Blessing of Evergreens.

The Blessing of the Evergreens.

The blessing should happen after nearly all deciduous trees are bare.  The people gather outdoors near a prominent evergreen tree.

We come to the time of bare trees.

Branches shaking stiffly in the pale air 

and whistling in the cold wind.

The leaves have turned brown and dried up,

falling to the earth,

disintegrating into the soil. 

The trees have gone dormant,

their life hidden within,

waiting for the stronger light of resurrection.

And yet some trees refuse to go into the cold unadorned.

Some trees brazenly shine a continued hope 

into the barren, gray landscape.

Some trees stubbornly stay green

even into the dead of winter.

Some trees refuse to surrender

to a season of indifference and hostility.

God has placed these trees among us as a sign.

A sign of life.

A memory of warm abundance and joy.

A sign of hope.

An anticipation of the distant spring.

A sign of abiding.

A bold act of resistance.

We call them “evergreen.”

The Light shines in the darkness

and the darkness did not overcome it.

The green persists in the cold

and the cold does not overwhelm it.

The icy darkness of bigotry, vulgarity, hatred, exclusion, and fear

cannot overcome Christ’s warm light of compassion, justice, peace, and welcome.

In the face of a harsh season:

some stay green.

In this season of waiting

as the darkness deepens

as the colors drain from the world

fading into the grays of winter:

We lift up the evergreen.

Pine, fir, cedar, holly, ivy, juniper, hemlock, 

spruce, cypress, rhododendron.…

We give thanks to the Creator

for the witness of the evergreens.

We cut and distribute sprigs of evergreen.

God of Life and Light:

you fashioned this Earth in love

and placed among us in nature

reminders of your abiding Presence.

Your life shines through your creation

and every living thing points to you.

Your Word echoes in everything you breathed into being.

So today we lift up in recognition

our sister and brother evergreen trees

whom you place among us as a reminder

that in your economy nothing is ever lost.

Life always remains.

Love always wins.

Keep us ever green as well, O God,

ever witnessing to the power of your verdant love

shining in all you have made.

Amen.

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The Reason for the Season.

First of all, let’s be clear: the literal, actual, physical, astronomical reason for the season is… the Winter Solstice.  That is, to people living in the Northern Hemisphere, for six months, the sun appears to be swinging lower and lower in the sky until it seems to stop, and then come back.  That’s why we have seasons at all.  That’s why it gets colder in winter.

Obviously, humans have noticed and dealt with this for millennia.  This time of year became a time of feasting first of all because crops were harvested just before the coming of winter.  And decisions had to be made about which animals to feed for months and which it made more sense to slaughter.  The fact that people had more produce in good years than they could immediately consume meant that they would sell or give away their excess.  The days prior to the Solstice  became a time for feasts and parties, as people prepared to hunker down for the winter.

The Winter Solstice was therefore a holiday long before the birth of Jesus.  In the Roman Empire it was called “Sol Invictus,” which means “Invincible Sun.”  

The early Christians, having no actual date for the birth of Jesus, eventually settled on this time of year for that.  This was, depending on who you talk to, either because they were trying to piggy-back on the celebrations that were already happening culturally, or they wanted to offer an alternative celebration in resistance to the debauchery, gluttony, and general excesses — often at the expense of poor and working people — that were going on all around them.  Christians said that the season was really about the return of the Son, prefigured in creation itself as the return of the sun.  Advent, the Christian season leading up to the Nativity, was originally a preparatory time of fasting, that is, non-consumption, conservation of resources, and generosity to those in need.  

So we see that the conflict between the two different ways of celebrating the season is very old.  (The best book on the last few centuries of this is The Battle for Christmas by Stephen Nissenbaum.)

The Church never wins this battle.  At worst, it gets coopted and subverted so thoroughly that when people go shopping they think they are doing something Christian.  At worst, saying “Merry Christmas” is part of the ethos of consumption, waste, spending, nostalgia, sentimentality, greed, and corruption that dominates the economy.  At this point it is more a confession of Capitalism than Christ.  And that is why many insist on forcing everyone to say it.  They are trying to baptize and apply a “Christian” veneer to an orgy of buying and selling, from which the main beneficiaries are the wealthy. 

If we want to make Jesus The Reason for the Season, and if we want to make “Merry Christmas” a confession of faith in him, then we need to radically change our behavior.  If we pay attention to our mainly Scriptural stories, we find things like: a woman with an illicit pregnancy, a baby born in extremely humble circumstances, the witness of animals, the testimony of working people, a visit from exotic foreigners, signs in the sky, a bloody assault by government troops against an innocent community, a family seeking asylum in another country, and elderly witnesses in the Temple.  

