Lent 3.

This was the week from hell. Here's a video of cats.

I'll post this weekend. For reals.

Lent 2.

Here's the link for the week: http://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/texts.php?id=25

I'm sorry to have rambled on. None of this is a finished thought. I was just taking a stab at it. Be merciful, as your Father in heaven is merciful...

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I’ve got St. Augustine on the brain, and you’re going to have to forgive me for that. As much as I love the Saint, and what he had to say, when it comes to his interpretation of the lectionary passages for the week he’s a hard pill to swallow. Unless you’re a Calvinist. If you’re a Calvinist than you’re in luck.

Now, why am I frontloading an apology for this entry? Because I’m going to talk about predestination. I kind of have to. Having sat with Augustine’s Ad Simplicianum for the last three weeks and then seeing this week’s lectionary won’t let me get around it, and it’s not something that can be gotten around. This has been rearing its ugly head for centuries and its not going to stop now. Case in point; The fact that Rob Bell has been in the news thanks to the “neo-Calvinists” (who really are just Calvinists) clamoring over his “universalism” in his recently released book. I guess now is the right time to talk about it. I’ll try to tread lightly.

The thing that I really want to highlight in all of this is the question of agency, and who has it. I really think that that’s at the heart of the predestination question. Who is responsible for our salvation, God or Us? If it’s a blending of both than who does how much? The historical answers range all over the spectrum, and rightfully so. It’s a really big question. But let’s look at the lectionary and see how we can take it.

The narrative of the call of Abram is a great place to explore questions of Agency. We’ll let Paul throw a wrench in the works later, but for now lets keep it pretty clear. God calls Abram out of “your country, and your kindred, and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” There’s and imperative at the beginning of that quote that didn’t flow with the way I wanted to phrase that sentence but it is very important to note. God told Abram to “Go.” Abram then could have said “No.” Or could he have? Did Abram make a choice to leave? Scripture doesn’t say. Linguistically we know that any call has a response, and that the imperative is a mood that is not indicative, that is to say not indicating events that have happened, are happening, or will happen, with a fair degree of certainty on the part of the speaker. The imperative is a kind of strengthened subjunctive. The action you’re ordering the object of your speech to do might not happen. You’re just saying it with a lot of gravitas and the expectation that it will get done. The linguistic structure typically acts like this.

Go! -> Object of command deliberates -> Object of command acts, becoming subject of commanded action, or subject of disobedient action.

The deliberation is crucial here. Whether or not it actually happens, whether God has done all the deliberating for you or not doesn’t really matter. It’s not grammatically significant, and therefore I’m going to say that it isn’t experientially significant.

“Abram went as the LORD had told him, and Lot went with him.” If we are interpreting this as an act in history, then we can assume that Abram decided to go. Abram had agency. I would like for the discussion to end here. Abram has agency, ergo we do too. Happy day.

But the call, there is still the issue of the call. Abram only has Agency in the story insomuch as he is responding to the call. God says, “Go.” Without that we just have a man in Sumeria living out his life in his Father’s household. Thanks be to God, there was a call, and the story goes on.

Before we get to the Gospel I want to take a quick look at St. Augustine’s treatment of John 3:5 and see what it brings to the table.

“And the Lord himself says: “Except a man be born again of water and the Holy Spirit, he shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven” (John 3:5). There are therefore inchoate beginnings of faith, which resemble conception. It is not enough to be conceived. A man must also be born if he is to attain to eternal life. None of these beginnings is without the grace of God’s mercy. And good works, if there are any, follow and do not precede that grace, as has been said.” –Ad Simplicianum http://www.romancatholicism.org/jansenism/augustine-simplician.htm

Oh Lord. Here comes the born-againner talk. Nope. Not going to do it. Not only was Jesus talking to Nicodemus in the singular here, but the rhetoric of “being born again” has been so co-opted that I’m not even going to try to touch it on those terms. Not going to do it. All of you who were worried can breathe a sigh of relief.

What I do want to look at here is where the agency is in this. There are a few things in our lives that we have little to no say in. Being born is one of them. It happens to us. It’s a choice made for us. That’s why so many are right in saying that “I didn’t ask for this.” At the heart of it we didn’t. But when it comes to re-birth, perhaps there is a bit more agency there. John Rist, and impeccable Augustine Scholar, points out that Augustine has defined faith as “thinking with assent.” Assent implies agency, and therefore we can read into Augustine’s assessment of the Gospel that there is a response that we take part of. It is our response to Assent to the command that Jesus gives to Nicodemus. “You must be born from above.” The call’s there.

I still don’t know what to think of the entire scope of the Gospel reading for the week. I know that I stand squarely on the side of our place in reaction to the call. Therefore I don’t buy predestination. We have agency. If its an illusion, its immaterial. Everything about our experience would say that we have a will to respond to the various calls around us.

I would like to close with a brief thought. I know I’ve rambled, and I apologize for that. I’m trying to work all this out just as I’m typing it. Its been a busy week. Forgive me.

There’s a simile that Jesus uses in talking to Nicodemus who, as a Pharisee, I’m certain would be familiar with it. In John 3:14 the Gospel writer refers to Numbers 21:9, or the story of the poisonous snakes in the wilderness. The Israelites were having a problem with snakes in the desert, so God told Moses to place a serpent made of bronze on a tall pole in the center of the camp, and all who looked at it were healed from the snake venom. The healing was broadcast. Open to all in the camp.

So was the Son of Man lifted up, as a broadcast, as a beacon for the whole world. I think its safe to say that the call is there, and that we can respond to it.

TL;DR. We have agency. God makes the call.

Lent 1.

