Unbreak our hearts and wash clean our windows: Why Paul would love a Luau (agl #8)

 The misunderstandings I have written about in recent days are actually reversals and repudiations of the words of the prophets, Jesus, and Paul. These broken stories have done great damage to the church and its members over the centuries, and are posing grave danger to the church and the world in our current times .  The great harm stems from the traditions that cling to the view that  sin makes us abhorrent to God: ugly, undesirable,  dirty, ruined.   Most of the Hebrew Bible, especially the Prophets,  and almost all of the New Testament, especially the Gospels, is the story of God trying to tell us and show us that we are wrong,   that God really does love us still, and as much as ever desires usin ways much like the way a handsome king would yearn for his beautiful princess bride. Perhaps more down to earth and powerful the story that God wants us to grow, be safe, and be happy like a nursing mother would feel towards her baby, or a like father would feel towards his teenage child, especially one who is feeling devastated that they have just ruined their life with a bad decision.I know. as Paul knows, and God knows, that YOU know this God, because most of you have had these feelings for your own children, grandchildren, and closest friends.A big part of Paul's mission was to fix and reframe this broken story, and then sanctify it with a shared meal (no doubt a bean supper followed by make your own sundaes).

The tendency of religion, especially the traditional pagan ones that ancient peoples were steeped in, is that the divinities are fickle, demanding, and self centered and therefore must continually be placated by material sacrifice and self-abasing, almost groveling, worship.  Like Wayne and Garth, the antiphon for every prayer, the posture of every encounter, is, “We’re not worthy!!”  But from God’s first encounter with Abram, God wants to tell a very different story, one that we have come to name covenantal love:  “ I am on your side, I will love you forever, I want to be close to you.”   . Paul is the great custodian of this covenant story, an apostle whose personal encounter with the Risen Christ, convinced him that Jesus IS the true, complete expression of the heart of God. Paul’s emphasis on “Katalasso” is his way of expressing how Jesus undid the great harms of disobedience, idolatry and injustice, of slavery, oppression and exile.   I want to use Paul’s teachings  today to undo a great harm that has come from “Christendom’s” distortion of Jesus’ message as it has reassimilated itself with “the powers and principalities” to extend its reach and influence, to elevate it status in the hierarchy of Western values.

Looking back to the original occasion of disconnection, fear, and self loathing as related in Genesis, we can notice that when Adam and Eve recognized their disobedience, they are surprised at God’s calling out, literally a father searching in the woods for his lost children, “Where are you?” I can hear the plaintive, worried note in God’s voice.  You and I know how gut punched we would feel if our child was missing, whether because of their own bad behavior or by the trickery of an evil stranger. If we read attentively, we can see that God did not lose his temper and freak out on them. God acted as  a provident mother as her frightened children started  their journey “And the Lord God made garments of skins for the man[ and for his wife and clothed them.”

Unfortunately, the community of Christ, especially as it blended into the Roman empire and the dominant patriarchies of their culture,  lost Paul’s positive reframing of the God  story as quickly as the people of Moses, David and Elijah had forgotten the stories of God’s covenant of love.   Even when the Holy Spirit brought liberating reminders in the shape of reform, the church’s collaborations with monarchy brought the distorted but pervasive story of man’s ugliness back for the sake of exercising institutional power and control.

For example, as the Roman Empire was self-destructing, a panicked Bishop Augustine doubled down on Constantine’s conquest of the church by inventing a doctrine of original sin.   After centuries of war, unjust domination,  and false equivalencies among the kingdoms of heaven and of earth, Martin Luther Luther initiated a Reformation intended to return the church to the joy and freedom of God’s grace, but Luther remained stuck within the feudal power structure by emphasizing how literally crappy human beings are.  John Calvin preached a doctrine of depravity intended to emphasize God’s generosity, but followers like Jonathan Edwards end up magnifying God’s vindictive anger.

But gratefully, holy people on fire with love always have been sent to us to refresh  the good story of the heart of God made manifest in  the Love of Jesus.   Macrina of Cappadocia and her little brother popes Basil and Gregory  lifted up the figure of the affectionate and merciful  Mary as the mother of God,  Francis of Asissi helped the church rediscover the original blessing of creation and the blessedness of the poor. Mystics like Teresa of Avila embraced the  deeper meanings and blessed gifts of our sensual desire.   John Wesley preaching a gospel of freedom and the possibility of holy living, redefining sanctification as a collaborative interaction with God that human beings can choose to become ever more open to God’s grace..   Today in America, it is the black church who most prophetically reminds us of the fullness of God’s delight in God’s people. In a culture in which their bodies are despised, exploited, and destroyed, embodied and celebratory worship is a witness to God’s loving and liberating faithfulness.  Poets like Mart Oliver and Wendell Berry, and innovative theologians like Matthew Fox and Richard Rohr remind us of how all of creation is a reminder of life’s goodness and God’s love for all creation:

 “ God said, “Let us make humans in our image, according to our likeness….God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. 

