Anyone who has—Some thoughts on Matthew 13

 “Anyone who has will be given more

and will have more than enough; but

anyone who has not will be deprived

of even what he has.”  --Matthew 13:12

 

Huh?

What on earth is Jesus talking about? And why would He say something that sounds so unfair?  The Gospel message is supposed to be a message of sharing and compassion. If someone is in need, we are supposed to go to them and share what we have with them.  I thought!

 

But here is Mr. Nice-guy-Turn-the-other-cheek-Do-unto-others, saying something that sounds a lot like: Tough luck!

 

This verse is a stumbling block for me. It is something that has always troubled me.  I am one of those Christians who desperately want everything to be “fair” and gentle; I want a yoke that is easy and a burden that is light!  And this doesn’t fit into that vision of Jesus the love-child and erstwhile hippy/peacenik, sandal wearing vegetarian, commune living carpenter.  My childhood vision of Jesus was probably as much shaped by Super-friends and The Archies as it was by church, scripture & random episodes of Davey and Goliath; more Godspell  than Gospel, if you know what I mean.  I come from a spiritual school of simplicity and the obvious.  Guitar masses, tambourines and agape feasts with broken baguettes passed from person to person at the end of a teen-life retreat. Lots of Cat Stevens music intermingled with our hymns.

 

And so, the idea of Jesus ever saying anything that sounds unfair just feels wrong; un-Christian, even.  And yet, there it is, right there in the Gospel. And not just in Matthew but also Mark (4:25) & Luke (8:18).  So, what on earth is Jesus telling us?

 

One of the first things I think we need to do when a teaching makes us uncomfortable is look to our discomfort.  Why does this teaching trouble us? Where is it challenging us? What is it asking of us that we are hesitant to give?  What are we holding back?

 

For me, this teaching stings particularly when it talks of taking away even “what little they have.”  Too often I can find myself thinking like this; pondering what little I have left. What little time left –I’m 60 now—what little energy, years left to me: to finish my novel, deliver an address to the UN, win the Pulitzer prize and/or a MacArthur Grant… Or even to finish streaming Midsomer Murders! (How many darned seasons are there?)  Sometimes, when I feel this way, disheartened and self-pitying, I find myself growing resentful, my heart hardening as I ponder all I have sacrificed or given up or never experienced. The many dishes I have washed, and floors I have swept, the diapers I changed, the date nights when I got the kids to bed, the house quieted, lit a candle, poured some wine and prepared a little plate of brie and crackers, only to find my wife asleep on the couch.  In my disappointment, I see not her exhaustion, the work she has done, the burden she has borne and the rest she so desperately needs, only my own wants and needs not being met, the resentful embittering sense of what little I have growing inside me.

And I want to scream out—like a little child—Not fair! I want to cry out to God: This isn’t fair! You can’t do this.

 

And I think that is the problem, my problem with this reading, this teaching. I am looking for the wrong thing.  I am looking for fairness.  And God is offering me abundance. 

 

Pondering this reading for a few days now, it occurs to me that it may actually be a teaching about attitude. How do you look at the world? How do you see life? And a phrase occurred to me: imaginative abundance.  Do you have an imagination of abundance or of meagerness? Do you look at the world, at your life, and see the abundance of gifts you have received? Or do you look at the world see only what you lack, where you have been slighted or ignored, what little you have received?  This ability (or willingness) to see all that you have been given: life, family, friends, sunshine, rain, abilities or talents, laughter and tears, as gift, as grace it brings comfort and it consoles us.  It is itself a sense of abundance. Of more… and in some way it multiplies everything we have. It gives us more. 

And the other way of looking at the world, the lens of meagerness, of not enough, leaves us always feeling like we have not received what we needed, what we wanted, what we deserve.  It leaves us always watching what the other one has, what the other person has received and measuring our share against theirs. We stand there like a small child who has been given half of a popsicle; and instead of enjoying it, we look at ours and compare it to the other half and we cry out: Her half is bigger! That’s not fair! She got more than me!  

