Harry Potter What If

I'm a big fan of the Harry Potter series. It's entertaining, and it explores some interesting questions. I've been thinking lately though that it would have been more interesting if the Sorting Hat had put Harry in Slytherin. Could Harry have still foiled Voldemort year after year?

The way I imagine it, the only thing necessary to get him in Slytherin would have been for him not to have met Ron on the train the first year. Then he could have become friends with Draco Malfoy instead. Would Malfoy have turned Harry toward evil, or could friendship with Harry have brought out a better side of Malfoy?

I like how J.K. Rowling develops the idea that Harry can't do any of what he does without the support of the people around him. But could he do it with Malfoy and Pansy Parkinson at his side instead of Ron and Hermoine, Professor Snape watching over him instead of Professor McGonagall, and (gasp) Filtch as his inside connection instead of Hagrid?

Granted, none of this would have any appeal if you didn't already know the story as it actually does unfold, but one of the things that bugs me about the story is that, in spite of a few hat tips to the idea that people aren't either all good or all bad, it's not at all hard to tell who's good and who's bad, with the notable exceptions of Snape and, to a lesser extent, Kreacher.

On the other hand, there's a certain way in which precisely this makes Harry's story a fitting model of the Christian life (and I'm guessing this is true of other moral/ethical systems as well), because Harry himself is the one character we see struggling with good and evil. And, as Harry looks out around him, all the other "good" people are pretty uniformly good, and it's generally only in "bad" people that he can see anything bad. It's my experience that life feels like that, though I've long since come to terms with the fact that it's an illusion.

So maybe, just maybe, the story with Harry in Gryffindor can be seen as an allegory for the way life looks from the inside looking out, and a rewriting of the story with Harry in Slytherin could be an allegory for life as it actually is. Which forces me to ask again, would the "good guy" win in that scenario?

Justification by Faith: A Case Study in Biblical Authority

In my previous post, I explored the idea of the authority of the Bible. I suggested that the authority of the Bible is more like the authority of wine than it is like the authority of a constitution. That is, its authority lies precisely in its ability to transform the reader and that for purposes of authority it should not be treated as an objective document which may be consulted and from which judgments may be derived.

I can't remember if I said that this is the authority the Bible should have or that's the authority the Bible does, in fact, have. It occurred to me last night that the latter is most certainly true, whether we pretend the Bible's authority is something else or not. It also seemed to me that a brief case study was in order.

I'd like to look at the question of justification by faith during the Reformation.

Although there are those who would rather die than admit this, there is a growing consensus that Luther was wrong about his idea of imputed righteousness. If this is indeed the case, would we then conclude that the Protestant cause in general was wrong? No.

Look at the way the story of Luther is always told: Luther was a diligent monk, struggling against a troubled conscience. In great fear over the certainty of his salvation, he wrestled over and over with the scriptures, until one glorious day while wrestling with Paul's letter to the Romans he discovered the glorious truth that it is by God's righteousness, and not our own that we are justified (insert sound of angels singing here).

Now granted that Luther was wrong, he was wrong precisely here at this most pivotal moment in the development of his Reformation insight. But consider, the above story is based entirely on how Luther himself told the story after his theology had completely gelled. Of course, the truth was more complicated than that.

I'm saying that Luther's actual discovery was more basic than what he later claimed. I'm saying that the heart of Luther's insight was that God loves sinners, not (only?) the righteous. And in this regard he was completely correct. Having received this light, Luther was totally transformed and invigorated enough to challenge the theology of his day to bring this good news to all who would listen. A movement was formed and "the Word of the Lord grew mightily and prevailed" as Acts 19:20 says.

Of course, there were those who held a vested interest in the theology of his day, and they immediately set people to the task of figuring out what was wrong with Luther's reading of the Bible. Now, as these scholars were studying to prepare their opposition, they latched on to the truth that God transforms sinners, and they propagated this Biblical truth to all who would listen, and again "the Word of the Lord grew mightily and prevailed" in a movement now known as the Counter Reformation (or Catholic Reformation, if you prefer).

It turns out that both of these basic insights were Biblically sound, and so both could be defended by referencing the Bible as though it were a dogmatic document, but both were cast in theologies which were not quite so Biblically sound, and so neither was unassailable from that same perspective. And so the "Bible-as-document" model of Biblical authority left us with a huge gaping wound in the Church.

However, in spite of this, because the Bible actually exercises its authority through transformed lives, both sides of this gaping wound thrived and grew and brought renewal to the Church, at least until the leaders who affiliated themselves with these movements managed to use the conflict as an occasion for deadening the faith of many.

Biblical Interpretation and Authority.

A friend recently dropped me a note in response to some thoughts I had shared with him about biblical interpretation. Like me, he's from a Protestant background but loves the Catholic tradition. He said he's basically torn between "believing that Petrine doctrine is the only way out of the theological mess" or "agreeing with Luther that individuals reading the text with the guidance of the inner light is the only way to subjectively legitimize interpretations."

