20090222 Gravity and Love

20090222  Gravity and Love

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1 Corinthians 8:8 - 9:2

St. Matthre 25: 31-46

Gravity and the Consequences of Poor Decisions

The better we understand the world, the more effectively we function in it.  Part of the duty of parents and teachers and of the broader community that supports them is to help children and youth learn about how things work so that they grow up to become productive and healthy members of the community.  If we neglect this duty, they will learn many more lessons than needed “the hard way” and will suffer as a result.  We do not want to see our children suffer, so we teach them as best we can.  God is our Loving Father, and He desires the same for us: that we grow in understanding so that we can become productive and healthy members of the Community of Love that is in Him.

One of the most fundamental things that must be learned, both by children if they are to grow into good men and women and by all of us if we are to grow into saints, is that ACTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES.   More specifically, we must learn that good decisions have positive consequences, and that bad decisions have negative consequences.  With children, we set up a series of punishments and rewards to teach them this fundamental truth.  These systems are largely artificial: there is no eternal connection between going to the potty and eating candy; or of finishing homework and playing video games; or of throwing a fit and loosing access to entertainment.  As adults, we set up these artificial systems to prepare children for the “real world” where the consequences of poor decisions are more brutal and damaging; and where the unyielding logic of “action and consequence” are often final.  

Our family rules may be somewhat arbitrary, but there is nothing arbitrary about the way most of the real world works.  And if you do not understand how the world works, you will get hurt and you will end up hurting the people around you, even the people you love.  We have to learn how the world works. 

Take the example of gravity: it is part of the way the world works.  We can say that there are “laws of gravity”, but that is just a figure of speech.  There is no Court of Gravity; no lawyer that will plead your case when you violate it; and no judge that will consider the merit of granting you mercy for extenuating circumstances.  When we say that there are “laws of gravity” it is just another way of saying that gravity works in such and such a way; that things fall when dropped, that the speed of the drop increases with distance, and so on.  Gravity works a certain way.  We have to learn it, we have to respect it, and we have to order our lives accordingly if we want to be healthy.  Actions have consequences.  Making decisions that are in accordance with the “laws of gravity” will have positive consequences; making decisions that ignore the “laws of gravity” will have negative consequences.  That is just how the world is. [Note that I say “ignore” rather than “break” the “laws of gravity” because you cannot actually “break” the laws of gravity… they are not that kind of law.] 

The study of Physics provides many such obvious examples, but the wise man realizes that there is an order to every aspect of life, and that everyone must learn of and live according to this order if they are to thrive.   Actions have consequences; if you don’t submit your plans and decisions to the way the world works, the consequences will be harmful.  Let me give some more examples from other scientific disciplines.

In economics, if you produce more of something than people want, or price it too high you will end up with extra product on your hands.  If you don’t produce enough or if you price your goods too low, you will run out of product too early.  You can call this the “law of supply and demand”, but as with the “law of gravity”, this is just shorthand: there is no economic court.  But just as in physics, if you act as if there was no order to economics, then you will hurt yourself and those around you.  You cannot pay bills from an empty account.  As with gravity, we can pretend economic reality is subjective; but not even the government can sustain such a fantasy for long.  All actions have consequences.

In biology, your body is made to function a certain way.  If you interfere with these functions, you will suffer.  For example, if you consume more calories than you burn, you will gain weight.  If you gain too much weight, then systems within your body will begin to break down.  Your body requires constant care; if you violate this “law”, you will suffer the consequences.

In sociology, there is a fundamental logic to relationships and the way they work.   If you want to sustain a relationship, then you have to understand and act in accordance to this logic.  Again, you can study this and develop “laws of marriage” just like scientists have developed the “law of gravity” and the “law of supply and demand”; but all you are really saying is that actions have consequences; and that just as a dropped ball falls, if you engage in things like pornography, gossip, extramarital flirtation, adultery, leaving the seat up, nagging, refusing to communicate, laziness, pre-marital sex, and so on, then your relationship with your spouse will suffer.  We can pretend that the “laws of marriage” are subjective; we can pretend as if we can change them or opt out of them; but the underlying reality they describe cannot be changed and the dreadful consequences of such insanity are inevitable.  [Of course there are “Marriage Courts”, but while a judge can grant a divorce or recognize a marriage, she cannot undo the years of cumulative damage done by ignorant, mean, or unbalanced people do to themselves and their spouses.]

The Logic of the Spiritual World

The spiritual world is inseparable from the physical world, and it, too, has an underlying logic that cannot be ignored.  In the spiritual world, actions have consequences just like they do in the world we see with our eyes.  Today, God is trying to teach us, His children, a little bit more about this world and how it works.

