Ewigkeitssonntag/Christ the King: Staying Awake

There once was a monastery that was known to be very strict. Following a vow of silence, no one was allowed to speak at all. But there was one exception to this rule. Every ten years, the monks were permitted to speak just two words. After spending his first ten years at the monastery, one monk went to the head monk. "It has been ten years," said the head monk. "What are the two words you would like to speak?..."

"Bed... hard..." said the monk.

"I see," replied the head monk.

Ten years later, the monk returned to the head monk's office. "It has been ten more years," said the head monk. "What are the two words you would like to speak?"

"Food... stinks..." said the monk.

"I see," replied the head monk.

Yet another ten years passed and the monk once again met with the head monk who asked, "What are your two words now, after these ten years?"

"I... quit!" said the monk.

"Well, I can see why," replied the head monk. "All you ever do is complain."

Imagine you have taken a vow of silence.  Now imagine having to wait ten years until you can speak -- and then all you are able to say are two words; those two words will need to sum up all your living, all your longing, all that is truly important to you -- for it will be another ten years until you will be allowed to speak another two words.  Keeping silence has a way of bringing into focus what counts. This last Sunday in the Church Year is about focusing on what counts. 

In German Lutheranism this Sunday was known as Totensonntag (Sunday of the Dead), and is now known as Ewigkeitssonntag (Eternity Sunday); in the ELCA we call it "Christ the King Sunday", following the custom of the Roman Church. When in the gospel texts Jesus is called "The King of the Jews", it's a way to mock him. Those mocking him see nothing but a little man who's gotten into the way of their schemes. But -- no matter whether what we call the last Sunday in the Church Year -- what we know and celebrate this Sunday is that he is not only the King of the Jews, but also the king of the outcasts, the king of the marginalized, the king of you and me, the king of the very cosmos.



Begin of J.S. Bach's setting of the chorale



As we are about to make the transition toward Advent and Christmas, we are invited to focus on what counts.  One way to do just that is, as the German Church does on this Sunday, to sing Philip Nicolai's "Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme", here in the translation of Carl Daw (which surpasses Catherine Winkworth's standard translation in accuracy): 

“Sleepers, wake!” A voice astounds us,

the shout of rampart guards surrounds us:

“Awake, Jerusalem, arise!”

Midnight's peace their cry has broken,

their urgent summons clearly spoken:

“The time has come, O maidens wise!

Rise up, and give us light;

the Bridegroom is in sight.

Alleluia!

Your lamps prepare and hasten there,

that you the wedding feast may share.”

Wakefulness is a major theme of this last Sunday before the Church Year begins anew. Just as the parable of the ten virgins (on which the above hymn is based) speaks of wakefulness, Luke speaks of it in Chapter 12:

35 “Let your waist be girded and your lamps burning; 36 be like those who are waiting for their master to return from the wedding banquet, so that they may open the door for him as soon as he comes and knocks. 37 Blessed are those slaves whom the master finds alert when he comes; truly I tell you, he will fasten his belt and have them sit down to eat, and he will come and serve them. 38 If he comes during the middle of the night, or near dawn, and finds them so, blessed are those slaves. 39 "But know this: if the owner of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into. 40 You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”  (V35, NKJV; VV36-40 NRSV)

Let your waist be girded ... All our modern translations have decided that the Greek of verse 35 ("the loins having been girded") would be unintelligible for modern readers; thus they came up with inane phrases such as "Be dressed for action" or "Be dressed for service". In the process, the old metaphor was lost. "Let your loins be girded" refers to the practice of tucking the ends of the long flowing outer garment into the belt to shorten it in preparation for activities such as running.  In addition, the modern translations obscure the close connection with a key Old Testament Passage:
  

This is how you shall eat [the Passover Lamb]: your loins girded, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand; and you shall eat it hurriedly. (Exodus 12:11)

The reference to Israel's exodus is crucial.  The urgency is similar: Just as being ready to march at any given moment was expected of the People of God when they were about to escape from the Egyptian oppressors, such readiness is expected of us when it comes to embrace the New World of God.

