No post full this time. Everything’s fine. I’ll be in touch again next week sometime.
For now, I’ll just share a mini reflection on this Sunday’s gospel, the parable of the prodigal son. I feel like in a lot of reflections on this passage, the focus is primarily on how the sons respond to the father’s generosity at different points in the story.
I find it more helpful to focus first on what the father is like throughout the story. The father fulfills the prodigal son’s desires even though those desires don’t mesh with the father’s original plan for the inheritance. After the son leaves, I picture the father gazing at the road every day, longing to have his child come to him. And when the son does return, he doesn’t have to make it all the way back to his father’s estate. The father comes out to meet him, embraces him, and pulls out all the stops to celebrate his son’s return. The father also acknowledges the patience and loyalty of the other son.
It’s this father that we’re invited to imitate and this father that shows us how God relates to us. This image of God sure has been comforting in times when I’ve acted like each of the sons in the story. I always hope it’s an image that will help me be less like those sons in their more selfish moments. It’s the father’s image that I definitely want to imitate so I can help other people feel the way the prodigal son must have felt after being embraced by his father.
After looking ahead to this week’s readings and then sitting with them for a while, I decided they address a couple very difficult, very human and very common questions: 1) Why does suffering happen? 2) How can I prevent it from happening to me?
Each reading seems to provide a slightly different response to the first question. I’m not bothered by these differences because I think different experiences create different images of God and that each person’s image of God changes throughout his or her life. I think the Scriptures reflect these differences and experiences. I’ve had friends get upset when I express this opinion because they think I’m saying God changes. I’m not. I hope I’m not being repetitive in trying to make this clear: we change and so our perception and understanding of God changes.
The Scriptures reflect these changes because they show God inspiring and working through different writers at different times. That’s why I find prayer, discernment, and reflection so important when looking for what Scripture has to say to me each time I read it.
I used this approach to Scripture as I prepared to write this post, and some thoughts came to me in response to this week’s readings.
1) Sometimes we cause ourselves and each other to suffer. God doesn’t will us to suffer, though God clearly allows suffering as an extension of free will.
2)Greater suffering is not a sign of greater guilt, nor is less suffering a sign of greater holiness (Luke 13:1- 3) .
3) God is present with everyone in their suffering, and because of God, who is life-giving presence, we may often be able to find good in the midst of suffering and after it (See Exod. 3:9, 14; 1 Cor. 1:10 1-4). Furthermore, we can be the good in the midst of suffering if we respond by acting to reduce suffering or to direct it toward a life-giving purpose (See Luke 13: 7-9). All this is good news because: 4) No one can steer completely clear of suffering, especially not if the person wants to grow and to put down roots that connect him or her to God and to others. Not to suffer for the sake of growing these connections is to suffer, to wither, for the lack of having them. (See John 15:5; Romans 6:8). It’s the human condition to experience both suffering that withers and suffering that allows for growth.
“At present we see indistinctly, as in a mirror, but then face to face. At present I know partially; then I shall know fully, as I am fully known.”
1 CORINTHIANS 13: 12
I won’t call the preceding four points totally satisfying answers to the questions I began this post with. I feel like doing that would imply a certainty and a completeness of knowledge that goes against one of the messages of this week’s main readings. Rather than implying that, I want to thank God, ever-present and ever-sustaining, for any partial knowledge and vision I may have. (See Luke 13: 8-9); 1 Cor. 13:12). I also pray for the grace to let the Holy Spirit turn and return me to the image and to the work of who I am in God. This transformation is my understanding of what it means to repent.
Work cited
The Bible. The New American Bible Revised Edition, Kindle edition, Fairbrother, 2011.
Tabor Monastery of the Transfiguration, Tbilisi City, Georgia — Photo by mostafa meraji on Unsplash
Luke 9:28b-36
“Listen to him,” I hear in this week’s gospel (Luke 9:35). And sometimes I think it would be easier to follow that instruction if I could clearly see him or if I could see that everything was going to turn out all that right in the end. Trusting without seeing is so hard a lot of the time.
But this gospel passage reminds me that Peter, James, and John received the sort of vision I sometimes wish I had. The way I imagine their experience suggests to me that seeing Jesus as he is now — glorified — wouldn’t necessarily transform me for the better in an instant.
In fact, the sight might add to any feelings of being overwhelmed, fearful, and confused that I might have had beforehand. Why? Because I’d be seeing something powerful and indescribable, something I’d never seen before, something familiar and yet, quite literally, out-of-this-world.
