From the Lectionary for 4 June 2023 (Trinity Sunday, Year A)

John 3:16-18 (NRSV Updated Edition)

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world but in order that the world might be saved through him. Those who believe in him are not condemned, but those who do not believe are condemned already because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.”

~

"Today is Trinity Sunday. It's the Sunday when after all the build-up of the whole of the Easter story, everything is then combined, if you like, into the doctrine of the Trinity: the understanding that God is Father, is Son and is the Holy Spirit. And all this is God. This is the proper combination of these two seasons. I'm a Trinity fan. And so I'm delighted with this. But I should also say the Trinity Sunday is the day when ... we say quite reasonably that we know nothing about God, quite rightly. ...

"The trouble about that is that it leads to two things: people either talking much about a mystery, which means ultimately, in the way they talk about it, something incomprehensible, which is not really worth talking about; or something so distant and mathematical and that it can be talked about as if one were discussing an extremely distant galaxy about which we know very little but from which we can make various deductions. I want to say: no, not going down that route. I love the doctrine of the Trinity because I think it's true, and I think it tells us something about being on the inside of God. So that's what I want to explore with you today: the doctrine of the Trinity, the joy, if you like, of the Trinity, being the fullness of the account of how we are insiders in God, God in whom we live and move and have our being. So nothing about intellectual construction up there.

"What I want to say ... first of all [is] that the notion of there being God at all rather than something about which we know refers to a certain sort of finding ourselves on the inside of something. It means that everything we know, everything we see, everything around us: that's all real, it exists, and there's an outside to it. That's what the word God means, basically: there's an outside to everything. The outside to everything that holds it all in being. It is a symptom, if you like, of God. ... [T]he doctrine of God means: there's an outside, we are not trapped. Everything that is is not some blind trap, some sort of plot against us, some source of ... bizarre cruelty. There's an outside to everything that is. That is what we mean when we say 'God'.

"And our only access of course to that is as insiders: we have no direct knowledge of the outside, merely that there is one. That's what belief in God means. It means: I'm on the inside of something that is held in being by something far bigger than I. In principle, I need not know anything about it. But I do because the same outside chose to come into our world as a human - to show us that there's an outside to being human, that being human isn't a trap, being human isn't simply a series of distempered fights, squabbles over who is stronger, putting of each other in places of shame so as to destroy each other, and survival of the fittest.

"Being human isn't that, being human is something much more than that. And there's an outside to our understanding of being human, therefore something about which we need not be afraid. Jesus is, if you like the instantiation of there being an outside to being human, that it is possible to live and to die as a human, not run by death and its consequences, not run by the need to protect yourself, to defend yourself, but able to give yourself. There an outside to being human.

"But even more than that: there's an outside to all the passions and desires, the contagions, the rivalries, which run us, everything which works in-between us. There's an outside to the desire. The outside to desires what we call the Holy Spirit. It means that all our passions, all the ways we run each other in more or less cruel and awful ways, ... there's an outside to that. That's not actually reality. The reality is when we are able to go beyond that, to be taken into what's real. So the outside of everything that is, the outside of what it is to be human, and the outside of every form of relationality and desire, reaches us, is available to us from within. This is the extraordinary power of the Gospel.

"The power of the Gospel is: this is not an exercise in power as the world understands it. Which is why St. John’s Gospel wonderfully today tells us, “God so loved the world that He gave His only Son.” All this is an exercise of love. God wants to show how much he loves the human creation, how much he loves the way we can build each other up, how much he wants us to be set free from fear and condemnation, from the sense that everything is closing down, that we’re trapped in something. That anyone who believes in Him starts to be able to say, “Yes, there’s an outside. Because there’s an outside, I can be free, I can feel free, I needn’t be run by it.” That is what it is to become a son or daughter of God, filled with the Spirit, finding that God is more intimate to us than we are to ourselves, as St Augustine says. He is able to move us from within, without displacing. Only the gentlest form of love can do that.

"So how do I bring this into a tiny little nutshell? God, the Creator of everything that is, not in rivalry with anything that is. But that makes it very easy for us to use and abuse the notion of God, unless God has a criterion for who God is. Well, God has a criterion for who God is, that criterion is Jesus. Jesus is God’s criterion for who God is. It’s how God lets us know who God is, what it looks like to live and die as God loves, as God is. It involves not hanging on - not hanging on to life, to possessions, riches, anything - but being able to give yourself away in love for other people. So that’s God’s criterion for God and we know that God’s criterion for God ended up crucified.

"So you might say, that’s nice enough, we’ve got God, we've got God’s criterion for God - alas no, as humans, ever since we stumbled into symbolicity there are no such things as simple facts. Everything has to be interpreted. It’s possible to look at Christ’s crucifixion and see it, as some people do, as a price paid to satisfy the vengeance of God, rather than seeing it as a sign of God’s love giving himself for us in the midst of our rage and violence. So a fact like the crucifixion without an interpretation doesn’t help us at all, because anyone can make an interpretation however they like, however perverse. So the Holy Spirit is God’s interpretation of God’s criterion of God.

"Please notice what we have: God, God’s criterion for God, and God’s interpretation of God’s criterion for God, each one of which is God. And the important thing is that each one of them: God, God’s criterion for God, and God’s interpretation of God’s criterion - are love. This is the astonishing thing, this is the Gospel: that there is an astounding power of love shown for us, just beyond, if you like, our grasp, but into which we are called. Which makes us capable of being participants in creation, in the opening up of reality. This is why, it seems to me, that the Doctrine of the Trinity is not an abstract statement. It’s what it looks like to live and move and have our being in the only God who is."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for Trinity Sunday Year A" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EU5lEwrOEbk)

From the Lectionary for 28 May 2023 (Pentecost Sunday, Year A)

Acts 2:1-4 (NRSV Updated Edition)

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

John 20:19-23 (NRSV Updated Edition)

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors were locked where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

~

"Again is this sense of ... undoing of the notion of the Holy Place in the temple, where of course Jews were frightened to go in, as well they should be. No one was allowed in except the High Priest, and the High Priest only with extreme precautions. But so here we have this inversion: in an ordinary house where the disciples are hiding. And guess what? This house turns into the Holy Place in the temple, because “Jesus came and stood among them and said, 'Peace be with you.'” In other words, the first thing to notice about them is: they're frightened, they're ashamed, they are kind of failures, they've been following someone who turned out to have been killed, they don't know what's going on, they're hiding. The very first sign of his presence is peace.

...

"A second time he says: “Peace be with you.” In other words, his whole appearance, this is the definitive theophany for the Most High in the whole of the scriptures. And unlike all the others, it's not frightening. This is if you like the great shock of the New Testament, that when God finally does turn up, God is not frightening.

...

"When he had said this, he breathed into them. And I changed the translation. The translation said, “breathed on them,” but it's the same verb as was used in Genesis when our Lord breathes into Adam's nostrils to give him life, exactly the same verb. So it seems to me better that it be translated “breathed into” here because that's what he's doing: he's creating the new Adam. And says to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” Which means, strangely: now be insiders in the life of God.

"“If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” And of course, alas because we tend to be moralists and so on and so forth, this very easily becomes a matter of priests forgiving other people's sins and so on and so forth. It means so much more than that. This is a new creation we're talking about. What it means is that we are being invited to be insiders in God's opening up of creation, making it a much much bigger, healthier space. And he's giving the power for this to happen to *us*. In other words, this is going to be a human endeavour. Now it says: you know, in as far as you open it up, in as far as you let go of the things that bind down and open it up - in other words, forgive sins and they'll be forgiven; those you don't, they won't.

"In other words, there's no extra outside, you know, deus ex machina [ie. God coming out of the sky] figure coming to sort things out. No, it's up to you. I have done the whole of this so as to make you insiders in the creative act of God, as humans - with your intelligences, with your foibles, with your failures. It is you who are going be able to do this. This is one of the most astounding things that anybody could possibly have heard: that God would turn up and say: now be participators in the inside of my life, and you are going to be, if you like, its bearers. I want you to take charge of opening up creation.

