Daily Quiz
Venite and Beneditus es are
a. titles of canticles
b. opening words of canticles in Latin
c. titles retained from the Latin of chanted songs in Morning prayer
d. all of the above
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
Monday, February 18, 2013
Daily Quiz, February 18, 2013
Daily Quiz
Martin Luther, whose feast day is today, belonged to what religious order?
a. Franciscan
b. Dominican
c. Jesuit
d. Augustinian
Martin Luther, whose feast day is today, belonged to what religious order?
a. Franciscan
b. Dominican
c. Jesuit
d. Augustinian
Sunday, February 17, 2013
Temptation: Acting on Misinterpretation
1 Lent
C February 17, 2013
Deut.26:1-11 Ps. 91
Rom.10:5-13 Luke 4:1-13
Text:
We begin the season of Lent with the famous
show down between Jesus and Satan. One
wonders how this private temptation of Jesus ever came to textual form but it
has and it ties in with numerology of the Hebrew Scripture. The number 40 is the symbolic number for test
and ordeal and wandering before arriving at an appointed place. 40 years in the wilderness for the people of
Israel. It rained 40 days and night in
the big Flood.
The wilderness is also a symbolic place of
making the lonely vision quest to test one’s calling. Are you really sure you’re supposed to do
this? A vision of vocation and ministry
is tested. “Maybe I shouldn’t have left
the previous familiar place. Maybe I did
not have any choice as circumstances forced me in the liminal state of betwixt
and between, a rite of passage. Maybe I’ve
launch out into the new vision and I’m getting nowhere so in disappointment,
maybe I should quit.” The showdown
between Jesus and Satan in the wilderness happened after his baptism by John
the Baptist, when Jesus was to begin his ministry. In his vision quest in the wilderness one can
find revisited the place of human defeat, namely the current state of the
Garden of Eden.. First Adam failed in
his temptation with the serpent-Satan, the trickster, and as a result the
entire creation was plagued with weeds.
The Garden of Eden was locked off; Shangri-la now but an ancient
myth. Now the dis-harmony with the plant
world was expressed in the weeds that want to grow in our garden of wheat and
fruits and choke off our labor. The Garden
of Eden as a friendly menagerie of animals with Adam being like a Dr. Doolittle
talking with animals and giving them their names, had become the wilderness where
the beasts were predators and humanity is a prey unless human beings can
outsmart the animals who were originally created for eco-harmony and
friendship.
“God, we’ve got to get ourselves back to the
garden.” This was a visionary impulse long before Joni Mitchell wrote a song about
the Woodstock hippie quest for a return to Eden. The entrance of Israel into the Promised Land
flowing with milk and honey was another attempt to get back to the Garden as
are all human attempts at utopia for more perfect societies.
Adam and Christ stand as the totemic
personalities for trying to understand human direction and in the story of
Adam, we find a story that gives us insight about our moral failure. First man and first woman, Adam and Eve are
naively innocent creatures, who succumb to the superior stealthy cunning of the
serpent, and the naïve pair went from being vegetarians to misbehaving
fruitarians and as they say, the rest is history. In the Biblical epic, there was one needed to
progress beyond the state of naiveté and go again to a site of the original
misdirection and that once Garden site has now become the wilderness haunted by
wild beasts. And a second Adam, a hero
had to go in to confront the great trickster.
We in our biblical religion are so used to “externalizing”
all things biblical as having happened out there in the external world. The Greeks use a word, “Topos” to refer to
both physical sites but also literary textual topics. When we read the Bible we are reading about
those “topoi,” those great human topics or literary topographical inner space
sites of human angst and triumph.
Perhaps the temptation of Jesus in the
wilderness highlights most poignantly the notion of word, text and topic. The temptation showdown was essentially an
interior verbal sparring between Jesus and his interior trickster Accuser. They exchanged words and so we had a debate or
forensic discourse, verbal jousting. And
what were they jousting about? They were
essentially jousting about the great text of their known world, the words of
their Bible, the words of the Hebrew Scripture.
The temptation of Christ shows us that Satan knew how to use the
Bible. The words of the Bible as written
could be interpreted in a hundred ways and so Satan was using the words of the
Hebrew Scripture to tempt Jesus to make the word flesh in coming to an actual
deed. The fullness of word being made
flesh occurs when it animates an actual deed.