All of the Torah, Law, and Wisdom Poetry of the Bible proclaims that not only is God never giving up on us, but that through the life and teaching of Jesus, a well as his death and resurrection, God is literally close enough for us to touch and longs to be near to us..   As John the Baptist, says. You just need to turn around and look for him. That is really what repent means:turn around again. “Just look  over your shoulder!” the high priest of Motown, Levi Stubbs of the Four Tops sings.  Jesus, the kingdom of God is very near to you!

Not only would Paul love to share meals with us in our Luau, (especially the beans and special desserts), table fellowship was a compelling focus of his ministry, likely the most dramatic and impactful.  In his calling to preach the Gospel to Gentiles was a source of dangerous conflict between Paul and his fellow Jews.  We hear about Paul fighting AGAINST circumcision of adult male converts, for which many Greek and Roman men of his time were deeply grateful), but what he was really FOR is that all followers of the Lord Jesus could share their meals with one another.    The whole clean/unclean, worthy/unworthy, insider/outsider binaries were most concretely and dramatically on display at communal gatherings, especially the commemoration of the Lord’s supper which had been established from the beginning as the central worship experience of the Jesus followers.  For Paul, it was THE key question of his theology of Jesus being the true Messiah of Israel. The entire point of the covenant from the very beginning with Abraham.  It ramified well beyond theology to justice and the very core of human identity and the purpose of community. This focus on expansive table fellowship wasn’t a Pauline quirk or innovation,  it was at the very heart of Jesus’ message and the way Jesus lived his daily life.   In some ways, Jesus was killed because he ate with the wrong kind of people.  Jesus’s parables are full of references to a  God of banquets and celebrations.  For goodness’ sake, even Jesus’ first documented miracle involves providing wine for a wedding party.

The lead scholar of the Jesus Seminar, an interdisciplinary search for the historical Jesus, John Dominic Crossan, suggests that  commensality (sharing the table with everyone, give us this day our daily bread), is at the very heart of Jesus mission as a social revolutionary.  I think of Jesus as God showing up to really be the life of the party, providing food and drink, telling stories, laughing, listening, and helping each person feel like they are the most beloved and important person in the room. If Jesus is at the party, NOBODY is going away hungry, lonely, or troubled. And isn’t that what this Empire Grove community has always been about?!  If you’re here, you know that you are welcome, you are treasured, you are needed.   You and I act naturally in the name of Jesus and the deep hospitality of the Holy Trinity to let every person know that God is delighted that they are here and is grateful to be in your presence. It’s not controversial. We’re not concerned with your financial portfolio, your political affiliation, or your sexual orientation.  We want you to let your beautiful light shine so that we can feel joy, gratitude, and peace that you have chosen to be withPaul, Jesus, and one another tonight.

The Great Misunderstanding of "Atonement", The Greater Truth of "Katalasso"(agl#7)

 We should be joyful always  in the knowledge that God delights in us, and that  Jesus not only come to reconcile us to God, but to teach us that God has always been very near, eager to be in close, loving relationship. (Philippians 4: 4-8)

For Jesus’ apostle Paul. immersed in the deep knowledge of the scriptures of Israel, called and sent by the Risen Jesus to teach his gospel to all the world, the great news he wants to share is that our relationship with God has been restored in Jesus. Indeed, from the perspective of God’s loving heart, this original connection of love  never was gone; it was we who seemed unwilling or unable to grasp that God could delight in us. The Greek word that Paul uses repeatedly to name this restoration of relationship  is “katalasso.” For Paul. “katalasso” as the restoration of relationship is not only the meaning of Jesus’s life but it is the job description of everyone called to follow Jesus or to communicate this awesome reality to others.  Paul uses forms of the word  “katalasso” frequently in the letters in which he focuses on the centrality of Jesus’ death and resurrection. One of the most powerful of these “katalasso statements” is in the second one he wrote to the contentious community in Corinth, in which he joyfully claims that, in Christ, God has begun a new creation, and we who have become one in Christ are helpers in bringing it about:

“All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation.”(2 Cor 5:18.)

