“I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” What is “abundant life?” What is it that Jesus promises here, when he tells the crowd that he came so that people might have life abundantly? How would you know if you had life abundantly? Would you have a prolonged life? If you lived past 100, would that be living abundantly? If you were part of the 1%, rich enough so that you could buy everything you needed and have access to the finest medical care, would that be abundant life? If you were blessed with a large and attentive extended family, would that be abundant life? Actually today’s readings suggest that having life abundantly is none of these things, but something else altogether.
Despite his promise, neither Jesus nor the writer of the gospel according to John defines what “having life abundantly” means. Here I need to make the usual reminder about the fourth gospel. It was the last of the gospels, written in the ‘90s to a community of mostly Jewish followers of Jesus who were in conflict with the majority Jewish community. When you hear the contrasts in this passage, between the shepherd and the thief, or between the shepherd who protects the sheep and those who want to hurt the sheep, it’s all too easy to slide into anti-Semitism and hear a condemnation of all Jews here. That is emphatically not the case. If there is any implied condemnation in this passage, it is only of those religious leaders with whom the new followers of Jesus are fighting.
So what might the evangelist mean by Jesus’ promise of abundant life? Commentators have offered many different answers to that question over the centuries. Actually, most twenty-first century people don’t find the image of sheep in this passage very helpful. To begin with, probably none of us have kept sheep or even observed the work of shepherds. And who wants to be a sheep? Do sheep have life abundantly? Members of PETA would probably say “no.” Not being a sheep, I’m not sure. But I do know this: there is one very important aspect of sheep life that we should notice. Sheep are social animals. They literally flock together, and they get nervous when one of the members of the flock goes missing. In using the images of sheep and sheepfold, Jesus is talking about a flock that is a community, a flock that not only knows its shepherd, but also each other. These sheep are not isolated individuals. They are bonded to Jesus and to each other. It is those bonds that enable them to follow Jesus’ voice.
Our lesson from the book of Acts suggests what a community committed to Jesus might look like in human terms. The shape of community is a continuing theme in Luke-Acts. We can especially watch the formation of new Christian communities under Paul’s leadership as we follow his travels through the Book of Acts. We even have a hint of the importance of community in the story we heard last week from the gospel of Luke, of the encounter along the road to Emmaus. There we discovered that Christ comes to us walking and in the breaking of bread. And that’s the point: Christ comes to us. Even in that story we find a community, albeit a small one, of only two people, but they encounter Christ together. And their response? They rush back to Jerusalem to share the good news of their experience with the rest of the Jerusalem community.
In today’s reading we are in the aftermath of Peter’s speech on Pentecost. Last week we heard the end of the speech, and that 3,000 people had been baptized as a result. Today, we hear a description of what the communities of these new Christians might have looked like. To be sure, what we have here is probably an idealized picture. It uses some of the common descriptions of an ideal community, and it was probably what someone writing in the ‘80s had heard or believed about those first followers of Jesus.
Nevertheless, the author of Luke-Acts suggests important characteristics of the way of life of Jesus’ newest followers. First, we are told that these new followers continued to grow in their faith by continuing “in the apostles’ teaching.” They didn’t think they knew all there was to know about their new faith simply by having had water poured over them. Secondly, they continued to worship regularly. For them, that meant going to the Temple on the Sabbath, which was the form of worship that they knew. However, they also experienced Jesus’ presence with them sacramentally, i.e., by gathering together, most likely in each other’s houses, and sharing bread and wine. Finally, they were generous with each other. They shared fellowship over meals and they provided for each other’s needs. It’s a wonderful picture of abundant life: life shared with trusted friends, and time set aside for study, worship, sacrament, and a good meal.
It’s a picture of abundant life that has never lost its appeal. Actually, the ideal of life shared in community antedates the coming of Jesus. The Essenes, who flourished about the turn of the first millennium, and who left accounts of their community in the Dead Sea Scrolls, observed the same kind of community life that the author of Acts describes. In the fourth century AD, the Desert Fathers and Mothers were fed up with the rich and indulgent way of life of Christians in Alexandria. So they took off for the hills and caves of the deserts, where they lived a simple life in community and devoted themselves to contemplative prayer and study. In central Italy in the sixth century, Benedict of Nursia established monastic communities that encouraged a balanced life of study, prayer, shared work, and shared meals. Benedictines have flourished ever since. From them have come all the other vowed communities: the Franciscans, the Augustinians, the Dominicans, the Jesuits, the Cistercians, and all the rest. We even have vowed communities in the Episcopal Church and in the wider Anglican Communion. Here in Ohio, the Episcopal Community of the Transfiguration has been settled in Glendale near Cincinnati since 1906.