Just as the serpent trickster of old used flattering words to motivate
Eve and Adam to the deed of eating the forbidden fruit, so too the trickster
and eloquent devil tried to appeal to the good holy book to influence an action
by Jesus.
The temptations of life most often are about
interpretation and timing? Is eating an
apple from the tree bad? Of course not,
it is timing of when the apple can be eaten.
A parent does the same thing with one’s child. Are cookies bad for children, yes and no, it
depends upon the timing of eating for good nutrition. Is bread bad for Jesus or us? Of course not, it has to do with the timing
of throwing Jesus off his schedule of how he understood his relationship with
God his father.
The idolatrous form of self-esteem is the megalomaniac
quest for the kind of fame when a person is dominated to define their very worth
as a person by the number of people who can express devotion or adoration
towards them. Our media society
certainly feeds this distorted view of fame as famous people complain about
invasive paparazzi even while they use all of the distorted fame to get
wealthy. Worship and adore me in exactly
the way that I want you to. And you see
how fame and the events that lead to fame often get labeled as a Faustian
bargain. “Jesus, you are clever enough
to use your wisdom and your charisma and your ability to manipulate people and
become as powerful and as famous as the Caesar, so why don’t you use your
ability to get this kind of fame.” The
plan of God had Jesus becoming famous in the path of counter-logic; by getting
crucified and then returning to countless numbers of people in resurrection
manifestations.
And then there is the temptation trick of
trying to get Jesus to be a fundamentalist literalist. “Throw yourself off the building Jesus because
the Bible says the angels will catch you.”
There was a time and a place for Jesus to die but not by being led into
acting because of a faulty reading of the Bible. Lots of people are led to hurtful prejudice and
acts of injustice because of the way in which they read the Bible. Our world is full of incredible cruel actions
done because of the way that religious people of all religions have been
tempted to read their Holy Books in distorted ways. The temptation of Christ is a witness to us to
be careful in how we seek to understand our Holy Book in our time and if our
interpretation of the Bible does not pass the non-exploitative, love and justice
and common sense smell test, then we need to be careful in the kinds of interpretation
of the Bible that we are acting upon.
The greater point that I would like for us to
understand is that you and I are word constituted in a sea of words. By this I mean our world and self-knowledge
is constructed by the way in which we see or perceive through the word
structures of our life. We use Holy
Books and “higher education” to inform the language lenses through which we see
all of life outside of us and all of who we are inside of us. So we have taken on lots of word usage that
already result in automatic body language acts in our life. Our body language follows the code of how we
have taken on word use in our lives.
So this temptation event of Jesus as a clash
of competing interpretations is crucial in understanding that you and I live on
a sea of words in how we are interpreting the meaning of our lives in each word
and deed. The parts of our life deeds
that are already on automatic in our body rituals sometimes are hard to
interdict and change.
The reason we try to educate and bring into
our lives new word events and new possibility of new interpretations is that we
hope to cure in progressive ways the ignorance that our speech and body habits have
taken on through being informed by less than ideal sources of information.
This is why we are always within a textual
temptation, a word battle for excellence in future speech and action. Jesus won the battle of words against the one
who wanted him to misinterpret and take the wrong actions in his life.
We live the drama of this temptation too,
every moment of our lives. That is why
the “ I.T. phrase “garbage in, garbage out” is relevant to our life of
temptation. What we take in as we live
on this sea of words in some ways become flesh in the actions of our lives and
so we need to be ever mindful of what we are taking in so as to influence what
we will be expressing in the words and deeds of our lives.
Friends, we highlight the temptation of Jesus
today as we have begun Lent, but trust me, you and I are living this dramatic
temptation in our word lives all of the time.
Let us ponder today how we are interpreting and acting out the highest
ideals of our lives today, and let us follow Jesus in finding strategies
against the temptation to “mistime” the words and deeds of our lives. Amen.