Now, I'm not sure Luther really felt the need for "the guidance of inner light." As I read him, he seemed to think that the literal meaning of scripture was plain for everyone to see and anyone who didn't read it like him was clearly succumbing to the leading of the devil. Luther was easy to get along with like that. On the other hand, my friend is a scholar of comparative religions, and I know he doesn't really believe the Petrine doctrine in a literal way any more than I do.

So that had me mulling things over again. What does the Bible really mean, and who says so?

On the one hand, I'm a bit of a Luther fanboy, and I tend to agree with him on the fact that the meaning of scripture is plain enough. On the other hand, fanboy or no, I disagree with him on an awful lot of the fine points of his reading, so it's kind of silly for me to agree with him on simply reading the plain meaning. On the third hand, the backdrop to the above mentioned discussion was a comment I had made of a bit from the Foreward of Pope Benedict's book Jesus of Nazareth in which he talks about the process by which the community gathered around the sacred texts reinterprets the texts, and how this is good and reasonable because the text created the community and the community created the text and so the text was somehow open to the reinterpretation all along. So there's something there of an ecclesial authority in interpreting the text which I believe and accept.

But the more I think about it, the more I think the problem is with how we try to locate authority relative to the Bible. We say the Bible is the final authority on matters of faith and doctrine, which I hope we understand to really mean that God speaking through the Bible is the final authority on matters of faith and doctrine. But the really big problem is that our interpretation of the Bible tends to become the de facto authority which we are trying to follow.

That is, we recognize the authority of the Bible and tip our hat to it, and we try as diligently as we are able to uncover the meaning of the Bible, and then we effectively legislate our behavior on the basis of the meaning we arrive at as our best guess at the meaning. This is essentially the logical outcome of the Protestant model, and I'm going on record right now saying it's wrong.

So what's the alternative?

First, let me suggest that in try to arrive at the meaning of the Bible, we're already a bit off track. The Church has long recognized multiple meanings embedded in Scripture. Some of these have been dismissed in modern times as silly, pious imagination. Nevertheless, as modern reading has given way to post-modern reading, we've been forced to acknowledge the simple fact that words, inspired and otherwise, tend not to have a single meaning.

And so I think we do well to look back at the history of how the Church has read various passages and see what may be gleaned from it. I think we also do well to consult Jewish traditions. And we do well to try to come at the text fresh (as if such a thing were possible) and hear it with new ears and respond. In all of these ways we will find many treasures, old and new (Matthew 13:52).

Does the Bible really mean all these things? Maybe. Maybe not. I think perhaps we should look at biblical interpretation as being somehow akin to wine tasting. A person can pick up a glass of wine, take a gulp and glibly say, "It tastes like wine." But an experienced wine taster may come along side and suggest that this person look for the hint of fruitiness in the finish. And perhaps the person takes another sip and finds this fruitiness. And so on. Merely having heard the suggestion of what's there gives us the ability to discern it where perhaps we did not before.

So that's interpretation. But what about authority?

I'd like to suggest that the authority of the Bible is also more like the authority of wine than it is like the authority of a constitution. Wine exercises its authority by the mere fact of having been imbibed. Even so with the Bible. The authority of the Bible is, and should be, in the effect it has upon us, the way in which it can transform us, not as something we can point to in order to support our arguments or to justify ourselves. It may be that I have misunderstood the meaning of the Bible, but in the act of engaging it and seeking it's meaning, I am transformed. It may have more to say to me, and the same passage may have more work to do with me, but having been transformed to the extent I have, I am to act as I have been led.

And so when I apply this to a controversial issue, such as same sex relationships, it's a mistake to lay out a list of verses and say, "These are the passages which justify my position." Instead, I can simply say, "Jesus calls me to love my neighbor, and this is what that seems to me to mean," and I am more genuinely placing authority in God through Scripture than if I were to cite chapter and verse.

You and I may even arrive at different positions in this way. That's OK, I think. We're not done. As long as we're both still opening ourselves to the authority of the Scripture and the action of the Holy Spirit upon us, we'll be moving, I hope, in the right direction.

The Pope Taught Me to Pray

I've never been quite comfortable that I really understood prayer, or perhaps it would be better to say that I've always been at least vaguely aware that I didn't understand prayer. Prayer obviously has many aspects and different traditions emphasize different facets, but none of them have seemed to quite fit with me.

Something about prayer of petition always seems off to me. I mean obviously the Biblical support to ask for what we need is there, but I can't help feeling that prayer is often used like some magic incantation to achieve a desired result. And I'm not even talking just about the recent "name it and claim it" trend. I'm thinking of the kind of church meeting where you make a bunch a plans and then someone says that you need a group of people praying for the effort so that it will be successful. Does it really work like that?