Pilgrimage, which I mentioned last week, is also a form of community, albeit a temporary one. Even so, study, worship, and generous sharing are important parts of the pilgrimage experience. And today we also have intentional communities of committed lay people who live together and share their time, prayer, food, and worldly goods with each other and with the neighborhood around them. And in Friday’s Columbus Dispatch I discovered a new kind of community of Jesus’ followers. There was an article about what they called “house churches.” These are groups of people who have formal worship in a church and then gather together in small groups in each other’s homes to discuss the lessons and sermon while sharing breakfast. Sounds like the community in today’s reading from Acts!
The truth is that there is a great longing in contemporary culture for true community, for communities not necessarily based on socio-economic class and geography, but on shared commitment to something larger than ourselves. In 2000, sociologist Robert Putnam wrote an influential book entitled Bowling Alone. In it, Putnam wrote about the collapse of community in the US and the decline of voluntary organizations, civic clubs, and religious communities. That collapse may well be even deeper today. We may have 24/7 access to social media, but do we have community? Are we perhaps finally reaching the limit of the individualism that is so rampant in our culture? Are we finally beginning to hear the lie in “Every tub on its own bottom” and “I’m all right, Jack?”
We long for authentic community. We may not be ready or able to run off to a convent or monastery, or even to form a new intentional community. But we long for true abundant life, of the life lived in community with other sheep, that Jesus promised us – and not just for an hour a week in a historic church building. Don’t we too want honest engagement with Scripture? Wouldn’t we like to deepen our relationship with God and each other through shared contemplative prayer? Perhaps this is a challenge that St. Peter’s can wrestle with in the weeks and months to come.
And more. Our abundant life in Jesus also calls us to reach out beyond the bounds of this parish, to see the welfare of others, and especially of those who are our immediate neighbors, as at least as important as our own. And we are called to do that together. African-American theologian Drew G.I. Hart describes the gathering of a group called to help people organize in Harrisburg, PA. After alluding to the “truth-telling, uninhibited joy, and extended grace” that the group experienced, Hart says, “Not all the insights that were shared were revelatory; some information could have been discovered more efficiently with a book or a Google search. Yet something is lost if our distinct bodies are never together, collectively participating in our Creator’s liberative activity for justice and peace.”1 Part of living abundantly is also acknowledging that we share this planet with everyone else on it, and their welfare ultimately has to be our concern as well. Which might also mean making a commitment as a parish to organizations such as Partners in Ministry in Liberia, Episcopal Relief and Development, or Doctors Without Borders, just to name a few. Choose your square inch of the world and embrace those who live on it as your sisters and brothers. Work against all those who would divide us.
Jesus has promised us abundant life. The life he holds out to us is life lived in community, in community where we can grow in faith, worship together, and share generously with each other. His promise still stands and still impels us forward.
1. “The Goodness of Gathered Flesh,” Sojourners, May 2017, p. 27.
Showing posts with label Easter 4. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Easter 4. Show all posts
Sunday, May 7, 2017
Sunday, May 11, 2014
Wonders and Signs
“Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles.” When was the last time you were awe-struck? How often do we see wonders and signs? We have been hearing Luke’s account in the book of Acts of the beginning of the community of Jesus’ disciples. We hear from Acts in Easter tide because the apostles so clearly proclaimed the resurrection of Jesus and showed its impact on the lives of Jesus’ followers. There was clearly something exciting and compelling about the work of Jesus’ earliest followers: they were emboldened by the Holy Spirit, they performed miracles, and they preached a message that left large numbers of people awe-struck and eager to join them.