Daily Quiz, February 17, 2013
Daily Quiz
Which Gospel does not mention the temptation of Jesus Christ in the wilderness?
a. Matthew
b. Mark
c. Luke
d. John
Which Gospel does not mention the temptation of Jesus Christ in the wilderness?
a. Matthew
b. Mark
c. Luke
d. John
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Aphorisms for Ash Wednesdays
Ash Wednesday February 13, 2013
Isaiah 58:1-12 Ps.103
2 Cor. 5:20b-6:10 Matt. 6:1-6, 16-21
Preached at a Joint Ash Wednesday Service with Advent Lutheran of Morgan Hill
What are we doing here tonight? Right now you are put in the situation of
listening to me preach unless you can let your minds wander to much more
exciting places to be, and I’m sure that there are many.
After preaching these same Ash Wednesday Scriptural
readings for 31 years, you’d think that I’d exhausted them by now or at least
exhausted lots of listeners. But now I
come with fear and trembling into a house of Luther where the preaching is
exceptional and I am used to Episcopal listeners who don’t expect me to say
anything profound because it’s all been said better in the Book of Common
Prayer, preferably in Tudor English.
The Ash Wednesday liturgy provides us with a
challenge; we have hundreds of years represented in the Scripture lessons and
2000 years of church history that bring us to this event tonight. We have a room of people who have some shared
community discourse in religious practice but also a room of people all of whom
have individually taken on faith vocabulary in very personal ways within your
own spiritual histories.
So how can I expect to speak and control the
meaning of anything that I say? My
knowledge is only my partial knowledge and my partial knowledge reaches out to
your partial knowledge to see what kinds of meanings can arise.
I feel like the best way to be honest to this
meeting of people, all of whom have but partial knowledge is to respond with a
discourse that admits the state of having partial knowledge. And so I choose the discourse of offering to
you a string of aphorisms. At first, I
thought that I should pay tribute to Lutheran numerology by offering a 95 point
sermon, in honor of Luther’s famous 95 Theses nailed to the Wittenberg Castle
Church Door, but 95 points would take too long and if I just taped it on your
door, it would surely be recycled in the morning. So, no outlined sermon with 95 points. So I offer you aphorisms in response to the
question what are we doing here tonight?
As Episcopalians are we here in violation of
our number one rule: Thou shalt not be
seen in church more than once a week, unless there is a funeral or wedding…and
if the wedding is on Saturday, that’s close enough to Sunday to not have to go
to church on Sunday.
We’re here to offer thanksgiving that Orchard
Valley Youth Soccer does not offer games tonight to affect our attendance.
(Although there are probably teams practicing).
We here to show our sacrificial beginning to
the Lenten Season by missing American Idol.
We are here to paint our foreheads with the
ashes that simulate our bodies’ future state, something like Native American
braves putting on war paint to frighten our opponent death not to come too
soon.
We here to pay tribute to the church calendar
that offers us 6 different seasons as an annual curriculum with Christian
knowledge divided up into seasonal emphases so as to give us a full review of
catechesis each year. And Lent is our
Spring training when we promise to simulate the tests and ordeals of life so as
to build different kind of faith muscles so that we might understand better our
calling to follow Christ.
We are here to ponder the appointed reading
from Scripture particularly the conjunction “as if” raised by the prophet
Isaiah. “Yet day after day they seek me
and delight to know my ways, as if they were a nation that practiced
righteousness.” We confront ourselves
with the possibility of our own hypocrisy:
Do we perform and practice our piety as if it could be a replacement for
practicing righteousness? Do we do this
as a way of convincing ourselves that we are okay with God? Do we suffer a major disconnect between our
churchly life and our life outside of the church?
We are
here to ponder our religious piety. Do we take on the voluntary fast for religious
devotion; and ignore those who have the involuntary fast of hunger and
starvation forced upon them by their conditions of living?
We are here to fast. Which fast would you rather choose? Giving up food for a day? Chocolate or wine for Lent? Or the fast that the Prophet Isaiah says is
preferred by God? Getting rid of
injustice. Feeding the hungry. Releasing the oppressed. Clothing the naked. Bringing the homeless into my house. God, I’d much prefer my own religious rituals
as a preferred fast to really dealing with these harsh realities of the world.
Do we see prayer as public performance with
great worry about our liturgical correctness and we cannot hear the authentic
prayer of desperate people who are crying, “help me God, help me somebody?”
Do we fuss over our public clothing, our
Sunday-going-to-meeting clothes, and robes and albs and chasubles even while
others do not have adequate clothing for their own warmth or dignity?
