How is rebellion a sin of sorcery?

Meditation for 4^th Sunday of Easter

23 April 2018

“…How much longer do you mean to go on mourning over Saul,

now that I myself have rejected him?” –1 Samuel 16:1

“What we shall be has not yet been revealed…

when it is revealed we shall be like Him…”

--1 John 3:1-2

Recently my daughter brought me some old college literary magazines she’d come across.  She thought I might like to see them because they included some of my old poems and stories.  She was of the opinion that I might like to see them again.  I was grateful to her for thinking of me, but fearful of what I would find. Afraid of what I would see not only in the words, but behind them –in the young man who wrote them.

So, I let them sit for several days untouched.  Then, a sense of curiosity mingled with obligation and I figured I should at least take a look, so I could give them back to her. At first, I was struck by names of people I had not remembered, but suddenly recalled. It was a pleasantly bittersweet sensation; a nostalgia mingled with regret. I recalled those names; faces came to mind, but also the regret that I had not been kinder or braver. I know I was just a young kid –barely out of my teens—but I wish I had been less self-conscious, more generous toward them.

When I began to read my own works, it only got worse.  I suspect some truths should remain only memory.  By that I mean, being faced with a poem I had long remembered as being pretty good and finding some 37 years later that it just wasn’t… aah, ‘tis a stinging feeling. Like the old adage says of ignorance --it was bliss.  Being suddenly face to face with my own failure was very uncomfortable.  And I would say what was most uncomfortable about it was not that my writing was so mediocre, but that I had remembered it and imagined it so much better.  That feeling of shame at having –it seemed-- lied to myself was very disheartening and humbling.

And this brings me to two things I have read in scripture recently.  My slow walk through the Old Testament has just crossed into the books of Samuel, and I am reading of Saul and his failure at being Israel’s king.  He loses his way by seeking to please the people, instead of God. He is trying to be the kind of king the people want, instead of being the king God has planned for him to be.  And yet after Samuel delivers God’s message of failure, Saul is still concerned with how the people will perceive him.  That is a fascinating little bit of psychological insight on the part of the author, but what is even more interesting to me is the beginning of chapter 16 when God calls out Samuel with that beautifully odd chastisement:

“How much longer do you mean to go on mourning over Saul…”

God is calling Samuel to account. Why is he mourning over something that God has rejected?  What does he hope to gain? What is the point? In a sense, Samuel is rebelling against God’s judgment.  Instead of accepting God’s will, he is mourning over what might have been.  He is refusing to trust that God’s will is always good—even when we don’t understand it.

In the next sentence we learn there is another reason for God’s chastisement.  Samuel has a job to do. God tells him, “fill your horn with oil and go,” because there is another king (David)  to be anointed.  In other words: Why are you sitting here moaning about something you can’t change? Get up and fill your horn and go. I have work for you (cf. 16:1b). 

In a way that’s what I was doing as I looked through those old Laurels magazines. I was mourning over Saul. I was regretting choices I had made, but also promise that had not been fulfilled, dreams that had not been realized and all that might have been.

Of course, there are times when we should look over our lives with remorse and regret and that’s why some of us go to “Confession” and why other might go see a therapist.  We see that things haven’t always been right or good and maybe even that there are patterns of behavior that we want to change.  That’s healthy and good. 

But sitting and bemoaning what cannot be changed is a form of rebellion.  It is not just a refusal to accept the truth, but a kind of challenge to God.  Lurking beneath that moaning is the unhealthy suspicion that if God had left things up to us, we would have done a better job.

“Rebellion is a sin of sorcery,

presumption a crime of idolatry.”

–1 Samuel 15:23

Sitting there, ruminating over old hurts or even old failings, we become like a sorcerer stirring our pot, adding a pinch of spite to a dollop of indignities and then stirring in dash of unfairness and suddenly… voila! A bubbling cauldron of heart hardening stewed egotism ready for a bowl full of Saltines.  

And we can sit there stirring it all up and ladling it over and over until it is boils over, or we can hear that distant voice calling us from somewhere so close it seems to be whispering in our ear:

Why are you still moaning over that? Get up. Fill your horn with oil. There is work to be done.

And that is what I heard at mass this past Sunday. In the second reading from the first letter of John, I heard God calling:

Why are you dwelling in the past? Why are you moaning about what might have been?  That is not who you were made to be.  Who you were made to be has not yet been revealed.  But when it is…

The message of Easter is a message of new life. Yes, we all have made mistakes and yes we all have regrets, but to live in those regrets and to cling to the hurt of those mistakes or hard feelings is to live in a tomb. It is to rebel against the glorified Christ who destroyed death, who opened the tomb that it might be empty.  Why on earth would we want to go back in? To pull the stone back over us and hide in the cold and the dark?

