Where Dwells This King of Glory

Almighty and everlasting God, whose will it is to restore all things in your well-beloved Son, the King of kings and Lord of lords: Mercifully grant that the peoples of the earth, divided and enslaved by sin, may be freed and brought together under his most gracious rule; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

            There is an image that stirs me so deeply I cannot put words to it or explain it.  At least once a year I feel it coming and my whole body begins to anticipate its response. It happened four weeks ago.  It was All Saints Day.  We were singing, as we always do, the Litany of All Saints including the stanzas of the hymn interspersed throughout.  And here came this verse:

But lo! there breaks a yet more glorious day;

The saints triumphant rise in bright array:

The king of glory passes on his way, Alleluia.

            In my mind’s eye, the king of glory rides a white horse.  With head lifted high, eyes beaming, clad in a homespun robe, his simple crown made of burnished gold, he rides through throngs from every family, language, people and nation, who bow in adoration and wonder as he passes on his way.  I see him so clearly, as if I were looking at an illustration from a child’s book I might once have held.  And yet I’m there, in the picture, a moving part.  And you are there, too.  And surprising people who I wouldn’t have imagined showing up to see the king of glory are there, as awestruck as any.  Old people and children, men in business suits and leather daddies, women in bikinis and nuns in their habits, garage mechanics and poets and farmers and professors and toothless beggars can’t say a word, utter a sound.  We all just watch the king of glory, whose very sight takes our breath away.

            Where does this come from, this image?  And why do I invariably find myself tearing up when I encounter it?  Why does it stick in my throat when I try to sing the words?  And why would I be telling you all this rather personal, perhaps even private, response to it?

            Let me start answering by parsing the Collect of the Day.  “Almighty God, whose will it is to restore all things…”  We need little convincing that things in this world are flying apart.  I suppose if I were to speak that sentence in Paris this morning, it might sound as if I were mocking an incredibly horrible national wound with words too light to describe it, so shocking the cruelty and devastating results of intentional terror.  But there is another world where things are in disarray.  It is the interior world of the human soul.  St. Athanasius once remarked that the image of God in humanity was flaking away like the cracked and peeling paint of a portrait, needing total restoration.  The chief symptom of the chaos in any of our souls—most of which we are unconscious of—is the pervasive feeling that we are separate.  In some native African religions, there is a myth that once the gods dwelt very close to the earth at about the level of the tree tops until something happened and they withdrew and became distant.  That feeling is replicated in various ways all over the world.  We sense we are alone, isolated.  Our culture specializes in teaching and celebrating the individual, teaching us that we are fundamentally distinct from other human beings.  But even cultures that de-emphasize the individual prize the identity of tribe and fuel a sense of differentness, of separation that guarantees inter-tribal suspicion and competition and ultimately warfare.  The image of the One is flaking away, and in bad need of restoration.

            The collect goes on, praying, “…in your well-beloved Son, the King of kings and Lord of lords.”  Listen for a second and you might begin humming the “Hallelujah” chorus from Handel’s Messiah.  I want to ask a peculiar question, though, as you hum along with Handel in your heart.  Where is this king of glory?  Do you imagine that he is up in the sky somewhere?  Do you think he is just out of this world?  Well, he is in heaven, you say.  So where is heaven?  Heaven is where God is.  And where is God not?  The first thing I learned in catechism class when I was eight was the answer to the question, “Where is God?”  God, the catechism said, “is everywhere.”  “Where shall I go then from your Spirit?” asks the psalmist.  “Where shall I flee from your presence?  If I climb up to heaven, you are there.  If I make the grave my bed, you are there also.  If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there you hand will lead me and your right hand hold me fast.”  There is no place you can go or be where God is not.  And so heaven, if by that we mean where God lives and reigns, is not a place somewhere, but a reality, a dimension, an experience that you can enter any time you please.  The gates are always open, and there is no secret password to getting in.  In fact, it is in your body.  Touch the tip of your nose.  God is there.  Look at your little fingernail.  Heaven is there.  Rub your belly.  God is there.  Heaven is nearer to you than the saliva on your tongue.  God is in everything on your body, in your body, and a part of your body.  And so this King of kings is all over you and all in you and one with you.