 

And aren’t we all that child at times?  I know I am.  This is the attitude that says there is never really enough.  That when you get more, by default I get less and that’s not fair.

 

And yet…  fairness isn’t what Jesus came for.  He came to give Himself, and to give Himself completely. He came for grace and grace overflows. It is at the heart of abundance.  A heart that isn’t constantly measuring and checking its pockets to see how much it has, and comparing that to what others seem to have.  That kind of heart, that kind of thinking, that kind of imagination of lack, of meagerness, blinds us to the truth of grace and God’s abundance, God’s mercy, God’s love.

 

Open your eyes to the abundance around you? An abundance that overflows. Let your imagination open to it, to the grace of it, the gift of it, and feel it washing over you, the joy of it washing over you like that first cleansing wave as you walk out into the surf on the beach. Think about the last time you went to Galveston. You take off your shoes and begin walking toward the waves. Feel it. It can be a little scary at first. You don’t know what to expect. Seaweed and crabs and fish and shells and the foam clinging to your ankles… it’s all a bit overwhelming at first… but then you realize. Yes. This is why I came. For all of this; for the strange enveloping wonder of it. For the amazing abundance of it. I was made for this.

 

And speaking of abundance, there’s more. When it comes to scripture, there is always more. In the very next chapter we catch a glimpse of this abundance in action. There is a wonderful little story about a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish. And a few thousand hungry people.

 

Open your eyes. The abundance isn’t imaginary. It is so real it can feed thousands… and still overflow with plenty for more.

 

---

 [HS1]

Please see me--Some thoughts on Lamentations 1:12

“All you who pass this way,

look and see

is any sorrow like the sorrow

inflicted on me…”

--Lamentations 1:12

Is this not the cry of all who are in pain?  Look!  Look at this!  Have you ever seen anything like this?  See!  See my pain. See me.  Please look and see me, see what has happened to me. Has anyone ever like this before? 

See! See what happened!  Please.  Think of the child with her first skinned knee rushing to her mother; is she not calling out for more than healing or medical attention?  Think of the drama of that cry, those tears.  Isn’t her cry also a cry pleading for attention. A cry demanding to be seen.  See!  See what has happened to me.  Has anything like this ever happened before?

And, isn’t it true? Isn’t every pain the first of its kind? Each of us is an individual, unlike any other person ever made.  I cannot feel your pain, no matter how empathetic I am.  You cannot feel my pain. I cannot know what it means to you to be hurt, to be lonely, to be broken hearted or broken armed?  In Merchant of Venice, Shylock famously proclaims a universal connection through suffering: If you prick us, do we not bleed?  And yes, there are universal aspects, we do all bleed when pricked, or when we stumble and skin our knees…

But, my skinned knee is not yours.  And that is the point. I still remember that desperate cry of as my children ran toward me or my wife calling, Mommy!  And wanting only to be held, kissed, comforted, acknowledged.  Even after the ointments and bandages were applied, they still wanted to retell the story of their fall, of their pain. Wanted to know that someone had seen their suffering, their sorrow.

We all want to be seen, individually; not as a member of a group, an ethnic identity, an orientation, a gender.  Not even just as people.  What is Shylock’s demand but a cry that he too is human! That isn’t enough.  Deep down inside, we want to be seen as individuals, as one of a kind creations—because that is what we each and everyone one of us are.  We are each of us one of a kind creations, and the world would not, and will not be the same without us. Without our lives, our joys, our struggles, our sorrows.

Every time someone cries out for rights, for equality, for justice, they are crying out—look at me! Look and see, I am alive. I am real.  And no one has ever suffered like this, ever loved like this, ever felt like this before, because no one has ever been ME before…

That is the lesson I hear in the cry of the author of lamentations. A call to wake up. A call to open my eyes and see, to look around and realize each day that –as it says in Revelations-- God truly does “make all things new.” (21:5) Open your eyes and see.

