thinking theology

Archive for March, 2023

The Way of the Empty Bucket

(Lent 3, 2023; Year A; John 4:5-14)

One of the catch phrases of our time is the “bucket list,” meaning ramming in activities before we die or become enfeebled. It’s a bit like our frenzied health efforts or fears. We seem to have lost track of the idea that we are mortal, and that we cannot possibly do everything possible in one lifetime. It’s there in the movie Moonstruck, as a somewhat cynical wife says that men have affairs to ward off the fear of death. 

Sometimes religion looks like that too. If we pray hard enough, if we are careful enough, or repentant enough, or pious enough, we will live forever. When people tell me they are not religious, it’s usually about having come to terms with their own mortality. If God cannot give us immortality, or invulnerability to suffering, then what good is God? When we take the idea of reward and punishment out of the equation, what is the point of faith? What use is God or faith?

In excerpts from the passage from John, we read:

Jesus came to a Samaritan city called Sychar. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well.

A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?”

Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked, and you would have been given living water.”

The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water?” Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.”

John 4

This woman who comes to the well by herself is a person who has passed from fear to challenge. She is not afraid of this stranger. Perhaps she has given up on hypocritical social norms. She is not afraid to contest Jesus’ right to be there or his status as a man, a Jew. Jesus engages in this challenge with her. I imagine Jesus laughing at her audacity and her enjoying trying to put him in his place. He asks for a drink, but it will be at her service, from her bucket, by her grace and generosity. Together, they are sitting in a moment of wilderness, a moment that both satisfies tradition and breaks with it. Peace in community belongs to settlement. Injustice and disharmony break the sacred bonds of creation/God/humanity.

So you shall keep the commandments of the Lord your God by walking in his ways and by fearing him. For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and springs, flowing out in the valleys and hills, a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey.

Deuteronomy 8:6-8

What bucket does Jesus bring to this encounter? I think he carries his traditions and history, but he wears them lightly, not as prison, but as foundation. And the traditions and history he carries are about covenants of justice and trust, prophetic curiosity, creativity, a sacred story that has called men and women out of their comfort zones for millennia. The Divine calls people in and out of wilderness, in and out of settlement. The impetus for movement is justice.

Jesus constantly fills this bucket with new relationships, new ways of understanding generosity and mercy. If the woman had known that the encounter would call her also to review her heritage, her experience to date, she might have been less bold, less sure. How could she have seen that the water of the well would not be as deep as the springs of spirit and hope that Jesus reveals and that are part of his heritage? How could she have guessed that morning, that her life would be changed by a chance encounter — except that she was daring and maybe desperate.

The “water” in Jesus’ bucket is not the property of anyone or any tradition, but the free gift discovered by anyone who chooses to live in harmony: justly, mercifully, compassionately. In this discovery, we find that the water is more than a metaphor, but a profound sense of unity with all that lives. Perhaps eternal life is not the right phrase. Perhaps a better way to describe this peace would be homecoming; it is a reminder that our consciousness is more than this moment, but at the same time, intensely this moment. And at the moment of encounter, Jesus and the woman create a circle of life, of peace.

So what do we have in our buckets? What needs to be emptied so that we can be filled with the water of life? Are our buckets full of regret or anger or shame? Will we create a shelter of peace where we can recognize Jesus? Do we want to receive what Jesus is offering, not as a reward or a punishment, but as a way to perceive reality, a way to be water and light, life saving and protecting? And other than the peace for ourselves, perhaps then we, too, may carry a bucket of love to be shared to those hungry for hope and blessing.

Category:

Categorically Random, Lent, Relationship

Tagged with:

The Moon My Soul

A. E. Turner © 2023

I am standing in the snow
In the winter of my life
The snow dusts my eye lashes,
Slips under my snood,

reminding me

I belong
I belong
To the snow
To the love
To the life that looks like death

Like birth
Like cold
But fall
beneath
and find the warmth,
moon-child.

Find the Holy place
The altar of our beginning

Category:

Categorically Random, poetry

Tagged with:

The Way is Water and Spirit

Jesus answered, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit.” (John 3:5)

When the church speaks of being baptized by water and the Spirit, we usually think of the rites of admission; in some churches, water baptism and in others, outward manifestation such as glossolalia (speaking in tongues) or ecstatic trance. In all cases, we understand that — by a spiritual intervention — the individual now lives as a transformed being, in new relationship with the divine and with community. This construct continues to be a way to separate the limits of the physical body from the eternal potential of the spiritual body.

In our time, we are working with a renewed emphasis on God’s expansive love for all, and our urgent need to remember the holiness of creation. Perhaps we could think of being born of water and the Spirit in an expanded metaphor.

Two images come to mind. Recently, on Facebook, a meme was circulating of the world. It was a globe showing how the world appeared from the perspective of the centre of the Pacific Ocean. Almost no land could be seen. Then, in the series, “The Reluctant Traveller,” Eugene Levy visits Lapland where it takes the whole episode to get him into a freezing water dip. He had resisted this idea although his hosts tried to convince him it would bring him happiness. Eventually, he gets in the water and is able to relax into the joy of the experience. We often forget how much we are beings of water, from our evolutionary beginnings to the womb from which we are born. So we tend to think about water as external, although mostly we are made up of water. “…[T]he brain and heart are composed of 73% water, and the lungs are about 83% water. The skin contains 64% water, muscles and kidneys are 79%, and even the bones are watery: 31%.” (from “The Water in You: Water and the Human Body”)

My own experience in developing in faith has been to notice how instructive children are. One little girl explained to me that one could hear the Spirit as it rushed around buildings and see it in the crackle of electricity. As she said, “It’s everywhere when you pay attention!” Another little one said to me, “Can’t you feel it?!” There are many books written about meditation, but sometimes it seems that to me that the children carry a direct link to a reality we must cultivate as we age. 

