Jesus Means Compassion.

 Jesus Means Compassion.

In my years as a Pastor I found I had to consistently remind people about one central thing: Jesus heals people because they suffer.  He does not ask why.  He does not take into account the person's lifestyle, or politics, or religion, age, or gender, behavior, or economic status.  Most come to him, but he also heals people at long distance based on others' word.  He considers only one thing: their suffering in that moment.

For Jesus, compassion depends purely on what a person has to deal with now.  Period.  Certainly they usually, but not always, must demonstrate some trust in him.  But Jesus addresses suffering in the moment for its own sake.

That sounds uncontroversial until we consider what Jesus' does not show any concern about.  He does not place blame.  In fact, when some of his disciples attempt to identify where the sin might lie that caused a person's illness, he rebukes them.  He refuses to make such extraneous distractions the point when he only cares about the raw fact of the pain experienced by the person.

This comes up all the time.  A person gets cancer and we want to attribute it to their foolish habits, like smoking or consistently eating and drinking unhealthily.  We seem to invest more attention in locating blame than in showing empathy for the suffering person.  Like we imagine we can avoid having to deal with the fact of a person's pain by looking somewhere, anywhere, else.  By extension maybe this strategy will somehow reduce our own suffering somehow.  As if bringing the guilty perpetrator to punishment makes us feel like we have done something useful in addressing the pain they caused.  When it really doesn't.

Right now I find myself having to listen to these arguments about Hamas' attacks of October 7 and the subsequent Israeli response.  When I express sorrow over the deaths of Israelis, someone will point out how the decades of Israeli oppression of Palestinians caused this ghastly atrocity on the part of Hamas.  The blame lies with the Israelis themselves.  If I tell how my heart breaks over the deaths of over 20,000 Palestinian civilians in Gaza from the recently Israeli bombardment, I will hear about how it is their own fault for supporting Hamas, and Hamas' fault for using them as human shields.  The blame lies with the Palestinians themselves.

All these explanations and rationalizations on both sides have some truth to them.  Israel has brutally oppressed the Palestinians in many ways for decades.  Hamas spouts a toxic ideology and committed a heinous assault on Israel, while carelessly and cynically abusing their own people.  The historical context of this war has deep and very complicated -- and bloody -- roots, going back to the Holocaust and the long history of violent anti-semitism in Europe.  I get that.

Indeed, humans have chosen this approach to "solve" problems for millennia: imagining we can prevent or reduce or heal suffering by committing violence and causing more suffering.  This strikes me as a form of mental illness.  It never works on any level.  It spawns cycles and systems of violence that churn on for generation after generation.  Yet it somehow appeals and makes sense to our egos to treat each other this way.  So we do.

But Jesus does not take this approach.  Hence, Jesus compassionately identifies with the Israeli families and communities shattered by Hamas.  At the same time, Jesus' heart breaks for the thousands of Palestinians dying and suffering terribly in Gaza.  He finds no contradiction in this.  He would only see the suffering, case by case, person by person, child by child.  He would not waste time reflecting on deciding whom to blame.  Indeed, when he himself gets nailed to pieces of wood and hung up to bleed and suffocate to death, he forgives those who do it while they are doing it.  His final identification with the hurt of the world on the cross serves finally to heal and redeem our suffering, our fear, our violence, and our ignorance.  

To follow him means identifying with the pain of the individuals suffering in this world, and seeking immediately to alleviate it... no matter who suffers or why; no matter who inflicts the pain or why.  Maybe if we follow him and start seeing things from the perspective of the victims of our violence, that violence will begin to recede.  Maybe that approach forms the foundation of justice for him, as we decline to support and participate in systems of violence.  Maybe if we stop getting distracted by our ideologies and fears, our desires and our sophisticated reason, and focus just on the pain of this person in this moment, as does Jesus, we can follow him out of this pit of despair and into the Light of his commonwealth of joy.

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The Spiritual Meaning of the Virgin Birth.

Modern people often tend to reject the Virgin Birth story.  I know some who clam up when that part of the creed gets recited in church.  We see several reasons for this.  The gynecological impossibility of it, and its connection to other ancient myths about important figures having miraculous births, allows us to imagine that we sophisticated Moderns know better than this silly, quaint story.  The story also gets used to erase and devalue the actual experiences of women, placing them on an intentionally impossible pedestal of "purity" to which no actual woman can attain.  We rightly want to reject that as well.