On the other end of the spectrum, you have prayer as mysticism. Now this has always appealed to me in a certain way. I am, like it or not, a child of my age and so the "spiritual" feel of mystical prayer has something going for it. But the problem I have with this type of prayer is that it hasn't seemed to me to have any particular connection with Jesus' teaching.

Well, today I got some help with this problem from Pope Benedict XVI. No, I wasn't granted an audience with His Holiness. Rather, I've been reading his book, Jesus of Nazareth. This morning I began the chapter on the Lord's Prayer. In about three pages, he explained something about what prayer is that had never quite clicked with me before.

Listen to this:

The more the depths of our souls are directed toward God, the better we will be able to pray. The more prayer is the foundation that upholds our entire existence, the more we will become men of peace. The more we can bear pain, the more we will be able to understand others and open ourselves to them. This orientation pervasively shaping our whole consciousness, this silent presence of God at the heart of our thinking, our meditating and our being, is what we mean by "prayer without ceasing." This is ultimately what we mean by love of God, which is at the same time the condition and the driving force behind love of neighbor.

This is what prayer really is--being in silent inner communion with God. It requires nourishment, and that is why we need articulated prayer in words, images or thoughts. The more God is present in us, the more we will really be able to be present to him when we utter the words of our prayers. But the converse is also true: Praying actualizes and deepens our communion of being with God.

Click!

I don't need to pray for God to support and nourish my marriage in order for God to support and nourish my marriage. I don't need to pray for God to come to the aid of my neighbor in order for God to come to the aid of my neighbor. And so on. But, if I want these things and I don't bring them before God, then I am not welcoming God into those parts of my life. And if I do bring these things before God, I am deepening my communion with God in these aspects of my life.

This perspective also makes sense of the more mystical forms of prayer. Seeking union with God, then, isn't about just attaining the experience or escaping from material life, but rather is a means of connecting God to our lives.

I don't think there's anything here that I hadn't heard before, but today it fit together and made sense to me in a way that it hadn't before. I don't think I had previously seen how all these things are connected.

Quo Vadis?

This morning as I was on my way to work, I was thinking about what Christianity means to me and what I need for my faith to thrive. I'm a bit dissatisfied with my religious life right now, and I was trying to figure out what to do about it.

I'm focussing on the gospels right now. I'm trying to understand what was at the heart of Jesus' teaching. In short, I'm trying to be a disciple.

I'm not convinced any of the traditional interpretations really capture the essence of Jesus' teaching. At least, none of the traditional interpretations seem to be telling me what I need to hear from Jesus. Obviously, it is very deeply rooted in the Judaism of the time, and yet it has to be somehow radically different.

So I'm applying the traditional core Bible study questions to the gospels in the broadest scope: What does it say? What does it mean? What does it mean for me?

As I thought about that, I was asking myself a series of questions.


Q. What does the Lord require of me?

"He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" (Micah 6:8)

That's been the heart of my faith, and I think it's the core of what Christianity has received from Judaism. But if that were all Jesus came to teach us, he wouldn't have found much opposition in Israel. I think perhaps it's only a first step, a starting point.


Q. What does the Lord ask of me?

I don't know the answer to this question. Another way to phrase it is "What is the Lord calling me to?" This is what I'm trying to discover.


Q. What does the Lord want for me?

This is a type of question that's quite popular in Christianity these days. There's a movement that says what God wants for me is better than what I can imagine and want for myself. I don't doubt that there's truth in that. I'm certain that following the Lord's calling leads to a fulfilling life. Yet there's a temptation in this way of thinking. It's driven (or at least can be driven) by self-seeking. And so my answer is, "Get behind me, Satan!" And I return to the previous question, "What does the Lord ask of me?" I find that this drifts into:


Q. Where am I going?

This, at last, gets to the point of what drove me to update my blog today. As I pondered this question, I recalled the ancient story of Peter fleeing the persecution in Rome. As he is fleeing, he meets Jesus on the road, and Jesus asks him, "Where are you going?" (In Latin, "Quo vadis?")

That's what was going through my mind. But then I realized what the reader who knows this story has perhaps already realized. I had the story wrong. It's not Jesus who asks Peter, "Quo vadis"? It's Peter who asks Jesus.

Peter, fleeing the persecution of Christians in Rome, sees the Lord on the road and asks him, "Lord, where are you going?" And Jesus answers, "I am going to Rome to be crucified in your place again." Peter realizes his mistake and returns to Rome, where he is crucified.

I'm not fleeing persecution anywhere, and I don't think that's in my calling. What I got out of this is that I'm pointing my questions in the wrong direction. I was prayerfully seeking God's help in finding the answers to the questions, but they were the wrong questions. So from this morning, I got a new question, "Lord, where are you going?"

There's an old Buddhist teaching that says, "if you see the Buddha on the road, kill him." The Buddha is not to be idolized, nor may he be allowed to interfere with one's own practice of the dharma. Christianity is different. If you see Christ on the road, follow him.

So now I'm looking for him. Where is he? Where is he going?