We are here to acknowledge all that is done
in our names for which we take no personal responsibility. Do we ponder the way we absolve our personal
responsibility within our group identities?
It is the government that goes to war, not I; it is the government that
denies health care, not I; it is our society that has the wrong priority about
the general welfare of all people, not I.
I cannot be held personally responsible for that fact that my country is
disproportionately the largest consumer of the earth’s resources.
We are here to ponder utopia. Isaiah suggests that if we ever start
practicing righteousness and not just religious behaviors within our own
religious communities, then it would result in the promise of God’s guidance in
a restored world.
We are here to think honestly about our
sins? Do we ponder the fact that the
past is absolute; that it happened cannot be denied and that our absolute past
includes our sins and short-comings? Do we come here to identify with the request
of the Psalmist for God to cleanse us from our sins and to create new hearts
within us?
We are here to think about forgiveness. Do we not feel challenged by our own
remembrances of the hurt that others have done to us and the seemingly
impossible task of forgiveness that we must seek as a gift from God?
We are here to ponder the radical words of St.
Paul about Christ. Are we not in awe of
the way that St. Paul states that Christ became our sin so that we might become
the righteousness of God? Christ
represents God’s full identity with us in our human condition so that we can
discover the godly and the spiritual within our human condition and not be
defeated by our own imperfection.
We are here to think about our role in being
witnesses to Christ. How many people
allow them selves to be atheists because they have seen Christians acting
badly? Does the way in which we live our
faith put obstacles in the way for others to believe in God and God’s goodness?
Pastor
Warner and I are probably happy that we don’t have to list on our ministerial
resumes the list of suffering that St.
Paul
We are here for corporate prayer and to
ponder the meaning of such. Public or
corporate prayer is not to impress other people; it is to join in agreement
with other people who share genuine concern for our world. The reason that we do our religion in public
is because there is more that can be done in sharing our gifts together than
can be done if each of us tries to do our religion alone. When we do our corporate prayer let us hope
that the people who need mission and ministry will be the recipients of us
doing public prayer together. Collective
effervescence can result in our worship attaining greater ministerial outcomes
in our world. Indeed let us be public in
our prayer, but not to impress people but to be delivered from individualism
and isolationism that says, “I don’t need you for my life of faith.”
We are here tonight to consider our private
lives. Thankfully most of our lives and
prayers are done in the closet and in secret.
God give us the grace to resist the publishing of all of our thoughts
and deeds. It is good to build our
resumes in heaven and let God see both our secret sins and goodness. It is good when we are hidden to ourselves
and the secret effects of our own ministries.
I have many, many people and mentors in my past life that I never took
time to thank (didn’t know how to thank them at the time) but they were there for me and they have
never known the value of their lives to mine.
I think that this is the kind of heavenly treasure that we build by just
being faithful and not expecting visible reinforcement for being so.
We are here tonight to ponder the witness
that Jesus gave to his heavenly Father. Have
you ever thought that perhaps the most profound witness of Jesus is the example
that he gave of knowing his heavenly parent? As much as we like to build solid doctrine
about how Jesus is the unique Son of God, I get the impression that Jesus wanted
each person to know herself or himself as a unique daughter or son of God. I get the impression that Jesus mostly wanted
to share with us this secret place with God our heavenly parent and to know
that this is the place where we can express our true honest authenticity. And from the place of knowing a treasured
relationship with God we go forth in our public lives, our religious lives
trying to bring to them as much authenticity as we can. And when we fail, we go back to the secret
place of forgiveness and renewal and come out again ready to try to do God’s
will of love and justice on earth.
I do wish all of us a holy Lent; I wish us
well in making strides in authenticity and I pray that each of us will know the
esteem of being recognized as unique and valued by God our heavenly
parent. To know the secret of this
recognition by God is indeed the greatest treasure of all. Amen.
Sunday, February 10, 2013
Transfiguration as Process of Life
Last Epiphany c February 10, 2013
Exodus 34:29-35 Ps. 99
2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2 Luke 9:28-36
How
did many of our favorite fairy tales end?
They ended with these words, “And they all lived happily ever after.” We know it isn’t exactly true even though we
like to promote optimism with our children.
Even though we know it really would be “they all lived happily until
they finally died.”
