Tag Archives: preaching

Bring Peace to Each House

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The mission of Jesus’ seventy disciples in Luke is filled with breathless excitement and peril. There is an urgency to the mission as “the harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few.” (Lk. 10: 2) On the other hand, Jesus warns his disciples that he is sending them out “like lambs among wolves.” (Lk. 10: 3).

The tone of the mission is expressed in the phrase: “Peace be to this house.” (:l. 10: 5) This offer of peace makes the disciples vulnerable to the reaction of the members of the house. In the best case scenario, somebody there promotes peace and welcomes the disciples who then accept what hospitality they are given. When peace is offered and accepted, it becomes dynamic throughout the house that has received it as the disciples heal the sick and announce that the Kingdom of God has come near. All this has the flavor of Jesus’ inaugural sermon that announced a new Jubilee. That is, announcing good news to the poor and freeing captives. We can see this missionary journey, then, as Jesus’ disciples spreading the Jubilee throughout the country.

As with Jesus first announcement of the Jubilee, there is no litany of doctrines or list of rules but a spirit of living, like the Spirit that was upon Isaiah and then upon Jesus at the beginning of his ministry. In his mission to Galatia, we see Paul, in his way, proclaiming the same Jubilee of good news to the poor and freedom of the captives. In this case, freedom from the Jewish Law and freedom for Christ. He celebrates this freedom through reconciliation so that anyone who is caught in a sin is restored “gently.” The spirit of this reconciliation is to “carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.” (Gal. 6: 2) Perhaps we can see this as the essence of the kingdom that has come near. Although there have been attempts to define the carrying of one another’s burdens, as Charles Williams famously did with his doctrine of substitution, it is best to see the mutual bearing of burdens as a Spirit-filled shape of spreading peace within the house that has received it.

But what about the wolves? Jesus tell the disciples that if a town rejects them, they should wipe off the dust from their feet and move on. (Lk. 10: 11) The wolves don’t seem to have done any real harm. But then Jesus goes on to say that it will be better for Tyre and Sidon than for the towns that rejected the disciples. Far from threatening these towns with divine vengeance, Jesus is actually warning us that the systemic violence embodied by these past cultures is about to be a lot worse in the present. Lots of wolves here. The few households of peace are surrounded by imperial strife and persecution. Paul’s church in Galatia was in this situation and we find ourselves in an even worse maelstrom of social rage. (It will go even worse for Western Civilization than it did to the towns that rejected the disciples.)

Maintaining a sense of peace in the midst of all this turmoil is excruciatingly difficult. We easily become enraged just from reading the news. What if we should actually face these enraged people in real life? It is hard to believe that the disciples had been so successful in their mission, but then if Satan fell from the sky, where else would Satan be now than in the midst of the wolves? This is where we must allow the peace we offered to return back to us and then vent our frustrated anger by dusting off our feet. Otherwise, we are drawn into the surrounding rage and all peace is lost. In the midst of this turmoil, bearing one another’s burdens is a practical way of developing the spirit of Jubilee, all the more so when we are all overburdened by the stress of it all. Bearing each other’s burdens fulfills the Law of Christ because this practice takes us right into the heart of what Jesus did for all of us on the Cross. Our house of peace in the mission of the Seventy seems small and weak, and it is. Paul’s household in Galatia was small and weak, too. But could the oppressive rage around us also mean there is the potential of a plentiful harvest if we can bring peace to others so as to bring the Kingdom of God closer?

On Being Called by God

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AndrewPreaching1The narratives of the call of Isaiah, Paul, and Simon Peter bring to mind my own experiences of God’s call. In my case, it wasn’t quite like being attacked by a Cherubim in church, getting knocked down on the Road to Damascus or being told to throw out the fishing nets one more time and being overwhelmed by the catch.

I did quite a lot of fishing as a child for the simple reason that my father loved it and my family spent most summer vacations at a fishing lodge. I lost interest in fishing by the time I was a teenager but the contemplative aspect of fishing stayed with me as I became a monk. While praying the Divine Office and praying silently in the Abbey Church, I constantly sense God calling me out of my self-preoccupations and self-indulgence to the wider concerns of God.

I had the call of Isaiah memorized when I was a choirboy because I sang an overwrought anthem to that text, ending with the prophet’s quiet volunteering to be sent by God. Even then, I had intimations that I might be called to the ministry although I was put off by how much kneeling I would have to do. Even so, one Sunday when our whole family was too sick to go to church, I led the four of us in the Office of Morning Prayer. As for kneeling, liturgical renewal dealt with that.

During my late high school and college years, I was a self-styled religious rebel who didn’t like the way God ran the universe. Like Paul, I was quite vocal about saying what I thought to anyone who would listen and to others who would rather not. By hindsight, I realize that I was being called all that time until I listened sufficiently to get on the track that led me to St. Gregory’s Abbey. By then I had come to realize that God doesn’t try to run the universe but God has pointed out ways we can run it better than we’re doing it if only we would listen.

