Walter Wink on Christ's Humanity

"And this is the revelation: God is HUMAN... It is the great error of humanity to believe that it is human. We are only fragmentarily human, fleetingly human, brokenly human. We see glimpses of our humanness, we can on;y dream of what a more human existence and political order would be like, but we have not yet arrived at true humanness. Only God is human, and we are made in God's image and likeness - which is to say, we are capable of becoming human."

Walter Wink, Just Jesus, p. 102.

To put it another way, Jesus alone is Human Being. We are, together, Human Becoming more than Human Being.

Empathy as a Component of a Larger Paradox within Traditional Psychology

"Is it not paradoxical that no traditional psychology up to the present day has been able to give even a true exposition of perception, or even the special type, the perception of bodies, or of memory, of expectation, of 'empathy,' or of any other manner of presentification; or an intentional, essential description of judgment, or of any other class-type of acts, or an intentional clarification of the synthesis of agreement and discrepancy (in their different modalities)?"

Husserl, Crisis, p. 249.

Husserl and Empathy in Crisis

"Through the empathy of his original sphere of consciousness, through what arises out of it, as a component which is never lacking, he also already has a universal intersubjective horizon, even though he may not notice it at first."

Husserl, Crisis, 243.

"What remains now, is not a multiplicity of separated souls, each reduced to its pure interiority, but rather" just as there is a sole universal nature as a self-enclosed framework of unity, so there is a sole psychic framework, a total framework of all souls, which are united not externally but internally, namely, through the intentional interpenetration which is the communalization of their lives. Each soul, reduced to its pure interiority, has its being-for-itself and its being-in-itself, has its life which is originally its own. And yet it belongs to each soul that it have its particular world-consciousness in a way which is originally its own, namely, through the fact that it has empathy experiences, experiencing consciousness of others as [also] having a world, the same world, that is, each apperceiving it in his own apperceptions."

Husserl, Crisis, 255.

"During the time in which I am a transcendental or pure phenomenologist, I am exclusively within transcendental self-consciousness, and I am my own subject matter... Here there is no objectivity at all; here there are objectivity, things, world, and world-science (including, then, all positive sciences and philosophies), only as my - the transcendental ego's - phenomena. All the ontic validities that I may perform and wish to perform as a transcendental investigator are related to myself; but this also includes the actual and possible 'empathies,' perceptions of others, that appear among my original intentions. Through the reduction [others] are transformed from human beings existing for me into alter egos existing for me, having the ontic meaning of implicata of my original intentional life. And the reverse also holds: I, with my whole original life, am implied in them; and they are all likewise implied in one another."

Husserl, Crisis, p. 258.

"We are thereby conscious of the men on our external horizon in each case as 'others'; in each case 'I' am conscious of them as 'my' others, as those with whom I can enter into actual and potential, immediate and mediate relations of empathy; [this involves] a reciprocal 'getting along' with others; and on the basis of these relations I can deal with them, enter into particular modes of community with them, and then know, in a habitual way, of my being so related."

Husserl, "The Origin of Geometry" in Crisis, p. 358.

The three-course development of Empathy

"Appresentation as such presupposes a core of presentation. it is a presentification combined by association with presentation, with perception proper, but a presentification that is fused with the latter in the particular function of 'co-perception'. In other words, the two are so fused that they stand within the functional community of one perception, which simultaneously presents and appresents, and yet furnishes for the total a consciousness of its being itself there."

Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), p. 150.

Husserl, Empathy, and Objectivity

"As we know, the ultimate effect of empathy is that universal superaddition of sense whereby my primordial 'world' becomes a truly objective world that transcends my sphere of ownness."

A.D. Smith, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Husserl and the Cartesian Meditations (New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 226.

"Yet, even with this, we still have not gone beyond the subject and his subjective, evident capacities; that is, we still have no 'objectivity' given. It does arise, however - in a preliminary stage - in understandable fashion as soon as we take into consideration the function of empathy and fellow mankind as a community of empathy and language. In the contact of reciprocal linguistic understanding, the original production and the product of one subject can be actively understood by others."

Husserl, "The Origin of Geometry" in Crisis, p. 360.

Empathy, Husserl, and the 5th Meditation

"So our initial concern will be with his account of how another self is even thinkable. Or rather, since all thought is a high-level, founded, cognitive accomplishment, which implicitly refers to first-hand experience, the real question is how another self can be at least putatively experienced. How can an object of my experience even so much as appear as another subject, whether veridically or not? Husserl commonly employs the term 'empathy' for this (putative) experiential awareness of another subject... he is not trying to explain our awareness of others by appeal to empathy: the term is but a label for the accomplishment. So, a substantial part of the present meditation is concerned to explain how empathy is possible as an intentional achievement."


A.D. Smith, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Husserl and the Cartesian Meditations (New York: Routledge, 2010), p.213.

Husserl, Leibniz, and Empathy

"The enormous agreement between the two is only underlined by Husserl's one insistent departure from Leibniz: monads 'have windows' (e.g., Int. II, 260), the windows being those of 'empathy'... monads communicate with each another."

A.D. Smith, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Husserl and the Cartesian Meditations (New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 201.

Husserl on the Recollected Self

"Self-temporalization through depresentation, so to speak (through recollection), has its analogue in my self-alienation (empathy as a depresentation of a higher of a higher level - depresentation of my primal presence into merely presentified primal presence). Thus, in me, 'another I' achieves ontic validity as co-present with his own ways of being self-evidently verified, which are obviously quite different from those of a 'sense'-perception."

Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 185.

"This idea is that the self in recollection has to unify itself with the earlier recollected self... two main implications. On the one hand, it is, for Husserl, the primal ego which in its self-temporalizing constitutes the full, transcendental ego. Secondly, this self-temporalization of the ego allows the ego to posit variations of itself, and this plays a role in the constitution of other egos."