Living happily ever after is suggestion about
a state of bliss in a world where bliss is not the only experience. One of the functions of art, music and
religion is to “transport” us to access a place within our own experience where
we touch the sublime, the eternal and the blissful. It really is not escapism unless it hinders
the realistic dealing with all of the other experiences in our lives.
The Bible and the Gospels are literature; they
are art, they are stories. They are
transporting stories. They are not exact
representations of reality. When we read
about Jesus bringing Lazarus back to life that is where the story ends; we don’t
read about Lazarus getting old and dying a slow painful death. Today, on Transfiguration Sunday, you noticed
that we read the aftermath of coming down from the mountain top experience;
Jesus whispers the inner life of a child and that child is freed from a
terrible inner torment. But that’s all
we know about the child; did he have a relapse?
Did he become a disciple? Or did
he get arrested for stealing chariot wheels in Jerusalem? Gospel stories give us such time lapsed
scenarios and the phenomenon of time lapsing tricks us to another better
place within ourselves.
The Gospel is a spiritual literary art that
transports us to another place, a parallel existence that we can access in our
lives. And this other place is perhaps
an ongoing process of life; this on-going process of life can also be called
the life of the Holy Spirit. And another
name for this life process is transfiguration. A pessimistic materialist might
say that the main process of life is called entropy or a running out of energy
in life but does not energy just change form and shape and what ends or dies is
transformed into another shape or form or manifestation of energy? Transfiguration is the English word for
translating the Greek word from which we get metamorphosis.
Our encounter with metamorphosis came in our
elementary school science classes. We
studied the phases of life of frogs and butterflies and moths. We watched little fuzzy-wuzzy caterpillars
appear to go lifeless in the pupa or cocoon phase, and if we were lucky we
would see the butterfly break out of the cocoon and take to flight. And this entire process of change is called
metamorphosis. We don’t so much know why
it happens; we can but record and witness that it does happen and try to name
this marvelous process.
Metamorphosis is incognito in many costumes;
the tiny egg, the larva, the pupa and finally the butterfly that in turn lays
the eggs. Metamorphosis or
transfiguration is the energy of life, the life force that pulsates through all
of life and this force is impartial to all of it guises. We on the other hand are human and all too
human and we in community become very attached to certain appearances and
manifestations of the process of metamorphosis.
If we took a survey, probably most people would prefer to look at
butterflies rather than tiny eggs, caterpillar or cocoons. In human vestiges we perhaps all have favorite
states of appearance; we want to have the wisdom of Methuselah and the physical
prowess of Adonis and the beauty of Venus.
It is very human to be attached to certain states of our manifest appearances. But metamorphosis does not discriminate; it gives
us no choice. Metamorphosis is equal in
the egg, in the larva, in the cocoon and in the butterfly even though it does
not seem to be equal in the experience of each phase.
The process of this life force of
Transfiguration provides us with encounters of an enchanted kind. Such an enchanted kind is chronicled in the
mountain trek of Jesus, Peter, James and John.
In the state of enchantment the interior life of people become like
incredible projectors putting in their environment things, people and events
not normally seen: Clouds and lights and
space travelers of two saints of old who did not have natural deaths, Moses and
Elijah. If a Jewish person were
influenced and formed by the Sadduceean tradition, they would honor Moses as
the final authority. Pharisees and other
Judaic sects allowed that the writings and acts of the prophets were
authoritative. So Moses and Elijah were seen in the visionary event as
endorsing Jesus to be the Successor within the line of salvation history. But
beyond Moses and Elijah came the testimony of the direct heavenly voice of the
Speaker who declared Jesus to be the beloved Son.
This enchanting experience was like a dream
that one does not want to wake up from.
Peter was so nervous with enchantment, he suggested that they build
temporary dwellings in honor of the three so they could camp out and stay
awhile. And why would anyone want to
leave the event when enchantment awakens us to the appearance of discovering a
person with whom one experiences love and friendship and guidance and comfort
and warmth and light. The
transfiguration process of life became apparent in a most poignant way in the
way in which Peter, James and John encountered Jesus.
