The Spirit of Martyrdom

        Is this a slender proof of the impotence of death, do you think? Or is it a slight indication 

        of the Savior's victory over it, when boys and young girls who are in Christ look beyond            

        this present life and train themselves to die? Every one is by nature afraid of death and 

        of bodily dissolution; the marvel of marvels is that he who is enfolded in the faith of the cross                 

        despises this natural fear and for the sake of the cross is no longer cowardly in face of it.

              ---Athanasius, On the Incarnation, ch. 5 "The Resurrection"

This post is written as something of a reflection on the killing of Jordan Davis in Jacksonville, Florida this past November.  After learning that the shooter was pleading self-defense, claiming that the teenagers were armed and that his life was in danger, although there is at the moment no evidence that this is the case, I began the principle parts of this reflection.  A few other elements of the killing also got my attention.  (1) The killer Michael Dunn was 46, well-employed, apparently a collector of guns, while the victim was a 17 year old.  (2) Michael Dunn was also white and the victim (and possibly his friends?) were black.  (3) Dunn fired 8 rounds total--there is no evidence of return fire from the alleged-armed victims.  (4)  Dunn was under the influence of some amount of alcohol, though whether enough to impair his reasoning is unclear. (5)  The shooting happened at night, in the dark.

I claim no particular insight or knowledge "about what really happened that night", but as an outsider, it is easy to imagine what could have happened, and what I suspect did happen, though I freely admit that my personal suspicions are not very valuable and do not really matter in this particular case.  But for the sake of my reflection, let us for the moment assume that my imaginative suspicions about "what really happened" is correct.  

I imagine the following:  I imagine that Dunn was slightly intoxicated--enough to make him suggestible, perhaps a bit sleepy, perhaps careless, perhaps more prone to anger because of whatever amount of alcohol he consumed.  I imagine that he was in a strange place (in Jacksonville, not his home town), and going to a liquor store and came across a car full of black teenagers listening to loud (rap) music and that he became unduly apprehensive and perhaps even paranoid because of all these factors.  I imagine he thought he had a right and a duty to defend himself and use lethal force if necessary (because who carries a handgun who doesn't believe that's true?).  I imagine he had a nasty altercation that involved lots of yelling and anger and curses from both parties, and that in his anger and partly racially motivated fear, and in the dark in a strange place . . . I imagine that Dunn heard Jordan Davis and his friends threatening him, and took them literally, and that Dunn imagined that Davis had a gun and was going to try to kill him.  So Dunn does what is necessary of course, shoots and kills Davis, and pops off eight rounds total just to make sure he had vanquished his foe, whose status as a deadly enemy was almost entirely fabricated by emotion and imagination.  That is what I imagine.

But regardless as to what I imagine, what I see is fear: fear of death.  Fear of losing one's life to someone else.  Fear of being robbed of what one deserves, fear of dying in a worthless altercation (better make sure--I'll get him before he gets me!  I won't let them take me that way!)  I also see a judgment made--better to kill than to be killed.  Better to protect one's own.  Better to exercise one's power where one can and fight for one's rights.  Better to be a killer than a coward or a fool.  I see the world's perspective on life and death.

What I suspect in Dunn, I've heard right out in other people in other ways: a self-protectiveness and devotion to self-love (incurvatus in se, perhaps) that chills me.  What chills me more is when I hear it in Christians, for it is the warning bell of a love of God and neighbor that has grown cold.  I hear it in the obnoxious birth-certificate "controversy" with Obama.  People absurdly hate him both for his liberal policies and accuse him of being a Muslim at the same time--don't they know that if he were a Muslim fundamentalist, he would not be a liberal in any sense?  But they are so ignorant that all they can do is fuse ignorant fear with ignorant fear--they have the now socially incorrect fear of black people and the socially ambiguous fear of fundamentalist Islam--and the masses to which this fear appeals know next to nothing about these things and no one who is either black or Muslim.  Thus, they join them both together into one great fear.

I hear it in the fearful bigoted speech of people who are "afraid" of black people or more often now, "afraid" of people from the Middle East.  I imagine if I lived in a different part of the United States, I would also hear about "immigrants", but thankfully I don't hear about that.  But the fact of the matter is, if I am afraid of someone else and have not conquered that fear with love and courage, I am going to treat someone or a class of people very badly.  History bears that out, though I am not presently going to prove my case by history.

What most of these small, fearful bigoted people (and heavens, perhaps I am one of them at times?!) have in common is that they want security in life: they want to secure what is theirs, secure what they have.  They want to secure their rights, their protection, their prosperity, their well-being before "those people" take it away.  What a miser or a miserably selfish person seeks to pursue for herself alone, a bigot pursues for "us" and "ours".  A selfish person only loves himself enough to act, a bigot has got far enough in love of neighbor to love their nearest kin alone.  A selfish person will sacrifice for no one but herself, but a bigot will sacrifice for his kind and not for what is not perceived to be his kind.  Thus, a very imperfect love has the capacity for terrible vice and sometimes terrible evil.  

My family particularly is prone to "tribalism"--they love their own and extend to their own every grace, courtesy, kindness, generosity--but little of this can be seen outside the family unit.  In fact, given the charity shown to insiders, it is really shocking to see how "outsiders" are treated.  It is rarely natural for us to extend this self-giving, other-preferring  love to the full extent to which Christ meant for it to be extended.  And by chance we learn to love all our neighbors, all the kindreds of the earth very well for Christ's sake, noticing and taking note and regard for his likeness in them all . . . Jesus has still asked from us a step further: we also must love our enemies.  It is this love that Christ exemplifies most fully in the Gospel--he loves those who betray him and those who put him to death.  Having loved his own, he loves them to the end, even if still they walk away from him or stab him in the back for 30 pieces of silver, or personally see to it that he dies in shame on a tree in agony as a criminal.

   

But back to bigotry.  It is this preference for the things that belong to "us" and "ours", and especially the security that we feel we are owed or entitled to by life or by the government or by the moral law or by whatever justification we seek and find that helps us justify some of our least Christ-like behaviors.  Because security under the perception of threat from a group that is "other" will make people do all sorts of crazy things that they ought not do.  It is the combination of "threat" and "other" ("not-me") that lets either a lone person or a nation think about preemptive strikes and "getting him before he gets me".  And the conviction that I (or we) deserve my own life and security is what makes self-defense necessary.  The one who deserves his life and his rights naturally feels that he must cling to it, and that it is only right to defend it.  If one is so thoughtlessly devoted to oneself and one's own good and one's own deserts and consumed with oneself, how is one to put one's own self aside to love one's neighbor, or more importantly, one's enemy? 

The Christian has been made free from self-defense.  We are not required to defend ourselves.  My life was once given to me in Creation by a gift.  Robbed from me by an enemy, and restored to me by a Friend.  But in restoring my life to me, my Friend did it in such a way that I need never cling to it again.  Jesus gives us Life Eternal that cannot be taken from us by anything or anyone, and thus we are freed to hold on to our own lives very lightly.  I don't have to cling to my life and protect my rights, because my true life is hidden with Christ on high and will one day be revealed in splendor.  What we see now isn't everything that is to be seen.

Tertullian once said that the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the Church.  It is my prayer that the spirit of the martyrs would fill the Church, so that it would be very obvious that we don't need to cling to our lives and our security like the world and our flesh tell us we must.  Athanasius was once able to use the lives of the martyrs as proof that Christ's Resurrection had truly taken place, and that the power of death had truly been beaten.  The saints, the people in the Church, were martyred so often and showed such disdain for dying (which normal people are afraid of) the only logical explanation, says Athanasius, is that something has truly changed.  That with Christ there is something truly different, and that difference is freedom from fear of death and being set free to truly live.  Athanasius (contra mundum!) writes,

        Even so, if anyone still doubts the conquest of death, after so many proofs and so many martyrdoms in      

        Christ and such daily scorn of death by His truest servants, he certainly does well to marvel at so great 

        a thing, but he must not be obstinate in unbelief and disregard of plain facts. No, he must be like the 

        man who wants to prove the property of the asbestos, and like him who enters the conqueror's 

        dominions to see the tyrant bound. He must embrace the faith of Christ, this disbeliever in the conquest

        of death, and come to His teaching. Then he will see how impotent death is and how completely 

        conquered. Indeed, there have been many former unbelievers and deriders who, after they became 

        believers, so scorned death as even themselves to become martyrs for Christ's sake.