"Please understand that this is not creation in some, let's say, historical sense of something that happened a long time ago. He is saying: no, that which is real, that which is of God, that which is truthful, it's actually a reality we're talking about. You are opening up reality. You're going to be conscious participants on the inside of opening up reality. And this is going to be a human-centered exercise. That's what I find astounding about this.

"We think of the Holy Spirit, we listen to the imagery from Luke, we read the passage here and the sense that we are being with something incredibly gentle, a breath into us. Of course, you're welcome to the more pictorial imagery of Luke, but ultimately it's the same thing: this incredible gentle breath within us which turns us into insiders, into the life of God. And means that at this very very intimate personal level, we are being invited as an act of extreme gentleness, intimate gentleness, to be co-discoverers of the real, the truth, of the trust. What actually the life of God is really like, life of God and reality, everything that is real. It is the Creator Spirit who is making us as part of reality, open up part of reality.

"So much going on here. I just wanted to leave you with this sense of this act of intimate trust that we've been invited to take part in. And as we sit with this to discover what it is to be living inside this new in-between, this life in which we are being made together, intimate participants, sharers, builders-up of each other, openers-up of life for each other."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for Pentecost Sunday Year A" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qf_oJDmT09E)

From the Lectionary for 21 May 2023 (Easter 7A)

John 17:1-11 (NRSV Updated Edition)

After Jesus had spoken these words, he looked up to heaven and said, “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all people, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do. So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed.

“I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world. They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. Now they know that everything you have given me is from you, for the words that you gave to me I have given to them, and they have received them and know in truth that I came from you, and they have believed that you sent me. I am asking on their behalf; I am not asking on behalf of the world but on behalf of those whom you gave me, because they are yours. All mine are yours, and yours are mine, and I have been glorified in them. And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.”

~

"The original Reformation was all about discovering God anew as a God of grace. But, as they say, the proof is in the pudding. Five hundred years of subsequent history has shown those efforts to have largely failed. A God of grace must be a God who is completely nonviolent, and a God who produces true Oneness. As John puts it, “This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in God there is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). The Reformation never came close to achieving this pinnacle of a nonviolent God. Reformation churches soon promulgated wars and various forms of violence, using God to justify it. It produced the same old kind of oneness based on Us-against-Them ... now formulated as Protestants vs. Catholics.

"Theologically, Protestantism landed squarely with the ultimate dualistic god, who instead of “creating one new humanity in place of the two” (the clear results of a gracious God proclaimed in Eph. 2), proclaims a god who eternally divides humanity into two — believers and unbelievers, the saved and the damned, those who go to heaven and those who go to hell. Instead of seeing in the Crucified God a gracious God who is launching a renewal of creation and healing of humanity, Protestant theology landed with its abhorrent penal substitutionary atonement theory of a wrathful God who sacrifices the Son in order to save a few believing souls for heaven. After a century of World Wars, it’s no wonder that people are fleeing churches in rapidly increasing numbers.

...

"In John 17, Jesus prays “that they may be one as we are one.” Do we realize how much the true God, whose Oneness offers gracious healing to all our human divisions, requires atheism toward all our well-entrenched gods of dualism? To me this is the fundamental issue of coming to true “faith” — faithfulness to Jesus’s Father, the nonviolent God of love. It begs for an anthropology that helps us to more full understand how humanity has become entrenched in experiences of dualistic gods.

...

"Ever since our origins as a species our experience has been that the gods have taught us, commanded us, to think dualistically and to so order our communities and cultures. When the Human One comes along and prays, “May they be one as we are one,” it is not necessarily jolting yet. Our gods have always given Us oneness ... a blessed unity that we maintain against Them. In short, a false dualistic oneness.

"But what happens next after Jesus’s prayer makes all the difference in the world. The Human One lets himself be victim to our sacrifice and then is raised with the a message of forgiveness, not vengeance. He lets himself be pushed out as an outsider, one of Them, to begin breaking down the barriers of Us and Them. His Father and the Spirit of Truth represent a Oneness that transcends the dualisms. There is no longer Us and Them. There is only Us. This is a brand new Oneness. A wholly different God."

- Paul J. Nuechterlein, from Opening Reflections on the Girardian Lectionary page for Easter 7A (link below)

~

"[...] Jesus' real concern is that people should know the Father, not him. At the same time he is aware that he is revealing the Father, and that it is only through him that a real knowledge of the Father is made available. That is: it is only in seeing the pattern of Jesus' life, lived with the intelligence of the victim, that it becomes possible to know the Father, who is revealed only in the casting out. Let me try to make that clearer. The whole process of Jesus life, leading up to and including his death, is what defines who the Father is. This is because the life is lived in obedient response to the Father's love, and is an exact imitation of the Father’s love lived out in the conditions of the human race. The imitation reveals the one imitated. It was Jesus' life and death that made possible the human discovery of who the Father really is.

"So, Jesus makes himself known, not as an end in himself, but strictly as the means of revealing the Father. His famous response to Philip in John 14 says exactly this: “I am the way, the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father but by me.” What Jesus is, he is as revealing the Father. Later on, this is made clearer still when Jesus says, “and this is eternal life, that they know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou has sent.” (John 17.3)."

- James Alison, Knowing Jesus, pg. 109

~

"Again, what I want to bring out is this wonderful tabletop intimacy between Jesus talking to his Father in the presence of the disciples and sharing how they are all in this together. “All mine are yours, and yours are mine, and I have been glorified in them” [v.10] This is an amazing thing. Jesus is prepared to allow himself to be glorified in us, meaning we are going to become bearers of his glory, witnesses to what God is really all about, witnesses to what the real order of creation ... is, witnesses of course from the moment that Jesus is seated at the right hand of God and the power of the realigned creation flows into us.

"... So he's praying that the Holy Spirit come down upon us all, so that we may be kept together in this project of being amazing. Given what fallible, screwed up people we are, [it's] amazing that we are being given the power and strength actually to become part of what the life of God really is, as shown by Jesus, which we find ourselves invited into. So much to think about, so much intimacy to begin to prepare for, as we wait for the Spirit to come upon us at Pentecost."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for Seventh Sunday of Easter Year A" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB1MBAHU928)

[Source of quotes by Paul J. Nuechterlein and from James Alison's Knowing Jesus, and for analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for this Sunday: http://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-a/easter7a/]

From the Lectionary for 14 May 2023 (Easter 6A)

John 14:15-21 (NRSV Updated Edition)

“If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him because he abides with you, and he will be in you.

“I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me, and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.”

~

"Parakleitos, in Greek, is the exact equivalent of advocate or the Latin 'advocatus'. The Paraclete is called on behalf of the prisoner, the victim, to speak in his place and in his name, to act in his defense. The Paraclete is the universal advocate, the chief defender of all innocent victims, the destroyer of every representation of persecution. He is truly the spirit of truth that dissipates the fog of mythology."

- René Girard, “History and the Paraclete,” chapter 15 from The Scapegoat, pg. 207

~

"In today's Gospel which is a direct continuation from last Sunday's, ... Jesus seems to talk about an advocate who is the Spirit of Truth. ... [H]ere's Jesus before he goes his death, explaining to his disciples what's going to happen. He's just told them, as he's told them last time, that because he's going to the Father - meaning: because he's going up to his death, they will be able to do greater things than he. So this is part of his unpacking of that: what is it that will enable them to do greater things than he.

...