            That should not, by the way, be a surprise to anyone who has even a toe in the water of Anglican spiritual tradition.  Many of us have been praying for years such phrases in the Eucharist as “made one body with him, that he may dwell in us and we in him” and “…so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us.”  That’s incarnation—the Word made flesh and the flesh made universal!  That’s resurrection:  the divine flesh affirmed and transformed and then offered in water, bread, and wine so that everyone may be made one, reconciled, in him.

            And so the collect rolls into the next phrase:  “Grant that the peoples of the earth, divided and enslaved by sin…” Ah!  That word!  Many years ago Karl Menninger of the famous Menninger Clinic treating psychiatric disorders authored a book, “Whatever Became of Sin?”  He suggested that we have lost sin as a meaningful understanding of what is deeply wrong in the human soul.  We have trivialized sin, replacing it with crime, sickness, and other categories. The root of sin, long before it manifests in such things as injustice, hate, enmity, strife, and willful destructiveness, is this basic illusion of separation.  Say it is inevitable, or a part of our hard wiring, or the consequence of the human being coming into our own kind of consciousness:  whatever.  As long as we see ourselves in opposition to creation, to the Creator, and to other creatures, we are “divided and enslaved” by sin.  Why enslaved?  Because we become addicted to our habits of heart, our patterns of thinking, our own defenses behind our walls of isolation.

            The collect has us praying that we may “be freed and brought together.”  We should know by now that this freeing is not a one-time-only event.  It is ongoing, and it is as eternal as the condition from which we are freed.  That is why confession is so integral a spiritual practice.  We have constantly to remind ourselves of our dance with delusion, the notion that we can free ourselves.  Now here is the climax—the moment when the king of glory passes on his way.  His way is right through the heart of you, down in the depths of your soul.  Imagine fire coming from the nostrils of the horse he is riding, a fire that you feel as a deep burning, yearning, that strangely becomes a tear-producing joy.  And imagine that as that unearthly fire breathes through you, the king of glory turns, and of all things, winks at you, making you laugh uncontrollably and cry at the same time, so undone you are by that little wink that says, “God, how I love you!”  Remember that all this is coming from the one who lives in you and in whom you live.  You are inseparable from him who now frees you and heals this condition of morbid isolation that you taste perhaps as anxiety sometimes, as depression sometimes. 

            Then there is this last little phrase in the collect:  “under his most gracious rule.”  Your soul is not terribly different from a puppy.  Puppies don’t do well unless they bond with a master.  Smart dog owners know that training a dog is not an act of cruelty or abusive power but an act of love.  Dogdom is full of happy dogs who, in their own form of consciousness, know the deep connection between obedience and love.  Humans, used to justifying our separateness—men against women, women against men—humans against nature, nature against humans—people against God and God against people and people squared off against each other—have a harder time, partly because we often think it is wrong to submit to anybody.  Hence we don’t even want to call him Lord, since it smacks of the very oppression which we imagine we ought to be freed from.  It messes up our minds, quite literally, to hear that down deep we need to obey.  But we are not talking here about obeying external authority, but obeying the deepest part of our Selves. And the deepest, most beautiful part of ourselves is this heaven in which dwells graciousness and courteousness personified in the King of kings.  When you so much as imagine it, much more when you feel it, you’ll find yourself breathing a sigh of deep peace.  The king of glory will be passing on his way.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2015

What Shall We Do?

 Luke 3:7-18

Every year John the Baptist shows up in Advent and hangs around for half the season, at which time he suddenly disappears until after Christmas and Epiphany, when he reappears to baptize Jesus the first or second Sunday in January.  The connection between John and Advent is reasonably clear:  he is the forerunner, and his message paves the way for the coming Messiah.  Were it not for John, the message we would likely hear in Advent would be something about the sweet baby Jesus, thus joining us to the culture’s romanticizing of Christmas by obliterating Advent.  John forestalls that.  His is a message of wildness, of thunder, of fire, of irrepressible truth telling.  If we hear him at all in Advent, it is hard not to grasp the notion that this season is about way more than getting revved up for a planet-wide blowout on December 25, and far beyond the sentimental notion of a little baby being cradled by a young mother meeting all the dictates of middle-class conformity. 