        

        (29) If, then, it is by the sign of the cross and by faith in Christ that death is trampled underfoot, it is 

        clear that it is Christ Himself and none other Who is the Archvictor over death and has robbed it of its 

        power. Death used to be strong and terrible, but now, since the sojourn of the Savior and the death and 

        resurrection of His body, it is despised; and obviously it is by the very Christ Who mounted on the 

        cross that it has been destroyed and vanquished finally. When the sun rises after the night and the whole 

        world is lit up by it, nobody doubts that it is the sun which has thus shed its light everywhere and driven 

        away the dark. Equally clear is it, since this utter scorning and trampling down of death has ensued

        upon the Savior's manifestation in the body and His death on the cross, that it is He Himself

        Who brought death to nought and daily raises monuments to His victory in His own disciples . . . .

        If you see with your own eyes men and women and children, even, thus welcoming death for the sake 
        of Christ's religion, how can you be so utterly silly and incredulous and maimed in your mind as not to 

        realize that Christ, to Whom these all bear witness, Himself gives the victory to each, making death

        completely powerless for those who hold His faith and bear the sign of the cross? No one in his senses 

        doubts that a snake is dead when he sees it trampled underfoot, especially when he knows how savage      
        it used to be; nor, if he sees boys making fun of a lion, does he doubt that the brute is either dead or 

        completely bereft of strength. These things can be seen with our own eyes, and it is the same with the 

        conquest of death. Doubt no longer, then, when you see death mocked and scorned by those who 

        believe in Christ, that by Christ death was destroyed, and the corruption that goes with it resolved and 

        brought to end.

I pray, not for the martyrdom of blood (though this happens today so much in our Church, albeit not so much in the United States), but for the "white martyrdom", the bloodless martyrdom, that the monastics went out in the desert to seek.  That the people of God would be joined to Christ in a death like his, so that they also may join in his Resurrection and shine the light of God's glory and freedom and power over the world and over death.  May our freedom and our life in Christ be so powerful that death and the world and the flesh are seen to be scorned and mocked by our people.  May the light of the glory of God shine in our faces as we are changed into the likeness of Christ's own face and image.

"The Mystery of Iniquity" a Reflection on the Events on December 14th, 2012

After reading a little bit about the Connecticut shooting today and trying to find a way to pray about it, I ran across this article in The Onion: "Fuck Everything, Nation Reports". As long as profanity isn't something that gets you terribly upset, I think it is worth the read. One of the most interesting parts of the article to me is the following excerpt:

"“Seriously, what the hell is this? What’s even going on anymore? Why do things like this keep happening?”
Continued McEllis, before covering her face with her hands, “Why?”
Despairing sources confirmed that the gunman, armed with a semiautomatic assault rifle—a fucking combat rifle, Jesus—walked into a classroom full of goddamned children where his mother was a teacher and, good God, if this is what the world is becoming, then how about we just pack it in and fucking give up, because this is no way to live.
I mean, honestly, all 315 million Americans confirmed."

I can't really blame anyone for feeling this way. When I was driving to work today, I heard about the shooting in Connecticut about the same time as I heard about another shooting in Florida (which, as one might expect, ended up being interracial again) . . . but I didn't hear any of the details of the former case. It wasn't until I talked with my mom after dinner this evening that she told me 20 children had died. 20 children. And this after the gunman killed his own mother at her house, and then went off to her workplace to kill her coworkers and students.

I don't know why any of this happened. Frankly, even if we ever are to learn exactly why Adam Lanza did any of those things, it won't really matter. God knows, I am sure, but I don't think knowledge will really mitigate any of the horror of what happened. Either he was insane, or he was demon-possessed, or he was evil of his own choosing. Does it really matter which one? When the facts of the matter are that the world really is this broken by evil and malice and madness, and things like this keep happening in relatively prosperous America as they have always happened in other times and places . . . does it matter why so and so did thus and such? I don't think so. And I doubt it is a real comfort to the families of the victims for them to know why. They don't care why right now--they just want their children back.

This is why Paul described the prevalent forces of evil in the world as the "mystery of iniquity" and this is why God included the book of Job in the Canon of Scripture. We rarely know why, the "reasons why" are themselves irrational and full of hate, malice, envy, rage that make no sense. The "why" does not help us. Wisdom has its limits. Sometimes you just need miracle.

Discovering the roots of evil is no real comfort to us. Even if we, as readers of Job and readers of the story of Scripture and readers of the story of the history of the world that unfolds before us, even if we readers know as God knows that there is a supernatural Enemy behind all of these things that eggs on evil in the world, that pursues us with malice, that is ever and always out to destroy us . . . well, that's not a comfort, is it? It might help us a little with perspective, but if anything, that knowledge that tempt us to despair--as Theoden King said in The Two Towers, "So much death. What can men do against such reckless hate?"

The answer for Theoden was "get rescued out of it". He and all his men would have died if it weren't for Gandalf and the aide that he brought with it. And the real lesson of the book of Job is that people absolutely need divine intervention. Although it did not appear so to Job, God had actually put a limit on the activities of the accuser. In this case, he would not let the enemy destroy Job's life--and apparently God would not let the enemy touch Job's wife either. Finally, in the end, God personally appears to Job, speaks to him, and overturns all the evil that Job had suffered with blessing: "And the Lord restored the fortunes of Job . . . and after this Job lived 140 years, and Job died, an old man, full of days."

I guess it would have taken at least 50 years to get over the tragic loss of his first family. Perhaps 140 years of blessing would have healed the devastation of Job's heart. 140 years of the Lord's love and favor and comfort lavished upon him.

I imagine the griefs I have suffered in my own life have been very small. I have never lost anyone close to me through death, much less a tragic death. I have loved a lot of different people and it seems like I am forever having to let go of someone or grieving the grief of a friend or loved one lost to this or that thing, though physical death has yet to be the cause. Love hurts and loving people who are bent on destroying themselves hurts, but I imagine death hurts more. I have however, got to watch and listen a little bit to people who have suffered. I have listened to some of my African brothers talk about the horrible losses endured in war-torn homelands. I have listened to the stories of women in prison who have lost everything and possess nothing except little shreds of hope in God. I have probably seen God more clearly present in jail and among the addicted than anywhere except the community gathered by and united in the Eucharistic meal and worship. God is with those who suffer and those who have nothing except hope in him.

The Onion said, "fuck everything" because, it isn't "as if the same fucking bullshit isn't going to keep happening again and again and fucking again before people finally decide it's time to change the way we live, so what's the point? What the hell is the goddamned point?" The authors concluded the article by saying that they had nothing to say. The latter is certainly appropriate: Job's comforters could have improved some by remaining silent, as difficult as that is to do. But I say, though not to those whose own loss it was, but to all the rest of us who look on their grief and try a little bit to grieve with them. Instead of "fuck everything", how about, "Love one another, as Christ has loved you." We can't stop all the madness right now. We don't have the power. But God does, and he has promised that he will bring an end to this madness. He will bring an end to this madness and then there will be such joy undiminished by sorrow for endless ages upon endless ages that we won't remember such horrible things as this.

I always used to cringe a little at the end of Job because I thought it was a fairy-tale ending stuck on the end of a tragic story. It only made sense to me as a picture of what the Gospel story is all about. It only made sense if Job was a little story that foreshadowed the real story about Jesus defeating death, ushering in the Resurrected life, and promising his children that he would be coming back for them, and coming back to do away with evil once and for all. And then telling those same children to tell this message to all the world, and to prove that this message is true by how they loved. We do need to change the way we live . . . but not because we have power in ourselves to overturn all the evil in the world--but rather that our witness is powerful to the One who does have the power to overturn all the evil in the world. (If we had the power to tackle evil by ourselves, we would have beaten it by now.) Our Gospel is pretty useless without Jesus coming back to set things right once and for all. He is often about the business of setting right smaller things, but one day he will come and set to right all things.

And what do we say to the people who are intimately suffering such horrible things as the shooting in Connecticut right now? Probably, you say nothing. Probably, you remain silent and love them in your presence and not by your speech. Probably you do everything in your power to love them by your service and by your presence and by your devotion to them and you let God speak to them. Probably you just suffer alongside them and maybe a day will come down the road where they will want to hear something, where they will want hope and encouragement, and want to hear a story about Somebody who loved them enough to taste and suffer death so that it might be sanctified for us, and one day banished altogether, and who is coming back as a Conquering King to set things right forever.  But that day, the day to speak, is not always today.

