Clarion: Journal of Spirituality and Justice

New Release: Philemon of Gaza Meditates Luke's Gospel

New Release: Philemon of Gaza Meditates Luke's Gospel 

"Turning the the other cheek is not enough: Luke 6:27-38"

The People's Seminary is delighted to announce the publication of the first English translation of 6th Century Philemon of Gaza's mediation on Luke's Gospel. Check out his inspiring reflection on Luke 6:27-38 below.

“To whoever slaps you on one cheek offer him the other.”

When we have received a slap, the first reaction that comes to us is most often to respond, slap for slap, we might say. The action of anger is rapid, so rapid in fact that it is, so to speak, instinctive. Also, what the Lord commands us regarding the slap becomes very difficult because we are to turn the other cheek before even responding to our aggressor. 

There are commandments that we can obey after careful consideration, but this is not the case with this one. We are to turn our cheek spontaneously, without even taking time to think. We barely have time to pray before turning the other cheek, and if we pray, then our prayer must be very brief, spontaneous, instinctive and precede any reflection.

Such rapid and instinctive obedience is not possible without long prior work on our part, without long practice of prayer, without long practice of obedience to the Lord, without such practice that our obedience has become our new nature. Then we can turn the other cheek without anger, without responding slap for slap. Anger is a fire that lights up very quickly; it is like a beast with rapid reflexes. Not responding to a slap requires having tamed anger and being its master. What is then necessary for us is self-control; it is also to have replaced anger with gentleness.

O my soul, you know that meekness and self-control are fruits of the Spirit (Gal 5:23). The long preliminary work that we must do in order not to retaliate against a slap is therefore only possible with the help of the Lord and the precious gift of the fruits of the Holy Spirit. You also know that this help is granted to us in response to a long practice of prayer and unfailing obedience to the commandments of the Lord; thus, our obedience to the command on slapping will be spontaneous. 

Only the humble know how to obey in this way, those whose humility has been granted by the Lord along with meekness and self-control. I now understand the apophthegm where we are told that a hermit turned the other cheek and thus chased away an evil spirit, he lived so much in this perfect humility received from the Lord. 

However, after turning the other cheek, we may still not at peace, nor in love towards our aggressor, nor ready to forgive him. Why is that? 

Turning your cheek is not enough! O my soul, I give thanks for the enlightenment given by the Lord to Abba Joseph who explains to us that this absence of peace comes from the fact that our pride has also been slapped. Indeed, not only has our cheek received a slap, but our pride has received one too. So if the fire of our anger was extinguished when we turned our cheek, another fire remains in us, the fire of resentment, a fire maintained by our pride which refuses to forgive and love our aggressor. While anger reacts and retaliates quickly, without even thinking, resentment takes time to reflect and nurture revenge before responding to the aggression. 

This is why, Abba Joseph tells us, we must truly obey the Lord and turn the other cheek, not the left cheek when the right has been struck, but the other right cheek, the inner cheek of our pride. 

This in truth is the deep meaning of the commandment given to us by the Lord. How marvelous! The long work that it is good for us before being attacked is the work of humility which alone chases away pride and resentment and then allows us to forgive our aggressor and to truly love. This humility that is victorious over pride is that which only the Lord can give us, the divine humility which he grants to those who have already walked a long way down the path of human humility. It is this humility received from the Lord which allows us to obey spontaneously, this famous humility which allowed Mark, the disciple of Abba Silvanus, to interrupt the writing of his omega. It is the very humility of Jesus who was slapped several times without ever responding with a slap (Mt 26:7; Mk 14:65; Jn 18:22; 19:3). 

We are never told that he turned the other cheek, because in truth, it was the invisible inner cheek that he turned; this reaction escaped the eyes of men, but not the eyes of the Evil One who was immediately repelled and chased away. The Lord, meek and humble of heart (Mt 11:29), is the only one who can enable us to respond with meekness and humility to an aggressor. He only grants this gift to those who open themselves to it through long interior work in synergy with him. Then we are given to turn our inner cheek with true love to our enemy.

Order your copy of Philemon of Gaza Meditates Luke's Gospel here.

Philemon of Gaza Meditates Mark's Gospel, is now available as an Audiobook here, as is Daniel Bourguet's The Humble Divinity of Jesus in Mark's Gospel, Volume 1 and Volume 2 paperback, e-book and Audiobook versions.

DOES THE BIBLE REVEAL A GOD WHO KILLS? Richard Murray

DOES THE BIBLE REVEAL A GOD WHO KILLS? 

Rather than starting from the Old Testament and working forward, we need to start from the more illuminated New Testament and work backward. 

This really has more to do with us a better recognizing the New Covenant SPIRIT rather than the Old Testament LETTER, or, put another way, the spiritual fingerprints of Jesus versus the spiritual fingerprints of Satan. 

This is scripturally true regardless of whether we consider the devil a dark angelic “who,” OR instead as a dark dynamical “what”. Whoever or whatever the devil is, the term Satan symbolizes the dark energies which are untethered from the divine will and work death, fear, hostility, condemnation, accusation, and oppression within this Earth realm. 

Jesus came to destroy the works of Satan, not utilize them, and to reveal to us that do NOT come from the Father (1 John 1:3).Satan is the killing source, not God. (John 10:10). Satan is the "murderer from the beginning," not God. (John 8:44). Hebrews 2:14-15 says Satan has the "power of death," NOT God. 1 Corinthians 15 lists "death" as an "enemy" of God, not a friendly force He uses. In other words, Jesus simply doesn't kill. Death is not in His nature. Let's start from the New Covenant Jesus and work backward to the Old Covenant view of God as killer. 

Jesus reveals a God who NEVER kills, and never orders us to kill. But, in wrongly reading OT Scripture "by the letter," which Paul says in 2 Corinthians 3:6 to NEVER do, for "the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life," one could say God kills and tells many others like Joshua and Saul to kill whole tribes of women, babies and men.

But reading the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5:38-48 we are told in the last verse to "Therefore be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect." What is the "Therefore" there for? The previous 10 verses tell us what the Father's perfection is--- to turn the other cheek toward our enemies, to bless those who curse us and despitefully use us, to pray for our enemies rather than kill them, to go the extra mile and give the extra coat. Just like the Lord blesses the just and the unjust with needed rain and energizing sunlight, the Father doesn't kill His enemies, but instead overcomes them with good. Romans 12:21.

So, as "able ministers of the New Covenant,"(2 Corinthians 3:6), if we read the Old Testament with the New Testament Spirit, which always gives life, we will see that it was Satan, always Satan, masquerading as an agent of God, who either kills or orders us to kill. 

The Old Testament had an UNDIFFERENTIATED view of God and Satan. The writers were not aware that Satan was an enemy of God. They thought he was an obedient angel of God, the Lord's "left hand" of wrath so to speak. So often, when the OT says "God said," it could refer to EITHER God or Satan saying it BECAUSE the OT Jews believed they were both just displaying different parts of God's nature. But, Jesus came to declare and differentiate the works of His Father from the works of Satan. Satan's death and destructions are NOT of God. Jesus came to destroy the works of Satan, not to claim them as His own. 1 John 3:8.

Simply put, the Old Testament was written from a perspective which saw Satan as an angel with a tough job, but who ultimately was just following the Lord's orders. Jesus, in contrast, revealed in His teachings and tone that Satan was violently OPPOSED to His Father's will RATHER than humbly submitted to it. Read most any Jewish religious reference material on Satan, and you will see they believe that Satan was the death angel who smote all the Egyptian firstborn, supposedly at the Lord's command. 

And not just the Egyptians. Jewish orthodoxy still largely believes that Satan is the grim reaper who ultimately kills all men at God's sole command. The book of Job shows Satan kills with sickness ("boils"), with nature ("a great wind"), with other violent men ("Sabeans with swords"), and with supernatural power ("fire from heaven"). Satan is a master assassin who kills a million different ways, but always, the Jews believe, at the express command of God. Jesus came in the New Testament to correct that view as error by revealing Satan to be a cosmic rebel, liar and murderer fro the beginning rather than an obedient angel merely fulfilling his purpose in creation.

As THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF JEWISH CONCEPTS by Philip Birnbaum says, "Satan...is...identified with the angel of death. He leads astray, then he brings accusations against man, whom he slays eventually. His chief functions are those of temptation, accusation and punishment. Under the control of God, he acts solely with the divine permission to carry out his plots." (Sanhedrin Press, page 594). Rabbi Benjamin Blech similarly writes, "Judaism sees Satan as a servant of God whose function is to set up choices between good and evil so that we can exercise our free will.... [His] apparent harshness is merely camouflage for divine concern and love." IF GOD IS SO GOOD, WHY IS THE WORLD SO BAD? Simcha Press, pages 7-9.

In the New Testament, we get a significantly different picture. While Hebrews 2:14-15 confirms that Satan, as "the devil," does indeed have "the power of death," Jesus' purpose in bearing the cross was to "deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage." Put even more bluntly in this passage, Jesus ascended the cross in order to "destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil." 

Jesus came to destroy the works of the destroyer. 1 John 3:8. But Jesus destroyed them not with His "alleged" counter-wrath, but with His sacrificial love. Jesus came to reveal that all forms of "death" and "violence" were enemies of God and never a part of His divine nature. 1 Corinthians 15:25-28 defines the dynamic of "death" as an "enemy" of God to be "put under His feet" until it's "destroyed."

So, if the Old Testament saints were confused and not able to differentiate the purposes of Satan and God, what does this imply about their ability to distinguish between the voices of God and the devil? Well, it allows for the absolute mother of all mistaken identities--- confusing the voices of God and Satan--- or, just as tragic, mistakenly combining their TWO voices into ONE bipolar voice. 

Like a high static radio, which sometimes receives two different signals at once, the Old Testament saints were hearing from both Yahweh and Satan, sometimes alternatively, and sometimes simultaneously. Without the indwelling Holy Spirit, they could not distinguish between both voices, again just like a radio receiving two different stations although the dial is only on one setting. The Old Testament saints assumed both voices were from God, that both WERE God. 

But, Jesus came to correct all misunderstandings about His Father. We have the anointing, BECAUSE of Jesus, to go back and properly divide Scripture, just like He did in Matthew 5:38-48. Jesus came to reveal His Father's light and Satan's darkness, something the Old Testament saints were clueless about. John 1:18.

DOES THE BIBLE REVEAL A GOD WHO KILLS? Richard Murray

DOES THE BIBLE REVEAL A GOD WHO KILLS? 

Rather than starting from the Old Testament and working forward, we need to start from the more illuminated New Testament and work backward. 