Oh, how we love to domesticate God!  The man upstairs, the genial co-pilot, the model scoutmaster, even the familial tyrant, the petty dictator, the threatening police officer, the punitive judge:  many of our functional notions and pictures of the deity are drawn from our rather small ideals and rather oversized fears and amount to a mishmash of cartoons that have nothing whatsoever to do with Truth.  John the Baptizer, though, proclaims a no-nonsense gospel of practical yet transformative behavior.  “What shall we do?”  ask the crowds on hearing his prophecy of a new age.  “Share your coats if you have more than one, and food if you have any,” he says.  “What shall we do?” ask the tax collectors.  “Don’t cheat,” he says.  “What shall we do?” ask the soldiers.  “Tell the truth and quit extorting,” John answers.  Pretty simple.  Moral.  Direct.  Somehow this is connected to turning over a new leaf in preparation for the messianic age.  Don’t underestimate it, though.  Stopping what we are used to doing; changing ingrained behavior; getting a totally new attitude: it might seem simple, but we know better if we have ever tried it.  The pull of the familiar is strong, strong.  God smashes the familiar in order to re-create us, freeing us from the patterns that warp us and leave us misshapen and powerless to do any good.

John the Baptizer.  People questioned in their hearts whether he might be the Messiah.  He looked and sounded and no doubt smelt like a messiah. Yet, he said, “One is coming who is mightier than I, the thong of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie.”  The search committee was looking for a parson, and John frustrated them:  “Not I,” said he.  “Look for another.  One is coming who will baptize you with Holy Spirit and with fire.”  That sort of sounds like Pentecost, doesn’t it?  And Pentecost Day is the culmination of the Easter season.  So what is going on here?  Suddenly John the Baptist has afforded the bridge that links Advent with Easter and Pentecost.  And that is fitting because of all things, John the Baptist is known for baptism.  Sure, his baptism was a simple bath, the way he practiced it.  It was an outward, visible sign—washing—of an interior change of heart.  It was the manifestation of a transformative shift in attitude and behavior. 

And that is what Advent is truly about.  Not something that is essentially tied to a birth a long time ago, but a season for getting our bearings in a new world—a world of resurrection, a world spirit-driven, where old habits are discarded, old attitudes are reworked, old approaches cleaned up, old responses carefully re-appropriated to match life in a new context. 

This is, if anything the secret of Christianity—and an all too well kept one.  The whole life of Christ, the entire message of salvation, is not a series of disconnected events and discrete messages having to do with a variety of things, but rather a single story that has to do with only two things, which are themselves two sides of the same thing.  One is incarnation and the other is resurrection.  One has to do with God becoming one with humanity.  The other has to do with humanity, especially the human body, being the vehicle for divine life.  These two things are all there is to it, at the end of the day.  All morality, all knowledge, all existence are caught up in these two things—and they are summed up in baptism.  We have taken baptism quite a way beyond what John the Baptist practiced, but we have not entirely left John’s baptism in the past.  We see going down under the water and back up again as the pattern for death and resurrection, while he only saw it as a change of heart. But the two insights lead to the same conclusion: resurrection is about radical change here and now.  We are bodies that share the divine life of him who for our sake came to share our humanity.  We are dead to all that is alien to God and alive to all that belongs to God, and it is only radical Grace that explains how and why. 

OK.  Enough rhetoric and theory. Where do spirit and flesh meet in all this?  What does all this have to do with the husband who is grieving his young wife’s death?  What does this matter to the parents who have just found out that their young son has incurable cancer?  What does this say to the person who has just lost his third job with no prospects of getting another any time soon? 