Star Trek: "A Piece of the Action"

I love Star Trek for all sorts of reasons.  One day I'll write a post about what is probably my most favorite episode of the entire Trek franchise, and why it's my favorite, but "A Piece of the Action" makes the cut as certainly being one of the most fun episodes ever.  Who doesn't want to see Kirk and Spock running about an extraterrestrial version of 1920s gangsta Chicago with tommy guns and fedoras?  And really rockin' the fedoras, too?  Who doesn't want to contemplate the deliciously absurd notion that descendants of a human colony might appropriate a 1990s history of 1920s Chicago mob life as a sort of biblical code of conduct? 

It doesn't really get much better than this.  Normally, I love Star Trek because it does such a good job communicating things like adventure and wonder and delight in what is beautiful and noble and good.  Most of the time, it also depicts characters who are adults with fairly advanced personal integrity, lots of self-respect, and a lot of love both for what they do and for other people.  It is a depiction of humanity's "golden-age" so to speak in which people are wise, intelligent, noble, and generous--the sort of people with whom you'd want to have adventures.  But other times, Star Trek is just fun.  And "A Piece of the Action" is one of those times.

Quasars and Super-symmetry: Proof that Science Works

When I was a kid, none of the science textbooks could tell you what a quasar was.  I don't even think they had good guesses.  I heard something about "quasi-stellar radio sources" and from thenceforth always got quasars and pulsars confused.  The best explanation at the time was that quasars were "proto-galaxies" that were so far away they were still in some mysterious stage of development.  (Pulsars are neutron stars that rotate so quickly they give off bursts of energy, some in the form of radio waves--it was the radio connection that got me confused).  I don't know what made me decide to check out quasars in my latest Wikipedia science binge, but I did.

I found out something new!  We now have a pretty good guess that quasars are supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies that have such amazing amounts of energy pouring into them that it causes incredible friction around the accretion disk.  The "accretion disk" is the whirlpool of energy being collected and draining into the black hole.  For whatever reason (still unknown) all that energy in the accretion disk explodes outward along the north and south poles of these huge black holes--so, ironically, these black holes are some of the brightest (absolute magnitude) objects in the universe!  I read somewhere else--if I recall correctly, that if the Milky Way had a quasar as the supermassive black hole at its center, then that quasar would shine in the heavens as brightly as the Sun now does, even though its 26,000 light years, not 96 million miles away (light year=6 trillion miles, and it takes 8 minutes, not 26,000 years for light to get from the Sun to the Earth).  I love learning something new about the glorious cosmos--science for the win and for the glory of God!  (On the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, check out the article on Sagittarius A on Wikipedia.)

I also learned last week that super-symmetry has all but failed the test of scientific rigor.  I don't know about you, but I read Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe back in the day--I read all the exciting things about how some form of super-symmetry (linked to string theory somewhere) was bound to emerge as the poetic completion of the current Standard Model of Particle Physics.  But, thanks to the new Hadron Collider, the scientific community is starting to throw in the towel.  (Read about it more here at Scientific American.)  It will be another couple of years before they have really finished the tests in order to be more certain, but hopes are dim that super-symmetry will be able to make a come-back, and whether they'll find the "super-partner-particles" of the already known particles that would have validated their theories.  (And so much for a quick solution to dark matter, I imagine, though that may be conflating things.)  Now everyone is back to the drawing board, and scratching their heads as to whether they can reasonable expect to find anything beyond the Standard Model.  Personally, right now I'm excited about relativistic chemistry--which no one told me about in school--and want to know when we're going to solve that quantum theory of gravity!

When I read about the tests for super-symmetry failing, I (oddly) felt an immense degree of satisfaction--about the same feeling of satisfaction when they found (we think) the Higgs-boson particle.  In both cases, I was immensely pleased because the hard work and years of labor had paid off--in the first case, it finally paid off with a discovery--scientists found more or less exactly what they wanted to find: how wonderful.  In the second case, scientists are about to prove that they are never going to find what they wanted to find: equally wonderful.  That is the point of science, after all--to devise methods and conditions of discovery and then to put those methods and conditions to the test with ever-increasing rigor until some little bit of the universe has been exegeted properly.   Lovely.  I love science.  It reminds me that life (in general) is really worth all the effort and uncertainty, disappointment and ambiguity for long road of the progress of knowledge and the contemplation of beautiful and wonderful things.

When it comes to the history of civilizations, I am not a big believer in "progressivism":  I don't really think the nations of the world are necessarily better or worse now than they were 500 years ago.  I think we are better in some ways and worse in other ways to which we are mostly blind.  But I do think every human being has the option before them of being better today than they were yesterday.  I think we have the option, with God's help, of contributing to goodness each and every day, though that work is sometimes painstaking and difficult and tedious and it seems that not much comes of it except profound moral failure.  But even accepting that failure and learning to live with it and with God and to move forward in the strength and grace of God and leave failure behind . . . that's what life is about in nearly every dimension.  Science reminds me that some types of failure are just as important as success and sometimes just as helpful and meaningful and instructive.  And living life well means being a good student of it as one learns to be a good student of the physical universe in science.

Some day, after years of striving, you discover the Higgs boson particle.  On another, after years of striving, you discover that super-symmetry has failed.  Both days can be worth the having.  I want to pray more for the grace to move forward in a spirit of discovery and wonder.

**(You can take a quiz about your knowledge of black holes here at http://www.space.com/15906-black-hole-quiz-facts.html.  I got 7/9 correct, and I gave you one of the answers that I originally got wrong in this post.  I think they said Einstein and Eddington would be proud, or something like that.)

Ecclesiology Begins in the Heart of Love

Aristotle thought that young people (under the age of 30) shouldn't study philosophy because they could not be wise or practiced in the virtues.  When I first learned that as an undergraduate studying philosophy, I at first thought that terribly unfair, and I generally countered his thought with this verse from Psalm 119: "I have more understanding than all my teachers, for your testimonies are my meditation.  I understand more than the elders, for I keep your precepts."  And of course Paul told Timothy, "Let no one despise you because of your youth."  It never occurred to me that the Psalmist's words and St. Paul's words were rarely applicable.  For a long time I believed everyone surely must love wisdom . . . they just aren't very good at it, that's all!

Also in college I learned that some students of theology were irritating and perhaps Aristotle had met young people like them, and that was why he thought the young should not study grave subjects.  These young people were irritating to me for very particular reasons: they were more interested in the way in which advanced-sounding subjects like "systematic theology" made them appear intelligent than they were in actual learning.  They were more in love with their egos than they were in love with the study of God.  I found this very difficult to understand--for although I was no stranger to love of ego, it seemed stupid to study theology to show-off.  Why not study something less important?  The love and study of God seemed too important to trifle with.

It occurs to me even now that we can all study theology or write theology or advocate for theology for all the wrong reasons.  We can do it with something other than love in mind.  We can study our books and write our papers and have nothing of real value in mind--we can completely miss the service of the Church and of God in favor of something else.  What a waste that would be.

I was praying the other day and decided to do something I hadn't done in a little while: use some Ignatian methods of prayer with imagination.  As I often do, I "imagined" Jesus with me and waited for him to say or do something.  To my surprise, he didn't do any of the things I normally expect from him, instead he just sat there, slumped over, and clearly sad.  I waited for a moment, and I think I said something like, "So . . . what's up?"  His response was, "I'm sad about my church.  I am sad about the brokenness of my church."

I couldn't really think of anything to say in response.  Of course Jesus is sad about the brokenness of his church.  One would have to be a fool not to be sad, at least on some level, about the brokenness of the church.  But on that particular day, I wasn't feeling terribly sad about the denominational aspect of the church's brokenness, so I was a bit surprised that He said something about it.

It took me the course of the day to realize that Jesus wasn't really talking about the divisions between denominations--as heartbreaking as that is.  He was actually talking about the kind of brokenness that means people shut out the love of God.  While I hadn't been doing very much reflecting lately about ecumenical issues in the church, I had been consumed with thought--and some grief--about the ways in which people don't want to be loved.  How much some people (Christians) don't want to be loved.  How much they ignore or turn away from God's provision of love, or his own outstretched arms of love.  How much they would rather have things other than love.  How much they are consumed by idolatrous desires for approval, for acceptance, for importance in the eyes of their brothers and sisters in Christ or of the world, and how much they simply are not able to believe and receive the gifts God wants to give them.  How often are our hearts cold and hard because we don't want the good things God has for us?  We'd rather play around with our addictions and diseases and our own death than be healed and forgiven and accepted and loved.  We play in death all the time.  And that makes Jesus sad, yet we do this all the time and the adherence to saying the Nicene rather than the Apostle's Creed will not compel you otherwise.