In church history, the meaning of this concept of reconciliation has been fraught with legalistic explanations of the machinery of this process, including such extreme distortions as penal substitutionary atonement, which in its darkest expressions, implies a God so angry, offended and disgusted by humanity’s sinfulness that he demands a cosmic retribution in the form of the death of his son.  This seems to me a spectacular misunderstanding of Paul’s and a tragic reversal of the message Jesus embodies of an unfailingly tender God.  It is natural for a person to feel revulsion and horror, rather than reverent awe,  when Abraham is about to slaughter his son Isaac to prove his faithfulness to God.  Even as little children we are broken hearted, even traumatized, at the realization that a little lamb must have its throat cut to make for our sacred meal.  We should trust our God-knit hearts and spirit-lighted minds to reject the idea that God is a brutal bully, more like an enraged feudal Lord, than a loving parent. I understand that  the biblical language of sacrifice, ransom and  atonement requires much reasoning and interpretation, but our engagement with  awe, wonder, and mystery, should not be silenced by the reproach to have “faith”,  a demand for assent to a legalistic formula. This understanding of faith is an affront to the teaching of Jesus and the prophets about the faithfulness and steadfastness of God’s love.

In this light, it may be more helpful to think of Jesus’ mission as restoration. “Reconciliation” has acquired an aftertaste of “propiation”, the attitude to the gods at the heart of pagan theologies of the ancient world.  Propitiation is rooted in postures of  pleasing, placating, appeasing, even groveling in a pantomime of self-loathing. Restoration denotes the  liberating revelation of God’s justice that the prophets of Israel so famously reveal.  Restorative justice is the prophetic game changer for worship and social relations.  not the retributive justice of  getting even, or the transactional reward and punishment of coercive behavior management.   Preeminent biblical scholar and biographer of Paul N.T. Wright locates this understanding of restoration in the teaching of the prophets of Israel, which were the life shaping scriptures of Jesus’ apostle Paul:

According to the prophets, Israel’s God had abandoned Jerusalem, had departed from the Temple, leaving it open to invasion and destruction. But the prophets didn’t leave it at that. They promised a great restoration. Two of Israel’s greatest prophets, Isaiah and Ezekiel, focused these long-range promises on the assurance that the One God, having apparently abandoned his people to their fate, would return. (Wright, N. T.. Paul: A Biography (pp. 47-48)

To better understand the relationship of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection to God’s plan for restoration, I have found so helpful the great Franciscan teacher Richard Rohr’s coinage of the term “AT -ONE- MENT.”  This intentional breaking down and rebuilding of the word “atonement” replaces the deeply problematic (but stubbornly rooted) misunderstanding of the cross as a punishment intended for human beings but executed on a more worthy victim. In Rohr’s most comprehensive work, “The Universal Christ”, he helps us imagine the purpose of the Incarnation, and ultimately, of all creation itself, as an ongoing process of becoming ONE with God . This transformation into “one body in Christ” is similar to the understandings of many spiritual traditions: life as a journey into unity, holiness as wholeness, growth an organic process of transformation into integrity and full relationships. Judaism’s central prayer, and what Jesus names the greatest commandment,  the “Shema” , can be interpreted as comprehending the essence of the divine as the oneness of heaven and earth in the “person” of God:

Listen, Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is One. Blessed be the name of His glorious kingdom for ever and all time. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might. These words which I command you today shall be on your heart.

Similarly,  the Sufi mystic poet Hafiz can say, “I am a hole in the flute that the Christ's breath moves through listen to this music. I am the concert from the mouth of every creature singing with the myriad chorus.”

All of the Torah, Law, and Wisdom Poetry of the Bible proclaims that contrary to conventional opinion, God love for all creation, including all of God’s people, never ends.   Not only is God never giving up on us, but in the life and teaching of Jesus, God is literally close enough for us to touch.   As John the Baptist, says. You just need to turn around and look for him. That is really what repent means:turn around again. “Just look  over your shoulder!” the high priest of Motown, Levi Stubbs of the Four Tops sings.  Jesus, the kingdom of God is very near to you.  

A Living God Gives Us Life, We Become What We Love (agl#6)

 

“The glory of God is a human person, truly alive.” -  Irenaeus of Lyons

The most  positive approach to understanding why the Hebrew prophets are so focused on idolatry throughout the Old Testament is their emphasis on Yahweh being a living God, not a distant or detached deity, certainly not malevolent or manipulating like pagan ones. For the Hebrews, their God was one who interacted with his creation and people. The God who cared, cared enough to forgive, cared enough to make a covenant, or as Hagar, the exiled mother of Ishmael declared, “the One who sees me and hears me.” This living God is a source of origin and a nurturer of continual growth. This understanding of is so different from other pagan conceptions of God, for whom  the gods are powerful but unpredictable adversaries.

In Second Corinthians again, Paul helps us understand this intimacy as the Spirit of God dwelling within the human heart:

“we are the temple of the living God. As God said, I will live in them and walk among them. I will be their God and they will be my people.”

