Showing posts with label beatitudes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label beatitudes. Show all posts

09 June 2019

Feast of Pentecost: The Battle for the Kingdom of God (Reprised with Tweaks)

 One of the problems I see most often with Christianity is its domestication, a kind of blunting of its prophetic and counter cultural character. It is one thing to be comfortable with our faith, to live it gently in every part of our lives and to be a source of quiet challenge and consolation because we have been wholly changed by it. It is entirely another to add it to our lives and identities as a merely superficial "spiritual component" which we refuse to allow not only to shake the very foundations of all we know but also to transform us in all we are and do. This has been a particularly challenging message we have heard again and again as we worked through the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount in our parish Bible study these past weeks. Again and again we heard the call to be radical disciples of Christ, to be poor in Spirit, non-violent, capable of grieving in Christ and of the compassion that flows in part from grieving well, to be peacemakers in a violent world, and so forth. Too often the Beatitudes are domesticated in a way which blunts their radical call and consolation.

Even more problematical --- and I admit to being sensitive to this because I am a hermit called to "stricter separation from the world" --- is a kind of self-centered spirituality which focuses on our own supposed holiness or perfection but calls for turning away from a world which undoubtedly needs and yearns for the love only God's powerful Spirit makes possible in us. Clearly today's Festal readings celebrate something very different than the sort of bland, powerless, pastorally ineffective, merely nominal Christianity we may embrace --- or the self-centered spirituality we sometimes espouse in the name of "contemplation" and  "contemptus mundi". Listen again to the shaking experience of the powerful Spirit that birthed the Church which Luke recounts in Acts: 

[[When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.]]

Roaring sounds filling the whole space, tongues of fire coming to rest above each person, a power of language which commun-icates (creates) incredible unity and destroys division --- this is a picture of a new and incredible creation, a new and awesome world in which the structure of power is turned on its head and those who were outsiders --- the sick and poor, the outcast and sinners, those with no status and only the stamp of shame marking their lives --- are kissed with divinity and revealed to be God's very own Temples. The imagery of this reading is profound. For instance, in the world of this time coins were stamped with Caesar's picture and above his head was the image of a tongue of fire. Fire was a symbol of life and potency; it was linked to the heavens (stars, comets, etc). The tongue of fire was a way of indicating the Emperor's divinity.  Similarly, the capacity for speech, the fact that one is given a voice, is a sign of power, standing, and authority.

And so Luke says of us. The Spirit of the Father and Son has come upon us. Tongues of Fire mark us as do tongues potentially capable of speaking a word of ultimate comfort to anyone anywhere. We have been made a Royal People, Temples of the Holy Spirit and called to live and act with a new authority, an authority and status which is greater than any Caesar. As I have noted before, this is not mere poetry, though it is certainly that. On this Feast we open ourselves to the Spirit who transforms us quite literally into images of God, literal Temples of God's prophetic presence in our world, literal exemplars of a consoling love-doing-justice and a fiery, earth-shaking holiness which both transcends and undercuts every authority and status in our world that pretends to divinity or ultimacy. We ARE the Body of Christ, expressions of the one in whom godless death has been destroyed, expressions of the One in whom one day all sin and death will be replaced by eternal life. In Christ we are embodiments and mediators of the Word which destroys divisions and summons creation to reconciliation and unity; in us the Spirit of God loves our world into wholeness.

You can see that there is something really dangerous about today's Feast. It is dangerous if you are a Caesar oppressing most of the known world with his taxation and arbitrary exercise of power depending on keeping subjects powerless and without choice or voice; it is dangerous if you are called to live out this gift of God's own Spirit as a prophetic presence in the same world which put your Lord to death as a shameful criminal, traitor, and blasphemer. Witnesses to the risen Christ and the Kingdom of God are liable, of course, to martyrdom of all sorts. That is the very nature of the word and it is what Friday's gospel lection referred to when it promised Peter that in his maturity he would be led where he did not really desire to go. But it is also dangerous to those who prefer a more domesticated and timid "Christianity", one that does not upset the status quo or demand the overthrow of all of one's vision, values, and the redefinition of one's entire purpose in life; it is dangerous if you care too much about what people think of you or you desire a faith which is consoling but undemanding --- a faith centered on what Bonhoeffer called "cheap grace". At least it is dangerous when one opens oneself, even slightly, to the Spirit celebrated in this Feast.

A few years ago my pastor quoted from Annie Dillard's book, Teaching a Stone to Talk. It may have been for Pentecost, but I can't remember that now. I got the book though, and here is the passage he cited, [[Why do people in church seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute? … Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us to where we can never return.]] Clearly both my pastor and Ms Dillard understood how truly dangerous the Spirit of Pentecost is.