So . . . it occurred to me that in all my thoughts about ecumenism, I had really forgotten about something the same way my college irritants had forgotten that they were studying theology because God is beautiful and worthy to be loved and adored.  They had forgotten that worship is at the heart of all theology, and I had forgotten or never quite knew that love is at the heart of ecclesiology and ecumenism.  Theologians occasionally differ (peaceably I think) as to whether they say that the Church was born out of the blood and water which came when Christ's heart was pierced by the spear or whether she was born when the Holy Spirit came down at Pentecost.  Either way, the Church is born when the love of God is poured out for us, the Holy Spirit is Love, and the blood poured out for us at Calvary is love.  The Church is born of Love, of the Bridegroom for the future Bride, and our meditations both on the nature of the church and on the ecumenical call to peace and reconciliation must begin with the identity of the Church as She who is Loved, the Beloved of God, the loved one in the Song of Songs.

I was thinking about ways in which I wish the ACNA would structure its conversations on the controversial matter of the ordination of women.  What I would really like to see is our Church come together about our identity first.  And I would like to see us come together in a way that is real and tangible, not just paying lip service to things we are supposed to believe.  I would like to have us have theological conversations in a matter befitting to Christians.  I would like to see them begin and end in love--knowing that the Church exists as living witness and proof of God's love, born out of his love, and born to the great purpose of one day being united to him in perfect wholeness, perfect peace, and perfect joy.  I would like to see a celebration of the nature of the Church as one loved by God, in which we are all striving to do what we can to show that love to one another.  And I would like to see us commit to love one another deeply from the heart, and to stop having theological conversations until we have done the first duty of loving our neighbors.  How can we reason about the things of God if we will not obey him?  And if we hate and resent our brothers and sisters about such small things, and intend to quarrel about power and doctrine, what good is it to pretend to talk to one another?  I want us to love one another first, and settle questions of theology later.  Maybe that means a lot of healing and reconciliation first, I imagine it means growth in trusting God to settle things rather than giving into our own fears and anxieties about what will happen if someone else does something or believes something we think is wrong or unjust.  I would like to see Jesus Heal in our Church, and offer that healing to our world.  I would like to see us awake to our identity in Christ and offer the world an escape from worshiping dead idols.

Love, real love, is heartbreaking.  It is hard and difficult and looks like the Cross and not like the Hallmark channel.  I think really learning how to love our neighbors as ourselves--or perhaps just beginning to love our neighbors as ourselves means the destruction of a whole lot of the "person" I think I am--the false identity, the false refuge of self I have created for myself in which I can hide.  Love will break you down and break you apart and overturn everything that seems right to you (Jesus died and the apostles didn't understand it at all), but Love turns the kingdoms of the world upside down and puts the right Man on the throne.  I really hope that the ACNA takes up the mantle of calling Anglican Christians and especially Anglican Christian leaders to the humble, patient, inglorious calling of love rather than to whatever thing the Episcopal church was seeking after for the last fifty years.  Was she searching for acceptance for the world, for recognition, for power, for relevance?  I don't really know, but I think her face was turned to the world and away from God.  If she had sought those things in God, she might have been weak and despised in the ways of the world, but strong and mighty to the casting down of strongholds in the name and power and will of God.  I hope we have the courage to embrace the latter destiny rather than the former.  I hope we have the courage to embrace shame and distress and irrelevance and smallness because we are so sure of ourselves in God, and so sure we are loved by Him, and chosen, and called according to his purposes.  We certainly can't do it without his love.  And if we don't know we are possessed by the God who is Love, we don't really have anything, and we don't really know anything, and we have forfeited our identity and mission as the Church.

Why not enact an ecclesiology and a call to unity and a call to theological conversation based on 1 Corinthians 13:4-7: "Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude.  It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.  Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things."  The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit live out these things in fullness and in perfection and impart their bounty to us: we need to be about the business of receiving all that God is, so we may give him away to every one we meet.

Anger and Forgiveness

A thought inspired by reading a friend's blog post.  But I didn't want to write the world's longest comment, so I thought I would re-post my thoughts here.

      I'm not sure if anger and forgiveness are mutually exclusive.  Being angry with someone doesn't have to mean that you are unwilling to forgive them, though sometimes that kind of anger can be resentment--the holding grudges kind of anger.  I once read a definition of resentment that I found terribly helpful and terribly convicting: resentment is the desire for revenge that you somehow feel that you are not able to take.  (Hence Nietzsche on resentment in Genealogy of Morals . . . oops, interject philosophy ramble!)  I do think believing in the justice of God and especially the final justice of God is important for resolving resentment and desire for revenge and deep anger.
     
     Sometimes other people crush us and there is nothing we can do about it because we just aren't strong enough to stop them.  That's not our fault.  It's also true that God just doesn't intervene every time (though sometimes) something goes wrong.  But he does promise that there will be ultimate justice and things will be put right in the end.  For me, the process of forgiving someone who has crushed me involves turning someone over to God in my heart--turning them over to him both for their judgment and their salvation because the cross both judges our sin and forgives it.  For me it has also involved seeing myself as a sinner as well who has also done wrong and also stands as one who has received a lot of mercy and grace from God, who has received my whole life from God.  So, if I know that I have received my life from God as a gracious gift, and that he has rescued me from my own brokenness, weakness, and my own sin (or that he has promised to rescue me) I also want to hope that he can do that for someone else who doesn't deserve it.

       Maybe one of the best but also one of the most repulsive doctrines of Christianity is the fact that Jesus really wants to save people who have done really bad things.  He wanted to save the people who murdered him and he wants to save the "bad guys" who hurt us.  And he wants to save us even when we are the bad guys.  And if we let him, he will.  But God wanted to save Cain as well as Abel, but Cain wouldn't repent.  I think the more we have suffered at the hands of other people the more this becomes real to us and we struggle to accept the cross.  I think, though, the only reason why the cross is ultimately palatable is because of the Resurrection.  If there weren't a Resurrection, the cross isn't good news.  And if there isn't healing for our hurts now, the gospel isn't good news.  But I do think God has shown us in his Word particularly and in good communities where his Word is faithfully lived and preached, that he does want to heal us.  Forgiveness comes from God in that he gives us healing and gives us Jesus and makes us truly able to forgive.  I think it is a mistake to treat forgiveness as if it were not a thing of mercy and grace and therefore a gift from God.

    Some people speak as if forgiveness were merely an action or an act from the will that one can obey because commanded to by God.  I don't believe that is true or helpful.  God also commands, "Love me with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength" and "Love your neighbor as yourself".  We are utterly unable to do those things without the help and transforming work of God, why would we be able to forgive without his help and transformation?

Dreamform One: Jesus Walks Into a Dream

The first dream that I can remember that ever really mattered to me was one in which Jesus actually showed up in person.  I have never had another dream like it and it certainly made me pay attention at the time.

In the dream, I was walking along the shore of the Sea of Galilee.   I remember looking at the row of ships on docks off to my left, and to my right was nothing much beside sand.  At some point, I remember peering down onto the deck flooring of a ship that was curiously clear--I could see straight down into the water.  That was a moment of fun outside of the dream and wonder within the dream.  At some point--I had no sense of being in a hurry--I wandered up to where Jesus was.  He was working on mending some nets and seemed also in no particular hurry.

If I was surprised to see him there, I wasn't very much surprised: it was the sort of surprise you have when you're not exactly expecting to see a friend to show up in a place where he or she might very well naturally show up, but you like your friend so much you are excited to see him or her anyway.  So I was a little excited to see Jesus, but not crazy excited to see him as I would be if I turned around in my living room now and saw him standing there.

I knew very clearly in the dream that I could ask Jesus anything at all that I wanted to, although I had no particular sense of anxiety or nervousness about it.  So, naturally, I asked him some wandering and convoluted question about how one should interpret some complicated problem of "authorial voice" in Scripture.  My question had something to do with both epistemology and ontology and I think had some relevance to some modernist quibbling about the inspiration of Scripture.  Honestly, I don't quite remember exactly what I asked, but since Jesus never quite got around to answering my question, I suppose that didn't matter too much.  What did matter and what was remarkable and what was the lesson for me was how he responded to my question.

