Storage

Gospel reading for Tuesday in Holy Week: John 12.20-36
Click HERE for the day's readings.

It's Holy Week, which means this feels like a good day to double task. For my blog this week I'm using some thoughts I pulled together for our noon service today.

Insufficient closet space is a form of accountability in my opinion. I know well that I’m swimming upstream here. And when I worked as a carpenter, I never heard a homeowner say, “Could you reduce the size of that walk in closet? I’m afraid I might just fill it.

And now, I regularly drive past the Mid Towne Mall and our gleaming new “Container Store.” It’s a huge new store to buy expensive things in which store all the expensive things we buy at other stores. And the strangest thing about it to me is that it’s bigger than any of the other stores in the mall. Isn’t that weird?

There is a very familiar instinct that the strange economics of stuff storage depend upon: I need to hang on to this, because I might just need it someday.

This isn’t a neurosis. But the gospel reading today addresses a similar spiritual instinct. The impulse to play it safe and hang on to what we know. “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies,” Jesus says, “it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”The trouble for the people he was speaking to was that this Jesus wasn’t staying put. He preached that we have to let go of our lives to find them. And he tells the gathered crowd that he will be “lifted up from the earth.” Jesus wasn’t staying put. So storage of the present wasn’t an option.

It was all a little disconcerting for the crowd. “We have heard from the law that the Messiah remains forever.” Their fear makes some sense. What was that old Hebrew adage about a Messiah in hand is better than two in the bush?

Jesus was showing them, and us, how to let go of the lives God has given us. Life isn’t about storage. It’s about letting go of the seeds of the present so that they can die. And come to life again.

Life has no shelf life, Jesus tells us. It happens always on that razor’s edge of the present.

Jesus reminds us that our hope isn’t that God can keep things from deteriorating. Our hope isn’t even that God can preserve our lives. Our hope is in the fact that God is always going about the work of resurrection. In fact God has knit resurrection into the very fabric of life itself: “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

Maybe I shouldn’t have started this blog with a smug comment about closet sizes. Our closets are small, but they are stuffed with the stuff that I can’t bear to throw out. If you thought “The preacher doth protest too much,” you’re right. But there’s hope I think. Not for my stuff but for my life. For our lives.

Jesus was showing us even before his resurrection that life is a gift that can’t be stored. The goodness we know today is goodness God has delivered into our lives through others. And that goodness stays living only as we give it away once again to our world.

Sinner, Wretch, and Reprobate

Gospel reading: John 11.1-45
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

Late yesterday morning I was put under general anesthesia. For all I know, my dentist then braced his feet against my shoulders and extracted my wisdom teeth with a pair of vice grips. Mercifully, I'll never know.

I'm pretty grateful just now for anesthesia. I wouldn't trade it for a shot of whiskey - even a good single malt Scotch - when it comes to oral surgery. But I also wouldn't trade it for consciousness. I was only out of it for less than an hour, although Ardelle might argue that I wasn't entirely with it for much of the afternoon.

Kathleen Norris discussed three words that are disappearing from our religious vocabulary: sinner, wretch, and reprobate. I wonder if the urge to be rid of these terms is something like the perfectly sane desire for anesthesia. There are some things I simply don't want to be conscious of.

But anesthesia is meant to wear off. Oblivion is meant to be a short term experience.

I think this is why we should resist anesthetizing language, as well as art. When a term or concept is beyond the pale, we lose access to something real not just for a while, but forever. Too many of us have had experiences of sin, of wretchedness, of reprobation for us to dismiss them altogether.

On the other hand, we need to be find a way of talking about these all to familiar human conditions that doesn't let them define us completely. In fact, we may need only to hold on to the word 'reprobate' as Christians to say clearly that it applies to precisely no one. No one is 'rejected by God and destined for damnation'.

It makes a lot of sense to me that localized and temporary anesthesia might be appropriate for some of our faith's harsher words. When we've been beat up and belittled by them for a long time we'll need a little distance for a time. But I'm not sure we need to anesthetize ourselves completely from them.