Maybe an authentic Christian response to these stories surrounding the birth of the Lord would pay attention to, serve, advocate for, and associate with the same kinds of people today.  What can we do to support pregnant women and children?  How can we make the lives of the working poor better?  How can we welcome and provide for refugees and asylum seekers? And so on.

It seems to me that policies that cut food assistance to hungry people, maintain an absurdly low minimum wage, slash aid for children’s programs, cut Medicaid and threaten cuts in Medicare and Social Security, and perpetrate acts of barbaric hostility towards people who come to our country feeling violence and seeking shelter, are rejections of what Christmas is really about.  When people who support such policies sanctimoniously mouth the words “Merry Christmas!” is a hollow, cynical lie.

More than an empty seasonal greeting — let alone the self-righteous, sentimental, and angry political slogan it has been twisted into — “Merry Christmas” needs to be embodied in our acts of compassion, generosity, welcome, and justice on behalf of poor, rejected, marginalized, and victimized people now.  Then Jesus will be The Reason for the Season.  

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Advent 2019 + The Way of the Future.

We have just done a year or so on the book of Revelation.  It may be argued that the main point of that book is the collision between the weight of our past and the glory of God’s future.  As it happens, this is also the overarching theme of the Advent/Nativity/Epiphany time in the Christian Year.

It is in these days, inching across the interface between darkness and light, that we are almost violently torn between the two opposed lifestyles that John describes in Revelation.  On the one hand the world confronts us with a loud orgy of consumerism permeated with nostalgic sentimentality.  On the other hand we hear in church a message both critical and affirming about God’s unlikely yet majestic entrance into our lives.  

One story is about the past.  In this season we invoke selected childhood memories and a sanitized (and largely invented) history of cultural festivities, all dedicated to only one thing: selling consumer products.  Jesus’ birth is also reduced to a distant, irrelevant, historical event.  It is oddly out-of-place, and apparently obligatorily woven into the corners of this gaudy tapestry as “the reason for the season.”  This is the story we all grew up with.  Most people, even most Christians, are unaware that there is another one.   

But Christians witness to a very different, even contradictory, story.  That concerns the way God’s future breaks into our world with a vision of peace, compassion, justice, grace, and love, in the person of Jesus Christ.  He is born in the humblest of circumstances and first greeted by the lowest of society.  He offers his life in service, healing, liberation, feeding, and finally in dying to give us life.  

Our season of Advent is about this other story, and we Presbyterians have been in the process of recovering it over the last half century or more.  Advent, of course, is not about buying or selling anything.  It is about an awesome gift: light in our darkness.  (That is one of the reasons why the church scheduled the Nativity around the Solstice: to connect with the hemispheric experience of sunlight returning.)  

The two main characters of Advent are St. John the Baptist, representing the wall-to-wall critique of the forces who appear to rule in our dark world, and St. Mary, in and through whom the Light  emerges into our world as one of us.  They show us God’s firm “no” to the-world-as-we-know-it, dominated by destructive, mercenary principalities and powers, and God’s “yes!” to the true world of God’s future, which Christ announces, embodies, and calls us into.

Advent is really important because it sets the tone for the rest of the year, and for our Christian life generally.  For we always live in anticipation of the fulfillment of God’s future among and within us.  This future has broken into human experience in different ways over time.  The Bible is the “unique and authoritative witness” to this.  The events described in Scripture are not important as history; their essential importance is found in how they point beyond themselves to God’s Reality.   In other words, they are less about the past than they are about the future.

I was taught that human identity is a story we tell ourselves about our past.  That may be accurate for our ego-centric, personality-driven identity.  But I am coming more to the view that our real, deep, and true identity in Christ is better related as a story we tell about our future.  Where we are going is more important than where we have been.  Advent is about where we are going.  In Scripture we hear stories from the past which serve to inform us about our future.  In Advent this is most explicit.

And by “where we are going” I don’t necessarily mean when we die.  A. J. Muste once said, “There is no way to peace; peace is the way.”  So it is with the followers of Jesus Christ.  There is no way to Christ; Christ is the Way.  That’s why the early Christians referred to themselves as the Way.  We live now in anticipation of, and participation in, something that is in the process of being fulfilled in us and in our world.  To live now according to his teachings and commandments is itself both the destination and the Way.  

December is the hardest month to stay with focused on the future Jesus gives us.  We are harassed by other voices yelling at us all month long to follow another path.  Let’s keep following John’s advice and make our lives a living witness to Jesus Christ.  In this season, let’s prove his Presence within and among us, by our service to those in need, our humility, gratitude, and forgiveness, and our peace, joy, and hope in our knowledge of the Truth revealed in him, which is God’s love.  That is the future we need to let shine in and through us, into a broken world.