The first thing Jesus did was actually think about my question.  He mulled over my question for a moment, asked me a clarifying question that went along the lines of, "So what you're really asking is x because of y and z?"  In turn, I thought about it for a little while and rephrased my question with his question in mind.  All the while, I noticed this sort of scrawny, mopey looking young man with quite the bush of thick brown hair sort of skulking around the edges of our conversation.  At some point he wandered off down a pier, looking remarkably sad and forlorn.  Jesus and I were still talking, but I remember watching the guy and feeling sort of sorry for him and distressed for him at the same time.  (I got the impression this was the Apostle John of all people.)  Both my eyes and Jesus' eyes followed the young man down the pier.

Jesus then interrupted our conversation by saying that he needed to go and talk to him.  Then he put down whatever he was working with in his hands, followed John down the pier, and put his arm around his shoulders.  I remember watching that and wondering whether I should feel put off because Jesus ditched me to go talk to someone else.  Oddly, I didn't really feel ditched.  I milled around the pier for a few minutes, not sure what I was going to do next, and then I woke up.

At first, I was rather puzzled by the dream.  Why have a dream with Jesus in it, in which he didn't really say anything to me that was informative?  Why get a chance to ask any question, but not have the question answered?  I puzzled over it for a moment or two, but then I went off to do my daily morning routine of Morning Prayer plus hymn singing.  The hymn I opened to, unplanned, happened to be: "There's a Wideness in God's Mercy" by Frederick Faber.  After I sang through especially verse 3, I knew exactly why I had dreamed the dream.  The meaning of the dream was threefold: One, that Jesus is far more human than I believe him to be,  two, that Jesus is far kinder than I believe him to be, and three, that Jesus "speaks my language".

The dream was meant to be corrective of the kind of "gnostic" or overly-spiritualized intuition I had about Jesus--that he was "god in a bod" (Apollinarian heresy)--God's mind in a human body.  The Jesus I spoke to actually had to think about my questions and process them and respond to me in a human and therefore limited way.  What I was really surprised about in the dream was how sharp and incisive Jesus' question was: the way he began to consider my question showed that he could more than keep up with me intellectually, and I've always been a little paranoid about the fact that the Jesus in the gospels doesn't seem to be a nerd, so how could he really relate to me.  (More on that in another post.)  I was being myself and Jesus seemed to be being himself when he asked a nerd question about my nerd question.  Fascinating.

But the dream was also corrective in that I tend to think of God the Father and the Son as strict disciplinarians, partly because of my own upbringing.  It genuinely hadn't occurred to me that the first thing Jesus would do with John was just give him a hug instead of, say, scolding him for acting like a baby.  In the dream, I felt some degree of compassion for John, but I didn't expect Jesus to.  I expected him to demand that John grow up and behave more sensibly.  That Jesus is so naturally and casually compassionate and kind  . . . that really hadn't been a part of my image of God.

The Jesus "speaking my language" bit now reminds me quite a bit of the Luke 5 text wherein Jesus goes fishing with Simon and basically says, "You think I don't know how fishing works?  I know how fish work so well they just do what I want."  When I read that text, I see Simon confronted with the fact that he's honored by this rabbi's interest in him, but he really doesn't know what Jesus has to do with his life.  But then Jesus says through his actions, "I own this, I own fishing, I know how it all works, I know and have mastered your livelihood--so why don't you trust me, and moreover, why don't you just come follow me already?"  In my dream, Jesus was telling me, "You know, I really get the life of the mind.  I really have that down.  You don't actually have to worry that I won't understand you or we'll run out of things to talk about or I won't be interested in you or your life.  Actually, I own all this, and I made it all up and it's all beautiful and fascinating--so why don't you stop dithering and come, follow me?"

Anyway, that's the impression I get about the dream and one of the reasons I rather like dreams, and rather like when Jesus walks into one.


"For the love of God is broader
than the measure of man's mind;
and the heart of the Eternal
is most wonderfully kind.
If our love were but more faithful,
we should take him at his word;
and our life would be thanksgiving
for the goodness of the Lord."


~Third stanza of Faber's "There's a Wideness in God's Mercy"

Creative Writing and the Spirit of Celebration

I suppose that many writers write for many reasons and out of many motivations.  I imagine one could spend a great deal of time cataloging those reasons, and could come up with a fantastic array of vices and virtues, healthy and abnormal psychological conditions.  I used to wonder what sort of mood fed my times of most intense creative writing--especially the reams and reams of ink on works of fiction (each ream having 500 or so pages, quite literally).  At some point in time, I called it "joy", but I think it is more verbal than that--I think I write fiction especially when I am in times of celebration, and find it difficult to write when I lose touch with that sense of celebration.

I originally entitled my blog "sublimation" because the bits of non-fiction writing I've been most happy with lately (because they've been the most creative) have been bits of sublimation: things I have written to process that have been caught up in something a little bit better than my confusing whirl of thought and emotion about them.  In the past, my fiction creative writing has been much different--it has been an almost aggressive pursuit and delight in aspects of God's creation (all of it--physical, spiritual, personal), God's own self, and God's interaction with us.  There's something about writing fiction and I think fantasy/science-fiction in particular that lets one really grasp creation--createdness--by two hands and shake it in joyous enthusiasm.  Tolkien and Lewis had their conception of "sub-creation" by which an artist of some kind enters into the similar (analogously so) kind of work that God does in creation.  In writing a story, I get to celebrate all of God's marvelous creativity by demonstrating the creation's awesome contingency: the fact that it could be, it has been, and it will be other than it is right now, and that is a good thing!  No where else is God's generosity and plenitude on display than in the vastness of the cosmos . . . and the sci-fi/fantasy section at Barnes and Nobles!  This is a part of God's own mind and character that we get to see and imitate whenever we do art, and especially when we imagine alternate worlds and histories and species and persons.  Paradoxically, we illuminate what is and call to mind what could be by celebrating what is not.

Question 44 of the Summa Theologica is the first "question" that Thomas Aquinas puts to exploring the creation and it goes like this: "The procession of creatures from God, and of the first cause of all things."  (As you can see, the question isn't exactly in question form . . . this probably isn't a case of allofunctional implicature, but I will bring it up anyway.)  I love this "question" and especially the grand use of the term "procession" almost as much as I love Boethius' definition of eternity.  Aquinas uses the term "procession" somewhat loosely.  God has both internal processions and external processions.  The internal ones are nothing less than the Personal processions of Son and Spirit and the external procession is the creation as a whole.  Procession simply refers to God as source, but it gives such a richness to the imagery!  When I think of the creation "processing" from God (though not from his being and substance, of course), I think of everything God has made marching before his throne in humble but joyous celebration of the goodness of God and the goodness of the gift of their own creation and existence.  That, perhaps, is why celebration is the key to my creative writing.  When I write, I celebrate the goodness of the created order and my own creation: I celebrate everything particular to that order, it's richness, its giftedness, its contingency, its fleetingness, the fact that it must begin and end.

Which is also why I'm not always in the mood to celebrate the createdness of the creation.  Oftentimes, I am more frightened than joyous at the fact that neither creation nor myself are necessary beings.  Oftentimes, I want to be a determinist because I want to be able to figure out all things before hand.  Or, I want to be a panentheist and be merged with God such that I am just as necessary to exist as God.  In short, I often either want to make an idol of myself or of the world in order to bring false comfort to myself that all is safe and sturdy and secure.  Contingency and giftedness displace us from occupying a too central role even in our own estimation because it displaces us ontologically, at the very root of our existence and our being.  But all false comfort is ultimately poison, and when I try to make myself too necessary (logically, ontologically, relationally) I end up making a burden for myself that I cannot possibly bear and web myself in with anxieties.    When I really trust God enough to relinquish control to him and accept my existence and my life and my being as the contingent, unneccesary, but beloved gift that I am, I can start opening my heart and hands to embrace createdness and creation again.  Otherwise, I close my heart and resent everything I don't know and don't understand.  I would rather have the spirit of adventure, but the spirit is willing while the flesh is weak.

There's something that happens in the transition from childhood to adulthood that makes most of us have to learn how to accept again.  (In many childhoods, anyway.)  Both my childhood and adolescence were fairly undisturbed and thus free to be filled with wonder. But when I ran off to college I found myself confronted with crises after crises of different sorts (some personal, some epistemological, some in matters of faith) that made trusting God and myself and the basic goodness of the world quite a bit more of a challenge!  I imagine some people never experience basic trust of the world in that way, and some people never have that trust shaken.  But I wonder whether the majority of people have a hiccup or two at the beginning or end of adolescence and have to learn again what it means to be a child.  I also imagine that many of us spend a great deal of time flubbing this lesson and having to be taken through it again and again until we really learn how to be led to Jesus like little children.