The Virgin Birth story remains important, however, for exactly the opposite reasons.  I have talked often about how Sojourner Truth shapes my understanding of this story.  She famously points out that the coming of Christ into the world happens between God and a woman, that a man had nothing to do with it.  I glean from this insight that no patriarchal authority, no member of the male establishment, no Empire, could have any claim or control over, or claim any credit for, God's coming into the world.  The Virgin Birth story thus becomes a significant instance of the anti-Imperialism that pervades the Scriptures.

Like so much of early Christianity, the story takes something from the larger culture and radically reframes it as a fundamental critique of the status quo and its powers.  I suspect this meaning caused later authorities to white-wash and domesticate the story, shoving it back into its accepted cultural frame as a justification for the inferiority and subjugation of women.  

Rather than cut or ignore the story for these reasons, I stand with Sojourner Truth in seeking to recover the deeper and more radical truth revealed in it.  In accepting the angel's offer, Mary basically gives the finger to systems of social convention and political power imposed on her and the world by The Man.  She rejects the patriarchy which characterizes Empire and even holds it together.    

This gives us the political meaning of the Virgin Birth.  But we may hear an interior, spiritual meaning as well.  For the Virgin Birth also excludes from any role in our acquisition of the Holy Spirit to the same patriarchy and Empire.  We must realize that the emergence with us of our Essence does not depend on or even include the values, practices, and goals dictated by the men who dominate society and politics.

Meister Eckhart alludes to this when he says: “We are all meant to be mothers of God.  What good is it to me if this eternal birth of the divine Son takes place unceasingly, but does not take place within myself?  And, what good is it to me if Mary is full of grace if I am not also full of grace?  What good is it to me for the Creator to give birth to his Son if I do not also give birth to him in my time and my culture?  This, then, is the fullness of time: When the Son of Man is begotten in us.”

In other words, as "mothers of God" we too participate in the same dynamic as Mary.  We do not bear God into the world as an expression or result of patriarchy or power; it does not happen "by the physical desire of a human father" (John 1:13 REB).  Rather this happens through our submission, humility, cooperation, assent, freedom, and vulnerability... not to any human authority or institution, but only to God.  Obedience to God explicitly refuses the authority and domination of any human power.

In other words, it has nothing to do with what we gain, own, control, extract, or measure; it renounces the money, fame, and power which Empire would have us crave and connive to get.  Rather, it concerns what we lose and renounce, divesting ourselves of our allegiance and loyalty to Empire's carrots and our fear of its sticks. Mary has to let go of her fear, her egocentric craving for control, even her own practical goals for her future. 

The example of Mary shows us the different path of openness and reception, even to a wildly alien visitation by a supernatural being with an impossible and costly message.   She has to open herself to this new thing, really an incredibly arrogant possibility, that she might herself serve as the mother of God.  She has to put her ego to the side, and embrace something exponentially bigger than her ego, even in its most grandiose fantasies, could imagine.

Mary shows us that our egos don't dream big enough!  Our ego craves independence and autonomy as a little separate, safe entity.  But only by letting our egos go can we emerge into an unthinkably larger place of union with and in God, what the early Church calls deification or theosis, the whole point and goal of Christian faith.

This humility and self-emptying become the path for nothing less than the eternal birth of the divine among us.  Gaining this new life means losing the old life; the new Self emerges when we let go of the old self.  Mary thus embodies in advance what will become the core of her son's teaching.

Finally, only when we let go of ego's grip on us, may we find ourselves in the position also to resist, rise above, and renounce Empire.  For only when we ourselves embody the vision of wholeness and inclusion, equity and compassion, justice and joy that we see in Jesus Christ, do we gain the capacity to resist the predations of Empire and model the Creator's reality.

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Modernity: Our Version of Empire.

1. Empire has functioned as the dominant political/economic operating system in the Western world for about 4000 years, since Pharaoh's Egypt.  Empire generally exhibits injustice and violence in the forms of:  a. social and economic stratification (patriarchy, racism, caste/class), b. military expansionism, c. a fetishization of economic growth, d. subservient religious institutions. 

