Monday, December 31, 2012

LBJ AND THE INSCRUTABILITY OF THE LORD


12/30/12

I’m currently reading The Path to Power, the first installment of Robert A. Caro’s three part biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson.   Yes, I know; the book was written in 1981 and I am about 30 years behind in my pleasure reading.   However, I highly recommend the book, though I am not normally given to 800 pages of anything.    But I digress.

Besides being a riveting, and disconcerting, picture of one of the most fascinating political figures of my lifetime, the book reinforces for me a point I made in my 10/27/12 piece, YOU MEAN EVERYBODY GETS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN LIFE--FOR FREE?

 It seems that, from almost the moment of his birth, LBJ, or someone close to him, felt he was destined to be somebody really important.  On the day of his birth in 1908, LBJ’s grandfather saddled up his horse and rode through the surrounding farms and towns announcing that a future U.S. senator had been born.   When LBJ was 10 or 12 years old, Caro tells us, he would break into conversations of the older boys he liked to hang out with and tell everyone he was going to be president of the United States.   In 1940, when Mr. Johnson was only 32 years old and in his second term in the U.S. House, he as much as told two of his financial backers that his political ambitions transcended Congress…and Texas.

We all know the rest of the story:  LBJ, with what can only be called a superhuman work ethic and an ambition and ego that was far stronger, finally achieved his ultimate goal, by whatever means necessary, and wound up serving one of the most consequential, yet one of the most troubling and, in many ways, tragic, presidencies in our history.  He died a sad and broken man.

So what does this all have to do with the ideas expressed in my 10/27 post?   President Johnson devoted his whole life, and his considerable talents, to the single-minded purpose of becoming President of the United States.  He sacrificed a lot of things, and a lot of people, in that quest.   He got what he wanted…and it ruined him.

The most immediate reaction would be to question those things we think we need and want and to examine them in light of what God wants for us.   The old adage “Be careful what you wish for” surely applies in his case.   I have come to the conclusion that we should wish for nothing, or for very little, and instead just let God have His way with us.   I have no idea what I want or what I should do, and I‘m no kid.   I pray for knowledge of God’s will for me and the power to carry that out, but I’m not even sure the first part of that prayer is necessary; I don’t have to know what God’s will is for me…I just have to carry it out by seeking whatever guidance He sees fit to give me and the willingness and the ability to do the next right thing.   When I was young, I thought I knew what I wanted, at least in a general sense, and went after it with everything I had, albeit far less talent, intelligence, energy, and, yes, ruthlessness and amorality, than LBJ had in such abundance.   I never achieved those things that seemed to be the only things that mattered, and the pursuit of them had nearly horrific consequences.  I did, however, get far better gifts without any planning or contemplation; they just happened and I could have never in a million years planned or predicted them; I didn‘t even want many of them.  Perhaps Mr. Johnson, and the country and the world, would have been better off if he had similarly let God make his life decisions for him.

The second reaction to LBJ’s pursuit is a bit more esoteric and more directly related to my 10/27 post.   LBJ worked like hell to become president, and he did manage to become only the 36th man to achieve that lofty and seemingly impossible, from looking at the odds, goal.   And one supposes that being president would be a great achievement, a lofty goal, a towering position, and many more superlatives that are impossible to enumerate.  But…

All of you (Some might say “some of you,“ or “many of you,“ but I am quite comfortable with saying “all of you,“ but, again, I digress.) reading this will achieve a goal, a position, or a place, far greater than the presidency of the United States:  We will all be with God in heaven and that will be an immeasurably better place, a more sublime goal, than being president of the United States.  There won’t be only 44 of us who achieve this goal, and it will take nothing like the effort that LBJ, or any man who held the office he so craved, dedicated to achieving what is, by comparison, a quite insignificant perch.   Indeed, we will “achieve” this goal through no achievement of our own; we will win our place with God through faith in Him and in His Son.   Simple, really.

That we can achieve so much, indeed the most important thing we can achieve or can imagine, with so much less effort than was expended by those who sought what is in comparison quite an insignificant position offends our human sense of fairness.   We bust our hindquarters for the things that we think are really important, even if not as important as being the most powerful person on earth, and yet we get the most important thing for free.  It just doesn’t seem right.   But then our ways are not His ways.  And we will never fully understand His ways until we join Him for eternity in heaven…if then.

Friday, December 21, 2012

“THEY SAY THIS CAT PAUL IS A BAD….SHUT YOUR MOUTH…BUT I’M TALKIN’ ABOUT PAUL!”

12/21/12



The Apostle Paul was one tough son of a, er, gun. He may not have always been the nicest guy in the group, and certainly was not the most agreeable, but he was the veritable Dick the Bruiser of the Apostles. This is completely understandable; he had a very tough job: to travel the world to often hostile lands to preach the gospel to people who often were not receptive and who could express that lack of receptivity in some of the cruelly enthusiastic, to say the least, methods of the time. Further, in these travels, he had to contend with people who, like he, were Pharisees, and thus who would like nothing more than to shut him up by any means possible. This was not a job for the lily-livered.