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The Open Table.

The Presbyterian Church USA practices an open eucharistic table.  That is, most of the time, we will gladly serve the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper to any who present themselves.  The actual rule in the Book of Order is a little more complicated; we prefer that people coming to communion be baptized, for instance.  But even that is not a hard-and-fast rule.  

I generally support an open table.  When I preside at the eucharist, I do make a point of saying that “all are welcome.”  I have never refused anyone.      

The early church, however, did not have an open table.  They lived in an oppressive situation where outsiders, including government authorities, would have broken up the service, were they allowed to know about it and show up.  Only baptized members known to the presiding elder as legitimate disciples of Jesus were permitted to commune in the Lord’s Body and Blood.

Marginalized and oppressed populations need separate, dedicated spaces and rituals, places outside the control of the rulers and owners.  African-American slaves engineered secret worship, without the overseers and the Plantation owners knowing about them.  In Ernesto Cardinale’s classic, The Gospel in Solentiname, representatives from the wealthy planters and their death-squads were not invited to the Bible Study meetings of the poor campesinos.  

We don’t live in that kind of context.  Our culture does not oppose Christian faith with violence.  It tends to use other, more subtle and often more effective, tools.  Like the trivialization of the spiritual/religious life, turning it into a private, personal hobby.  Most American Protestants buy into a Zwinglian view of the Sacrament as a little commemorative snack which may or may not be added on to a worship service, depending on people’s preference.  Under this ideology, participation in the Sacrament is optional, immaterial, and constitutive of nothing in particular.  It is a matter of one’s personal spiritual taste.  It should be available to all who want it, the way they want it.   

The most potent argument against fencing the table is the fact that Judas shared in the Lord’s last supper, when the Sacrament was instituted.  Jesus, who knows what is going to happen, does not wait until Judas leaves before offering the bread to him along with the other disciples.  No.  He deliberately includes his own betrayer in the holy meal.  In doing so, the Lord explicitly dismisses any moral worthiness qualification for participation.  Indeed, all of the disciples were clueless about what he was doing and what would happen in the next 16 hours.  No one comes to the table personally deserving to share in this Sacrament.

So participation in the Sacrament is not a reward for the righteous or a privilege for religious insiders.  That may be how it got twisted under Christendom.  For instance, in the Presbyterian Church it used to be that children were not permitted to share in the Sacrament.  The reason I was given was that children “do not understand” it.  Yo, no one cognitively understands what is going on in the Sacrament!  It’s not about how smart or informed or educated we are.  It’s about how we are included in the love of God.    

  

That being said, God’s love is not whatever we want it to be.  In Judas’ case, he barely had time to swallow the bread and wine before he went out and ratted on Jesus to the police.  It does not end well for Judas.  Eventually he offed himself rather gruesomely out of overwhelming guilt and grief.   We may reject God’s love and choose to exist in a web of self-serving mercenary treason.  Then we experience God’s love as judgment and condemnation.    

What does it mean for someone who has invested their energy into actively betraying and killing God, poor people, and God’s creation to receive the Body and Blood of the Lord?  Are they not eating and drinking the blood/life of those whom they have murdered?  Are they not therefore consuming their own judgment, punishment, and condemnation?  Are they not expressing their own hatred for God and God’s creation, and spiraling into a profound alienation?

I wonder if this isn’t why the Sacrament has been so degraded in the Modern world.  Maybe our historical reticence in participating in this meal was based on a subconscious awareness that to do so while systematically wrecking God’s creation in a nihilistic orgy of profiteering might earn us the fate of Judas.  Maybe it has.  I would not be the first to suggest that the engine of Modernity is ecocide and therefore suicide.  If Modernity had a patron saint, perhaps it would be Judas.

The Apostle Paul says that “all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgment against themselves.”  So it matters how we see what is going on in the Sacrament.  We have to “discern the body.”  This has nothing to do with having a particular theological opinion about the bread and what does or does not physically happen to it.  That’s a distraction.  Discerning “the body” means awakening to the universal oneness revealed in the Sacrament.   

The earliest eucharistic liturgies talked about how the grain that had been scattered in the fields was gathered into one loaf.  The loaf represented the disciples of Jesus, gathered together in that time and place, around that table, participating in that rite.  The gathering in turn represents the oneness of all humans, as Christ reveals that in him there are no divisions among us.  That awareness of oneness extends to all creation, breathed into being by the one Creator.  Finally, there is the oneness we therefore share with and in Jesus Christ, the truly human One, who is the Word of God by whom all things were made, and who is God-with-us.  