It is tempting to think that one is special if one senses a call from God, as if God would surely call a superior person such as myself. But Isaiah, Paul, and Simon Peter all felt differently when approached by God. In each case, the call convicted them and pulled them out of the way they were living to a radical change of attitude and activity. In my case, I had to realize that a seminary I went to after graduating from college was the wrong choice for me, one fueled by my rebellious attitude. Only then could I hear the call to a seminary much better suited for me.

In God’s mission charge to Isaiah, God tells him to tell the people: “Keep listening, but do not comprehend; keep looking, but do not understand.” (Is. 6: 9) Jesus uses these same words to characterize the response he got from his own preaching. Some way to be “ catching people.” (Lk. 5: 10) There are many ways one can understand what it means to be a person of unclean lips living “among a people of unclean lips.” (Is. 6: 5) René Girard writes of the human tendency to share desires so intensely that they become rivalrous. When that happens, we may have ears but we will not hear what other people are saying and we will not hear what God is saying to us. In my case, I had cast myself so deeply into rivalry with God that I drowned out the direction of my call for many years. Since the most vulnerable people in a society bear the brunt of the rivalry of the powerful, deafness to the cries of the poor go unheard with only prophets like Isaiah to defend them.

Paul received his call from the resurrected Christ who asked Paul why he was persecuting him in the act of persecuting his people. John’s Gospel has a variant of the story of the overwhelming catch of fish placed after the Resurrection which raises the intriguing question of whether or not Luke placed a resurrection narrative in an early chapter of his narrative. In any case, after deserting Jesus, the disciples did need to be called a second time by the resurrected Christ. Jesus was raised from the dead because first he was killed in an act of collective violence, the sort of persecution Girard argues is the result of a society allowing itself to be swamped in rivalry where we have ears but fail to hear.

Since God’s call to each of us entails preaching the Word and, much more important, witnessing to it in our ways of living, we are fundamentally spreading our repentance to others to open their ears as well. The hazard is that a sense of rivalry can enter through the back door if we treat our ministry of witnessing as a contest in which we try to “defeat” the other and win a “victory.” What we need to do is listen to ourselves in God, and listen to others as God listens to them, and use our listening skills, based on repentance, to help other people learn to listen.

For an introduction to the thought of René Girard, see Violence and the Kingdom of God  and Living Stones in the House of the Forgiving Victim.

Feed My Sheep

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AndrewPreaching1In the final chapter of John’s Gospel, Jesus asks Peter three times: “Simon son of John, do you love me?” Peter has to answer three times that he loves Jesus and then listen to Jesus tell him three times: “Feed my sheep.” (Jn. 21: 15-17) This three-fold question and response is commonly interpreted as Peter undoing his three-fold betrayal of Jesus in the court of the high priest. I agree, but with the caveat that Peter’s betrayal goes further back. At Gethsemane, when Jesus had been seized by the temple police, Peter drew a sword and cut off the right ear of one of the high priest’s servants. This may look like loyalty to most people, but not to Jesus, who said: “Put your sword back into its sheath. Am I not to drink the cup that the Father has given me?” (Jn. 18: 11) That is, Peter had betrayed what Jesus really lived for and was about to die for. As he had at Caesarea Philippi, Peter had acted as a “satan,” a stumbling block to Jesus’ commitment to non-violence, even at the cost of his life. In declaring his love for Jesus three times, Peter declared his love for what Jesus lived for and died for. It is with this love that Peter was told to feed his sheep.

Paul, whom we also celebrate today, is famous for his conversion experience. Like Peter, Paul had to repent of the violence he had committed in what he thought was in the service of God. The voice from Heaven on the road to Damascus told Paul that he was actually persecuting God by persecuting the followers of Jesus. After hearing this voice, Paul realized that, like his fellow Pharisees denounced by Jesus, he had been committing the social violence of heaping burdens on people and not lifting a finger to lift them. With Paul, this social violence had exploded into physical violence against those very people on whom these burdens had been imposed. (Mt. 23: 4) The voice of Heaven converted Paul into being a lifter of heavy burdens from others so that he and those he preached to could embrace the gift of forgiveness Jesus bestowed on him when he drank the cup given by his heavenly Abba and allowed his Abba to raise him from the dead.

Peter and Paul are often posed as opposites, even antagonists, but they are united in one most important thing: both ministered out of their conversion from violence to living by the free gift of God’s mercy grounded in the cross. Out of their conversions, they preached whether “the time [was] favorable or unfavorable.” (2 Tim 4: 2) In doing so, both of their lives were “poured out as a libation” (2 Tim. 4: 6) as they tended the heavenly Abba’s sheep with special care for the sick and the wounded. In the end, both were led away to where they did not wish to go (Jn. 21: 18) but ended up winning “the crown of righteousness.” (2 Tim. 4: 8) If we are to follow these two great saints, we, too, must hear the voice of Jesus warning us of the violence we commit or benefit from and be converted so that we, too, can feed Jesus’ sheep.