March 3, 2019

Cate Thorn

Ordinary 8     Isaiah 55:10-13     Luke 6:39-49

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Today’s gospel is a cascade of pithy sayings, about the danger of judging others, that our actions reveal what we most treasure About those who come to hear one they admire and the repercussion of acting in accord with what they hear – of the transformation, or otherwise, of the heart. They strike me as common wisdom sayings, extracted from the gospel context they’d still apply. They don’t seem to me to be particularly ‘religious’ more common sense guidelines.

When taken out of the religious purview, they’re simply reflections of that which is known to be true through life experience. The blind leading the blind is not a safe bet. If you’re inadequately self-reflective, brashly confident in correcting, quick to judge and condemn, for you lack understanding gained only through experience you do more harm than good. What you do, how you behave expresses what’s most important to you. If you wish to emulate someone you admire, cede authority to their way of being, you have to enact what you hear to test its value and sustainability.

What difference does a religious perspective make? If you do these things from a non-religious perspective it’s pretty straight forward – by what you do, you become. You determine, decide what you will choose to become, it offers both freedom and constraint, free to choose yet limited to your own imagination, or someone else’s persuasion.

However, these sayings are part of, are woven into the tapestry of a larger and longer, deeper and broader story, told out of landscapes and contexts in and through time often times unimaginable to us. Sayings permeated with wisdom, through time wisdom distilled, wisdom filtered through experience. Wisdom that intimates there’s more to this creation in which we dwell than our imagining, there’s more in us, to what we can become than our imagining. Though bound by we need not be bound to our limitations that constrain us.

Today’s gospel sayings are included in Luke’s telling of the Jesus story. They follow in wake of Luke’s beatitudes – uncomfortable to those of us who have, not words we like to hear even as they echo in us. They follow the directive to love our enemy, act for their good, turn the other cheek, subtle yet powerfully subversive actions come to change us, our self-understanding. Come to change the way we are in the world, change the world from the way it is – to make the aspirational, seemingly unrealistic ideal, real. As you do so what you do will be made real.

I wonder if the challenge and invitation, the call and insistence in all of this is for us to live the heart of the law, for our heart not just our head to be converted. For such words to move from our heads, from being a good idea to being the way we live, something has to give or we have to give up something. Is taking this seriously a literal requirement, like cutting off hands or tearing out eyes should we sin? I suspect not but I don't imagine either that these words were spoken as a clever passing of comment. Something’s required of us, not because living by faith has to be arduous undertaking, rather living this way engenders our flourishing and the flourishing of the world around us. How are we to move from these things being a safe ideological ideal in our intellect to their being an embedded, indwelt way of being within us?

Let me illustrate with an anecdote philosopher Slavoj Zizek is fond of telling: “There was a young man who met with a psychotherapist once a week for years because he was convinced that he was a seed. Eventually, after many years, he became convinced that he was really a human being. Thanking the therapist, he returned home happy.

However, two weeks later the therapist hears a loud banging on his door. When he opens it he sees the man back again, sweating and breathing heavily.

"You have to help me," says the man, "my next door neighbours recently bought chickens, and I am terrified that they are going to eat me."

"But surely you know now that you are a human being and not a seed," replies the therapist.

"I know that," he says, "but do the chickens know?

Faith narratives and the religions that evolve from such sources tell us we can be different, we can live differently, the world can be different. We can tell ourselves we do live differently, we are changed, until we come under unexpected pressure or through circumstance beyond our control our world’s upended. Then words of our faith and aspiration once inspirational and full of meaning can seem somehow empty, a faded memory of the way things used to be.They struggle to touch our need, reach in and meet us – as if they're words of privilege, distant from us, not words speaking to the gnarly guts of what our life is now.

Is it because they're words in our head, not our heart? For them to get anywhere near our heart maybe we have to let them go, let go of them trying to mean or be something we think’s important. Let go of what we think they mean, let them go so they can speak to us, reveal to us the truth they speak – for they speak of the way things are. And come to recognise them not because we think of it but because it is indeed our experience. The irony of it is that even if it may be desirable, in fact a recommended gospel prerogative to live differently, be oriented entirely differently I'm not sure it's something we can just decide to do by dint of our own will, even with the best will in the world. If we can't do such gospel imperative, change by our own will, discover in fact we act quite oppositely to our espoused beliefs what is left for us?

Perhaps Pooh Bear can help. In the story of Pooh Bear, Pooh Bear's first introduced this way "coming downstairs now bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it." Transformation of the heart may not be something in our power to effect but it doesn’t mean we cannot be changed. It may begin by being willing to accept that there is a disjunction between what we say we believe and what we do and to pay attention. If he stopped long enough Pooh Bear may have discovered another way to come downstairs. Scary as it may seem maybe we need to stop holding tight to the seed we imagine being faithful is. Seeds are for become flourishing plants. Perhaps we’re afraid for we're not sure what we’ll become if we stop being a seed of potential, what flourishing will make of us and who God released from our bondage will be. Maybe if we stop trying to make God as we need God to be long enough, we’ll discover God with us we miss each day.