The story that most exemplifies the toughness of Paul is one that is often glazed over in a quick, or even not so quick, read of the Acts of the Apostles.



Paul is on his first missionary journey with his pal Barnabas. He starts in Antioch, a city in which he was already spent some time and the city in which the followers of Jesus were first called “Christians.” (Acts 11, 26) He does pretty well with the people of Antioch, and especially the Gentiles of the town. (Acts 13, 48) But then his former buddies, the Pharisees showed up and “stirred up a persecution against Paul and Barnabas,” forcing the pair to vamoose before they get stoned, and not in the way we in the modern world interpret that verb.



Paul and Barnabas move on to Iconium with the same results. The Pharisees (“the unbelieving Jews,” Acts 14, 2, the term Paul (and John and Luke) uses for the Jewish religious authorities, not the Jewish people in general) are on his tail and again “stirred up the Gentiles” and Paul and Barnabas make a quick exit before the rocks come out.



The duo end up in Lystra, where Paul cures a lame man (Acts 14, 8-10), which really wins the people over, though not in a way Paul would have preferred. He has to persuade the people that he is not Hermes and that Barnabas is not Zeus (Acts 14, 11-18). Once he convinces the Lystrans that he is, like them, only a man, who shows up again but the Pharisees? They once again manage to stir up the crowd, and this time Paul doesn’t escape and is stoned. The Lystrans drag him out of the city and leave him for dead. Paul’s disciples gather around him and, lo and behold, he isn’t dead. That is remarkable enough and is usually the part in the story when readers zone out. But the next sentence (Acts 14, 20) is even more astonishing.



But when the disciples gathered around him, he got up and entered the city.”



So Paul goes to Lystra, gets stoned, and is left for dead. When he recovers, he doesn’t do what you and I would have done, i.e., get the he(ck) out of there. He goes right back into the city the residents of which had just stoned him! Maybe he’s a little touched, but he’s definitely tough…and fearless.



After Paul and Barnabas leave Lystra, they head to Derbe and then, in a passage people mostly gloss over, head back to Antioch via Lystra and Iconium. (Acts 14, 21) So he goes back to each city in which the people just a little while before had been preparing to line rocks in his direction.



The man was a glutton for punishment, one supposes. But Paul’s hunger for doing the Lord’s will transcended what most people, in both the modern and ancient worlds, would consider his craziness. Thank God Paul was a tough, stubborn, and perhaps a little crazy, man.

Sunday, December 9, 2012

I WANT TO DO WHAT MY ABBA WANTS…or I HAVE TO DO THIS OR GOD WILL SEND ME TO HELL…?

12/9/12




We know generally what God wants of us; He wants us to have faith in Him (and in His Son, if we are Christians), live a life, in accordance with His will, reflective of that faith, and thus to share eternity with Him, our Abba (Galatians, 4, 6), or Papa.



It’s harder to know specifically what God wants of us (See my 11/27/12 post, THE WEDDING FEAST AT CANA: A WHOLE LOT OF PARTYING GOING ON…AND MARY’S COMMAND FOR THE AGES), especially with all the people, many of them poseurs, who purport to speak for God. But I suspect that one thing God wants is to be loved volitionally rather than out of a sense of obligation; i.e., He wants us to be so in love with Him that we want to be with Him and serve Him. He doesn’t want us to love and serve Him and spend time with Him because we are afraid we will go to hell if we don’t. He wants to be Daddy, not some kind of celestial drill sergeant.



Anybody who has been deeply in love and/or who is a parent knows this feeling. Who wants his lover, or his children, to love him out of fear or obligation? Neither does God.

“OH, YOU’RE A CATHOLIC BOY? YOU CAN’T COME.”

12/9/12




Both Matthew 15, 21-28 and Mark 7, 24-30 recount a troubling tale of Jesus’ treatment of a Gentile woman.



According to Mark, a woman who “was a Greek, a Syrophoenician by birth” (Mark 7, 26. In Matthew’s account, she is a “Canaanite woman” (Matthew 15, 22). The term “Greek” was often used at the time in the Holy Land to denote any Gentile. Hence, if I or you had been alive at the time, we would have been “Greek” even if our names were Quinn, Kruszewski, Patrello, of Fernholz, but I digress.) begged Jesus to expel the unclean spirit that had possessed her daughter. Jesus, knowing that the woman was not a Jew, replies in a way most of us find stunning:



Let the children be fed first. For it is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs.” (Mark, 7, 27)



Jesus is calling Gentiles dogs!