This really has more to do with us a better recognizing the New Covenant SPIRIT rather than the Old Testament LETTER, or, put another way, the spiritual fingerprints of Jesus versus the spiritual fingerprints of Satan. 

This is scripturally true regardless of whether we consider the devil a dark angelic “who,” OR instead as a dark dynamical “what”. Whoever or whatever the devil is, the term Satan symbolizes the dark energies which are untethered from the divine will and work death, fear, hostility, condemnation, accusation, and oppression within this Earth realm. 

Jesus came to destroy the works of Satan, not utilize them, and to reveal to us that do NOT come from the Father (1 John 1:3).Satan is the killing source, not God. (John 10:10). Satan is the "murderer from the beginning," not God. (John 8:44). Hebrews 2:14-15 says Satan has the "power of death," NOT God. 1 Corinthians 15 lists "death" as an "enemy" of God, not a friendly force He uses. In other words, Jesus simply doesn't kill. Death is not in His nature. Let's start from the New Covenant Jesus and work backward to the Old Covenant view of God as killer. 

Jesus reveals a God who NEVER kills, and never orders us to kill. But, in wrongly reading OT Scripture "by the letter," which Paul says in 2 Corinthians 3:6 to NEVER do, for "the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life," one could say God kills and tells many others like Joshua and Saul to kill whole tribes of women, babies and men.

But reading the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5:38-48 we are told in the last verse to "Therefore be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect." What is the "Therefore" there for? The previous 10 verses tell us what the Father's perfection is--- to turn the other cheek toward our enemies, to bless those who curse us and despitefully use us, to pray for our enemies rather than kill them, to go the extra mile and give the extra coat. Just like the Lord blesses the just and the unjust with needed rain and energizing sunlight, the Father doesn't kill His enemies, but instead overcomes them with good. Romans 12:21.

So, as "able ministers of the New Covenant,"(2 Corinthians 3:6), if we read the Old Testament with the New Testament Spirit, which always gives life, we will see that it was Satan, always Satan, masquerading as an agent of God, who either kills or orders us to kill. 

The Old Testament had an UNDIFFERENTIATED view of God and Satan. The writers were not aware that Satan was an enemy of God. They thought he was an obedient angel of God, the Lord's "left hand" of wrath so to speak. So often, when the OT says "God said," it could refer to EITHER God or Satan saying it BECAUSE the OT Jews believed they were both just displaying different parts of God's nature. But, Jesus came to declare and differentiate the works of His Father from the works of Satan. Satan's death and destructions are NOT of God. Jesus came to destroy the works of Satan, not to claim them as His own. 1 John 3:8.

Simply put, the Old Testament was written from a perspective which saw Satan as an angel with a tough job, but who ultimately was just following the Lord's orders. Jesus, in contrast, revealed in His teachings and tone that Satan was violently OPPOSED to His Father's will RATHER than humbly submitted to it. Read most any Jewish religious reference material on Satan, and you will see they believe that Satan was the death angel who smote all the Egyptian firstborn, supposedly at the Lord's command. 

And not just the Egyptians. Jewish orthodoxy still largely believes that Satan is the grim reaper who ultimately kills all men at God's sole command. The book of Job shows Satan kills with sickness ("boils"), with nature ("a great wind"), with other violent men ("Sabeans with swords"), and with supernatural power ("fire from heaven"). Satan is a master assassin who kills a million different ways, but always, the Jews believe, at the express command of God. Jesus came in the New Testament to correct that view as error by revealing Satan to be a cosmic rebel, liar and murderer fro the beginning rather than an obedient angel merely fulfilling his purpose in creation.

As THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF JEWISH CONCEPTS by Philip Birnbaum says, "Satan...is...identified with the angel of death. He leads astray, then he brings accusations against man, whom he slays eventually. His chief functions are those of temptation, accusation and punishment. Under the control of God, he acts solely with the divine permission to carry out his plots." (Sanhedrin Press, page 594). Rabbi Benjamin Blech similarly writes, "Judaism sees Satan as a servant of God whose function is to set up choices between good and evil so that we can exercise our free will.... [His] apparent harshness is merely camouflage for divine concern and love." IF GOD IS SO GOOD, WHY IS THE WORLD SO BAD? Simcha Press, pages 7-9.

In the New Testament, we get a significantly different picture. While Hebrews 2:14-15 confirms that Satan, as "the devil," does indeed have "the power of death," Jesus' purpose in bearing the cross was to "deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage." Put even more bluntly in this passage, Jesus ascended the cross in order to "destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil." 

Jesus came to destroy the works of the destroyer. 1 John 3:8. But Jesus destroyed them not with His "alleged" counter-wrath, but with His sacrificial love. Jesus came to reveal that all forms of "death" and "violence" were enemies of God and never a part of His divine nature. 1 Corinthians 15:25-28 defines the dynamic of "death" as an "enemy" of God to be "put under His feet" until it's "destroyed."

So, if the Old Testament saints were confused and not able to differentiate the purposes of Satan and God, what does this imply about their ability to distinguish between the voices of God and the devil? Well, it allows for the absolute mother of all mistaken identities--- confusing the voices of God and Satan--- or, just as tragic, mistakenly combining their TWO voices into ONE bipolar voice. 

Like a high static radio, which sometimes receives two different signals at once, the Old Testament saints were hearing from both Yahweh and Satan, sometimes alternatively, and sometimes simultaneously. Without the indwelling Holy Spirit, they could not distinguish between both voices, again just like a radio receiving two different stations although the dial is only on one setting. The Old Testament saints assumed both voices were from God, that both WERE God. 

But, Jesus came to correct all misunderstandings about His Father. We have the anointing, BECAUSE of Jesus, to go back and properly divide Scripture, just like He did in Matthew 5:38-48. Jesus came to reveal His Father's light and Satan's darkness, something the Old Testament saints were clueless about. John 1:18.

When the Old & New Testaments *Literally* Clash - Richard Murray

What are we to do when the Old and New Testaments "appear" to LITERALLY clash in meaning?

Here are a few examples.

The New Testament says Satan is the destroyer who wields "the power of death," NOT God. Hebrews 2:14-15. 

The Old Testament, by contrast, says God alone holds the power of death. Deuteronomy 32:39; Psalm 90.

Both can't LITERALLY (by the dead letter) be right. 

The New Testament says Satan is the afflicter and oppressor of men, not God, never God. Acts 10:38; John 10:10. 

The Old Testament says that God alone is the ultimate oppressor and afflicter of men. Deuteronomy 28:15-68; Psalm 90; Job 1:21.

Both can't LITERALLY (by the dead letter) be right. 

The New Testament teaches "God is light and in Him is no darkness at all" and that He has no connection to "evil" whatsoever, and to let no man say" otherwise, not even Old Testament men. 1 John 1:5; James 1:13-17. 

The Old Testament LITERALLY says God DOES have darkness within Him and that He IS the author and doer of evil. Amos 3:6; Isaiah 45:7.

Both can't LITERALLY (by the dead letter) be right. 

The New Testament says that ONLY good and non-harmful gifts come down from the Father of Lights in whom there is no shadow of turning. James 1:16-17; Luke 11:10-13. 

The Old Testament LITERALLY says God "delights" to afflict us with "marvelous...plagues,...  enemies, ...famines, ...destructions...and many other curses." God happily sends these oppressions directly our way straight from His wrathful hand until we are "utterly destroyed." Deuteronomy 28:15-68; Psalm 91.

Both can't LITERALLY (by the dead letter) be right. 

I could go on and on. The issue here is that the Old Testament had an undifferentiated view of God. They wrongly believed, due to their developmental limitations, that Satan was God's "angry voice," His "left hand of wrath," His "obedient servant angel" who was merely carrying out God's express commands to tempt, punish and eventually kill all men.

But the above view is not at all consistent with New Testament teaching regarding Satan (regardless of whether we consider the devil a dark angel OR a dark dynamic working within the corporate psyche of humanity). 

Satan is NOT fulfilling God's will, but OPPOSING it on every level. New Testament Scripture proclaims Satan a cosmic rebel, the accuser of the brethren, the tempter, a liar, a murderer from the beginning, the destroyer, a thief, a devouring lion, the god of this world, and the prince of the power of the air. Jesus came to destroy Satan's works, not implement them (1 John 3:8). Jesus came to fully differentiate His Father's nature from Satan's nature. He came to cull away and forever sever all Satanic attributes which had been wrongly attributed to His Abba's character by the OT saints. 

The early church fathers recognized these sometimes conflicting ideologies between the Old Testament and the New Testament. The fathers certainly encouraged us to not always read OT passages literally. They believed that Scriptures had to be illuminated by the Holy Spirit before their deeper meanings could rightly be understood. 

Even though there were on occasion some "literal" misstatements in the OT due to their developmental limitations from not being indwelt by the New Covenant Pentecostal Spirit, what they wrote was nonetheless of great value. But, their writings just had to be excavated, elevated and renovated  to comport with the "better" understanding of the New Testament revelation.

Here is the perfect example. God confessed in Isaiah 13:3-18, in the first person no less, to wrathfully causing: a nation of women to be raped, a nation of infants to be executed by smashing them all to pieces against rocks, a nation of children to be mercilessly impaled with arrows, and, finally, a nation of men to be executed by the sword. 

To claim that Jesus (or His beloved Abba) were rapists would, of course, be blasphemy. 

And yet, and yet, and yet----- Isaiah 13:3-18 says (quoting God in the first person) that God's 'burning wrath' DOES do all this pillaging, raping, and killing. 

So what's the point? Merely this. If you won't accept the 'rape confession' as coming from the lips of Jesus, then don't dare accept any OTHER Old Testament quote as coming directly from Jesus' lips IF it portrays His Father as being a plague-sending, famine-bringing, fire-flinging, bone-crushing, child-drowning, throat-slitting, homicidal, genocidal, and infanticidal God.