In this Sacrament the confession that “God became human so that humans might become God” begins to be realized.  In and through the particular elements we begin to perceive — discern — the glorious oneness of an interconnected/interdependent universe in which, as Richard Rohr has said, everything belongs. 

Discerning the body, the oneness, the unity, the integrity of creation, precludes and prevents the animosities and manipulations, the fear and the anger, the abstraction and analysis, that drives us to destroy the planet and each other in order to “save” it.  

So, while we should not be denying the Sacrament to anyone who comes trusting in the Lord Jesus, no matter how faint that trust may be, we do at the same time need to impress upon people what they are in for.  This is a radical participation in the eternal truth of God’s love for and in the world.  It is a humble proclamation of our place as part of and dependent on the wider creation.  It is the negation of all privilege and profit, exclusion and condemnation, domination and retribution.  Indeed, the Sacrament is, in effect, chemotherapy against the ego.

But for those who trust in the Lord Jesus, the One who gives his life for the life of the world, the Sacrament is holy medicine.  It awakens, feeds, and expresses the Presence of Christ-in-us, uniting us to every person, every life, and every thing God breathed into being.  If we perceive in the Sacrament the infinite love God has for the world, and if we also discern that it is all in some sense God’s body in which we participate, then this, as the primary way Christ gives us to remember him, incorporates us into him, revealing how he is all in all.

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Accordion Man.

In 1990, after serving as a commissioner to the General Assembly in Salt Lake City, I took a train-ride through the West.  In Amtrak dining cars it is not unusual to be seated at a table with other passengers.  One time I was sitting with a group which included a musician and his wife.  He quickly began telling us his tale of woe.

He was an out-of-work accordion player.  No one would hire him.  Everyone had gone over to guitars and pianos.  No one wanted an accordion player.  He had no gigs.  The guy was almost in tears at the rank injustice of the situation and the squalid philistinism of the population in its rejection of the wonderful accordion.  Clearly the world had taken a nosedive in the sixties.  The subsequent deterioration in everything good, true, and beautiful was manifest in his consistent rejection as an accordion player.

His wife compassionately rubbed his arm and looked deeply into his eyes during all this.  It was clearly a relationship dynamic that was working for them.  He: lost in the injustice of it all, and she: sympathetically supporting him.

Anyway, to be helpful, I asked, “Have you tried zydeco music, from the Mississippi Delta?  They have lots of accordion.”

Accordion Man just shook his head.  It wasn’t the same, he said.  He wanted to play weddings and birthdays, not Cajun dance music.

“How about New Tango?  That music uses accordion,” I offered.

He looked at me somewhat annoyed, sadly shaking his head again.  Argentine music was too exotic.

I suggested one or two other forms of music I knew of that featured accordion.  But I could tell he was only getting angry with me.  So I stopped.  The conversation went elsewhere.

But I never forgot Accordion Man.  He is an example to me of how we can wallow in our failures so much that they come to define us.  We cherish them and hold on to them so tightly that we close off all other opportunities and possibilities.  And if we have people around us who enable, feed, and even reward this sort of thing, it can become a black hole from which we never emerge.

The writer, Carolyn Myss, remembers encountering someone at a conference.  As they were trying to set up a date and time to meet again, the person looked at her calendar and said, “No, that won’t work; it’s my incest survivors’ support group meeting.”  Myss refers to this as “leading with our wounds.”  It has the effect of making our wounds define us in a deeply unhealthy way.  In a manner slightly subtler than that of Accordion Man, this person still managed to get her personal pain and tragedy into a conversation, presumably to plant a similar seed of pity in someone else’s mind.

I think countries do this when they nurse grievances from past defeats.  Like erecting statues of Confederate Generals.  When anger towards an enemy from centuries before can become a sour pillar of national or regional identity.  When we base our identity on wounds and losses we become mired in a consistently dark rage, resentment, bitterness, and cynicism.    

Sometimes Christianity looks like it’s also a matter of leading with our wounds.  In our path to fogrgiveness, we habitually confess our sinfulness, recognize our fallenness, and admit the wrongs we have done.  In the classic little book, The Way of a Pilgrim, the pilgrim, a Russian peasant wandering through the countryside seeking spiritual guidance, meets a famous elder, called a staretz, and goes to him fir spiritual direction.  He wants to begin their relationship with a comprehensive confession of all his sins.  So he fills sheets of paper dutifully and sorrowfully recounting a lifetime of his bad behavior.  When he presents this to the staretz the holy man hands it back to him, instructing him only to confess sins that he has never before confessed and received absolution for.  For to continue to dwell on things for which he had already been forgiven was to, in effect, deny the efficacy of God’s forgiveness.  It was to wallow in our own sinfulness in a strangely prideful way.