The most relatable conception I can come up with for what this experience might be like is an eerily realistic dream. It transcends the experience of waking life, yet it feels somehow just as real, if not more real than everyday experiences do. Maybe that’s because this kind of dream would tap into a deeper part of ourselves that we can’t — or don’t — access when we think we’re in full control of our senses and our consciousness.
I don’t see being witnesses to the Transfiguration as a circumstance in which the three apostles needed to “Do whatever he tells you” (See John 2:5). Instead, I see the circumstance as a situation in which their defenses were lowered so they could go to sleep and be awakened, refreshed and ready to listen. (See Luke 9:32). The spiritual life includes times for talking and doing, but that period on the mountain wasn’t one of those times (See Luke 9:36).
An experience like witnessing the Transfiguration needs time to sink in and to be understood better. An experience like that one doesn’t provide immediate answers, so it’s not entirely comforting. Yet wouldn’t an experience like that get the people witnessing it out of their own way for a moment and allow God to work in them?
Could witnessing the Transfiguration be said to share additional characteristics with other life-changing experiences? I mean other experiences that jar us out of our comfortable routines, that leave us speechless, or cause us to see the people around us in a different light. Such experiences may provide us insight into our previous experiences or give us a glimpse of possibilities we hadn’t imagined before. They may make our lives flash before our eyes. They may involve a mix of intense emotions, and they take time to process, but we may also see God in them.
Work cited
The Bible. The New American Bible Revised Edition, Kindle edition, Fairbrother, 2011.
I’m breaking away — just a little bit— from a couple of patterns I usually follow on this blog.
1) From last weekend’s Scripture readings, I’m going to focus only on the gospel reading. 2) I’m going to bring in Scripture that wasn’t included in the weekend readings. I guess the second choice isn’t entirely foreign to this space. I brought in Scripture not included in the weekly readings in my second post, but it seems like I haven’t taken that approach in a while.
It occurs to me that breaking away from unhelpful patterns and returning to helpful approaches that I’ve gotten away from are what Lent is about. Since “now is a very acceptable time,” here I go on this week’s exploration of breaking away and returning (2 Cor. 6:2).
Verses 4 and 5 of 1 Corinthians Chapter 13 remind us that among its other qualities, “[love] is not pompous, it does not seek its own interests. This famous passage in the first letter to the Corinthians provides a challenging, yet rather abstract description of the nature of Divine love. Luke’s account of Christ’s temptation in the desert, in contrast, provides a concrete picture. It shows me Divine love lived.
Luke tells us that when he was tempted, Jesus didn’t stop trusting that his father was caring and would care for him — even when it wasn’t clear how —and he didn’t use the gifts he received from his father to serve himself. In the temptation scene, he doesn’t turn the stones into bread as the devil urges him to (Luke 4:3). Instead, he leans on his father in his weakness, saying, “‘One does not live by bread alone'” (Luke 4:4). Here, Jesus quotes the Torah, where the rest of the verse is “but by all that comes forth from the mouth of God” (Deut. 8:3). The pastor reminded us this weekend that this verse acknowledges Jesus’ and our need for bread. It reminds us that bread comes from God’s creation, as does everything good.
I would add that Jesus doesn’t say “One does not live on bread. He says, “One does not live on bread alone. The word “alone” is the key to what Jesus’ response means. The response says our needs are emotional, intellectual, and spiritual as well as physical. We’re not totally self-sufficient. Instead, deep down, we long to extend beyond ourselves to God and to others. We need bread, but our nourishment goes beyond the physical when we share bread. When we share it, we open ourselves to leaning on God and each other and to learning from God and each other. And sometimes it takes not having these forms of nourishment to appreciate having them. That’s why alone time and forms of fasting sometimes allow for the growth and increased clarity we need to draw closer to God and each other so that we can work with God.
As we look at more of Luke’s temptation scene, we read how the devil works against this spirit of communion and cooperation. The devil promises Jesus
“all the kingdoms of the world,” saying “I shall give you all this power and their gloryin a single instant, for it has been handed over to, and I may give it to whomever I wish. All this will be yours if you worship me (Luke 4:5-7) [italics mine].
Those are a lot of words of ownership — and ownership right now, mind you. Those are not words about being family, about sharing, or about being patient. And Jesus knows his father is about being family, about sharing, and about being patient. He knows the devil is feeding him a lie. He knows that power rightly used is used to serve, not to dominate, and he knows the devil can’t give him this power to serve because his adversary is not its source. The devil doesn’t own the kingdoms of the world either, so he can’t give them all to anyone — not that Jesus would take them if they were the devil’s to offer. Jesus came among the people to draw them to God, to help them to see and to choose God, not to drag them to God. I’d venture to say that no one can be forced to find God. No one truly finds God except freely.