We would like a template that we can take and apply to any and all situations, coming up with answers that make sense of these lofty notions of incarnation and resurrection, especially if the template would make all things turn out happily.  There is no such thing.  As scripture says in one place, “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,” which means look at your own life and figure out where wholeness happens for you, and how, by the love of Christ, you can not only survive but really live.  The way we go about this whole process is through sharing our stories.  Little tidbits of light and promise show up in my life and in yours.  We talk about  them with each other and gain some insight in the way to live.  We gradually begin to see patterns of things, never reducible to formulas, but strangely telling of principles like letting go, easing up, learning to trust, giving up control, fighting for the right against all odds, learning to submit our egos to a higher, if sometimes incomprehensible, purpose.  Such is the story of a man whose life the church is about to celebrate this week, William Lloyd Garrison.  Born in Massachusetts, Garrison tasted poverty in his childhood when his father, a sailor, abandoned his family.  Somehow—God knows how—Garrison caught a zeal for justice and a hatred of slavery.  He worked on a newspaper in Baltimore.  Later he returned to Boston.  The black community there helped him to found The Liberator, an antislavery paper.

Garrison’s paper became the dominant voice in the abolitionist movement.  He refused to be a moderate when, as he put it, the house was clearly on fire.  People all over the country, enraged by his insistence of abolition with no compensation to slave owners, spewed forth hatred and violence, as is, you might observe, the norm.  Garrison was even jailed for his own safety. 

Not to be deterred, Garrison invited black and female writers to contribute to The Liberator.  Maria Stewart was one of the writers who came to him with a handful of essays to publish.  An orphaned black woman born in Hartford, Stewart had grown up in the household of a white minister.  Widowed at a young age, she became an outspoken foe of slavery and racism.  Ultimately she became the Head Matron of Freedom’s Hospital here in Washington, which was to become Howard University. 

Though the cause of evil prosper,

Yet ‘tis truth alone is strong,

Though her portion be the scaffold,

And upon the throne be wrong,

Yet that scaffold sways the future

And behind the dim unknown,

Standeth God within the shadow

Keeping watch above [God’s] own.[1]

So this is the outward life.  But the inward life is not too different.  Justice does not come only to those who are engaged in the large fights against slavery, inhumanity, and oppression, but also to those who are privately hurting, wounded, and choking back their own tears.  The grieving husband might find astonishing power to form new relationships and to weather the days and nights of loneliness by reaching out to others.  The parents of a dying child may discover how to celebrate life whether it is short or long.  The jobless person could bounce around trying to find work and ultimately discover new life in communities of caring people.  Does it always work out handily?  No.  Are there disappointments galore?  Yes.  What makes the difference then?  Why should anyone pay any attention to this gospel of baptism, of death and resurrection?  For the simple reason that those who give themselves over to it, like William Lloyd Garrison and Maria Stewart and Joan of Arc and Mohandas Ghandi and Thomas Merton and Nelson Mandela and Dorothy Day and Jesus of Nazareth, keep showing the human race that success is a worthless deity, while the Spirit gives New Life to mortal bodies, often weak ones, forgotten, and even dead. 

So John the Baptist thunders on.  Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees.  Bear fruit, or be cut down.  It doesn’t sound pretty.  But he means that we simply cannot make peace with oppression, either outwardly or inwardly.  The resurrection will happen, no matter how many stones are rolled against the grave.  God will raise up children who are as good as dead.  You don’t even have to believe it.  Incarnation is powerful enough to take bread and make it body, and take blood and make it drinkable as wine.  God is afoot in the world and there is no deterring what brought all into being.  Mock on, fret on, and you cannot stop the unstoppable. 

Of course, there are no guarantees.  That is why we call it “faith.” 

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2015

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[1] James Russell Lowell, “The Present Crisis,” popularly known as “Once to Every Man and Nation,” The Hymnal 1940 (New York: The Church Hymal Corporation), 519.

A Word to the Wise

1 Kings 8:22-43; John 6:51-58

Solomon was wise—wise beyond his years, wise even beyond description.  So the story goes.  What probably is true is that Solomon, as king, was  the patron of a certain group of people who carried wise sayings, proverbs, and the cultivation of wisdom literature to the status of high art.  So many of the wisdom books in what came to be our Bible bear his name.  The storyteller who relates Solomon’s famous prayer for wisdom is weaving a narrative in support of an already existing identification of Solomon with wisdom.