From these naive responses to more sophisticated theology, we can know the creation and the Spirit are one in that we share in these expressions of the Divine with our bodies. The relevance of God to our lives depends on our willingness to “walk in the garden,” both as cognitive beings and as responsive life forms. Paul’s “great mystery” can be experienced but not defined or contained by human knowledge alone. Our knowledge changes as we learn, but the sense of oneness with the creation only deepens. Maybe instead of dreading the gate of death, we could prepare for a deep plunge into what we thought would be freezing water, but turns out to be the womb of new birth. I wonder if Laplanders would be amused to think of their land as a metaphor for eternal life.

Nicodemus’ question about being born again is a question about the deep plunge into reality as it resonates in the life of the cosmos. And that plunge will require commitment and bravery. Jesus models courage in the face of the unknown, willing to defy the temptations of power for compassion in relationship, willing to defy the punitive forces of politics for the integrity and solidarity of community.  For Christians, our reception of Spirit and water must be more than signs. It must be a way of life that seeks relationship, empathy, honesty, and openness to revelation, especially when we are anxious or fearful. We cannot be born again from our mothers’ wombs, but we must be born again and again in the wildness of the Spirit, in the cleansing, bracing waters of revelation, trusting in Jesus who shows us the way. 

Here is a poem “Taom” by irish poet Moya Cannon from her book Oar.

The unexpected tide,
the great wave,
uncontained, breasts the rock,
overwhelms the heart, in spring or winter.

Surfacing from a fading language,
the word comes when needed.
A dark sound surges and ebbs,
its accuracy steadying the heart.

Certain kernels of sound
reverberate like seasoned timber,
unmuted truths of a people’s winters
stirrings of a thousand different springs.

There are small unassailable words
that diminish caesars;
territories of the voice
that intimate across death and generation
how a secret was imparted –
when someone, in anguish
made a new and mortal sound
that lived until now,
a testimony 
to waves succumbed to 
and survived.

Category:

Faith, Lent, Spirit

Tagged with:

The Way is Relationship

(Lent 1, 2023)

A church where I was the rector used to create a week-long dramatic presentation for Holy Week, beginning with Palm Sunday. The children and young people were all involved. We would workshop the week ahead of time, discussing the themes and the actions of the narrative. Talking about Jesus’ trial and execution, one young fellow said, “I just don’t get it. Why didn’t Jesus run away?” 

What a great question and I begin every Lent asking why about a lot of what arises. For example, we piously applaud Jesus’ resistance to the temptations. But if he could have solved hunger, oppression, why would that have been so bad?

I want to reflect on two other stories too. In the garden, the snake convinces Eve to eat and share the fruit. Her eyes were indeed opened, and she did learn that evil and good exist; she also learned about mortality and body shame. She did not learn wisdom or discernment. And why was that tree in the garden anyway?

A favourite hymn is God sees The Little Sparrow Fall, based on Matthew 10:29, usually understood to underscore God’s special love for humanity. What we skip over, is that God does not save the sparrow, or us; God cares and knows us intimately, but we must walk our own paths all the same. 

So back to my young man. From the beginning, humanity has been trying to figure out why we are here. We would like it to be for grand schemes, but what if we are here to learn how to be in relationship.And being in relationship entails a series of choices, of commitments, of embarking on one path over another. Maybe choice is the critical issue. 

Maybe the story of Jesus’ temptation is not really about him, so much as answer to why not run, why not be a king, why not start a revolution. The temptation is a story of how just supplying the solutions does not help us to become wise or compassionate or honest. Those solutions are temporary and contingent. The way of Christ is a call to a deep conversion of the human spirit that makes political solutions shallow. Maybe Eve’s choice was in fact the test of whether or not we had the potential, the courage to risk, in order to become the companions of the Holy One. 

The problem with choice is that it requires uncertainty. If we know the outcome, there is no risk, and that means it is not really a choice. Choice means trusting in the moment, following a path with no guarantees. St. Paul reminds his church that for followers of Jesus, it is hope that guides us, not certainty. 

And finally, the little sparrow. I believe God loves the creation with all the passion of divine creativity, but we will not be saved from error, from suffering, from shame and fear. We have been given a special medicine though. We are following one who was so in touch with the Maker that he faced torture and death, trusting that God would use him for good, that his life had value and purpose. You will remember the Gethsemane story when Jesus considers his choice, when escape would have swept away all his work, all the trusting relationships.

In deep connection with God, he saw the only path that could lead his followers into a new humanity. In his choice, Jesus said that power without honesty, integrity, compassion, can only bring death. The way of life and abundance is a round table where the first and last cannot be distinguished. The way of life is relationship, not separating others into groups and categories. The way of life is weeping over the sparrow, the victims of war, the homeless frozen in the midst of plenty. The way of life is understanding that we are just beginning to be human and God will be with us as we leave the past behind like the ashes, blown by away by Spirit. 

And so we sit on the edge of the desert again, with our broken hearts and dreams, with our successes and our failures, and we offer them up to the One who wants to hold us tenderly, but not fix us or stop us. On this journey, we have companions: the sacred stories of other saints and sinners struggling along; we have each other, what needs to be safe community where there is room for error, where we share both suffering and rejoicing, And as we step into the desert without any certainty at all, we feel the Spirit of creativity stirring. And we look behind us at the ashes of our past becoming fertilizer for our new selves and relationships. 

Category:

Categorically Random, Lent, Relationship, Temptation