Reflection on Abram, Vulnerability & Blessing II

“I will bless those who bless you…”  -Genesis 12:3

 

           Here is the other thing that I was thinking about in relation to this reading –to this verse in particular— what if it isn’t simply descriptive of how Abram became a blessing to the world –by leaving the security and safety of his homeland and his father’s house and going to a foreign land—but what if it was also instructive of how someone we turn someone from a curse to a blessing in our own life? Of course, it could certainly be both and most probably even more than that (i.e. the four-fold reading method), but with my own prejudices (or predilections) I tend to look for the paradox or the strangeness in a passage; that is the element that tends to call out to me and so I stumbled over the blessing of vulnerability in my first approach to Abram’s call.  But, ruminating over the passage I kept hearing this little piece echoing over and over again in my soul. And so, after a day or so, I began to contemplate whether the talk of blessing might also apply to how we look at others, how we treat them, how we transform we feel toward them. 

            And this all came into my heart as I was falling into a moment of personal failing and –if not sin, then a very near occasion of; I was doing something very much like gossip.  I was talking about someone who had been hurtful toward me. A person who frightened me even. It all started with me telling a friend why I wouldn’t be part of an event, and by way of explanation I brought up the event that caused me such pain and my need to avoid a particular person.  And if I had stopped there, my words might have simply been informative.  But, I began to elaborate on what happened and my own hurt feelings, and I began to speculate about this person and to shape my story to make myself the innocent victim and this other person a mean-spirited bully. 

            And then suddenly I stopped. Cut myself off. Sitting there, in that classroom, talking with a friend, I heard God’s words echo in my head: “I will bless those who bless you…” and I thought –What am I doing? I’m not blessing her; I’m cursing this person; therefore, I am cursing myself.

            It was probably that precise moment when I realized that this was not simply a description of Abram’s call to go become vulnerable, but also an instruction for how we are called to treat others.

I will bless those who bless you.

I began to suspect that this wasn’t JUST directed to Abram of Ur in 2000 BC. I began to suspect that, like most of the rest of the Bible, it contained a truth that was meant for me as well.  And I began to suspect that it had something to do with turning my heart around; with how to turn what seems like a curse into a blessing. 

I will bless those who bless you.

If this wasn’t just directed Abram of Ur, then it probably wasn’t just directed to me either. Maybe I needed to look at it from a different point of view. Step out of the middle of the “you-ness” of the statement and consider it from the other side. From this other vantage point I’m not simply the one being blessed or cursed, but I’m also the one doing the blessing and the cursing.  And reading it thus, I realized: God blesses me –when I bless others.  I don’t mean as a reward, I mean that the supernatural consequence of blessing another is to be blessed. The supernatural result of cursing someone is to be cursed.   

            For me the message was clear: Having a difficult time with someone? Stop talking about it and start blessing them.            

How can we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?

Friday 26 June 2015

“…the life I live is not my own; Christ is living in me…”  Galatians 2:19

“…I will make you a light to the nations
that my salvation shall reach to the ends of the earth…”  Isaiah 49:6

          Today the US Supreme Court decided in favor of a right to same-sex marriage.  And this decision, whether one approves or disapproves, is a clear signal of our nation’s further move from what was once considered a “Christian nation” toward a more and more secular nation divorced from any spiritual or faith-based influences.  Again, one may approve or disapprove of such a movement; in fact individual Christians, Jews and Muslims, members of all faiths, may sincerely disagree on the importance and societal value of this movement. But, it seems pretty clear that today we no longer live in a “Christian nation.”  And I think, as a Christian we will find very shortly that we are no longer at home in this nation, in our homeland, but instead we are in exile (whether spiritual, political or societal –I don’t know, perhaps all three). 

            Last night (Thursday) in our theology class we were studying the Hebrew prophets (mainly Isaiah and Jeremiah) and our professor offered us a series of passages from Isaiah as an example of the prophet’s style and theology.  When he came to 49:1-6 and introduced it by discussing the scholarly tradition that this passage was probably written by a second writer during the Babylonian captivity and at some point attributed to Isaiah, I became very curious about the image of Israel as a “light to the nations.” I began to wonder why would this image come to mind while a people is in exile?  Why a light to the nations and not just the Jews? Why that transition would occur in exile –during captivity.