Dermot Moran, Husserl's Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 255.

Husserl and Intersubjectivity

"For Husserl, intersubjectivity is not some relation, within the world, that is to be observed from the outside; it is not something transcendent to consciousness, or some sort of system or structure in which consciousness would be found... The very opposite is the case: intersubjectivity is a relation between me and the other or others, and correspondingly, its treatment and analysis must necessarily take the I's relation to others as its point of departure."

Dan Zahavi, Husserl and Transcendental Intersubjectivity, trans. Elizabeth A. Behnke (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2001) p. 79.

"intersubjectivity has to be understood transcendentally in terms of the ego having its other, its 'you', its 'we'. There can be no 'you' or 'we' except from the standpoint of an ego, and this gives the ego a certain primacy... There is an egoic core to the self which is essential to it at a level prior to intersubjective engagement."

Dermot Moran, Husserl's Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 253-254.

Husserl's Epochē and the 'Split Ego'

"According to this splitting, the mediating self leads a double life. On the one hand, the ego continues to live naturally, absorbed in the temporal course of everyday life with its ontological commitments and positings, and yet, at the same time, the ego becomes aware of itself as the functioning of world-constituting subjectivity within the natural life and adopts the position of a disinterested onlooker of its own life with inevitable change in the manner in which it lives temporality. As Husserl puts it elsewhere: 'First the transcendental epochē and reduction release transcendental subjectivity from its self-concealment and raise it up to a new position, that of transcendental self-consciousness' (Hua XXXIV 399, my translation). The inevitable result is that natural worldly life is lived in a new register, aware of the transcendental operations that make it possible. The natural ego is, as it were, enlightened by the transcendental onlooker."

Dermot Moran, Husserl's Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 241.

"Husserl, however, sees this disinterested theoretical stance as a first-person attitude that has arrived at final 'clarity' about its own nature. Furthermore, for Husserl, the initiation of the reduction from within the natural attitude is a matter of complete freedom of the will (akin to his understanding of the initiation of Cartesian doubt). Transcendental reduction requires an 'act of will' (Trans. Phen., p. 247; Hua IX 341)."

Dermot Moran, Husserl's Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 242.

"An attitude is arrived at which is above the pregiveness of the validity of the world, above the infinite complex whereby, in concealment, the world's validities are always founded on other validites, above the whole manifold but synthetically unified flow in which the world has and forever attains anew its content of meaning and its validity of being. In other words, we have an attitude above the universal conscious life (both individual subjective and intersubjective) through which the world is 'there' for those naïvely absorbed in ongoing life, as unquestionably present, as the universe of what there is".

Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 150.

"conscious life is through and through an intentionally accomplishing life"

Husserl, Crisis, p. 204.

Husserl and Transcendental Philosophy

"Natural human understanding and the objectivism rooted in it will view every transcendental philosophy as a flighty eccentricity, its wisdom as useless foolishness; or it will interpret it as a psychology which seeks to convince itself that it is not a psychology." (Husserl, C 200)

"Husserl considers the domain of transcendental subjectivity not just to be a set of formal conditions for knowledge (as in Kant), categorical frameworks and formal rules for organizing experience, but to be a domain of life, of living, of genuine experience, a domain that has never before been examined in philosophy... The transcendental domain is a domain of conscious experiences, albeit a domain of experience which cannot be entered from the natural attitude." (Moran, p. 219)

"The life-world in which we live 'naively' will be, under the transcendental epoche, transformed into a 'transcendental phenomenon' (C 174)"

Dermont Moran, Husserl's Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 221.

"it is not the being of the world as unquestioned, taken for granted, which is primary in itself... rather what is primary in itself is subjectivity, understood as that which naively pregives the being of the world and then rationalizes or (what is the same thing) objectifies it" (Husserl, C 69).

Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970).

Empathy and the Lifeworld

"But when we are thrown into an alien social sphere, that of the Negroes in the Congo, Chinese peasants, etc., we discover that their truths, the facts that for them are fixed, generally verified and verifiable, are not the same as ours"

Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 139.

"In order to truly understand them we need to put ourselves in their place. Ideally, we need to grow up in their world (see Hua XXXIX 158). Alternatively, we can imagine ourselves in their worlds and grasp what is typical for us (trees, buildings, animals and so on), even thought their typification is not available to us. Husserl writes in one manuscript:

'The individual type is not completely known to me: a plant, but a strange sort, a field, but full of plants that are familiar to me. The work on the field: I do not figure out their typical way to cultivate the land. A house is built in alien ways. Is it a temple, or is it a building of the government? I am in China, in the market trade and traffic, but in an alien way. I do know that they have their own typification, but I have no knowledge of them, somehow there are people there in the market. (Hua XXXIX, 159, my translation)'

Something typical in one world is unfamiliar in another."

Dermont Moran, Husserl's Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 212-213.

Excerpt from Husserl's Letter to Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, 1935

"Saying 'I' and 'we,' they find themselves as members of families, of associations, social units, as living 'together,' exerting an influence on and suffering from their world - the world, which has sense and reality for them, through their intentional life, their experiencing, thinking, valuing. Naturally, we have known for a long time that every human being has a 'world-representation', that every nation, that every supranational cultural grouping lives, so to speak, in a distinct world as its own surrounding world, and so again every historical time in its [world]."

'Edmund Husserl's Letter to Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, II March 1935', trans. Dermot Moran and Lukas Steinacher, New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy Vol. 8 (2008), 349-54, esp. 350.

The Life-world in Husserl's Crisis

"The life-world is the natural world - in the attitude of natural life we are living functioning subjects together in an open circle of other functioning subjects. Everything objective about the life-world is subjective givenness, our possession, mine, the other's, and everyone's together".