2. For the last 500 years, we have called the prevailing version of Empire "Modernity."
3. Modernity expresses the characteristics of Empire in the following ways:  

• Humanism - While "humanism" sounds very enlightened and benign, under Modernity it means that human beings (by this it originally means almost exclusively white men) constitute the highest and best form of life, "the measure of all things," and absolute lords of the planet, with freedom to dispose of anything as they see fit.  No higher power exists in the universe.  Modern Humanism means Secularism.

• Rationalism - the human mind may completely know the universe by reason alone.

• Individualism - every individual human functions independently and autonomously.

• Materialism - only things that we can quantify, measure, and empirically verify exist. 

• Techism - humans have the right and responsibility to manipulate, transform, and commodify things in the world for their own benefit.

• Capitalism - "Benefit" means material wealth: capital, money, property, ownership, goods, possessions, and their ceaseless accumulation.  

• Progress - under human management, life necessarily continues to improve, advance, evolve.  Modernity focuses on the future; it demands "growth."

• Survival of the fittest - the best humans will naturally increase their wealth and power; those who have wealth and power deserve to rule.  Modernity uses different kinds of controlled violence to determine fitness: eg. adversariality, competition, war, asset measurement.

• Oligarchy - the class of the fittest individuals rules.

• White supremacy/eurocentrism.

• Colonialism - Those espousing this ideology have the right to conquer, rule, and profit from the work of every other life form on Earth.

• Secularism - Nothing has reality beyond the tangible, knowable, measurable, quantifiable, commodifiable world.     

4. Modernity, like every manifestation of Empire, cannot sustain itself.  Built on falsehoods of Empire, Modernity contains essential contradictions that doom it from the start.  Modernity has always exerted extractive and controlling violence towards planet and people.  While it talked about "democracy, equality, and human rights," in practice it always featured the hegemony of one class: white, male, property owners.  While it made progress including a limited number of more kinds of people in mainly the lower margins of the hegemonic class, Modernity has always demanded a cohort of usually non-white poor and working people to exploit.  It remains impossible to argue for the goodness of Modernity when we observe its results in ecological, social, and psychological devastation.  Modernity therefore disintegrates and collapses in turbulence and upheaval, confusion and insecurity.  We face changes we cannot anticipate and do not understand. 

4. Most people who feel as negatively as I do about Modernity want somehow to go "back" to an idealized better time (which could mean just an earlier era within Modernity or some pre-Modern age).  Therefore, they tend towards a conservative and reactionary perspective, even sometimes resorting to Fascism and other kinds of autocracy.  

4. But going back doesn't work.  History and time do not move that way.  We cannot escape our context.  We only attempt this through the application of extreme violence -- and it will inevitably fail.  Conservatism thus falls short as foolish, futile, and cruel.    

4. Liberals, on the other hand, tend to view Modernity positively, requiring merely a few technical tweaks to function more effectively.  They see a bright future in the intensified application of its avowed principles.  They point to the technological and social progress achieved under Modernity (mostly ignoring or discounting the cost or the uneven distribution of that progress).  

4. But problems cannot be solved from the way of thinking that produced them.  For example, we cannot grow our way out of an ecological catastrophe that results from the fetishization of growth.  Technology will not save us from problems created by the belief that technology will save us.  We cannot build communities through individualism that inherently rejects community.  Basically, humanity alone cannot solve problems perpetrated by humanity acting alone.  The myths, institutions, structures, ideas, and practices of Modernity cannot and will not help us overcome or even survive Modernity's ecological or economic catastrophes that came out of those myths, institutions, structures, and ideas.  To follow the liberal path will simply lead to a re-manifestation of Empire in some new, yet-to-be-named, post-Modern, expression.  

4. Instead of looking to an impossible utopia -- a conservative one that looks back to restore an illusory past or liberal one that looks ahead to an illusory future -- I suggest that we look elsewhere: Up.  To a "Higher Power," God, the Creator.

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Modernity Means Vivisection.

Vivisection.  noun

1.  The act or practice of cutting into or otherwise injuring living animals for the purpose of scientific research.

2.  Dissection of a living body; the practice of anatomizing alive, or of experimenting upon living animals, for the purpose of investigating some physiological function or pathological process which cannot well be otherwise determined.