But they could not remain on the mountain top
in the preferred state of ecstatic encounter; they had to go down into the “demon
possessed” valley. The reality of
transfiguration on the mountain top had to accomplish some creative reclamation
within the valley of chaos. And we sure
do not like the ugly states of chaos in the phases of transformation. But transfiguration does not avoid the valley
of chaos and the demon possessed. The
power of transfiguration is evident in the life of Jesus to do some serious
people whispering in the valley of the demon possessed. Transfiguration does not keep Jesus or us in
the state of spiritual ecstasy; it brings us into the world where apparently
chaos reigns. We who have been
transfigured need to activate our transfiguring energy; we need to activate our
life force as personal charisma or graceful creativity and do some people
whispering ourselves to help each other and the people to whom we are called to come into new states of mental and spiritual peace.
We need to find the rhythm of transfiguration
within our lives; learning to be recharged in the ecstatic of the sublime, but
then called to release and advance transfiguring energy for people who need
their lives whispered to the next creative and peaceful state of existence.
You and I are called to the transfigured
life. It is a process of God’s Holy
Spirit that impels us through many apparent states; sometimes we’re breathless
with awe and wonder and sometimes we’re holding on in intense waiting for what
seems an interminably delay of transformation into the next phase. Transfiguring life is equal and same in all
phases, even though we naturally prefer certain phases over others.
Let us embrace Transfiguration as the Creative
process of God’s Spirit within us now and within the life of our world. And let us make ourselves available to the
power of transfiguration to be people who are willing to whisper the lives of
other people to a greater sense of peace, love, care and kindness. Let the transfiguring Spirit of God within us
be a heavenly voice that says to each person:
You are God’s beloved and unique and special son and daughter. And God is pleased with you. Amen.
Sunday, February 3, 2013
Awesome Love Makes Us Humble Relativists
4
Epiphany C February 3, 2013
Jer.
1:4-10 Ps.71:1-6
1
Cor. 13:1-13 Luke 4:21-32
Super Bowl Sunday and we actually have some
people in church or perhaps you are here to pray for the home team and not “jinx”
them? There is more superstition in
sports than has probably ever been religion.
I have been trying to build some hype for the
church service today by doing some Tweeting on Twitter; kind of like the Old
Burma Shave Signs. (And I know some of
you are old enough to remember them on the road side).
Tweets: The Love Chapter will be in your
local parish on Sunday. The Love
Chapter: Is it a Rock Band? The Love Chapter: Is it a new online dating service? The Love Chapter: Is it a club for lonely hearts?
And what is the Love Chapter? The 13th Chapter of 1
Corinthians. How many of you had this
read at your marriage? Can you believe
that this was written by a man who was not married, so he decided to write an
impossible standard because he knew that he’d never have anyone to ask him to
take out the trash or fix the faucet?
All kidding aside, I really do think it is
St. Paul’s very best writing. If love is
a cliché then sometimes it is the truest cliché that needs to be used. Do you ever use the word love? The Greek language has at least four words
for love and in English we have to supplement the word love with lots of
qualifying nuances. It is easy to decry
love as a trivial cliché especially if you are not the one who is fortunate
enough to be “in love.” We get a life
time education in love because what we mean by love at 16 may be completely
different when we are 82.
So how do we use the word love? Let us count the ways? Well, today is anyone saying, “I love
football?” I love the 49’ers? And what kind of love is this? Do you love your spouse, your partner or your
friend? Do you love pizza or haggis or quiche? Do you love to ski? To play golf?
To jog? Do you love a particular
hobby? Do you love your enemy? Or is that an oxymoron? Do you love a particular television
show? Do you love music? Do you love your country? Do you love your job? Do you love money? Do you love your political affiliations?
Do we over use the word love such that it
becomes trivialized and loses precision of meaning? Should we decry love and speak against its trivial use? Is love only about the
passion and desire known as one's preference? Is
being in love actually a pathological state because it makes us “lose”
control? Is the passion of love not to
be trusted? Have people done things
because of love that they've come to regret?
Should we always choose the calm, restrained, and passionless voice of
reason over the whims of love?
What is the way of love? How does it work? In a general sense is it a kind of magnetic
force that exists between everything that in rather fickle fashion draws
together beings with desire in a more or less predictable but often serendipitous
ways?
The writer of the Song of Solomon called love
strong as death. Emily Dickenson wrote, “That
love is all there is, is all we know of love.”