Blessed are those slaves whom the master finds alert when he comes; ... he will fasten his belt ... and he will come and serve them. ... The picture changes in v. 37. There it is the master, not the servants, who "is girded" and serves the slaves. The master serving the slave -- this is a difficult picture for us to capture; it turns our normal picture of religion upside down: While most of us grew up with the idea that it is the followers' duty to serve God, to offer something to God, Jesus tells us here that faith means being served by God and receiving gifts from God!  I am reminded of Frederick Buechner's statement: "However inanely and blindly we are seeking the kingdom of heaven, it is also seeking us."

If he comes during the middle of the night, or near dawn, and finds them so, blessed are those slaves. ... When we are told in church that we should be ready, often the first things that come to mind are judgment and punishment. But v. 38 simply states that we should stay awake so we can participate in what the King has prepared for us!

The kingdom is seeking us; the king is inviting us.  When the king returns, that will be the exodus of those among the People of God who manage to stay awake.  He wants to take us away from this world marked by noise and unrest and injustice, away from what we know, away to the glorious wedding feast, a feast of victory and joy, a feast of reunion and homecoming. You and I, he wants us there.

The Sufi mystic Jalaluddin Rumi issued his own call to wakefulness; "Don't go back to sleep" he called it.
  

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you -- dont' go back to sleep.

You must ask for what you really want -- don't go back to sleep.

People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch. The door is round and open -- don't go back to sleep.

- Going back to sleep means to become satisfied with the lures of this temporary world; staying awake means to never forget the eternal hunger, the hunger that can only be stilled in the "kingdom", the New World of God.

- Going back to sleep means to settle and to give up; staying awake means living in this world, but not of it.

- Going back to sleep means to shut the door in God's face; staying awake means to expect that the door to that New World of God is wide open, if then we are willing to face the fact that's it's all new and mysterious, and that we are not in charge.

Alveslohe, Northern Germany: Christuskirche

When this past Sunday I played the organ in my Dad's hometown in Germany, I performed Buxtehude's prelude on the old chorale tune "Salvation Unto Us Has Come".  Some of my relatives who were in church that morning said they weren't sure whether what I had played was "Salvation Unto Us" or "Wake, Awake".

Their statement confirmed what I had discovered but not shared with them:  that in the midst of what looks like ordinary secondary and tertiary voices that show up only when the tune is silent, Buxtehude managed to sneak in a few phrases from "Wake Awake", as if to say that singing of our salvation never can be complete without a reminder to stay awake.  Singing of salvation and remembering that we must stay awake belong together. 

It has been said that the three poisons that keep us spiritually "asleep" and beholden to this world are greed, anger and delusion: If we remain caught in our ego's greed for more stuff, its angry quest for being right, and its delusions of grandeur, the world will succeed in making us believe that there is nothing else out there. 

The best way to "detox" from greed, anger and delusion is to remember home. "For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come" (Hebrews 13:14).  To remember home is to remember the values of our God; as the People of God we replace greed, anger and delusion with moral and ethical standards, meditation and wisdom.  We follow that Morning Star of which we will soon sing again:

Star whose light shines o'er me,
Rock on which I stand,
Guide who goes before me
To my fatherland,
Daily bread reviving,
Spring that cheers my heart,
Goal to which I'm striving
All, O Lord, Thou art!

Luke 12:35-40; Exodus 12:11; Hebrews 13:14

Rosh Hashanah - Birthday of Humankind

Since it marks the end of one and the beginning of a new year, newness is a main theme of Rosh Hashanah. I have read that the rabbis in the Talmud taught that Rosh Hashanah coincides with the sixth day of creation, when humanity was created; this makes Rosh Hashanah something like the birthday of all peoples. Nonetheless, we know how complex the creation story is: Adam and Eve were formed, given life, found to eat from the forbidden fruit, called to account for this act, and consequently exiled from the Garden of Eden, all on the same day. Thus, Rosh Hashanah is traditionally a day to celebrate our creation, but also a day of accounting for our actions.

I believe that the creation myth of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden continues to fascinate humankind because each of us knows it deep down in our bones: it's true. It speaks of both or longing for unity and our striving for independence.