            The professor emphasized the change in theology implied by the image, from we are the chosen people to we are a light to the nations, that all people may come to God; He’s not just for the Jews anymore.

   And I still wondered why they would come to this idea in exile? And then he went on to elaborate that some think that it was possibly in exile (in captivity) that the Jews actually gained their identity.

   And still I wondered why this change in teaching and why during captivity?

   Then I began to wonder: is it because of the captivity, because in captivity, in exile, in defeat they had to grapple with: Why? Why did this happen to us? To God’s chosen people and why would a good and loving God who made a covenant with us let this happen to us? This seems terrible! Horrible! Evil! But then someone (Isaiah or Duetero-Isaiah) had the flash of inspiration OR the Holy Spirit inspired him (or his redactors) to see that if God is good and God is love or loves us in a special covenantal way then there must be some good in this; some good in the exile and captivity and defeat and destruction of the temple, etc etc.  And not just some good (i.e. –we might as well look on the bright side) but…If we are God’s people and He loves us and this happened to us there must be a good in this that we can’t or don’t see, there must be a good intended by this that we can’t see—and that good, Isaiah somehow realized, was to become the “light to the nations…”

  The Jews were to become “…so marred…beyond human semblance…despised and rejected… a [people] of suffering and acquainted  with infirmities…” (52:13-53:3) not as a sign that God rejected them or was punishing them but as a sign to the world, a light to the nations.  Dispersed so that they could finally discover what it was God really wanted of them: a home –not in a temple—but within them, within each one of them, within the “lowly and afflicted…” (66:2) and that they could in their suffering (and perhaps only through their suffering) become truly a light to the world –a lamp not hidden behind temple walls or hidden in a bushel, but put where it can be seen –every day by any and every one. They were to become truly chosen people, but it didn’t look like what anyone expected. With no temple save their own humble and contrite hearts, they were each and every one being called to become the dwelling place of the Lord.   The land was finally truly theirs –the Holy Land was finally theirs and the covenant complete –because the Holy Land was right beneath their feet always and everywhere, wherever they stood all they could do was go from one piece of Holy ground to the next.

  And so we Christians now, (once again?), are being called to go through the refining fire of exile and captivity, that we too may finally become (once again?) truly a light to the world.  And it seems to me that our light will glow through the way we live our exile; how we live this exile will determine how bright our light glows because the glow will in fact be not ours, but a reflection of God’s love dwelling in us—and the love we reflect to the world will be reflected not in acts of confrontation and political activism, but in the love we show, the love we feel for the world, the love we will toward the world. 

  Do we act with love and compassion when we meet difficulties and feel oppressed? Or do we meet these moments with clenched teeth and forced smiles –pretended tenderness?  If so, then we won’t reflect much of God’s love. But if we meet our exile with gentleness, with sincere and tender compassion; if we are open and vulnerable and willing to embrace even our oppressors, then we will reflect God’s love more brightly and maybe through us, through our exile we will become a light that shines His glory to all the nations –drawing people to Him.  We shall see.  It won’t be easy; for many this exile in our own land will be terribly hard and bitter, as if they are being led out of Jerusalem through a hole in the wall, bound and chained, a hook through their lip, dragged away to see their home no more.  The world will never again be the same, they fear... I too suspect that the world will never again be the same, not in my lifetime… But I'm not sad about that. I know God is good, therefore out of this sea change, this fearful exile, good is coming…somehow, someday, someway…

and I know this, because the life we live now is not our own… therefore when people ask me how I think we should react to this national transformation, I can only say: do not be afraid, He is with you always. Let go of your need to prove anything, let go of your need to be right,  speak the truth with humility and compassion and be vulnerable; you may be a stranger living in a strange land, but don't be afraid --let God make of you a light for the nations, a light that will reach to the ends of the earth.