Coming "Back"?

Jesus says: “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”

Talk is increasing about churches opening up and getting “back to normal” after the pandemic (whenever that is).  As we prepare for this, let’s remember what Jesus says here.  Let’s remember that, in discipleship, there is no going “back.”

Some will show up at church expecting, hoping, even demanding that everything go back to the way it was.  They want to worship like it’s 2019.  It is an understandable sentiment, given all we have been through.  We may justifiably crave the stability, familiarity, and comfort of the church life we once knew.

But I wonder what stability, familiarity, and comfort 

have to do with discipleship.  

For there is no going back.  2020-2021 will not be a meaningless detour after which we may resume our journey where we left off.  Rather, like most detours, we will find ourselves in a very different place, much farther on up the road, maybe even on a different road altogether. 

The 18 months or so we will have slogged our way through the pandemic have changed us.  This difficult time has revealed things about us, good and bad.  It has changed relationships, the economy, and our politics.  The whole way we see society, each other, the planet, and ourselves has shifted.  Far from simply picking up the story in 2019 before we were so rudely interrupted, the world of 2021 and forward will be something new and unfamiliar.

And we will have to keep adjusting and adapting, even after the pandemic has run its course, as we try to find a new equilibrium together.  There will be a strong tendency to pretend like nothing has happened and we can get back to the way it was.  On the other hand, many will find opportunities and assume some changes are permanent.  I suggest nothing is permanent.  The days after the pandemic will not look like when we were in the middle of it any more than they will merely repeat the time before.

None of this should particularly bother Christians.  

Our life is not about the past or preserving an old social order or economy.  Disciples of Jesus Christ 

have an inherently an essentially future orientation.  

Christianity is at its heart an apocalyptic and eschatological faith.  

Our prayer is “Your Kingdom come,” 

which means we are always looking ahead, 

listening as God’s Word, Jesus Christ, 

calls us forward into the fullness of time, 

into the realization of his true humanity, 

when God is revealed as all in all.

If we are consumed with grief, wallowing in nostalgia, or even reacting in anger, over what we have lost; if we are craving a return to what is, after all, just the arbitrary “normal” of 2019; if we are looking to the Church to pat us on the head and oh-poor-baby us to sleep as a way to escape or avoid change, we will have missed the opportunity Jesus is placing in our lap.  For this is a kairos moment if there ever was one.  That is, in the same way that a personal crisis can lead a person to faith, so a global crisis can be the shock that causes a shift in the way we see and act in the world.  

I wonder if the pandemic will not serve as the final jumpstart of the next era in human history.  Maybe it is the terminus of the long-disintegrating Modern Age, and now the shape of the emerging new era will become more clear.  

And the Church has to consciously and intentionally inhabit its role as beachhead, vanguard, and model of the new humanity.  We are — and always have been, in spite of our historical addiction to serving as reactionary lapdog for the Empire — the Ministry of the Future.  

So rather than imagine we can settle back into old routines and habits, this will be a time for discernment, discipleship, and equipping ourselves for mission in a different and changing world.  If we blow this opportunity, and choose instead inertia, and merely continue to regurgitate the worship and mission structures of the 1950’s, or feed on the corpse of 16th century theologies, the Church will deserve its consequent demise.  The Spirit will have moved on.

The point is not innovation for innovation’s sake.  Neither is it to dispense with whatever is old.  It is following the liberating gospel of Jesus Christ in a new time.  It is about finding the future that is always breaking into our present.  It is about putting our hand to the plow and looking ahead.

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The Jesus Prayer and Discipleship.

I have practiced the Jesus Prayer as a pillar of my personal spirituality for over 40 years.  This prayer has become so ingrained in me that occasionally I will notice that it has started itself up in my consciousness on its own.  I have repeated the prayer countless times in every kind of circumstance: walking and running, driving, going to sleep, praying, and of course in meditation.  It has become a constant companion.

The prayer itself is very simple.  The basic form is: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God: have mercy on me, a sinner.”

How does the Jesus Prayer make me a better disciple?  That is basically the only question I use to assess the value of anything. 

The invocation of the Name of Jesus is intended to accomplish two things.  First, it is an appeal to the Christ within me, my Essence.  And second, it is a way of identifying and releasing my own ego, which is what prevents the full realization of Christ within me.  These two hopes constitute the two parts of the prayer.

Authentic spirituality is a movement from ego to Essence, from “old self” or “the flesh,” to our “new self” or “spirit.”  We move from a false, invented, projected, and highly defended ego-centric sense of ourselves as separate, at-risk, alienated, and deluded about its own independence, to a realization of our true self, which is connected to everything and everyone.  The true self is Christ within us, through and in whom we realize our integration and participation in all creation, and even the Creator.

Calling on the Name of Jesus awakens us to the Presence of Christ, our true self, within us.  It is a desire to see emerging at our very core this original identity, which is Jesus Christ.  This Jesus Christ, the Word of God, is the spiritual Presence and Wisdom that flavors and permeates everything that God has breathed into existence.  He is the shape and pattern, the wavelength and voiceprint, of the living God.  He is the Creator encoded in everything.  Therefore, he is the Way to communion with and in everything.   

But I admit this is too verbal and abstract.  The Jesus Prayer is words… but the words are like an icon, a window to something far deeper.  If we just analyze the words, we have done almost nothing.  