There's something childlike about joy and celebration--which makes it harder for those of us who feel the need to be sober-minded adults much of the time.  I don't have anything against genuine adulthood--in fact, praise Jesus if you actually manage to become a self-respecting, contributing adult.  But not if it makes you boring and self-protective and think you are the one who must be in control and in charge of your life.  That pose sometimes makes me feel more secure or more adult, but it also makes me curl up in on myself and have less to give and less to celebrate.

Art is one of the closest things we have to pure gift on this side of the veil.  Ultimately we engage in art for the sake of beauty and not for the sake of utility.  We know that beauty makes life better, but only because it appears that human beings are made for beauty, not because of any "practical" gain or reason.  The thing that refreshes us about the imagination-in-act is that it awakens us to our true nature--to our true identity as beings given an identity for no other reason that we were thought by One to be lovely, to be worthy, to be gift.  In life we are receivers before we are ever givers, and what we receive is as deep as our own bodies, souls, and minds.

Sermon: The Silence and Absence of God in Esther 7

Our passage today is from the middle of the book of Esther. We have to talk a little bit about what makes this book unique before we go on to examine the particular passage we find ourselves in this morning. Esther is set in the period of the Exile—after the conquest of Jerusalem by foreign powers, and it is set among the people of the Exile—a people who have been banished from the land promised to their forefathers and to their decedents. It is set in a time between times—between judgment and punishment by God and the deliverance promised. Right now Esther and Mordecai are a part of a people vanquished and banished, one conquered people among many conquered peoples, scraping along by wit and guile for survival. It is a book that resounds with the silence and the absence of God, or so it appears, and it is filled with people that do not necessarily seem to have personal faith and devotion to Yahweh, the God of Israel, or the Law of Moses, or even Jewish identity. We don’t hear the name of God in this passage, we don’t hear any mention of the Law of Moses, and you won’t find either in the rest of the book either.

There’s something else odd about the way the characters act in this book. In other books of the Bible, the Biblical heroes are normally remarkable because of the ways in which God interacts with them. We remember Abraham because God first spoke the words of promise to him. We remember Moses because God revealed himself to Moses in the burning bush. We even remember a sneaky trickster like Jacob because God sent him dreams and answered his prayers and eventually transformed Jacob into someone you might actually like to meet. We even have other stories in the Bible that are set in the Exile in which the characters and heroes do all of the normal things (Daniel is one conspicuous example): other characters pray, they keep the Law of Moses, they hear from God, they do great deeds in the name and power of God. But not in Esther. In Esther, the characters fast, but they don’t pray, it is not certain whether Esther or Mordecai are interested in keeping the Law, and they certainly aren’t getting about the task of evangelizing Haman or King Xerxes or anyone else. Esther seems to have hidden her Jewish identity for most of the story, and would have gone on hiding it had not she been forced to reveal it for the sake of saving her people. The characters in this story don’t seem to do what they do for the glory and fame of God. The most religious thing a character does besides fast is cast lots, and that’s what Haman does in order to discover when he ought to begin exterminating the Jews. In the rest of the story, religious observance is inconspicuous if it is present at all. But this story is still about redemption, and our passage today is about the defeat of the enemy who is seeking to destroy all of the Jewish Exiles. Let’s get caught up on the action.

Esther 7 walks us into the climax of the action of the story. Esther 1 sets the scene for our story with the downfall of the previous queen, Queen Vashti, which paves the way for Esther to rise in the Persian Court. Esther 2 paints a pretty distressing picture of how Esther is chosen by the licentious Xerxes as queen and shows us just how little power Esther has had over her own life and her own fate. Esther 2 also tells us how Mordecai warns the King about an assassination plot against his life, and establishes Mordecai as an important figure at least temporarily in good graces with the king. Chapter 3 tells us about the rise of Haman the Egomaniac and how Mordecai slights him and Haman the Egomaniac decides a fitting punishment for Mordecai should be the destruction of all of Mordecai’s people. (By the way, the portrayals of Xerxes and Haman are preposterous and exaggerated on purpose—their evil is so evil, it’s absurd. Both of them are insanely greedy egomaniacs who have incredible amounts of power and seemingly very little discretion. Your reaction is supposed to be something like, “These are the people in power? Who put them in charge?) Chapter 3 also chronicles Haman tricking Xerxes into killing off the Jews—Haman doesn’t actually tell Xerxes it’s the Jews he’s killing and Xerxes seems perfectly willing and content to commit genocide just on the word of one trusted official. And Haman gets the king to pay him to do it. Chapter 4 is about Mordecai freaking out and rightly so, and his appeal to Queen Esther to intercede for the Jews. Esther initially refuses, saying she risks her own life in such an appeal and Mordecai responds with some of the most important words in the entire book: "Do not think to yourself that in the king's palace you will escape any more than all the other Jews. For if you keep silent at this time relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father's house will perish. And who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?" Esther's response is also pretty awesome: “Hold a fast on my behalf, and do not eat or drink for three days, night or day. I and my young women will also fast as you do. Then I will go to the king, though it is against the law, and if I perish, I perish.”

The rest of the book until our passage chronicles Esther’s response to Mordecai’s words, and foreshadows Haman’s demise. She gathers her people together to fast, and then approaches the King. She spends what we might consider a really ridiculous amount of time buttering up King Xerxes to accept her petition—apparently she has no reason to expect benevolence from him, or to be able to appeal to his better nature. Xerxes doesn’t appear to have a hard time ordering the death of an entire group of people and Esther has to use wit, guile, and charm in order to maneuver Xerxes into favoring her over Haman.

Which brings us to our present passage. This is the second banquet that Esther has hosted for Xerxes and for Haman, and our scene finds Haman and Xerxes relaxing and drinking wine after the feast. Xerxes says to Esther for the second time, “What is your wish?” Xerxes said this to Esther at the feast on the day before, but Esther deferred her request, asking for a second banquet. Even now, she must wait until the end of the feast, until Xerxes turns to her and asks her what her wish and her request is. It is clear that Xerxes is the one with absolute power here. Esther knew she was taking her life into her own hands by going against the law to approach the king without being summoned. Now she does it again, knowing that Xerxes could banish or depose or even kill her for opposing Haman. She doesn’t bother to try approaching Haman at all, to try to wheedle a compromise of some sort from him. In Persia, she doesn’t have that kind of independent power.

The words that Esther uses to beg the king for her life and the life of her people are interesting. She speaks in terms of finding favor with the king, and she finally identifies herself with her people (though she doesn’t mention she’s a Jew, yet, that’s the next chapter), and identifies herself with her people when it means getting killed along with her people. She asks for her life and for her people and doesn’t allow herself to be parted from them, and doesn’t allow Xerxes the chance to only save Esther—she demands that he save her people as well. She also casts her presently unnamed enemy’s motives in economic terms—in terms of greed: “we have been sold to be destroyed, to be killed, and to be annihilated.” Haman’s a greedy would-be mass-murderer.

These three words are a constant refrain in Esther: the Jews are “to be destroyed, to be killed, and to be annihilated.” It is said this way and repeated so often I think for a couple of reasons: On one level, it’s a part of the exaggeration we see throughout the book. The villains are crazy villainous and the dramatic tension is epic—so why not turn up the hype? On another level, you can tease out distinctions between destruction, killing, and annihilation. “Destruction” in this context suggests something being violently ripped apart. If the decree of Haman goes forward, the Jews as a people—as a corporate body with corporate unity—will be destroyed. Probably not every single Jew will be killed—no doubt some will escape. But the Jewish identity will be destroyed and erased from the face of the earth. “Killing” is the most literal—Haman destroys the Jews by killing them all, not just destroying their capital city or their local places of worship, or enslaving them all or forbidding worship of the True God. Horrifically, he actually wants to kill them all. Finally, Haman’s purpose is annihilation. He doesn’t just want to kill a few Jewish troublemakers like he perceives Mordecai to be, he wants to completely and utterly destroy them and wipe them off the planet. Annihilation is an appropriately dramatic word for genocide, especially for a coolly calculated genocide such as this, which is motivated solely by Haman’s egomania. A normal person would have found a way to punish Mordecai alone—who resorts to genocide because of personal insult?

