St. Patrick and St. Job October 14, 2012 Twenty Third Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B Job 23.1-9

           St. Patrick had a rough go of it in fifth century Ireland. The snakes were the least of it.

Details remain sketchy but it appears that he lived without legal or cultural protection because he refused to accept gifts from local kings, the only way to gain patronage. He writes of being beaten, robbed, and shackled. If the pagans were hard on him, the Christians may have been worse. In what appears to be a court brief he denies charges of taking bribes for baptisms and ordinations or accepting money from wealthy female converts.

Small wonder then that in his famous “Breastplate” prayer he cries out for for a full-on roll cage of the Lord’s protecting presence:

Christ be with me, Christ within me,

Christ behind me, Christ before me,

Christ beside me, Christ to win me,

Christ to comfort and restore me.

Christ beneath me, Christ above me,

Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,

Christ in hearts of all that love me,

Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.

            Job had a tough time of things as well, managing to draw the unwelcome attention of the devil, who persecuted him, and of the saints, who threatened to theologize him to death. Like Patrick, Job prayed a prayer concerning the presence of the Lord in time of struggle, but his poem seldom gets stitched into samplers:

            Behold, I go forward but He is not there,

And backward, but I cannot perceive Him;

When He acts on the left, I cannot behold Him;

He turns on the right, I cannot see Him.

Like an NFL replacement referee, Job senses the action all around him but can make sense of none of it. He hunkers armorless on the ash heap and gropes and grasps for a God who has gone AWOL.

But God is right there all along. God’s voice chuckles in the lightest winds of that Cat-Five hurricane building just off the coast. Those winds will shout the Almighty’s words in just a few more chapters. If Job can’t find God, he doesn’t despair: God can always find him. “But He knows the way I take. . . .My foot has kept His way and not turned aside.”

In the depth of the soul’s dark night the saint sometimes cries a desperate “Marco!” to a Deus absconditus who refuses to respond with a single “Polo.” We hear the enemy’s arrows whine through the gloom and it seems our hearts have no protection. When we don’t know where to find God, the best strategy is to sit down in the middle of the Almighty’s will and refuse to budge. If we feel like abandoned baggage, let us at least remember that we bear a label which reads, “To be left until called for.”

In the Middle of Nowhere,

Doug

Out-of-Date, Up-to-Date or Timeless? October 7, 2012 Twenty Second Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B Mark 10.2-16

            Howard Gardner of Harvard wants to scrap the Ten Commandments. He’s not nuts about the Golden Rule, either. And he’s an equal opportunity iconoclast: he’d also trash the code of Hammurabi and Confucius’ Analects. The modern world, Professor Gardner argues, is just too darn complicated a place for simplistic morality. (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/reinventing-ethics/?ref=global )

            Jesus readily goes old-school on two important issues of his day: divorce and care for children. In this the Master stands with all great moral codes. “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her.” The Volospa, an ancient Norse creed, puts adulterers in Hell. The Babylonian “List of Sins” includes one who “has approached his neighbor’s wife.”

            “Permit the children to come to Me; do not hinder them; for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.” “Children,” says a Hindu text, “should be considered as lords of the atmosphere.” Juvenal decreed that, “great reverence is owed to a child.”

            Now, Dr. Gardner may be right, but he would have to be very, very right indeed. And probably he’s not.

            The ancient rabbis realized that changing times call for new applications of changeless truth. That’s why they hammered out the Talmud, a massive commentary on the specific implications of the Torah. Christian theologians recognized the same reality and have continued to produce theological works that explore the specific impact of Scripture’s general revelation.

            Great moral teaching defines boundaries. Then we have to figure out how to act within them. A society that bats .500 at sustaining marriages and destroys well over one million babies a year probably would not benefit from laws against divorce and abortion. Probably what we need is a better understanding of the value of marriage and of life, and a deeper intention to support one another in both.

            When a thief explains to G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown that right and wrong vary with time and space the old priest replies that even the fantastic landscapes of undiscovered worlds would make no difference. “On plains of opal, under cliffs cut out of pearl, you would still find a notice-board, ‘Thou shalt not steal.’” Or kill. Or commit adultery.

Rules Rule,

Doug

How to Fail September 30, 2012 Twenty First Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B James 5.13-20

Author Oliver Burkeman isn’t big on positive thinking. “Telling yourself that everything must work out,” he explains, “is poor preparation for those times when they don’t. You can try, if you insist, to follow the famous self-help advice to eliminate the word ‘failure’ from your vocabulary — but then you’ll just have an inadequate vocabulary when failure strikes.”

James appears to agree. He prefaces this section on prayer by naming three possible conditions of the Christian. Like legendary football coach Tom Landry’s assessment of the passing game, it has three possible outcomes, two of which are bad: suffering, singing, and sickness. He recommends prayer in all three cases. (“Sing praises” is literally “sing psalms,” most likely the prayers in the Old Testament.)  Even his example of answered prayer involves a request for judgment and he follows his big brother’s fudging of the original time-frame (1 Kings 17.1, see Luke 4.25) to introduce the idea of ill omen. (Three point five halves the perfect number of seven.) He also studs his treatment of prayer with references to sin: forgiveness of sin (v.15) and confession of sin (v.16) and salvation from sin (v.20).

Sorrow and sin – two forbidden categories in the conversation of American society and, too often, American churches. In place of an inadequate vocabulary of denial, James offers the concerted effort of the Christian community. The church’s spiritual leaders, not the ice-cream suited celebrity healer, gather to pray. Confession of sin to “one another,” not to some pastoral potentate, leads to life. Like the firing squad where one unknown rifle fires blanks, the Holy Spirit moves in the church so that no one knows whose prayer did the job and only God receives the glory.

Telling yourself that everything is all right is lying. Reminding yourself that God will in the end make all things well is eschatology. In between, the Scripture offers a rich lexicon of lament and a powerful practice of prayer.

Brethren, Let Us Pray.

Doug

           

Sentence First, Verdict Afterwards September 23, 2012 Twentieth Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B James 3.13-4.3

            Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski has formulated what he calls the Law of Infinite Cornucopia: The human mind will provide a limitless supply of arguments in favor of whatever we already want to believe. Once that happens, we go on auto-pilot because something so self-evidently true justifies any means necessary to achieve or defend it.

            Jewish Christian theologian James has his own name for this thought process: demonic.

            James contrasts wisdom that descends from above with wisdom that erupts from below. The two lack even a single point of contact. The Law of Infinite Grace states that God will provide a limitless supply of significance, and thus frees us to give out, give up, and give in. Hell’s logic begins with what I lack and thus drives me to deploy any weapon that comes to hand. It might not actually come to murder (4.2), but James’ big brother taught him that killing someone is only the extreme expression of any desire to make less of someone else in order to make more of myself. (Mt 5.21-22) Jesus also taught him that adultery (4.4) isn’t about getting, but about wanting. (Mt 5.31-32)

            When James promises lavish answers to prayer (4.2) he refers principally to the terrible blessing of an upended way of looking at the world. If the church wants, if we dare to ask, Jesus will happily show us the worthlessness of everything we hold dear and the true value of what we reject.

            But it would require a lot to take delivery on that kind of answer to prayer. In fact, we might need an outlook so radical that it would be like returning to infancy to start life all over again. And I have a cornucopia of good reasons not to do that.

Look Up!

Doug