 Paul is literally echoing the prophets of the Babylonian exile, like Jeremiah and Isaiah and Ezekiel in these words. But in this letter to the Corinthians, he talks about the kind of change that has happened. Now that it seems as though God is not in the temple because the oppressors continue to dominate, so the temple now is within the human person. And so access to this living God is abrogated, short-circuited if you will, by choosing a deity that is not alive, that does not care for our living.

This phrase, living God, highlights the contrast between the God of Israel and idols made of wood and stone that were worshipped by other nations. These pagan idols were inanimate and powerless while the God of Israel was alive, active, and capable of performing miracles. God for the people of Israel was the ultimate source of life, both physical and spiritual. It's interesting that in John's Gospel, Jesus refers to himself as living water, living bread. This idea of something that is involved, dynamic, involved in natural growth seems to be so important to this concept and where idolatry doesn't have that natural aspect.

One of the most notable articulations of this problem is in Psalm 115, beginning in the fourth verse, the psalmist says, 

“their idols are merely things of silver and gold, shaped by human hands. 

They have mouths, but cannot speak, and eyes, but cannot see. 

They have ears, but cannot hear, and noses, but cannot smell. 

They have hands, but cannot feel, and feet, but cannot walk, 

and throats, but cannot make a sound. 

And those who make idols are just like them, as are all who trust in 

Them.”

In Mesopotamian culture and the building of civilizations and ziggurats, a city would be built around a temple designated as the dwelling of a god often a giant wooden or metal structure would come. A city formed because of the need of people to care for the imagined physical needs of that God (as well as real physical needs of all of the needed servants).  Animals were butchered and roasted, the meat offered to the god and ritually eaten by the people. Often there was a priest whose job it was to use a gigantic toothbrush to brush the stony or wooden or metal teeth of the God. But if one were to become like these gods and lose all these wonderful, intrinsic, and wonderfully expressive and productive human gifts, eyes, mouths, ears, noses, hands, feet, throats, they would have kind of a sclerosis of their soul, or a dystrophy, if you will, such that idolatry becomes ultimately fatal. That is, if you are a living human person destined to grow, you hasten your death by becoming like your idol.

Even some of the traditional Greek myths show this, like the story of King Midas, who everything he touched turned to gold. Unfortunately, when he touched the things he loved most, like a wife or a daughter, they turned to gold and they died. This is kind of the ancient paradox that if you turn others into objects, or permanent expressions of art, or reflections of one's own desire, you in a sense destroy their humanity. You effectively kill their souls.

And one of the great benefits of our time is we realize that in our knowledge of the brain and of learning, of the power of intentionality and affirmation, that we can create new realities. This is not really a new insight. It's a very ancient, traditional one. One of the best articulations of this is by St. Clara of Assisi, the young woman contemporary of St. Francis of Assisi, who founded her own order of female devotees to partner with Francis in their reform. She says,

 “we become what we love, and who we love shapes what we become. If we love things, we become a thing. If we love nothing, we become nothing. Imitation is not a literal mimicking of Christ. Rather, it means becoming the image of the beloved and image disclosed through transformation. This means we are to become vessels of God's compassionate love for others.”

 So if we love a living God and a loving God, we become more living and loving people. Very powerful insight. This deeper understanding of idolatry as loving the wrong things clarifies why the great Shema of Israel, the greatest commandment is that you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, with all your strength, with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself. Not an arbitrary command of a so-called jealous God, but a desire, advice, a path given by a deity that wants you to live. In fact, when a scholar of the law wanted to test Jesus, he asked him, teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life? And when the young man quoted the Shema, Jesus proved, saying, you have answered correctly. Do this and you will live. This is from the Gospel of Luke, the 10th chapter, verses 25 through 28.

To sum up then, idolatry is essentially loving the wrong things. When we started  this year’s Empire Grove Camp Meeting,  a “Luau with the Lord” featuring the teachings of the apostle Paul,  Brother Matthias Tanner presented a  sermon at Sunday worship about Jesus’ parable teaching that we all are searching for a “pearl of great price.” And this teaching is echoed in another Gospel verse, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will lie”

 In this metaphor of life as a search for hidden treasure is a key to understanding the problem with idolatry. That is, when you are looking for and loving the wrong thing, you are blinded, you stop growing, and you eventually die. In the context of our need to belong to God and one another, idolatry isolates us or gives us the illusion that we are disconnected from God, with the painfully practical result that we  become alienated from, and hurtful towards,  one another. The hurt, the loneliness, the destruction, the injustice, the suffering that comes from that perceived disconnection is the fruit of idolatry.

