The Valley of Vision & the Keys to The Kingdom

There is an important stage in faith development when a person shatters their old image of God and reconstructs a new one. Most people do go through this natural maturation of faith. New understanding comes from a collision of faith and experience. Faith must be re-ordered to include and make meaning out of the new experience. One theologian calls it "faithing."

If you think about it, it is quite a bold act to change the image of God. Yet if you think about this conflict and reconstruction a little more, it just makes sense. We never get it totally right anyway.

The readings this week started me thinking:

Do we shatter and re-order our understanding of the Roman Catholic Church? If we do it for God, I think we should. Why do we believe the Church is perfect?

In the Gospel reading today, we hear the often cited foundational story of the Roman Church on the Rock of St. Peter.

In Matthew 16:18 Christ says, "You are Petros (Peter), and on this Petra (rock) I will build my church..." In Matthew 16:23, Christ tells the same Petra, "Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things."

The same criticism can be leveled at the Church hierarchy of our day and days past. Church leadership is human. And like the apostles in the Gospel of Matthew, they repeatedly wax and wane in their understanding of Who Christ Is and what his message is. It isn't for a lack of trying though.

At Cesearea Philipi when Peter nails it, it wasn't out of any individual knowledge. "For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven (Mt. 16:17) God reveals this wisdom to Peter in a moment and Peter speaks before he could filter it. "This" statement of recognition through grace, is "this" Rock Christ will build his Church on. It wasn't the person of Peter or any persons to follow, but those moments of unfiltered revelation and action that will constantly require re-imaging of God. Peter's own understanding of Christ had to be re-ordered immediately after his shining moment at Cesaerea Philipi when he goes from Church rock to stumbling bloc in a few short verses.

Christ promises to give him keys to the kingdom. Peter, like us, probably thought in terms of physical objects or symbols of possession rather than key principles that open doors between heaven and earth. The first thing Christ shows Peter after promising him the keys is the path of self denial and the Paschal Mystery. Peter didn't get it.

The human filter was back on. This is the first key to kingdom and the first act of our Church. I wonder how did Peter made sense of that juxtaposition - Church rock to stumbling block - in the eyes of God. How did he change his understanding of Christ and Christ's vision for the Church?

People are what matter

When I was 19 years old, I lived abroad in a small community of 40 students from a small college. One morning our home campus' paper arrived over breakfast.  We sat side by side as we read the article.  Four members of our group got very quiet. And I knew why.  

Matthew Shepherd had been killed in Wyoming. The headline was: "Murder is Wrong, But So is Homosexuality."

During the discussion that ensued, the majority's voice was hurtful and insensitive.  They thought they were talking about "strangers" - people distant and unconnected to our group - when in fact they hurt people close to us.  The four students who became voiceless during the discussion were some of the most loved people in the group.  After breakfast, I found some of my gay classmates in my room in tears or fuming with rage.

...

Have you ever judged someone by what seemed like an acceptable and righteous standard - Gay, Lesbian or Transgender folk, Non-Christians, ethnic minorities or the poor - only to realize by the end of the encounter that you had better re-evaluate your position?

The readings this Sunday emphasize the reversal of what we might discern facing the inevitable question in any "gathering of God."    Who is in? and Who is out?

Paul, in his letter to the Christians in Rome, addresses this question in terms of the tension between gentile Christians and Jewish Christians.  "By no means," he writes, has the covenant between God and Israel been annulled. Although there is a new covenant outside the Law revealed in the life of Christ, God's love is irrevocable.  He warns new Christians not to boast in their gift of God's love & mercy.  You aren't the only ones receiving it!

How difficult it is to follow a God like this!?  How do we know who is right?  

This is the wrong question.

 The theologian Karl Barth asserts that the Gospel sets a question-mark against the whole course of the world. No one is excluded from the divine contradiction that is in Christ.  What most humans "this side of resurrection" proclaim as God is most characteristically Not-God. This 'God' is a complete affirmation not of the Kingdom but the course of the world as it is. This 'God' does not redeem creation (Epistle to the Romans). In Christ, God offers to be known as the Redeemer by doing something different.