One of the problems with being in School for so long is that I can no longer bring myself to write without a prompt, so as a practice of getting myself back in the habit of writing regularly (we can call it a lenten practice) I'm going to be offering reflections on the weekly lectionary. I'll post either on Saturday or Sunday if you care to follow along. I'll include links to the week's lectionary so you're not lost.

This is the RCL selection for the first week of Lent:

http://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/texts.php?id=24

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Lent 1.

I was driving home one night listening to “Story Corps” on NPR and there was a man telling a story about his relationship with his therapist. He was a writer by trade and spoke eloquently enough to make me keep listening until I heard him say “I tend to think about the people closest to me dying a lot. I think that’s how I know I care about them. I think about them dying, and how sad that would make me.” It was an A-Ha moment for me. I do the exact same thing, and it’s pretty morbid. The story culminated in the death of his Therapist, and how meaningful that relationship had been. How they had moved together through the human condition, through the highs and lows of emotional exploration to what could be considered a deep caring, and finally a friendship cut short by death. It was one of the more moving stories that I’ve heard in quite some time, and it greatly resonated with me.

That is most likely because I’m a pretty morbid person. I remember sitting in Humanities class learning about the genre of the Memento Mori, the reminder of death, and being absolutely fascinated. Chapels everywhere in our history greeted you with a reminder of death. It absolutely permeates the imagery of the Western Church. Maybe that’s why I like the Church so much. It could be the whole Jesus thing. I’m not sure.

I am, however, certain that this is why Lent is one of my favorite seasons of the Church year. I should phrase that better… The whole progression of Lent into Easter capped off at Pentecost is my favorite time of the Church calendar. We start Lent off with a reminder that we are dust, and we’re going to be dust again. It’s morbid. It clicks with me. I think it clicks with most of us, even if we don’t want it to. It’s unsettling because it is an indictment of our humanity. Lent is the Church’s way of striking at the heart of the human condition, and this is why I find the lectionary choices for this week to be outstandingly appropriate.

It’s hard not to let Paul do all the heavy lifting in interpreting Genesis, and I think Paul’s right. Adam and Christ are the bookends of our humanity. (I’m not implying a literal reading of Genesis here. Just a healthy theology of original sin.) We have death in Adam and life in Christ. An entrance and end to the reign of sin and death, and in Paul’s reading of Genesis I believe we can find a good analogy for the flow of the life of the Church from Ash Wednesday to Pentecost. Church life reflects the life of faith. Its almost like they did that on purpose…

The way Christ lives out the human condition in Matthew gives us further insight into another theme running through the Lectionary for the week, and that is that of temptation and struggle. The life between the bookends. I would hope, that at least in a small degree we are dealing with temptation in our own Lenten walks, and can then, in some way, be spoken to in the story of Christ’s temptation.

Jesus was led into the desert by the spirit, and it’s interesting to look at the following purpose clause. “to be tempted by the devil.” That passive infinitive is telling us a lot. Matthew is presenting this as the spirit leading Jesus into the desert for the purpose of being tempted.

Speaking of temptation there is a great one present here that many interpreters succumb to. That is the temptation of believing that Jesus walked out into that desert with the inability to give into temptation, and therefore, quite often in my experience, the claim is made that this passage is proof that God never gives us more than we can handle. While that may, and I heavily emphasize may be true, it is not helpful to us in the moment. God may not give us more than we can handle, but it is certainly hard to know that at the time. Anyone in crisis can attest to this. Anyone facing extreme circumstances knows that there are times where you’re fairly certain you can’t handle it. Sometime’s you’re Job.

We need to read this severity into Jesus’ time in the desert. Matthew is explicit in telling us that this was not a leisurely walk into the wilderness. Jesus was famished. Not just hungry. Famished. In physical pain. Suffering from Dehydration. This was dire, and Jesus could feel it.

Enter the tempter.

Everything that was offered to Jesus in the desert was something that he would eventually come to possess. Food, Angelic intervention, Rule of the World. I would go so far as to say that he knew this too. I believe that Christ knew the end of his life and his ministry. (It’s part of that Fully Human/Fully Divine thing that our Catholic friends would rightly call “a mystery.”) So what the tempter was offering him was nothing he would never obtain. All these and more would be his, eventually. After a lot of struggle, and a lot of hurt Christ would be seated at the right hand of the Father again, and his Kingdom will have no end. The temptation lies in the fact that he could get that now, and more importantly he could get all of those things without the Cross. “If you are the son of God…” I’m quite certain that Jesus knew who he was, and therefore what he could do.

Too often we frame temptation as the choice between the right thing and the wrong thing. The wrong thing is usually remarkably attractive, but still remarkably wrong. Temptation like that happens. There are wrong things. I don’t have a list of them on hand, but there are wrong choices. Though this frame is valid, I don’t think it’s what Jesus was experiencing here, nor do I think that this frame is the most troublesome type of temptation. In searching the scripture there’s not a lot I can find that is marked as out and out wrong. There’s a lot of fluidity. You can call it Christian liberty, if you want to be sufficiently Lutheran about it. Jesus’ temptation was to avoid the struggle, and the pain, and the cross, and get to the good stuff the wrong way. As Christians this idea of the “way” should be a huge buzzword for us. Jesus said some things about that.

The cliché “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions” may not be too off the mark here. We’re trying to get to the good stuff. Things that are honestly and undeniably good, things like Peace, Justice, Love, and Reconciliation; Things that we know to be the things of the Kingdom. The temptation here is to go about this in the way that Jesus chose not to go. Christ could have flexed his authority as the Messiah and brought the Kingdom down there in that desert, right atop the Devil’s head. But he didn’t. He became a servant, and our Passover. This is the chief temptation, to seek the Kingdom in a way that isn’t Christlike, that is to say, sacrificial and servant-minded. But the Gospel gives us the assurance that if we stay faithful to God’s vision, If we model our story on Christ’s, Angels will wait on us.