Praise Music and Palm Sunday

After my last post, my wife asked me to say more about my idea that doubt and faith are more closely related than certainty and faith. I've been intending to do just that, but it's a big enough job to have caused a bottleneck in my blogging. Maybe tomorrow.

In the meantime, I've got something else to say. It's still related to my previous post. In that post, I was trying to put my finger on what I don't like about the praise music that's so prevalent in non-liturgical churches. I said, this music "tends to begin with, 'Let's all stand and sing praise to our mighty God,' and stays there."

As I was on my way to church yesterday, it occurred to me that the emotional tone of this music is perfect for Palm Sunday. Palm Sunday, coming in the middle of the great penitential season of Lent as it does, is a bit tricky to get right. It's too obvious that the praise and hosanna of Palm Sunday is hollow. And that's exactly how I feel about traditional praise music.

Praise music is overflowing with "God is great" and "we offer our full devotion" and so on, and I know as I sing it that it just isn't true, BUT it's perfect for Palm Sunday. It helps me play my part in the annual drama. So for me, the perfect Palm Sunday worship service would be filled with praise music of this nature, interrupted only by a strong sermon reminding me that I can't really back it up and a good send-off into holy week.

I know I'm coming across as very down on praise music, and I don't mean to. There's an awful lot of good to it. For one thing, the introduction of contemporary musical forms into the worship setting is fantastic. This music also helps a lot of people connect with and find expression for the difficult emotions of praise and worship. But it can't hold the weight of the full expression of the Christian life.

What the Church desperately needs right now is talented musicians with a strong sense of the emotions of the liturgy and the flow of the liturgical year. I know there out there. I pray that we will find their work.

I Can't Get No Dissatisfaction

My wife and I were listening to Sinead O'Connor's album "Theology" today as we drove to the Oregon Coast. Earlier in the day at the grocery store I had heard some Bruce Springsteen song (don't know which one) with a religious theme. It occurred to me that I really like works like this with a religious theme. Too many U2 songs to count would fall in this same category, but most notably "40", and, extending beyond music, the treatment of religion is one of the things I like most in the TV show "House".

Now, you may say to yourself, "So a guy who writes a religious blog likes religious stuff, where's the revelation in that?" The thing is, as a rule, I really dislike "Christian music" -- that is, the stuff that you hear on a Christian radio station. And for that matter I'm not too crazy about a lot of the music that gets sung in non-liturgical Christian churches on a Sunday morning. (I should divulge at this point that I attend a non-liturgical church which I very much love, in spite of the music.)

So, I got to wondering, what is it about Sinead O'Connor and Bruce Springsteen and U2 and "House" that I like so much when they wax religious that I don't like in your average Christian radio station music? Without "House" being in the list, you might attribute it simply to the quality of the musical composition, but "House" was specifically in the list my mind made for me and integral to the pattern my subconscious had identified, so I had to dig a little deeper.

The thing that I came up with is dissatisfaction. The average praise song is generally OK with the state of the world, usually even pretty happy about it. But when Sinead or Bruce Springsteen or U2 sing a religious song, they're generally not satisfied with the way things are, often starting with religion, even their own personal faith. That draws me in. It makes it accessible to me.

The thing is, I think this is profoundly Biblical. The people in the Bible from Abraham to Moses to Jesus(!) in Gethsemane are constantly struggling with God. And if I'm reading it correctly, that's the way God likes it. God doesn't want to be surrounded by yes men.

Now I'm going to take this a step further and go from talking about Christian music to talking about specifically Christian worship. The traditional liturgy begins with "Lord, have mercy" and brings a broken world before God and only then receives it back transformed. Non-liturgical worship tends to begin with, "Let's all stand and sing praise to our mighty God" and stays there. It's got too much "Gloria in Excelsis" and not enough "Kyrie Eleison".

Now if you've read this far, you may have noticed that I've completely muddled the two distinct ideas of dissatisfaction with the state of the world and dissatisfaction with worship and religion. I'm OK with that. I think there's one thing beneath them both, and that's uncertainty.

I need uncertainty to nurture my faith. I am convinced that faith has more to do with doubt than it does with certainty. A religion based on certainty forces me almost immediately into a conflict between that religion and my experience of the world. A religion based on uncertainty leads me almost immediately into engagement with God, even if that engagement is in the form of wrestling.

A Man Called Matthew

As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, "Follow me." And he got up and followed him.
-Matthew 9:9

I'm always suspicious of interpretations that rely too heavily on the precise wording of the Bible, but today I was inspired to try one. The text here doesn't say Matthew was a tax collector. It says he was sitting at the tax booth. Of course, he was sitting there because his job was collecting taxes, but the text doesn't define him that way. It describes him simply as "a man called Matthew."