Almost surprisingly, Xerxes is moved by Esther’s plea. Partially this is true because he doesn’t really know that he is ultimately the one responsible for the decree. Esther has set it up such that the plight of the Jews is identified with her and has managed to get Xerxes enraged on her behalf. It is only then that Esther identifies Haman as the villain. It’s all over for Haman now. The rest of our reading and the rest of the book of Esther is about poetic justice. The plan that Haman devises for Mordecai falls on his own head, and the people who set out to destroy the Jews on the day that Haman appoints are actually destroyed by the Jews because Xerxes allows the Jews to arm and defend themselves. Genocide is averted and Purim is inaugurated to celebrate this kind of second Passover.

And what is it that we are supposed to learn from this peculiar story of deliverance, in which we see vividly evil and powerful characters at work and so much absence from God? First, God wants us to know that he works through history and he works for our good—for salvation and for redemption and for peace—whether or not we are aware of it. So God seems silent in Esther. Well. Take a look at the world. Take a look at secular history. Take a look at your own life. I am sure that there are gaps and moments or maybe even decades in your own life and in the life of the world in general when God seems conspicuously absent. It doesn’t seem like he’s speaking. It doesn’t seem like he’s around. It certainly doesn’t seem like he’s delivering. It seems as though the powers that be who are in control of the world are evil and clueless and who really knows what God is up to. I think there are a lot of people who spend a lot of time in God’s silence or apparent absence—and they don’t know why. Now, we happen to know that there is a reason for silence in the book of Esther because Esther and her people are in Exile—they have been thrown out of the Promised Land because of the sin and rebellion of the people just as Adam and Eve were thrown out of the Garden of Eden. Part of the reason that God is silent is because the people don’t listen and that lack of ability to hear and obey creates distance between us and God. In Esther we find ourselves with a heroine who may have some strength of character, but may not necessarily have any faith. Maybe she does, maybe she doesn’t. Probably she doesn’t—books in the Bible like to mention faith if people have it.

Another reason why this story is good for us is because it tells a story of God’s faithfulness and God’s redemption of people who have been Exiled, who are religiously clueless and probably disobedient, and who don’t seem to deserve or warrant God’s use of them . . . even as, to a certain extent, they still remain in Exile. So often in Scripture we find heroes—like Abraham, for example-- that seem to “deserve” being used by God. That’s probably not a very good way of reading those stories, but biblical heroes are often remarkable and we oftentimes wish that at the very least, we had their connection to God. I don’t how you feel, but I don’t feel that way about Esther. Esther is basically a slave who is valued because Xerxes thinks she’s beautiful and thinks that he is in love with her. She’s stuck with a powerful man in the most powerful country on the planet, and that man is not a good man. She hides her identity and who knows what kind of freedom she has. Esther doesn’t seem to really know what’s she doing insofar as God is concerned. And at the end of the day, she delivers her people and is herself delivered, but she still doesn’t meet with God. Yuck. I don’t want anything to do with any of that. In many respects, she isn’t your typical role model, and her life is not enviable. But God still redeems her life. He takes someone who could have done absolutely nothing remarkable and made her a deliverer of the entire Jewish people. In that way, she is on par with the earlier Judges of Israel. She’s like Gideon or Sampson or Debrah. And that is completely characteristic of God. He takes our lives, and the lives of others less fortunate than ourselves, and turns what is simply unenviable and tragic into his vehicle for redemption. That is what God does—and you know what, he is always doing it for people who don’t deserve it and for people who don’t recognize that he is the one acting in their lives. And the weakness of Esther reminds us that we, too, are unable to save ourselves and must appeal to someone else with power—to Xerxes. We may think it unfortunate that Xerxes has the power he does, but it does serve to remind us that we don’t have enough power in ourselves to defeat the evil and brokenness in our own hearts and minds.

In many ways, I wonder if the story of Esther is for people who don’t recognize that the good that comes into their lives, the gifts they receive, whatever kind of redemption they receive, is really from God. God doesn’t sign every good thing he does, “Love, from Jesus.” But he does sign it, “Love.” Or “Grace.” or “Mercy.” Or, “Salvation.” As Christians, we know that God is the author of Love and Grace and Mercy and Salvation. Jewish theologians and later Christian theologians knew that God was the only redeemer, the only one who saved. If there was salvation, it was from God. That’s part of the reason we know Esther is a theological book—because it’s a story of redemption, and only God redeems, though he often uses human instruments, willing or unwilling, knowing or unknowing, to do so.

There’s one more element of the story that is important. And it is this element of the story that makes remembering why “believing that only God saves” crucially important. This last element of the story is the character Haman. Haman is the enemy, and in so many ways he is The Enemy, and yes, I mean, Haman is really a Satanic figure. Haman and Satan have a lot of things in common insofar as the Bible characterizes both people. Satan is always someone who is out to get human beings out of pride and malice. He is always accusing people or tempting people or deceiving people who have certainly done him no wrong—and he is always a force working for destruction, for killing, and for annihilation. For whatever the enemy’s reasons are, he wants to destroy, to kill, and to annihilate the people of God. He tricked Adam and Eve into something that actually got them killed and doomed the entire human race to the daily struggle with evil and brokenness and sin. While Haman’s powers are a little more constricted, he is little less malevolent. He only goes after the Jewish people (though the Jews are often representative of humanity in general in Scripture), but does so for senseless and malicious reasons. He wants to destroy all Jews because of a small slight to his pride, and he is only satisfied with their complete destruction. I think this serves as a warning to us on more than one level. After all, Haman’s evil notions aren’t unique—genocide is an old evil that people with too much power seem to employ all too readily. Esther does a good job of showing how absurd and truly insane Haman’s malice is. But why does Haman choose such disproportionately evil actions?

It’s because there is an enemy behind Haman and Hitler and all the other power-crazed psychopaths that keeps creeping back into the scene from every nook and cranny possible, and keeps coming back, time and again. If Haman were unique, Esther’s story would be a little happier than it is. But Haman’s story isn’t unique, and because his story isn’t unique, we know there’s something more going on. That something more is the spiritual kingdom of darkness that wars against God, against human beings, and especially targets the people of God to take them out—to destroy, to kill, and to annihilate.

And this is why Queen Esther is only a temporary deliverer, who is upheld by the Great Deliverer. This is why Mordecai can say to Esther, “For if you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place.” The Jews and human beings will always have a deliverer because God is present even when he appears to be absent. Esther just had the privilege of her life being redeemed to serve God’s purposes. There will always be salvation for the undeserving and for the weak, and we always have a defender.

And we know how this story plays out better than Queen Esther does. We can see the universal themes in Esther because we already know what Jesus did. We know from the New Testament that the real fight for the life of the world doesn’t ultimately concern things like murder and genocide and hatred—unfortunately, those horrible things are only symptoms of a condition that would have been utterly tragic had not God intervened at the source. We need someone who can intercede for us, who can fight that battle for us. Jesus, when he fights for us, wins the battle at the very root of the problem. He’s takes on all the powers of the world and all the spiritual powers behind those powers and shows them how he takes on humanity’s sin in the cross and defeats their punishment and defeats death in the Easter Resurrection. By mercy and grace and redemption and destroying death for us, Jesus humiliates the evil powers. Jesus destroys the real power that sin has, so he can start to loose the chains that enslave us to brokenness, to sin, to defeat, and to evil. But it’s only when you take on the real problem that you have real results. We can’t pretend that symptoms are causes. Esther is a small story that tells the same story as the big story, and reminds us not to fool ourselves about what’s really going on in human life. What’s going on with both the problem and power of evil and the deliverance and salvation of God is far more than immediately meets the eye.

Let’s take a moment to remember who we are and where we are. Father, we live in the midst of a broken world that you sent your Son Jesus to save. Jesus has completely his work and sent his Spirit to create a new people with whom you are very present and very active. But we still live in a time of Exile even though we know that time is coming to an end. Help us to remember who the real enemy is and who the real Deliverer is, and that because of what you have done for us in Jesus Christ, life triumphs over death.



Sources: I found two books of particular use and interest in crafting this sermon. The first is The Gospel in Esther by Michael Beckett . . . and I can’t quite find the second book, so I will update it when I do.

