Intolerance/Forbearance

Gospel reading: John 3.1-17
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

If God did not choose to work in ways that confound us, grace would not be amazing. It would not be grace.
~ Kathleen Norris in Amazing Grace

Since much of this week's chapter concerns sexuality, I thought this might be a good time to blog about the apocrypha.

To this day every time we read from the Apocrypha I get a tinge of the willies. I grew up believing there were exactly 66 books in the Bible. And none of these was called The Additions to Esther, or Susannah, or Bel and the Dragon. If asked to defend my response, I would probably offer a two point apology for a 66 book canon: 1. Oh, come on! and 2. Those don't sound like books of the Bible.

It's not just because I'm scared to blog about sexuality that I started with a diversion. Because I think we underestimate the power of our resistance to the unfamiliar. In fact I'm pretty sure that most of humanity's most elaborate philosophical and ethical systems arose in response to particular cases of the willies.

Maybe gay people give you the willies. Maybe Republicans or lawyers or insurance salesmen do. Maybe soldiers or hippies or bicycle riders do. But regardless, we ignore the sources of our willies at our peril.

Which brings me to Sunday's Gospel. You have to wonder what Jesus was experiencing with that woman at the well. Maybe you've heard often enough why Jesus' culture would have told him he had no business speaking to this woman. But nobody ever wonders whether she gave him the willies. What if she did?

I mean, when we are drawn across some threshold toward contact with the unfamiliar or the forbidden the most human response is visceral. Literally. It happens in the viscera.

Imagining Jesus with the willies adds a dimension to the story. It would mean that doing what he did took courage. Stepping across a boundary that was both outside himself in the culture and within himself in his culturally conditioned response would take courage. And I wonder if something like courage is being asked of us in this story.

I like very much Kathleen Norris's use of the old word 'forbearance' in place of the nearly bankrupt 'tolerance'. Forbearance strikes me as a more forceful word, a word that assumes some initiative on my part rather than clenched teeth and resignation. Forbearance is that careful and courageous act of acknowledging our willies, but not jumping in too quickly to validate them. Forbearance creates enough space for us to override the willies and experience something that might just change us.

Some of the grace that our struggle with issues of human sexuality might have in store for us is that nothing gives us the willies more reliably than sex. Do we ever really grow out of that first intense case of the willies that the thought of our parents' engaging in such acts brought on?

God does choose to work in ways that confound us. Because God chooses to work through other people. Strange people with different ideas. But when we learn to be forbearing, when we learn to give the willies a wide berth, we open ourselves to be changed. We open ourselves to see a little of God in the life of someone my willies would steer me away from.

It helps me to think that even Jesus might say, "I know how you feel."

Grace

Gospel reading: John 3.1-17
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

Arrowheads were often found at the summer camp I attended as a child. Some of the counselors were fairly expert in the field, accumulating large and varied collections over the years. I suppose some folks could make informed guesses as to age, tribe, purposes associated with their finds.

But my interests almost always tend toward the particular. What fascinated me was not some general development in the tools of tribal warfare or hunting. It was that a particular set of hands chose this piece of flint one afternoon in the history of the world and set to knocking of its edges until the made thing satisfied its maker.

Equally compelling was the story of how the thing was lost. Did a lost arrow's shaft rot away in the woods, or did the head tumble out of a pocket before it ever got the chance to be thrown by a bow?

My mind makes the very same leap to this day when I read of Jacob taking the stone he had used for a pillow the night before and tipping it up to mark the place God had come to him in a dream. I imagine stumbling onto such a stone and seeing some evidence of human intention. Then wondering who tipped this up and why.

We get the who and why in the book of Genesis when this crafty deceiver named Jacob dreams a dream of breathtaking beauty as he waits nervously to meet the brother he lied to years ago. He tipped up that stone and poured oil on it, saying, "This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven." (Gen. 28.17)

He was marking the spot where grace happened.

I think all the strange stories and songs and lists and letters that make up what we call the Bible are such stones. They can be confusing and contradictory even. But when we see them as markers of grace, as little monuments to the experience of God in our world we can find that grace for ourselves in real time.

On Sunday we read the most famous verse in the Bible: John 3.16. But we read the story it came to us within as well. We read of Nicodemus's coming to Jesus at night and of the strange conversation they had about being born from above and whether that meant reentering a mother's womb. That story made it all the way to us. It was a stone tipped up that we might say, "Look here. Grace again."

The great thing about arrowheads is that finding one isn't satisfying. It's intoxicating to the enthusiast. Finding one means that there might be more along this river or at the edge of that wood. Maybe that's the way the stories and the sacraments of our faith are meant to work on us. They don't pin God down by telling us that grace happens only here, in this place, in this wine, in this book, among people like these. They put our sacred imagination to work.

They are hints. Maybe even hints of hints that draw us on and draw our imaginations in. Tipped up stones marking yet another arrival of grace.

Conversion: One More Boom

Gospel reading: Matthew 4.1-11
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

Yesterday I had a meeting in a downtown office building I had never been in before. My meeting was on the sixth floor so I stepped into the first elevator I found and pushed the 6. Unfortunately the elevator I was on serviced only the parking garage, so when the doors opened I realized that I had to go back down to floor one, and I might even have to ask for directions.