Indeed.  To hold on to our wounds, our failings, our wrongdoing, our pain, our grievances, and so forth, can be a denial of God’s love and redemption.  To be redeemed means that we are no longer deemed as sinners, but now we are re-deemed as beloved and forgiven.  Redemption means accepting who God says we are, and letting go of what we think we are.  It means living into our essential nature as creatures in God’s Image and members of Jesus Christ.  

We Presbyterians, even though we don’t have a tradition of personal confession to another person, do understand ourselves to have been forgiven by God in Jesus.  Forgiveness literally means “letting go” of our wrongs and our wounds, recognizing that they have all somehow been healed by Jesus’ wounds.  Traditions that place crucifixes front and center may lead us in this direction, if understood properly.  “By his bruises we are healed,” is how Isaiah 53:7 puts it. 

To identify with him in his suffering and death is also to identify with him in his emergence into resurrection life.  To see our wounds in him is to see his resurrection in us.  To let go of our wounds means to take on the healing and wholeness God gives us in Christ.  It means to inhabit the deeper Self God has placed inside of us, where we participate in the true humanity Christ reveals in us.  That true humanity is united in Christ to God.  Our wounds, losses, failures, wrongs, and liabilities, because God takes them on in Christ, thus become the Way to inhabit his new life. 

Because in them what we are really losing is our old, egocentric, narrow, small selves.  In losing them we may find and gain our true and essential selves in Jesus Christ.  This is what Jesus means when he says “Those who lose their life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 10:39b).

It is this finding of life and joy and blessing and goodness — the new life of resurrection and hope — which is the point.  It is coming to live together in peace and justice, allowing the love of God to flow in and through us into our world.  

At the end of the movie, Harold and Maude, Harold deals with his intense grief at Maude’s death by dancing away from the cliff of despair and playing the banjo she gave him.  Our losses and wounds are kind of gifts.  When we release them they have the power to release us from despair into life.  Maybe that’s the message of the Cross.  

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Free Stuff.

Jesus is all about free stuff.

His ministry is characterized by his giving away free health care.  There is no record in any of the gospels of Jesus presenting anyone with a bill for healing them.  Neither does he have any kind of means test or other set of requirements before he will heal someone.  Nobody even attempts to pay him.  The most he will say, and this only to some, is that they should come and follow him.  The only requirement for him to heal someone is that they are sick.  Usually, they come to him, but not always.  He heals several people at long distance.  He heals at least one person because his friends dragged him to him.  Sometimes they have to believe in him, but not always.  He heals some people who just happen to be there in the same place at the same time.

He converts six jars of water into free wine for a wedding reception.  Free wine!

Several places he suggests, or even demands, that rich people give their wealth away to the poor.  He doesn’t qualify “poor” with “deserving” or “working.”  No.  The only criteria that the recipients have to meet is that they are poor, that is, they have less wealth, fewer assets or possessions, than most people.  In other words, Jesus feels these less-well-off people are entitled to free stuff, just because they are less-well-off.  In other words, the rich should give free stuff to the poor.

In this, by the way, he is only echoing the requirements of Leviticus 25, in which all wealth is redistributed downward every 50 years.  It’s called the Jubilee and Jesus comes to proclaim it.  Free stuff.

In one of the few stories included in all four gospels, Jesus gives away free food.  They have the option of going to the store and buying food for themselves.  That’s the disciples’ idea, that they should all go find a Quick Chek.  A market-based solution.  Jesus has none of that.  He produces and gives away food, so much food that there is a lot left over.

In one of his parables a landowner pays people who worked for one hour the same amount as those who worked a full day: free stuff.  

In another a wealthy person places money or property in the possession of tenants or servants.  It doesn’t work out very well, but still: it’s about free stuff, with the qualification that it should be used in the way God intended.  Which is to give it away.  

In one of his most famous and characteristic parables, a father throws a great banquet for a son who squandered his inheritance: free stuff.  When the older brother complains that the father never gave him free stuff, the father is flabbergasted, and tells him that he has always been surrounded by free stuff he could take whatever he wanted whenever he wanted. 

Jesus has no concern about “personal responsibility.”  God made the whole place and offers it to everyone, as much as they need and more.  If you think you worked for what you have, that’s a self-serving lie.  The truth is that sinful humans have engineered a system by which some are allowed to hoard some of God’s stuff, and make you work for them to get some of it.

That’s not God’s plan.  That’s not what we see in Jesus.

God’s plan is… free stuff.

Jesus implements a system in which everyone contributes what they have and receives what they need.  We see the church actually doing this in Acts.  Freely have we received; freely must we give.    