Dreamform

In my second year of seminary, I went to a conference at the Falls Church on dreams and healing prayer.  It was led by one Russ Parker, who is something of an Anglican guru on dreams and healing prayer.  Healing prayer has always been an interest of mine, as emotional healing and contemplative prayer has always been a   substantive way in which God has shown himself to be Lord to me.  I had always been curious about dreams, as is probably anyone with half a mole of imagination, but I had not had any particular reason to take them seriously or believe that dream interpretation was anything more than a gift sometimes but not frequently given by God to help his people.  At that conference, I was persuaded otherwise and have come to believe that dreams are a valuable source of spiritual insight and that they are more often "written" (as Russ Parker says) by our own minds than by the Holy Spirit.  Sometimes the Holy Spirit speaks to us in special visions, but more often God speaks to us through our own imagination and the normal processing of dream work.

Since then, I have had an unusually rich dream life.  Partly that comes out of concerted effort to remember my dreams--I've spent a few weeks here or there writing down every bit of every dream I can remember, mostly as an exercise to develop my skill at remembering dreams.  (I'm told one only remembers dreams if one wakes up during a dream.)  I've also spent a fair chunk of time praying through dreams and have found that it is one of the most reliable ways I hear God speaking to me.  If I am having trouble hearing God's voice because of my own anxiety or distress or doubt, I oftentimes ask him to tell me something in a dream.  I find--not surprisingly--that the medium of narrative is a medium I understand well.  It is easy for me (and I imagine, for lots of people) to understand the point or morale or even the nuances of a story I read.

I find there are two or three kinds of dreams I have that are valuable.  There are "normal" dreams in which I normally pray about how the emotional resonances of a dream match up with strong emotion in my life, and discover what that has to tell me.  Sometimes this is as simple as, "Gee, I didn't know I was anxious about that!"  Or, "I had no idea I was feeling resentment toward this."  There are also dreams that are heavily "plot-driven" in which I generally do pray about the emotional resonance, but the plot of the dream itself mirrors something that has happened in my life, but not in a way that is immediately obvious to me.  (Partly, that's because I dream mostly in science-fiction as a language of metaphor--space ships, other planets, apocalypse, unidentified bizarre objects I assume are alien . . . so far none of these things have shown up in my waking life.)  Sometimes when I pray about those dreams, it isn't long before an "Aha" moment occurs.  I often have plot-oriented dreams after I have prayed for discernment for something specifically, and also prayed to have my answer come in dream form.   A third type of dream--or perhaps it is a subset of plot-oriented dreams--are dreams that are plot-oriented with strong enough emotional resonance that they bother me or continue to bother me as I have prayed through them.  At that point, I have either been prompted or decided to take Russ Parker's advice and invite Jesus into the dream and imagine him there.  His actions are always surprising!

I will be writing a few synopsis or descriptions of some dreams I have had.  Partly I do this because some dreams I have had are so vivid and creative they might as well be stories, and partly because I think this is an overlooked part of our humanity that God has always intended to integrate into our life with him.  Enjoy!

See also Russ Parker's website for more information.  I do believe he is leading a conference in Eastern PA this October on healing prayer.

Enneagram and Identity: What makes Enneagram Distinct from Myers-Briggs and All the Rest

I am not claiming to be an expert on the Enneagram or on Myers-Briggs (or the thousand other personality tests and inventories), but from my amateur study of the two, I have reached a couple of preliminary conclusions.  As I said in my previous post, I think Myers-Briggs is interested in providing a description of how cognitive processes work in human beings, but makes no claims about what human identity is or ought to be.  The Enneagram is different.  It has a "narrative" so to speak, about the origin of human personality and the neuroses thereof, and the story of redemption is about a return to the primeval harmony.  In most accounts, although some tend to Christianize the Enneagram, the story is what I would call secularized pantheism.  The problem is mostly one of being reconnected to the One, but the One is not necessarily Other, nor is the One a discreet Person, as far as I can tell.  (Actually, the way the folks on the Enneagram Institute's website tend to talk about the relation between the individual and the One reminds me more of Spinoza's Ethics than anything else, but that may be coincidence.  They point to medieval mystic traditions of all sorts, and back to Plato or Pythagoras, if I'm not mistaken.)
 
Though I am by no means a pantheistic and am not quite sure what I think about "secularized mysticism" of the kind proposed by the folks at the Enneagram Institute*, I do find the Enneagram's understanding of the connection between personality and identity to be one of the most helpful in contemporary psychology.  In this, the Enneagram seems to be in tune with what much of Christian mysticism (especially medieval mysticism) has said about personality, and I find this true, helpful, and mostly unsaid in modern settings.

   What the Enneagram writers and the Christian mystics (and possibly other mystics) agree on is this: personality--the sum of habit, inclination, predisposition, orientation, and desire in a human being is not necessarily helpful, and it is not necessarily essential to our identity.  In fact, personality (our inclinations, habits, predispositions, orientations, likes, dislikes, loves, hatreds) oftentimes gets in the way of true identity formation.  Personality is either unshaped or it is misshaped or it needs to be reshaped or finished--and some parts of personality have to be abolished altogether in order for the person to be made whole.  The Enneagram folks will say that every person is a sum of all the Enneagram points as represented by numbers 1-9, and the number you identify as is the way that your personality has become fixated on a certain thing.  In other words, personality--the fact that I am a "5"--is much more about how my soul has wrapped itself around my own brokenness than it is about anything else.  And what self-work in the Enneagram is is a way of getting "unfurled"--a way of relaxing into who you really are, a way of easing yourself out of being wrapped up in yourself out of some anxiety or knowledge of some deficiency in yourself or in the world.

If you're even a passing admirer of the work of Martin Luther, perhaps my description of the Enneagram makes it sound like Luther's description of original sin--that human beings are all incurvatus in se--all curved in on themselves.  Inflamed with the love of self and cold toward God and neighbor.  The way the Spanish mystics such as Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, and Ignatius of Loyola used to describe it, human beings are attached to the wrong things.  Part of our cure is being detached from wrong things (mostly creatures, created things) in wrong ways (i.e., idolatrous ways), re-attached to God in the proper way, so that we can also be present but non-attached to creatures.  John of the Cross' famous Dark Night of the Soul is all about this journey of proper attachment and non-attachment.  And for him there are two dark nights--the first is "sensible" (about stuff: feelings, experiences, etc) and the second is "intellectual" (about the work of reason, the intellect, knowing, the possession of the good).  But both nights are about deprivation--God deprives first the sensible part of human beings, and then the whole intellect of knowledge, sensation, use, in order to correct their disordered attachments to wrong things.  (This is why the theological virtues--faith, hope, and love must lead.  God must lead where we cannot even see, especially where we cannot we have gone wrong.)  In other words, this correction in the form of deprivation occurs in order to reform identities properly.  But what ends up happening is that the mature person, having died to self as one might also call it, has become less involved with their own inclinations.  Those inclinations are purified, reformed, remade, brought back into submission to reason and to faith and ultimately to God.  That is the work of the dark night and that is the work of sanctification.

The idea that we can love the wrong things in the wrong way is by no means unique to the medieval period.  It's essential to the whole scheme of virtue ethics and can be found in different forms in both Aristotle and Augustine.  For Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics of course moral virtue is about the proper response (the mean between extremes) to emotion or desire.  For Augustine, having the right loves is essential to living well, but we need the Spirit of God to give us love and to reshape our loves.  The Enneagram is helpful because it is friendly to the idea that we need to change and be reshaped, and that our identity does not .  depend on our behavior or even on what we see in ourselves at this very moment.  Myers-Briggs can sometimes be used superficially--"See, look, the MBTI says I'm like this, so don't ask me to change."  The Enneagram calls us to deeper observation and to the continual work of transformation.

I'm not knocking Myers-Briggs.  I think cognitive process theory is helpful, especially when what we struggle with is the fact that someone gets at the world differently than I do.  For that, it's a nice idea to do a nice jaunt through the pages of a good MB book or website.  It can be a great aide for self-knowledge or even for just helping one think more clearly about how to play well with others or with the world.  It can be helpful for self-acceptance or acceptance of fundamental non-moral ways in which human beings are different.   But I don't think it addresses the problem of transformation or discerning the difference between personality and identity.  For that, the Enneagram is an unexpected ally to the Christian agenda, even if the Christian response to questions about identity and transformation go deeper and are not, I hope, a sophisticated form of pantheistic monism!



*I am much too much a supernaturalist to be happy with any sort of system that doesn't take mysticism seriously.  Either someone is communing with God in a mystical experience, or being distracted by demons.  It is nothing to play with and vague notions about "the One" do leave me concerned about who exactly people are talking with.  The enemy does take every advantage, whether we want him to or not.)