Encounters with the Undomesticated God: Lent 1, 2012

The first Sunday of Lent starts with readings of Jesus heading out into the wilderness for forty days after his baptism. The connection between these forty days of Jesus and the forty days of Lent (not counting Sundays which are always little Easters) are not lost to preachers (myself included). So, this past week when my colleague Marcia mentioned maps, wilderness and the Undomesticated God, my ears perked up. Of course, the Divine is undomesticateable (is that a word?). But, we humans also enjoy our routines and ordered lives. And yet ... isn't this in part what draws us out to far off places in our boats? Don't we, too, wish to have encounters with this Undomesticated Divine Presence that blows where and when s/he will? Don't the longings for such encounters keep us going?
May your Lent be filled with experiences in the Wilderness.

Blessed Be
Joel

Here's the quote Marcia was talking about in full: Barbara Brown Taylor. Leaving Church: a Memoir of Faith. HarperOne, 2006. p. 170-2.

By the time I resigned from Grace-Calvary [to teach at the college], I had arrived at an understanding of faith that had far more to do with trust than with certainty. I trusted God to be God even if I could not say who God was for sure. I trusted God to sustain the world although I could not say for sure how that happened. I trusted God to hold me and those I loved, in life and in death, without giving me one shred of conclusive evidence that it was so. While this understanding had the welcome effect of changing faith from a noun to a verb for me, it was an understanding that told me how far I had strayed from the center of my old spiritual map.

Like any other map, mine had both a center and an edge. At the center stood the Church, where good women baked communion bread, ironed alter linens, and polished silver that had been in the church family for generations. Parents presented their children for baptism, and those children grew up with dozens of church aunts and uncles who knew them by name. The Christian education committee recruited Sunday school teachers, the youth group leaders planned pizza parties at the bowling alley, and the choir rehearsed from 6:30 to 8:00 in the parish house on Thursday nights. At the center, some people never picked up a prayer book on Sunday morning because they knew the communion service by heart, and even those who had to look said the Nicene Creed all the way through without leaving any parts of it out. These people at the center kept the map from blowing away.

As it turned out, the edge of the map was not all that far from the center. It was not as if I or anyone else had to take a mule train for three weeks to find ourselves in the wilderness. All we had to do was step outside the Church and walk to where the lights from the sanctuary did not pierce the darkness anymore. All we had to do was lay down the books we could not longer read and listen to the howling that our favorite hymns so often covered up. There were no slate roofs or signs to the restroom out there, no printed programs or friendly ushers. There was just the unscripted encounter with the undomesticated God whose name was unpronounceable - that, and a bunch of flimsy tents lit up by lanterns inside, pitched by those who were either seeking such an encounter or huddling in their sleeping bags while they recovered from one. These people at the edge kept the map from becoming redundant.

According to the Bible, both the center and the edge are essential to the spiritual landscape, although they are as different from one another as they can be. The wilderness of Sinai provided the people of Israel with an experience of God that was distinct from their experience in the Temple in Jerusalem. The Judean desert showed Jesus a side of God's Holy Spirit that was not apparent while magi knelt before his manger in Bethlehem. There is life in both places because the same God is in both places, but they are so different from one another that it is often difficult for people to be one place without wanting to be the other place or to agree that both places really belong on the same map. Much that is certain at the center is up for grabs in the wilderness, while much that is real in the wilderness turns out to be far too feral for the center.

1 Trombone + a Duke Ellington Quote

In cleaning up today, I ran across this quote I had written down a few years ago. One of the things that I found delightfully ironic is that our son picked up his new trombone and played for the first time in his life just prior to me finding this.

"Whenever God's people throw away fear in pursuit of honesty, miracles happen!" ~ Duke Ellington

What miracles are you experiencing?
What risks are you taking?
Where are you finding grace?

William Sloan Coffin: Faith, Hope, Love

Here are some quotes from William Sloan Coffin - see his book Credo.

Socrates had it wrong; it is not the unexamined but finally the uncommitted life that is not worth living. Descartes too was mistaken; "Cogito ergo sum" - "I think therefore I am"? Nonsense. "Amo ergo sum" - "I love therefore I am." Or, as with unconscious eloquence St. Paul wrote, "Now abide faith, hope, love, these three; and the greatest of these is love."
I believe that. I believe it is better not to live than not to love.*

Of God's love we can say two things: it is poured out universally for everyone from the Pope to the loneliest wino on the planet; and secondly, God's love doesn't seek value, it creates value. It is not because we have value that we are loved, but because we are loved that we have value. Our value is a gift, not an achievement.**

Because our value is a gift, we don't have to prove ourselves, only to express ourselves, and what a world of difference there is between proving ourselves and expressing ourselves.***

We don't have to be "successful," only valuable. We don't have to make money, only a difference, and particularly in the lives society counts least and puts last.****

*page 5; **page 6; ***page 6, ****page 7

Apocalypse and Paradise

I have been hesitant to discuss this topic, but as we now have predictions of the end of the world occurring in October (sense it didn't happen over the weekend) I have decided to add my two bits to the discussion.

Before I start, I would like to say that this has serious ramifications for our society in general. Family members of friends of ours sold everything and gave the money to charity because they were no longer going to need it. It's a great gesture. I'm not sure what this means about their feelings of those running the charities. The concern is what do they do now? They've got nothing left. Do they dare trust another authority figure again? Will they trust the church?

Secondly, predictions about the world coming to an end and Christ's coming back are very old, as old as Christianity. So, in some regards, this phenomenon is nothing new.

Here's my perspective, view on things. Any of you are welcome to disagree, but this is how I see things at the present moment.
I have always read Apocalyptic literature (like the Revelation of John) as a way of giving hope to an oppressed group of people. In essence, Apocalyptic literature says, "It is going to be ok. God is ultimately in charge. It may not look like that now, but in the end, God's kingdom will prevail."

When we remove Paradise from this earth, we lose a sense of who we are as beloved children of God. In the Sermon on the Mount, in Matthew's gospel, Jesus says, "Consider the lilies of the fields..." We consider them because we are connected to them. If the Divine cares for them, how much more are we cared for? Yet we are connected to them. What effects the lilies of the fields effects us in ways we have always suspected, but are only just now scientifically discovering how close the connection is.

When we insist that Paradise is someplace else (Heaven, accessible only in the afterlife, or after the end of the world), we remove ourselves from the world around us. Inadvertently, this separation allows exploitation of the lilies of the fields to which we are so connected. Which means our own exploitation, of course.

Keeping Paradise connected to the earth, knowing it is just around the corner, and is something we can participate in the here and now, connects us to another part - actually a stronger part - of the Christian tradition. I invite you to look, ponder and read Saving Paradise by Brock and Parker (I've mentioned this book in a previous post) for a fuller discussion of this tradition. Keeping Paradise, the Kingdom of God, the Great Economy a part of the earthly experience, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not, provides a critique of our smaller economies, kingdoms and environs. As such, the critique gives us something to work towards. Paradise shapes our actions. I believe it also reminds us of who we are, beloved children of God.

I think you can see my own bias. It shapes my perspective in how I live and how I see the world. What underlying beliefs and biases shape how you see and interact in the world?