The typical treatment of this story is to say how because Matthew was a tax collector he was basically the scum of the earth in his culture and then to marvel at the fact that Jesus is willing to have him as a disciple anyway. But this treatment (yes, I've sketched it harshly) really involves a judgment of Matthew that Jesus doesn't make. Matthew is a man. He has his faults, and his choice of careers may be one of them, but we don't know what his life has been like and why he made the choices he did.

As I was trying to apply this to my life, I thought about my neighbor. He's the manager of a local strip club. I've never met him, but I have met his wife and his son. They seem nice enough. My daughters are friends with his son. Thinking about this man in the light of this verse in Matthew I think I see what's required for me to see him as a man apart from his occupation.

Foxes and Birds Three Ways

And Jesus said to him, "Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head."
-Matthew 8:20

This is one of those verses that I normally have no idea what it means, so when it came around as the passage I was going to focus on for the day, I wasn't sure what to expect. As I started to ruminate on it, I drew the expected blank. But I stuck with it. To my surprise, I came up with three possible interpretations. If these are any good, they were inspiration from God. If not, they're all mine.

The first thing I noticed was a connection with verse 18, "Now when Jesus saw great crowds around him, he gave orders to go over to the other side." The crowds are gathering. Things are no doubt getting hectic. So Jesus sends his disciples to the other side of the lake so they will have space. But Jesus himself is the attraction. If he goes to the other side, the crowds go too. Jesus gives his followers rest, but he does not rest.

Then I moved on to how it relates to verse 19, "A scribe then approached and said, 'Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go.'" The connection here is obvious. The scribe will follow Jesus anywhere, and Jesus appears not to particularly like that. Is there nowhere he can go to get away from this guy? But why does he want to get away from him? Doesn't Jesus want us to follow him wherever he goes?

So here's what I thought about that. When Jesus calls his disciples he says, "Follow me," and they follow. But this guy has called himself. He steps up and say, "I will follow you everywhere." The only problem I can see is that he's trying to be the one in control. The follower needs to take his cues from the one he's following.

There were a couple of ideas, but neither was entirely satisfying. I thought there must be something more there. So I looked closer at verse 20.

"Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests"

What do fox's holes and bird's nests have in common? They aren't homes, like we think of homes. They are places to raise their young and keep them safe until they are mature enough to take care of themselves. And once the young are ready, the whole group moves out and into the world.

But the Son of Man has no such protective place. His children are in the world, like sheep among wolves. This scribe has come to follow Jesus, but Jesus warns him about what that will entail. It won't be easy. It won't be safe.

I think this third interpretation is the best. In particular, it's the one that seems most applicable to my day-to-day life. With this interpretation in hand, I can look at what my life in Christ is like, and it helps me to understand why it goes the way it so often does. I'm not learning to be a Christian in a nursery. I'm learning in the wild.

Emergence

I was listening to Radiolab on NPR yesterday. The show (or at least the part of it that I caught) was on emergence (a really old episode, apparently). Specifically, they were talking about how the organized behavior of an ant colony emerges from the random behavior of individual ants.

One of the show's hosts, talking about ant colonies, says, "Buried in the system is a rule, a sense of direction, but how do you see that rule?" Scientist Deborah Gordon responds, "That's the wrong question, and that's what's so uncomfortable. The instructions aren't anywhere. The instructions come out of the way that the colony lives and behaves."

They didn't talk about the idea of the Emergent Church at all, but that was naturally where my mind was going, particularly after the above exchange. Churches seem to like instructions. They want plans for how to do things, and I think that's why it's so hard to find a good emergent church. You can't lay out a plan for replicating the church. If you have a formula that says, "Use candles, provide couches, play this type of music, focus on that type of sermons, etc." then you've already blown it. You imposed the "rule" and tried to get a church to emerge on the blueprint.

But to be emergent, an emergent church needs to arise spontaneously from a rule that is internal. You can't know ahead of time what it's going to look like.

And yet, I think this is obviously the right way to do church. All churches should be "emergent" in this sense, and I would bet that the best products in the history of Christianity have been emergent in this way. The Franciscan movement, for instance, was emergent. It grew up around an internalized "rule" working itself out in the context of 12th century Italy.

Unlike in the case of the ants, we can say what the "rule" is -- not exactly perhaps, at least not in a way that isn't culture-bound, but we can say. The "rule" from which a good church emerges is the Gospel.

One of the great blessings and geniuses of Christianity is that the Church has never codified a single articulation of the Gospel. The Gospel which can be spoken is not the true Gospel. It is a culture-bound artifact of the Gospel. But the Church "knows" what the Gospel is in exactly the same way that an ant colony knows the rule which guides the ant colony. The Gospel is the rule that created the Church. To paraphrase Dr. Gordon, the Gospel comes out of the way that the Church lives and behaves.

Having Authority

Now when Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as their scribes.
-Matthew 7:28-29

These words are typically interpreted as being an indication of Jesus' divinity. I don't believe it. I think Matthew here is making a more general statement about the authority of the people of God. I think it's about a new way of looking at God, the Bible and religious tradition. God is empowering people to act apart from the authority of tradition.