If you answered 'yes' to the opening question, you are not alone. We all have judged wrong based on what we have learned. Sometimes we even learn these categories in Church. While they are a base to engage the world from, I trust Karl Barth's intuition that he/she who knows the Gospel knows the "world is bound by a Truth that contradicts it completely." (Ibid)  Even Christ made mistakes and had to change his mind publicly!

In Matthew's Gospel this Sunday, Christ and his followers travel outside the boundaries of Israel for respite after a difficult ministry within Israel.  For the sake of their tenuous ministry within Israel, Christ and company would have been very careful to not appear to also minister to the "strangers" of Tyre and Sidon. Canaanites were definitely outside the covenant.  Meaning they were unsaved and unworthy in our terms.  Although in the preceding passage, Christ challenges a group of Pharisees, Jewish Christians and the Law itself when he teaches that it is not breaking rituals or rules that defiles us, but what comes out of our mouth in words, it would have been shocking to break that boundary and minister with "Strangers."  It was. and still is.

Christ teaches us something about perfection here and reveals Barth's notion of contradiction. Christ hesitates to respond to the Canannite woman based on all that was considered holy and lawful according to human understanding. Yet, her faith, desire, and love for her daughter - her humanness - breaks him from his automatic response. Christ the man & God changes his mind. He didn't get it right the first time. It was the clash between an of idea who-is-in with a living person who-is-out that revealed what, in fact, Christ does.

For myself and others in the group that morning after reading the article that equivocated Matthew Shepherd's murder, some of us reconciled the love for our friends with what we thought was doctrine by realizing that rules can be wrong. People are what matter.

A few days late and under pressure

I am a few days behind.  I was hiking with a group from my new job & parish.  I have to run in a few moments, but I want to follow through with what is my intention: to read, reflect and write on Each Sunday's readings.

So here we go...Double time.

"Lord, Let us see your kindness, and grant us your salvation."

The words of the Psalm are what stand out to me in these readings.  Although the 1Kings reading is one of my favorite in Scripture, the idea "seeing" God's kindness & recognizing salvation draws me into tender and developing ideas.  Each reading, to me is about the struggle to find's God's work and presence in baffling circumstances: a silent whisper vs. an earthquake, God's new covenant vs. a covenant that seems to leave one's own people behind, & during the fourth watch of the night...

It sounds Cliche' to repeat but God works in mysterious ways.  A version more true to my life is God works in scary ways - but then repeatedly invites  me to, in fact, not BE afraid.  The only way I can imagine and have overcome that fear is with courage, trepidation and humble faith that I am not crazy.  I am seeing God's kindness and invitation to do what might seem as impossible as walking on water.

I can relate with the ambitious-young Peter in the Gospel story.  After Feeding the Five Thousand, Jesus’ closest friends got in a boat to cross the Sea of Galilee.  Christ met them later in the middle of the sea amidst a great storm.  Peter did not know it, but he was going to learn how to swim.  Peter’s experience on the water sounds a lot like my discernment to enter religious life, initial formation and this time of grieving and starting over after leaving.  Every step I have taken during my vocation story seemed to be one thing but turned out to be another. 

At this point in my life, I feel a little like Peter on the hull of the ship.  What do I do know?  This is not what I thought was going to happen when I got in this boat! I had different plans! 

The only way I can make sense of this whole sequence of experiences and events is to look back and try see God in the whispers and small choices I made.  I sure didn’t plan it this way.  Every step I took made sense moving in the direction I intended: to earn a college degree with the best financial aid package, to study what I loved, to have an adventure in a new city, return with a master’s degree, be an urban monk/street priest, fall in love.  How I entered the Novitiate with the Franciscan Friars, had my heart broken again, left the order and have been given a bounty of opportunity during my grieving is a little miracle.  As much as I have studied, I forgot how God can act in people’s lives.  I am still afraid though.

 

In Matthew’s Gospel, I think Christ knew Peter was going to sink.  And I think Peter just thought he was going to Galilee.  Like Peter must have, I constantly have to look back and reflect how far I have come and the miracles that persuaded me to drop my nets and get on a boat called religious life.  I am not going to lie to you.  The winds have been strong and waves high, at times. I have never been so happy or so sad in my life.