Edmund Husserl, "Supplement XIII" in Ideas II, p. 385.

"Pre-scientifically, in everyday sense-experience, the world is given in a subjectively relative way. Each of us has his own appearances; and for each of us they count as that which actually is. In dealing with one another, we have long since become aware of this discrepancy between our various ontic validities. But we do not think that, because of this, there are many worlds. Necessarily, we believe in the world, whose things appear to us differently but are the same." (p. 23)

"Consciously we always live in the life-world; normally there is no reason to make it explicitly thematic for ourselves universally as world." (p. 379)

Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970).

"It is essentially impossible to find men in any 'pre-worldly' state, because to be human, to be aware of oneself as a man and to exist as a human self, is precisely to live on the basis of a world."

Ludwig Landgrebe, 'The World as a Phenomenological Problem', Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Vol. 1 No. 1 (September 1940), 38-58.

"The concept of the life-world is the antithesis of all objectivism. It is an essentially historical concept, which does not refer to the universe of being, to the 'existent world'... the life-world means something else, namely the whole in which we live as historical creatures."

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. edn., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London: Sheed and Ward, 1989), p. 247.

Philosophical Generativity

"For philosophers of the present day the philosophical past is genuinely motivating. The peculiar modality of the horizon of the philosopher - generations and their works, their thoughts. Every philosopher has his historical horizon, encompassing all the philosophers, who have formed their thoughts in philosophical co-existence, and has worked on new philosophers as entering anew into this co-existence."

Edmund Husserl, "Supplement XXIV" trans. Dermot Moran, found in Krisis, p. 488.

Husserl's Definition of History

"We can now say that history is from the start nothing other than the vital movement of the being-with-one-another and the interweaving of the original formation of meaning and sedimentation of meaning."

Edmund Husserl, "The Origin of Geometry" in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 371.

Husserl on 'Physico-Psychology'

"The natural science of the modern period, establishing itself in physics, has its roots in the consistent abstraction through which it wants to see, in the life-world, only corporeity. Each 'thing' 'has' corporeity even though, if it is (say) a human being or a work of art, it is not merely bodily but is only 'embodied,' like everything real."

Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 227.

Husserl on Infinity and Idealization

"But with the appearance of Greek Philosophy and its first formulation, through consistent idealization, of the new sense of infinity, there is accomplished in this respect a thoroughgoing transformation [Umwandlung] which finally draws all ideas of finitude and with them all spiritual culture and [its concept of] mankind into its sphere."

Husserl, C 279; K 325.

"Traditionally, Greek philosophy (e.g. Aristotle) did not accept the idea of an actual infinite. The infinitude or 'limitless' (apeiron) as such was incomplete and hence not actual or real."

Modified translation provided by Dermont Moran in Husserl's Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 87.

Take Me to Church - A Sermon from October 29th, 2017

Reformation Sunday: Hozier and the state of the Church

Twenty-two-year-old Hozier’s mid-tempo soul song is a powerfully tense expression of waffling and tension. The lyrics move back and forth between lightness and darkness – truth and lies. In many ways it’s surprising that it was a chart topper. The rich and phantasmatic imagery is a testament to the diversity of musical tastes in the popular music sphere, despite the efforts of Max Martin and other Swedish producers to monopolize the pop music industry around familiar formulas that drive sales.[1] As most musically minded people know Max Martin has written more number-one singles than anyone recent musicians, excluding Paul McCartney and John Lennon. So, I believe that the success of a quirky twenty-two-year-old Irish folk singer can give us hope for something beyond the compositions of the Swedes over the past twenty years.

Hozier’s tune seems to resonate with people. The fact that it topped the charts in 12 countries and spent 23 consecutive weeks at the top of the US Hot Rock Songs chart is a testament to that fact (it tied the record for the longest-running # 1 song in the history of that chart). As the song opens we hear this big E-minor chord – it’s a traditionally dark rock n’ roll key. But then the song immediately moves to G-major which is a happy pop-song key. Pop music loves G-major. So, from the outset we get this tension. It’s a disorienting beginning that sets us up for the rest of the song. He’s waffling back and forth harmonically in a way that mirrors his disillusionment with his faith. Hozier, like all good song writers, writes music that parallels and illuminates the message he inscribes on our souls in his lyrics. The music is itself full of the very thing he’s singing about and that’s precisely what makes this song so powerful. And it’s probably just me, but this song reminds me a lot of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” - or, perhaps, just the Jeff Buckley cover that I'm fond of. Maybe it’s just the parallels in speaking about sex and religion in the same song, or maybe there’s something deeper in the music itself. Someone with a deeper knowledge of music could probably analyze that better than me.

But I think that this song can be an appropriate one to analyze on Reformation Sunday. It’s been five hundred years since Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Wittenberg Chapel – an action that condemned the Catholic Church and initiated the Protestant Reformation. So, it’s not without a parallel in mind that I decided to open today’s sermon with Hozier’s “Take Me to Church”. This song is also an indictment, an amazingly deep call to empathize not only with the experiences of our gay brothers and sisters, but all those who struggle with pains that the church may have heaped on them at some point.

This song wasn’t a hit just because it pointed to many of the terrifying and violent experiences of gay people throughout Ireland and much of the world. Yes, the music video displays a rather brutal scene of vigilantes murdering a gay man and Hozier is himself gay, but the song seems to resonate because it is intentionally vague. When you listen to it, you it doesn’t speak to that issue alone. You have to know that background information ahead of time to realize that.

I think that this song was successful precisely because it hit a nerve – it diagnosed a central and undeniable element of Western culture. Affluent Westerners haven’t given up on spirituality or even belief in vague type of monotheism. Sociologists and missiologists have been noting the dominance of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism[2] for quite some time now (since 2005), but this is not the same thing as Christianity, nor is it the same as religious practice. And I wouldn’t say that Hozier’s song represents this worldview necessarily, I actually think that his honesty and self-awareness go a bit deeper. However, I do think that the Moralistic Therapeutic Deism we see around us rests in a similar type of tension and disillusionment.