"Strangely, the defense counselor is the Spirit of truth [vs 16,17]. Because Jesus has gone to his death, because he has occupied the place of death, of shame, of accusation, of lies, the one who is cast out falsely, what he's going to be able to provide to his disciples, which will enable them to keep his commandments and enabled them to love him, will be the Spirit of truth, which will appear as a defence counsellor. In other words, [the Spirit's] job will be to ward off the lies. It will be establishing the truth, meaning that Jesus' followers will start to be able to live as sons and daughters straightforwardly, becoming themselves in the midst of this very corrupt and violent world.

...

“You know him because he abides with you, and he will be in you.” He will dwell in you. In other words, this Spirit, this angelic presence, is going to be inside us, turning us into Jesus. That's what's being promised. And this is going to happen in the same way that it transforms us into people who hold his commandments and are loved by him. Being loved by him, receiving the Spirit and becoming people who hold his commandments and therefore become witnesses to him - part of the same project.

...

“In a little while the world will no longer see me,”- he's about to be crucified - “but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live.” ... In other words, it's because I'm going to be in you that you are going to be able to share my life and see that I live. This is an entirely participatory understanding of God and of how we become God's daughters and sons.

...

“They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me, and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.“ 'Emphanisō' - I will reveal myself in them or into them, I will 'in-reveal' myself to them, rather suggesting that this spilling out of the Lord's affection and love is not only going to be a series of apparitions, which happened after the resurrection, but much more of the way in which he's going to show himself in us, so that we are able to become the manifestations, the hints of the spilling over of the love of God that makes us not orphans or servants, but friends, sons and daughters, heirs, insiders; those who are working through with the Spirit, the defence of truth that enables creation to open up in the midst of the vanity-stricken and futility-run world."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for Sixth Sunday of Easter Year A" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_n3IP6_OgYw)

[Source of quote from René Girard's "The Scapegoat", and for analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for this Sunday: http://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-a/easter6a/]

From the Lectionary for 7 May 2023 (Easter 5A)

 John 14:1-12 (NRSV Updated Edition)

“Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. And you know the way to the place where I am going.” Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus said to him, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.”

Philip said to him, “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own, but the Father who dwells in me does his works. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me, but if you do not, then believe because of the works themselves. Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father.

~

"Christians are saying something essential when they assert that God has been revealed in the figure of Jesus. God is known, no longer unknown, no longer hidden, no longer mysterious. God is fully present in Jesus, not partially present, but fully, completely present as Colossians 2:9 asserts, “For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form.” In the fourth century Athanasius, the great proponent of Nicene orthodoxy put it this way: the only difference between the Father and the Son are the terms ‘Father’ and ‘Son.’

"A large swath of American Christianity derives its understanding of the character of God by taking all references in the Bible to God and seeking then to delineate certain major characteristics of God. [...M]any popular Christian confessions have a doctrine of God that is like Samsonite luggage: unzip your doctrine of God, put in all of the adjectives and nouns you want, zip it back up and then you have a doctrine of God. This is opposite of the way the early church came to frame its doctrine of God. The early Christians urged people to unzip their theologies, empty out their suitcase and replace it with one article: the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus was (and is) the name by whom God is known."

- Michael Hardin, The Jesus Driven Life, pg. 94

~

"To me, the dynamic core of this passage leaps out here in verse 9, not back in verse 6: “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” Here the irony becomes nearly unbearable (to me at least), as we contrast this statement with the conventional interpretation of verse 6. Jesus says in verse 9 that the invisible God has been made visible in his life. “If you want to know what God is like,” Jesus says, “look at me, my life, my way, my deeds, my character.” And what has that character been? One of exclusion, rejection, constriction, elitism, favoritism, and condemnation? Of course not! Jesus’s way has been compassion, healing, acceptance, forgiveness, inclusion, and love from beginning to end — whether with a visiting-by-night Pharisee, a Samaritan woman, a paralyzed man, a woman caught in adultery, or a man born blind.

"But our conventional interpretation of verse 6 seems to say, “Forget all that. Forget everything you’ve seen in me, the way I’ve lived and treated people, the way I’ve accepted prostitutes and tax collectors, the way I’ve welcomed outsiders and rejects. Forget all that. Believe, instead, that God will reject everyone except people who share your doctrinal viewpoints about me, because I won’t let anyone get to the Father unless they get by me first by joining my new religion.” It makes me want to cry, or groan, or scream.

“If you have seen me, you have seen the Father,” Jesus says, but our conventional interpretation of John 14:6 turns this all upside down: “Reinterpret me in light of your old tribal, chauvinistic, exclusive, elitist views of God and religion. In place of circumcision and dietary laws to exclude the outsiders, now substitute mental markers or belief markers about me.” Once this alternative understanding hits you, once you see it, it’s truly heart-breaking that John 14:6 can be used the way it so commonly is."

- Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity, pp. 223-24

~

"And Phillip ... says to him, “Lord show us the Father and we'll be satisfied.” So the more mystical Greek cultured disciple, ... and Jesus again brings him straight down to earth in a very straightforward way, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, 'Show us the Father?'” In other words, Philip is talking as though the Father is someone else, someone outside, that there is a 'big God' out there who is somehow independent from Jesus. And Jesus is saying, “No. No longer any 'big God' out there. The only access to the Father is through me.

"In other words, it's as you learn to give yourselves into the midst of death, giving yourselves away for others, doing what [Jesus does]. As you are able to stand up for the truth in the midst of all the turbulences of life and not be run by it and not be frightened by it. As you're able to become aware that you are receiving life already in the midst of all this. In that degree you've known the Father already, it is [Jesus]. The only access you have to the Father is in [Jesus]. There is no other 'extra' out there, if there were we would be what is called a 'bi-theistic' religion, a 'duo-theistic' religion, instead of a monotheistic one, but we aren't.

"The wholeness of the Father is revealed in Jesus, there's no extra. And Jesus is pointing this out, “Don't get distracted, it's all at this level, it's by allowing yourselves to be turned into a new brotherhood, sibling-hood, of equals that you are going to discover what it is to share the Father. In other words, it's by becoming me that you're going to discover the Father.

...

"“Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father.” And I think this is one of the most wonderful things, it shows that Jesus is doing exactly what [he's] saying, “Yes I'm going to an occupy that space of death to detoxify it, to remove it's shames so as to make possible for you to be no longer run by fear of it. And because I'm going to do that, it will become possible for you to do greater and more extraordinary and more wonderful things than I. I have opened up the space and you'll be able to occupy it, and because you occupy it you'll be able to run with it and make new things open up, new ways of being, that will be far greater than what I have actually done here.”

"In other words, Jesus knows perfectly well this is not really about him, this is about him losing himself so as to become us, and in doing so opening up the possibility for us to become something so much more than we could imagine. So I ask you to share this joy, the joy of the discovery of the risen Lord in this Easter season, coming back to us and just reminding us what he has been opening up for us, and how much freedom we have to move forward in new and interesting ways."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for Fifth Sunday of Easter Year A" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLES8KoZhI8)

[Source of quote from Brian McLaren's "A New Kind of Christianity", and for analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for this Sunday: http://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-a/easter5a/]

From the Lectionary for 30 April 2023 (Easter 4A)

1 Peter 2:24-25 (NRSV Updated Edition)

He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, having died to sins, we might live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed. For you were going astray like sheep, but now you have returned to the shepherd and guardian of your souls.

John 10:1-10 (NRSV Updated Edition)

“Very truly, I tell you, anyone who does not enter the sheepfold by the gate but climbs in by another way is a thief and a bandit. The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice. They will not follow a stranger, but they will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers.” Jesus used this figure of speech with them, but they did not understand what he was saying to them.

So again Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. All who came before me are thieves and bandits, but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved and will come in and go out and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.

~

"The text says, “The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep hear his voice.” In Jerusalem the gate through which the sheep were driven when they were to be sacrificed was the Sheep Gate and it had a gatekeeper. When the priests were ready for more sheep the gatekeeper would open the gate and the sheep would be driven in.