The moments that Christ has come, and continues to come, to me in my discernment doesn’t feel like it used to on dry land, so to speak.  It is different now.  So little of this makes any human sense – until you are with a group of humans who have had similar experiences and who have chosen to test the waters.  As for me.  I am all wet.  I am going to meet Christ, for the same reason I got in the boat.  I don't want to be afraid anymore.

Peter got out of the boat and began to walk on the water toward Jesus.  But when he saw how strong the wind was he became frightened; and beginning to sink, he cried out, “Lord, save me!”  Immediately Jesus stretched out his hand and caught him, and said to him, “O you of little faith, why did you doubt?”(Mt. 14:29-31 NAB)

 

Sunday reflections

Now that I am home and have new adventures to blog about, I am going to try to use this blog to record my reflections on the Sunday lectionary readings.  Your help in keeping my accountable is appreciated.

Today in the readings we hear of God’s love and deliverance in the echo of lament.  There are most certainly times when God seems absent and we are hungry for God’s love.  What are we to do?

 

In Romans 8:35-39, Paul quotes Psalm 44.  This song calls upon God to rise from apparent sleep and remember Israel in its cries of affliction.  Israel knows the stories of God’s great deeds and covenant that brought them out slavery and guides them through history.  “Why do you sleep, O Lord? Awake.  Do not cast us off forever!  Why do you hide your face?” (Ps 44:23-24_“Where are you now?” Is what the Psalm writer is asking.  I have certainly asked this question myself faced with scripture stories in one hand, and my life’s challenges in the other.

 

Second Isaish ( Chps 40-55) speaks from a similar context.  Second Isaiah’s messages of encouragement and a promise of deliverance are for a specific audience: Israelites living many years into Babylonian exile.  Isaiah consoles those living under hardship with the prophecy that God still controls history, even in periods when it seems quite the opposite. 

 

In such times, How on earth!? does God “Feed us; and answer all our needs,” as the psalm today intones?  What can satisfy our hunger for home, for peace and for belonging? 

 

Although there can be plenty of doubt, All the readings today, the Hebrew Scriptures to the Christian Testament of Christ, representing thousands of years of inspired human wisdom and experience, all tell of God’s presence with us, and for us especially during times of hardship and suffering.

 

What God feeds us in these times is God’s own self.  What he receive is an ongoing relationship.  How this profound reality is communicated in tangible terms is the life and love of Jesus the Christ in the incarnation; and the continuing incarnation of Christ in the Eucharist and us – the Body of Christ.

 

Paul, answers the question of Psalm 44 in remarkable transformative metaphor:

 

            For your sake we are being killed all day long;

                        We are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered (Ps 44:22 qtd in Rm 8:36.)

 

No, in all these things we conquer overwhelmingly
 through him who loved us

(Rm 8:37)

 

We are conquering sheep! Through him who loves us!!!

 

Though we are persecuted, struggle and endure hardship, anything that gives us the illusion of existing separate from God does not actually do so.  Before we do or not do anything, Christ’s love, God’s love and the Spirit’s action never leave us alone.   –Paul notes this when he comments we have Christ to intercede for us from within God (Rm 8:34) as well as the Spirit “who intercedes with sighs too deep for words” from within us!!!(8:26-27).

 

And if we can’t quite take the leap of faith by Paul’s words alone, we have Matthew’s Gospel story of Christ’s action of intercession when there is need. 

 

After the death of John the Baptist and Herod Antipas’ notice of Jesus, Jesus withdraws.  Jesus was no doubt afraid.  He sought prayer and the God he called Father as a refuge.  But the Crowds followed him.  What we have here is an instance where God actually wanted to be absent!  However, he was moved with compassion to heal and further demonstrate his vision of the Kingdom to his Disciples.  He tells them:

 

There is no need for them to go away;
 give them some food yourselves (Mt 14:16).

 

What God feeds us is God’s own self in relationship.  How this profound reality is communicated in tangible terms is the life and love of Jesus the Christ in the incarnation; and the continuing incarnation of Christ in the Eucharist and in us – the Body of Christ.