Today the Apostle Paul uses the example of violating kosher to teach us that we must always consider how our actions affect those weaker than ourselves; and that if we don’t then we will do damage to them and ourselves.   He teaches us that the strong must make allowances for the weak; and that we can often do more good through humble, generous, and loving condescension than we can by an unyielding example or even a gentle word of correction. 

Christ Himself uses the Final Judgment to teach about the underlying logic of charity:  we learn that just as gravity rewards the dropped ball by pulling it to the earth; God rewards charity and love by pulling charitable and loving people closer to Him.  We learn that just as those who deny gravity will be punished with broken bones and the like; those who deny charity will also suffer the very real and inevitable consequences of their willful ignorance.

Love is the most fundamental reality there is.  Even the effects of gravity are relative: they diminish as you distance yourself from the Earth; and there are places in this world (such as in space) where dropped objects do not fall.  But there is no place that Love does not reach, and there is no way to avoid its logic.  You can deny it and pretend it does not exist; you can ignore the beggar; you can refuse to share your life and your goods with others; you can convince yourself that you are good just the way you are.  But all these things are foolish because they ignore the logic of love.  You can describe this situation in many ways.  You can say hatred, selfishness, and apathy violate the “Laws of God”; you can call God the Judge that enforces His Laws; You can say that He punishes those who refuse to love others; you can even step away from theology and use labels like “immoral”, “sinful”, or mean” to describe such hard-heartedness; but all these things are just ways of saying the same thing:

Actions have consequences.  

Brothers and sisters: live your life in love.  Give generously to the poor.  Sacrifice yourself and your pride for the person beside you.  God built the world around Love.  Live according to this Love, and the consequential blessings will be both real and eternal.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

PS  It is true that we get no lawyers when we break the laws of gravity, economics, biology, & sociology, but we do get one when we break the Law of Love:  Christ-God Himself (e.g. 1 John 2:1)!  

PPS  Approaching the question of judgment in this way shows just how shallow attacks on the morality of it are:  First, would we prefer a world based on something other than charity and love (e.g. “tooth and claw”)?  Second, (and forgive my simplicity) God has given us an automatic “get out of jail free” card in the form of His Son, if we just submit to Him and the power of His sacrificial love.  Third, those who live outside of Love and reject Christ’s offer to represent them get an eternity of exactly what they wanted - a life apart from the Love they did not want.  The last may sound harsh, but what could be more moral?!

20090208 Publican and the Pharisee

20090208  Publican and the Pharisee

1. 1 Timothy 3: 10-15 
   

2. St. Luke 18: 10-14 
   

Scientific Support for Humility:  

in this parable, God describes how humility is blessed and how pride is not.

Before I was a priest, I was a social scientist.  I love comparisons.  Scientists use comparisons to isolate the effects of the variables they are interested in.  For example, if you want to know what the effect of sleep deprivation is on intellectual performance, you have two groups of similar subjects take the very same exam; but you let one group get a good night’s sleep the night before, while forcing the other to stay up most of the night.  Then you compare how well they did on the exam.  Because nothing else was allowed to vary, the difference in performance is ascribed to sleep [FWIW, this kind of study has conclusively shown that sleep improves performance on tests, and that a lack of sleep leads to lower grades.  This despite a college culture that encourages cramming!].  

The kind of work that I did as a social scientist and intelligence analyst was a bit messier because I could not run controlled experiments to isolate the effects of each variable.  For example, if I wanted to understand the effect of theology on the Taliban insurgency, I could not run i he insurgency twice; once with radical Islam and the next without.  Rather, I would have to compare radical Islamist insurgencies with ones that used other religions and ideologies; trying to find the kinds of cases that allowed me to draw out the independent effect of religion.  While this kind of work is important, it is messy and full of nuance.  And frankly, after a while, the ambiguity gave me a bit of a headache.

Which is why I am so thankful that God gave us such a clear comparison in the parable of the Publican and the Pharisee.  He tells us of two men, describes what it is that makes them different, and how those differences lead them to different outcomes.  Scientifically speaking, there is nothing clearer.

•The Pharisee exalted himself and received no grace (i.e. he was not “justified”)

•The Publican humbled himself and received grace (i.e. he was “justified” and “exalted”)

The Lord is teaching us in no uncertain terms that if we want to receive grace  (if we want to be exalted), then we must humble ourselves and repent.  (“God be merciful to me a sinner”).  The publican in this parable  is like Zacchaeus in last week’s Gospel, and like Matthew before him: they lived sinful lives but repented of these sins.  The Pharisee judges and mocks the publican and his encounter with Our Lord, just as the onlookers mocked Zaccheaus and Matthew in their encounters with Christ.  The Pharisee thought that his deeds; his righteous fasting, tithing, and obedience to the Law; would raise Him up to the presence of God.  It did not: it only increased the gulf between them [i.e. him and God].  He thought that the publican’s sin would completely remove the publican from holiness; and he was right.  This is what sin does.  But what he was blind to was how the publican’s repentance and humility allowed God to reach down to and into the publican and raise him up to glory (i.e. “exalt” him).