It's not about who you were, or what you did or even who you wanted to be.  You are not the sum of all your mistakes, all your hurts, not even of all your successes; thanks to Christ, we are something new. Something more.  Something made in His image.  We can’t really know what it is, but we know it is something glorious –because it is like Him. So, Mr. Sutter… it is time to put away childish things. Fill your horn (get out your pen), there is anointing to be done.

The Tranfiguration: 2nd Sunday of Lent

“…when they looked around, they saw no

one with them anymore but only Jesus.”

--Mark 9:8

Outside my window, the branches of the oak in our front yard are being transfigured –metamorphosing—from stark leafless twiggy things, seemingly lifeless, icons of loss and sorrow, into budding branches almost literally bursting with life.  Images of transfiguration are all around us. But often we either don’t see them or don’t know what to make of them.  We rush on to our next appointment unwilling to stop and stare and really see what is right before our eyes.  The blessing that rises before us.

Looking at the readings for this Sunday, I quickly read the Old Testament passage –Abraham and Isaac and the sacrifice—and rushed past the psalm and the reading from Romans to look at the Gospel. Eager to skip over the side dishes and get to the main course, I guess.  And when I saw that the reading from Mark was the story of the transfiguration, I thought: Oh, that’s why we have the Abraham story! Perfect! Yes. Both stories have mountains and both involve beloved sons and both involve some kind of change or revelation. I got that. Easy. I wonder what’s next week?

I was treating these familiar readings with too much familiarity. I was treating them the way one might treat an old stain on the wall, or your 851^st bowl of oatmeal, or your wife’s hair… I wasn’t really looking at it, wasn’t really noticing it. I wasn’t really paying attention. Yeah, it’s fine. Looks nice. Tastes like it always does… I guess.  How would I know? Unless I take the time to actually taste it, notice it, appreciate it.

When I teach poetry (this is definitely an aside) I like to share with students a piece of historical prose written by William Carlos Williams as a kind of introduction. The piece is called something like “The American Background,” and I first came upon it in Williams’s Selected Essays (pg. 134).  It is a brief observation (less than a page) about the early American settlers from England and their misidentification of a bird. Williams tells us that these early settlers saw a bird that looked to them like something they remembered from their homeland and they called the bird a robin. But (according to Williams) what they were looking at was a thrush –a larger bird, a bird of wilder song and that even landed differently. It was a totally different bird with only similar coloring.  But instead of looking at it and seeing that this was something new, something they had never experienced before –they fell back on their past, retreated to what they already knew and missed the actual: Nothing new here. Just a robin –seen one, seen ‘em all.  Let’s go find some gold.

Instead of seeing the truth perched on the branch before us, how often do we rush past not noticing the gift God has set before us? How often do we look at a thrush, but see only what we think is a robin –because that’s what we are expecting to see?  How often do we read a familiar story and hear only what we expect to hear –never really what is on the page, never letting ourselves hear the story fresh, engage it anew?

Beginning to wonder if maybe I’d missed something by seeing only the familiar, I went back to look at the psalm (and possibly I was feeling sorry for it –who pays attention to the psalms?).  I wondered what it might have to say about the theme of transfiguration.

I was first struck by the words:

“I believed, even when I said:

I am greatly afflicted.

Precious in the eyes of the Lord

Is the death of His faithful ones.” (116:10)

And instead of trying to make that mean something about the Gospel or the story of Abraham, I simply heard it and felt the words begin to take root in my soul. Precious in the eyes of the Lord is the death of His faithful ones… In the midst of a culture that measures success and the value of a life by the amount of comfort and pleasure experienced, and by the amount of pain and discomfort avoided it is very troubling to hear of such preciousness. One might even ask: If the faithful one is so precious to God, why doesn’t God save him?

            Next the psalm speaks of being God’s servant, of being set free by God (“you have loosed my bonds…”). And then the psalmist sings:

“To You I will offer sacrifice of thanksgiving,

I will call upon the name of the Lord…” (cf. 116:16-17)

And I began to contemplate –what does this mean to me? How is God speaking something new to me through these ancient words?  And it was in that time of contemplation that I began to understand being transfigured doesn’t just mean a change of appearance.  When Jesus is transfigured, Peter, James & John see Him in a new way. But it isn’t just that Jesus has changed in appearance. In this story, in that moment, the disciples get a glimpse of the Truth… they have the mystical experience of seeing Christ in the fullness of His being.  But Jesus isn’t the only one who is transfigured on that mountain. Peter, James & John come down the mountain changed, metamorphosed by the experience. And then I heard myself asking: What about Abraham? Who is transfigured in that story? On the one hand there is Abraham who is challenged to offer his beloved son as a sacrifice, and in his willingness to do whatever God demands of him, he is transformed from a man who follows God in order to receive a reward (wealth, land, generations of children, and a lasting memory) into a man who “fears the Lord” [not afraid the way someone might be afraid of ghosts or the dark or nuns with yardsticks, but more like awe or a sense of being devoted to God] (cf. Gen 22:12).   Okay, so on one level there is a change in Abraham’s relationship with God, but there is something else; something that reminds me of the changed disciples coming down from the mountain with Jesus.  They now understand Jesus in a new way. They have heard God’s voice from a cloud proclaim “This is My beloved son. Listen to Him.” (Mk 9:7)

