2014 Lent 30

I Corinthians 14:20-33a; 39-40

“God is a God not of disorder but of peace” (v. 33).

I have a Jewish friend named Shay.  I met him one winter day on top of a mountain in southern California.  I had taken my family sledding for the day, a fun Saturday activity for a February southern California day.  So there we were, running up the slope and sliding down, time and again, when my forward-thinking wife thought it would be a good idea to take a family photo.  I then turned to the man next to me, to ask if he’d take our picture, when I heard him speaking to his six year-old son in a foreign tongue.

“Excuse me,” I said; “could you take a picture of us?”

“Yes,” he smiled, “I’d love to.  And would you do the same for my family?”

“Certainly.  By the way, were you just speaking in Hebrew?”

“Yes!  How did you know?”

So I recited Genesis 1:1 to him in Hebrew, which I’d memorized once upon a time, and we began a dear friendship.  Shay and his wife, Yael, and their two sons attended my daughters’ baptisms, in fact, eleven years ago on Pentecost.  We were now Presbyterians, having recently left a Baptist Church; and we lined the girls up for the sacrament, stair-step style, ages two, four, six, and eight.

“I’m Jewish by heritage,” Shay told me later that day as we picnicked, “but not by belief.  We keep the festivals: the holy days and all that.  It’s our heritage.  But it’s really hard for me to believe in God–or at least in ideas like providence–when we, God’s so-called chosen people, have been mistreated for so long.  Especially in the twentieth century!  Could there really be an almighty God who allows this kind of evil to happen?”

So that’s one side of the coin.  The other is seen in what the apostle Paul says here, writing with certainty that God is a God of peace, not disorder.

How do we reconcile this problem of evil in a world created and governed by a good God?

Yesterday I mentioned John Cage, the twentieth-century American composer (see “2014 Lent 29″).  In his composition 4’33”, he suggested a possible answer to this riddle.  There is apparent chaos all around us.  But after the chaos has had a time to do its chaotic thing, a sort of settling occurs.  A certain peace, in other words, or order.  It’s not perhaps as orderly or as peaceful or as settled as we would like, but there is nevertheless more order, peace, and settlement than before, when the chaos was running its course.

That Cage was able to convey this idea through musical examples is brilliant.  But what I have been wrestling with since yesterday (and indeed for many years) is the connection between chaos, determinism, and providence, not just in music but in the wider world we live in.

How are these three related?  Are providence and determinism just two different words to describe the same thing–but one sounds religious and the other does not?  Or, if they are not the same thing, how do they differ from one another?  And to what degree does chaos–or dynamical instabilities–affect providence and/or determinism?

We get so caught up in wanting God to answer our prayers just as we’d like.  But determinism says that if a butterfly were to flap its wings just once in just a certain way on one side of the world, the result would be a hurricane on the other side of the world a year later.  This idea has in fact been proven mathematically.  So with respect to providence, perhaps if God were to answer a specific prayer just the way I wanted, it would result in a catastrophe at a different time and in a different place.  And I most definitely wouldn’t want that!

Kind of makes me rethink how I pray, or at least how I want God to answer my prayers.

Well, this is not a definitive answer for my friend Shay, I know.  But with seven billion humans walking the planet, we’ve got to make room for dynamical instabilities in our worldviews, whether we believe in providence, determinism, anarchy, fatalism, or anything else.

At least Paul’s view–and mine–sees peace as a destination to which we’re headed.  Come to think of it, so does John Cage’s.

2014 Lent 29

I Corinthians 14:1-19

Music practiced is far different than music performed, generally speaking anyway.

When a piano player first sits down to practice, for instance, she might give the piece in question a once-through. But she’s not performing. Rather, she’s paying close attention in the once-through to what needs particular work. At the conclusion of the once-through, then, she returns to those problematic areas, one at a time, working them through until there is noticeable improvement. Then maybe she does a final once-through to assess. The whole process has taken, say, an hour.

For the person practicing, this has been a productive hour. But if someone were to sit in the same room for that hour expecting a performance, that person would experience something of a let-down. With the exception of the beginning and the end of the time, when the practicer did her once-throughs, the listener would not have been able to follow along very well, if at all. The casual listener would leave such a session frustrated.