Because when we look around in our world we see the results of something like sin. We see hatred and bigotry and cruelty. Christians have always held that we are partly complicit in our world's trouble. Jesus brought us the good news of our forgiveness. But he also told us that we carry the seeds of murder in our heart when we simply hate another person.

I don't think Jesus taught this to make us feel worse about ourselves. I think he was trying to remind us that we're in this thing together. You and me and Charles Manson. We matter to one another. But our goodness matters as surely as our failures do. Anesthetizing ourselves from this reality isn't a good long term policy.

Like the best art, the best religion shouldn't flinch from the grimmer or more glorious details of life. For anesthesia is never very local. We lose our capacity for wonder and goodness when we protect ourselves too well from the experiences of loss and pain.

In Sunday's gospel we saw Jesus weeping, and 'greatly disturbed in spirit'. There's something in us that wants to anesthetize Jesus from such emotion. And it's all the more surprising to find it in the gospel of John where Jesus seems so otherworldy at times. But there it is. Here he is. Here he is in the world of loss and death that we recognize. It turns out that the healing he means to bring is meant for lives like ours, for losses like ours. And the healing he means to bring can flow through lives like ours, sinners that we are.

The effects of last night's pain meds haven't worn off completely. If this blog's even less coherent than the others, I suppose I have an excuse. If it's not, well, never mind...

Christ

Gospel reading: John 9.1-41
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

No ideas but in things.
-William Carlos Williams

Most of us go through life searching for the ideal. The ideal job or the ideal mate or the ideal pair of pants. Even if we're hard headed realists, at least in our language we set up the "ideal" as what's best, don't we? As in "Sure, a cat with a good attitude that doesn't smell would be ideal, but good luck finding one."

Now I know what you're thinking (unless you're a cat lover, which means you're probably too busy thinking unkind thoughts about me to be thinking what I think you would be thinking). You're thinking, "We're just talking like good Neoplatonists."

Well, you're right. Which is why we need to be reading more William Carlos Williams.

That should be enough confusion to untangle (or tangle with) for one blog.

If you remember anything your old philosophy professor taught you it might be that Plato said that ultimate reality lies in the ideal. There is an ideal in which all the particular instances of a thing participate. We know this tree is a tree because it participates in the ideal of treeness. Or we say something is beautiful because is participates more fully in the ideal of beauty. "Oh, that would be ideal!" is the highest praise in Plato's world.

But not so for William Carlos Williams. His obsession was things. So after Philosophy 101 we wandered into English class and memorized his poem about a red wheelbarrow that didn't seem to be a poem at all. It just described a thing. And said that so much depends upon this unremarkable thing.

Now, if Plato and Williams occupy the ends of some kind of spectrum (I don't know that anybody else ever placed them on one) it would seem that religion would fall toward the Platonic end. God could be the name for the ultimate ideal. And William Carlos Williams was a New Jersey doctor with no interest in the supernatural. The thing in front of him held all the wonder he needed.

But I think Christianity actually falls towards the Williams end. The Christian faith isn't about ideals. It's about particulars. Incarnation is the opposite of God as an ideal. Ideals stay vague and stay put because they are perfect. Incarnate things move and surprise and challenge and offend. As Rilke says in the quote at the beginning of this chapter, "Who is this Christ, who interferes in everything?"

If the Christian faith rings true to us don't you think it's because in some way, we all come to God like the blind man from Sunday's gospel reading. We don't think our way to God. We don't imagine a perfect and life-giving concept. We have an encounter. And we try to make some sense out of it.

Somebody spat on the ground and rubbed mud on the eyes of this man. And when he was healed he began to suspect something wonderful was happening. Something even beyond his own healing. God was present in his life in the person standing right in front of him. He wasn't searching for an ideal to believe in. He was wondering about the person who had just touched his eyes.

The beauty of the Christian faith is that as God gives us God's self in face to face encounter we are given one another as well. We let go of the impossible search for the ideal and take up the wonderful exploration of the life and the people before us. As Kathleen Norris says, Christ is present among us "not as a static idea or principle, but a Word made flesh, a listening, active Christ who in the gospels tells us that he prays for us, and who promises to be with us always."

That's not ideal. It's something - or someone - much, much better.