Do you remember the history of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11: 4-9)?  Men thought that their skills would allow them to reach God.  This is impossible and spiritually harmful (which is another way of saying; “sinful”).  God attempted to teach men humility by confusing their tongues; but the lesson did not stick.  Like these men, and like the Pharisee in the parable, we still act as if we were “good enough” on our own.  That we have plenty to be proud of, that we have no real sins to hold us back, that humility and repentance are for real sins; sins like “extortion”, “adultery”, murder, and the like.  If we continue acting this way after hearing this Gospel, then we do so only out of hard-headedness and pride; because God couldn’t be clearer.  [FWIW, the architecture of our churches reinforce this lesson: we do not build towers in an attempt to reach God; we build domes that describe how God reaches down to us, and make them beautiful to show how this unites us with heaven].

We must develop habits of humility and repentance.  Even though you believe it with all our heart, the logic of the Gospel may not be enough to move you in this direction. All the disciplines of Orthodoxy are designed to make us spiritually less like the Pharisee and more like the Publican, but let me pull out two examples of  Orthodox spiritual disciplines that, if followed, will help us become better, more humble, people:

•Prayer.  Make the Morning and Evening prayers in your Prayer Book part of your life.  The lessons they teach will, over years of repetition, make repentance and humility seem natural. Read or listen to the Prayers before Communion on Sunday morning as you prepare to come to Divine Liturgy.  These, too, are excellent teachers.  Augment these with the regular recitation of the full version of the publican’s prayer; “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner” (Jesus Prayer).  A disciplined Orthodox prayer life will do wonders for your sanity and your spirituality. 

•Love one another.  God exhibited His great love for us by humbling Himself to our level; by focusing His salvific attention on each and every one of us; and by dying on the Cross to atone for the sins of every single one of us.  It is rare that we are given the opportunity to actually suffer and die to save someone; but every day you have the opportunity to what Christ did: love the person standing before you.  This requires real humility. This person may not deserve your attention in any objective sense; in fact, he may be petty, or slow of speech, or offensive, or simply irrelevant and incoherent.  But love him despite his nonsense the way Christ loves you despite yours.  While he is before you, make him the center of your world, the focus of your attention, the object of your love; and his reception of this love the goal of your interaction.  This will not only teach you humility, it will make you a powerful instrument for spreading peace and salvation.  And you can work on this even while you are along: praying for individual persons is wonderful way to reinforce this habit.

Let me conclude with a paradox: humility will make you more confident.  Humility will give you the backbone to be strong.  Humility will remove all fear and anxiety from your life.  Christ Himself was humble, and He was no pushover.  The humble man is able to perform every good deed without hesitation or remorse; to love without fear of pain or reprisal; and to enjoy the constant reassurance of God’s grace.  

As St. Paul taught (Philippians 2: 3-11):

Let nothing be done through selfish ambition or conceit, but in lowliness of mind let each esteem others better than himself.  Let each of you look out not only for his own interests, but also for the interests of others. Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be [proud of], but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and born in the likeness of men.  And being found in human form, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross.  Therefore God also has highly exalted Him and given Him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those in heaven, and of those on earth, and of those under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Let us imitate Christ in His humility; let us imitate Christ in His love; so that we too, might follow Him to Glory.  In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

20090201 Zacchaeus Sunday

20090201  Zacchaeus Sunday

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1 Timothy 4: 9-15 
St. Luke 19: 1-10 

Zacchaeus was a wee little man...

Today’s Gospel is about how a real sinner found salvation through his encounter with Christ.  Jesus’ healing and teaching ministry attracted a crowd as he traveled.  One person that it attracted was Zaccheaus.  He was attracted by more than simple curiosity.  He was not out for entertainment or a spiritual fix.  Nor was he trying to impress anyone.  He was a sinner looking for salvation, and he found it and a better life in the God-man Jesus Christ.

I want to make sure you understand his condition.  Zacchaeus was a tax collector.  A “publican”. He collected taxes for the imperial pagan army that had enslaved his people (the Jews).  We are all familiar with “taxation without representation”.   We abhor it and everyone who facilitates it.  Zacchaeus was the Jewish equivalent of the American “duty-men” who were universally reviled here in America during Colonial times.  I have never read of the Jews tar-and-feathering anyone in Jericho like our ancestors here did, but the antipathy towards injustice was the same.  In fact, it may have been worse than the colonials felt: Zacchaeus got rich by taking even more in taxes than the Romans demanded and keeping the extra for himself.  You can bet that the other Jews reviled him and his wicked manner of life.  He was a pariah: greedy, traitorous, and sinful.