In our infancy as a species, we felt no separation from the natural world around us. Trees, rocks, and plants surrounded us with a living presence as intimate and pulsing as our own bodies. In that primal intimacy, which anthropologists call "participation mystique," we were as one with our world as a child in the mother's womb. It was, well, paradise!

But then came "The Fall". We remember that the big transgression, the reason for being cast out of the garden was that Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. As a result of their transgression, they were thrown out of the garden. From the perspective of Zen, the knowledge of good and evil of the old myth is the beginning of duality.

Duality means the separation into basic categories, such as good and evil, yes and no, desirable and undesirable. Original sin began with the need for categories; it was the beginning of thought. The knowledge of good and evil was the beginning of thinking. Our thought process is based on the separation of opposites. If we look at the myth that way, the transgression was the beginning of ego life, because it is the ego self that thinks stuff like "I am and you are; we are different". Some of my experience is good and some of my experience is bad.

Since the beginning of time human beings have distinguished pleasant and unpleasant, yes and no, "I want it" and "I don’t want it". That’s the original primary fault; it happens as a reflex. Everything we experience is immediately judged to be pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral, and then all behavior follows from that. Our need to categorize is the basic activity of the ego self, the aspect of our mind that is dedicated to separation and separate self. We live our lives from that point of view. The fall from grace, the original sin, was the identification with thought, making a distinction between good and evil, yes and no. And that was the beginning of all suffering.

Along with the garden, our species lost the participation mystique, the original intimacy with all living things. Self-consciousness arose and gave us distance. We used that distance in order to make decisions and strategies, in order to measure, judge and to monitor our judgments. With the emergence of free-will, the lonely journey of the ego began, the same journey of which all our fairy tales speak. Painful as the separation was, it brought great learning: The distanced and observing eye brought us tools of science, and a priceless view of the vast, orderly intricacy of our world.

But the achievements of our journey are often overshadowed by what we have lost. We are lonely. We are ready to return. Having gained distance and sophistication of perception is one thing, but we realize that all our technology cannot bring us back home. It's time to turn and recognize who we have been all along. It then might dawn on us that perhaps we are our world knowing itself. For us to go home again, we need to relinquish our separateness.

Without our need for separateness, our senses are no longer slaves of our intellect. We take in the world as it is; overjoyed we realize that we are one with everything. We can come home again, and participate in our world in a richer, more responsible and poignantly beautiful way than way back, in the infancy of our species.

Here's a bit of Rumi (in the masterful translation of Coleman Barks), who celebrated being one with everything like so:

my place is the placeless,
the trace of the traceless
neither body
or soul

i belong to the Beloved,
have seen the two worlds as One
and that One called to
and know:
First,
Last,
Outer,
Inner.

only that breath
breathing,
human - being.

Rosh Hashanah is a day for old things ending, and a day for new beginnings. It's a day when we are invited to account for our actions. Maimonides said the blowing of Shofar wants to tear us out of stupor and darkness: "Wake up you people from your sleep and arise from your slumber. Examine your deeds, repent, and remember your Creator. All those who forget the truth, immersing themselves in vanity and emptiness, look into your souls and improve your ways."

Let's make today a day to remember what we have lost in the moment in which we wanted to be "other"; let's make it a day to remember how much suffering we have caused and experienced because of our need to be separate and to see others as separate. From today on, let's think twice before we use the word "other"; from today on, let's remember that our home is our oneness with everything that is.

L'Shanah Tovah to everyone.

No more Rotten Potatoes!

In tomorrow's Gospel Jesus intensifies and radicalizes Old Testament law, by taking up four of the more contentious issues of his day -- anger, adultery, divorce and swearing. The common motif is how we treat broken relationships as the People of the Kingdom.

Four times Jesus begins with "You have heard" and continues with "But I say". Four times Jesus shows that God's law is about God's love.

He enables his disciples to see the world with the eyes of God, and to be transformed in the process. Charles H. Talbert of Baylor University observes:

To see differently is to have our perceptions altered. From that come changes in our dispositions, intentions and motivations. The Beatitudes and antitheses shape character by enabling a new way of seeing God's will.