God creates the universe and declares it very good.  God makes sure there is always more than enough for everybody.  All we have to do is make sure it is distributed so that nobody has too little, and nobody has too much.  All we have to do is make sure the Earth continues to be able to sustain the many, many forms of life that the Creator placed here.   All we have to do is give thanks and share.

How are we doing on that?

Jesus gives his life for the whole world on the cross.  And his life is free.  It’s a matter of grace.

And the main thing do when we gather, aside from hear God’s Word, is give thanks and share his Body and Blood.  At no charge.  It’s free.

And therefore so are we.

Free stuff is the mission of the church, God’s people.

Let’s do it.

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Sin and Mercy.

Possibly the oldest Christian prayer is simply, “Lord, have mercy.”  It is based on the appeal of a blind man in Jericho named Bartimaeus in Mark 10:47.  It has been an integral and essential part of Christian liturgy ever since.

Unfortunately, this prayer, appears to be a problem for some folks.  I am told the words are too negative.  The criticism is that begging for mercy and calling oneself a sinner only reinforce the kind of oppressive, self-flagellating religious expressions that Christianity is infamous for.  It is especially disempowering for those victimized by religious imperialism, like women.  Not only do practices like this keep people under the thumb of the authorities, but such self-hatred tends to get expressed in acts of misanthropic violence.  Finally, there seems to be an assumption that God is always ready to punish and afflict, but can be dissuaded by our pathetic pleas for mercy.  Surely we can do better than morose and depressing, chest-beating, guilt obsessed begging for God to forgive us.  So the argument goes.

First of all, modern people don’t like to talk about “sin” at all.  We see it as a guilt-trip.  Surely it is better to awaken to our original blessing, than to wallow in misery about our sins. 

The fact that sin has become a rejected category for sophisticated, modern people indicates not so much a healthy self-esteem as a deliberate reticence to face the wall-to-wall mess we have made of the planet and its people, including ourselves, over the last 500 years.  We have reduced the word “sin” to refer to somebody else’s sexuality, when actually it denotes a comprehensive breakdown of relationships.  

Talk about “sin” simply recognizes that we humans, in our egocentric condition, are functioning as if separated from God, creation, others, and even our true selves.  Calling ourselves sinners does not mean we are essentially bad people who do not deserve to live.  It means, as in the first of the 12 steps of recovery, realizing that our life is unmanageable, and that we are indeed complicit in all kinds of evil.  

This is what it means to be “woke.”  When we do awaken to our original blessing and goodness, one of the first things that happens is we understand how far our words, thoughts, and actions had drifted away from that.  Awakening means realizing that we had been, in effect, asleep, and taking responsibility for what we did when we were not as fully conscious.  

Awakening causes us at the same time to see the wreckage we have left behind us in the world, in our relationships, in our own bodies and souls, with clarity and honesty.  It is not that we are bad, but we have done bad things, usually inadvertently, unknowingly, or rationalizing that they are actually good.

Secondly, the prayer is about mercy.  Mercy is the recognition of our original blessing and goodness.  Awareness of mercy — that is, of forgiveness, compassion, peace, acceptance, wholeness, and welcome — is awakening.  

Mercy is not just something we receive and then keep for ourselves, like a commodity.  Mercy, like so many of the qualities Jesus talks about and embodies, is something in which we participate by sharing it.  To receive mercy is to give it.  If we do not become merciful, we will not receive mercy.  Mercy is a flow.  It goes through us.  We only have it only to the extent that we give it away.

Therefore, “have mercy on me, a sinner” emphatically does not mean, “don’t punish me for being such a terrible person.”  It means rather, “Let the flow of your mercy, goodness, and blessing overwhelm and transform me and my world through me.”  It means “Let me be your mercy, your compassion, and your forgiveness in the world.” 

And yes, it includes the implication that we have a way to go in realizing this, but at least we are hopefully making progress.  The sign of this progress is that we have the sense to pray for mercy.

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Bugs.

Bugs.

When I was a kid I remember going on long drives with my family.  We always had a lot of bugs get smashed on the windshield.  Sometimes we even had to stop at a gas station to squeegee them off.

That doesn’t happen anymore.

I didn’t even notice it until I was told about a study from Britain that actually uses windshield counts to measure the insect population.  In fact, apparently the number of insects on the planet is crashing.  40% of species are in serious decline.  [https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2019/02/why-insect-populations-are-plummeting-and-why-it-matters/]

While this may not bother many of us — indeed, some may feel it is a benefit — the fact is that insects do have a role in the global ecosystem, from pollination to feeding birds.

This caused me to pay attention to my own practice regarding bugs.  Like just about everyone in this culture, I think nothing of killing insects.  Indeed, the more I could slaughter, the better.  Especially in the house.  I might leave them alone outside, but the house is my domain and will not be infected with bugs.