So I think instead, we have to deal with that kind of messy uncertainty that comes from not being in control, by surrendering to an ascending acceptance of reality as it is, and not be controlled by fear, or by especially fear of death, and not to give power to others by trying to numb those fears or ignore those fears, overcome them with a kind of social control. So why not make a graven image of God? Why not try to put God in a box so that you can manage your understanding? Ultimately, that will shut off your questioning, your searching, your wondering, the creative life that keeps you alive and keeps you looking for love, looking for the God who wants to love you.

Turns out that that old heresy hunting bishop Irenaeus was onto something when he was fighting to preserve the idea that God’s anointed one Jesus was fully divine and fully human at the same time, or as Paul would say on Colossians, “God in all his fullness was pleased to live in Christ, and through him God reconciled everything to himself.” In the context of Ireanaeus’ quote, Christ is both the “glory of God” AND “the fully living human person.

What's the Matter with Idols?" (agl #5)

 

In teaching about Paul's ideas of God being very close to us but we  being unable to perceive it, I used the metaphor of broken hearts and dirty windows from John Prine’s song “Souvenirs” to talk about how sin has a distorted effect on our perception. I want to go deeper into this dynamic of blurring vision  and breaking hearts  by considering the idea of idolatry as used by the Hebrew prophets including Moses, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, as well as Jesus's apostle Paul. “Idolatry” seems like a quaint and ancient concept but is actually quite connected to contemporary ideas of distorted thinking, addiction, unhealthy obsessions, as well as the traditional language of sin and social injustice. If we define sin as the inability to realize and take delight in the presence of God, then we can begin to see why idolatry is such a big deal in the Old Testament. In the context of my overall assertion about Paul’s gospel, sin takes away our ability to trust that God delights in us, and reconciliation is not a matter of changing God’s perception of us, but rather a transformation of our perception of God.

I have to admit that for most of my life I haven't really understood the all the fuss about  idols or idolatry. I've always thought idols were kind of harmless knickknacks.  Aren't those little household gods that people would gathered around their hearths simply a quaintm ancient form of collectible figurines? Why do the prophets who speak on Yahweh’s behalf get so dramatic about idols? Why would a God get so upset and build  a covenant on this idea of not having false gods? It seems to me like some of the commandments against stealing or lying or especially killing have much more importance than how you name your gods, how you picture them, how you adore them . But yet here we are,  in the first few commandments about not having false gods, not making graven images or carved images, about keeping the Sabbath holy, we seem to be overly fixated on God's feelings, God's sensibilities. In fact, we read in Deuteronomy and other places that God is a “jealous” God. This can’t mean that Yahweh is an insecure or envious macho man. That doesn't quite fit with the idea of an infinite, eternally loving, all-powerful God. Why would God be concerned about the affections  of a human being?

In Paul's second letter to the church community he had planted in  Corinth, he says, “I feel a divine jealousy for you since I betrothed you to one husband to present you as a pure virgin in Christ. But I'm afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion.”

Paul's use of “jealous” is closer to the meaning that the Hebrew Bible might use in their word for jealous, which is “kanna”. A better denotation of the intended meaning than “envious” might be “zealous”,  that is,  “fervently devoted”, conveying the idea that God is so in love with God’s people that like a true human lover (like a parent, spouse, or committed friend) God only wants the best for the beloved, their growth, freedom, and joy, or as our quote from Irenaeus suggests, their becoming fully and truly alive doesn't want the loved one  to suffer or be seriously hurt. When Paul is being somewhat solicitous in the letter to the Corinthians by saying that he's jealous for the people, he is saying that he is imitating the desire of God that  they clearly  recognize God's presence.

But let's go back to this whole idolatry thing. So, what is an idol? In the traditional sense of the word, an idol is an actual physical shaping of a god, or the worship of a natural phenomenon, or of an imaginative construct like a myth or an idea, or even a simple man-made objects that is fashioned to be an object of one’s primary commitment of attention and effort. In fact, idolatry exists when any of these items serves to replace or limit or control an infinite, transcendent, God. 

This kind of idol worship  is really based on a sense of extreme vulnerability, on a fear of death and of  divine power over existence. As we can see in a lot of ancient mythology, especially the Greek stories of Homer and its echoes in Rome, the gods are can are selfish, impetuous. Capricious, and vindictive.  The gods of Olympus do not love people, they use them.  The relationship with mortals is punishment and reward. If the god has an attraction to a mortal, he or she simply take what they want from them.  Rapacious, manipulative, and objectifying in the extreme, these gods are to feared, and dealt with with avoidance or abject submission,There doesn't seem to be any kind of meaning or justice or caring in the gods’ actions. In fact, the gods, as they're depicted, seem to have on them projected all the quintessential flaws and failings of human beings. To repeat, this vulnerability is based on a fear of divine power and of competition for what seem to be uncertain or scarce resources.