3.  The dissection of an animal while alive, for the purpose of making physiological investigations.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition 

New York City recently removed a statue in Central Park of Dr. J. Marion Sims, the father of modern gynecology.  Sims experimented on living slave women in the American South, without the use of anesthesia.  The fact that we managed to admire and celebrate this monster reveals something about the mindset governing our whole civilization, from the so-called Enlightenment on.  I believe this got articulated most directly when people understood Francis Bacon as declaring that now humans could strap nature to a table and torture her secrets out of her.  

Under Modernity we applied that sentiment to everything, including other humans, right down to atoms.  Dr. Sims' atrocities do not present a special case by any means.  Modernity means the use of power to impose one's will upon another by violence.  When a coal executive looks at a mountain and sees only the fuel that he can extract from it by violence, we see the same way of thinking at work.       

Christians believe that God created the universe by speaking it into being and declaring each thing created "very good."  All things therefore bear the Voiceprint of the Creator, and exist as the Creator's beneficent expression.  All things reflect and express the Life of the One who created them.  We may dismiss nothing as inanimate, inert, or lifeless.  The Scriptures reveal a Creator who permeates the creation, a doctrine called panentheism: God in all.  (Panentheism, as distinct from pantheism, which identifies Creator and creation, means that all things participate in the One who created them by resonating together according to the Creator's pattern, first uttered in Word and Breath.)  "The Earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof, the world and all that dwell therein" (Psalm 24:1).  It all belongs to God.

This doctrine eliminates the right of any human to dispose of anything in creation as a neutral, lifeless object, an "it," a "thing" of no intrinsic value or connection to its Creator, to everything else, including the human.  It means that our approach to anything -- from a rock to another human being -- needs to show deference, respect, gratitude, humility, and grace.  In terms understandable to the Modern mentality, it grants inalienable rights to everything in creation.

Obviously, to think this way runs diametrically against that Modern mentality.  For from the so-called Enlightenment on, Modernity has only granted rights and freedom to humans, usually only to certain, privileged humans at that.   The exaltation of the human we get in Modernity necessarily and intentionally dehumanizes both the objects of such gruesome attention and its perpetrator.

An essential element in moving out of the Modern mindset means getting it into our consciousness and practice that nothing belongs to us and we are not free to do whatever we want with anything.  Everything belongs to the One who made it, and everything connects with everything else, including you.

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Not Leaving Church.

[Disclaimer: I do not know why the background goes to white sometimes.  But it's a free blog site, so I can't complain....]

What if people were invited to come tell what they already know of God instead of to learn what they are supposed to believe?  What if they were blessed for what they are doing in the world instead of chastened for not doing more at church? What if church felt more like a way station than a destination?  What if the church’s job were to move people out the door instead of trying to keep them in, by convincing them that God needed them more in the world than in the church? 

― Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith

This sentiment of Taylor's disturbs me.  Perhaps I take her words out of context; I haven't read the whole book.  But some friends of mine passed this along on Facebook to much approval.  Let me respond to her "what ifs" one by one:    

1.  What if people were invited to come tell what they already know of God instead of to learn what they are supposed to believe?  

Most people go through their existence assuming their ego constitutes their entire being.  What people "already know of God" in this condition will of necessity reflect and express nothing more than their own egocentric desires and fears, memories and imagination, pleasures, and pain.  Certainly, we might see this as a good place to start... but affirming people who imagine that "what they already know of God" has anything to do with the real God does them a disservice.  

Listening to such people share "what they already know of God" reminds me of people telling what they already know of Mongolia, having never been there, or talked to anyone who has been there, or even read about it.  We would hear what they thought or imagined about Mongolia, which would tell us absolutely nothing about the actual, real Mongolia.  We've all heard that parable about the blind people trying to describe an elephant by their own limited experience of different parts of the elephant?  Well this sounds more like a bunch of people trying to describe an elephant... when they have never actually even come close to one. 

Taylor assumes, it seems to me, that God isn't real in God's Self, but rather a conglomeration of individuals' imaginings about "God."  And as Dostoevsky famously said, if there is no God, everything is permitted.    