Until just a few years ago, every time I returned from visiting my parents, I was such an emotional mess that nobody wanted to be around me. Visiting my folks made me come home with anger and resentment and sadness, ... but no more, for one fine day a friend gave me the story of the sage and his disciple, a story that indeed transformed me by helping me see.

Once there was a sage who asked his disciple to carve out names of the people he could not forgive on potatoes, one potato for each name.

Then, the disciple was asked to put all the potatoes in a sack and carry it with him at all times, for one week.

The longer time went by, the heavier the potatoes seemed to have become. To make the matter worse, those carved potatoes also started to rot and smell bad. It was such an unpleasant experience for the disciple.

At the end of the week, the master asked, "So, what did you learn?" 

The disciple told the master that he now realized that holding on to grudges only brought negative things to him. Asked how he should go about correcting that, the youngster said he should strive his best to forgive everyone that used to cross him and made him angry. 

The master then asked, "What if someone crosses you again after you unload this present load of potatoes?"

The disciple suddenly felt terrified at the thought of having to start all over again with new potatoes, week after week. He said, "What can I do if there are still other people crossing me? I cannot control what other people do to me!"

At which point the master replied, "So far we only discussed the conventional way to approach forgiveness, that is, to strive to forgive. But striving is difficult. It is also quite unneccessary."

Seeing the disciple completely at a loss then, the master asked, "If resentment and anger are the potatoes, what is the sack?"

The disciple finally grasped it, "Ahh the sack is something that allows me to hold on to the negativity. It is my inflated sense of self-importance!"

The master said, "Once you learn to let go of the sack, whatever people say or do against you will no longer matter. Forgiveness is your conscious decision to get rid of the sack altogether, not just the potatoes. Get rid of your self, and your resentment will be gone."

Angry, resentful and sad, I read the story of the sage and his disciple. I cried a bit and read it again, that day and the next few days. And then I got it. It dawned on me that in my navel-gazing and my constant saying "woe is me" I had been in the way of these relationships. All I had been willing to see was my inflated ego and its constant yelling "Me-me-me".

Little by little I learned to get rid of the sack. Every time my best friend heard me returning to the old broken record of my resentment, he said, "So you put that sack on your back again, did you?"  My relationships with my family have changed, and much to the better.

"To love", says Juris Rubens, Latvian Lutheran pastor, "is to want another person to acknowledge that it was worth creating you." Forgiving my folks made it possible for me to love them again. And in doing so, I acknowledged that they were created by God with the same exquisite love and care as everything and everyone else.

The Sufi mystic Rumi -- often reduced to a new-age "poet of love" -- conceives of every expression of human love as an echo of our relationship with the divine lover:

Both light and shadow

are the dance of Love.

Love has no cause;

it is the astrolabe of God’s secrets.

Lover and Loving are inseparable

and timeless.

Although I may try to describe Love

when I experience it I am speechless.

Although I may try to write about Love

I am rendered helpless;

my pen breaks and the paper slips away

at the ineffable place

where Lover, Loving and Loved are one.

Every moment is made glorious

by the light of Love.

"Where Lover, Loving and Loved are one" -- if someone were to look for a hermeneutical key for the Sermon on the Mount, this would be a good start!


Matthew 5:21-37

Repentance, or Why I Never Wash

Into our confusion, our terror and our questions in the aftermath of the Tucson massacre, Sunday's gospel text from Matthew 4 speaks to us with some of the first few words from Jesus' mouth:

"Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near."

What is repentance?  The Greek word used by Matthew, metanoeo, means "to change one's mind and purpose". The underlying Hebrew word, shub, denotes a turning back, specifically turning away from one's sins and back to God.

The definition suggested by Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder is better than most:

To repent doesn't mean to grovel in self-hatred or pious sorrow. When you repent you turn around, change directions, choose a different path, or make a radical rupture. Repentance signals an abrupt end to life on auto-pilot or to business as usual.

The urgency Yoder describes is reflected in the Greek word kairos, which in Mark Chapter 1 Jesus uses together with "repent".  Kairos describes something extraordinary and utterly new, a rupture in normal time that demands a response or a reorientation. It seems as though the disciples described in Sunday's gospel almost instantly "got it", completely walking away from their lives and families and security and routines, and becoming "fishers of men".