Idolatry focuses on taking a posture of subservience, or at least apparent subservience, of manipulation and negotiation, appeasement, even propitiation. Try to placate and please and in some way manage the will of the more powerful force, perhaps for the sake of good weather or other kinds of good fortune. This kind of idolatry, which is the heart of most pagan religion, signifies a fundamentally transactional, a quid pro quo orientation to all relationships. That is, not just to the idea of humans and the divine, but humans among themselves.

In a more contemporary sense, an idol is anything that receives excessive devotion, trust, importance, or attention in a person's life, surpassing the devotion to what they might consider sacred or the ultimate reality. So what's the trouble? Again, what's wrong with this kind of devotion? It seems potentially quite harmless, even often times quite productive.. But what both ancient and contemporary idolatries have in common is that they involve the denial of humanity's participation in the infinite. In a sense, idolatry, like a fetish or an addiction, is  an attempt to quench an unquenchable thirst or fill an infinite emptiness. And in so doing, the idol helps numb or conceal  a longing for the infinite, a longing for something more than we can imagine or see.

One of the great insights of Alcoholics Anonymous, the origin and model of 12-step programs for healing and recovery from addiction, is that one needs to let go of this kind of control, because realistic futility of any person's control to manage all of reality, in essence, the impossibility be be one's own god. Powerlessness over alcohol is evidence that this self-idolatry is unmanageable and doomed to failure and death. In his correspondence with Bill Wilson, the great psychoanalyst Carl Jung writes that we limit and destroy ourselves by thirsting for the wrong things. That is, addiction to alcohol is addiction to an intrinsic poison, a poison that takes away our power to choose but gives the illusion that we can either stop the pain or use the alcohol to manage our experience. To quote Jung's letter,

 “an ordinary man not protected by an axiom above and isolated in society cannot resist the power of evil, which is called very aptly the devil. But the use of such words allows so many mistakes that one can only keep aloof from them as much as possible. Rather than use this kind of very judgmental religious language, one that seems almost meaningless to many contemporaries." Jung continues,  “I have acquired a point of view above the misleading platitudes that one usually hears about alcoholism. He says, you see, alcohol in Latin is spiritus, and you use the same word for the highest religious experience as well as for the most depraving poison. The helpful formula therefore is spiritus contra spiritum.” Jung ends with a verse from Psalm 42, “As the heart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, oh God.”

Jung uses the metaphor of thirst to talk about a longing for an infinite fulfillment, a yearning for belonging and wholeness and vitality, a participation in infinite being. Many addictions,  idolatries, and  and inculturated habits limit our access to anything that is commensurate with our most important needs and meaningful desires. As dangerously, idolatry is a denial of our human limitations and the avoidance of the realities of our mutability, our change in suffering, our mortality. In Bill Wilson, Carl Jung's correspondent might say that it's not denial of our existence, the existence of or our need for a higher power. So that a delusion of control becomes a self-authored slavery.

The first three steps in Alcoholics Anonymous’ 12 Steps represent a movement from awareness of powerlessness to a surrender to a power beyond the self. The necessity of the move from denial to acceptance is depicted in Bob Dylan's song, “You Gotta Serve Somebody.” To quote one key verse and  the refrain, 

“you might be a rock and roll addict prancing on the stage. 

You might have drugs at your command, women in a cage. 

You may be a businessman or some high degree thief. 

They may call you doctor or they may call you chief, 

but you're going to have to serve somebody. Yes, you are. 

You're going to have to serve somebody. 

Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord, 

but you're going to have to serve somebody.”

In the inclination of a self to deny or ignore this dynamic, idolatry offers an apparent work around, ceding identity in an apparent obedience that masks a self-oriented willfulness . The result is  voluntary dehumanization of oneself, a more manageable enslavement. This kind of self deception and reality blindness becomes devastating for society as the grasping to maintain an illusion of personal control is intrinsically isolating and is a catalyst for othering. We are expert, I assume it means, at labeling, grouping, and demonizing the other so that we might compete with them in good conscience, even perhaps justifying killing them  by claiming their inferiority or their inhumanity.

James Baldwin,  in his writing about bigotry talks about this kind of labeling, classifying others as intrinsically dehumanizing. In 1976, in an essay titled”The Devil Finds Work, Baldwin asserts,

 ‘identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of itself. In which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which one's nakedness can always be felt, and sometimes discerned. This trust in one's nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one's robes.”

 This metaphor of nakedness is a deliberate evocation of the story in Genesis of Adam and Eve. That after they grasp at control in their disobedience of God and eating the forbidden fruit that gives knowledge of life and death, they become ashamed and they try to hide themselves from God. In many ways, what we call idolatry is a similar  type of hiding.