However, if you ARE a strict Biblical literalist, then you must believe that God's 'burning wrath' 'hunts' us down and directly CAUSES: 

--women to be raped, 

--infants to be dashed to pieces against the rocks, 

--children to be impaled by arrows

--houses to be looted

'I MYSELF...SUMMONED MY WARRIORS ...to EXECUTE MY ANGER....The LORD of hosts IS MUSTERING AN ARMY FOR BATTLE. They come from a distant land...the LORD AND THE WEAPONS OF HIS INDIGNATION, to DESTROY THE WHOLE EARTH. Wail, for the day of the Lord is near; it will come like DESTRUCTION FROM THE ALMIGHTY!....See, the DAY OF THE LORD COMES, CRUEL, WITH WRATH AND FIERCE ANGER, to make the earth a desolation, and to DESTROY ITS SINNERS from it....I WILL PUNISH THE WORLD for its evil, and the wicked for their iniquity.... I will make mortals more rare than fine gold....Therefore I will make the heavens tremble, and the earth will be shaken out of its place, at THE WRATH OF THE LORD of hosts in the day of his fierce anger. Like a hunted gazelle, or like sheep with no one to gather them, all will turn to their own people, and all will flee to their own lands. Whoever is found will be THRUST THROUGH, and whoever is caught will fall by the SWORD. Their INFANTS will be DASHED TO PIECES before their eyes; their HOUSES will be PLUNDERED, and their WIVES RAVISHED. See, I AM STIRRING UP the Medes AGAINST them, who have no regard for silver and do not delight in gold. Their BOWS will SLAUGHTER the YOUNG men; they will have NO MERCY on the FRUIT of the WOMB; their eyes WILL NOT PITY CHILDREN.' Isaiah 13:3-18. 

The above statement literally claims to be the Lord talking in first person, so we can't say anybody else is exaggerating or misstating His character. Nor can we cop out by saying that God was just this way on this one occasion because the Lord 'changes not.' (Malachi 3:6). Either this 'baby bashing brutality' and 'man-smashing malice' and 'woman-raping evil' is in His nature now and forever-- or it isn't-- it's that simple.

Will literalists own this passage and just declare that God's burning wrath makes Him a child-killing, rape-committing, man-impaling killer? Or, will they continue to hide behind silly euphemisms that these brutal acts are just part of God's 'mysterious ways,' His 'higher ways,' His 'justice and holiness' being dispensed?

Do we really want to go here, to this dark corner of primitive savagery? I think not. 

Instead, let's choose a better hermeneutic. Let's choose Jesus as our hermeneutic. His flawless nature is written in all our consciences, waiting to be consulted and catalyzed into love. 

Don't let literalism kill your conscience. Those who loosen their 'death-grip' on Scripture will surely find their 'life-grip' on the Spirit of love and light."

Had enough yet? There are MANY, MANY, examples. So, what is the reason for these misstatements about God's character?  

All the violence, plagues, killings, oppressions, curses, afflictions, destructions and damning which the Old Testament says comes from GOD must NOW be re-evaluated with New Testament light. We must look at the particular Old Testament passage which is attributing "evil" to GOD and ask if it is referring to THE GOD OF THIS WORLD or is it referring to THE GOD OF OUR LORD JESUS.

The problem was that the Old Testament had an “undifferentiated" view of God. They lumped Satan into their image of Yahweh. They simply did not differentiate God from the Devil in any meaningful way. 

The result? A bipolar God who is up and down, good and evil, hateful and loving, cruel and gentle, vengeful and forgiving, murderous and peaceful.

The Old Testament certainly has many accurate and priceless versions of the wondrous acts of the true Yahweh, THE GOD OF OUR LORD JESUS. The Old Testament frequently reflects the riches of Jesus' love, virtue, blessing, mercy, miracles and generosity. 

But, not always. Too often, because they are largely clueless about Satan's identity, the Old Testament mars and deforms the image of God by attributing the works of Satan to God.

Jesus came to heal and reveal. He came to heal our image of a wrathful and hateful God by revealing His Father-God to be ALL love and ALL light. 

Jesus came to teach us how to differentiate the works of the true God from the works of Satan. 

Jesus IS that dynamic differentiation. 

Satan, as the FALLEN GOD (or dark cosmic sickness) afflicting this WORLD, operates in all forms of stealing, killing and destroying. 

God, on the other hand, as fully revealed by the RISEN CHRIST of the RISEN FATHER, operates only in forms of life --- the giving of it, the protection of it, the blessing of it! John 10:10.

If it’s not good it’s not God.

Self-Effacement in Philemon of Gaza & Simone Weil - Ted Hill

Self-Effacement - What I am learning from a 6th century monk and a 20th century mystic.

Philemon of Gaza Meditates Mark’s Gospel - edited by Daniel Bourguet
Gravity and Grace - Simone Weil

If you have not come across this contemplative treasure of the 6th century monk Philemon of Gaza yet, it is worth searching it out! Bob Ekblad with Tierra Nueva and The People’s Seminary Press has introduced me to this treasure.

Philemon of Gaza meditating Mark 1:21-28 where Jesus heals a man with an unclean spirit. Philemon recognizes Jesus seeing this man in deep pain unable to pray.

Philemon says this about the man: “A man who has prayer taken from him while in a place of prayer has lost his humanity.” (Bourguet, 15) This halted me. Jesus sees differently than I do. I seem to be locked into the problem/solution mode of evaluation. Jesus sees someone who has lost their being. Jesus also sees what it takes to have that humanity restored. The following is what Philemon of Gaza contemplates most as he meditates the Gospels: humility or effacement. This is the word Daniel Bourguet chose to use found in the following quote:

“Jesus said nothing. He had set a man free in order to restore him to prayer, and now was silent to make room for the man’s prayer. He stepped back so as not to disturb the man’s dialogue with God, effacing himself before both the man and his Father … the humble Jesus!” (Bourguet, 16, emphasis added)

I read this and can almost picture the face of Jesus as he removes Himself from this restoration of this man’s humanity - “so as not to disturb” - so tender a moment Philemon is describing in his meditation. Effacing is an erasing or to become inconspicuous - Jesus didn’t disappear but He refused to disturb what was happening. Nothing in Him needed to be seen or heard at this moment.

A few days before I read this meditation, I read Simone Weil’s ‘essay’ on Self-Effacement and was shocked by something so similar I even wonder if this 20th French Mystic had access to the French manuscripts of Philemon of Gaza as there is such close connection - at least in my mind - of the following Weil quote to Philemon:

“... I act as a screen. I must withdraw so that he may see it. I must withdraw so that God may make contact with the beings whom chance places in my path and whom he loves. It is tactless for me to be there. It is as though I were placed between two lovers or two friends.” (Weil, 88, emphasis added)

Earlier in the essay she says it in a less imagined way when realizing how much deprivation her presence has between God and His creatures: “I can do something for all that and for God, namely to know how to retire and to respect the tete-a-tete.” As I connect her unsettling words, that seem to be leaning toward unhealthy self-deprecation, to Philemon of Gaza’ meditation, I hear something different in her words and a few questions come to mind: Is she emptying (kenosis) herself in this effacing like Jesus did and does? Is she seeing the beauty of what God longs to see but, because of consent, cannot see until she removes herself?

In my mind, those questions lead away from self-deprecation (and any sense of will-less-ness) to an extraordinarily subtle humility, a humility that I can only sense as I read.

Weil’s subtle humility seems to be tied to a yearning to be present in the world without being present, or maybe without being the cause of distance between God and someone God loves. I am not quite sure if that is what she is saying but I am simply choosing to settle into these humble words of humility and yearning:

“I do not in the least wish that this created world should fade from my view, but I do wish that it should no longer be shown to me in person. To me it cannot tell its secret which is too high. If I go, then the creator and the creature will exchange their secrets. To see a landscape as it is when I am not there … When I am in any place, I disturb the silence of heaven and earth by my breathing and the beating of my heart.” (Weil, 89 emphasis added)

Self-Effacement is not simply an action I control such as removal or withdrawal or destruction/eraser of self, it is recognizing what our presence does and how our removal also does something essential. It cannot do (be a “screen” or “stop[ping] the light of God,” p 87) what it does without being in the way, the screen, or realization of the tactless nature of my presence. Getting out of the way is then intrinsically linked to first being in the way … is it not? Jesus was in the way of the pain of man with the evil spirit and once this man’s humanity was restored to prayer, Jesus stepped out of the way.

I want to be one who gets in the way of God so I can then know what it looks like to get out of the way and see in the posture of Christ-like humility the beauty of God’s love, the ‘secrets’ between the Creator and creature!

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Weil, S. (1997). Gravity and Grace. University of Nebraska Press.

Bourguet, D. (ed) (2023). Philemon of Gaza Meditates Mark's Gospel. The People's Seminary Press.

Homily on the Conscience - St. Dorotheos of Gaza

St. Dorotheos of Gaza

"There are no ‘little things’"

When God created man, he breathed into him something divine, as it were a hot and bright spark added to reason, which lit up the mind and showed him the difference between right and wrong. This is called the conscience, which is the law of his nature. This is compared to the well which Jacob dug, as the Fathers say, and which the Philistines filled up. [cf. Genesis 26:15] That is, to this law of conscience adhered the patriarchs and all the holy men of old before the written law, and they were pleasing to God. But when this law was buried and trodden underfoot by men through the onset of sin, we needed a written law, we needed the holy prophets, we needed the instruction of our Master, Jesus Christ, to reveal it and raise it up and bring to life through the observance of the Commandments that buried spark.

It is in our power either to bury it again or, if we obey it, to allow it to shine and illuminate us. When our conscience says to us, ‘do this!’ and we despise it and it speaks again and we do not do it but continue to despise it, at last we bury it and it is no longer able to speak clearly to us from the depths where we have laid it. But like a lamp shining on a damaged mirror, it reflects things dimly and darkly, just as you cannot see the reflection of your face in muddy water. We are found unable to perceive what our conscience says to us so that we think we have hardly any conscience. No one is without a conscience, since it is something divinely implanted in us, as we have already said, and it can never be destroyed. It always patiently reminds us of our duties, but sometimes we do not perceive that we are despising it and treading it underfoot. This is why the prophet bewails Ephraim and says, ‘Ephraim prevails against his adversary and treads down judgment.’ [Hosea 10:11] The adversary here is ‘conscience.’ Here the Gospel says, ‘Come to an agreement with your adversary while you are on the way with him, lest he deliver you to the judge and the judge to the warders and they put you in chains. Amen, I say to you, you shall not leave the place until you have paid the last farthing.’ [Mt. 5:25-26] Why does he call conscience the adversary? It is called the adversary because it always opposes our evil desires and tells what we ought to do and we do not, or what we ought not to do and we do; and it accuses us, and so conscience is called our adversary, and Our Lord admonishes, ‘Come to an agreement with your adversary while you are on the way;’ for the ‘way’ as St Basil says, is this world. [Homily on Ps. 1; PG 29:200-21]

 

Let us be zealous, brothers, to guard our conscience for as long as we are in this world and not to neglect its promptings in anything. And let us not tread it under foot even in the least thing, for you can see that from the smallest things, which of their nature are worth little, we come to despise the great things. When we begin to say, ‘What is it if I say just these few words? What does it matter if I eat this morsel? What difference if I poke my nose in here or there? From this way of saying, ‘What does this or that matter?’ a man takes evil and bitter nourishment and begins presently to despise greater and more serious things and even to tread down his own conscience and so, at last destroying it, bit by bit, he falls into danger and finally becomes completely impervious to the light of conscience.

