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.

5 Days with (St) Paul, so far...

The Westar Institute has initiated a 30-day reading plan designed to cover all of the undisputed letters of Paul in the New Testament.  I found out about on the first day, and have been trying to catch up ever since.  Sunday afternoon seemed like a good opportunity to read not only the first few days' worth of Pauline entries, but to see what the Westar blog, along with my dear friend Jack, have been saying in response to the readings.

First, I should say that I have typically focused on the Gospels, particularly as a preacher, and haven't paid close attention to Paul since the one course I had on the Epistles in seminary.  (Anyone out there remember 'Romans to Revelation' at Garrett Evangelical?)  So I took this on as a personal challenge to actually read through these letters in a somewhat systematic fashion.  (As an aside, I'll be travelling mid-month, and will most likely be doing well if I keep up with the readings.  I don't expect to be able to comment on them often.)

Thus far we have read 1 Thessalonians and Galatians, and tomorrow we move on to 1 Corinthians.  That's helpful right there, since we're reading the letters in the order in which current scholarship suggests they were actually written. That allows me to imagine that Paul's thought is developing in response to his own experience of life in faith, as well as in response to the questions he is being asked, or the news he is receiving from the various communities to which the letters are addressed.

What surprises me so far is the degree to which Paul is #1, anxious, and #2, concerned to explain himself more than actually reiterate what he considers to be the Gospel message. While he frequently counsels others to live quiet, restrained lives, his own urgency and anxiety fairly jumps off the page.  A friend who is also following the 30-day plan observed, "He has no idea of what a non-anxious presence might be."    Honestly, I'd rather hear him calmly pointing to Jesus as the model for our lives than to hear him frantically pointing to himself as the model, which is what he mostly does.

Then there's the whole section in Galatians that addresses the dichotomy of "flesh" and "Spirit."  I wish he weren't so polarized in his description here.  Richard Rohr presents Paul as a non-dual thinker, although I suspect Paul comes to a non-dual awareness later in his development.  The best I can do with the "flesh" and "Spirit" section is to posit that Paul saw "flesh" as the working metaphor for limited, self-driven, egoistic awareness, a way of being that could not be open to others, or to God's presence in love, and "Spirit" as the softer, kinder, wider, way of being that allows grace and compassion to lead.  

I'm sure there are other voices that will help me come to a fresh understanding of Paul as this month goes along.  Comments on the 30-day challenge are welcome!

What is Faith?

Hebrews 11:1 gives a straightforward answer: Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.  But is faith all about convincing ourselves of the reality of things we can't see?  Too often modern Christians hear the second half of this verse, and neglect the two critical words in the first half: assurance, and hope.

I'm continuing to contemplate the idea that there may be no real gap between the Divine Reality (God) and the human reality (us).  God does not have to bridge an infinite distance to reach us, and we are not forever alienated from the Source of our Being. (see previous post) If that's true, however, then it has implications for how we define "faith."

Mind the Gap

On my first trip to London I noticed the very helpful signs that were posted in useful places.  "Look Right" appears at crosswalks so that pedestrians check one last time for oncoming traffic.  And on train platforms the message "Mind the Gap" keeps passengers from slipping a foot into the space between the platform and the train itself.

While contemplating the ancient story of Christ's birth over the past few days, however, a very different application of the phrase, "mind the gap," came to mind.  The whole point of the Incarnation, the whole reason why God sent His Son, as it was taught to me for many years, was to reach across an unbridgeable gulf between God and humanity, and close the gap Himself.  In the same way, the purpose of the crucifixion was so that Christ could pay a debt, our debt, that we could not pay on our own.  Both of these interpretations suggest a separation between God and God's beloved human community that has never made sense to me.

An Advent Meditation on Justice

 What follows is an Advent meditation which was shared today with my brothers and sisters in the Lindisfarne Community.  May it be a blessing to others.

Brothers and Sisters,

Many of us are deeply troubled by the violence in our streets.  Race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, class, even religion, all the things we thought back in the 60s and 70s that we'd confronted and named and faced down seem to be roaring back with a vengeance to divide God's beloved children into warring camps. And yet, the very word, religion, comes from a root that means to bind back together what has been separated.

The Indestructible Core

Has anyone else ever received the spiritual blow to your head, or heart, or ego, the one that turns everything upside down?  It's happened to me a couple of times, and I sometimes call it the "cosmic 2 x 4," it can hit that hard.

This one was completely unexpected.  A few weeks ago. the wonderful Elizabeth Gilbert posted a quick exchange from a recent interview onto her Facebook page.  At a public event, an attendee walked to the microphone and asked, "What do you know more than anything?" 

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.

Encounters with God

I'm taking a short break from Jung (although he slips in at the end, as you'll see) to share a sermon I was privileged to give at the First Baptist Church of Westwood, Massachusetts yesterday.  It was the second in a two-part series based on the notion of encountering God in various ways.  The first part was preached last Sunday by my wonderful husband, speaking about Jacob at the Jabbok, and I picked up the theme of encounter with the story of Elijah and the "sound of sheer silence."

Enjoy!  Next post will wrap up the series on Jung, religion and spirituality.

Synchronicity

Greetings, Dear Ones,

It's been a lovely few weeks learning to love what is, integrating the enneagram insights I spoke of in my last blog post.  What I am beginning to notice (you may know this better than I) is how eager the Spirit is to provide what one needs once the need has become conscious.  Let me explain.

Looking at Type One, the Perfectionist, I have had to admit how desperately I punish myself for sins and imperfections, real and imagined.  And at the same time, how desperately I defend myself against criticism, constructive or gratuitous.  It's a bit like having an internal older brother -- I'll beat myself up with abandon, but don't let anyone else take a swing at me, even if I deserve it!!

So, of course, the first thing I do is troll around looking for clues to how to avoid all this pain.  There are some, most of which are terribly obvious and no less useful for being plain as the nose on one's face.  Detach from your inner critic, take breaks from your work, appreciate other people's gifts and contributions (no, you don't have to do it all).  I'm chagrined to acknowledge how few of these I actually recall from having read the list several times in the last week!  But there is one that has really stuck with me -- one that the Spirit seems to want me to pay attention to.

Still Becoming

Hello, Dear Ones,

I've been pondering what to blog about lately, which may be why this one's a little late.  There was the weekend I spent at a conference, where I learned quite a bit, mostly about how well I do (or not) when away from home and my usual comforts and disciplines.  There is the dissertation chapter I sent to my supervisors recently, and the resulting shift of focus, from Cuthbert of Lindisfarne to Brigit of Kildare.  And there's the online course in World Religions that I'm teaching this summer -- a course that I've taught many times now, but in a whole new format.  It took a lot of work to get the course built, and we didn't know whether it would actually run or not.  Today is the first day.

And then I saw the illustration at the top of this column,  "still becoming," with that gorgeous embroidered butterfly.  (Thank you, Louise Hay.) And I thought, that's it.  Taken individually, none of these topics is all that compelling, but all together I think they say something important about a life of faith.  At root, it's all about the process of becoming.  How many grandmas do you know who are working on doctorates? How many adjuncts in the humanities are pushing their administrators to allow them to teach their first online course?  How many academics in their late fifties are attending a range of conferences, not to present, but just to find out which ones address their research interests?  Sure, there are some out there, but not many.  Or at least, I haven't met many.