Five-hundred years ago Martin Luther indicted the church for its corruption and faithlessness. As the reformation went on, the reformers took up a motto that was meant to be a reminder of sorts – “reformed, but always reforming.” As Protestants, we reformed Christianity, but we should never think that this task is finished. We need to learn from our predecessors and traditions, for if we fail to do that we’ll lose sight of the lessons of the past and a sense of identity, but we should also work to remind ourselves that God is still speaking. God doesn’t stop speaking precisely because God is still at work. Christians are not deists precisely because they believe in an active and present God who works and moves within creation both to effect salvation and redemption, but also to effect healing and restoration. And in order to do that, God often uses his people – the Church – to bring Good News and hope to places where it seems absent.

And perhaps that’s what Hozier is addressing. Maybe that is what has led to a time where large swaths of our society have embraced moralistic therapeutic deism. The Christ they’ve been shown may not have had room for them. That seems to be Hozier’s message. He seems to believe and yet he also seems to believe that a fundamental aspect of his humanity has been cast aside. So, while Martin Luther may have given us theological reasons to be wary of indulgences or the idea that we could earn our salvation, Hozier seems to present us with a personal encounter with Roman Catholicism that speaks to the heart. But I don’t think that we should take this to be a problem confined to Roman Catholicism. Protestantism has been just as guilty when it comes to failing to meet the example of Jesus. And that’s why I think we need to remind ourselves that we’re not done changing. We’re not done moving. And We’re not done learning. God is still working to mold us into better people – into more faithful people capable of better expressing the love that God has for us.

That’s what grace does. God is faithful not only insofar as came to suffer and die for us, but also in the manner that God helps us grow in our faith. We all struggle. I struggle with my faith! That’s natural and that’s why we can all relate to Hozier. But God is also faithful in his work to help us grow and change as people, because we all need to become more like Jesus. We all need to reform such that we can come together in ways that better illustrate the kinds of things we heard in this morning’s scripture – love of God and love of each other. So, I want to close with one more scripture. This one comes from 1 John 4:7-9:

“Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him.”

Amen.

---

[1] Max Martin has written and produced for The Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, NSYNC, Katy Perry, Maroon 5, The Weeknd, Lana Del Ray, Kelly Clarkson, P!nk, Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, Demi Lovato, Hilary Duff, Adele, and Denniz Pop.

[2] Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is defined with the following criterion, which appeared behind me as I preached: 1) a god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth. 2) God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and most world religions. 3) The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself. 4) God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem. 5) Good people go to heaven when they die.

Galileo on Geometry and the Idealization of Nature

"Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe... It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures. Without such means, it is impossible for us humans to understand a word of it, and to be without them is to wander around in vain through a dark labyrinth."

Galileo Galilei, The Assayer, trans. Stillman Drake in Drake, ed., Discoveries and opinions of Galileo (New York: Anchor Books, 1957), pp. 237-238.

Husserl on a Thing's relation to Circumstances

Exhibition of the Materiality of the thing by way of its Dependence on Circumstances

"What is real of the thing itself is as multiple as it has, in this sense, real properties, ones which are, throughout, unities with respect to manifolds of schematic regulations in relation to corresponding circumstances."

Edmund Husserl, Ideas II (Norwell, MA: Kulwer Academic Publishers, 1989), p. 46.

The Schema as Real Determinateness of the Material Thing

"There are as many directions of unity prefigured in the causal apprehension of the schema (i.e., directions for possible series of perceptions in functional relation to series of perceptible circumstances) as there is multiplicity in the way in which the reality-thing, the unitary material 'substance,' is determinable according to properties corresponding to the apprehended sense itself."

Ibid, p. 47.

Property Changes

"For all property-changes we have corresponding changes in the circumstances. In all its modes of behavior the thing is dependent on circumstances, and it is in relation to circumstances that the thing is what it is."

Ibid, p. 51.

Apprehension and Perception

"Every apprehension of a thing takes place in the midst of a co-apprehension of circumstances as conditioning. But the thing never achieves perfect givenness.... That is, perception is not an experience which provides a full report about the thing. What arises for reflection thereby is that we have to distinguish, regarding a thing, between external and internal circumstances, between externally caused and internally caused changes, processes, etc."

Ibid, p. 54.

Nature of a Thing

"a thing is in itself really [reell] composed if it is an aggregate of things which stand in certain relations of reciprocal action and, to be precise, in such a way that, over against external causalities, they exhibit a unity of lawful relations and have a total state which leads back to the element's singular states, ones ruled by laws, and which do so, in general, in such wise that the 'totality' behaves formaliter like a thing, with reference to certain encompassing classes of 'circumstances.'"

Ibid, p. 55.

What Shall We Do? - A Sermon from August 13th, 2017

“What Shall We Do?”[1]

2 Peter 3:12a

“Wait for and hasten to the coming of the day of God!”

          When I began planning this service earlier in the week, I had something else in mind. I had jokingly written “Inescapable – Part 2” underneath “What Shall We Do?” the title for today’s sermon. The joke was, of course, that I would continue from where I left off last week. I had even planned to open my sermon with a short clip from The Matrix. However, life took a bit of an interesting turn and there was no way that I could – in good conscious – continue on the same route I had been planning to take. From my perspective, it would have diminished the Good News of the Gospel to do so. And one of my fundamental convictions about the Church in today’s world is that God is still speaking to us, even if only in the soft tones of the hugs we share with people who are nothing like us or the cries of distress and death from the victims of the deadly car that sped into a group of counter-protestors who had gathered to object to the Unite the Right Rally, which gathered right-wing paramilitary groups, white nationalists, and the Alt-Right to protest the removal of a statute of Robert E. Lee with chants for “Blood and Soil” and “Sieg heil”.