But to hear a performance is a different matter entirely. The performer has practiced and practiced, time and again, countless hours, mastering even the most difficult sections, tweaking repeatedly until she achieves just the subtle nuances she desires. And now she performs the piece from start to finish in all its glory. The audience hears and understands; and at the performance’s completion they rise to their feet and shout, “Brava!” (the appropriate response for a female performer, by the way).

Practicing and performing music are two very different instances.

But the twentieth century paints a different picture—or, eh hem, plays a different symphony. For the twentieth century introduces figures like Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, and John Cage. And these guys played with music in innovative ways. The same, of course, could be said of Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart. But the innovative liberties these guys took in their compositions made performances difficult to distinguish from practice sessions—to all but the most learned listener anyway.

Schoenberg and Webern focused on order. Both men were Jews living during the Great War and WWII; they were arguably trying to make sense of a chaotic world. That’s certainly what their music sounds like; except, for the casual listener raised mostly on pop music and musicals, it’s difficult to hear the order. That’s what makes the performance hard to distinguish from the practice. To a casual listener it can sound like a toddler striking piano keys at random—or a toddler orchestra!

For an example, listen here to a Webern string quartet premiered in September, 1938: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyHIG5rxo7s.

Yet to those who are learned regarding this musical style, to those who are “in the know,” there is indeed incredibly precise order to these twelve-tone works. Mathematically precise order in fact! I’ll save you the details, but composing them was effectively a math problem; and we all know how precise math is.

On the other hand was the American composer John Cage—deeply influenced, incidentally, by eastern thought. Unlike Schoenberg and Webern, who tried to make order out of chaos (a musical reflection of the world of the twentieth century), Cage exploited chaos’s influence on the art, and on the world. For instance, one of his pieces is called 4’33”. Here a pianist sits before an audience and merely holds the sustain pedal down for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. What happens is almost entirely relative, depending on the concert hall, size of audience, how close someone with allergies is sitting to the piano, and so on. For the engaged sustain pedal allows the piano strings to pick up all sorts of resonant frequencies. But by the end of the time, regardless of how different the piece starts out relatively speaking, there is always a sort of hum produced by all the strings. And by this Cage is demonstrating that chaos left unchecked will eventually settle into some form of apparent order.

Another Cage piece is the image at the top of this post. As you can see, it hardly looks like sheet music. It’s up to the performer, really, to interpret this piece. Thus ideas about how this piece ought to sound vary widely—just listen to a handful of recordings of it by different performers! Again, relativism seems to be the motivator here. If Schoenberg and Webern are trying to make order from chaos, Cage seems to be making chaos (i. e., relativistic performances) from order (i. e., his written notation). Beyond this, or perhaps above it, though, a sort of order emerges in the end—not as orderly as we conservative Americans would like, but similar to the order emerging out of the chaos of the twentieth-century world.

So here are two dramatically different approaches to music. The point I set out to make was that the performances of these twentieth-century compositions blur the line between performance and practice to all but the most learned listeners.

And I haven’t even begun to talk about jazz and other types of musical improvisation, where the “practice” suddenly becomes the performance! But that would be cool to explore too—maybe another day.

But what triggered this discussion for me was Paul’s take on the spiritual gifts of tongues and prophecy in today’s reading. Using the gift of tongues, Paul says, is like practicing a musical instrument, to be done in private essentially; but prophecy is for the benefit of an audience, like a musical performance.

The ramifications of Schoenberg, Webern, and Cage seem to me to be that even in our prophet-like spiritual gifts (preaching, teaching, knowledge, etc.), the church enters a danger-zone when it speaks in a way that only those “in the know” can understand.

But, on the other hand, Schoenberg, Webern, Cage, and jazz are definitely worth knowing, whether broader culture feels this way or not. So shouldn’t the church similarly raise the bar?

2014 Lent 28

I Corinthians 13

Love never ends, says Paul.

But what about its beginnings?

Seriously, this is a question worth pondering.  Has love always existed?  Or is it something that came into being somewhere in time, back in the ancient past, maybe when the first rational animal committed a selfless act?