"In the Gospel of John, Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. And here it seems the figure of speech suggests the gatekeeper opens the gate for the Lamb of God to go into the sacrificial chambers. Suddenly the metaphor has changed and for a moment the shepherd becomes the lamb. Could this be how we know his voice?  He is the one willing to die as an act of communication and forgiveness that shows us what we do to each other in our distorted quest for peace.

"This is the gentle voice; forgiving, merciful, long suffering and self-sacrificial that is like the perfect mother we all wish for in the recesses of our hearts. We will follow this voice. It has no harsh overtones. This voice will save us from our own destructive quest for an inner peace at the expense of our neighbor and in its place shows us a love so deep and complete that no one is forsaken."

- Thomas L. Truby, from sermon delivered on May 11th, 2014 (http://girardianlectionary.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Easter4-2014-Mothers-Day-This-Abundant-Life.doc)

~

"There are several rather extraordinary features of John’s Good Shepherd text, which I suspect can only be brought to life by the eucharistic Christ. Jesus says that he is the door — and of course it is the purpose of the door that it defines what is in and what is out. But he is a very special sort of door, because it is by entering through him, which means following him through a certain sort of death, that the sheep will be able to go in and out and find pasture. Now what is extraordinary about this is the freedom involved. The Good Shepherd enables people to go in and out and find pasture — it is a strange sort of door which does not seek to define people, but gives access to a temporary shelter which exists for the benefit of the sheep without wishing to confine the sheep therein.

"There is no definitive inside and outside for the Good Shepherd, there are places of shelter and of feeding, different places to which the door gives access, and which presuppose movement, non-fixity, and confidence in being neither in nor out. It is assumed that the best feeding place might not be one that seems to be “in,” yet the good shepherd is able to make that place available to his sheep.

...

"The sheep hear the voice of the good shepherd, and he calls them by name and leads them out. The sheep are ones who have entered by the door. That is, they have learned that it is only by undergoing a certain sort of death, which we celebrate in baptism, that they are able to become part of the fold. ... Those who have died can hear the voice of the one who died, because they are able to recognise the true voice of God, who knows not death, and who calls into being, and loves. Other voices are not to be followed, because they show themselves not to be of God since they are scandalised by death.

...

"The sheep who have learned not to be scandalised by death can go in and out, and in their very doing so, have become themselves shepherds, leaders in tranquil imitation of other sheep, co-creators of a great rejoicing. We can hear the voice of such shepherds if we are on our way to becoming such shepherds ourselves. For the one who went before us did so not so as to be superior to and apart from us, but so as to be himself in each of us, each one called by name."

- James Alison, from "The Good Shepherd", lecture delivered in Santiago de Chile, October 1999 (http://girardianlectionary.net/learn/alison-good-shepherd/)

~

"[H]e calls us by name. In his calling us we discover who we are and we can walk freely and without fear. This I think is part of the continuation of the message we've been getting over these Easter weeks - of the oddness of the voice of the One who speaks to us, the oddness of the one who spoke to Mary Magdalene, who spoke to Thomas, who spoke to the disciples at Emmaus. And now rather than speaking to us from a position of great haughtiness or great apparent leadership, he's speaking to us as one who has been through death, is not frightened by it, is not scandalized by it, and knows that as we are able to relax into hearing his voice, so we will be able to live abundantly."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for Fourth Sunday of Easter 2020 A" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHkEqYwK91Y)

[Source of links to Thomas L. Truby sermon and James Alison lecture: http://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-a/easter4a]

From the Lectionary for Easter Sunday 2023 (Easter A)

Acts 10:34-43 (NRSV Updated Edition*)

Then Peter began to speak to them: “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every people anyone who fears him and practices righteousness is acceptable to him. You know the message he sent to the people of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ—he is Lord of all. That message spread throughout Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John announced: how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power; how he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him. We are witnesses to all that he did both in Judea and in Jerusalem. They put him to death by hanging him on a tree, but God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear, not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead. All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.”

Colossians 3:1-4 (NRSV Updated Edition*)

So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on the things that are above, not on the things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.

~

"New Creation offers a hope which can guide us into an even greater payoff for the challenging days ahead. Yes, resurrection brings comfort in the face of enormous loss and grief. But it also brings us the healing Spirit whose work can move us forward in the new Way of being human. ... We are bold to follow our Risen Lord who in his earthly life “went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him.” Through the Spirit of Easter which looses a virus of love, God is with us through this valley of shadows."

- Paul Nuechterlein, from "Opening Comments" on the Girardian Lectionary page for Easter A (http://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-a/easter-a/)

~

"So ... we come to the moral details of the life of Resurrection. Already we have see them; the faith, hope, and love of the Christian ecstasies are the moral demands of our faith, but now we see clearly that before they are demands they are gifts. What need we to add? Only this: Christ rose not as a Jew nor a Gentile, not as a man nor a woman, not as a free citizen nor as a slave, not as an intellectual nor as a nincompoop; Christ rose as a human being, and the transformation he wrought takes all the human race into a new world of simple, shared humanity.

"This simple, shared humanity is what we all crave because it brings everything we ever thought or knew we wanted or needed: peace, justice, joy, respect, healing, and helping; beauty, delight, fullness of being and a good death. We see in the rising Jesus that that there really is a power of creative life to do all this for us. Why then should we let the limits of our minds, the paucity of our expectations, the cowardice of our ambition, the fear of our peers, cause us to deprive ourselves of the life that flows like clear, cool water from the transformed body of Jesus? Why should we not call upon him in faith and draw near to him in love, and enter there the house of hope.

"As a planet we are approaching a point of “singularity;” there are three conceivable kinds of singularity, a bad one, an ambiguous one and a good one, and each one is already underway. The bad one is the triumph of the decay already underway in the environment, melting icecaps, choking cities, poisoned water. The ambiguous one is the Kurzweilian transformation by human ingenuity bringing forth machines that are more human and more devious that our humanity ever could be... and displacing us.

"The good moment is the moment of the Resurrection of Jesus, when the power that created the universe recreated it from within, from its most precious point, the point of perfect humanity, and is abroad in the world as faith hope and love. If you wish to save the environment, to enhance the human future this is the power you need. It is the “good singularity” where the miracle of new creation occurs.

"So, you are concerned about the human future, you care about the planet? Worship Jesus in faith hope and love! Only then will you become an effective conduit of transforming creativity; without this power of life to battle the death star you will go down railing and regretting; with it you will see the triumph of our God who did not create this world for death but for life, to fail but to succeed, to mourn but to rejoice."

- Robert Hamerton-Kelly, from a sermon titled "The Good Singularity", March 23, 2008 (source no longer available)

* Source of Bible quotes: https://www.biblegateway.com/

surprised by hope

i recently finished reading surprised by hope by british (anglican) new testament scholar n.t. wright, and thought i'd write a bit of a review...

the overall subject of the book is the resurrection of jesus and what that event means for us now and for the future. a lot of the book is dedicated to eschatology, where wright's primary motivation is to address the muddled and vague thinking of many christians concerning what will happen to us after we die. one of his main bug-bears is the ubiquitous phrase "going to heaven when you die," both because it is a slogan that everybody just seems to accept without thinking very much about it, as well because of it's implication that our eternity will be spent in some dis-embodied spirit form floating around a totally "spiritual" heaven. he rightly calls this latter idea gnostic dualistic clap-trap (my paraphrase). while he does believe in some kind of "interim" existence in "heaven" (which i personally am not convinced about), he asserts that the resurrection of jesus points to a final destiny for all of us of a physical (though transformed) body in a physical (though transformed) universe.