I think it might be easier to understand this dynamic of dehumanizing delusion in terms of another quote from James Baldwin, a famous sentence from his essay, “Notes of a Native Son.”  Baldwin writes, 

“Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves. The loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his.”

 Broadly speaking, group identity is a form of idolatry. What we name “othering” is a process of defining individuals or groups as fundamentally different and often inferior to a dominant group or the self. This creates an “us versus them”  mentality. Othering often involves attributing negative stereotypes and characteristics to the other, resulting in dehumanization and marginalization. This can manifest in many forms, including racism, sexism, and xenophobia.

Idolatry, therefore, stems from and engenders a disconnection that numbs perception and hardens hearts, standing in the way of empathy and compassion. In the language of cognitive behavioral therapy, idols play into distorted thinking and human reactivity. Thus, a dysfunctional, destructive delusion of disconnection creates real fractures in a person, a family, and a society. Reconciliation, Paul’s katalasso, becomes a clarification of one’s perception of divine presence that can heal human beings  and relationships

"Broken Hearts and Dirty Windows". (EGGLFA #4{

 

On the first night of my teaching about Paul in the context of Empire Grove Camp Meeting vespers, I realized that Brother Matthias Tanner's’ and Catherine Anderson’s Sunday reflections about being alert for the presence of God in our week together had provided for me a wonderful way to transition to what Paul teaches us about the relationship of perception to our ability to recognize God’s presence, how sin creates our sense that God is far away from us, and how reconciliation and forgiveness, especially that which is enacted in the death and resurrection of Jesus,  can open our hearts and all of  our portals of perception, to better perceive and experience God’s closeness and caring for us.  

When my children were teens, one of our favorite family television shows was “Friday Night Lights”, an optimistic drama centered on the fictional rural town of Dillon, Texas, where winning the state football championship is prized above all else. Coach Eric Taylor and his wife Tammy, a counselor at Dillon High, help one another guide a high school football team through pressure-filled seasons while dealing with struggles relating to their own family. My most cherished slogan from the show was the team’s motivational chant, “Full hearts, clear eyes, can’t lose.”   The apostle Paul would totally get that, and be able to connect it to how the brokenness of sin blinds us, silences us, enslaves us, and divides us.  Paul uses the Greek verb Katalasso, and  its noun form, katalegge, meaning reconciliation, to express the goal of our lives in Christ.  In fact, in the in his Second Letter to the church in Corinths, Paul asserts that reconciliation is the foundational ministry which all followers of Christ should share.

And all of this is a gift from God, who brought us back to himself through Christ. And God has given us this task of reconciling people to him.  For God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting people’s sins against them. And he gave us this wonderful message of reconciliation. So we are Christ’s ambassadors; God is making his appeal through us. We speak for Christ when we plead, “Come back to God!”  For God made Christ, who never sinned, to be the offering for our sin, so that we could be made right with God through Christ. (2 Cor 5:18-21)

 Unfortunately, the word “reconciliation” is weighed down with many historical accretions, well intentioned distortions that end up distorting our perception of who God is and what it means to be human.  For Paul, Jesus IS reconciliation itself ( indeed the whole “Katalasso of fish”), but to get to Paul’s understanding of katalasso’s meaning and importance, we need to consider the very nature of sin, especially the relationship of the major disconnections of idolatry, alienation, and addiction and sin to our ability to perceive whether or not God is near and whether God is truly our greatest good, like a mother who can’t forget us, but only forgive us, or like a father who would do anything to provide for us and guide us on a life giving path. 

For Jesus’ apostle Paul. called and sent by the Risen Jesus the greatest of the very good news flashes that  he wants to tell us about  God is that our relationship with God is restored. Indeed, from the perspective of God’s loving heart, it never was gone; it was we who seemed unwilling or unable to grasp that God could delight in us.

In church history, the meaning of this concept of reconciliation has been fraught with legalistic explanations of the machinery of this process, including such extreme distortions as penal substitutionary atonement, which in its darkest expressions, implies a God so angry, offended and disgusted by humanity’s sinfulness that he demands a cosmic retribution in the form of the death of his son.  This seems to me a spectacular misunderstanding of Paul’s and a tragic reversal of the message Jesus embodies of an unfailing tender God.  It is natural to feel revulsion and horror when Abraham is about to slaughter his son Isaac to prove his faithfulness to God.  Even as little children we are broken hearted, even traumatized, at the realization that a little, unblemished baby lamb must have its throat cut to make for our sacred meal.  So should we trust our God knit hearts and spirit lighted minds to reject the idea that God is a brutal bully like an enraged feudal Lord. I understand that  the biblical language of sacrifice, ransom and  atonement requires much reasoning and interpretation, but our engagement with  awe, wonder, and mystery, should not be silenced by the reproach to have “faith”,.  a demand for assent to a legalistic formula. This understanding of faith is an affront to the teaching of Jesus and the prophets about the faithfulness and steadfastness of God’s love.