 

Therefore, brothers, see to it that we do not neglect little things; see to it that we do not despise them as of no account. There are no ‘little things’ – for when it is a question of bad habits, it is a question of a malignant ulcer. Let us live circumspectly, let us give heed to trivial matters when they are trivial, lest they become grave. Doing what is right and what is wrong: both begin from small things and advance to what is great, either good or evil. Therefore Our Lord warns us to take account of our conscience as one giving evidence of his own experience and saying ‘Be careful, simpleton, see what you are doing, come to an agreement with your adversary while yet on the road’ and he shows the danger to be feared: ‘Lest he deliver you to the judge, and the judge to the executioner and he throw you into prison.’ And what else? ‘Amen, I tell you, he shall not go from there until he has paid the last farthing.’ [Mt. 5:26] Conscience then warns us, as I said, about what is good or what is bad and shows us what to do and what not to do, and in the world to come it will accuse us. Therefore it says, ‘Lest he deliver you to the judge…’ etc.

 

In attending to our conscience, we need to consider many different factors. A man needs to satisfy his conscience towards God, towards his neighbor, and towards material things. As regards God: he must not despise God’s precepts, even those concerning things which are not seen by men or those things for which one is not accountable to men. A man should obey his conscience in relation to God; for example, did he neglect his prayer? If an evil thought came into his heart, was he vigilant and did he keep control of himself or did he entertain it? He sees his neighbor saying something or doing something; does he suspect it’s evil and condemn him? To put it simply, all the hidden things that happen inside us, things which no one sees except God and our conscience, we need to take account of. This is what I mean by our conscience towards God.

 

To respect our conscience towards our neighbor means not to do anything that we think may trouble or harm our neighbor in deed, or word, or gesture, or look. For there are gestures, as I very often tell you, which hurt our neighbors and there are looks capable of wounding him and, to speak plainly, whatever a man does readily, knowing it gives his neighbor a bad thought stains his own conscience because it means that he is ready to harm or trouble his neighbor-and this is the sort of thing I mean by keeping a good conscience towards our neighbor.

 

As regards keeping a good conscience in respect of material things: not to use things badly, not to render things useless, not to leave things about, and when we find things left about not to leave them even if they are of small value, but to pick them up and put them in their proper place. Not to be slovenly about our clothes or wear them out too quickly: for example, when one can wear a shirt a week or two, to want to wash it every day and so by constant washing wear it out too quickly and always be asking for new. These things are against the conscience. Similarly about the bed, often when one can make do with a small mattress, one asks for a large one; and when one has a blanket, one wants to exchange it for a new one or a better one for the sake of prestige or from mere thoughtlessness. Or where a rush mat is adequate one asks for a carpet and is quick to protest unless one gets it; or one approaches one of the brethren and says, ‘Why has so-and-so got such a thing and I haven’t?’ Such a man is not on the right road. Or a man hangs his tunic or blanket in the sun and through negligence leaves it there to spoil-this is all against the conscience. It is the same about food: a man is perfectly able to satisfy the needs of his body with bread, vegetables, and few olives, but he gives up doing so and seeks something more tasty and more expensive-all this is against the conscience.

 

The Fathers tell us that a monk ought not to give his conscience occasion to reproach him about anything at all [Apo. Agathon 2; PG 65:109]. It is necessary, therefore, brothers, to keep watch over ourselves always and to keep ourselves away from all these things lest we fall into danger. For Our Lord also will bring an indictment against us, as we have said above. May God grant we listen and be attentive to these things, lest the sayings of our Fathers turn out to be for us words of condemnation.

“And Jesus Closed the Book” - Richard Murray

Here is a radical idea: sometimes we need to CLOSE the Bible and BEHOLD God. 

"And He [Jesus] CLOSED the book...and sat down. And the eyes of all... were fastened on Him. And He began to say to them, “This day is this Scripture fulfilled in your ears.” And all bore Him witness and wondered at the gracious words which proceeded out of His mouth."

Jesus here in Luke 4:17-22 declares that He, in their immediate midst, IS the fulfillment of the messianic promise of Isaiah. This promise stated that messiah would be anointed to preach the gospel to the poor, that He would heal the brokenhearted, preach deliverance to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, and to preach the year of favor from the Lord.

But, before Jesus manifested this incredible truth, He first had to CLOSE THE BOOK. This allowed every eye to focus solely on Him. The Bible needed to be closed so it would not be a distraction from relating to the manifest presence of God right THEN and THERE.

The Bible is meant to be a launching pad which thrusts us into ACTUAL Heavenly interactions with the presence of God, just like it occurred here. 

But, if we keep the book frantically open all the time, our attention will be divided, continually racing, and we will never be able to fully relate to the God who sits down and speaks gracious words to our hearts and minds all the day long. We can be so legalistically chained to the book that we will never be able to wholeheartedly set our spiritual eyes on the God of here and now---- and therefrom listen and behold His grace with a single eye.

The Bible is wonderful, profitable and vital in countless ways, BUT it is not Jesus. Jesus is Jesus. The Bible, when used properly, will always promptly point us to a direct encounter with Jesus by first closing the book, and then listening to the Holy Spirit's inner glowings, showings, and knowings as they are quickened to our inner beings. 

The Bible becomes much more special whenever we do open it, if we also remember that it is just as important to close it for a time so that we can allow the ministry of direct Spiritual encounter to occur. 

Allowing the Scriptural promises to blossom this way into direct encounter with the Lord is what it's all about.

One last point, after Jesus closed the book declaring that the Isaiah passage was fulfilled in Him THAT very moment, the crowd’s response was to try to hurl Jesus off a cliff. 

They failed. 

And the crowd might want to suggest the same fate for us when we suggest that sometimes closing the book is needed to open our eyes. Their wanting to frantically keep the book perpetually open was actually an deadened excuse to keep their spiritual eyes closed to the living truth.

THE CO-SUFFERING CONSCIENCE by Bradley Jersak

THE CO-SUFFERING CONSCIENCE by Bradley Jersak

Awareness

1. I am aware of the gifts I’ve been given as blessings from God, family, and the body of Christ. I will use these where I’m able, let go where I can’t, and seek to use them in service of others.

2. I am aware of the harms I’ve done along the way, including those I hurt who are not yet in a place to forgive or to heal. I will co-suffer the pain I caused as a consequence, bearing it as I remember them in prayer.

3. I am aware of the prevailing culture’s aggressive commitment to retribution, humiliation, and public shame to cut off pathways to redemption of the sinner. I’m aware of the fear they have sown in me.

4. I am aware of the mercy I’ve received through healing communities who hold me accountable for my life and my obligation to pay forward that same mercy to anyone who needs it as God gives me the opportunity and within the limits God prescribes.

5. I am aware of the humility required to continually resist pedestals that those I help are tempted to erect, remembering the great suffering that occurs when idols topple. 

6. I am aware of the need to centering my redemption rather than my failures and to testify that God has removed our transgressions from us.

The Co-suffering Conscience

People with addictions who have harmed others live with the reality that some of those they’ve harmed are not healed and may never fully recover in this lifetime. Some of those they’ve injured cannot and likely will not forgive them or be reconciled on this side of eternity. Appropriate boundaries for their safety often mean that the opportunity to offer a direct amends is shut off.

For the addict with an awakened conscience, the daily torment of this reality can either lead to relapse or to such depths of self-loathing that they despair of life. Perhaps worse, the self-loathing is no longer about the pain they caused others but becomes focused on the pain they feel, making it all about themselves. The moral injury of their own actions energizes a new locus of self-centeredness in self-pity. The memory of those they hurt thus fuels the character defects that drove the addiction in the first place.

What to do? The solution is not found in the defensive posture of denial or of forgetting and simply moving on as if nothing happened. That's dangerous and it’s not actually forgiving oneself. It’s repression of shame that will resurface under pressure.

One possible way forward: “the co-suffering conscience.” The idea here is that instead of indulging in our own shame-based pain OR the panacea of denial, we allow the conscience to bear (to co-suffer) whatever pain our past actions continue to cause the other today and to offer that suffering to God on their behalf as intercession. 

ONLY in the act of praying do we allow ourselves to feel their pain because only there will it cease to be selfish or dangerous. Only there is it redemptive—only there is it love. 

We continue this practice for as long as we suffer the pangs of a stricken conscience and beyond that, for as long as we are aware that the people we hurt continue to suffer the harms we caused. A lifetime of intercession will be a lighter burden than a lifetime of shame and self-loathing and will be far more effective for our recovery and for theirs. 

We will discover that in centering the person’s well-being by praying for their liberation and flourishing, the transgression itself will be and has already been forgiven and removed. But now we will begin to experience the truth of infinite mercy by lifting our eyes to the throne of grace (the Cross) and surrendering ourselves and them into the loving care of the Good Shepherd, rather than forever lowering ourselves in ineffective self-debasement (which is still an obsession with the self).

I wonder if this approach can apply to anyone for the actual harm their conscience knows they have done—not just as addicts, but as parents and children, as pastors and teachers, as soldiers and police, as sinners. Wherever they have caused physical and emotional injury to another and moral injury to oneself—and where the wounds that persist cause ongoing dysfunction and alienation. This is one way we can be reconciled to our accusing conscience that saves us from self-centered shame, from denial, or from trying to control outcomes or extract forgiveness from our victims.

The active ingredients to the approach are (1) a strict adherence to consciously staying at the Mercy Seat, (2) surrendering the ones we have harmed into God’s care, (3) focusing the prayers on blessing their flourishing, and (4) encountering the love of God for ourselves.

Bottom line: coming with our tormented and tormenting conscience to the Mercy Seat of God, our suffering is transfigured into co-suffering intercession that liberates us from the machinations of the squirming self that seeks an exit from shame.

Generally, the person in this place has bottomed out on the compulsion to make everything right (they know they can’t), with their obsession over self-disqualification, and the delusion of manipulating others or managing God with their prayers. But the ego is sneaky… so even “doing this right” must be surrendered and, instead, offer our pain and theirs into the loving care of the Divine.