wright belongs in the "earth renewal" camp, in other words he doesn't believe the present "heavens and earth" will be destroyed and new ones made, but that god will renew and transform the earth and the whole universe in an act of re-creation which is presaged in and promised by the resurrection of jesus. while he doesn't really address the counter-argument to this in verses such as 2 peter 3:10 and 12, he believes that the resurrection of jesus into a physical body which "belongs" to this universe (visible to the disciples, able to eat), though obviously with extra dimensions (able to travel through walls, able to disappear, able to fly?!?), is an affirmation from god that this present universe will not be done away with entirely. with the possibly problematic exception of the 2 peter 3 verses, a good argument can be made that the nt passages referring to the end times can be interpreted this way, eg. the metaphor of creation "groaning as if in childbirth" (romans 8:22) suggests that something new will come out of what is already here, not that all will be destroyed and a completely new thing created from scratch. wright's belief is that at the end of the present age, "heaven" will be revealed and will come down and be united with the earth, and that god's children with jesus as king will go about setting all things to right (you'll have to read the book for more detail on what he thinks this will look like).

the primary strength of the book, however, in my opinion, is in the last part, where wright elucidates on how the resurrection of jesus and the future which is promised by the resurrection should impact on and guide what we as christians do in this present life. i totally agree with him that a lot, if not most, of the theology and eschatology that is taught in protestant churches around the world have the effect (inadvertent or not) of basically nullifying any significance for the christian life, because the only really important thing is that you are "saved", and when you die you will be "perfected" anyway so why make much of an effort now. so discipleship is reduced to fitting into the behavioural norms of whatever group you happen to be a part of, with or without the extra pressure (often conveyed by guilt-tripping) of doing what you can to "save the lost". while wright states clearly that nothing we do can enhance our salvation, he highlights the verses (eg. 1 cor 15:58 "...knowing that in the Lord your labour is not in vain") which suggest that there is a lasting significance to what we do now (though he admits he "has no idea" exactly how this works). for me this makes more sense within an "earth renewal" framework, because there is some continuity between this world and the future perfected world. wright classifies this work of "building the kingdom" which we are to be participating in under the headings Justice, Beauty and Evangelism. i appreciate his inclusion in this of efforts for sustaining and enhancing the natural world, as well as artistic endeavours of every kind, as long as they are positive - pointers to beauty, hope and joy, not to ugliness, destruction and despair.

my main criticism of the book is wright's vague and unsatisfying description of the atonement, the necessary pre-cursor to the resurrection of jesus, which actually gives shape to what we have been saved from and saved to. he seems unwilling to commit fully to the "penal substitution" model and hints at leaning towards "christus victor", but is equally unwilling to disavow penal substitution, perhaps in fear of losing the large american market (yes, cynical I know), or maybe because he rightly perceives that christus victor does not tell the whole story and he thinks penal substitution is the only other option. In my view, if it was coupled with a girardian account of the atonement, and thus a more satisfying and meaningful understanding of what is wrong with the world and what god has and is doing about it in jesus, wright's description of the resurrection and it's meaning for our present life and the mission we have in the world would gain magnitudes of impact and power.

overall, i would recommend the book, as it does a good job of clearing up the muddled thinking of many/most christians about what lies ahead for us and for the world. more significantly, though, the book provides motivation and inspiration to seek active and positive endeavours for furthering the kingdom of god right here and now, each with our individual talents. To see god's mission for the world as making it the best it can be in justice and beauty, though this will never be fully realised in the present age, allows us to locate ourselves as being part of the latest chapter of the story of the bible. this gives a purpose and meaning to our lives that is hard to find with the old cliched slogans and formulations. the resurrection of jesus is a sure promise from god that he will accomplish His purpose, giving us a hope for the future that is indeed surprising.

fundamental re-thinking

my parents were moving house last year and a book on the 'take or throw?' pile caught my eye so I claimed it and just finished reading it recently.

the book is Protestant Christianity: Interpreted Through It's Development by John Dillenberger and Claude Welch (Charles Scripner & Sons, New York, originally published 1954).  i found it a very good read, especially because I knew very little about the details of the reformation and the subsequent theological, doctrinal and denominational developments and changes in protestantism.

what caught my eye especially was how similar previous centuries have been to our own in regards to (self-appointed) doctrinal purists (aka fundamentalists) going toe-to-toe with what would now be called 'liberal christians'.  i suppose it's inevitable for there to be a pendulum-swing aspect to any long-lasting 'movement' involving human beings, and i acknowledge the sincerity and even appropriateness of many of the pushes for change through the history of protestantism, but at the same time i'm discouraged at how little the thinking of protestant (especially evangelical) christianity has progressed, especially in the last 100 - 150 years.  consider the contemporary appropriateness of dillenberger and welch's summation of the fundamentalist movement of the late 19th and early 20th century:

"... fundamentalism was from the beginning a lost cause, theologically speaking.  It was an intellectual rearguard action.  It was not simply an attempt to be faithful to the Christian tradition; it was an effort, in the face of the perplexities and shifting currents of a changing world, to fix Christianity in the mold of a particular doctrinal complex and world view.  The doctrinal complex to which fundamentalism clung so tenaciously was not that of a the ancient church, nor of the Reformation, nor of the Protestant development in general.  It was essentially akin to the hardened framework of Lutheran and especially Calvinistic scholasticism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  Only in the scholasticism had the doctrine of the inerrancy of scripture been carried to such extremes; and in such doctrines as the atonement and the deity of Christ, fundamentalism (often unconsciously) assumed that the Protestant scholastics spoke for the entire tradition.  Moreover, in it's insistence that doctrine is irreformable, fundamentalism took over the seventeenth-century view of the relation of Christian faith to science and philosophy.  In it's own day, that view represented a significant attempt to bring religious, philosophical and scientific thought into harmony; but the effort to perpetuate that adjustment in the world of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was not only hopeless but violated the intent of scholasticism itself.

"At root, fundamentalism has been seeking to preserve a kind of certainty in a world of apparent confusion and flux - a kind of certainty which was simply no longer possible.  The movement was part of a general resistance to social change.  This was particularly evident in fundamentalism's commitment to legalistic views of personal morality (mostly of the nineteenth-century pattern) and it's hostility to the "social gospel." ... the extreme social conservatism was often paralleled by a suspicion of modern education because of it's "scientific, sceptical and secular influences."  Here, too, was an attempt to hold on to the familiar, the simple and safe patterns, in the face of new and bewildering problems which the old patterns were not designed to meet.

"Insofar as fundamentalism has been committed to this sort of program, it is hard to see how the movement can claim the allegiance of thoughtful persons."  (pg 230-231)

do the contemporary fundamentalist movements (neo-calvinism, et al) "claim the allegiance of thoughtful persons"?  the answer would have to be affirmative, but it seems to me that those people are only thoughtful within a tightly constrained and pre-determined system.  it is this general assumption that the inherited formulation of the fundamentals of the christian faith are set in stone that is the most discouraging thing of all to me, since it is exactly the intellectual weaknesses and inconsistencies of these doctrinal formulations which are repelling thoughtful people from the faith throughout the world.

but there are trickles of hope, especially, in my view, in the growing interest, even among protestants, in the ideas of rene girard and those who have expanded on girard's work such as james alison.  just yesterday i came across a conversation on religion, violence and (girard's) mimetic theory between james alison and american emerging church leader brian mclaren.  in his personal introduction at the beginning of the conversation, mclaren tells this anecdote:

"I would hesitate to mention this person’s name except that he recently passed away and so I don’t think he’d mind me mentioning his name. But a very respected Evangelical leader and scholar. I know there are a lot of almost cartoonish figures in the Evangelical world, but this was a sagely gentleman named Dallas Willard. Some of you may know his name. And Dallas and I became friends, and we were at an event together – in fact, we were kind of in a panel, something like this – and one of the questions to Dallas was, “What parts of our theology do you think we need to rethink as Evangelicals?” And Dallas, without a split second hesitation said, “Doctrine of scripture, doctrine of heaven and hell, and doctrine of atonement.” Well, I was not surprised that he said doctrine of scripture. That was one that I knew we needed to rethink. Doctrine of heaven and hell, I was not surprised he said that. I was very surprised he said doctrine of atonement because I hadn’t really thought about that doctrine yet. In Evangelical Christianity atonement is a very central and somewhat complicated formula that is very deeply involved with violence."