The exemplary biblical scholar, pastor and prolific writer N.T. Wright summarizes Paul’s perspective as a teacher deeply immersed in the scriptures of Israel in this Way:

“  According to the prophets, Israel’s God had abandoned Jerusalem, had departed from the Temple, leaving it open to invasion and destruction. But the prophets didn’t leave it at that. They promised a great restoration. Two of Israel’s greatest prophets, Isaiah and Ezekiel, focused these long-range promises on the assurance that the One God, having apparently abandoned his people to their fate, would return. (Wright, N. T. Paul: A Biography, p 44). 

In this light, it is more helpful to think of Jesus’ mission as restoration, rather than reconciliation with its bitter aftertaste of propiation, the attitude to the gods at the heart of pagan theologies of the ancient world.  Propitiation is rooted in postures of  pleasing, placating, appeasing. Restoration is the  liberating revelation of God’s justice that the prophets of Israel so famously reveal.  Restorative justice is the prophetic game changer for worship and social relations.  not the retributive justice of  getting even, or the transactional reward and punishment of coercive behavior management (it’s Pavlov’s DOG, not Pavlov’s GOD).  

A counter point to the Dillon High School confident slogan about triumphantly full hearts is a more pragmatic and poignant lyric in one of folk musician John Prine’s most treasured songs, “Souvenirs”.  The speaker laments, “Broken hearts and dirty windows make life difficult to see; that’s why las night and this morning always look the same to me.” Here again, Paul would understand and explain further how sin is the chief heart breaker and window smearer in our lives. Next, we will explain how idolatry, addiction, mental health and social dysfunction work in ways similar to sin in distorting not only our sense of perception, but also breaking and blurring our lived experience of who God is,who we are, and how best to be connected to one another and the rest of creation. 

Matthias' Treasures, Sunday Morning of Camp Meeting, (AGL#3)

 

The 2025 Empire Grove Camp Meeting began in earnest for me at  Sunday Morning worship on July 27.  Reverend Matthias Tanner, a retired Methodist minister and  a long time resident of the Grove, led a service of Word and Table that featured Jesus’ parable about a pearl of great price that a person found in a field. The person sold  everything they owned to purchase the field and to recover and claim the treasure it held as their own.  Matthias, who had in recent years “rechristened” himself after the apostle selected to restore the group of twelve early in Acts (many of his long time friends still call him by his familiar name “Stan”). Matthias linked these familiar parables of Jesus about our lives in God as a search for our heart’s treasures,  to our current commitment to seek to grow closer to God in our camp meeting week together. He encouraged us to view the upcoming week as an opportunity to rediscover our "God treasures". He urged us to seek what our hearts desire most deeply and to be aware of the pearls that are "hidden in plain sight" all around us. Matthias highlighted several sacred spaces where we have often encountered God before and will likely do so again if only we choose to stop, look, and listen. 

Later that day and again the next morning, retired pastors Catherine and Raymond Anderson echoed this theme by inviting us to be alert to and aware of “Emmaus moments”: those times when in the sharing of the scriptures and the breaking of the bread, we have those exceptionally intense realizations that Jesus has been among us.  If they had had Facebook, Snapchat, or texting back in the day, Clopas and his companion (possibly his wife who had stood with the Marys under the cross as Jesus was dying) would have messaged the disciples they had just left back in Jerusalem, “OMG! You’ll never guess who we ran into on our hike today!”🙏❤️‍🔥🥰 #heartsonfire #itistheLord! 

Matthias explained that these God glimpses could be in the faces of loved ones, in the laughter we share, or in the joy of children playing or riding the train. Our encounters with God might also occur during our morning Bible studies, or in the natural world—perhaps in a bird's song or the sunlight filtering through the trees. It could even be in a quiet moment when we feel a sense of belonging and become aware of God's presence. God might also appear in our memories, even those tinged with sadness for loved ones who have passed. Yet, through our traditions and memories of Empire Grove, we realize that what we love isn’t truly lost. Our worship services, where we listen to God's word and share in the body and blood of Christ, are another moment where God reveals Himself. Similarly, God is present as we share meals together.

This message resonated deeply with me as I prepared to discuss Paul's teachings during vespers during the week. The witness of Matthias, Catherine, and Raymond, and again throughout the week with Heather, Stuart, and many other ministers of the Word,  echoes the message that God has never really left us. Paul, like Jesus and all of the prophets, taught that God has never abandoned us, has from the very beginning,  never turned his back and walked away. God is as close to us as our own breath. We need only to trust, stop, turn around and then wait, listen,  and look.