Fleeing to Stay Alive: Tales of Forced Displacement in Venezuela & Gaza - Bruce N. Fisk

Fleeing to Stay Alive:
Tales of Forced Displacement in Venezuela and Gaza
Bruce N. Fisk, NEME Senior Research Fellow

From Panamá’s shiny capital we drove our rental as far as we could toward the border of Colombia. My wife and I had flown from Peru to attend a fortunate cousin’s unforgettable wedding, but we were as eager to meet some of the forgettable unfortunates desperately squeezing through the “narrow waist” of the American hemisphere. After years roaming the Middle East, we counted a number of Palestinian refugees among our friends, but thus far these Latino refugiados en movimiento existed for us in only two dimensions, as fodder for news reports and topics of awkward conversation.

Five hours on the road brought us to an impassable tangle of jungle, mountains and rivers. The Darién Gap as it’s called is the only break in the Pan-American highway—the 30,000 mile thread that weaves through fourteen countries from Alaska to Argentina. In Spanish it’s el Tapón, The Plug. For migrants and asylum seekers it’s the largest obstacle on the path from South America to their land of hope, the U.S.A. 

More than half a million souls dared the 100-kilometer Gap last year (2023). That’s 1,400 per day. They travel solo, as couples, as single parents with children. They form small groups along the way, many retracing the path of relatives who have sent money, and Instagram photos that romanticize immigrant life in the U.S. They encounter thieves and coyotes (human smugglers). They face abuse and sexual violation. They fear snake bites and injury, wolf attacks and drowning. 

Our drive ended in the dusty shambles of Lajas Blancas, a reception hamlet where migrants, emerging from the jungle on foot or in dugout canoes, find a few services and handouts. UN and Red Cross vehicles came and went. Trekkers clutched brand new sweatshirts bestowed by some NGO, oddly out of place in the tropical heat. 

CLICK HERE to Download & Continue Reading: Fleeing to Stay Alive

 

 

A Meditation on Power - David J. Goa

6 June 2016
Sahakarini[1] AGM, Camrose

A Meditation on Power

David J. Goa

Members of Sahakarini, friends.

When Gail Stolee wrote to me some six weeks ago and asked who I might suggest to speak on power, I responded with a number of names, including those in our midst and nearby who have exercised political power, bureaucratic power, and leadership of various sorts.

I thought of those who have never known power. The young men (largely) in the Near East and parts of Asia join ISIS because, as Thomas Friedman has pointed out, “they have never held power, never held a job and never held a girl's hand.” ISIS gives them a wife, a paycheque, and the opportunity, or so they say, to change history.

I thought of the many in our midst who are daily deprived of the straightforward creative path where power is at rest with love and justice.

I remembered my old friend of blessed memory, Heiko Schlieper, the marvelous historian and iconographer who loved to repeat Lord Acton’s little formulation but repeat it with a difference. “Power corrupts, and impotence corrupts absolutely.”

Gail talked with me a day or so later and asked me to reflect on power this evening with you. My first thought, given that my childhood was in this place with its many evangelical songs and hymns, that I could simply sing one of these, “There is power in the blood, wonderworking power in the blood.”

Such requests galvanize the mind. I have rarely thought about power. It has always been below the surface. And now, an NGO I admire sets power as its annual theme. Is there something I have misunderstood, perhaps about myself and how I am in the world; something about power I have never really got my mind around?

My childhood world viewed power with suspicion. Any talk I heard of it was critical. Pastors occupied positions of power, and we knew just how much of a threat that was to their souls. It’s an old pietist insight, and I got it in spades. Institutions have power, and since the church so often squandered its proper vocation, certainly other institutions did as well. How easily institutions turn inward, become the captive of an inner circle, forget their public work, and reorient their effort to the careers of those who hold power—often masked as institutional development.

And political power seemed so often a nasty business. Even Premier Ernest C. Manning became the director of banks . . . after retiring, having built his political career on critiquing them. So I absorbed with my dear mother’s milk a visceral knowledge of the exploitative power over others and manipulative power using cunning psychological means to gain power over another. But I also learned, and largely took for granted, the call to a nutrient power that involves a “temporary or permanent inequality of status in relationship but is power used for the benefit of another,” the power (although we called it grace) of parenting, the works of healing through mercy and the ministry of blessing for the sake of the world. Only much later in life, when I found myself in positions of very modest authority, did I begin to experience what some have called “integrative power,” the power that relies on mutual influence and cooperative freedom of all parties involved; the power with others. It is the gift central to Sahakarini, as you know better than I.

And then, after talking with Gail, I was off to Turkey and Bosnia on our Ronning Centre work associated with the secular and public religion, a theme, I suppose, that has a lot to do with power, with love, and with justice.

Every day of the last month I have thought a little about power. It is a word that slips around in our culture so easily and with such imprecision.

Power play, reminiscing of my hockey playing days.

Power ball, the fates line up.

Empowerment, a word on the lips of those who have colonized and their revolutionary opponents.

Power and politics, such an odd formulation since they seem the same to me.

Power elite, powerful, and powerless.

Power to the people.

The power of forgiveness.

Graham Green’s marvelous novel The Power and the Glory flitted across my memory.

In Turkey, I saw the two-prop plane arrive and slowly taxi toward a contingent of women and men dressed in military uniforms. The plane taxied past the paratroopers standing at the ready, fingering the trigger of their assault rifles, surveying, alert even to the slightest movement from inside the terminal. It was an oddly-shaped plane a little larger at the back. I assumed it carried some military dignitaries, or perhaps President Erdogan was arriving unannounced. As the back hatch of the plane opened and became a ramp six soldiers marched forward. A dozen civilians, unable to hold rank, rushed past them and into the plane. After three minutes the soldiers emerged carrying a coffin. It was draped in the blood-red flag of Turkey with its image of the new moon. The civilians followed convulsing in grief. Another “martyr” had arrived home. His life had ended twenty hours ago with gunfire in the city of Tunceli in the Eastern province of Turkey.

Earlier that morning in the city of Nevshir in Capadoccia I had listened attentively to the call from the minaret that swept over the city. “Come to prayer, come to salvation. Prayer is better than sleep.” Five minutes or so after the call had faded, the muezzin returned to the loudspeaker and repeated the Bismillah: “Allah, the most compassionate, the most merciful.” The Quranic text used as a salutation when someone has died was spoken: “We are from God and will return to God.” A slight somberness settled over the street where I was walking. Ears perked. People stopped for a moment to listen and hear the name of the deceased, his or her village and parents' names, and the deceased’s occupation. Then the hour of the burial and the location were announced. The muezzin closed with the words: “May the mercy of God be upon our martyrs,” a prayer heard across Turkey some 900 times in the last year as the systematic assassination of police and military by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) unfolded. At the airport, waiting for the gate to open so I could cross the tarmac to my plane to carry me home, I saw the coffin bearing Sargent Caner Erdan to his childhood village, his final resting place.

The power of war, the power of hate, the power of enmity. Power struggle.

On the plane, I remembered the Black Panthers who, in the 1960s, were fed up with Dr. Martin Luther King’s non-violent movement. They patrolled the West Side of Chicago with automatic weapons, distributed milk to children in schoolyards, and lived like monks with a single purpose. When Robert Maynard Hutchinson introduced the Cistercian Monk Thomas Merton to a group of Black Panthers at the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, California, their visceral response was, “We are monks too.” I remembered the early morning when a number of them were killed in an apartment not far from where I lived on the Westside of Chicago, murdered by police, some still in their beds. The founder of the Kurdish militants, the PKK, shares the Marxist-Leninist ideology with the Black Panthers, an ideology that sees the power of violence as central to how history is meant and must unfold.

The power to purify the world.

Is it power or impotence or some deformed way that these two mingle that sees death as the only way to exercise power, to excise impotence?

Earlier in the month I was invited to Sarajevo to speak at an international conference of Religious Studies scholars. All the scholars were Muslim. We were asked to consider how Religious Studies ought to be taught, given the rivers of blood flowing in our world. For those of us who are Christian, Jesus Christ is the Prince of Peace, one of his names that Muslims also treasure. The Prophet Muhammad taught that the pathway called “Islam,” the pathway of peace, of Salaam, comes to us when we surrender our self-interest, idealizations, and the enmity we have come to treasure, an enmity that sees the world and other human beings through a crimson prism. Only such surrender opens a place in the heart where enmity may turn to empathy.

In Sarajevo and Mostar peace has broken out. The memory of war is ever-present. Pocked-marked buildings from the incessant shelling for the better part of three years. Walk the graveyards; the birth dates vary. Most death dates fall between 1993-1995.

The power of war.

The power of enmity.

The power of difference, corrupted and wedded to fear. Faceless power.

The greater jihad Islam teaches is the struggle for power in the human heart: the power of fear and desire or the power of “the spirit that makes all things new.”

Muhammad Ali left this world on June 3^rd, three days ago. Now there was power, both in his right jab and left hook and certainly in his dance, his butterfly dance. I saw that power expressed in the basement of Swedish Covenant Hospital on the north side of Chicago, where I worked at night doing mechanical maintenance. John Crook came in at 11 pm to tend the hospital boilers through the night. He could sleep because if anything went wrong the alarms were so loud they would, as he said, “wake the dead.” He had outlived three wives, had worked the railway for god knows how many years. As we got to know each other, I realized I was talking with a man who was conceived three or four years after his parents were freed from slavery. Muhammad Ali was on his lips.

Rudy Smith taught me all I needed to know to not burn the hospital down. He was a golden glove champ in the South before coming to Chicago. Rudy was a lean beautiful human being, gracious to the end. We were strapping on our tool belts the day after Ali had won the heavyweight championship. Rudy was chanting, “Dance like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” The competitive hockey player in me surfaced, and I was raised by dukes. “Show me Rudy, show me.” Rudy rose on his toes and hit me twenty times before I could move. It was masterful. He embodied the champ. Black was beautiful and we tussled until I called for mercy, a mercy he joyously granted.

The Power of grace and movement.

The power to express freedom.

One commentator said that as Muhammad Ali’s physical power waned, with the Parkinson’s disease, his power increased. Even when he shook like a leaf and lost the power of speech he still danced and played.

Here is a lesson in power. He joined the Nation of Islam in 1964 much to the astonishment of many lovers of boxing. The Nation of Islam, with its strange racist theology and reading of history, saved many young men and women and gave them a model of sobriety, good work, and healthy pride. It did so for Muhammad Ali as well. He went on the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, where he saw the whole of the Muslim world gather and, like Malcolm X, realized that Islam is a call to recover the dignity of all human beings. He became an orthodox Sunni Muslim and later embraced a Sufi teaching. His rhetoric turned to the power of love.

His strength was made perfect in weakness. May his memory be Eternal.