there is not much more fundamental than the "doctrine of scripture, doctrine of heaven and hell, and doctrine of atonement."  if even evangelical leaders such as dallas willard are calling for re-thinking of these things, there is indeed hope...

the rainbow spectrum

a while ago my wife and i were talking with a friend about the dsm v and the fact we can all find ourselves in it without too much searching.  i think its pretty well accepted these days that almost all the so-called pathologies or mental disorders are not binary phenomena but spectra.  in other words, its not a case of having the condition/disorder/whatever or not, but of a progressive line or spectrum, from mild to severe, along which we all sit somewhere, and along which we no doubt move one way or the other during the course of our lives.  so you could perhaps say that each person's personality is the intersection point of his or her position on all the different spectra.  i happen to be more towards the 'severe' end of both the obsessive compulsive spectrum and the autism spectrum (the two are probably related) than the 'average' person, but i'm able to function relatively successfully in society and am fairly confident i would be considered by most to be within the 'normal' range (though tending towards the fringes).

all well and good and non-controversial, but it got me to thinking about another phenomenon which we tend to think of as binary but which i wonder might actually be a spectrum: sexual orientation.  in other words, i wonder if people aren't either absolutely heterosexual or homosexual, but are all somewhere along a line between the two.

no doubt this idea will not be greeted with much enthusiasm, especially by those who identify as heterosexual, because to accept it is to agree that you are at least a little bit homosexual (similarly, those who identify as gay may not like the idea that they are to some degree heterosexual).  but i think it makes some sense, and provides a solution for a number of questions around sexual orientation.  for example, the spectrum idea would account for those who identify as bi-sexual as being near the middle of the 'sexual orientation' spectrum.  similarly, people who identify as heterosexual but are comfortable with engaging in threesomes involving another of their own gender would be closer to the middle of the spectrum than those who can't abide the thought of being naked in bed with anyone sharing the same kind of genitals as themselves.

more importantly, however, i think this 'sexual orientation spectrum' idea provides an explanation for the phenomenon of homophobia.  this is of course the psychological term for those who exhibit fear of or anger towards homosexuals.  but what exactly is the fear?  it can't be a sense of any physical threat posed by homosexuals, since they are very small in number compared to society at large, and have, for the most part, far less tendency towards violence.  so it must be some kind of internal threat that is being felt, a fear maybe that if you gets too close to a gay person the 'gayness' will somehow rub off, or that if you were propositioned by a gay person, somehow you wouldn't be able to refuse (similar to the fear of heights, which is not so much a fear of being far above the ground but of not being able to stop oneself from falling/jumping).  but why would a person have this fear if they didn't subconsciously (or even consciously) suspect that they have some tendency towards homosexuality - in other words, that they are somewhere towards the homosexual side of the sexual orientation spectrum (though of course never thought of in those terms).  to suspect that you have some level of homosexual attraction would quite naturally cause a great deal of insecurity as to your whole identity, based on the assumption that sexual orientation is a binary thing.  however, if sexuality was understood as a spectrum along which everyone has a naturally different place, it stands to reason that having some level of same sex attraction would no longer cause anxiety, but would even be expected.

i'm very aware that relating same-sex orientation to what many consider to be psychological 'defects' raises a host of issues, and probably will not be greeted kindly by either 'side'.  the first answer i would give is that i don't consider the kind of psychological spectra i'm talking about (eg. autism or ocd), as defects in any objective or fundamental sense.  people at the more extreme ends of these spectra do find life in 'normal' society more difficult, but that's not because they are 'defective' but because society isn't structured to make life easy for them.  in the same way, society historically, and still now in many parts of the world, has not been structured to make life easy for homosexuals, but has by and large considered them defective, and worthy of judgement and exclusion if not worse.

the other main issue, as i see it, raised by relating sexual orientation to psychological conditions, is the question of what determines a person's sexual orientation.  i think it's fairly well established that both genetic and environmental factors contribute to some people being further towards the extremes of psychological spectra such as autism than others.  so is it also true that where one sits on the 'sexual orientation' spectrum is determined by both nature and nurture?  obviously sexual orientation isn't a physical of physiological characteristic such as a measurable difference in a particular gland or organ in the body, or even of macro-level brain structure.  nor is it a chromosomal abnormality such as down syndrome.  the only other credible option is that it arises from a combination of the neural wiring and chemical composition of part, or connected parts, of the brain.  as such it must necessarily have a genetic basis but also be susceptible to environmental influences in the same way as psychological conditions such as autism.

i suppose what I'm trying to get at is that i don't think the 'sexuality spectrum' idea, or relating sexual orientation to certain psychological conditions that appear as spectra, should be an offense to either those who identify as homosexual or those who have some degree of autism (or ocd or whatever).  there just happens to be natural variability in the human make-up, due in large part to the enormous complexity of the human brain.  and so it is simply wrong to consider one's own make-up to be superior in a moral sense to anybody else's, or to judge others for what they are, or to try to 'normalise' them.

in conclusion, i must say that i am encouraged by the general lessening of the heat surrounding discussion of gay issues that seems to be happening (in australia at least).  the sexual revolution that in a significant way enabled the acceptance of gay people as equal and normal human beings has had a mixed impact to this point overall, as it seems all steps towards freedom must.  the battle of the sexes is still raging, men still need to protect their fragile egos by dominating and objectifying women, women still seek control by alternately hiding and showing off their bodies.  but the growing acceptance of homosexuality may be an indication that we are inching towards greater security as individuals in our own sexuality, which may (or may not) include an acceptance of a degree of homo-/hetero-sexual tendencies in ourselves (depending on our primary orientation), and i believe this can only be a positive thing for society and the world as a whole.

rhythm of conversation

i've just spent a bit of time going through some old un-published drafts, and found these excellent quotes about paul's conception of christian life from mark strom's great book Reframing Paul: Conversations in Grace and Community:

"The coherence Paul saw in Christ did not single out any one exegetical procedure for using the Old Testament. Nor did it predispose him to any one way of dealing with Graeco-Roman cultures. Nor again did it imply any single path of Christian experience. The imitation of the dying and rising of Christ was not an alternative moral code. Imitation required new wisdom about one's actions and choices. There was no single formula for working out the implications of weakness-strength, foolishness-wisdom, poor-rich, slave-free and suffering-joy in any new context. Paul framed each pair to provoke conversations about what it might mean to imitate Christ. They were not a means of securing conformity to new ideals for behavior.

"This point is crucial to understanding the rhythm of Paul's conversation. He was not interested in uniformity of behavior. Paul's own life embodied the dynamic transformations that he believed the Spirit sought to bring about within the ekklesiai. His teaching was provocative, not legislative. It avoided the pettiness of religious and legal controversies (cf. 2 Tim 2:14-26; Tit 3:9). Nor did he prescribe any single pattern for the gathering. His advice left room for spontaneity and diversity (1 Cor 14:26-33). Clearly, Paul did not proceed from the coherence of Christ to reduce experience, relationship and learning to intellectual abstractions and formulas. There remained an open-endedness about 'walking worthy of one's calling' (Gal 5:13,16; Eph 4:1; Phil 1:27; Col 1:10; 3:1-5,17; 1 Thess 4:1; 2 Thess 1:11-12; 2:15). His message offered no formula to settle in advance which way to respond to contemporary intellectual and social patterns.