Doing the Will of God

Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.
-Matthew 7:21

I was pondering this word today, trying to figure out what it says to me. It's always easier to imagine a word like this speaking to someone else. I can stand beside Jesus and listen to him tell the hypocrits that putting his name on their big shows won't get them anywhere, but I'm a big fan of Jesus' teaching, so I'm OK, right?

But I know that's all part of the shell I need to crack to get to what God wants to say to me through the Bible. I know if I really want to hear it, I can't be pointing it at others. I need to look deep into it as it faces me.

To do that, I had to extend the list Jesus offers. On that day, many will say to him, "Lord, Lord, did we not pray in your name? Did we not go to church? Did we not read our Bibles? Did we not love your teaching?" These are all good things, all commendable. The last one on my list drove the point home for me. "Did I not love your teachings?"

I do. God knows, I do. My love for Jesus' teaching is why I'm a Christian. Yet I'm afraid sometimes (too often) my love for his teachings far outpaces my actual performance of his teachings. "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven." To "know" Jesus, and to be known by him, is to do what he says.

Don't get me wrong. I try to be a follower. I intend to be. What this drove home for me today is that I need to watch myself and make sure I don't lapse into simple admiration. I need to be a doer.

Ask

Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.
-Matthew 7:7

This is one of those passages that always makes me scratch my head. I look at it, and it just doesn't seem to be true. Christians ask and don't receive all the time. What does it mean?

Searching my mental concordance I get a suggestion from James: "You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures." (James 4:3) But applying this to Jesus' saying strikes me as overly pious. It doesn't feel right. It might be right, but it doesn't feel right. It's not right in the way that it first strikes me to apply it, in the pious way.

I was ruminating on this passage, looking for a better way in. What does it mean? And then I thought occurs to me. Go back and read what I said above, "I look at it." I'm looking at the text. I'm analyzing it. I'm evaluating it. I'm asking, "Is this true? What does it mean?" But these are the wrong questions. This is the wrong approach. I'm sitting in judgment over the text, instead of letting it speak to me.

So I step back, and I listen. "Ask, and it will be given to you." What should I ask? Ah, now there's a better start. "Seek, and you will find." What should I seek? "Seek first the kingdom of God." "Knock, and it will be opened to you." And here I realized that someone else was knocking. "Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me."

I see that I can't just pull these verses out of the Sermon on the Mount and apply them willy nilly as if they were the words of a genie granting wishes. They have to fit into the Sermon on the Mount. They have to be a part of what Jesus is telling me (telling us) about the Kingdom of God.

And so what I take away today is not answers but questions, questions that I should constantly be asking. "What should I ask? What should I seek? Where should I knock?" If I ask these questions, I think, I'll be on the right track.

Fallen Off the Wagon

I am a creature of habit. Without routine I'd accomplish nothing at all. And so, when I break my routines, I accomplish nothing. My last blog post was two weeks ago. That's no disaster I suppose, but the reason I started blogging again was to prop up my habit of renewed daily reflection on the scriptures. That habit lasted a few days longer than my blogging, but it turns out I did need the support.

Writing helps me think, and the blog is a good outlet for that. I had a few things I wanted to pursue that I didn't blog about, and hopefully I'll go back and pick them up, but in the mean time, I need to restart the routine machine. Consider this post a sputter.

How Good It Is

How very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity! It is like the precious oil on the head, running down upon the beard, on the beard of Aaron, running down over the collar of his robes. It is like the dew of Hermon, which falls on the mountains of Zion. For there the Lord ordained his blessing, life forevermore.
-Psalm 133

I just got back from a long weekend visiting my brother in Copperas Cove, Texas. He just returned from his second tour in Iraq and my sister and I went down for four days to spend some time with him. It was a great time. I spent more time talking with him in those four days than I have in the past ten years put together. How very good and pleasant it was.

Truth and Openness

Let your word be "Yes, Yes" or "No, No"; anything more than this comes from the evil one.
-Matthew 5:37

Continuing my slow, deliberate pace through Matthew, I came to the passage on oaths today.

I had reflected in previous days that Jesus' teachings on anger and adultery were both double-sided. That is, he first warns against being angry with a brother and then gives instruction on whaat to do if your brother is angry with you. Then he warns against "adultery of the heart" and then immediately follows it with prohibitions of actions that would force others into adultery (the sayings about divorce).

The double-sided nature of these teachings makes perfect sense if, as I previously concluded, Jesus is teaching a community to be a righteous community. None of us are in this alone, and so in everything we do, we must uphold one another.

With that as my personal context of understanding, I was looking for something similar in the teachings on oaths, but it isn't there. I thought about it, I considered that perhaps there is an implicit reciprocity in this. If everyone in the community is to "let their 'yes' be 'yes' and their 'no' be 'no,' it is encumbant upon the others to accept this as such. It requires trust.

But then I wondered, what if another person abuses this trust? Is this not poison to the community? How can it be remedied? That was as far as I got most of the day.