It seems reasonable to say that love has always existed, doesn’t it?

But be careful.  Especially if you’re an atheist.  For if you want to say that love has always existed, to do so is akin to saying it is not a created concept; or to saying it is eternal, that it has no beginning, regardless of whether there ever was a big bang or not.  That puts love beyond time, and thus likens it to the trans-religion concept of God: existing both within and without the dimensions of space and time.

So if you want to say that love has always existed (as I do), then you’re somehow connecting love to God whether you admit it or not.

Perhaps then the being we call God should instead be named Love.  Not a bad idea.

But there is another way of seeing love; namely, as an attribute of God.  Love never ends, yes.  But love never begins either.  It has always been, is now, and will always be.  And this is because it is a part of who God is.  In this sense love is not a god, but similar to truth, beauty, and goodness, three other eternal attributes of God.

Are you with me?

But here is what makes love different from anything else, including truth, beauty, and goodness: it is outward.

Put yourself in that beyond-time-and-space realm mentioned earlier.  Here is where God alone dwells.  God has always dwelled here; God will always dwell here.  This means that God was here forever in the past, infinitely and eternally, before creation began–sun, moon, stars, planets, supernovae, all of it!

Now, here, in this beyond-time-and-space place, God could possess infinite truth, beauty, and goodness easily enough.  But how could God possess the type of love described in I Corinthians 13?  God could have thought it up, sure.  God could have determined to create a world in which beings existed in God’s own image, male and female, and that these beings would selflessly put one ahead of the other, that they would love one another.

But that would make love a created concept.  And that would mean that love is not really attached to God’s being–unless God took on that attribute after it had been created, which would mean that God was at one time less complete (and thus less perfect) than God is now.  But this is impossible.

No, love has to be an eternal attribute of God.

But, to return to that infinite and eternal beyond-time-and-space place, God could not possess love unless God had some way of expressing love, of putting another first, selflessly.  But God dwells here alone.  So with, for, and to whom can God express love here?

Tricky conundrum, eh?

For the atheist, love has to be a human invention, by definition.  But humans are no more than rational animals that operate by the same Darwinian principles as any other species.  They should be self-centered, not selfless.  Yet agape love, a love humans are capable of showing to one another, puts others first: it defies survival of the fittest.

Love also baffles the concept of a monotheistic God.  The God of the Jews and the God of Islam have always existed, eternally and infinitely in the past.  But they are alone in that beyond-time-and-space place.  So for them love cannot be an eternal and infinite attribute.

Love is indeed a baffler.

Only the Christian God provides an adequate answer.  For only the Christian God is seen as triune, three-in-one, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, existing infinitely and eternally in perfect perichoresis (a kind of divine dance).  Only the Christian God possesses community.  Only the Christian God allows for one person to put another first eternally and infinitely.

Love, then–the kind of love explained in today’s reading anyway–is what convinces me more than anything else that Christianity contains the truest expression of religious faith.

Love never ends.

2014 Lent 27

I Corinthians 12:27–13:3

Now we come to a still more excellent way: love.  Whatever else we are, without love we are nothing.

But the word itself is thrown around lightly by us English speakers, isn’t it?  “I love you, man,” one friend says to another over a beer, a bowl of pretzels, and a football game.  Is this the love without which we are nothing?

I could go on to illustrate other uses of the word, some glib and others not so much.  But it’s been done already by many others, far better than I can do it too.  Read C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces for one of the best illustrations, in my opinion, of various loves.  Or read my book review of it on this blog–if I ever get around to writing it.

But to Paul’s point, the love we must strive to possess is that same love of the Great Commandment from Jesus.  Love the Lord your God, Jesus tells us.  And out of this love, we then infer, flows all goodness, truth, and beauty in life.  That’s why Jesus quickly names a second commandment that is like unto the first: love your neighbor as yourself.

This is no silly, glib, emotionally charged impulse.  Instead, it’s a firm resolve to put others first, starting with God and extending to others.

It does not focus too much on humanity.  We might strive to get along with a relative, to say encouraging words continuously to others, or to bring about world peace.  But without God-focused love, all these efforts amount to nothing.

