Thursday, January 30, 2025

Does God Need to be Pleased?

Questions can linger. Several years ago, the Spiritual Director asked, "By going into ordained ministry, and serving  for all those years, you did what God wanted you to do, right?

"I guess." was my reply.  I never saw it as a matter of pleasing God. But I hear that word "pleasing" God often in congregational worship- and have used it myself. It's another phrase that's used without much thought. But think of the absurdity of somehow pleasing the Lord of all the powers of the universe. 

As I read the Bible, there are responsibilities for living in a covenant relationship with God. You do this for me, then I will do this for you. You refuse to do this for me, then I will do bad things to you (and generations to follow!) * It appears God has little use for people who do not please. Any reading of Scripture cannot skip over it.

As is often the case in Scripture, there's another side to this question. Because of who God is, there is no need to please her if it were even possible: "The God who made the world and everything in it, the God who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is God served by human hands, as though God needed anything, since God gives to all mortals life and breath and all things." Acts 17: 24-25 

Are we still talking about pleasing God? 

What thoughts come to mind when I hear something about "pleasing God?"

  • Arrogance in assuming we know how to please God.
  • The irony of trying please God who is supposed to love us unconditionally. 
  • A bargaining chip to get what I want, i.e., "I need a favor." (Pop icon Jelly Roll)
  • Guilt and shame in never measuring up. 
  • Inability to please people, much less God. 
Considerations
  1. Consider omitting references to pleasing God from prayers, etc. For Scripture texts, provide context. **
  2. Indicate that our primary responsibility is to fulfill our purpose, to make good on the gifts God has given us. 
  3. Teach the difference between transactional and transformational God-covenant. One is based on shame and guilt, the other on unconditional love.
  4.  Measure intention- i.e., why be moral? Loving to get something we want in return is not about love. How do I love without any hope of return, reward or gain?
  5. What effect do these words have on the listeners? How do others hear these words? 
  6. What are the drawbacks of living to please others?
  7. Any leader can use insider knowledge on what God and use it as a cover for what he or she wants.
*Exodus 20:5-6: You shall not bow down and worship them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments." The theme of blessings and curses is repeated in gruesome detail in Deuteronomy 28.

**For example, Romans 12:1-2 NRSV states "I appeal to you... to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God... Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect." In biblical faith, the people of God are delivered from slavery. No one owns your body; you and your body now belong to God. Paul is drawing on the idea of acceptable sacrifices for the goal of transformation. Like repentance or metanoia, transformation leads to a true discernment of one's gifts and an honest estimate of one's limits. (12: 3-8). 




Wednesday, January 15, 2025

Pain

In his anguish he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down on the ground. Luke 24:43 NRSV

Pain is tossed around alot in sermons, messages, etc. It's often used without much context or meaning. This is a sign of laziness and leaves listeners guessing.

I sometimes hear about "the pain or sin of addiction." Addiction begins by providing more pleasure than pain. Maybe the pain of recovery is more apropos, since it's in recovery that I learn about my true self, the harm I have caused, the destruction I did to myself, the sense of time and opportunities wasted before recovery. (I suspect that addiction is yet another term thrown around without much thought or concretizing).

It's helpful to clarify the intended meaning of pain-- 
instead of using it as a blanket term covering anything distasteful or annoying (a pain in the ass).

The definition for pain in Merriam-Webster

a localized or generalized unpleasant bodily sensation or complex of sensations that causes mild to severe physical discomfort and emotional distress and typically results from bodily disorder (such as injury or disease).

Another commonly used meaning for pain:

        mental or emotional distress or suffering : grief. 

The text above -from Luke 23- is an example of the most extreme kind of mental and emotional distress. Remember that the sweat was "like" drops of blood. Whatever our faith allows us to believe, Jesus' distress is a human response to being abandoned by friends and God. (1). 

Consider that, before his torture and execution, Jesus's emotional distress is also one of human ego loss and grief. Jesus cries over Jerusalem, which refuses the gathering of the mother hen and her chicks. (2) The disciples' illusions of messianic deliverance and kingdom died a painful death: "we had hoped he was the one to redeem Israel." Luke 24:21  A disciple that Jesus hand-picked turns Jesus into the authorities for questioning. (3) The others in the inner circle run away as fast as they can, leaving their garments behind if  necessary. (4) Another disciple stays closer for awhile, until he denies any association with Jesus.(5) 

Jesus preaches the nearness and immediacy of God's reign and life in that kingdom, (6) which results, ultimately in his being taken into custody and losing all power over his fate. Those story-lines do not present Jesus' ministry as successful when contemporary measurements of church success are applied. The failure and humiliation was public even before the torture and cross. 