Then this evening, I picked up Joan Chittister's book on The Rule of Benedict, and the section I read tonight included Benedict's admonition, "Bind yourself to no oath, lest it prove false, but speak the truth with heart and tongue."

Sister Joan comments, "Holiness, this ancient rule says to a culture that has made crafty packaging high art, has something to do with being who we say we are, claiming our truths, opening our hearts, giving ourselves to the other pure and unglossed." Good stuff. She may as well have been commenting on this section from the Sermon on the Mount, and I suppose indirectly she was, given that Benedict is so obviously referencing it.

So this reinforces my understanding of the main point, but it doesn't solve my problem of broken trust. When a coincidence like this comes along, I expect it to resolve my difficulties. :-)

Then I read on and saw that the very next thing Benedict talked about in his rule was bearing injuries patiently, loving your enemies and blessing those who curse you. And what do you know, that's going to be the next thing Jesus talks about too. Again, it may be that Benedict is simply following the order of the Sermon on the Mount, but either way it gave me my answer.

What do you do when someone you've trusted has lied to you? You bear it.

I don't think Jesus is telling me to be a dupe. I can recognize that I've been lied to. I suppose I can even tell the other person I know they've lied. (Would anything less be honest?) What I can't do is repay evil with evil. What I must do is react with love.

Pascal's Wager

There's an idea known as Pascal's Wager. In the commonly heard form, the idea is this: If God exists and you believe in God, then you will receive eternal life, and if God does not exist and you believe in God, you will have lost nothing. On the other hand, if God exists and you do not believe in God, you will have lost eternal life. Therefore, you should make the "wager" of deciding to believe in God, because the possible return so greatly outweighs the risk.

Pascal's Wager is often much maligned for two reasons: (1) because it is seen as an attempted proof of the existence of God, and (2) because it is treated as though there were nothing more to it than the brief sketch presented above.

This second point is where I'd like to start. I was wondering about Pascal's Wager recently. I thought Pascal, being a mathematician, could have been just dense enough to come up with an idea as thoroughly unsubtle as the above sketch, but then I thought Pascal, being a philosopher, must have thought more deeply about it than that.

So I did some reading. It turns out Pascal was starting from an assumption of irresolvable uncertainty. Reason alone cannot assure us of either the existence or non-existence of God. There is no indisputable evidence for the existence of God, but there is also no indisputable evidence of the non-existence of God. So how does one choose? Pascal considered the potential reward for each choice and the potential risk for each choice. He concluded that choosing to believe in God offers the possibility of infinite reward with at most a finite risk.

But there were still a couple of problems. First, Pascal recognized that simply "choosing God" wouldn't be enough. Faith, Pascal knew, involves more than simply making a rational decision. And that leads to the second problem -- a person can't choose to have faith. So what can a person do? Pascal says:

You would like to attain faith, and do not know the way; you would like to cure yourself of unbelief, and ask the remedy for it. Learn of those who have been bound like you, and who now stake all their possessions. These are people who know the way which you would follow, and who are cured of an ill of which you would be cured. Follow the way by which they began; by acting as if they believed, taking the holy water, having masses said, etc.
-Pensées, 233

Act as if you believe, do the things that believers do, and this will lead you to faith, Pascal claims. I'm not sure I'm sold on that. It could work, but I'm not sure. Pascal asks:

Now, what harm will befall you in taking this side? You will be faithful, honest, humble, grateful, generous, a sincere friend, truthful. Certainly you will not have those poisonous pleasures, glory and luxury; but will you not have others? I will tell you that you will thereby gain in this life, and that, at each step you take on this road, you will see so great certainty of gain, so much nothingness in what you risk, that you will at last recognise that you have wagered for something certain and infinite, for which you have given nothing.
-Pensées, 233

This I like, and to me, this is the strength of the argument. Ultimately, I don't think faith can be said to be about believing or not believing some intellectual proposition. I think faith is more a matter of how we live our lives. What sort of life will I choose? Will I choose a life where I look after only my own interests, constantly in struggle with the world, fighting daily for what I believe is, or at least could be, mine? Or will I choose a life where I make myself vulnerable to others by being open to them and asking them to be open to me? What is the outcome of these ways of life?

As far as I am able to see, the life that is open to others, is the life that will be more worthwhile and rewarding. Yet to some extent, this takes me back to Pascal's starting point. My reason is weak. I cannot always see what is the best way of life. I cannot always see the way that leads to a better, more open life. How do I find the way? My answer is that I can't rely on my own reason to find the way. I must trust myself to the teachings of Jesus -- Jesus who said:

Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell—and great was its fall!
-Matthew 7:24-27

Here, at the end of the Sermon on the Mount, I find the meat of Pascal's argument. Live this way, and you will find life. Do not live this way, and you will lose it.