Miracles, wonders, and signs seemed to have been common in the earliest church. St. Paul had a miraculous vision while travelling on the road to Damascus. As an evangelist of gentiles, Paul later rebuked the newbie Christians at Corinth for over-emphasizing ecstatic experiences of the Spirit. Many first and even second-century accounts of the Way, as devotion to Christ was called, depict miracles, visions, ecstatic speech, and other visible manifestations of the Holy Spirit. However, as the church became institutionalized, especially after it became the official religion of the Roman Empire, visible experiences of the Spirit, “wonders and signs,” became much less frequent. Although mystics continued to have intense – and often visible – experiences of the presence of the Holy Spirit, awe at God’s wondrous presence virtually disappeared in most church communities. In mainline Protestant congregations today, including Episcopal parishes determined to do everything “decently and in order,” awe at God’s wonders and signs might even be suspect!
And yet awe is just what we should feel! God is all around us. In God “we live and move and have our being.” God’s wonders and signs are visible everywhere, if we would but open our eyes to see them. More important, contemporary scientific discoveries have given us new ways of experiencing God’s presence, new ways of looking for “wonders and signs” that ancient thinkers and religious leaders could not see. When we contemplate what those discoveries have shown us, truly the only reaction we could possibly have is awe.
I recently read a book entitled Radical Amazement by Catholic laywoman Judy Cannato. In a surprisingly accessible way, Cannato relates all that we now know about the cosmos to our faith as followers of Jesus the Christ. Consider, Cannato says, the vastness of the universe. Where the ancients could only see the sun and the planets revolving around the earth, we now know that our galaxy, the Milky Way, is one of millions of galaxies, most of which are larger than ours. The distances among all these galaxies are millions of light years. We also know that the beginning of the cosmos, an explosion of matter and energy now called the Big Bang, occurred more than thirteen billion years ago. Scientists also theorize that if the Big Bang had been one trillionth of a second shorter, matter and energy would have collapsed inward, while one trillionth of a second longer would have flung all the matter and energy irretrievably apart. We know that the cosmos is continuing to expand, and at an accelerating rate. Scientists have discovered black holes, dark matter, and dark energy, and theorize that 95% of the cosmos is invisible to us.
Just as astounding is what we now know of the origins of life. Scientists have begun to understand that the earth is about 4.5 billion years old, that life arose from light, and that life became ever more complex through a process of self-development and evolution. Although we are intimately – in our very molecules and atoms – connected to every other form of life, even to the rocks and stars – we humans appear to be the most complex form of life. We are also the most self-conscious form of life, able to reflect on our relationship with our creator, in whose image we are made, and our connection with each other and the rest of creation. As followers of Jesus, God’s expression of Godself in human terms, we glimpse what human life might become in the completion of God’s plan. Although God reveals Godself in God’s creation, we acknowledge that ultimately God is incomprehensible mystery, the Holy One of whom we limited humans can say little or nothing.
Wonders and signs! When we contemplate all this, the cosmos, the earth, the miracle of complex human life, how can we not be awe-struck? How can we not resonate with Abraham Heschel’s reminder that awe is “a way of being in rapport with the mystery of all reality?” How can we not agree that, “Awe enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine, to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and simple; to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal.”1 And when we understand our deep and intimate connection to all this immensity and vastness, how can we not be left utterly speechless?
Awe-struck by God’s wonders and signs, speechless at God’s creation, what do we do now? How do we live our lives when we contemplate our connection with all of God’s wondrous creation? Following Judy Cannato’s lead, we can begin by expanding our image of God.2 We can remember that God is both transcendent and immanent. God is more than all of creation. Yet God is intimately connected with creation and reveals something of Godself in all of it, from our DNA to the farthest star. We can embrace a God of incomprehensible mystery. Although we are made in God’s image, we can never assume that God is like us. We can never assume that we have God nailed down, God neatly confined in the box of our own intellect. In his last discourse in the gospel according to John, Jesus reminded his disciples that “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth….” We must always expect God to surprise us and continue to reveal more of both Godself and God’s creation.
If we are made in God’s image, and we believe creation to have sprung forth from God, then we must also expand our embrace of all creation. All life is connected, both physically and spiritually. To see ourselves as atoms, separate and distinct from each other and the rest of creation is, as Albert Einstein called it, “optical delusion.” And yet, for the last several centuries, that is exactly how we have seen ourselves. We have poisoned rivers and lakes, we have created the great Pacific trash island, we have caused acid rain, and we have removed mountain tops. We have even begun to change the climate of “this fragile earth.” In an arresting article on the website of the magazine Sojourners Wes Granberg-Michaelson pointedly asks us, “Who will take personal responsibility for denying climate Change?” Granberg-Michaelson goes on to remind us that, “those who have denied climate change and thwarted actions to prevent or mitigate its effects have not just been mistaken. They are responsible for the increase in human suffering that has resulted now, and will continue in the future, from its effects.”3 Even if we accept the reality of climate change, we are still bound to ask ourselves how we can better care for creation. Can we support local farmers? Plant our own gardens? Decrease our use of plastic? Decrease our trash? Support recycling?
