The Second Letter to Corinth

My summer travel schedule has put me a bit behind the Westar Institute's 30 Days with Paul reading plan.  I will continue on with Philemon, Philippians, and Romans at my own pace, but first I want to reflect a bit on Paul's Second Letter to his community in Corinth.

Reading 1 Corinthians I was struck by the dualism, and underlying sense of separateness and conflict that engaged Paul so relentlessly.  There were bits of light along the way, but at that point they did not cohere into anything solid.  With 2 Corinthians, that begins to change.

In this letter, Paul still feels separate from the community, and threatened by the appearance of other preachers who apparently want the Corinthian Christians to live by Jewish law in order to be "properly" Christian.  That, however, was not Paul's message, and he pleads with his readers to remember the truth of what he taught them.

The down side?  He nearly drowns those nuggets of truth in a long tirade of self-justification.  To his credit, he justifies his teaching on the basis of his attempt to embody the humility of the crucified Christ in his own experience of hardship and humiliation.  He's on the right track here, I would say, but he's still only beginning to see the truth of Christ's life and message.  He tells his readers that it was 14 years earlier that "someone" was lifted up and given a heavenly vision.  Scholars consider this "someone" to be Paul himself.  And while 14 years may sound like a long time to ponder and digest and make sense of the kind of life-changing revelation Paul received, in the history of the development of new religious movements, it is barely a blink of the Divine eye.  Paul is trying desperately to teach something he barely understands, at least at an intellectual level, to communities that do not have a shared religious vocabulary or worldview.  No wonder he sounds so frustrated!

There is, however, a glimmer of the message Paul tries so desperately to convey to his Corinthian converts.  I find it in these verses:

3:17 -- "...where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom."  In the face of those who would impose the Hebrew Law upon non-Jewish Christians, Paul intuits that there is a freedom to be found in embracing Christ as the embodiment of God.

5:15 -- "...he [Christ] died for all..."  The death of Christ works effectively to bring all persons into a new form of life, if they know this to be true.  No one is left out of the saving work of Christ.

5:19 -- "in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself..."  Again, no part of creation was left out of God's reconciling, I would say unifying, work.

What Paul has not seen yet, or has seen but not yet understood, is that the freedom and the reconciliation are two sides of God's love.  Paul still wants to fence "the community of the saved" with laws and expectations.  He sees other teachers as threats to his own ministry, and to God.  He doesn't yet see that there is no threat to God, and that, in the words of the Lindisfarne Community, all truth is God's truth.  God's love is more than large enough to reconcile all of creation to himself.

At the same time that I was reading this letter, I was coming across statements from other world religions about the essential unity of all persons in Divine Love.  Religions such as Daoism, Hinduism, and Buddhism had been around for hundreds, if not thousands, of years before Paul's breakthrough revelation.  I see him as groping toward something that requires long years of thought, prayer and struggle to understand and articulate, something that is at the heart of the religious vision: that God's love is neither exclusive nor earned, but given freely to all of God's creatures.  To live in that love, one needs simply to acknowledge and open the gift.  But those who do and those who have not yet are still united by the love God has for them, not separated by the judgments we make about each other.

Christians who root themselves deeply in Pauline writing need to be careful not to stay at a beginner's level of religious understanding.  Paul's fear and self-justification run the risk of creating fearful, self-justifying Christians, even now.  I will be digging into the next few letters, especially Romans, seeking signs of a more nuanced, mature understanding of the Christian revelation.

Paul and the Community in Corinth

The 30 Days with Paul challenge continues from Galatians to the First Letter to the Corinthians.  Blogs on these letters can be found at the Westar Institute site, and at the site presented by my friend and brother, Jack Gillespie, Celtic Odyssey.  There are many useful insights into the Pauline writings at these and other web resources.

I find myself returning to the question of duality in Paul.  It's all over the first several chapters of First Corinthians.  Insiders and outsiders, married or single, believers or not believers.  And if the believers aren't living up to Paul's moral code, "send them off to Satan!"  Wow! I am working very hard to find Good News in here.  Let me point out a few places where I see some light.