After 40 years of ministry, I can report that what a lot of people already think they know about God scares the shit out of me.  Some still hold toxic versions of God they received from oppressive religious institutions... both victims of this experience and those who still maintain and enforce that regime.  Some think God is little more than a spiritual mascot for the American Empire, equating Christianity with patriotism and nationalism.  Some imagine a God who exists to serve and bless them personally... and they may get angry and disillusioned if that God screws up and permits something bad to happen to them.  Or they imagine a God who keeps and checks a list to reward the nice and punish the naughty, like Santa Claus.  And so on.  God as philosophical problem, God as obsolete mythical sky fairy, God as Creator of cosmic beauty, God as surrogate parent....  I suspect any list of imagined Gods would be nearly as long as the number of humans on the earth.   

At best, having people share their personal images of God tells us something about their own personalities and neuroses.  That has some value as a starting point for psychological therapy.  But it tells us nothing about God.

Yes, we do come to church to learn what we're "supposed to believe," because it is by believing, which means by trusting in and walking with God and others in discipleship, that we come to know and see God's Presence.  This does not happen by an individual thinking about it in isolation.  It only happens in community with others, some of whom have traveled further on the path.

Taylor states it in a somewhat pejorative by saying "supposed to believe," as if faith and belief have nothing to do with our actual experience.  As in, "You know God in your heart, but the church dictates that you're supposed to believe something else."  As in, "You gonna believe your own experience or some church doctrine?"  As if beliefs have nothing to do with reality.   

When I visit a doctor, I expect them to listen very carefully to my story.  I do expect them to listen to how I feel.   But I can tell that to anyone for a lot less money.  I also rely upon their education and expertise as someone who knows more than I about how to proceed.  In other words, I count on them to tell me "what I should believe" based on his medical knowledge.  When they tell what not to eat or what kind of exercise or therapy will help me, and when they give me prescriptions for specific medicines, I trust their judgment.  I believe them, and I show this by doing what they say to do. 

This works for any kind of personal growth and healing.  I have to begin with the humility to recognize the inadequacy of what I already know.  Isn't that the point?  Whether it has to do with learning a skill, recovering from an injury, or overcoming an addiction, we can't depend on what we already know about anything.

2.  "What if they were blessed for what they are doing in the world instead of chastened for not doing more at church?"  

What if what someone is "already doing in the world" contributes to the destruction of the earth and people, even though they think it God's will and do it for the greater good?  If we start with each person's individual, egocentric version of God, the consequences in people's actions can get quite catastrophic.  Do I really need to explain how people invent versions of God to justify, explain, rationalize, and defend their bad actions?  Can we imagine someone whom the church might not want to bless "for what they are doing in the world"?  I can.  

Certainly we need to celebrate people when they do good things in the world.  That expresses discipleship.  But we don't find ourselves often faced with the choice of doing more at church or doing things in the world.  Most of us figure out how to do both, as each supports the other.

3.  "What if church felt more like a way station than a destination?"

Taylor again indulges in a characteristic polemic strategy of pretending we have to choose between two opposites.  As if here the church may either function as way station or a destination, but not both.  Maybe she means that she experienced church as a dead end, or an end in itself, and would prefer if the church actually gave her resources for living in the world.  In that case, I agree.  At the same time, life goes on, and the places we com to serve both as way stations and destinations.  

On the one hand, the gathering community needs to give us tools and equipment for the life of discipleship in the world.  People should not think it sufficient to just show up in church once a week.  Merely attending a language class accomplishes nothing; I have to go out and use the language in conversation for the class to have purpose.   

On the other hand, the church does offer a destination in the sense that what goes on there has some intrinsic value.  Everything does not have to prove its utility according to arbitrary secular values.  If I go to a concert or an art museum, or read a novel or watch a movie, I do not expect it necessarily to have some tangible benefit down the road.  Maybe I experience something as fun in itself!  We don't have to be on the clock all the time.  Staring out the window can have value.  Surely simply being moved by the beauty, community, meaning, stories, and music of worship has value as well.

Finally, ought we not cultivate a sense of presence/destination all the time?  "Be here now," as so many mystics have said.  I can travel somewhere and be present where I am along the way.  Maybe cultivating this perpetual presence needs to happen all the time, wherever we find ourselves.

