over the meager fare available in the desert provide the background for John’s probing of human resistance to God. The original manna came as a response to the people’s whining and their nostalgic preference for the lovely food they had enjoyed as slaves that seemed, in retrospect, to make slavery preferable to the hardships of the desert. How much more likely then that the visitation of the authentic bread of heaven in the person of the son sent from God would provoke complaints, given the inveterate and bitterly ironic resistance of the broken human heart to the very means that God provides for nourishment and healing!

How does God overcome this resistance? Not by the fire of punishment: that had proved ineffectual in the original exodus. John’s answer is by the divine power of attraction to the person of the son, the embodiment of divine self-giving. The “drawing” of God is the leitmotif, the dominant theme, of the fourth gospel. “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself” (John 12:32). There can be no force-feeding; the encounter with Christ, the bread of life, has to be a “coming,” a willing yielding to God’s magnetic attraction to eternal life, a surrender to the invitation that we find in today’s psalm, “O taste and see that the Lord is good” (34:8).

The writer to the Ephesians puts a finger on whining as a symptom of the necessarily restless state of human beings locked into the state of rivalry, envy, and egotistical entitlement. The urgency of his injunctions to practice mutual forbearance and compassion and the costly sharing of power does not stem from an overheated moralism, but trust in our baptismal transformation, being “marked with a seal for the day of redemption” (4:30). Our determination to counteract “bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling” (verse 31) stems from our baptismal confidence. The Spirit empowers us to pioneer a new way of being together in community, the actual promised land we can enter through God’s new exodus liberation in Christ.

[August 19 ]
Sober Inebriation?

Proverbs 9:1-6; Psalm 34:9-14; Ephesians 5:15-20; John 6:51-58

PIONEERS OF early Christian spirituality adopted a paradoxical expression from contemporary Jewish philosophy and mysticism that summed up the experience of authentic spiritual joy: “sober inebriation.” When our hearts resonate with the joy of God we experience bliss, but not as a “trip” that disconnects us from reality. God’s joy grounds us more deeply in truth and insight. Israel’s sages had long played with this imagery, as we see in Proverbs. Here God’s wisdom is personified as an alluring hostess—and architect of her own mansion with its seven splendid pillars!—issuing a free invitation to her banquet: “To those without sense she says, ‘Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed. Lay aside immaturity, and live, and walk in the way of insight” (Proverbs 9:4-6).

Our reading from Ephesians takes up this rich experiential wisdom tradition: “Be careful then how you live, not as unwise people, but as wise, making the most of the time, because the days are evil” (5:15-16). Here wisdom takes its eschatological stance. Our wisdom in Christ takes the form of sober vigilance, fortifying us to resist the forces that blight human flourishing. Instead of taking an escape route from reality through bingeing, we commit to wakefulness, and enjoy authentic exhilaration in worship and song. The current lingo of being “woke” neatly captures the theme. Eastern Christian spirituality called it nepsis (awakeness), the state of being alert and mindful, a gentle resistance to the addictions that compromise our God-given freedom.

The theme of the authentic food and wine of God is at the heart the sixth chapter of John’s gospel: “My flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them” (verses 55-56). Our ultimate nourishment consists in a sustained personal intimacy and mutual indwelling with Christ in which we share now in the life-fullness of God that makes death powerless—the mystical core of the gospel!

[ August 26 ]
How Do We Abide?

Joshua 24:1-2a, 14-18; Psalm 34:15-22; Ephesians 6:10-20; John 6:56-69

SCHOLARS SUGGEST that John 6 makes subtle references to traumatic conflicts undergone by the communities associated with “the disciple whom Jesus loved” in the 25 years following the destruction of the temple in 70 C.E. Eventually, followers of Jesus were ejected from their synagogues as Jewish identity began to be redefined. The protests lodged against Jesus’ proclamations about the necessity of eating his flesh and drinking his blood almost certainly hint at bitter disputes about Communion practiced by Jewish followers of Jesus in their homes. These rituals were probably deemed intolerably offensive to a coalescing Judaism. The churches lost members in the disputes and had to adapt to internal exile within their neighborhoods once they were banned from the synagogues.

The gospel addresses the vulnerability of those who persisted in abiding in Christ and deepening their commitment to Communion. “Because of this, many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him. So, Jesus asked the 12, ‘Do you also wish to go away?’ Simon Peter answered him, ‘Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life?’” (John 6:66-68). We may even find hints that among the “remaining Christians” were some who had doubled down on the language of eating Christ’s body and blood, making the ritual almost magical and literalistic. The gospel warns them and us that there is nothing magical at all about what came to be called sacraments. The meaning is what is all important: “It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life,” Jesus says (6:63).

Ephesians’ teaching about putting on “the whole armor of God” may remind us of awful stained-glass windows of Christian “knights in shining armor” and individualistic moralizing about defending ourselves from worldliness. Let us be willing to heed the reminder that to actually resist the “principalities and powers”—those larger-than-human forces that systemically pervert our cultures and institutions—it is not enough to imagine that we are immune from their power. Only actual spiritual practices, which counteract their influence, have any value in sustaining our distinct identity as members of Christ’s body and pioneers of God’s future.