Usually, when I say the prayer, I connect it with my breath.  I inhale on the first phrase: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God,” and exhale on the second: “Have mercy on me, a sinner.”  This wedding of the prayer to my breath is supposed to get the words out of my mind and into my body.  It physicalizes the prayer, connecting it to sensation.  I feel the breath — and also the beating of my heart, and indeed other physical sensations, like the air on my skin, the weight of my body, even the sounds of my environment — and the prayer becomes grounded in the moment.  I become present to the moment and the matter of my own body and immediate location.

Just as Jesus Christ is a single, mortal, historical human being for a specific time and in a specific place, and through him we see God and all creation… so also do we need to ground ourselves in a specific time and place by means of physicality and sensation —  breath — which becomes the place of our realization of our union with all.  But unless we can get down to this Real Presence in an experience and consciousness of our own temporal materiality in this breath, we continue to be lost in the fog of abstract mental processes and interpretations which only  separate us from life and reality, and continue to bind us to the old, ego self.

So the Jesus Prayer is about nothing less than becoming Christ.  It is a way of fulfilling the saying of Sts. Irenaeus, Athanasius, and other early Christians: “God became human so that humans might become God.”  

Robert E. Kennedy put it this way: “Christians are not taught to imitate Christ at all, but to be transformed into Christ.  Christians are not urged to copy or repeat the words or gestures of Christ, but to have his mind and be one with his spirit.”

To me, that is what the Jesus Prayer does.  It is therefore the foundation and taproot of discipleship.

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It's About Power.

 

Power matters.  It is one thing for a tiny, weak, new religious movement to criticize and complain about its bad treatment at the hands of a more powerful religious establishment.  This is what’s going on in a lot of the New Testament’s attitude towards “the Jews” and the Pharisees.  But when the tables are turned, and that weaker group evolves into the State Religion of the Roman Empire, and that formerly stronger group becomes a small minority, those same words can  become poison, and used to justify unthinkable atrocities and violence.  It turns out that the power differentials are more important than the mere names and labels groups happen to have.  From this perspective, the oppressed Jewish communities in Europe had way more in common with Jesus and his early followers than did the pompous, wealthy, culturally ubiquitous Roman Catholic Church.

Power matters.  Which American Christian community relates more closely to the position of the Bible, and of Jesus: the prosperous, all-but-established, tall-steeple church full of middle-class white people at the center of town?  Or the gatherings of the descendants of slaves on the outskirts?

Some may ask why it is okay for Black people to chant that “Black lives matter!” but not okay for white people to chant that white lives matter?  Why is one chant justified and the other an example of disgraceful racism?  Because of power.  People whose lives have been shown not to matter to those who have power — police, courts, banks, businesses, and so on — are justified in making their voices heard and appealing for equal treatment.  But when the people whose lives already matter, as shown by the deferential treatment they habitually receive from every institution, howl about their lives mattering too, it is clearly a hollow and cynical ploy intended to preserve their superior status.   

When I was in seminary there was a long effort to convince the administration to set aside space for a Women’s Center.  Many of the liberal men spoke in favor of this.  When it finally happened and a small room was dedicated as the new Women’s Center, the women declared it a man-free zone.  Some of the men who supported the effort on the grounds of equality were incensed about this.  They did not understand power, or equality.  It is okay and necessary for a small, minority making its way in an unfamiliar and often hostile environment to gather separately to share their stories and concerns without having to accommodate people who not only have no understanding of their situation, but actively maintain their marginalization. 

When we don’t take power differentials into account and delude ourselves that everyone is somehow functionally equal, then we will simply not understand the world or relationships.  Indeed, we will do a lot of damage by our ignorance.  Because only those who have experienced the business-end of inequality understand that people are not treated the same.  The ones who benefit don’t see it.  The ones who suffer do.

Today I listened to Andrew Cuomo’s profuse apologies for his offensive and intrusive behavior towards women.  He sounded mystified that anyone would take offense at his actions.  People who have power are not necessarily conscious that they have it, or its effects on others.  They often seem to imagine that they are just like everyone else, that there is this mythical level playing field, and that there is no difference between the words and actions of a Starbucks barista and the Governor of New York.

So human society is a minefield of power inequalities.  With everyone we meet, there is a complex set of power differentials based on race, gender, class, status, health, abilities, ethnicity, age, and many other categories.  All tis has to be recognized and navigated, all the time.  

The radical approach of the Lord Jesus to this situation is first to welcome especially those excluded by the society: the poor, women, the sick, the possessed, children, and people condemned as “sinners.”  Even more importantly, Jesus identifies with them.  He lives with them.  He embraces their lifestyle.  His welcoming is not a paternalistic, charitable accommodation.  No, he empties himself of superiority,  privilege, and power.  Living intentionally in simple humility and joyful acceptance, in recognition of the humanity he shares with each, Jesus thereby becomes a kind of conduit by which his divinity also gets shared with others, enabling them to access the power they have within them.  How often, when someone is healed, does he refuse to accept the credit, and say “Your faith has made you well”?

Discipleship means, at least, going consciously towards the lowest place.  It means divesting ourselves of power.  It means coming to identify with the neediest and most broken among us.  It means realizing that this self-offering is the shape of divine activity in the world, beginning even with creation itself.  In this way powerlessness opens us to receive the ultimate power which works in the world in and through us.

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