But neither does it focus too much on self, like Narcissus did, and we all know what happened to him, yeah?

Maybe, then, instead of thinking of four different types of love–eros, agape, and so on–we should limit it to one, as we do in English with our one word: love.  After all, this sort of focus is really what Jesus does when he narrows ten commandments, themselves a summary of so many more, down to one.  But then we would have to reserve its use for only its purest form, as it appears in today’s reading.

But that would mean taking a lot of love out of the world, or at least out of our language.  I’m not so sure I like that idea.  For then we wouldn’t be able to say things like, “Man, I sure love this Beethoven symphony”; or, “Don’t you just love this Thai restaurant?”  Etc.  And the whole world would feel a little colder, or at least a little less lovely.

So I guess we’re back at needing at least four ways of describing love.  Maybe we should add some more words to the English language then, words to describe the subtle differences of love, like the Greeks did.

But there are so many facets to this diamond.  There’s brotherly love, for instance.  But isn’t this the same love we share with friends, relatives, and even colleagues?  Trying to come up with a different word for each, then, and then doing so again with romantic love (I’ve heard these adjectives attached to it, to name a few: dating, courting, engagement, marriage, and platonic), godly love, and so on–and before you know it we’d need to add thirty-seven new words to Webster’s.  Indeed, facets within facets!  And I’m not being facetious!

Which brings us back to an admiration for the economy of the English language, yeah?

Anyway, John Lennon offers a solid paraphrase of Paul today: all you need is love.

2014 Lent 26

I Corinthians 12:12-26

Over the course of the last few weeks I’ve said more than once that here–at some point or another in my contemplation of I Corinthians–I must disagree with the apostle.  Reason, experience, and tradition have had to overrule one or another of Paul’s points, or some method he tries to persuade me to follow.

Well, today I’ve come to a new turn in the road.  For today he simply makes me laugh.

He’s talking about how an assembly of Christ-believers makes up one body; though concurrently, according to the unique liberties and gifts given to each person, each assembly is made up of many members.  The NIV, by the way, uses the word parts instead of members (a good distinction to keep in mind): one body, many parts.

So then, this is a good picture to bring up, especially in light of the liberty (of the many parts) and divisions (of the one body) he has been discussing up to now.  But Paul then exploits this metaphor, likening a person in a congregation to a member, or part, of a human body.

A foot and a hand, for instance, have different functions.  The hand needs to do its thing, and the foot its.  That doesn’t make either of these any less a part of the overall body.  The same thing could be said of the eye and ear.  Looking at this a little differently, for a body to be all eyes (like Argos from Greek mythology?) would make for someone who sees really well but is not much good at anything else.

So should it be in the Christian assembly.  Not all have been called to be the eyes of the organization.  Some have been called to be the feet, others hands, without which, in fact, the organization would be seriously hindered.

And I want to say, “Okay, Paul, thanks, you can stop right there.  I get it.”

But he doesn’t stop right there.

He goes on, indeed to the point of embarrassment, to mention “less honorable” and “inferior” members–or, parts.

Now maybe you’re thinking, “Surely he can’t mean private parts here, can he?”  Which is exactly what I thought at first.  But he does.  And, the more I think about it, that’s what strikes me as so funny.

For it’s fine and well enough to call me the hand or foot of an organization, or the eye, ear, mouth, or even the nose.  But who wants to be known as the organization’s belly button?  Or worse, as the organization’s– well, you get the picture, yeah?

But even to be an organization’s private part, apparently for Paul, is respectable enough.  For we give greater attention to our “less honorable,” “inferior” parts–making sure to cover them from exposure, I presume, which is something we don’t have to do when with our hands and feet, eyes and ears, and so on; but most definitely must do in public when it comes to our, eh hem, privates.

Anyway, this greater amount of attention shown to the private parts is supposed to yield this result: “that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another.  If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it” (v. 25-26).

And I don’t know about you, but my middle school boy’s mind has now taken over.  The metaphor broke down for me some time ago.  I’m no longer thinking about a congregation and the various roles its parishioners play, but about jokes I used to make with Chris, Dave, John, and Rich as we dressed out for P. E. in the Los Altos Junior High School locker room.  And I’m holding my aching sides.