The story has a happy ending. The woman, who must have been quite a pistol, replies



Lord, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s scraps.” (Mark 7, 28)



and Jesus replies



For saying this, you may go. The demon has gone out of your daughter.” (Mark 7, 29)



and Mark further reports



When the woman went home, she found the child lying in bed and the demon gone. (Mark 7, 30)



But despite the happy ending, we come away asking how Jesus could be so callous to this woman who was begging His help.



I’ve heard several explanations, but they are all lame. One… “culture”…is especially unsatisfying. After years of prayer and thought on this, I have come up with a better explanation.



In this passage, Jesus is acting so clearly cold, cruel, and contrary to Himself in order to show us how cold, cruel, and contrary to Him we are, and how ridiculous we sound, when we exclude people from access to Him, actually or in our minds, because they are different from us. How do you think some of us Catholics sound when we speak of “the one true Church” and hint, if not proclaim (contrary, by the way, to the doctrine of our Church, at least for now), that salvation can only come through the Catholic Church? How do you think some Protestants sound when they say that we “papist” and “idol worshipping” Catholics can’t achieve salvation? How do all of us Christians sound when we argue, in line with or contrary to the doctrines of our branch of Christianity that non-Christians cannot enter into eternal happiness with God? (See my 11/14/12 post YOU MEAN NON-CHRISTIANS DON’T GET TO COME TO HEAVEN?) That’s right; we sound like Jesus sounded when he told the Gentile woman who begged for His mercy (There was no need to beg, by the way; Jesus doesn’t want us begging for anything from Him; see my 12/4/12 post, “HEY, GOD…DO YOU SUPPOSE WE CAN WORK OUT A DEAL?”)…cold, cruel, and contrary to His very nature, a nature He so much wants us to share.



So do you think Jesus sounds uncaring, mean, and cruel in Mark 7, 24-30 and Matthew 15, 21-28? I do. And He knows He sounds uncaring, mean, and cruel. But He does so because He wants us to realize how we sound, and how much we hurt Him, when we presume to say something like



You can’t have (eternal life, friendship with God, admittance to our church, partnership in our community) because you’re not (Catholic, Protestant, Christian, Jew, Muslim).





Tuesday, December 4, 2012

“HEY, GOD…DO YOU SUPPOSE WE CAN WORK OUT A DEAL?”

12/4/12




As I said in my last post, THE WEDDING FEAST AT CANA: A WHOLE LOT OF PARTYING GOING ON…AND MARY’S COMMAND FOR THE AGES, John’s gospel is dense, with multiple meanings and multiple layers of those meanings for virtually every passage. But within one of the most complex passages can be found one of the few simple statements in that gospel.



John 3, 31-36 is a brief reflection on Jesus’ divine nature, delivered immediately after a passage about John the Baptist’s proclaiming that



He (Jesus) must increase; I must decrease.” (John 3, 35)



(Note, by the way, that we do not know who the speaker is of 31-36. Is it John the Baptist? John the evangelist? Or is it Jesus? We don’t know, but we suspect it is the evangelist reflecting on what he has just reported, as happens so often in this gospel.)



The reflections of 3, 31-36 are there for at least two reasons, as is everything else in John. One of those reasons is to reinforce the point that it is Jesus whom the early Christians must follow, not John the Baptist. Following John the Baptist is, of course, beneficial because it will lead us to Jesus, but John’s purpose is indeed to lead us to Jesus. This was quite the controversy in the earliest days of the Church; many of John’s followers clung to their loyalties and were hesitant to follow Jesus, thinking that doing so was somehow an abrogation of their fealty to John. John and Jesus were, in many people’s minds, rivals rather than the partners in salvation that they actually were.



The second reason for John 3, 31-36 is to yet again reinforce the major thrust of John’s gospel; i.e., that Jesus is indeed divine, that He is the son of God and that He is God.

Buried within this passage is verse 34, which could easily be glazed over:



For the one whom God sent speaks the word of God. He does not ration his gift of the Spirit.” John 3, 34, emphasis mine



It is the second portion that is especially germane: God does not ration his gift of the Spirit.



We tend to think of God in human terms…



“If I do this, will you do that?”



“I promise to do this if you give me what I ask.”



“Don’t give this to me; give it to someone who needs it more than I do.” (or maybe the opposite: “Don’t give that to that guy; give it to me”!)



“Don’t inflict this trial on my children (or friends or spouse); inflict it on me.”



But, while God, in the Person of Jesus, did indeed share our humanity, He is also divine. He doesn’t think like us and He knows no limits. He has and gives abundantly of everything, and especially of the Spirit. “He does not ration the gift of the Spirit.” The only limitation of the gifts of God, and especially of the Spirit, is our willingness to accept them, to believe, if you will, that God is so good and so powerful that He wants to and indeed can deliver to us immeasurable quantities of the Spirit if only we will accept those gifts.



This is indeed a formidable limitation, given our human frailties, suspicions, and limitations. But it is a limitation imposed by us, not by God.