… it’s hardly ever clear …

Sunday morning the sermon was about ‘disarming’ the Bible. It’s a series they are doing, so this first one mostly talked about how accustomed we readers and listeners are to attaching our own biases and experiences to, well … to everything we read.  Nothing ever comes into our understanding of things that isn’t seriously affected by all our other understandings. I doubt there is anything like ‘the pure truth’ to any of us. We bring our selves into every thought and reflection … and into every reading.  So also we read the Bible. We load up our interpretations with all that we already are. It can’t be otherwise. 

The sermon talked about how we are influenced, but with a focus on how we understand God.  We say God is love, and 1 John  4:8 … (whoever does not love does not know God because God is love) is very clear, as is so much of the Bible in saying this. But we are transactional humans. We like to add and subtract.  So we tend to turn love into transactions. Exchanges and deals. Accomplishments. Love in exchange for something. Because of something. For good behaviour. Upon confession of sin. Forgiving someone entitles us. Not killing our enemies.  But the Bible, said our preacher is pointing us away from the rules and transactions. The Bible points to Jesus, the Christ. To the Center. That is its primary intention. The whole idea is love, end to end …  which is why, it seems to me, we humans are so instinctively drawn to love and so repulsed by behaviour that is otherwise. We do get this. The DNA of the entire universe is love.  

But that, said the preacher, is not as easy as the words make it to seem.  Rules are easy. Doctrine is easy. Believing is easy. It’s why we like rules and doctrine and theology so much. But love … that’s another thing and Jesus spent his entire ministry poking at the rules and at our beliefs and dragging us into the messier, often less clear Center.  Love. Let him who is without sin, cast the first stone, he said to the rule-followers who wanted to stone the woman caught in adultery. It’s not easy, this love thing, and those who dumb it down to a few rules, or a couple of broad statements, have likely not seen some of the darker corners and nighttime shadows. 

Sunday afternoon, Kathy and I watched Women Talking. It seemed the opposite, the very complete opposite of that God-is-love DNA. Except, maybe also not so opposite at all.  It’s a sad and difficult movie, really well done, we thought, about a complicated story, which, now many years later, remains murky, except that something was happening to the women in that colony over a prolonged period of time. The movie story takes place in a hayloft where a group of the women, older and younger, are charged with deciding on behalf of all the women in the colony, whether to leave the colony where most of them have at one time or another been raped, abused in other ways, taken for granted … by their husbands, their relatives, even by their own sons or brothers. The men are in town, trying to get bail for the ten or so men and boys recently charged, the story of which has received plenty of attention in recent years, and in every telling, it seems to have become a little murkier. The women in the movie talk. They agonize and argue and weep and scream about it all; they are looking for a better way. They’re also desperate, afraid of their men.

Based on the book, a novel by the same title, the debate is about deciding whether to leave or stay, but their discussion keeps spilling over into how they experience power (they have almost none), rules, love, forgiveness, pacifism, violence and scripture, and also a wish for revenge. So far away from a Sunday morning sermon, their talking makes very clear how conflicted our understanding of it all is. Where the rubber meets the road, as we like to say, is where this story happens. Clarity, it seems to me, belongs to those who haven’t experienced much of living at all. These women have, and they go up and down every side of the rules, the culture that creates space for the rules, the few scriptures under which their rules have been made.  We want to be in a place where we can keep our faith, they say, even as they pull at so many of its edges … and also where we can think. We’ve never been allowed to think, they say. Our animals are treated better than we. Never, said one of the older ones, do our men or our sons acknowledge us. Not even enough to pass us the salt, she said. We are born not to exist, one of them says. 

Forgiveness keeps coming up … and some kind of related guilt.  They’ve been taught that forgiveness is required of them, no matter how repeated and awful the assaults and the abuse and the neglect. The women poke at scriptures they have long been told to mean that should they not forgive their men, they will not be allowed into ‘the kingdom of heaven’. Can’t God alone offer forgiveness, one of them asks? Who are they, the men, to control and offer forgiveness to anyone, they being the perpetrators and perpetuators of a culture that makes so much room for abuse. But then they acknowledge that if it’s really their centuries-old religious culture that has created a climate in which abuse of women and girls can so easily and so routinely happen, then are their men really even guilty? Maybe we will just kill them, becomes a question at one point in this passionate, at times subdued, other times desperate conversation; it’s quickly dismissed as an unserious option. These women, victims of so much, think about love, and whether, in their life experience, it’s even possible for any of them to know anything about love. They know as much as anyone about its absence and they are determined to look for a better way, for the sake of their children, and for themselves. Maybe for their men.  I will not die in this colony, says one of the older ones. Bury me on the trail, if you have to, as they line up their horses, buggies, children, and a few quickly gathered belongings. 