At any rate, all things considered, my ongoing conversation with Paul has now included discussion and debate–agreement about some matters, disagreement about others–and, today, flat out laughter.  A fly on the wall would think we’ve become pretty good friends.

2014 Lent 25

I Corinthians 12:1-11

The consensus from scholars of the New Testament seems to be that Paul’s purpose in writing to the Corinthians, at least in his first letter, was to combat division.  More and more, though, I find myself disagreeing with this consensus.  (But I’m just a lowly M. Div.; is it okay to disagree with Ph. D.s?)  Instead, I’m thinking that Paul wrote this letter in order to explain Christian liberty.

Crossing the line between liberty and license, on the one hand, can certainly lead to division.  So, on the other hand, can crossing the line between liberty and legalism.

Think of it as a liberty spectrum.  What you can see on this spectrum are all the glorious shades of liberty, like the colors of the rainbow.  Go too far to the right, though, into the ultraviolet zone of legalism, and you no longer see these glorious shades.  Stay there too long, in fact, and you will get burned–unless, of course, you manufacture some formula to block out (some of) the harmful rays’ effects.

A similar thing happens when you travel too far to the left, into the land of infrared license.  Here the unseen microwaves will boil your blood, destroying you from the inside out.  You can try to shield yourself from harm, sure.  And I know many people for whom this has worked for a time, such as my recovering alcoholic friends.  But, as these friends will tell you, in the end their personal license proved very harmful, and likely would have proved fatal if they had not gotten their liberty in check.

Anyway, I think this is really what Paul is getting at in this letter.  If a group of people ends up either too far to the left or right, well, that produces a faction.  Hence the division so evident at certain points in this letter.

But division does not strike me as the chiefest theme running throughout.  For if it were, what could we make of today’s reading, where there isn’t the slightest suggestion of it?  Today’s passage is all about spiritual gifts, and how one God gives specific gifts to many individuals and then lets these many individuals use them according to who they are as individuals for the one God’s glory.  No, there’s no division here.  Rather, today is about liberty in Christ.

The same could be said for several of the previous passages we’ve encountered, including the very first chapter.

Not legalism, then, and not license–which cause division–but liberty!

2014 Lent 24

I Corinthians 11:17-34

Aside from my dear bride, who is by far my best friend in the world, I’ve had only a handful of really close friends in my adult life.

Up until fairly recently, if you were to have asked me why, I wouldn’t have been able to give a satisfactory answer.  But presently I’m onto something, a hunch; and I think it’s right.  For each of these good friends I’ve known possesses a certain quality, a sort of running theme that I’ve identified only recently.  And for the record, my wife possesses this quality too, in abundance.

But aside from this quality, I can’t say there is any other that runs through all my friendships.

One friend may have been fat, another thin; one athletic, another sedentary; one nerdy, another cool, to excess; one a reader, another a post-literate technophile; one a Christian, another an atheist; one sanguine, another melancholy; one a gourmet, another a fast-food junkie; one contemplative, another active; one outdoorsy, another a couch potato; one selfish, another selfless; one a musician, another who can’t play so much as a radio; one who sees the obvious advantages of a liberal arts education, another who refuses to see them; one a motorcycle lover, another who thinks that motorcycles are the principal vehicular mode of transportation in hell and thus that’s where they should stay, thank you very much; and so on; and so forth.

That’s because, in the long run, with maybe an exception or two, none of these differences matters much–if, that is, a person possesses the one quality to which I refer.  For if the person possesses this quality, then deep, ongoing, meaningful discussion can take place over a long period of time, allowing two parties to accommodate each other in respectful, engaging, and loving ways, even when they disagree.

So then, what is this quality of which I speak?

It is simply this: genuineness.

Don’t you agree?  Isn’t it wonderful to engage in discussion with someone who is out in the open with what he means, not playing mind games or trying to insinuate hidden meanings into what he says, even when that discussion involves passionate disagreements?  Don’t you want a friend who will be up front with you, who will treat you well whether you are physically with her or not?  Really, who wants to be besties with a Janus, a two-faced friend who’s nice to you when you’re present but then talks trash about you when your back is turned?