4.  "What if the church’s job were to move people out the door instead of trying to keep them in, by convincing them that God needed them more in the world than in the church?" 

One early skit on Saturday Night Live was a fake ad for "Mr. Tea," a machine like a Mr. Coffee, except for tea.  When demonstrated, first you put a tea bag in a cup, then you put the cup into bottom of the Mr. Tea, then you pour boiling water down through the Mr. Tea into the cup... basically the same procedure as for a Mr. Coffee.  Of course, the machine itself does nothing, which generates the humor.

But if we have a church that only wants to hear of people's imaginary personal fantasies about God, and then sends them out to share that God with others, what function does the gathering serve at all?  It sounds like a Mr. Tea only without the tea bag.  People come in and people get moved out the door in the same condition.  Maybe while they sit in church they find some kind of affirmation for their personal, individual caricature of God, and receive permission to live according to that opinion?  Which they were going to do anyway?  Only now they can do it without feeling judged by the church?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a book called The Cost of Discipleship in which he describes "cheap grace" in almost exactly this way.  The church simply affirms people, requiring nothing of them, least of all any kind of behavioral change, which would look like "works righteousness," a very bad thing.

With churches following this approach, it does not surprise me that attendance continues to tank, and the numbers of "nones" and the unchurched keep rising.  People just decide they can get uncritical self-affirmation elsewhere.  They will particularly not seek it in a place that continues to have a reputation for offering very critical condemnation of non-conforming people.

Of course, Taylor critiques that latter version of the church, which she seems to identify with the very idea of church generally.  As if we might find the antidote for the church of condemnation in her alternative church of universal, uncritical acceptance and approval.  Another artificial dichotomy and choice.

Jesus intends the gathering of his disciples to serve as a place of transformation and growth, repentance and renewal, blessing and vocation.  When it devolves into a dead end of condemnation, conformism, and surveillance, it certainly forecloses on that identity.  But a church of cheap grace, which just affirms every ignorant prejudice, mindless self-gratification, and nostalgic or utopian fantasy, doesn't work either.  Not if the church exists to form people who follow the Way of Jesus.  Surely Jesus calls us to a Way distinct from these two choices of exclusive regulatory club or anything goes, tell-people-what-they-want-to-hear party.  In other words, maybe God needs people in the church because God's wants them in the world witnessing to the good news.  Maybe God intends the church to be the place where we learn how to follow Jesus in the world.

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I do not find it helpful to pretend we have these oppositional choices, like church OR world, believe OR follow, acceptance OR condemnation, way station OR destination, moving them out OR keeping them in, and so forth.  Maybe this works as a way of demonstrating one's frustration with the way things happened in the churches some folks grew up in.  But if we hope to move forward, I suspect we will have to adopt a better and frankly more inclusive approach, one that does not reflexively devalue the central role of the gathering of disciples -- the church.  

Far from functioning as a repressive, restrictive, regulatory institution designed to squash all individuality and creativity, Jesus sees and institutes the church as a gathering of his disciples for healing and mission.  Discipleship simply cannot happen apart from the community of those who follow Jesus: the church.

We cannot follow Jesus as separate individuals; discipleship only happens in and by the church.  Devaluing and even rejecting the whole idea of the necessity of a gathering of Jesus-followers plays directly into the agenda of Empire which depends on people believing themselves to be separated individuals, who think that selecting from the binary "choices" presented by the ruling powers means "freedom."

The Empire wants us to believe in and follow whatever amorphous, individualized, ego-centric God we "already know," and reject any God that the church suggests we "are supposed to believe."  What if, instead of following the Empire's subtle lure of personal independence, asking only what we have been taught to prefer, we gather together around the Word of God, Jesus Christ, as attested in Scripture, and grow into  a new way of thinking and acting?  What if we thought in terms of both/and, breaking artificial dichotomies, false binaries, and toxic adversarialities, realizing that we are all one in Christ?  What if we began to understand that in order to access our true and essential Self, we have to identify and decenter our adapted, ego selves, coming to realize our participation in and connection with all creation?   

Now, I realize that this doesn't actually happen in many churches.  But our agenda should involve finding ways to let the true church emerge among us, not abandoning the vision altogether in favor of the atomized, egocentric individualism the Empire keeps force-feeding us.              

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