It was a display that propelled Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) to state that, “My brother didn’t give his life fighting Hitler for Nazi ideas to go unchallenged here at home.” Similarly, Senator Marco Rubio (R-Florida) stated, “Nothing patriotic about #Nazis, the #KKK or #WhiteSupremacists It’s the direct opposite of what #America seeks to be.” Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) called upon the Department of Justice “to immediately investigate and prosecute this grotesque act of domestic terrorism”. Needless to say, I was tempted to go on with the rest of the verse from 2 Peter (not just the first clause) which states that the Day of God will see the heavens “set ablaze, and dissolved” and the elements melted with fire.[2] There could be a bit of God’s justice in a sermon like that, but that’s not what I’m here to do. I’m not sure that it would be easy for me to find the Good News in the direction that clause would lead me. And even if the reports of the attacks of clergymen and women are true, Christianity has a long and proud tradition of speaking truth and love into a world filled with violence and hate. We are all called to do our best to speak and live God’s love into this world of ours, particularly when it’s painful and it wrenches at your soul. We are called to die for love if it comes to that. That’s what Bonhoeffer and scores of other Christians have had to do over the millennia.

And so, I was left – last night – wondering how I could take this weekend’s events and bring the Gospel to all of us this morning in our need, in our brokenness, and in the fragility and instability that we all bear in the weakness of our minds. Or, just as importantly in my mind, how could I respond not just in front of all of you, but in front of my Muslim roommate who told me yesterday that he’s glad that he didn’t accept an offer from the University of North Carolina, because he doesn’t want to go any further South and that he’s glad that he loves Philly so much. So here am I, sitting with a terrible mixture of emotions – wondering “what should I do? How can I be like Christ in this moment?” And this, dear friends, is where I want to come back to the first clause of this verse from 2 Peter which can be read as – “Wait for and hasten to the Day of God!”

This is, admittedly, an incredibly strange statement. The NIV translation tries to remove the inherent paradox intrinsic to this statement by translating it as, “as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming.” It’s an understandable move given that the NIV always tries to make sense of what’s being said in Greek, rather than translate it precisely. However, I think that there’s something lost in this treatment. I think that there is an inherent tension here between the ‘waiting’ and the ‘hastening’ and that this tension was left there on purpose. The theologian Karl Barth noted this weird phrase “wait for and hasten to” and he jokingly referred to it as the “hurry up and wait” clause.[3] He had a love for antithesis. And it was this love that can help us recognize the paradox of the Gospel – that we are both “owned and loved by God even in our rebellion and that the day of the Lord is both our mercy and our judgment at the same time.”[4] But the most important I learned from Barth this week was that this verse – this clause that says “Wait for and hasten to the coming of the day of God” – is actually an answer to a question we all ask, namely “what does it mean to be a human being?” or more practically “what are we supposed to do?” Later on, in today’s benediction, you’re going to see a reference to “the existential question” and this is all that really means – what does it mean for us to exist? What are we supposed to do with our lives? Or in my case, what am I supposed to do with this weekend’s events?

This question, “What shall we do?” is a frequent one in the Bible. We encounter it in Luke 3:10, 12, 14; and Acts 2:37. It’s the kind of question we encounter when we realize that things cannot go on as usual. As Barth says,

“It is the question of the rich man when the meaning of his wealth and situation of comfortable well-being becomes questionable… It is the question of the young woman when she becomes aware that nice clothes and marriage are not the total of what a young woman should think about. It is the question of a pastor when his position and peculiar dignity in the midst of worldly life strike him as odd. It is the question of superficial persons when they become anxious about their soul…. It is the question of the businessman when he is not fully satisfied with what he is doing, but is driven now and again by a mysterious disquiet, so that he glances down with the question, “Where have I come from, and where am I really going? ... All of them ask, “What should we do?”[5]

It’s easy for us to get on a track of the way we normally do things. We are all creatures of habit to some extent. For some of us, that might mean that we view the world through our experiences, our character, our faith, or the traditions we’ve inherited. And yet, all of those things are imbued with our humanity both in it’s beauty and it’s fragility – it’s instability. We all have that voice of protest inside of us that tells us that there is something wrong with the world and it’s that disquiet that wakes us up.

When the Bible answers our cry – “What should I do?” with the phrase, “Wait for and hasten to the coming of the day of God” it is suggesting that our humanity comes from our relationship to God. It’s derived from the fact that we all belong to God and, to continue from last week, that we can never escape the love that God shows us, even when we try to run from it. The verse that I chose for today gives us an antithesis of time – we’re called to hurry up and wait, but this idea is intricately linked to another much larger idea of salvation. When God looks upon our world, he extends a ‘yes’ and a ‘no’ – an affirmation of all that is good and a condemnation of all that is evil. God is both loving and just and we live in the existential tension between those two realities.

When we ask, “What shall I do?” and we hear “Wait for and hasten to the coming of the day of God” in response we are being called to wait for Christ’s return, but we are also being called to make it a reality in the present. That’s the beautiful thing about Christianity. It’s not just a set of propositions or beliefs. It’s a way of life. It’s a calling to follow Christ and live according to His Spirit. And this calling is tough because it requires us to strive and grow in all of our struggles. And as we learned a few weeks ago, Romans 5:3-5 tells us that,

“we know that suffering produces perseverance; ⁴ perseverance, character; and character, hope. ⁵ And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.”