So: show me a person who is genuine and you’ve shown me a good friend.

I wonder if this is what Paul was getting at when he used the word.  It’s right there at the end of verse 19, genuine.  I wonder, would there have been a lot less division in the Corinthian assembly if more persons there had been genuine?

2014 Lent 23

I Corinthians 10:14–11:1

Whoa!  Got some feedback to that last one–my last Lenten post, that is (cf. “2014 Lent 22”)!  Some readers hated it.  Others loved it–picked up a few new followers, in fact.  So I went back over it to see if I could discern why the controversy.

My thinking is that it’s the last line.  There I said something like, “So yeah, Paul, I know you’re the writer of sacred scriptures and all, but in this case reason and experience must rule the day for me.”

So my thinking is that maybe this sounds like I’ve just elevated my own reason and experience over scripture in the authority department.  Is that it?  Am I actually suggesting that, even though the scriptures are authoritative for me, my reasoning capabilities and personal experiences are nevertheless somehow more authoritative?

No.  That’s not what I am suggesting.  My heart beats a certain way; my mind follows the laws of logic as I know them.  But I am just one person, extremely limited, who is keenly aware that individuals are almost always poor assessors of self.

So I offer a clarification.

St. Paul writes to the Corinthians to address division in their congregation.  In his letter, he brings up some causes for division revolving around the matter of liberty.  How much liberty should a believer in Christ be allowed?  Should a believer in Christ have to follow the Jewish custom of circumcision, for instance?  No!  What about Jewish dietary laws?  Are Christ-believers allowed to eat ham and shellfish?  Sure!  So, what about matters of sexuality?

Here Paul seems to waffle a bit.  He argues that marriage isn’t really that good–and by implication neither is family–that such relationships burden the Christ-believer with unneccessities (my cool new word, by the way).  But, for the sake of controlling lusts, marriage is allowable.  But when a man sleeps with his stepmother, that’s going way too far!

But Paul also believes that the end of the world is near, perhaps to come even in his lifetime.  In other words, he has an apocalyptic worldview.  In this scenario (indeed, just watch an episode or two of The Walking Dead), marriage and family certainly would be a burden.

But we’re not facing an imminent apocalypse.  Or even if we are, we don’t know it and therefore shouldn’t live like it.  Jesus himself says, when charging folks to remember Lot’s wife, that in the days of Noah, right up until the very day of the flood, they were eating, drinking, living, carrying on business, and marrying and being given in marriage.  Even before a worldwide cataclysm, people were carrying on life as normal.

Now Paul says not to since the world’s about to end.

I resisted this idea a little.  It was just a few posts ago if you want to see, something like “2014 Lent 18.”  Point is, I argued with the apostle.  And it felt good to do so.  After all, he and Jesus are making contrary points here; they can’t both be right.

But that post generated little response.

So why now, when I disagree with a method Paul uses to argue a point do I sense such resistance?

Paul makes a great point in I Corinthians 10:14: “Flee from the worship of idols.”  I totally agree, 100%.  Any time something becomes more important to me than God, it’s ugly.  But getting to this point Paul says we shouldn’t eat meat sacrificed to idols if doing so would cause someone to stumble in his or her faith.  Huh?  He also uses fear tactics in his argument:

“Remember all those Israelites who died in the wilderness after God delivered them from Egypt?  Well, they died because of God’s judgment.  Do you want to die under God’s judgment too?  I didn’t think so.  Therefore flee from idols.”

So my point yesterday was not that I disagree with a great truth, but that I disagree with Paul’s methods to get us there.

We are so far removed from Paul that we don’t even really know what meat sacrificed to idols looks like.  So we have no problem with his statement about that.  Why then can’t we remove ourselves from using fear tactics in our moral teachings?  In judgment, he says, “Twenty-three thousand fell in a single day.”  This is a huge number.  Certainly, I’m not about to make a brazen statement about Hurricane Katrina, for instance, being a demonstration of God’s judgment.  But isn’t that the idea behind what Paul does in chapter 10:1-13?