If we are truly awe-struck by the grandeur of God’s creation, we can also work at rising above self-preoccupation and pursue communion and relationship with each other. And perhaps, most important of all, we can open ourselves to God’s presence in silence and contemplation. We can take the time to savor our time and place, to pray through our days, acknowledging God’s presence with us in all things. And we have help in doing this. Celtic prayer, the prayer tradition of Ireland and Scotland, recognized God’s intimate connection with all creation, ourselves, the rest of earth’s creatures, and the cosmos, long before contemporary scientists did. We can offer to God all that we do, and have, and are. We can experience God’s presence not only in formal worship but also in all the “domestic mess” of our daily lives. In all that we do we can gratefully acknowledge God’s presence in, with, under, around, and through us.
And if we need words to express our awe at the signs and wonders of God’s presence in creation, we might turn to Psalm 8:
When I behold your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars which you set in place –
what is humanity that you should be mindful of us?
Who are we that you should care for us?
You have made us barely less than God,
and crowned us with glory and honor.
You have made us responsible
For the work of your hands,
putting all things at our feet….
YHWH, our Sovereign,
how majestic is your Name in all the earth!4
1. God in Search of Man (New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1955), 74-75, quoted in Judy Cannato, Radical Amazement (Notre Dame, IN: Sorin Books, 2006), 142.
2. Based on Cannato, pp. 137ff.
3. http://sojo.net/blogs/2014/05/08/who-will-take-personal-responsibility-denying-climate-change .
4. The Inclusive Bible (Plymouth, UK: Sheed and Ward, 2007), 373.
Miracles, wonders, and signs seemed to have been common in the earliest church. St. Paul had a miraculous vision while travelling on the road to Damascus. As an evangelist of gentiles, Paul later rebuked the newbie Christians at Corinth for over-emphasizing ecstatic experiences of the Spirit. Many first and even second-century accounts of the Way, as devotion to Christ was called, depict miracles, visions, ecstatic speech, and other visible manifestations of the Holy Spirit. However, as the church became institutionalized, especially after it became the official religion of the Roman Empire, visible experiences of the Spirit, “wonders and signs,” became much less frequent. Although mystics continued to have intense – and often visible – experiences of the presence of the Holy Spirit, awe at God’s wondrous presence virtually disappeared in most church communities. In mainline Protestant congregations today, including Episcopal parishes determined to do everything “decently and in order,” awe at God’s wonders and signs might even be suspect!
And yet awe is just what we should feel! God is all around us. In God “we live and move and have our being.” God’s wonders and signs are visible everywhere, if we would but open our eyes to see them. More important, contemporary scientific discoveries have given us new ways of experiencing God’s presence, new ways of looking for “wonders and signs” that ancient thinkers and religious leaders could not see. When we contemplate what those discoveries have shown us, truly the only reaction we could possibly have is awe.
I recently read a book entitled Radical Amazement by Catholic laywoman Judy Cannato. In a surprisingly accessible way, Cannato relates all that we now know about the cosmos to our faith as followers of Jesus the Christ. Consider, Cannato says, the vastness of the universe. Where the ancients could only see the sun and the planets revolving around the earth, we now know that our galaxy, the Milky Way, is one of millions of galaxies, most of which are larger than ours. The distances among all these galaxies are millions of light years. We also know that the beginning of the cosmos, an explosion of matter and energy now called the Big Bang, occurred more than thirteen billion years ago. Scientists also theorize that if the Big Bang had been one trillionth of a second shorter, matter and energy would have collapsed inward, while one trillionth of a second longer would have flung all the matter and energy irretrievably apart. We know that the cosmos is continuing to expand, and at an accelerating rate. Scientists have discovered black holes, dark matter, and dark energy, and theorize that 95% of the cosmos is invisible to us.