So for now we struggle and we pray. We look forward to the day of the Lord, when Christ will return, trumpets will sound, and all of creation will be healed from it’s broken darkness. But until that time comes, we hasten to the coming of that day. We don’t just wait, we strive to make that’s day’s fulfillment a reality. We strive to live into the example of Jesus and breathe love into this world. We struggle with the most difficult of callings – to love our enemies.[6] And some days I think that’s one of the hardest things Jesus asks us to do. I doubt that I’m the only one who has to ask, “how do I love Nazis?” and yet Christ tells us to pray “for those who persecute you” and to love even those who seem most abhorrent because that’s what God does. He judges certainly, but God also loves and he does so because he is perfect.[7]

And that is what we are called to do as well. We live in the tension between what theologians call the ‘already’ and the ‘not yet’. We live in an imperfect and broken world and in so doing have the opportunity to breathe love and hope into it. This is the ‘already’ – the hastening to in today’s verse. And yet, we are also a people of hopeful expectation. We know that Jesus will return like a thief in the night and create a new heaven and a new earth – healed from all these evils that we see. This is the ‘not yet’. And so, “we look forward to the day of God and speed its coming.”[8] That is our calling, even in troubled times such as these.

May we each pray for strength both this morning and in those days that come. We all need the strength and power of the Holy Spirit to shape us into better disciples of Jesus – followers who try to exhibit the kind of love that God showed to us to others, even those we struggle to understand. This is the way of the cross – the cross that we are all called to bear. May we all find strength in the examples before us. Christ, who gave himself for those who crucified him. The martyrs, who died bringing the message of love to people’s intent on rejecting it. Civil Rights leaders, who fought for equality. And the Confessing Church, as it suffered and struggled against fascism and communism. May we grow into this type of love.

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[1] I’m working with a translation that focuses on this clause exclusively in all of its paradoxical glory. It’s also a translation that Karl Barth utilized. Original text: προσδοκῶντας καὶ σπεύδοντας τὴν παρουσίαν τῆς τοῦ Θεοῦ ἡμέρας; the second clause follows as: δι’ ἣν οὐρανοὶ πυρούμενοι λυθήσονται καὶ στοιχεῖα καυσούμενα τήκεται.

[2] 2 Peter 3:12

[3] Karl Barth, “2 Peter 3:12a”, April 29^th, 1917 in The Early Preaching of Karl Barth: Fourteen Sermons with Commentary, ed. William H. Willimon, trans. John E. Wilson (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009); and “We tarry and - hurry” in Karl Barth, Romans, pp. 30 and 33.

[4] Williams H. Willimon, “Commentary on 2 Peter 3:12a” in The Early Preaching of Karl Barth, p. 31.

[5] Karl Barth, “2 Peter 3:12a”, p. 25-26.

[6] Matthew 5:44.

[7] Matthew 5:48.

[8] 2 Peter 3:12a, NRSV translation.

Truth and Power

"To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights."

Timothy Synder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lesson From the Twentieth Century (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2017), p. 65.

A Tale of Two Sufferers

A Sermon from July 9th, 2017

Mark 10:46-52

They came to Jericho. As he and his disciples and a large crowd were leaving Jericho, Bartimaeus son of Timaeus, a blind beggar, was sitting by the roadside. ⁴⁷ When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout out and say, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” ⁴⁸ Many sternly ordered him to be quiet, but he cried out even more loudly, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” ⁴⁹ Jesus stood still and said, “Call him here.” And they called the blind man, saying to him, “Take heart; get up, he is calling you.” ⁵⁰ So throwing off his cloak, he sprang up and came to Jesus. ⁵¹ Then Jesus said to him, “What do you want me to do for you?” The blind man said to him, “My teacher, let me see again.” ⁵² Jesus said to him, “Go; your faith has made you well.” Immediately he regained his sight and followed him on the way.

          On March 4^th, 1917 Karl Barth preached on the text that we just heard. To give that moment a bit of context, it was set in the middle of a World War – Germany was starving and Russia was undergoing Revolution.[1] And it is at this moment that Barth anticipated the pessimism that would sweep postwar Europe. Like many great preachers, Barth had a tendency to turn single sentences into sermons and his sermon on this text is no different. When Barth looked at this text and at his own world he was struck by the phrase, “Bartimaeus son of Timaeus, a blind beggar, was sitting by the roadside.” Today I hope to take a step in this direction. If you follow me, we’ll scope out the nature of our world just as Barth surveyed his. Then we’ll delve into what this scripture has to say to us both as moderns and as humans in general.

          Earlier this week I read an interesting book review in The New Yorker.[2] The review focused in on a new and fairly popular book within literary circles that addresses the rise and origins of the Early Church. Emmanuel Carrère’s The Kingdom is a sweeping fictional take on the lives of Paul and Luke and is, in many respects, a bit of an autobiographical reflection. But it wasn’t the contents of the new book that led me to connect it to today’s scripture.[3] It was, rather, some of the reflections from the reviewer that caught my eye.

          The New Yorker’s review of this book provides several themes that are useful for us as scriptural interpreters. As it notes, Christianity was novel precisely because it went beyond the “the intimate, familial struggle of the Jews and their God”. In its place, Christianity brought us a “strict theology of sin and salvation” – both in the writings of Paul and in the Christian approach to modernity that we can find in Søren Kierkegaard. As the review states, “Christianity’s singularity lies in its understanding of sin.” Both the book review and Carrère argue that Christianity was unique because it went beyond the Golden Rule of both Classical and Jewish thought.

It’s easy to forget that it was the Jewish scholar Hillel (50 B.C. - 10 A.D.) who popularized the idea that the Golden Rule was the essence of the Torah a generation before Jesus. But Jesus was unique precisely because he went beyond this kind of statement; and, indeed, I think that we could surmise that he wouldn’t have been unique if he hadn’t done so. Jesus didn’t just say, “Do to others what you want them to do to you” (Matt 7:12) he went further and said that we must love our enemies and be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect (Matt. 5:44 and 5:48). This is both the power and the scandal inherent to Christianity – the inversion of our humanity that so appalled Nietzsche and attracted both Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky. To a normal mind, it is as though “everything natural and human is turned upside down.” And it is this point that inspired me to bring in another video clip for us to watch together this morning. I want us to listen to this narrative from a popular TV series and see how it might reflect something from Christianity.