           

            The notion of a king praying for discernment and wisdom is by any standard a fetching story.  It is fairly rare, actually.  Sincere prayer of that sort, I mean.  Leaders do not always have a streak of humility, if that is what prompts prayer for wisdom in the first place.  Sometimes leaders and would-be leaders are busy knowing all the answers, shooting off their mouths, all but poking fun at wisdom, certainly with a penchant for burlesquing it.  But Solomon, says the story, asked for guidance and discernment.  “I will give you a wise and discerning mind,” it is said that God responded.  And moreover, he would have all those things that he had expressly not asked for—long life, power, triumph over enemies, riches.  And, says God, “if you have the good sense to keep my commandments and statutes as your father David did, I’ll see to it that you have a long life.”  After Solomon was dead and gone, he looked, like most of us, better and better in retrospect.  Certainly he was a paragon of intelligence and wisdom compared with his son Rehoboam who succeeded him.  Rehoboam holds the prize for saying the stupidest thing in the entire Old Testament.  When he came to the throne, a delegation came to him and in effect said, “Give us a break.  Your father made our yoke heavy.  Lighten it up for us, won’t you, and we’ll serve you.”  So Rehoboam took his sweet easy time, consulted the elders, heard them say, “You know, they’re right.  You could have this thing in the bag, if you’ll take our advice and heed them.”  Rehoboam had a better answer:  “My father disciplined you with whips, but I’ll discipline you with scorpions.”  Just about as dumb a thing as he could have come up with.  And, of course, the kingdom split over such nonsense.

            So, in a way, Solomon’s reputation as a wise king, while mitigated by some of the evidence like his forced labor and some rather brash love affairs, was built on the way he contrasted with what followed him.  And the explanation of his effectiveness is in part this prayer, read back into the account of his reign. 

            Out of all this story, get one thing:  discernment is a very valuable thing.  Exactly what is it?  In effect, it is the gift, the ability, to be able to see the truth of things, the heart of the matter, and to choose actions consistent with the truth.  We could put it more picturesquely by saying that discernment is the gift or ability to distinguish between the voice of God, which is Truth, from all the other voices that we hear. 

            Before we go any further, let me say flatly that none of us becomes wise simply by wishing that we were.  We cannot will ourselves to be wise (would that we could!).  Nor can we become discerning just by deciding that we want to be.  On the other hand, I am convinced that there are some things that in the long run move us more towards being wise and discerning and away from simply posturing and playing as if we are lot smarter than we actually are.  One of those things is  practice.  There are some practices in which we can engage.  And there are a few key attitudinal shifts that can help us to “wise up.” 

            In order to explain what I mean, I want to turn to today’s gospel, which is the last in a four-week series of readings from the 6^th chapter of John, in which Jesus discourses about the “true Bread.”  The entire chapter, including the snippet that we hear today, depicts Jesus speaking metaphorically while people take him literally.  He says that he has come down from heaven to be the true Bread which gives life to the world.  He says that the Bread that he will give for the life of the world is his flesh.  He says what must have turned the stomachs of his hearers, that unless they eat of the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, they have no life in them.  Those who eat his flesh and drink his blood abide in him and he in them.  I don’t know a better or clearer example of a sacred text that more explicitly calls for a discerning mind!  If you can’t discern the difference between symbolic language and the directions on a box; if you can’t discern the difference between metaphor and diagnosis; if you can’t distinguish between poetry and biology,  then you’ve got a major problem.  And the problem is that you’re going to miss some very interesting and I would say essential things that are a part of the experience of being human.