Let me finish with a few words of insight from the great philosophical theologian Paul Tillich who wrote a book titled Love, Power and Justice. In that work he explored the ambiguity and confusion around these three words that are so central to theology and philosophy. Without these three words ethics would be mute, and our disciplines of psychology, sociology, and political theory barren.

Tillich argues that love, power and justice are part of our being as human persons. We cannot escape their exercise and will exercise them in a disordered way if we do not hold them tenderly together.

Tillich discusses the compulsory element of power, the way power moves in us simply because we live in the world and encounter each other. It lives in us just as love does, just as justice does. His question: “If love is united with the compulsory element of power, where are the limits of this union? Where does compulsion conflict with love? It conflicts with love when it prevents the aims of love, namely the reunion of the separated. Love, through compulsory power, must destroy what is against love. But love cannot destroy him (or her) who acts against love.” When power is integrated with love and justice, it works to save and fulfill the person crippled by deformed power. It does so by transforming that which is within in him or her that is against love.

Sahakarini, or so it seems to me, is a labour of love engaged by all of you. The power to heal that you exercise in your work in partnership with others, transforms the lives of many and, if I have heard a number of you correctly over the years, that partnership has transformed you and Camrose as well.

Love, justice, and power lay down together in a verdant field.   

[1] Sahakarini was a community based NGO in Camrose, Alberta . It brought people in this jewel of a town together around collaborative work such as water wells and schools in partnership with those in communities in a number of countries.

Goldilocks and the Three Bears: An Allegorical Read – Ron Dart

Goldilocks and the Three Bears: An Allegorical Read – Bradley Jersak

Goldilocks and the Three Bears is a much loved and much read tale that can be read at a simple literal level (or with varied moral reads) but it can also be read at a more complex and layered allegorical  level. First, though, there is a short history of the story to be told. The tale was initially published by Robert Southey (High Tory Anglican Poet Laureate of England from 1813 until his death in 1843) in 1837 as The Three Bears. It was not a young girl who entered the bears home but an old woman. Then, in 1850, Joseph Cundall turned the old woman into a young child called Silver-hair.  And, as the story developed, Goldilocks replaced Silver-hair, hence Goldilocks and the Three Bears. And, now we turn to the read and layered interpretation of the evocative tale.

Goldilocks was a restless child at home, at odds with her parents and eager to see a bigger world. Such is a legitimate and necessary part of the journey—weaning from parents, individuating, tradition of upbringing not speaking to soul or life direction. The journey of Goldilocks is a perennial one.  It is one thing to be “free from” something but another thing to be “free for” the next phase of the pilgrimage through time. We must always be alert that we are not just changing one cage for another—such is at the centre of so much religious and political culture wars, past and present.  

Goldilocks lacked discernment in the “freedom for” and so she unwittingly entered the home of 3 bears, the bears absent and the home inviting—such is often innocent entering the world of competing experiences.  It was just a matter of time before innocence met experience but Goldilocks was unaware of the threats to her existence, bears and humans often at odds, the underlying myth of the story unfolding and to be read as such.  

Goldilocks does, though, enter the home of the bears and she finds 3 bowels of porridge—one too hot, one too cold and one just right. Needless to say, in the path of life there are those who too emotional, too charismatic, too intense, too irrational, Dionysius the god—avoid such! But, there are also those who are too cold, too rational, too aloof, Apollo the god, political ideologies and religions veering in both directions. But, the porridge that is just right blends the best of the thoughtful and the imaginative, emotions and reflection---and yet, and yet--there is more!

Goldilocks then turns to the three chairs---one is too high, another moderate but still not right, the smaller chair just perfect and yet, once sat on, Goldilocks breaks it—the insight not to be missed---be wary of being too sophisticated, too high culturally, too aesthetic but also too middle, too bourgeois, too addicted to the middle way—Nietzsche once said, “Blessed are the balanced for they will be bland—Blessed are the moderate for they will be mediocre”. Aristotle beware!   Goldilocks found the smallest chair to her liking and yet, once sat on, she broke it. A danger on the journey is finding the place we seem at peace in and yet there is more and such means we need either consciously or unconsciously to break it to grow deeper and walk further on the trail of life. Or, as Eliot aptly suggested “Old Men ought to be explorers….”

And finally, it was to the 3 beds—the one too hard, the other too soft and again the bed that was just right. There are those in life that can be too hard, too critical, too convinced of their worldviews and ways, often judgmental of others---and others can be too soft, too uncritical, grounded and rooted in nothing, Dante’s upper level of the Inferno—such are so open they invite and welcome demons unaware. Goldilocks finds the bed that is just right and falls asleep in it—such is yet another danger. We think we have found a thoughtful and meaningful explanation for our journey and we drift off into sleep and cease to ask deeper and further questions about ourselves, friendships, community and the larger political and public world we live in.

It is often the tragedies and suffering of life, painful experiences, like the bears that Goldilocks encounters, that wake us from our slumber and sleep.   It is as we engage the bears (of various shapes and sizes, some smaller and less threatening, others challenging and more difficult and the larger bears that are almost too difficult to face into yet necessary to do so).

Goldilocks does flee from the wake-up experience of being in the bears den, learned much about the deeper and more complex journey and returns to her parents (to a larger Tradition) a sadder but a wiser person—she understands her parents (Tradition) in a more sophisticated and mature manner.  So, what seems to be the sad romp of the innocent girl becomes the process of education and transformation, the metaphors of porridges, chairs and beds each lessons to be internalized, none to be absolutized—la lotta continua!

I suspect Southey might be pleased with such a read, literal and moral level giving way to a deeper ontological one of being becoming being.

amor vincit omnia

Ron Dart       

          

"HOLY BEPUZZLEMENT" - Bill Thiessen

HOLY BEPUZZLEMENT

What is the alternative? I ponder.

Is it a matter of enduring the unknown?
Or resolving the puzzle by living it
As if it were a maze?
Labyrinth?
Not knowing the end?
The ultimate destination?
Do I follow another

Or do I forge my own path?
Is there a guide, or a map
For a spiritual journey?
Or do I just follow another?

However, I am determined
To forge my own path
One that is personal, enriching
I will attend social events which inspire
I will optimize my strength and desire

I am made in the image of my father
--and (unknown and known) mothers.
I bear the marks of a genetic code.
I have employed them In myriad contexts.

Beginning at home--on the farm
Near Venice (school)--honing basic skills
I was always motivated to duty
Obediently, I followed father’s example
Never did I stray--

I know I did not measure up
But I thrived on seeking to obey
Dutifully.

What do I do now?
How do I exercise life lessons?
Am I losing my mooring??

To do or not to do
As in “To be or not to be”

Bth April/24

A Theology of Reality Abp Lazar Puhalo

A theology of reality & the human condition

A theology of reality describes the human condition instead of creating dogmas about what we think it should be. It looks at the realities of the human condition to try to understand them in the light of understandings that have developed through medicine, through psychiatry and neurobiology, and shape our theology around the way humanity actually is instead of the way we fantasize it to be.

Without a theology of reality, we deprive people of their authenticity—of life—with some of our dogmas and doctrines. We need to accept the authenticity of human life and then shape our theology around that because otherwise, we end up excluding certain people and certain conditions from God's love… as if we ever had power over dispensing God's love ourselves.

A theology of reality also includes a theology of the world condition or situation.

We now live with a whole new set of realities—things we've learned are the realities of humanity. But much of our theology talks around the realities of human existence and the realities of social structures in the world. And we try to impose an almost fantasy idea about what society and culture should be and what humanity should be. But we don't talk about what humanity is.

Review of Diane Kalen-Sukra's "Save Your City" by Ron Dart

Diane Kalen-Sukra, Save Your City: How toxic culture kills community & what to do about it (5^th Anniversary Edition: 2024).

Review by Ron Dart

Cultural, religious, educational, and political wars are not new to our all-too-human journey. Sadly, with the rise of instant media, “cancel culture,” “wokeism,” and simplistic ideological posturing, a rather crude notion of polarization has come to define trendy progressivism and reactionary conservatism. In the process, healthy civic virtues and civility in the midst of the fray have been mostly banished.

The evocative and compelling beauty of the 5^th edition of Save Your City is the way Diane Kalen-Sukra, drawing from the best and wisest of political thought and activism, overcomes the toxic culture that kills community and shows us what can be done about it. In short, this bounty of a missive reflects on our contemporary crises and what, practically, can be done to bring health and healing to local communities again. Needless to say, such insights can also be applied to higher levels of cultural and political life.

Save Your City is both a short yet large book, short in length but a library of information packed into it. The missive is divided into three parts with an “Appendix” worth sitting with for many a lingering moment:

Part 1: “Welcome to Bullyville,” rightly so, walks the curious and attentive reader through the “City Gates” and “Surviving Uncivil Society.”

Part 2: “Journey to Sustainable” points the way out of the malaise in a positive direction to “Sanctuary,” “Join the Renaissance,” and “One Ship, One Destiny.”

Part III: Sustainable Culture” ups the challenge to yet higher and more significant levels, “Global Call for Values Education” and “Love is the Greatest Civic Virtue.”

The timely and timeless Appendix holds the reader and offers a mature path to a “Roadmap To Renewing Civic Culture.”

Is Save Your City a naively optimist manifesto, as some hard realists and cynics might argue (the position of such skeptics leading to impotence and paralysis), or does this book provide a pathway and opening forward to engage the tough issues in a demanding yet thoughtful manner? Diane has been in the thick of the fray for many a decade; hence, Save Your City is acutely aware of the low culture that often dominates much public discourse—she is realistic enough to know if such toxicity continues, communities, in time, will be no more.

So, such a book is realism at its most focused and engaged. Save Your City, for those with a background in Classical education, draws from the lessons learned from such a heritage and the lessons learned both for good and ill of the wisest women and men of the past. History, in short, is replete with many tragic and sad tales, for those who ignore both Cassandra and Tiresias, and Diane knows of what she speaks because of where she sees from. We do well to heed her seeing and speaking, vision, and committed activism.

I would not hesitate, for a moment, to warmly and highly encourage one and all to purchase, inwardly digest, and be shaped and massaged in mind and imagination, soul and body by Save Your City—the future of meaningful civic virtues and public civility hinges on understanding what needs to be understood at a deeper level to overcome toxic culture at many insidious and acrid levels.