But as I become, however slowly and incrementally, more woke, I am coming to appreciate and respect life.  All of life.  Over the past few months I have grown more tolerant of insects to the point that I will only rarely kill one intentionally.  If I find one in the house I seek a way to either ignore it or release it outdoors.  (Mostly the latter: ignoring insects in the house can lead to them becoming much less ignorable.)    

God creates insects In Genesis 1:20-23, on the Fifth Day.  They are called “swarming creatures.”  They are an integral and essential part of creation.  Biologists know this.  Without some pollinators humanity basically perishes.

The other day I saw an atheist cartoon.  It depicted God talking to someone, who asks whether God made mosquitoes.  When God says yes, the other person lists the devastating effect of mosquitoes on humans, including the fact that mosquitoes have, by transmitting Malaria, caused the death of more people than anything else in history, by far.  He concludes by remarking to God, “You must really hate those people.”

From the point of view of an atheist, that is a radically anthropocentric perspective in which everything is valued by its relationship to humans, or more precisely, me today, God does look like an evil monster for creating mosquitoes.  

At a recent church picnic someone asked me why a good God would create such a pernicious life form as mosquitoes.  My response at the time was to ask, “Perhaps you’d rather live on a planet with an atmosphere made of ammonia or sulfuric acid?  With crushing gravity or baking heat or sub-zero temperatures?  You live in the most beautiful and abundant place in the universe!  Deal with the bugs already!”

The acquisition of the Holy Spirit gives us an increasingly heavenly — which is to say broad, inclusive, and universal — perspective.  We realize that it’s not all about me or even us.  The humans are not the be-all-and-end-all of creation.  The presence of mosquitoes should help us get a grip on this and develop some humility and respect.  This is not our house, it’s the Creator’s.  And if the Creator has determined that mosquitoes have a place in it, who are we to whine about it?

Now I do not underestimate the deadly nuisance that some bugs can be.  I have had Lyme disease.  I have been in places where I had to wear netting to prevent being eaten by Black Flies.  I have had to have my home “bombed” to get rid of cockroaches.  I understand the problems caused by fleas and ticks, and so on.  

But we are seeing that humans have been far, far more destructive to the garden than mosquitoes ever were or will be.  They may have killed a lot of us.  But no species has ever gone extinct because of mosquitoes.  Our ravaging, predatory exploitation of this planet is on a scale beyond the entomological imagination.  

The existence of mosquitoes tells us that God cares much more about the well-being of this whole place and everything in it than God cares about one particularly noxious and destructive species, no matter how smart they think they are.

Anyway, trying not to kill insects has opened my eyes to the value of all life.  

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Waking Up Hurts.

The reason why so few people wake up is that it is so profoundly painful.  The reason it is so painful is that to wake up means accepting responsibility for so much of the world’s pain.  Maybe this is why suffering is such an essential aspect of enlightenment.  Tears are often considered a gift, even a necessary sign of one’s enlightenment.  These tears prove the depth of our awakening, that it is not merely imaginary or mental but felt in our bodies.

I am using “awakening” and “enlightenment” to talk about what Christianity means by resurrection.  Resurrection is uprising.  It is the emergence of the True Self — Christ — and the letting go and falling away of the false self — ego.  

The false self does not fall away without suffering.  It is embedded within and attached to the True Self, extending its tentacles through it.  It does not detach easily.  Which is why contemplatives equate the process of detachment from it with death.  The false self has to “die,” which feels like actual death to the person who is totally identified with it.

The false self dies when we realize the damage we have done under its influence.  This damage is to ourselves, to others, and to creation.  The false self dies when we take responsibility for this damage and feel the pain it has caused.  It dies because it deserves death as a matter of justice.  It “dies” because it was never really alive or even real.  The false self is an invention and projection of our ego based first on fear, and then on anger and shame.  What dies is our addiction to it, which is to say, our pathological identification with it.  That is to say, our presumption that the false self is who we are.

This only happens when we reject the three temptations: money, fame, and power.  And that only happens when we feel the pain of those we have harmed in our obsessive drive to acquire for ourselves money, fame, and power.   We don’t wake up until we feel the damage.

There is an old M*A*S*H episode where a bomber pilot ends up in the unit, and meets a little Korean girl badly hurt by aerial bombing.  At first he tries to avoid responsibility by asking whose planes did the bombing.  Hawkeye’s answer is basically that we don’t know and what difference does it make?  The bomber’s subsequent discomfort is the beginning of his awakening.  He’s not happy about it.  No one wakes up happy, at first.