            It would be dandy if we could simply say that Jesus is talking about things like his eventual death on the cross and the Church’s Eucharistic celebration.  But what he is saying is that if we look at spiritual reality as something that can be parsed in the terms of physical science or political theory, we will frankly starve.  “My flesh is food indeed and my blood is drink indeed” is, of course, something that in a few minutes you and I will experience at the altar.  But it is more, much more, that that.  The practice involved in discerning is the practice of looking behind and beyond the obvious and opening ourselves to the grammar of the spirit.  It’s somewhat like going to a football game and trying to “get it” by analyzing the muscle groups in the various bodies that are playing on the field.  It is possible to do so, but it would hardly be the way one would understand a bevy of other things in play such as motivation to compete, team rivalries, histories, not to mention the psychological effects of yells and cheers, music, and the pageantry of half-time, nor to mention the ritualized behavior of referees, coaches, and the outsized role of the quarterback in a team’s reputation.  In order to “get” the real life promised by Jesus, we can practice looking for the meaning of the symbols.  That is not so different from how we learn to enjoy football, for example.  When I was six years old and in the first grade, my brother who was sixteen and not far from finishing high school, tried to help me understand football by teaching me how to sketch plays.  It was years before I realized what all those plays were about, because I wasn’t connecting the symbols on the paper to what was happening on the field.  The problem that a great many people have with religion is that they don’t see how to connect it with what is really happening in their lives.  They don’t see what it has to do with their financial decisions, their work, their living arrangements, their bodies, or their sex lives. 

            So discernment is practicing the art of asking questions—such as what might be the meaning of the various experiences we have; how our symbol systems, religious and otherwise, help or hinder us from understanding our lives and ourselves; how we might sort out what is relatively useless from what is quite essential and helpful.  Once we get far enough into practicing discernment, then other things begin to make sense:  regular meditation, prayer, staying in community, worshiping consistently; pulling together our bodies, our psyches, and our spirits; taking regular stock of what we are doing and how we are living; practicing regular confession, especially with another honest human, in an effort to avoid the trap of confusing healthy self-esteem with arrogance. 

            But discernment doesn’t stop there.  Once we get started, or re-started, in practicing the things that make for discernment, it is possible to begin looking at the world not as a set of binaries, a field of polarities, a simplistic right/wrong, good/bad, light/dark, good/evil, material/spiritual affair.  Most folks can’t seem to get beyond that, witness the pervasive tendency to demonize those different from us and to vilify those who disagree with us.  Yes, there is a value and plenty of reason to look duality in the eye and respect it.  There is, for example, such a thing as real evil in the world, and we are not especially helped by papering it over with a nicey-nicey attitude.  But pushing beyond the obvious long enough might open us up to the possibility of seeing that truth shows up in surprising places and that God is not limited to a relatively small fan club in which to work wonders.  There is flesh and blood, and it is possible to see the divine in the very tissues of the human body (one of Jesus’ major points and a point that many Christians keep missing).  There is an underlying oneness that upholds all creation, matter and energy, bodies and spirits, animate and inanimate creation.  Stay on the path of discernment long enough and it shouldn’t surprise you (yet it always will) to find that you come, over time, to appreciate real Wisdom more and more—like the wisdom of a Solomon on his better days, like the wisdom of the gods, as was said to have characterized the prophet Daniel.  You might even glimpse from time to time something in yourself that feels like wisdom—though the truly wise will always be the first to question whether their own wisdom is the real stuff, or just a shiny object that caught their fancy for a moment.  A word to the wise.  Don’t worry about that.  It is probably a long way off for most of us.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2015

Family Matters

Mark 3: 20-35

This is pretty strong stuff.  Jesus is accused of being nuts.  His family is embarrassed by him.  He seems to disown his own kin.  This man who forgives sins right and left says that a sin against the Holy Spirit is unforgiveable.  What is going on?

Let’s tease the various strands and questions apart a little bit.  Start with family.  An enormous number of people prize family as the chief value in their lives.  Because our kinships are so important, even sacred, to us, many of us tend to think that family must be pretty high up on God’s value scale as well.  It took me awhile to appreciate the family I was born into.  There were times in my early life when I would gladly have bolted out of my family and never looked back.  Or so I thought.  Anne, my younger daughter, once said to her parents and sister, “You know how it is with the high school band?  Kids sign up for band and stay in it until the band takes its trip to Europe and then they are out of the band.  Well, I’m in this family until we take a Caribbean vacation, then I’m outta here.” 