Ron Dart
Professor Emeritus
Department of Political Science
University of the Fraser Valley
Abbotsford BC                                                       

Guest Post on "The Age of Sayida Aisha (r.a.)" - Safi Kaskas

Age of Sayida Aisha (r.a)

logical and critical analysis of the age of Sayida Aisha r.a

Abstract

The article presents a critical analysis of the age of Sayida Ayesha (r.a) at the time of her marriage to the Prophet Muhammad (S.A.W.W). It challenges the commonly held belief that she was six or nine years old by offering mathematical and historical evidence to suggest she was actually 19-21 years old.

**Key Points:**

- **Asma's Age:** Asma, Ayesha's sister, was 10 years older than Ayesha and died at 100 years old in 73 A.H. This places Ayesha's birth in 605 C.E.

- **Marriage Age:** Ayesha married the Prophet after the Battle of Badr in 2 A.H., which corresponds to 624 C.E., making her 19 years old at the time.

- **Surah Al-Qamar:** Ayesha recalled being a young girl when Surah Al-Qamar was revealed in 614 C.E., which would make her an adult at the time of her marriage.

- **Hisham ibn `Urwah's Narratives:** The reliability of Hisham ibn `Urwah's reports, which claim Ayesha was six or nine at marriage, is questioned due to his old age and memory issues, as well as contradictions from other scholars.

- **Arabic Language:** The term 'bikr' used for Ayesha refers to an unmarried lady, not a child, further supporting the claim that she was an adult.

The article concludes that Ayesha was not a child at the time of her marriage, and this assertion is supported by historical records and linguistic analysis. It emphasizes that the Quran rejects the marriage of immature individuals, aligning with the evidence presented that Ayesha was a young adult.

Trusting God with Everyone’s Eternity - Kenneth Tanner

A good God would never leave humans with a message of non-universal salvation because humans simply cannot be trusted with one.

If God is malevolence and not benevolence none of this matters, of course, but some argue that a good God forever withholds salvation from a lot of us.

The all-too-familiar power plays of Christian history are a collective cautionary tale about what happens when we are certain of an eternal hell for most of us.

We burn heretics and exile anyone our judgments consign to damnation. We divide, we separate, we sort humans, as if we were God because humans behave like the gods we worship.

We dehumanize, demonize, and erase anyone we consider an infidel. Hiroshima and Auschwitz were, after all, the work of ostensibly-baptized nations.

We contemporary American Christian don’t execute heretics but we seem adept at torturing souls and wounding hearts, of banishing and shaming so many, separating persons from our communities under the cloak of some political or cultural notion that is not at the center of gospel trust.

Instead of certainty about the destiny of each human, the tradition gives us something better: radical trust in the God Jesus reveals.

In exchange for the fear that drives so many of the punishments we exact on ourselves and others, we are taught to welcome the judgment of God, who alone can without harm remove the tares from our virtues and harvest the wheat from our vices, who will with sanctifying fire make us the humans he intends us to be.

We are left after all the dust settles—after we listen to and sit with the tradition’s wisest hearts, especially the first Christians, who read the Scriptures as though Jesus Christ is what it means to be God in eternity and in all the times eternity contains—with a God who wants to gift us with permanence.

When perfect love casts out fear, when we trust the God who will judge us when we die, we live lives of radical solidarity with, courageous forgiveness for, all of us. We embody the reconciliation of the world with God.

I see this redeemed and peacemaking disposition in Elder Porphyrios:

“I am not afraid of hell, and I don’t think about paradise. I just ask God to be merciful to the entire world and to myself.”

Trusting God with Everyone’s Eternity - Kenneth Tanner

A good God would never leave humans with a message of non-universal salvation because humans simply cannot be trusted with one.

If God is malevolence and not benevolence none of this matters, of course, but some argue that a good God forever withholds salvation from a lot of us.

The all-too-familiar power plays of Christian history are a collective cautionary tale about what happens when we are certain of an eternal hell for most of us.

We burn heretics and exile anyone our judgments consign to damnation. We divide, we separate, we sort humans, as if we were God because humans behave like the gods we worship.

We dehumanize, demonize, and erase anyone we consider an infidel. Hiroshima and Auschwitz were, after all, the work of ostensibly-baptized nations.

We contemporary American Christian don’t execute heretics but we seem adept at torturing souls and wounding hearts, of banishing and shaming so many, separating persons from our communities under the cloak of some political or cultural notion that is not at the center of gospel trust.

Instead of certainty about the destiny of each human, the tradition gives us something better: radical trust in the God Jesus reveals.

In exchange for the fear that drives so many of the punishments we exact on ourselves and others, we are taught to welcome the judgment of God, who alone can without harm remove the tares from our virtues and harvest the wheat from our vices, who will with sanctifying fire make us the humans he intends us to be.

We are left after all the dust settles—after we listen to and sit with the tradition’s wisest hearts, especially the first Christians, who read the Scriptures as though Jesus Christ is what it means to be God in eternity and in all the times eternity contains—with a God who wants to gift us with permanence.

When perfect love casts out fear, when we trust the God who will judge us when we die, we live lives of radical solidarity with, courageous forgiveness for, all of us. We embody the reconciliation of the world with God.

I see this redeemed and peacemaking disposition in Elder Porphyrios:

“I am not afraid of hell, and I don’t think about paradise. I just ask God to be merciful to the entire world and to myself.”

Ron Dart: The Anamnesis Podcast

Whom Would Jesus Burn? Florian Berndt

Addressing the increasing number of recent posts arguing for a god that can’t make up his (its?) mind if he (it?) should love or destroy us, I’ve been arguing that a god that doesn’t look like His Son is not the Abba of Jesus. This obviously implies that one deals with the real Jesus, rather than a projection of our anger, guilt and fears, an idol of which there are plenty of versions “out there” (2. Corinthians 11:4).

The more disturbing was a recent post of someone claiming to proclaim the “real Jesus” as a rebuke against moral laxity, posting, “Jesus will burn evil, unrepentant people with unquenchable fire … (so repent),” based on Matthew 3:12: “His (Jesus') winnowing fan is in His hand, and He will thoroughly clean out His threshing floor, and gather His wheat into the barn; but He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire” (Matthew 3:12).

Sadly, I am seeing this kind of rhetoric emerge with concerning rapidity, even from people who should know better, who without doubt have at some point encountered the real Jesus, but who for some reason are reintroducing the idea of a retributive deity back into their theology and spirituality.

This should not surprise us too much, since we all can fall prone to this error – the most famous example probably being the Apostle Peter, who in one moment received revelation about the identity of Jesus from Abba, and in the next breath attempted to oppose His mission – just after Jesus warned them about the influence of the Pharisees and Sadducees (in Matthew), as well as Herod (in Mark), all holding retributive views about God (Matthew 16:23).

In Luke’s Gospel the phrase spoken to Peter in this narrative, “get behind me satan (adversary)” (Luke 4:8), is in the context of Jesus being tempted to fashion His ministry according to the retributive ways of what John and his community call the “world” with all its conflict creating cravings (1. John 2:17-16). Would He try and prove His identity by turning stones into bread, show of His power by jumping off the pinnacle of the temple, or exercise it by bowing down to the ways of the empires of this world, rather than pouring out His life in love, as His Abba does? That was His temptation, and it still is ours.

 

But when John the Baptist proclaimed that He that baptizes in the Holy Spirit, would “burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire” he was speaking in the tradition of the Jewish prophets (Matthew 11:10-12), as the messenger that was sent beforehand (a reference to Malachi 3:1-2), to a people under foreign occupation, waiting for their deliverance.

 

Interestingly, the Lord, for Whom the messenger prepares the way, is described as “a refiner’s fire, like a launderer’s soap” – two different images that have nothing to do with the destruction of people, but the cleansing of the temple in which He suddenly appears - Malachi 3:3 – an event that is described in all four Gospel accounts: Matthew 21:12–17; Mark 11:15–19; Luke 19:45–48; and John 2:13–16.

 

While I’ve heard people use this incident to claim that Jesus will employ violence in the future, thereby going against His own teachings in the Sermon on the Mount and other places, we don’t read of anyone getting hurt, no bleeding people lying on the ground begging for mercy, no wounded animals. Instead we read of him driving out the animals and overthrowing tables (John 2:15-16). He was prophetically enacting (like the prophet in Jeremiah 19) the overthrow of the temple, that would occur years later, because Jerusalem was continuing its program of violent insurrection against the occupying Romans.

 

It was the same warning that Jeremiah before Him announced against those who attempted to violently overthrow their Babylonian oppressors. And while John the Baptist might have anticipated - like most people at the time – the Messiah destroying Israel’s enemies, Jesus’ message was different, as shown in His first message in the synagogue, after having rejected the retributive ways of the systems of this world (Luke 4:1-29). As He later explained in a message to his disillusioned cousin John, the reign of His Abba was not established in violence, but manifests in healing, deliverance, and restoration (Matthew 11:4-6).

 

Now, why was John the Baptist offended (verse 6)? Because Jesus did not fulfill his expectations of violently overthrowing the Romans and establishing Jerusalem as the capitol of the world under the rule of retributive justice, while he suffered in prison for confronting Herod. Instead it was Jerusalem that got burned to the ground years later (Matthew 24; Mark 13 etc.), meaning that those who rose up in violence to fight for retributive justice, suffered the fate they wanted to inflict upon their enemies (Matthew 26:52)

 

Rather than retributive justice we see a God Who turns His enemies into friends when Jesus baptized His disciples in Holy Spirit, with the manifestation of flames of fire, and 3000 people, who formerly shouted for the crucifixion of the Messiah get added to His body of followers, after being confronted with what they had done (Acts 2:1-41).

 

For the same God Who is an All-Consuming Fire (Hebrews 12:29), is Love (1. John 4:16) and Light - which is fire – in Whom there is no darkness (there is no two-faced god) – the very message Jesus proclaimed (1. John 1:5), the Father of lights in Whom there is no shadow of turning (James 1:17), which means He has no dark side, and hence, we His children cannot live double-minded either (James 1:8).

 

Here I have heard it said that, “Jesus came as a Lamb (in gentleness), but He will return as a Lion (violently),” as if He lived like a doormat during His earthly life (e. g. Luke 4:30 etc.), or as if He was crucified because He couldn’t stand up for Himself (e. g. Matthew 26:53; John 10:18 etc.) – not to mention that the letter to the Hebrews speaks about Him being the same, “yesterday, today, and forever” (Hebrews 13:8).

 

Further, in reference to the Lion of Judah, that is supposed to support the aforementioned claim of Him returning in violence, there is no lion in the book of John’s Revelation. Instead, we see the prophet turning around when the voice declares to him, “Behold the Lion of the tribe of Judah, Who has triumphed,” and we see a slaughtered Lamb instead (Revelation 5:5-6). Because, this is how Jesus overcomes the forces of evil (Colossians 2:15).