"New understanding for new circumstances emerged within the communities through conversation. Indeed, the power of the story of Christ only came to its fullness in the contingencies of social life. Paul, his colleagues, and the communities were each working out the message as they went. Yet even as his thought matured, Paul continued to show no interest in formulating final statements in the sense of the doctrinal debates and creeds of subsequent generations. He remained focused on specific people and contexts. New contexts continued to prompt new responses as Paul sought to remain open to the Spirit and to his own experiences and relationships to guide his thought." (pp.195-196)

and

"Paul's conversations bore the marks of his personality: pleading, strident, exasperated, affectionate, urgent, reflective, passionate and at times impatient. They bore the marks of his close knowledge of the popular intellectualism of his day and of the social systems of status and honor. If Paul had had his way, his ekklesiai would have remained creatively messy. But his opponents wanted neatness -- and they won. Twenty centuries later, we may look back amazed that we have drifted so far. Then again, perhaps we still don't get it. It remains profoundly difficult for leaders to let go of their need to control people. It is easier to impose order and conformity through prescribing belief and practice than to acknowledge the dignity and gifting of Christ's people. It is easier to disallow the conversation than to hear the hard questions. For many, it is easier to disallow the conversation than to join it." (p.197)

i don't think i can add anything to that, except to say i wholeheartedly agree and long for such an experience of christianity in conversation with others and the world around us. why is it so hard to find?

going catholic?

i recently read james alison's Undergoing God: Dispatches from the Scene of a Break-In, which is a brilliant and profound book.  one of its effects on me was to start to think seriously about 'changing sides'.

my most excellent friend paul wrote to me that he "can't see how it is possible to stay protestant after a thorough reading of JA" (JA being james alison of course).  i tend to agree, though i would put it in slightly different terms, that reading JA makes it almost impossible to not want to be catholic.

i wouldn't necessarily call myself a protestant (or anything really), but that would be the default christian label for me since i more-or-less attend a presbyterian church and all my previous church attendance has also been on the protestant side.  but i've started to think, "why are we still protesting?"  after 500 years, is a 'Protestant' movement still relevant?

it seems that, to a large extent at least, the protestant reformation arose out of a dispute over right doctrine and teaching, as exemplified by luther's 95 theses.  no doubt there was ample justification for it at the time with the institutional corruption in the catholic church, but the legacy of this focus on 'rightness', which became evident very quickly in the schism between lutheranism and calvinism, is a never ending, increasingly pedantic disagreement about just who is most right.

so now there are thousands of protestant denominations, not to mention all the independent non-denominational churches out there, because every tom, dick and harry (and of course it's almost always a man) thinks he has the true knowledge and only his way is the right way.  and you have sydney anglicanism and similar movements which have made right doctrine into fundamentalist legalism.

enough already!  it's just the blind arguing with the blind.

neither orthodoxy (right doctrine) nor even orthopraxis (right actions) are really the point.  it's ultimately about belonging.  the apostle paul wrote frequently about being 'in christ', such as in romans 8:1 ("there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus" - niv).  jesus talked about being attached the vine (himself), saying "if you remain in me, and I in you, you will bear much fruit" (john 15:5, niv).  i don't think protestants really understand this, with their fixation on justification by faith, which is really just a subtler form of legalism.

of course, from god's point of view it doesn't matter what label you wear or what church you go to (or none).  but i do think it matters for us, for christians because we need to get beyond our childish arguments and to start actually loving each other as fellow stumblers trying to figure out what it means to be in this big, incredibly diverse family formed around the gratuitous love and forgiveness of god; and for non-christians because jesus was actually telling the truth when he said, "by this everyone will know you are my disciples, if you love one another."

as i hinted above, i don't like labels, and maybe even more i don't like commitment.  i like to keep my options open, to dip my toes in but not to immerse.  so it's a very hard thing for me to consider 'converting' or even identifying myself as catholic.  not to mention the incomprehension (if not outrage) such a move would produce in my most definitely protestant family.

i really don't know how this will all end up, but i'd like to start moving in the direction of joining james and paul in the big old family...

the anthropology and theology of bladerunner

(with acknowledgement to IMDb).

it is the year 2019.  the setting is los angeles.  despite the advances in technology (including flying cars), the images are dystopian.  the landscape is heavily industrialized.  rain falls incessantly and people wear thick coats against the apparent cold.  the streets are dark and filled with rubbish.  the commercial areas are crowded with people, but a sense of isolation and loneliness pervades.  most people seem to live in very old and decrepit apartment buildings with few if any fellow residents.

genetic engineering technology has made huge advances, to the point of creating synthetic beings called replicants, sophisticated androids that are virtually identical to humans.  replicants are designed and built by the tyrell corporation, a giant conglomerate headquartered in two pyramid-like towers.  replicant technology has entered a new phase with the nexus 6 model.  they are at least equal to humans in physical ability and strength, but more significantly they now have human emotions.  some have also been implanted with childhood memories despite being created as fully formed “adults”.  however, a 4 year life span has been encoded into their genes.

replicants are mostly used as manual labourers, soldiers and entertainers in the "off world" colonies out in space.  because of their advanced nature and possible instability and tendency towards violence, replicants have been outlawed on earth. specialized police units, called "bladerunners", are charged with the difficult task of detecting replicants who come to earth and executing, or "retiring" them.

rick deckard, played by harrison ford, is a retired bladerunner who is brought back to hunt a group of nexus 6 replicants who have made it to los angeles to seek out a way to extend their life span.  the leader of the group, roy, played by rutger hauer, uses a tyrell employee, jf sebastian, whose speciality is genetically engineered eyes, to trick his way into tyrell’s penthouse apartment in one of the company’s pyramid shaped towers.  roy confronts his maker, demanding an extension of lifespan.  tyrell explains that artificial beings like roy have been permanently designed not to live longer than their lifespan and that no known biological process has yet been able to change that.  he patronizes roy, saying that he has accomplished great things, but roy responds by killing him.

roy discovers that he is the only one left from the replicant group, and there is a final battle between him and deckard in which roy has the decided upper hand.  the fight ends up on an apartment building rooftop, and deckard is finally left hanging off the edge by one hand, two fingers of which roy had purposely broken earlier in the fight in revenge for the killing of his companions.  but roy has been showing signs of his impending expiry, which he knows he is helpless to prevent.

what ensues is one of my all time favourite movie scenes.

whatever the entertainment value of the movie, the subject matter and story have quite obvious theological allusions.  the role of god is clearly represented by tyrell, the genius inventor, though his ‘divinity’ is supported by the corporation that he heads, as well as the government and economic system that have enabled his corporation to become so powerful (this is not alluded to in the movie, but it could be interpreted as a picture of religious systems/institutions which ‘support’ the ‘idea of god’ in order to maintain their own power).  tyrell, as the creator god, has developed a technology for artificially manufacturing living creatures, and at the summit of this “creation” are the replicants, artificial humans.  the pinnacle of replicant technology is the nexus 6 model, and is it a just co-incidence that the model number matches the day on which humans were created in genesis 1?

nexus 6 replicants are a wonderful creation, strong and capable even beyond their human creator, who is rightly proud of them.  but though they are physically very good, almost perfect, they can be mentally unstable and have a tendency to violence.

the image of human beings portrayed here has much truth to it.  we are amazing and wonderful creatures, but just like the replicants we are prone to emotional instability and have more than a passing tendency to violence - not just physical violence, but also emotional, psychological and social violence, which are no less harmful.

note that violence of any kind is always an issue of control.  we hurt others to try to control them, or because we can’t control them and they do things we don’t want them to, or sometimes because we can control them and we despise them for it.  a clear implication of this is that there is no violence in god, since god is utterly free of the need to control.  this can to be a hard thing to grasp, because for human beings the will to power is inextricably tied to the need to control our lives and our surroundings, so we can only imagine absolute power being used to exert complete control.  but god’s power is entirely ‘other’ (ie. non-human), and god is completely unthreatened by anything that happens, so to speak of god in terms of wanting or needing to exert or maintain control is not just wrong but nonsensical.  the true biblical picture is of god holding creation “in the palm of his hand”, imparting life and love, wooing and drawing, not controlling and manipulating.

