Again, from Verna Holyhead's book:
It may sound from the reading of the beginning of Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians that everything was going well in their church, but to read the Letter in its entirety makes it clear that the Corinthians were also experiencing crises. Disturbed by internal rival factions, deviant sexual practices, marital difficulties, disputes about liturgy and community roles, they too needed to be encouraged to use the gifts of the Spirit that they had received in baptism, and so recognize the revelation of Christ and endure in fidelity to him. Paul encourages them to put their lives under the loving reign of God until this is definitively established on earth "on the day of the Lord Jesus Christ," that second coming of Jesus. Like the Corinthians, we are still waiting for that day, are still in the "in-between-time" that stretches from Pentecost to parousia. Waiting can sap our energies unless it is pregnant with hope, compassionate for those who have no hope, vigilant for justice and faithful to the promises of God spoken to us by Jesus.
In one of his talks Walter Brueggemann mentions how people love to dwell on what's coming to those whose preferences and likings and doings we find obnoxious or disgusting as a trait of human moral systems. In the United States right now it's going from the allegedly "last taboo" dealing with sexual practices back to reverting to what was all too briefly made taboo in terms of racism, ethnic and religious hatred. That's not to say that there aren't things wrong with sexual practices, those that violate the well being and autonomy and dignity of one or both parties are not made OK by someone getting convinced or wanting to give consent, not those in which someone in a position of more power can impose their will on someone in a position of less power. That is an objective evil of the kind that the traditional prohibitions, but only at their best, attempt to legislate. In the case of those contained in the legal code of the Old Testament, they are problematically bound up in the exercise of power by males over women, over children, over slaves, over those with lesser power, just as they always have been and are, even under democracy which has not achieved anything like equality.
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Thinking about eternity is bigger than I can do much, other than hoping that all things will be well, that the "omega" will get us back to the "alpha" of Creation in a state of unmitigated goodness or, rather bring the goodness that was always coming out of it. Other than that it's a topic that saps my energy, I don't find the superficial reading of Revelations as stimulating as fundamentalists who like to get scared for thrills and to use it for other reasons than the book was probably written for. And in that misunderstanding there has been little good. Clearly Paul's time line was off, he was only human, after all. In the mean time we have to get on with things.
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Having long since given up the sterility and futility of the ebbing fashion and the increasingly annoying buzz-wording of "mindfulness," of dwelling on every fleeting thing that presents itself to my notice, for the past several months I've been concentrating on the "Our Father" phrase by phrase, sentence by sentence, how those fit together and am finding it quite productive. Even the first two words of it, "Our father" or our parent, has a lot in it to think about. The use of the plural pronoun for us instead of the singular is a good place to start. There is no "I" in the prayer, not in any of its petitions and desires and the "us" isn't limited, it's a universal prayer on behalf of everyone.
And calling God "our Father" is fraught with implications. Not so much in modern America or, perhaps, Europe, but the relationship of a child to a father at the time was far, far more encompassing and extensive, a network of obligations and duties and expectations and, yes, family honor, than you get from just a rote recitation of the two words. One of those implications, I think, would have been the expectation that a child would take up the imitation of the father as a life vocation. That we're supposed to act in imitation to our father, a father who has the same obligations to the other members of the family and who expects us to treat them with respect. It's like what the father in the prodigal son parable says to the dutiful son when he welcomes his annoying, irresponsible, profligate brother back into the family. The themes of the Gospel are a lot more intertwining and comprehensive than I remember anyone ever telling us in catechism class. Both in obligations, which we can never hope to achieve in our lifetimes and in blessings that we are told to expect - forgive us as we forgive - give us our daily bread - maybe that's what we find at the end, how to do that perfectly when we die into God. In the meantime, it's hard to put the "our" above the "my" and even harder to try to live up to God who allows rain to fall on the wicked as well as the virtuous, who just might understand the wicked better than we understand them or they understand themselves. And in our misunderstanding of ourselves, we might not be as virtuous as we think.
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