My belief is that God doesn’t want to control us and our world because if God did, we couldn’t be in a loving relationship with God. And because God doesn’t want to control us, we encounter the consequences of our own actions and the actions of others. I think that’s why Jesus doesn’t jump off the parapet of the temple as the devil tempts him to do (Luke 4:9). I believe God shares in our suffering, and that somehow, in some way, God saves all who “call upon him in truth” — though I can’t always see how (and I’d like to be able to see how a lot more often) (Psalm 145:18).
But I also believe that because my actions have consequences, I shouldn’t invite trouble — especially not to prove something about myself or about God. We all face enough troubles and challenges in life without inviting it for reasons other than love. Inviting trouble for reasons other than love is my understanding of what it means to “put the Lord… to the test” (Luke 4:12). To do so would be to throw away the love, safety and security God has given me. I don’t want to do that.
Sometimes the path love leads me along is comfortable. Other times, it’s not comfortable, but it’s familiar. Still other times, it’s neither. Regardless, I want to follow where love leads. Thank goodness, Jesus knows how hard that can be.
Work cited
The Bible. The New American Bible Revised Edition, Kindle edition, Fairbrother, 2011.
“Remove the wooden beam from your eye first; then you will see clearly to remove the splinter in your brother’s eye” (Luke 6:42). This sentence makes the process of seeing clearly or helping someone else see clearly sound so simple and linear. All I have to do is hoist a “beam” out of my eye, and then I will see clearly and be able to help others see clearly. It sounds like a single step, a one-time action – at least when I look at the sentence as a whole.
My perspective shifts when I focus on the translation “beam” (Luke 6:42). A beam sounds like something that would trap my whole body under it, not just block my vision. The negative behaviors and thought patterns I get caught in definitely feel like burdens that imprison my mind and weigh down my body more than something I could rub out of my eye would.
A beam is something I need someone’s help to free myself from. Yet everyone else is being stabbed in the eye by splinters or trapped by beams as well. Even when a person doesn’t struggle with a particular thought pattern or behavior, everyone gets wounded. Everyone faces uncertainty. Only God who knows all and has the power to break me out of confinement and to lift what weighs me down. Because I live in a world where the beauty of creation is visible alongside the suffering that pride, fear, and the human condition carry with them, this process of freeing and unburdening is one that will last a lifetime — and beyond. Again and again, I’ll have to entrust my burdens and limitations to God, asking God to lift them, and if not to lift them, to help me bear their weight.
Knowing this doesn’t let me feel like I’m losing spiritual weight or like I have more room to breathe and the Spirit. In fact, I feel more like I’m sitting in a room with the door open only a crack. The window blinds are closed. It’s daylight, so the room isn’t black, but it’s gray. Light barely slips in around the door and between the slats of the blinds. The door is too heavy for me to pass through on my own, so on my own, I can’t lead someone else out of the same room, and certainly not out of a room different than the one I’m in. This “dim room” metaphor is a visualization of what Luke 6:42 says to me this week.
I have no way to know how the amount of light in my rooms will change throughout my life. I know that neither will they reach full brightness, nor will the doors be fully open while I journey on this earth. My prayer as I write this is that I’ll relate to others with an awareness that I’m as unable to see clearly as they are. There are more obstacles blocking my path to the sources of natural light than I realize, so others can see things I can’t, even as we’re all looking for light and making our way through dim rooms. Therefore, I suspect that If I want to help others, the first step forward is to acknowledge the limitations on my vision of and movement through life’s rooms. The second step might be to acknowledge any ways I benefit from walking with them.
As we journey together, I hope my fellow travelers will find more to trust in my accompaniment than I recognize. After all, I’m “corruptible” but “clothe[d]” with the “incorruptibility” of God. I’m “mortal” but “clothe[d] in immortality (1 Cor.15:53). It’s hard to see that clothing through the “beam[s] in my eye[s] (Luke 6 42). The result is that I don’t see myself or others as clearly as God does. The good news is that I’m wrapped in God anyway. What I need to do is remember I’m wrapped in God’s reflective clothing and not shrug off those clothes. They will keep me from getting lost and going in circles in low light. They’re why “It is good to give thanks to the Lord” (Psalm 92:2).
Work cited
The Bible. The New American Bible Revised Edition, Kindle edition, Fairbrother, 2011.
Sitting with the Sacred 