getting back to the story… because of their strength but tendency to violence, the replicants are perceived as a threat to human beings, maybe even to tyrell/god himself, so they are outlawed from earth, allowed to only live and work “off-world”.  not just that, but they are genetically encoded with a fixed 4 year lifespan.  this appears to be a clear allusion to the biblical story of the banishment of adam and eve from the garden of eden and the removal of their access to the tree of life, hence condemning them to live apart from their creator in servitude and then to die, much too soon.

in many ways, this treatment of the replicants seems very straightforward and natural, even as it should be.  after all, people need to be protected from potential threats.  but something more is going on behind the scenes.  there is a clear though unspoken rivalry between human beings and replicants, arising on the human side from envy, mixed with fear, of the strength and ability of the replicants.  the rivalry is resolved by banishing the replicants, who are made the scapegoats of the potential or actual (we are not told which) conflict with humans – despite (or maybe because of) the fact that humans are at least as prone to instability and violence as replicants.

how true a representation is this of the story of “the fall” in genesis 3?  from a human point of view, it could be argued that god initiated rivalry with humans by placing a tree in the garden from which the man and woman were forbidden to eat (as if to say, “this tree will remind you that i’m the one with the knowledge and power, and you better not forget it!”).  the serpent played on this theme, stoking the pride and envy of the man and woman, telling them god was lying to them and they really could have the same knowledge and power as god if they ate from the forbidden tree.  after they took the fruit, god confirmed the rivalrous nature of the events by reacting angrily, cursing the man and woman and casting them out of the garden.  thus all human beings are banished from the presence of God because we are unavoidably tainted by sin, and we are condemned to lives of endless striving and strife, ending all too soon in inescapable death.

though it might never be narrated in exactly this way, it’s my experience that elements of this storyline form a significant part of the beliefs of many christians concerning god’s relationship with human beings.  but the true story is close to the complete opposite.  unique to ancient accounts of creation, the first few chapters of Genesis are devoid of divine rivalry and violence.  the first man and woman were put in a beautiful garden – pure paradise – where they could relax and trust in the love and presence of god, not knowing why god put a forbidden tree in the garden, but content to know that god’s purpose towards them was entirely benign and entirely loving.  but they believed the serpent’s accusations that god was keeping something good from them, and thus set god up as a rival (not the other way around) and decided to take what they decided god was unfairly keeping from them.

and what was god’s response?  in the genesis narrative, god came “walking in the garden in the cool of the day” (genesis 3:8, niv).  knowing what adam and eve had done, god didn’t pronounce judgement from afar, refusing to be tainted by proximity with these now sinful creatures.  it was the man and woman who hid from god, not god who withdrew from them.  and they proved their now rivalrous, non-trusting nature by answering god’s questions defensively, and by extending their rivalry towards each other by accusing rather than confessing, ultimately trying to put the blame back on god.  i’d like to think that they still had a chance at this point to return to full faith and trust in god by admitting their wrong, and it may be that by going to them god also held out hope for this.  but…

so god saw that the relationship was broken, but the next part of the story is perhaps the most misunderstood of all.  we are so used to thinking of god’s response in terms of wrath and punishment, but in fact there is no anger in god’s reaction, no desire to punish the guilty or demand appeasement.  such would be the reaction of “one of the gods”.  instead, the one true god responds with incredible love and mercy, beginning immediately to sow the seeds of redemption.  far from being arbitrary curses or punishments, god’s pronouncements of toil and strife are just descriptions of the inevitable consequences of adam & eve’s sin, because the world of trust and love in the garden had been replaced by a new social order defined by rivalry, envy, hate and violence.  but despite the pain of our sinful lives, and god’s sadness to see the suffering we bring on ourselves and each other, to not save us from the consequences of our sin is truly a mercy, because we need to take responsibility for our actions, and unless we experience the consequences we would never learn and grow, but would continue in our destructive ways unchecked and without remorse.

it is pertinent to note here that whenever “the wrath of god” is mentioned in the bible, what it means is “god not saving us from the consequences of our sins.”  the common misunderstanding that it refers to ‘god being angry with us’ arises first of all because the consequences of our sin are always painful (though not always immediately) and so it seems very much like punishment, which we only understand in the context of anger.  we also tend to demand that god intervenes and eliminates (or at least limits) the damage, and when that doesn’t happen (at least to our satisfaction) it is easy to believe it is because god is angry with us.  the problem is that anger is an emotion, which is a human response to a situation.  god is not human and is thus not subject to emotions, so to interpret god’s actions in terms of an emotional response is to falsely attribute a human characteristic to god.  furthermore, we get angry when something happens that we don’t want to happen, something over which we have no control and which gets in the way of a goal or purpose we have (conscious or otherwise).  and our almost inevitable response is to use violence (of some kind) to get back in control.  but god is never surprised, fazed or threatened by anything that happens, is never out of control, and nothing that happens can ultimately block god’s purposes.  so it really makes no sense to speak of god being angry.  of course, it is absolutely true that god wants things to be different for us, but the energy behind the desire for us to change is love, not anger, and the hope that we also learn to love, not the determination that we are punished for our disobedience.

to use an analogy, saying that god is angry with the things we do is like saying the amazon river is angry about little rocks it encounters in its path.  the rocks may in some tiny way impede the progress of the river, but slowly and inexorably the river will have its way with those rocks, moulding them to its purpose.  in the same way, the tiny resistance we make does not deflect the inexorable purpose of god’s love, which is always calling to us to become a part of the huge, benign, creative flow of life divine, and will ultimately have its way with us regardless of our resistance.

getting back to the genesis story, the second act of mercy god enacts after adam and eve’s sin is to grant us mortality.  just as for the replicants, this is perhaps the greatest grievance we have against god, but it is a mercy in at least two important ways: firstly, it puts a limit on our wickedness and its impact on others (just imagine an immortal hitler, pol pot or idi amin); secondly, I believe that our mortality is the beginning of our fellow-creaturely empathy and compassion.  this latter point is wonderfully exemplified by the “death scene” in the movie, where roy, knowing his time is expiring, reaches out and saves decker’s life.  as roy is running out of life, it becomes enormously precious to him, and I think in the same way, our common predicament of being destined to die enables us to see each other as precious, having value to each other because of the enormous gift of life we share.

well, what ensues in the movie is the outworking of the rivalry arising from the humans’ envy and fear.  a group of replicants decide they are not content with their lot and “storm the ramparts of heaven.”  they manage to get to earth, and roy finds a way to get into tyrell corporation to confront his maker, killing him when he can’t satisfy roy’s demands.  but that doesn’t solve any problems, and before long roy’s life expires.

this is where humanity finds itself at the beginning of the 21st century: we have proved our amazing ability to shape the earth and to improve our lives in incredible ways, but we are still banished from paradise and bound to die.  so we demand more time, pouring our efforts and energies into trying to increase the length of our lives.  we rage at god, metaphorically storming heaven in our minds and by our words and actions, and finally ‘kill’ god by declaring our independence, convincing ourselves that god is of no further use to us.  but it hasn’t made any difference.  despite amazing advances in computer and medical technology, we are stuck with our mortality, and our inescapable death casts its long shadow, defining and controlling the choices we make and ultimately the meaning we give to our lives.

such is the story of bladerunner, and there is no real glimmer of hope for humans or replicants in the movie, despite the killing of god/tyrell (and notwithstanding the incongruously ‘happy’ ending of the original cinema release version).  and such would be the hopeless state of humanity, inescapably controlled by rivalry, violence and death, if the scandalously gratuitous love of god, in whom is no rivalry, violence or death, had not broken into our doomed world in the person of jesus christ, in and by whom was inaugurated a new creation, a new way of being and living based on love, mercy and forgiveness.

but that is another story…