Ego-loss is not always something we associate with Jesus' Passion. But if the pain he experiences is not physical sensation but mental anguish, then there is something teachable and preachable here:

1. Use pain-- but explain it. Pain as emotional distress suggests a therapeutic, psychological framework. Sin is a theological idea. Brokenness is sometime used instead of pain or sin. Another concept from Korea, han, allows for the corporate nature of both pain and sin. (7)  
2. The mystics offer insight into emotional distress. The paradigm of Illumination --Purgation--Unification informs the ego-loss experienced in life with God. This is not a therapeutic scheme, but rather, a spiritual one. Although I am not a mystic, I can still learn from their experiences and writings. (8)
3. The ego thrives on false consolation and programs promising happiness which eventually cause more pain. St. Ignatius of Loyola set forth the discernment of spirits as essential in understanding our pain, and making decisions amidst uncertainty, (9)

(1) Matthew 27:46 
(2) Luke 19:41
(3) Mark 14:10 
(4) Mark 14: 50-51
(5) Matthew 26:69-75
(6) Matthew 12:28, Mark 1:15, Luke 10:11, 11:20, 17:21
(7) Han, according to Suh Nam Dong is “a feeling of unresolved resentment against injustices suffered, a sense of helplessness because of the overwhelming odds against one, a feeling of acute pain in one’s guts and bowels, making the whole body writhe and squirm, and an obstinate urge to take revenge and to right the wrong—all these combined." See Yes Magazine, August 24, 2022. 
(8) For a contemporary treatment of this, see Elaine A. Heath, The Mystic Way of Evangelism: A Contemplative Vision for Christian Outreach, 2008.
(9) See, Pope Francis, "Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future, 2020, specifically Chapter 2, "A Time to Choose.






            














 

Monday, March 25, 2024

Amazing: Frederick Douglass on Methodism

From AP American History (High School) to Afro-American History (Trinity University) to Black Church History (Duke Divinity School) to Doctoral Studies (Perkins School of Theology), the fact that Frederick Douglass' biography was not required was a monumental omission of the curriculum and leadership. Especially when Douglass' statements on religion, Methodists and Christian leaders are considered. I include two notable excerpts referenced below.

In August, 1832, my master attended a Methodist camp-meeting. held in the Bay-side, Talbot county, and there experienced religion. I indulged a faint hope that his conversion would lead him to emancipate his slaves, and that, if he did not do this, it would, at any rate, make him more kind and humane. I was disappointed in both respects. It neither made him more humane to his slaves, nor to emancipate them. If it had any effect on his character, it and him more cruel and hateful in all his ways; for I believe him to have been a much worse man after his conversion than before. Prior to his conversion, he relied upon his own depravity to shield and sustain him in his savage barbarity; but after his conversion, he found religious sanction and support for his slaveholding cruelty. He made the greatest pretentions to piety. His house was a house of prayer. He prayed morning, noon, and night. He very soon distinguished himself among his brethren and was soon made a class- leader and exhorter.  p. 56

I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the south is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes- a justifier of the most appalling barbarity,- a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds,- and a dark shelter under which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection. Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being a slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me. For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others. pp. 72-3

Comment

In my classrooms, any consideration of the nature of American human enslavement based solely on race, or Blackness, was overlooked.  Prior to 1865, to be Black  was to be enslaved. Those born into slavery, like Douglass, had no hope of freedom. Douglass' father was a white enslaver. It paid to multiply the enslaved through Black mothers.

Most of my education stopped with a cursory mention of indentured servants and slavery of the colonial era and pre-Civil War.. With no critical exploration of the workings of human enslavement, conclusions one could draw were wrong. For example, there is no comparison between indentured servanthood and human enslavement. 

Douglass suggests that the holidays were used to inebriate slaves into thinking they would forget about their hopelessness and think their lot not so bad after all. A drunken stupor was required to think the slave's life was acceptable. 

There were other vast shortcomings in my formal education. The institutional racism which was established before, during and after the Civil War was rarely, if ever, explored. What about the systemic inequalities that persisted because of race? What about the violence and lynchings that were perpetrated to support that system in the Jim Crow era?**

Whether it was the major labor unions excluding blacks from membership or banks systemically denying credit and home mortgages in the north, or requiring black children to be transported in worn down vehicles many miles from town to dilapidated, rural school houses in the south, why were these things not explored in my studies? We had debates about slavery vs. abolition, but had no exploration of the Civil Rights and Voting Acts of the 1960's, why these Acts of Congress were necessary. 

There is great resistance to learning of the black experience and history today, of course. State and local school boards attempt to limit or define which Black history can be taught and what should be excluded. For the most part, the outcry, or better, the backlash is about what Black history whites are most comfortable with. The resistance is hardened in our churches. Sunday morning in the U.S. remains the most segregated time of the week. 

Douglass' words can be discounted by white congregations today because, after all, enslavement is dead as an institution. The challenge of most congregations of the cultural middle would be to explore why, historically, inequities exist in generational wealth and educational attainment. The Pandemic exposed inequalities on a massive scale. *** 

Instead of seizing this as an historic teachable moment, the lazy dualism between material and spiritual, the corporate and individual, continues to be a dominant theme in preaching and teaching. The Advent Gospel is reduced to inner, individual peace. Lent is reduced to how Jesus and I feel about my sin. Easter is all about my private, individual eternal life, not entering more fully into God's rule and realm.  

*Originally published in 1845 by the Anti-Slavery Office. For pages cited, see Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Barnes and Noble,2003.

**James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, offers a rigorous analysis of the history of lynchings in Jim Crow, and their absence in the writings of  Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr is still considered one of the leading social ethicists of the 20th Century. 

**See How Covid Exposed Racial Disparity in all Aspects of the Health Care System, NPR, 2022.


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