It’s a movie, so the story ends when it ends. But it’s a struggle based on real things. And about how to survive and live with some kind of thoughtfulness in a world where so much goes wrong and where scripture is laid bare in its own struggle to find us humans in ours. 

… he seems a little stuck …

In the Mennonite world, we have a long history of wanting to be peaceful people; sometimes we’re even peacemakers.  I’m not sure that as a people we’re any better at this than anyone else, but we do point to it in our statements of faith, and in our institutional vision statements. So, yes. We think about peace. At least. 

Our mother had the job of managing a bunch of kids when dad was away, which was often.  That she survived us is something! We were exasperating and unreasonable! So I remember her saying, after we boys had become pig-headed and intransigent with each other, usually over nothing, that ‘one of you has to give in’. That never made good sense to me because if I was the one giving in, even if for the sake of a desperate peace and some quiet, somehow I felt cheated … and how could that be fair? 

For the last week or so, the world has seen a lot of Prince Harry. He’s published a 400-page book about his life – Spare – that seems like a book, as someone said, mostly about revenge. Harry has lived in the shadows of his brother and his dad and he feels like an extra. The one who could become king if something happened to his dad and his older brother and his nephew, but it’s not likely. The investment of the monarchy has been more in his brother than in him. He feels this and he seems to resent his place and the many things that have happened to him growing up and now, with a young family. But did he really want that other life? The heir thing? They (the heirs) have long, exhausting lives to live, with endless commitments to duty for which they get little thanks. So, was that really it?

I haven’t read the book, but I’ve seen and read some of the news releases and interviews Harry has given about it. He seems a little stuck. Interview after interview has the same focus. He’s a victim of a system, of his family, of the British press, and of quite a few ‘isms’. Life has been unfair to him and so he’s written the book slamming and exposing his family, the British media, and remembering all the wrongs – real and perceived – done to him. He’s kept a long list, for a long time. Harry does say it’s all about making peace and he ‘wants his dad and his brother back’ but he adds that it’s really up to them to make it happen. He, apparently, has done his part by telling the world what he calls the truth, exposing things most families might appropriately have kept at home. 

‘I don’t think we can ever have peace with my family unless the truth is out there’, he says, and he’s pretty convinced that his truth is ‘the truth’. Even a little bit of reflection will usually point to there being a bit more to most stories, but Harry insists, ‘If you can’t rely on truth’ (presumably his) ‘then I just don’t see how peace is possible’. Even when asked how he thinks his mother would feel about what is now a serious trust issue between him and his brother, Harry tosses the blame to his brother.  ‘She would be heartbroken that William and his staff were part of these stories’, he says, referring to stories he says were leaked to the press about him and Meghan, his wife.  

My reaction is that a more thoughtful person would be a bit wary of exposing all those wrongs; they might be equally angry about many of them, might even write a book about some of them, but I wonder if they would be a bit more reflective. If he was, Harry, maybe, by now, would be wondering if he is still the victim, or if he has also become an offender. And were he to reach that moment of self-doubt, well, then making peace with his family would have a chance. Self-doubt is about humility and being curious enough to know that whenever we think we have figured something out and understood all there is, we keep looking and listening because, well, most always, there will be more. The most dangerous political and religious leaders are those who with no capacity for self-doubt.

Last Sunday we heard a sermon about curiosity and our capacity to change and to grow. Even Jesus, said the pastor, was self-reflective. Matthew 5 is the sermon on the mount. Probably the most often referenced Jesus sermon, it’s all about behaviour. How we treat each other. But after that, Jesus moves from teaching wisdom to speaking mostly in riddles and parables. By the time he preaches another sermon in chapter 13, Jesus seems to realize that he can’t teach people into the kingdom. They have to be invited.  Just sensible, cognitive teaching won’t do it, attractive and stimulating as that often is.  Said the pastor in his conclusions, what this means for us all is that what we earlier were is an essential part of who we are now. Even Jesus was different at 30 than he was at, say, 25 or 18.

We evangelicals and progressives are sometimes a little proud of what we are not.  What we once were, we are not now, and sometimes we prefer to define ourselves in only that way. No longer bound by earlier traditions perhaps, we are now, abundantly something else. Except, what we once were may be the bricks and mortar to what we now are. We didn’t get here from nowhere. When I think of Jesus, or Gandhi or Mandela or Mother Theresa, I have an image of them that usually doesn’t wonder about their life experience. But I should. Were they always the whole package? All mature and amazing? Not likely. There is always what came before. 

So Harry, now that you’ve put so much of yourself and your family out there – the truth, as you call it – maybe the ball is really in your court. Give in a little, my mother might say. Your always careful grandmother, I’m quite sure, would say the same.  Look back at what you were, at what your family was, and who you are all becoming. Don’t beat on the memories with so much anger and vengeance, maybe? They can and will shape you and your young family. You might be surprized.  And when you are 65, write another book. 