Abraham goes up a mountain following a God capable of demanding human sacrifice, but he comes down serving a God who refuses such a sacrifice.  Abraham’s very understanding of God has been transformed –transfigured. God has revealed something new about Himself to Abraham and be so doing He has loosed the bonds of superstition and set Abraham free.  But this freedom is not a freedom to lick the earth, to seek comfort and pleasure wherever you will. It is a freedom to serve God, a freedom to submit to God’s gift of the law. A freedom to offer our brokenness and our sin, our death to our longings and desires, our selfishness, as the sacrifice we place upon the alter, our living sacrifice offered in Thanksgiving.

Open your Bible, climb the mountain (go out in your front yard) and offer God the sacrifice of your attention. Give yourself to God with a thankful heart. And don’t be afraid. Just open your eyes and let yourself see. Really see. And don’t be surprised if what you see is something you have never noticed before; you may just find yourself transfigured.

Of altars and sacred stones and dispossession

“You must completely destroy all the places where
the nations you dispossess have served their gods…
you must tear down their altars, smash their sacred
stones…hack to bits the statues of their gods and
obliterate their names from that place.” –Deuteronomy 12:2-3

The Israelites were being sent by God to “dispossess” other nations of their lands and to dwell there.  But in this call, they were also being called to act as a kind of purifying agent.  They were called to go to this new land and tear down the altars, smash the sacred stones, hack to bits the statues and obliterate the names of these false gods from that place. To purify that place. 

            On a literal level this call horrifies our diversity sensitive ears. We shudder at the very idea of knocking down someone else’s gods.  Instead, in the name of sensitivity and diversity, we tend to look for ways to affirm and celebrate those beliefs and acknowledge their equality and validity. All in the name of avoiding conflict and promoting peaceful co-existence.  Anyway, who am I to knock over someone else’s idols and tear down their altars? What right do I have to tell someone else what to believe?

            And yes, there is some value in this attitude. Some value in acknowledging that we do not (personally or communally) possess a stranglehold on truth.  Plus, we can’t just walk into someone else’s home and start obliterating the names of their gods from the altars and stones and walls and poles of their home; not if we don’t want to start a war, at least.

            Clearly in the time of which Deuteronomy speaks that was literally a part of God’s plan. In this story, that was definitely included as part of the dispossessing and purifying plan God was laying before His people. 

            So, if we are not being called to actual war by this passage, what does it say to us today? What “land” are we called to dispossess? What altars and statues and sacred stones are we called to smash and what false gods are we called to obliterate?

            For me, the first thing to do with scripture is to accept that if it is the Word of God, then it truly does contain eternal truths.  And second, if God truly is love and truly loves each and every one of us, numbers even every hair on our heads, then I would tend accept that God is truly speaking to us through His word and He is truly speaking to each and every one of us.  And I would definitely take His words very personally.

            So, what do these words say to me –personally?  Well, I’ve been meditating on St. Joseph lately and so I return to that contemplation and see how these words help me understand Joseph or how Joseph’s example helps me understand better these words. 

            So, here goes: Joseph had a home, a career, a sense of place in his community, a reputation as an honorable and just man, and to that he had hopes for his new bride and coming life with Mary.  There was security and comfort and safety in this life, but God had something else in mind; a very different kind of life—the life of a refugee, of a step-father, of a cuckold even, --a life of complete self-surrrendering (it seems). Looking at it from my perspective, it looks like a life of letting go; letting go of personal dreams, letting go of career objectives and life goals. It looks like God is calling Joseph to dispossess himself of the lands of comfort and safety and independence and to obliterate any personal gods such as pleasure and security, and to put himself completely into God’s hands. Let go of those gods, smash them and hack them to bits and put your trust in Me.  I will bring you into a land of dependence, and vulnerability, a land that looks to the world like shame and foolishness, and you may not even live to see the fulfillment, to understand the reason (the point) for this life.  You will simply have to trust me… completely.  Will you let go of your gods, your altars, your sacred stones and come with me?

            So –where have I built altars to my personal gods of ego and pride and pleasure and safety and comfort? Where have I set up sacred stones to honor them?  What are the personal beliefs/desires/dreams that I hold sacred? Are there certain topics I simply won’t be challenged on? Politics? Money? Morality? Poetry? Art? Thin crust extra garlic pizza? Hmmm.

You see, for me, I don’t hear God talking about someone else and their false gods, their sacred stones… I hear Him talking to me.  About my gods...  I really do take His words very personally.