Just as astounding is what we now know of the origins of life. Scientists have begun to understand that the earth is about 4.5 billion years old, that life arose from light, and that life became ever more complex through a process of self-development and evolution. Although we are intimately – in our very molecules and atoms – connected to every other form of life, even to the rocks and stars – we humans appear to be the most complex form of life. We are also the most self-conscious form of life, able to reflect on our relationship with our creator, in whose image we are made, and our connection with each other and the rest of creation. As followers of Jesus, God’s expression of Godself in human terms, we glimpse what human life might become in the completion of God’s plan. Although God reveals Godself in God’s creation, we acknowledge that ultimately God is incomprehensible mystery, the Holy One of whom we limited humans can say little or nothing.
Wonders and signs! When we contemplate all this, the cosmos, the earth, the miracle of complex human life, how can we not be awe-struck? How can we not resonate with Abraham Heschel’s reminder that awe is “a way of being in rapport with the mystery of all reality?” How can we not agree that, “Awe enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine, to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and simple; to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal.”1 And when we understand our deep and intimate connection to all this immensity and vastness, how can we not be left utterly speechless?
Awe-struck by God’s wonders and signs, speechless at God’s creation, what do we do now? How do we live our lives when we contemplate our connection with all of God’s wondrous creation? Following Judy Cannato’s lead, we can begin by expanding our image of God.2 We can remember that God is both transcendent and immanent. God is more than all of creation. Yet God is intimately connected with creation and reveals something of Godself in all of it, from our DNA to the farthest star. We can embrace a God of incomprehensible mystery. Although we are made in God’s image, we can never assume that God is like us. We can never assume that we have God nailed down, God neatly confined in the box of our own intellect. In his last discourse in the gospel according to John, Jesus reminded his disciples that “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth….” We must always expect God to surprise us and continue to reveal more of both Godself and God’s creation.
If we are made in God’s image, and we believe creation to have sprung forth from God, then we must also expand our embrace of all creation. All life is connected, both physically and spiritually. To see ourselves as atoms, separate and distinct from each other and the rest of creation is, as Albert Einstein called it, “optical delusion.” And yet, for the last several centuries, that is exactly how we have seen ourselves. We have poisoned rivers and lakes, we have created the great Pacific trash island, we have caused acid rain, and we have removed mountain tops. We have even begun to change the climate of “this fragile earth.” In an arresting article on the website of the magazine Sojourners Wes Granberg-Michaelson pointedly asks us, “Who will take personal responsibility for denying climate Change?” Granberg-Michaelson goes on to remind us that, “those who have denied climate change and thwarted actions to prevent or mitigate its effects have not just been mistaken. They are responsible for the increase in human suffering that has resulted now, and will continue in the future, from its effects.”3 Even if we accept the reality of climate change, we are still bound to ask ourselves how we can better care for creation. Can we support local farmers? Plant our own gardens? Decrease our use of plastic? Decrease our trash? Support recycling?
If we are truly awe-struck by the grandeur of God’s creation, we can also work at rising above self-preoccupation and pursue communion and relationship with each other. And perhaps, most important of all, we can open ourselves to God’s presence in silence and contemplation. We can take the time to savor our time and place, to pray through our days, acknowledging God’s presence with us in all things. And we have help in doing this. Celtic prayer, the prayer tradition of Ireland and Scotland, recognized God’s intimate connection with all creation, ourselves, the rest of earth’s creatures, and the cosmos, long before contemporary scientists did. We can offer to God all that we do, and have, and are. We can experience God’s presence not only in formal worship but also in all the “domestic mess” of our daily lives. In all that we do we can gratefully acknowledge God’s presence in, with, under, around, and through us.
And if we need words to express our awe at the signs and wonders of God’s presence in creation, we might turn to Psalm 8:
When I behold your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars which you set in place –
what is humanity that you should be mindful of us?
Who are we that you should care for us?
You have made us barely less than God,
and crowned us with glory and honor.
You have made us responsible
For the work of your hands,
putting all things at our feet….
YHWH, our Sovereign,
how majestic is your Name in all the earth!4
1. God in Search of Man (New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1955), 74-75, quoted in Judy Cannato, Radical Amazement (Notre Dame, IN: Sorin Books, 2006), 142.
2. Based on Cannato, pp. 137ff.
3. http://sojo.net/blogs/2014/05/08/who-will-take-personal-responsibility-denying-climate-change .
4. The Inclusive Bible (Plymouth, UK: Sheed and Ward, 2007), 373.
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