In the 12-step system, the addict must make a fearless inventory of the harm they have done to others, and then seek to personally make amends to those harmed.  This is what healing means.  This is how healing happens.  It is astonishingly painful and humiliating, even sometimes personally dangerous, to admit such wrongdoing.  But it is the only way to real healing.

None of us wants to face or admit the harm we have done.  This is true with individuals, as well as with larger organizations and institutions.  It is true of nations and whole civilizations.    

But acknowledgement of harm and making amends for that harm is the only way to cut away the false self and allow the True Self to emerge.  Acknowledgement of harm is repentance; making amends is discipleship.  The former is a change of direction; the latter is actually to move in that direction by acting differently.

If the church is missionally ineffective it is because it does not understand that discipleship is making amends.  It is repairing the world… based on the recognition that we are the ones who wrecked the world in the first place.  To proceed without this recognition is to blame victims for their own pain and make yourself — your false self — the savior.  The false self only acts out of self-interest.  It only acts out of what it stands to gain.  When the church is not making amends it is only seeking to gain members, money, or influence for itself.  It takes the superior position of a generous benefactor, forgetting that it needs and must seek forgiveness in humility.  

Ultimately, waking up is a joy.  Once the false self has fallen away, what emerges is the True Self.  The false self was collapsed in on itself, lost in a funhouse of self-reference, self-obsession, self-righteousness, and self-gratification.  The True Self is connected outward.  It is one with everything.  It gives thanks in all circumstances.  It knows that everything is working together for good.  It prays constantly.  It lives forever participating in the true life of all.        

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Wisdom/Sophia as the Voice-print of God.

The reading from the Hebrew Scriptures on Trinity Sunday was from Proverbs 8.  It is about wisdom’s role in creation.  Since the word for wisdom in Greek is sophia, the text talks about a female character.  “Does not wisdom call, and does not understanding raise her voice?  On the heights, beside the way, at the crossroads she takes her stand [saying] ‘The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago….’”  And it goes on to describe Sophia/Wisdom participating and delighting in God’s work of creating the world.  And there are more interesting passages about Wisdom — including a whole book by that title — among the apocryphal books that are not included in many Protestant Bibles.

The place of Wisdom in Christian theology has always been ambiguous.  Some virtually equate her with the Holy Spirit.  There are references in the tradition to Jesus as Wisdom as well.  Protestants have tended to practically ignore her altogether.  But the greatest cathedral of the Christian East is named after her: Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.

Interest in Wisdom has perked up in the last 100 or so years, largely due to her emergence in Russian theology, especially by a writer named Sergius Bulgakov.  Bulgakov influenced one of the greatest American Christian thinkers of the 20th century, Thomas Merton.

It is unlikely that I completely understand Bulgakov’s theology; however, he seems to be saying that Wisdom is like the voice-print of God on creation.  God, of course, creates by speaking in Genesis 1.  Speech is both Word and Spirit (breath), which is to say that creation is inherently trinitarian.  Bulgakov’s view appears to insert Wisdom into the process as sort of the vibratory signature of the triune God which is imprinted on creation, giving creation its character and relating it all to its Creator.  It is a way of talking about Christianty’s panentheistic understanding of creation, that is, God is not identical with creation (which would be pantheism), but is somehow in creation.  Wisdom/Sophia is how God is in creation in the form of God’s identifying voice-print.  That’s the best I can do with Bulgakov for now.

The reason this is all more than theological doodling is that it tells us the nature of wisdom, in the sense of what it means for people to be wise and act wisely.  Basically, wisdom means thinking and acting in accordance with this basic voice-print by which God is present within creation.  That is, wisdom means seeing God’s shape and mark on and in everything, beginning with ourselves, and extending to all creation, from grains of sand to supernovae.  We act wisely when we treat everything with awe, wonder, respect, gratitude, and humility, because everything participates in God’s nature, as revealed to us in Jesus Christ.  Everything is a transcendent miracle.  There is no such thing as a mere, inanimate object which we may dispose of as we please.  Rather, everything is imprinted with God’s name as belonging to God (Psalm 24:1).  

Wisdom/Sophia thus provides an otherwise missing connection between God and creation.  Without her, it is possible to believe that God generated the creation without leaving any echo or identifying mark of divinity in or on it.  In which case it would indeed be a neutral object, a blank slate, a set of “resources” and commodities for humans to dominate, defile, degrade, and destroy.  And this includes other people.  Unfortunately, this is the way humans have behaved for almost all of our history, a sorry circumstance for which we are beginning to pay dearly.  Messing with what belongs to God never ends well; it is the surest way to experience the transcendent love of God as blistering wrath.

Only waking up to Wisdom, that is, a knowledge that God is present with and in the creation, which includes us, will give us a pathway out of this catastrophe.  If it is not indeed too late already.

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