Truth be told, many of us have conflicting feelings about our families.  That is no surprise.  Not only do families support us, nurture us, shape us, and sustain us; they also hold us back.  Even the most liberal families are seedbeds of conformity.  How do I know?  Show me a liberal family and I will show you a family that will go bonkers if one of the children becomes a member of the Tea Party, a racist, a fundamentalist Christian.  They may deal with it reasonably well, but it will be a challenge.  Someone once said to me when I was in the process of coming out as a gay man, “If you choose a path that is counter to what your relatives approve, don’t expect, no matter how polite you are, for those relatives to stand up and applaud you.  They will feel betrayed, perhaps embarrassed, maybe defensive, and they will likely do everything in their power to pull you back into the old familiar orbit.” 

            That is what is going on with Jesus, his mother, and his siblings.  He has become someone different.  He is doing things that people think are crazy.  And they are embarrassed and ashamed of him and for him.  Now, of course, not all families react the same way to nearly anything.  The point here is not to bad-mouth families, but to see how family relationships fare in the larger scheme of things.  For Jesus, that “larger scheme” was what he called the Kingdom of God.  Life in the Kingdom, which I call by its Greek word, βασιλεια, is lived by a significantly different set of standards from “ordinary life.”  And, quite frankly, life in the βασιλεια can seem, as it appeared to Jesus’ contemporaries, whacky.  If there is one basic thing that the βασιλεια entails it is to be real, to be authentically oneself.  How do we know?  Because that was what Jesus modeled above all.  Bear in mind that he spoke his truth, he lived his truth, he embodied truth.  He reinvented the whole notion of Messiah and became its incarnation.  One cannot do any of those things very effectively while asking, “Will mom approve of this?”

            And that leads us to the second strand of this story, this improbable and mysterious statement about the sin against the Holy Spirit.  What is that all about?  Well, it is the conundrum that one cannot simultaneously embrace and disdain the reality of spirit.  To shut oneself off from the possibility that the βασιλεια is real, that God’s power is palpably present in the world, is the gut meaning of “sin,” which, remember, is not a moral goof-up, but an act of separation from the Divine Will.  As long as we stay in a state of negation, refusing to accept the life and power of God, we are impervious to the very transformation that the βασιλεια involves.  There is nothing very mysterious about that.  Steal yourself against love and you won’t experience it. 

            The continual problem is that we want to have our cake and eat it too.  That is to say, we want—or say we want—transformation and the accompanying passion, peace, joy, maybe even ecstasy, or who knows, enlightenment— but we want to have it in a way that doesn’t disturb too much of our world.  That is not true for everyone, to be sure, but it is true for a huge slice of the population who have never quite differentiated themselves from family, tribe, society.  The sad part about it all is that the Church itself often puts a damper on life in the βασιλεια, preferring instead that we conform to the norms and expectations that will keep us moored to familiar behaviors and attitudes. 

            “Who are my mother and my brother and my sister?”  asks Jesus.  “Looking around the room, he says, “These are my mother and brothers and sisters.  Those who do the will of my Abba are my mother and brothers and sisters.”  You could read this gospel today and ask, “Where is the good news in that?”  If you catch on to the truth that the will of God in creating a community called the βασιλεια is that we be whole persons, free, honest, rooted and grounded in love; that we be merciful, forgiving, and kind; that we respect own dignity in body, soul, and spirit as well as that we respect the dignity of every human being and the integrity of all creation—then it is a tall order, but one that inspires rather than depresses us, wouldn’t you say? 

            All those things we have been celebrating about Jesus between Advent through Pentecost—his incarnation, his baptism, his own transfiguration, all the way to his  resurrection, his glorious ascension, and all the suffering, death and grief in between—are not about him only, but about every last one of us.  They are the story of becoming, being, and living your real life, come what may, cost what it might.  You do not have to throw mud all over your family and loved ones in order to ask seriously if conforming to roles and expectations that others lay upon you are really what you want your life to be about.  Who are you anyway?  In the end, all you have to be is yourself, as they told me in the third grade, “your best self,” your truest self, and you will indeed be right in line with what God wills for you—you who are Jesus’ mother and brothers and sisters.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2015