So here’s another statement that some of my readership might disagree with: Paul was a product of his times.  My reason strongly suggests this anyway.

Yes, he wrote a good chunk of our sacred scriptures.  And yes, there are many moral truths from his writings that transcend cultural contexts and are thus broadly applicable.  But he also shows some inconsistencies, such as vilifying pagans in one breath and then condoning their actions in the next (cf. 1 Cor. 5:1-2), not to mention that bit above where he disagrees with Jesus.

So I’m learning to argue with Paul.

He’s used to it.  He himself was raised in a tradition that values discussion and debate.  Indeed, arguments continue to this day between Rabbis and the Torah.  It’s part of Midrash.  So what if I come along and question Paul’s methods?  According to Paul himself, I have liberty to do so.  Why then should the concluding statement of Saturday’s post be so rankling for you?

Interestingly enough, Paul ends today’s reading with another timeless charge: “Whatever you do, do everything for the glory of God.”

No argument there.

Nevertheless, I have taken upon myself a serious discipline this Lent to give substantial consideration to a passage of scripture daily as evidenced by my writing about it.  And this daily consideration includes engaging Paul in argument.  Following his charge, then, I am thus arguing with him for the glory of God.  That’s how I see it anyway.  For the remaining skeptics, however, I offer this: at the last day, after all the arguing and wrestling and rankling is over, I will say, eagerly, “Not my will, Jesus, but yours.”

Now, how in the cosmos is that putting my reason and experience’s authority above that of the scriptures?

2014 Lent 22

I Corinthians 10:1-13

Again, more issues for me here.

In today’s passage, Paul begins with a reference to one cool thing that happened in the past: that all Israel was delivered from slavery through a miraculous parting of the Red Sea.  No problem here.

But then he lists several negative things.  “Nevertheless,” he begins this list, “God was not pleased with most of them, and they were struck down in the wilderness.”  Yikes!  Next, some were idolaters, others indulged in sexual immorality, “and twenty-three thousand fell in a single day” because of it.  Again, some put Christ to the test “and were destroyed by serpents.”  And finally, some of “our ancestors” complained and thus “were destroyed by the destroyer.”

So let me get this straight.  God delivered the nation of Israel miraculously only then to allow them to die in the wilderness?  And I don’t know about you, but some of these descriptions of death–the one by serpents at least–strike me as more gruesome than drowning.

But this isn’t Paul’s point.  Rather, these things are an example to us, he says, to instruct us.  Then he sums it up this way: “So if you think you are standing, watch out that you do not fall.”

Okay, okay, it’s a good point, I’ll grant you that.  Pride indeed comes before the fall, as we can all attest.

But my issues lie in how Paul got us here.

For it strikes me that he motivates the Corinthians, and by extension us, with fear.

“Our ancestors did these wrong things,” he says, “and look what happened to them.  Do you want to bring the same thing down on you?”

But I don’t do well with fear mongering.

As a little boy there were certain men I minded my p’s and q’s around more than anyone else.  It wasn’t because I respected them, though; but because I feared them.

Some of them were my dad’s friends.  And he’d ask, “Wow, how did you get Timmy to listen to you?  He won’t do a thing I tell him.”

But is this really the best way to get kids to obey?

One of these guys–I can barely remember most of the exchange, I was so young–I liked initially.  He made me laugh, I remember.  And for that reason I was drawn to him.  But then, whether I got too close for his comfort level or was otherwise too riled up for his liking, he threw a limon at my head.

Limons are rock-hard little lemon-like fruits the grow in Mexico, where we were camping for the long weekend.  So imagine a thirty-ish year-old engineer with little experience around kids interacting with a five year-old boy with puppy-like energy.  Then imagine the engineer getting tired of playing with the puppy.  He tries to move on but the puppy-kid won’t let him.  So to make his point he throws a rock-hard fruit at the kid’s head.  And he hits him squarely.

Now this might seem funny to an engineer, or even to a grownup in general.  (I seem to remember my mom laughing.)  But, let me tell you, to a five year-old it was enough.  That friendship was immediately over.  For, to the five year-old, that engineer-man was uncertain, unpredictable, to be feared.