Repentance is about change, radical change.

Human beings don't change easily, and every theory of human personality is expected to describe how "resistance to change" is to be explained. A colleague, disgusted with the excuses parishioners offered as to why they didn’t attend worship, offered "Fourty Reasons Why I Never Wash"; those "reasons", however humorous and exaggerated, illustrate just how hard change is for our kind. Here are some of my favorite ones:

• "I only believe in things I can see, and I can’t see bacteria";
• "I’ll start washing when I get older and dirtier";
• "People who make soap are only after your money"; 
• "I know someone who washes every day and still smells bad";
• "People who wash are hypocrites - they think they are cleaner than everybody else".

"Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near" -- how can we hear these words for our day and time? Even as Republicans are working on their efforts to repeal the 2010 health care reform, I remember a powerful 2010 article by Frank Rich of the New York Times, where he said this:

If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. ... The week before the health care vote, The Times reported that births to Asian, black and Hispanic women accounted for 48 percent of all births in America in the 12 months ending in July 2008. By 2012, the next presidential election year, non-Hispanic white births will be in the minority. The Tea Party movement is virtually all white. The Republicans haven’t had a single African-American in the Senate or the House since 2003 and have had only three in total since 1935. Their anxieties about a rapidly changing America are well-grounded.

In other words, Frank Rich suggests that ultimately the whole fight (back then and even now) is not about health care or any specific subject at all.

Frank Rich suggests that the whole fight has been about fear of change. 

Even as early as March of 2010, Rich warned that President Obama's “middle-of-the-road bill" had "incited an unglued firestorm of homicidal rhetoric", with the result that "reports of death threats and vandalism stretched from Arizona to Kansas to upstate New York, the F.B.I. and the local police had to get into the act to protect members of Congress and their families":

from “Kill the bill!” to Sarah Palin’s cry for her followers to “reload.” At least four of the House members hit with death threats or vandalism are among the 20 political targets Palin marks with rifle crosshairs on a map on her Facebook page.

Looking at the events of January 8 from this angle, the violence seems even more senseless; my point is that human beings will go to great lengths to avoid change. No, not "Republicans will go to great lengths to avoid changes", but "human beings will go to great lengths", all of us.

President Obama's call for more civility in our discourse sounds good, but I think the problem lies deeper, much deeper.

• When some people in this nation think they need to stop change by using violence, that's a good indication that some form of dialog stopped somewhere way-back-when; that conversation needs to begin again: about who we are as a people, and about how diversity is part of our identity.
• And when, as Frank Rich suggests, a lot of the fear of change has to do with the fact that the new face of this nation doesn't look like the faces of those fearful ones, we need to have a conversation about the faulty idea of "other".  For Christians, there is no "other"; we are all one, children of the same Father.   

Many of us are used to singing a section of Psalm 51; some of us are singing these words every Sunday.  I wonder whether we know just how serious this stuff is.

Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from your presence and take not your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation and sustain me with your bountiful Spirit.

If God were to start acting like we do with each other, we would have been flung so far away from God's presence we'd never find our way back.  Each of us depends on God's grace and mercy in our everyday struggle, yet it's hard for the folks around us to feel the grace. The writer Anne Lamott names these reasons why she made her adolescent son go to church against his will:

The main reason is that I want to give him what I found in the world, which is to say a path and a little light to see by. Most of the people I know who have what I want--which is to say, purpose, heart, balance, gratitude, joy--are people with a deep sense of spirituality.

The kairos is here.  In this rupture of time, "business as usual" will not cut it, and living on auto-pilot won't work.  As Rumi says, "All the other [doors] are sometimes open, sometimes shut; yet never is the door of repentance anything but open. Come seize the opportunity: the door is open."

Rather than feeling helpless in the midst of the violence, we know how to find "a path and a little light to see by". We can show purpose, heart, balance, gratitude and joy.  We can reflect the grace of our God.  With God, we are always in the majority.

Matthew 4:12-23; Psalm 51