          I chose this particular clip because I believe that this character, the High Sparrow, can teach us something about Christianity. When George R.R. Martin created the fictional word in which that story is set, he had Catholicism in mind. The High Sparrow could be said to be reminiscent of many of Christianity’s reformers. His statement that, “The poor disgust us because they are us, shorn of our illusions. They show us what we’d look like without our fine clothes. How we’d smell without perfume” is powerful and reminiscent of much that can be found within the Christian tradition, particularly the failed reforms in the few hundred years preceding the Reformation. I do not believe that his insight is far from the truth, but it this insight along with those I already mentioned like the call to love our enemies and be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect that turn the fallen state of our humanity on its head. These are the tenants that revolutionized the world and appalled those who wanted a more natural order.

          As most of us know, Christians were not heavily persecuted by the Romans at first. Cities with large Jewish populations certainly saw appeals to the Roman authorities for the persecution of the early followers of Christ, but the Empire itself was largely ambivalent until the reign of the Emperor Nero between 54 and 68 A.D. The Roman historian:

“Tacitus suggests that Nero used them as scapegoats for the great fire of Rome, in 64. But Tacitus adds that the Christians, devotees of what he calls ‘a most mischievous superstition,’ were likely convicted not because they started the fire but because of their otherworldly beliefs and practices—their ‘hatred of humanity.’”[4]

Most of us would probably stay far away from any claim that we hate humanity. I know that I would never want anyone to say that I hated humanity or that I was a bit of a masochist. However, I think it can be helpful to realize how truly revolutionary Christianity actually is.

          Perhaps we can see this by taking up a comparison that Carrère makes in The Kingdom. Many of us probably read the Homer’s Odyssey in High School. It was required reading at both of the High Schools I attended. In the story, Odysseus comes to a point where he has to decide:

“between staying on Calypso’s paradisal island… or returning home to Ithaca. Calypso’s charms are intense: she offers eternal pleasures, and she reminds our hero that Penelope, his wife back home, cannot possibly rival the beauty of an immortal goddess. Odysseus concedes as much, but still he chooses to go home; he chooses the mortal and the mutable over the deathless and the eternal.”[5]

The point of this, and of most ancient wisdom, is that an authentic life is better than the life of a god because it is real. As Carrère says, “Authentic suffering is better than deceptive bliss. Eternity is not desirable because it’s not part of our common lot.”[6]

          Christianity offers a very different vision. It is, essentially, utopian.[7] We wait for and proclaim and Christ who will help us escape our current sufferings, even when we hedge that argument by saying that he also empowers us to heal and create in the present world we now occupy. If we take the opposition of Paul and Odysseus seriously then we might conclude that:

“Each one calls the only true good what the other condemns as baneful illusion. Odysseus says that wisdom always consists in turning your attention to the human condition and life on earth, Paul says it consists in tearing yourself away. Odysseus says that, regardless of how beautiful it is, paradise is a fiction, and Paul says that’s the only reality.” [8]

That’s where Carrère ended up at least. He paints Christianity’s rejection of the natural order as enticing, but also utopian. And perhaps he’s right to degree. In my mind, there is some truth to this. I think there are some parallels between the utopian themes of Christianity and those found in even some of the more recent utopian works of people like Herbert Marcuse whose thought influenced much of the radical movements of the 1960’s.[9] Perhaps there’s some reason for that. I might be stretching things a bit, but maybe there’s as much of a connection between this kind of hope and Christianity as there is between Christianity and the origins of human rights and ethical standards that protect the vulnerable – be they minorities or scapegoats.[10]

          So, let’s come back to the phrase I wanted to bring our attention to from today’s scripture – “A blind beggar was sitting by the roadside.” What should we think about his? Here, we have a few words about the sad state of a man, but perhaps we can also see this as the state of humanity itself. In this passage, we have what life can make of us. It describes what it can make of me today and what it can make of you tomorrow. We tend to think that life is a friend to the strong, the healthy, the rich, and the intelligent. Life can seemingly reassure us of our importance, how much we are needed, and how much we can enjoy the sunshine of knowing that we are alive. Life gladly:

“plays with us in the sunshine as long as it likes to do so. But life is a treacherous and false friend: you never know when, in a moment, it might strike you to the ground and roll you around in the mud, if this so happens to suit its mood.”[11]

Likewise, we also know that the fate which stands as a cheerful companion of the strong also untiringly plagues the weak. Why should any of us not think that our strengths could not disappear?

          If a blind beggar is sitting by the roadside we inevitably ask why he is blind – “why is the light that shines on us absent for him?” And yet, life pays little attention to this question. In today’s story, as in life, most people disregard that which is thrown to the curb. We can imagine the people passing by. There’s something strikingly similar between this story and the story of the Good Samaritan. The beggar is helpless. All he, or perhaps we, can do is beg.  That’s the way of the shadow side of life. It is ruled by Mammon – the almost divine forces that compel us to consume, destroy, and take without regard for others or our environment. It is bitter thing when we are thrown from one side of life to the other and forced to look into the face of the Mammon that had formerly blessed us. Perhaps it is a curse that takes everything at once; or, perhaps, it is a curse that consumes a little at a time until it no longer has a use for that which it cannot use.

The world looks different from the eyes of the blind. It looks different from the windows of the hospital, the asylum, and the prison. The world looks different in the gaze of the widow and the orphan. It looks different from the many dark alleyways, underpasses, and hovels that serve as the resting places for the world’s poor and dispossessed. A blind beggar sits by the roadside not only then but now.