Now, today, as a dad, I in no way want to bring fear mongering into the way I raise my kids.  I want them to obey me, sure.  But they should do it out of love for me, not out of fear.

I view God this way too: to be obeyed; but out of love, not fear.

So, Paul, I know you’re a writer of the sacred scriptures and all, but this is an instance where reason and experience must rule the day for me.

2014 Lent 21

I Corinthians 9:16-27

Work is paradoxical.

We encourage children from the earliest age to think about what they want to be when they grow up.  We also tell them that they can aspire to be anything they want professionally.

Right now, in my own family, I have a daughter on the cusp of graduating from high school.  I’m giving her lots of counsel about a possible major, the adult work world, and so on.  Wouldn’t it be great if she could find the perfect blend of low stress and high pay?  But what is that?  Every doctor and lawyer I know deals with stress, usually lots of it.  Not sure I’d want to wish a life of that on her for all the money in the world.  But every low-stress job I can think of is low paying–except, perhaps, some teaching gigs and the arts.

Anyway, we raise children with a sense of liberty towards work.  “Work hard in school,” we say, “so that when you graduate you can do something you love.”  I even heard Ryan Seacrest say something along these lines last night on national TV: “‘Cause when you love what you do, it’s not work.”

So a lot of kids grow up with the idea that they will pick a field of work they love, of their own choosing.  And many succeed at it.

There are those, however, who end up doing something they’re not entirely fond of, something that was never a dream for them, in order to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves and their loved ones.  In fact, this may be the majority of folks out there.  Next time you’re in a restaurant, for instance, just look around.  How many table servers, cashiers, and managers do you think got into this facet of the hospitality industry because they were following a dream?  For these folks, work must feel something like enslavement.

So the kids in the first scenario end up seeming privileged over those in the second.  For the first end up doing what they love, and it doesn’t feel like work to them, at least according to Ryan Seacrest.  But the second face daily drudgery, working for the man, as it were.

But, you know, in each scenario the tables can be turned.  In the first, where liberty points us to find a career, in time the obligation still turns the job into labor, toil, even drudgery.  No lawyers and doctors I know fit the second scenario; that is, they went into their field following a dream.  But most (if not all) end up feeling somewhat enslaved to their positions after a while.

On the other hand, one of the most joyful persons–and in that sense one of the most liberated souls–I know is Daniel, my gardener.  He entered this line of work for little more reason than to make ends meet.  Yet I’m sure he sleeps very well at night, free from most (if not all) anxieties and stresses that plague others.

So Paul mentioned liberty yesterday.  Today he says that in his liberty he has entered a sort of enslavement so that others might be won over to the good news of Christ.

We can transfer the paradoxical nature of work over to self-discipline.  Christians who enter into a Lenten discipline do so voluntarily, in liberty, into a sort of self-imposed forty-day enslavement.

But maybe paradox isn’t the best way to look at it.  Maybe, instead, what we should see in all this is balance.

Does this sound eastern to you?  Wherever there is some yin, there must also be some yang.

Yes, it is eastern–in the sense that it resonates with worldviews with origins in the far east.

But it also resonates with Christian origins.  Paul writes about it here, after all.  And didn’t Jesus himself teach in a paradoxical way–or, in other words, in a way that seeks balance?  How is it that we are already raised to new life and members of a new kingdom yet still must die an earthly death on this here-and-now kingdom?  And so on.

I looked for an image (on Wikimedia, so copyright issues are copacetic), as I often do, to illustrate this post.  How interesting to find an ancient Celtic piece of art with yin-yang symbolized on it!  It dates from the mid-first century AD, a full century after Julius Caesar conquered Britannia.  Had Christianity, or the school of thought leading to Christianity, yet reached the island by the time this piece of art was made?  It’s debatable–not to be ruled out, but neither to be assumed.  What is certain is that western thought had entered the island.  So, apparently, had eastern.

Doesn’t this provide us with another picture of liberty and enslavement?

The ancient Celts knew what it meant to live at rest in tension–to live in balance.

So did Paul.

We can too, whether it involves job dissatisfaction, unrealized dreams, factions in the church, political unrest, wars, or simply the joys and sorrows of everyday life.