6:19 - Do you not know that your body is a Temple of the Holy Spirit within you?  My mom used to use that phrase, "your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit," when I was young.  As a child, it made no sense to me. Now, however, I think of it as the indwelling presence of holiness that connects me in a visceral way to God, and draws me toward body practices like conscious breathing and yoga that help me experience the Divine in a wide range of ways.  Paul limits his scope of concern here to sexual behavior, but I think it has a much wider application.

5:9 - If you try to avoid all sinners in the world, you would need to leave the world completely.  Paul is struggling here to maintain a firm line between sin in the world, which is inescapable, and sin within the community of believers.  Two thousand years later, we must admit that the sin of the world, while redeemed by Christ in his sacrifice of love, has not in fact been removed from among the community of followers.  I would update Paul's statement to say that if you want to avoid all the sinners in the church, you'd need to leave the church as well!

4:5 - Do not judge (others) until God has a chance to offer judgement.  One's inward moral stance may feel authentic and genuine, but we do not know all that God knows -- even about ourselves!  Patience and forbearance are necessary parts of life in community as well as life in the world.

I may, perhaps, see some of these "inside/outside" dynamics differently from Paul because of my efforts to live a secular monastic life, to weave together a contemplative way of living with ministry and activity in the world.  Paul is trying so hard to make life within the nascent Christian community look different and BE different from all else around it, and of course, in some ways it is and should be.  But he reminds me of a child coloring with their crayon so vigorously that the crayon breaks.  The lines need not be as dark as Paul draws them.

I will be traveling for the next week or so, and will most likely not be writing about my readings with Paul.  I will continue on the 30 Day challenge, though, and will look forward to catching up with other followers when I return.

Soul & Psyche 4: The New Sacred Awareness

David Tacey concludes his exploration of Jung, spirituality and religion with a short chapter which examines Jung's struggle over time to define his relationship with religion in general, and Christianity in particular.  It was in every way a vexed and painful relationship, covering two thirds of the twentieth century, a time in which religion and the life of the spirit were in great flux, certainly in the West, and arguably around the world.  We are living with the consequences of that flux today as the world writhes with the pain of racial, ethnic, and religious conflicts.  I think there are connections to be made, and I will attempt to make some of them here.

Soul & Psyche, 3

Greetings, Dear Ones,

I am returning once again to meditating upon David Tacey's The Darkening Spirit,an exploration of Jungian spirituality and religious life.  In chapter four, which Tacey calls, "Jung and the Prophetic Life," I believe he is making a useful distinction, but using misleading terms to identify the two "sides" he seeks to distinguish.

Tacey describes Jung as a prophet, speaking on behalf of a God who no longer comfortably inhabits the narrow confines of institutional Christian life.  He explains, "...what the Church calls God is not a description of his [God's] character, but an interpretation of his nature. As an interpretation, it is relative, not absolute, and thus liable to error and correction."  It is the role of the prophet, both in biblical history and in the present time, to call attention to what Tacey calls "the provisional nature of religious discourse," and to point beyond that provisional interpretation of God to the Divinity that transcends but still speaks to the human condition.

Spring Cleaning in the Household of God

Greetings, Dear Ones,

The temperature finally got up over freezing this past weekend -- warm enough to open the windows and declare a Spring Cleaning day. I did the three bathrooms and the three upstairs rooms.  My husband cleaned out the fireplace, the porch where we stack the firewood in the winter and enjoy the sound of the nearby stream in the summer, and scrubbed out the kitchen.  Oh, bliss!

The day before, I had just heard the news that an old friend had been elected a bishop in the Episcopal Church.  Evidently the election process was a bit messy, but looking at the ballots posted on the internet, it seemed as though the newly-elected bishop had in fact been the frontrunner all along.  And it got me to wondering, how do we 'clean up' in God's household?  It was a day's work for my husband and me to get our little house sparkling and fresh.  Now my friend has been called to be the head-of-household for over 100 congregations.  How does that get done?