No, Jesus doesn’t burn evil and “unrepentant” people with “unquenchable fire” (in ancient texts, including the Jewish and Christian scriptures, describing a fire that will not go out until it establishes its purpose). In fact, He said, “Everyone will be seasoned with fire” (Mark 9:49) – the unquenchable fire of His love. This is the same love that the two sons in Jesus’ parable of the loving father were confronted with (Luke 15:11-32), melting the younger son’s shame in the father’s embrace, and calling the older one to give up his ideas of performance and retributive justice. That is the Abba of the real Jesus, the only true God that ever existed ( John 17:3).

Triune Belovedness & Belonging - Cherith Fee Nordling

Triune Belovedness & Belonging

(Ex 3:1-6, Ps 93; Rom 8:9-17; John 3:1-16)

Trinity Sunday. Christ Church Anglican 5/26/24

When I finished sixth grade, my dad put up a basketball hoop in our driveway. My three brothers spent lots of lazy afternoons shooting baskets and talking nonsense. But some of our conversations I won’t forget, like the day we got talking about heaven.

What would it be like? How would we see God if he lives in unapproachable light? How would we recognize each other without our bodies? Would we fly? Sit on clouds? How would we handle the boredom if, after 10,000 years, “we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise than when we’d first begun”? We could barely make it through a Sunday morning service!

We knew that God ‘so loved the world’ but we weren’t sure he liked it, at least not as much as we did. We wondered why so many cool things – like glaciers, and whales, and basketball – were going to disappear when Jesus took us all to that place reserved for only angels, souls, and God.  

We looked forward to meeting Jesus, but not in a body. Sure, he temporarily needed one to teach and do miracles, die and resurrect, but he dumped it at his ascension, right? And though we prayed for his return, we hoped he would take his time. Not least because we wanted to stay up late, drive, get married, have kids, stop sinning. We still wanted to live so much human life.  

Clearly, we didn’t know the first thing about the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.

We didn’t know that he became like us so that we would become like him in our humanity—and his!

Or that he’d lived and died and been raised not with a divine power pack but in the power of the Holy Spirit, precisely so that we too could live by the Spirit.

We didn’t know that resurrection was about getting our creaturely human lives back, made new, fitted for life in a renewed heaven on earth.

Or that in Jesus’ ascension our human lives were joined to the very life of God, perfect human life enfolded into the Trinity forever, united to the shared love of the Father, Son and Spirit.

Even though we’d been baptized into the One Triune Name, we didn’t know that we would find our Belonging, our Belovedness, and our most human being, at a Trinitarian table, in God’s Triune life.

They say that what you don’t know can’t hurt you. I beg to differ.

We all carry preset notions of God and ourselves and others. Unexamined beliefs shaped by our experience that we simply assume to be true, even if we can’t really say what they are or why they matter.

Nicodemus had the same problem. Like us, he was raised in a religious system of deeply held beliefs and rules. As an expert in Jewish law, an interpreter of Israel’s Scriptures, he tested things and people by what he knew. His curiosity about Jesus was because Jesus’ miracles sounded so much like what Yahweh had done and promised in Scripture, in Israel’s history. Hence his acknowledgment of Jesus as one sent from God.

Clearly, Jesus’ response about the extraordinary means necessary to see God’s Kingdom didn’t fit the categories for this man, who had little imagination for metaphor,let alone what God might be doing in Jesus.

“Born Again?

Through a mother’s womb?

Nonsense.

Can’t be done.”

Well, says, Jesus, it’s already been done, and it’s the only Kingdom life there is on offer. Reborn life. Something must happen to Nicodemus that he cannot do for himself or understand in advance. Jesus’ invitation assumes that Nicodemus has already been placed in the birth canal of God’s new covenant by the Spirit. The invitation is to come on out and live, as a child of Yahweh, who loves the whole world so much that he won’t give a Messiah to crush it but his Son to save it. As a gift.

But transactional religious ideas always get in the way of gift. They’re too busy telling God what he can and can’t do, what people deserve, or don’t, who gets a seat at the table and who doesn’t, all the while attempting to secure their place by doing things for God, for which  God owes them—hiding failure, fear, and shame.

It’s so hard to receive a gift we can’t earn, so hard to be set free from defending religious ideas in order to be freefor, saved for, eternal life with the Triune God of self-giving love.

Jesus’ own disciples had a hard time receiving what they’d been given. As we heard last week, Philip was done with talk and mystery and waiting. He just wanted to see the Father—a Father he couldn’t seem to recognize in Jesus. Jesus, in turn, told Philip, and us, as plainly as possible, that when we’ve seen Jesus, we’ve seen our Father. They look like each other, act just like each other. Only he can show us our Father, our Abba who art in heaven—which is exactly what he has done.

To see what God is like, we look to Jesus, Son of God and Mary.

Which means we must also look to Jesus to see what it means to be truly human, wearing the DNA of his mother and the stardust of the cosmos. Fully human like us, tempted in every way that we are. He gets what it means to be born into a weird family, to be deeply loved yet also suspect and unloved. To be poor, oppressed, betrayed, delighted, disappointed, tired, aroused, cranky, tempted to misuse love and power for his own gain.

Yet he’s unlike us at the most critical point; when tempted to break, he is without sin. Instead, he trusted and delighted in the love of our Father and obeyed him out of love for the world. That obedience, minute by minute, attentive, prophetic, wise, parabolically just and merciful, loving those considered most, and least, human, more than his own life. Healing, delivering, and obeying, all the way to a final Passover that would be the death of him for the resurrection of the world.

Trinity Sunday reminds us that the ascended, still-human Jesus is God’s faithful embodiment of grace and truth, standing at the center of God’s Kingdom, entering the depths of our depravity to reorder it toward life.

Crowned with glory and honor and Yahweh’s own name, not simply in his divinity but his humanity, Jesus has faithfully brought our life into the very life of God and kept it there, as God’s way of being Triune, forever!

Taking what is ours and giving us what is his, our brother and Lord still serves us on his knees, washing not only our feet but our whole lives.

As our High Priest, he remains united to our suffering, priesting our joy and sorrow, our hope and despair, in his intercessory life, speaking on our behalf to his Abba and ours using the most intimate, infant, of names. He embodies the prayers we have no words for or awareness of and invites us to join him in what he’s still doing in the world.

By the Spirit, he mediates our brokenness and our perfection until our final homecoming.

In Jesus, the Father always sees us finished, so the Trinity isn’t stressed about how we turn out. Their love for us is complete.

Yet, they love us without measure, in the moments of our daily lives. Because it’s here that we let the Triune God shape us as beloveds as we learn to trust that love and discover its faithfulness and forgiveness.

 We discover that our life in the Spirit is a gift of love, killing off what is killing us, empowering us to be free enough to die to ourselves, just like him.

Conformed to Jesus’ image, the spitting image of the Father, we too take on the family likeness. As Hebrews reminds us, “both the one who makes people holy, and those who are made holy are of the same family. So, Jesus is not ashamed to call us brothers and sisters.

Thus, our Father seats us with Jesus to enact his justice and mercy, giving us authority as firstborns that is always shaped by the intimacy of life with our Abba who named himself to Moses in the bush of fire and later called himself a “Father” to Israel, protecting and nurturing her. This Father, says Paul, who raised Jesus from the dead by the Spirit, will also give life to our mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in us, seating us human children at the Triune table forever.

This means life in the Spirit is nonnegotiable. It’s the only human life there is, now and forever. And only Jesus can show us the Spirit—“the Lord and giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified,” fully, equally God among us.

This is not some invisible, shy, God who assures us of salvation, not a force who convicts us of sin or illuminates the Scriptures between whose pages we’ve trapped him. This is God, with us, hovering over the waters of first creation with life-giving breath; hovering like a dove over a flood, bringing a branch from a new tree of life as a promise of new creation; hovering over the waters of the Red Sea like a pillar of fire and cloud; and later over the Jordan. A millennia later, the Spirit is hovering in that same river once more in the form of a dove, resting on the Father’s beloved Son, who is being baptized in the waters of our repentance so that we too might hear our Abba’s voice speaking his love over us, as children are reborn.

About six hundred years ago, a monk named Andrei Rublev painted an icon of the Trinity based on the story of God coming to Abraham in Gen 18 in a three-personed, angelic visitation,

Rublev’s icon is a two-dimensional picture window of God’s reality, through which WE are gazed upon, into which we step, opening a reality waiting to greet us and gather us in.

This is what “Trinity” is shorthand for: the Father loving the Son loving the Spirit loving Father loving the Son, and so on; Mutually indwelling, self-giving, other-fulfilling love.

God’s Love is not a commodity. The Trinity does “have” an allotment of “love.” No, the Trinity is endless, eternal love that loves you and me and all creation in the same way the Father Son, and Spirit reciprocally love one other as one God. A creation made not because God needs to love, or be loved, but simply for the joy of including what is not God in God’s perfect love.

As we look at this icon for a moment, Rublev wants to remind us of all of this. [Size, colors, faces, poses/gazes, imagery, open table, emphasis on divine identity/character, relationality, personhood]

By the Spirit we feast at the Table of the Son of God, the only truly human person there has ever yet been. As we set our minds on “things above” right here where Christ is, where our life “is now hidden with Christ in God,” we come together in the Eucharist and offer his “one-anothering” life to each other, laying down our privilege and divisions, our conflicts and brokenness, to receive individual and communal healing and wholeness, forgiveness and human holiness. Yet, also to be empowered to share in the sufferings that Jesus still suffers with and for us all and also to minister healing as a sign of resurrection.

This meal is a lifeline to his own person and cruciform power to the world. As one theologian has put it, “He takes us, as those who have died, risen and ascended with him, into his own movement from the world toward the Father and empowers us to join with him in transforming the old world into a new, divine world, a world of the Spirit.” [Hans Urs von Balthasar]

So come. You were made for love by Father, Son, and Spirit, whose love makes the world new, new like a reborn baby.  Find your place at the Triune table of belovedness and belonging. That place has your name on it. It was set for you, with you in God’s heart and eyes on you, before the creation of the world. The bread is abundant, and the wine is flowing freely.

Look around the table at one another. Until the day you see Jesus face to face, you get to see him in every human brother and sister.

Come ready to laugh, because the joke’s on us all, thinking we could ever earn a place at a table for which we were made.

Laugh with the relief of it. And when you’ve eaten, run and tell the world that God so loved them that he gave his only Son to bring them home as well. Then pass the wine again. There’s always more than enough. There always has been. In the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. Amen.