But the elevator stopped on floor two, and a friend stepped in. Actually she gasped, then laughed, then clasped a hand to her mouth, then stepped back out, then back in, and then teared up. "I was just taking a short walk during my break, and thinking that I needed to call you." She had had a difficult weekend and thought talking through things a bit might help. What are the odds?

She wondered whether this encounter was a "God thing."

My own theological hunches lean more toward serendipity than providence in such matters. At least since the time I realized that God apparently wasn't going to step in and stop my mother's multiple sclerosis, I have had a hard time believing that God nudges people onto elevators for our edification, but never quite gets around to doing away with real suffering. It's an old and noble question, definitive answers for which we're no closer to than Job.

Needing to know how and why and when God acts in our lives has been a preoccupation of mine for a long time. And it has been something of a red herring at times. I felt like God's action in the world needed to be comprehensible before I could trust it.

But whether I decided that God places me in elevators or leaves me entirely alone, my wonderings were all about me. I was the center of the universe, the point on which God did or did not focus. And what this perspective kept (and keeps) me from was enjoying the grace that I do stumble into. The answer to "What are the odds?" was always "Not very good."

Kathleen Norris wandered reluctantly into a church one All Saints' day. And there she heard the Beatitudes read, only moments after she had found them in the Gideon's Bible in her room at the Super-8. "I had found the right place after all," she said.

And that seems like a more life-giving way to imagine "God things" for me: finding the right place. Maybe our world is strewn with grace. We're stepping into it all the time. And when we have a moment in which we're certain that we've found one of those right places maybe such moments can be signs for us of all the times and places our lives will intersect with grace.

Lent is a time of paring down. And as we read of Jesus' temptations, grace seemed sparse there in the wilderness. But I wonder if Lent, and perhaps even times like those of Jesus in the wilderness are a clearing away of the clutter of our experiences so that we can watch those instances of grace reappear, one by one, here and there, over and over again. We watch grace reappear in the midst of life's pain and confusion to be sure. But it comes. Or we stumble onto it.

Soon enough we may find ourselves answering, "What are the odds?" with "Pretty good. I wonder what we'll stumble into next?"

Fear

Gospel reading: Matthew 17.1-9
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

Instead of opening us up, allowing us to explore our capacity for devotion in the presence of something larger and wiser than ourselves, fear is seen as something that shrinks us, harms us, and renders us incapable of acting on our own behalf.

- Kathleen Norris in Amazing Grace

I wonder if some fears are meant to be gotten over. And others are meant to be gotten into.

It's worth nothing that most fear is a response to some unknown. I suppose that even if I knew exactly what the creature looked like who lived under my bed, and if I knew precisely the hour in the night at which he was scheduled to crawl out and do me in, what's most frightening is that I don't really know what it's like to be eaten or just how long it might take. While I'm fairly convinced that the experience will be generally unpleasant, most of it remains a mystery. And that's scary.

This kind of fear must be the shrinking, harmful form that Kathleen Norris writes about. If we happen to be religious and are describing the 'fear of God' mentioned in the Bible we'll probably argue that this is some other kind of fear. But I wonder.

It's tempting to simplify things by calling the fear of God something like 'awe' and the fear of everything else something like 'horror'. This feels more precise. Two different words to distinguish between two different experiences. But what fascinates me most is the breadth of response that an encounter with the unknown can elicit in my self.

I understand both the opening up and the closing down that fear can work on us. And let me propose that these are not two polar opposites. In the face of death I find both responses present in myself when confronted with this great mystery. Part of me shrinks away in a debilitating self protection. But something opens up as well. Something opens up about the ordinary mystery that there is anything but the silence of death. Through the bleary eyed fog that accompanies a funeral wake the world takes on a surreality. How strangely wonderful that people paddle canoes and paint windows and drink coffee and kiss grandmothers.

I think the encounter with God is meant to be a similar - and related, perhaps - sort of complex experience. One in which we can't always sift out the abject horror at the unknown from a very human fascination with that same mystery.

The grace in my mixed up responses to mystery is that it relieves me of the need to explain mystery away. My work in life is to cultivate a life giving, expansive response to the great unknowns we live with and before. My work is to let the mystery of God do its broadening work on my life.

On Sunday we read the story of the Transfiguration. Jesus' face shone like the sun, and when a voice spoke from the cloud that enveloped the mountain, Peter and James and John fell down in fear. They lay on the ground until Jesus said, "Get up and do not be afraid."

Maybe the "get up" is the most important part. Jesus didn't say that they really didn't experience a mystery beyond words. He didn't make it more comprehensible. He just said, "Get up." There is a way of living in relationship with the great mystery that is God without minimizing the wonder or shrinking away. Such religion might just be worth the trouble.

Annie Dillard once wrote,

"The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, making up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies hats and 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 out to where we can never return."

I like that. Maybe Jesus wasn't telling those disciples to get over their fear, but to get into it. Maybe what he really said to them was, "Get up. And put on your crash helmets."