          This blind man had no choice but to be thrown to the side of the road. He is blind! How can we imagine him being anything but bitter and despairing? How can we imagine him not seeing the world as a place of great suffering and injustice – an injustice? Barth asks us to consider who is right: “he [the beggar], as he sees the world; or we – we secure, happy, healthy people – as we see the world?”[12] It’s a question that sounds shockingly similar to the narrative we heard from the High Sparrow in the clip we just saw. We are the beggar. Yet, we ignore that which is thrown to the roadside precisely because it is us shorn of the narratives we tell ourselves – the theatre of performance we enact day in and day out ever struggling to create a sense of ourselves apart from that which is cast aside. Yet, we are not entirely unfamiliar with the beggar. There is something about our lives that might stir us and make us uncomfortable enough to agree with Barth who says that the beggar:

“sees the world as it is; he, with his blind eyes, understands the world better than we do with our seeing eyes; he no longer allows himself to be deceived. Life at bottom is suffering, injustice, outrage! And he knows it, but we not yet – and that is the difference!”[13]

We are the beggar even when we hide from that fact. Shades and shadows slip through the light of our own comforts even when things are going well.

Each one of us asks what it means to be human, both individually and collectively. Often times, we are led to this question by the concern that life might be making fools of us all. Life is like a game of cat and mouse. And yet it is not an episode of Tom and Jerry. In the real world, the cat catches the mouse, even if only after an extended chase. We, the blind beggar, can just as easily lift our accusations against the fates of life, the evils of Mammon, and the insanities of war. But even in this moment of chorus it can feel the wind usually carries our voices away – to be lost in the distance and mocked by silence.

          And yet there is now another who passes the blind beggar of Jericho. He too is a human being and a victim. He is about to be pushed to the side of the road and tormented – to be thrown among the dead. “He belongs neither to ‘good society’ nor to those who climb up the social ladder with agility and guile.”[14] He chose a path with no prospect of success. In the story, he has already suffered and will continue to until the end. He has no illusions about what lies ahead. He is headed to Jerusalem – the city that kills the prophets and stones those sent to it (Matt. 23:37). “But this man is in a different relationship to life than the blind beggar. In fact, a whole world lies between them.”[15] The beggar was thrown into nothingness and the Son of Man took life into his own hands and made something miraculous out of it. These are two sufferers, yes, but one is subjected to the sigh of futility and anguish (Rom. 8:20) and the other is the Lamb of God, who bears the sin of the world (John 1:29).

          This man, the Son of God, came down the road to us blind beggars because we needed God. The course of events was set because God both moves and acts. God is a cause:

“in the singular sense that God cannot be with human beings because human beings make their life without God. With God, they could rule over life, but now they are subjected to it. With God, truth would be their existence, but now life swindles and disappoints them. […] God is the key to life, but human beings have lost the key: what wonder that they now stand angrily before the many dark secrets of their existence.”[16]

And yet this is why Jesus came. He was not surprised to see suffering, nor was he surprised about what happened to him, because he saw through both.

          Jesus did not come to say to the blind beggar, “Resign to reality as it is. It’s your tough luck.” He was kept from doing that by his deep respect for God, who will never leave humanity to itself nor let it wither in the shadows. Jesus pitted the powers of this life against the powers of God. He not only shows us the keys to being human, but returns those to us again as well. He asks us not to just accept things as they are, but to accept God, who accepts us and empowers us in so doing. The passion of Christ is the ultimate moment of humanity. It is not a moment of resignation or defeat but a moment of defiance. It is a moment where Christ, the preeminent human, advanced with the banner of God. As Barth stated, “Jesus suffered not stupidly and not in anger, but as the soldier of God standing at the most difficult and most exposed post and doing his duty against the evil enemy!”[17] I think that we can understand that this is something different from what we see in the blind beggar and from what we see in ourselves. It is easy to not see things the way Christ sees them.

And yet, Jesus let the blind man see again just as he offers us the chance to see again. Jesus conquered death and despair and he offers us the chance to do that too. We need not resign to fate, suffering, or any type of despair because we can call out in faith and have God heal us with the words, “Go, your faith has made you well.” Christ reaches into our lives with those words. Our lives and world can be affected by them if we come to Christ with the same kind of determination and faith that Bartimaeus expressed. May God grant us the wisdom and strength to cry out, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” For it is in this moment, where we embrace the very thing that appalled Nietzsche and the Classical world, that we draw near to the words that we ever so desperately need to hear, “Go, your faith has made you well.”

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[1] Karl Barth, Mark 10:46-52 [March 4^th, 1917], trans. William H. Willimon, The Early Preaching of Karl Barth: Fourteen Sermons with Commentary by William H. Willimon (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), pp. 1-8.

[2] James Wood, “The Radical Origins of Christianity: Emmanuel Carrère’s ‘The Kingdom’ explores how a tiny sect became a global religion”, The New Yorker, July 10^th & 17^th 2017: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/10/the-radical-origins-of-christianity?mbid=social_facebook

[3] Emmanuel Carrère, The Kingdom, trans. John Lambert (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2017).

[4] Wood, “The Radical Origins of Christianity”.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Carrère, The Kingdom, p. 175.

[7] Perhaps even dialectic utopianism, particularly if we take the ‘already’ and ‘not yet’ into account.

[8] Wood, “The Radical Origins of Christianity”.

[9] Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (1964) and; An Essay on Liberation (1969).

[10] René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightening, trans. James G. Williams (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001)

[11] Karl Barth, Mark 10:46-52, p. 1.

[12] Ibid, p. 3.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid, p. 4.

[15] Ibid, p. 5.

[16] Ibid, p. 6.

[17] Ibid, p. 7.