George Grigorieff

The Portland Tribune had a really wonderful story this Thursday on George Grigorieff, a local homeless man who died just before Christmas. The story was printed on the front page, above the fold, and continued for two more full pages inside, complete with several color pictures.

It's a very moving story, including details about his early life, how he came to be homeless, a few details of his final days and an account of the memorial service in which he was given full military honors. I recommend it highly. Unfortunately, most of the photos were not posted on the online version.

We Are the Light of the World

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
-Matthew 5:8

I've long had a problem with other people's interpretations of the Beatitudes. So often they're treated as commandments. Some people hear, "Blessed are the meek," and they seem to automatically translate it to, "Thou shalt be meek!" That's always kind of gotten under my skin. These are announcements of blessing, right? But the human heart is an hopeless seeker of merit, and so the natural reaction is to ask, "What do I have to do to earn that blessing?" And the only answer in sight is, "Be meek." So it becomes a commandment. The problem is, it doesn't work quite as well with "Thou shalt mourn" or "Thou shalt be persecuted."

Against this, I've seen (and been taught to see) the Beatitudes as blessings, announcements of God's favor. But despite my best efforts, I haven't really been able to dig in and get more than a shallow grasp on this. I've always been in danger of slipping into a sort of "Minnesota nice" view of it, like the woman in Monty Python's Life of Brian who says, "Oh! It's 'the meek'...'Blessed are the meek.' That's nice. I'm glad they’re getting something because they have a terrible time."

I've gotten some help from Christian thinkers from Dallas Willard to Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I can't remember exactly who put it this way (maybe Willard), but I remember reading someone who said the Beatitudes are a description of what life in the Kingdom of God is like. I liked it, but it didn't really sink in with me. But this week, as I reflected on this passage, by God's grace it did sink in.

I would describe my understanding this way: The Beatitudes are a vision of Christian community. I think my problem in the past is that I've always tried to view things too much from an individual's point of view. "I'm poor in spirit, so I score. I'm not mourning, but I'm happy that those who are will be comforted." Or, on my best days, I saw the people of God in the "blessed" column and God on the "blessing" side.

And I guess this was my real breakthrough this week. I saw that the people of God are blessed through the people of God. We are both blessed and blessing because God is in our midst.

The poor in spirit are welcomed into the community. The community comforts those who mourn. The community values the meek and helps them to thrive. Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness/justice will have their fill in the community. The merciful will meet mercy within the community. The pure in heart will see God all around them in the interactions of the community. Peacemakers will be called childern of God in the community. Persecution will not overcome the community. All of this is because God is in their midst.

This understanding gives the Beatitudes an overwhelmingly strong connection to the sayings about the salt of the earth and the light of the world that follow, and invites me to continue applying this sort of view further into the Sermon on the Mount.

One of the great shortcomings of modern English is that you (singular) and you (plural) are the same word. It causes us to hear things like, "unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven," and respond, "Who me? Oh, thank you very much. I'll work on that." But with a suspicion fed by my above insight, I looked it up. Those "you's" are plural.

Unless the righteousness of the Christian community exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, the Christian community will not enter the kingdom of heaven.

It's even more pressing, isn't it? It's not just my soul on the line now.

Immediately

Immediately they left their nets and followed him.
-Matthew 4:20

Peter and Andrew are fishing when Jesus calls them. They leave their nets and follow him...immediately! I would imagine with most people, assuming they were inclined to accept Jesus' call to follow him, would say something like, "OK, fishers of men, that sounds good. We'll be done here about five..." But, no, Peter and Andrew followed immediately. They left their nets even. Did they even take the time to haul them in and put them away? The text makes it sound like not. It's quite remarkable.

Chapter one of Genesis tells us God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. Jesus' calling of Peter and Andrew is like that.

In Pia Desideria, Philip Jacob Spener reflects that the Jews of his time couldn't believe that the Christians really thought Jesus was God because the Christians did not obey Jesus' commandments. It's a very profound insight. The Jews obey God's commandments because they are God's commandments. Christians....? Jesus himself asked, "Why do you call me, Lord, Lord, but don't do what I say?" (Luke 6:46)

Is it because we have some uncertainty about who Jesus is? Protestants often approach the question of obedience to God's commandments from the perspective of debating what we are required to do. But if Jesus is who we say he is, and here I don't simply mean "if he is God" but rather "if he is the Good Shepherd who calls to all who are weary and carrying heavy burdens promising them rest"...if that's who Jesus is, why would we hesitate to do everything he says. I think, for me at least, it's because I'm afraid to give up control like that. I'm afraid it won't be as good as what I would choose for myself. I know that's ridiculous, but that's the way the human mind works, isn't it?

In the prologue to his Rule, St. Benedict says, "Do not be daunted immediately by fear and run away from the road that leads to salvation. It is bound to be narrow at the outset. But as we progress in this way of life and in faith, we shall run on the path of God’s commandments, our hearts overflowing with the inexpressible delight of love."

Lord, grant me that kind of faith!