So perhaps now you can see why people were upset that Our Lord stopped and offered to bless Zacchaeus and his home; and when Jesus actually went into his house as guest.  As the Gospel says; “And when they saw it, they all murmured, saying, that he was gone to be guest with a man that is a sinner.”  Do you share their enmity?

Pious Jews did not eat with sinners lest they also be defiled by their sin.  The home of someone like Zacceaus, whose sin was so awful and so public, would have also been seen as an unclean place.  It would have been like dining with lepers.  They did not understand that Jesus could not be defiled by anyone’s sin, or contaminated by being within a cursed place.  The prayer the priest shares during the blessing of homes (a prayer which many of you have recently heard) describes what happens when Christ enters a sinner’s home: 

O God our Savior, the True Light, Who was baptized in the Jordan by the Prophet John, and Who did deign to enter under the roof-tree of Zacchaeus, bringing salvation unto him and unto his house: do You, the same Lord, keep safe also from harm those who dwell herein; grant to them Your blessing, purification and bodily health, and all their petitions that are unto salvation and Life everlasting; for blessed are You, as also Your Father Who is from everlasting, and Your All; Holy, Good and Life; creating Spirit, both now and ever, and to the ages of ages. Amen. 

Far from being cursed, Jesus changes things by his very presence.  His blessing cuts through the deepest stains.  But the onlooking Jews did not trust in the blessing of the God-man.  Their only reaction was visceral: they hated Zaccheaus and his sin and could not stand the idea that Jesus would spend time with him.  No doubt, it undermined their faith in Christ.  They would need to look elsewhere for a messiah: in their eyes, Jesus had been compromised.  

Jesus’ message of forgiveness was radical; designed to restore community to Himself as God, and through this; restore community among all God-fearing people.  It must have been hard for the Jewish community to even think of admitting Zacchaeus back into their lives.  Not only had he done enormous damage on his own, they themselves had done nothing wrong.  In fact, they must have wondered why Jesus did not dine with them!  Why should Jesus go to so much trouble as to eat with a sinner when he could have joined with others who were like Him in their holiness?

Christ had responded to such criticism earlier while eating with sinners at the home of another tax collector, the apostle Matthew, so we have His response to this question “on the record”:

As Jesus passed on from there, He saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax office. And He said to him, “Follow Me.” So he arose and followed Him.  Now it happened, as Jesus sat at the table in the house, that behold, many tax collectors and sinners came and sat down with Him and His disciples.  And when the Pharisees saw it, they said to His disciples, “Why does your Teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?”  When Jesus heard that, He said to them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.  But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice.’ For I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.”

Like Zaccheaus, I am a sinner.  Last week I described the temptations that I wrestle with.  God does not bless my sinfulness: he calls me to repentance.  He did not bless Zaccheaus’ sinfulness: he called Him to repent and change.  Christ is so perfect, so holy, that you cannot be in His presence and remain unaffected. There may be some who need only bask in His glow [we will hear of them next week when we speak of the “Publican and the Pharisee”]; but for the rest of us, remaining in His Light requires constant repentance and growth.  For the rest of us, self-satisfaction would require turning our backs on Him, turning our backs on happiness, turning our backs on community, and embracing an eternity of the sin that comes so easy to us.  It is obvious that sinners do not deserve to have the Lord come into our homes (e.g. “beneath the roof of the temple of our souls” (Communion prayer)); that we do not deserve to come and eat the Mystical Food and Drink He so lovingly offers and shares with us; and that we certainly do not deserve the mansion He has prepared for us in glory.  

We deserve none of this, but I hope that no one is offended by that offers it to us.  More so, I hope that no one is offended if we actually accept his mercy.  While we can never earn the love He has freely given, we do “repent sincerely” and “promise that, with the help of God, we will better our lives” (from the prayer after confession).  Like Zaccheaus, we promise that we will make amends.  He gave half of all he had to the poor; and to give those he cheated four-times what he stole.  We offer nothing less than our lives.    

All of us are sinners.  All of us fall short of the glory of God.  But God is merciful and desires our salvation; it is for this reason that He offered up His Son, Jesus Christ; it is for this reason that He gave us His Church.  Acknowledge your sins and repent.  Accept forgiveness for your sins, and allow the Lord to bless and better your life.  Then, having done this, rejoice and bring others to the same.  This may cause you to sit down with sinners, but you will feast with saints.