We live in a world where two Kingdoms vie against each other. One is marked by oppression, a lack of freedom --- except for the privileged few who hold positions of wealth and influence --- and is marred by the dominion of sin and death. It is a world where the poor, ill, aged, and otherwise powerless are essentially voiceless. In this world Caesars of all sorts have been sovereign or pretended to sovereignty. The other Kingdom, the Kingdom which signals the eventual and inevitable end of the first one is the Kingdom of God. It has come among us first in God's quiet self-emptying and in the smallness of an infant, the generosity, compassion, and ultimately, the weakness, suffering and sinful death of a Jewish man in a Roman world. Today it comes to us as a powerful wind which shakes and disorients even as it grounds and reorients us in the love of God. Today it comes to us as the power of love that does justice and sets all things to right.

While the battle between these two Kingdoms occurs all around us in the way we live and proclaim the Gospel with our lives, the way, that is, we worship God, raise our children, teach our students, treat our parishioners, clients, and patients, vote our consciences, contribute to our society's needs, and generally minister to our world, it is our hearts which are ground zero in this "tale of two Kingdoms." It is not easy to admit that insofar as we are truly human we have been kissed by a Divinity which invites us to a divine/human union that makes us whole and results in a fruitfulness we associate with all similar intimate unions. It is not easy to give our hearts so completely or embrace a dignity which is entirely the gift of another. Far easier to keep our hearts divided and ambiguous. But today's Feast calls us to truly open ourselves to this union, to accept that our lives are marked and transformed by tongues of fire and the shaking, stormy Spirit of prophets. After all, this is Pentecost and through us God truly will renew the face of the earth.

09 June 2014

On Dynamic Equivalence, the Beatitudes, and Being Driven into the Desert by the Spirit

One form of translation of the ancient (or really any) text is called dynamic equivalence. This means that rather than formal equivalence where a translator simply plugs in the proper word in English for the original Greek word as literal translations do, the translator opts to try and go the further step of giving us a translation which also conveys the idiomatic quality of the original. It is a form of translation in which the living character of the language is respected as well as the formal dimension. In today's gospel lection we hear the  good news of Matthew's version of the Beatitudes. Unfortunately, it is one of those texts we know so well we might never truly hear it in a way which challenges and transforms. At my parish our pastor also provided us with a contemporary "dynamic equivalency" translation of the lection as part of his homily. It is wonderful in the dimensions of the text it opens up to us and in its ability to allow us to hear with new ears. I wanted to share it here.

Matthew 5:1-12
from The Message, Eugene H Peterson

[[When Jesus saw his ministry drawing huge crowds, he climbed a hillside. Those were apprenticed to him, the committed, climbed with him. Arriving at a quiet place, he sat down and taught his climbing companions. This is what he said.

"You're blessed when you are at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and his rule.
You're blessed when you feel you have lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you.

You're blessed when you are content with just who you are --- no more, no less. That's the moment you find yourselves the proud owners of everything that can't be bought.
You're blessed when you've worked up a good appetite for God. He's food and drink in the best meal you'll ever eat.
You're blessed when you care. At the moment of being 'care-full,' you find yourselves cared for.
You're blessed when you get your inside world --- your minds and hearts --- put right. Then you can see God in the outside world.
You're blessed when you can show people how to cooperate instead of compete or fight. That's when you discover who you really are, and your place in God's family.
You're blessed when your commitment to God provokes persecution. The persecution drives you even deeper into God's Kingdom.

Not only that --- count yourselves blessed every time people put you down or throw you out or speak lies about you to discredit me.  What it means is that the truth is too close for comfort and they are uncomfortable. You can be glad when that happens --- give a cheer, even --- for though they don't like it, I do! And all heaven applauds. And know that you are in good company. My prophets and witnesses have always gotten into this kind of trouble.]]

Throughout the following couple of weeks we are going to be initiated into a vision of "desert spirituality" --- that spirituality associated with prophets, hermits, and even the occasional (and genuine) messiah; we will find it to be central to Israel's own identity, to those of her greatest leaders, and of course, to Jesus himself and the God he reveals in kenosis. It is that spirituality associated the Holy Spirit's impulse in our lives, with the opportunity to cast ourselves entirely on the Lord and the abundant nourishment, strength, and refreshment God faithfully provides so that we can become true daughters and sons of God.

During this time the basic struggle in the OT readings is between two forms of Kingship, two worlds or perspectives on reality, two different sets of values. The entrance to the reign of God, the values of his Kingdom and true discipleship is always through the desert. Elijah, in a paradigm of desert life, is fed by the ravens and drinks from living springs of water. In today's Gospel lection the Beatitudes are presented as the paradigmatic code or charter of desert spirituality and this new Kingdom. It defines what it means to be Jesus' own "apprentices," "the committed" -- as Peterson describes those who actually climb the mountain with Jesus. Throughout this post-Pentecost period we will find the Spirit of Pentecost is driving us each into the desert in these readings, into, that is, the privileged place where Jesus himself was driven by the Spirit, plumbed the depths of his own heart, and claimed and consolidated his own Divine Sonship while rejecting the temptation to exploit and distort it represented by Satan and the "other kingdom". Thus, we will find God calling us to do the same with our new gifts and Spirit-renewed identities.

See also, Driven into the Desert by the Spirit of Sonship