Love rides on the border of always being a
trivialized cliché and being the most profoundly definitive word of how we
truly feel at any time.
Love is a word like God, a single word for a
highly awesome and complex inclusive conception. We have to use the word even though we always
feel a bit hypocritical and a bit unworthy to use the word love, because it is
always strangely more wonderful and more awesome than we can say.
St. Paul was writing to a congregation of
people who had ministerial gifts and the great qualities of and for religious devotion. Some had the faith to become martyrs; some had
the ecstatic states and utterances of the angelic sort with incredible experiential
highs that made them feel very touched by God. Some had faith to do great works, and in the
face of all of this St. Paul writes about Love.
The way in which he writes about love is awesome and even terrifying
because his view of love is a view of God.
It is a vision of what is possible.
And what is possible overwhelms what is actual. What is possible inspires hope because the
possible is the future that inspire our actual efforts now.
The awesome and terrifying nuances of the
Love that Paul writes about are revealed in these phrases: Love endures all things. Love believes all things. Love hopes all things.
Well do you believe in UFO’s and unicorns and
gnomes and fairies? In my own
understanding, I’ve come to believe in everything that can come to language,
since not to believe in what comes to language is to deny the way in which a
person characterizes their own experience.
Yes, I would always qualify about how I believe many things that have
occurred in the imaginations of people.
But this hymn of Paul to Love is a confession of the all-inclusiveness
of love. That is terrifying because
there is much included in the total body of human experience that I would like
to censor and remove because it is not to my liking. But love believes all things and hopes all
things. This is a witness to the expansive
nature of the freedom that exists with the full play of possibility. The awesome and creative can arise in this
Plenitude of love but also some very dark and evil things can occur as
well. But love is not in the business of
exclusion it is all about inclusion because with inclusion comes maximum
aesthetic clarity.
What would I mean by aesthetic clarity? It is like the young boy who was hit
repeatedly by the bully at school. His
mom ask him if he were hurt. And the boy
stumbled upon a sort Yoga Berra explanation: “Mom, after he stopped hitting me,
not being hit felt much better.” The boy
had aesthetic clarity about what health was in a different way. The Plenitude of the Love about which St.
Paul wrote is the very condition for meaning that occurs because of the
tolerance and belief in vast differences.
Love has the inclusive plenitude of
contradiction, as in love your enemies.
Jesus also said that even after one has the paper of divorce love still
maintains that the two are still preserved in the reality of Love. Love preserves in that it means that what has
happened can never be that it did not happen.
Love preserves to make the past absolute. That is awesome and terrifying at the same
time.
Love can also be unrecognized and
incognito. Jesus the prophet did not
have the honor of love in his own hometown.
Familiarity can make it seem as though love is not there and love
sometimes does not become apparent again until a person has died or is gone
from the scene. And suddenly love is
known as having been “taken for granted.”
Love can be known in the experience of “wow,
this is what I was put in the world to do.”
The prophet in his call felt like he had been called from the womb. This is the poetry of love being known as the
proverbial “déjà vu.” Wow, this just
seems so awesomely right.
The final thing that I want to say about Paul’s
hymn to love is this: “To know love is to know that humility is not a choice,
it is the true condition of being overwhelmed in the plenitude of love.”
In most philosophy, the supreme insult is to
call someone a “relativist.” St. Paul
makes it clear that in the face of love we have no choice but to know ourselves
as relativists. Why? St. Paul, wrote, “Now, I know in part.” That is the most any of us can say, “I know
in part.” My knowledge is very limited
and partial, even while I hope that my knowledge is growing. What do we do in having only partial
knowledge in the face of such plenitude?
We have all of the real conditions of humility that enables us to
worship the one who has much more than our partial knowledge. Where our
knowledge ends we submit in our hearts to the loving relationship with the God
of Love. And we say, “Take me Oh God of
love!” Since I cannot comprehend the
divine plenitude, I take comfort that the ocean of God knows me and loves
through me, even in ways I cannot see.
In the end, St. Paul is telling us that God is calling to be lovers and
that we can receive in moment by moment doses the inclusive love of God. It is our calling to let God’s love be
transmitted through us in the words and deeds of our life. This is the mystical experience of Love to
which all of us are ever invited. Amen,
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