And also … the poet Samuel Coleridge is to have said, in a lecture about education: ‘little is taught by contest or dispute. Everything by sympathy and love.’  

… a question for 2023?…

We made it to the 9 am church service yesterday.  There weren’t many of us so it all felt a little special. During the morning service, two comments were made that stayed with me. Well, there were more, but I noted these especially. One of the pastors inserted New Year’s wishes during the opening singing; she wondered how we were all doing at 9 am after New Year’s Eve, and what, if anything, we were thinking about in these early hours of 2023. What, as an example, she asked, is your question of the new year? Do you have one?  She listed other examples of what might be ‘running through our minds’ on this day, this morning after, but that one stuck with me. What, on Jan 1, 2023, is my question?  I hadn’t really made any resolutions, but do I have a question? Maybe I don’t. Maybe I’m just contented and not reflective about anything, just glad to having survived ’22.  That’s possible. Maybe, on the other hand, I am sitting with questions, or a question, that’s older than time itself? That’s also possible, and in most cases, if we’re honest, we do have those questions. If we’re not wandering around with at least a few of the big ones, we probably should be. Which is, I suspect, why Jesus tells us that to enter the kingdom of heaven we need to be like children. Children are curious about most things, and our faith story, perhaps more than anything, should be about curiosity. Questions, more than about answers.  

I do have questions. Some are ordinary … like is there milk in the fridge? When can we stop eating leftovers? Who will win the world juniors tournament? Will inflation and high interest rates finally collapse our security here in the ‘developed’ world? Will de Santos really run for President ? Will Biden realize that he’s past his best before time? Will Putin become a human being?… etc. But there are other questions … . Are we the only ones here? Did we really evolve or were we always like this? How is it possible that people, especially people of faith, vote for Donald Trump?  Is there really a heaven? And there is that Problem of Pain, as C.S. Lewis calls it. Why do the poor continue to suffer so unbearably? Why do white people tend to have so much advantage?  How is it possible that a God who is all about love and redemption, allows so much trouble to fall onto this planet. Lots of questions, … but do I have one particular 2023 question?  

Kathy and I stumbled onto a 2-hour special about Barbara Walters last night.  They did a most interesting job of scanning her life as an interviewer. One snippet after another about the woman who seemed to know better, apparently, than most, how to ask the right questions and when to ask them. They also kept saying that it wasn’t just about asking; she was a listener.  We’ve all heard or seen media hosts who walk through their questions, but don’t seem at all interested in the people they’re talking to, and afterwards, they likely have little idea about anything that was said to them. Barbara Walters, they said, did tonnes of prep work before any interview so that, as one person said, she sometimes knew her candidates better than they knew themselves. She was so well prepared she could throw aside all her questions, depending on how the conversation was going, if she needed to. She was in a conversation, which is different from just asking a list of questions. She asked the toughest questions, but they also kept remarking about the compassion she brought to seemingly every person she spoke with. 

And that brings me to the sermon yesterday, and the second comment I’m remembering. It was also about the new year, referencing an encounter between Jesus and a couple of disciples of John, in John chapter 1. John introduces them to Jesus, and they are curious.  When they follow him Jesus asks them, ‘what do you want?’ Was he annoyed at being followed? It’s a bit awkward there so it’s hard to tell what that little exchange was about but the preacher’s point was that the divine reveals itself in the longings that we pursue. The mundane and the bigger ones too. 

The disciples simply ask Jesus where he is staying.  My guess is they were a little intimidated and didn’t know what else to ask, but regardless, he invites them and they spend some time together after which one of them (Andrew) is convinced that Jesus really is the Messiah.  The writer then notes that all this happened at about the 10^th hour, or ‘late in the afternoon’,  around 4 pm. They meet the Messiah. That’s one of the big things. It’s cosmic, really, so why would the writer of John want to mention the time of day this happened. Could it at least have happened at daybreak, as the sun came up, or late at night when drama normally happens? No, this happened around 4 pm, with a Messiah who is surely above and beyond time and circumstance. Right?  Or maybe not either. This Messiah apparently comes among us … at 4 pm on an ordinary day. He meets us then. 

The point the sermon made was to remind us that the Messiah, of whom all the questions – the timeless ones and the others – can be asked, inserts himself into the mundane of our lives, at 4 in the afternoon.  The divine becomes personal and is present with us, not just on the heavy theologies of the time, not just on the big questions, not just in our sanctuaries or study halls, but right around faspa time if you’re Russian Mennonite and at salteña time if you’re a Cruzeño in Santa Cruz. All of us have the 4 pms and the 10 ams in our lives. The ordinary … and the extraordinary, and this Messiah shows up … in the longings that we pursue and in the any-kind-of questions that we ask … in 2023 and beyond.