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Exploring Biblical Spirituality Philip E. Wheaton, Community of Christ, Washington, D.C., November 16, 2008 The great day of the Lord is near and it will be bitter: a day of wrath, of distress, of Three weeks ago I decided to focus on biblical spirituality in my homily today. I imagine most of you don’t think I think much about spirituality but only about the prophetic word. In fact the prophets are our main source of biblical spirituality which is quite different from the spirituality of most religions, but central to Judaism and Christianity. Many Christians don’t understand the uniqueness of biblical spirituality assuming it is like the spirituality in all religions, our common human search for the holy and/or our common awe of the wonder of God’s creation whatever our theological differences may be. Now it is certainly true that we are all God’s children, all equal in God’s sight, all sinners and all have intimations on immortality... of being with God after death. This wonder of God or waiting upon God is common to all of us whether we are believers, agnostics or atheists, but the nature of biblical spiritually varies greatly from faith to faith. Some religions are spiritually linked to nature, like Indian cosmology or Shinto animism; some are mythical and totemistic, a sense of the holy in relation to many gods, as in Greek mythology and poli-theistic Hinduism; and from the spiritual purification of the Buddhists. Yet none of these represent biblical spirituality. To understand biblical spirituality, we first have to recognize its clear distinction between God as Creator and Yahweh in history. At certain points in the Bible: in Genesis, the Psalms and Wisdom literature, there are references to God as totally Other, as unknowable, as a holiness we cannot see face to face or a divine presence we see only as it moves away from us, that is, God as inscrutable. Biblical revelation never pretends to know the fullness of God, indeed it says openly that we cannot communicate with God, that we can only contemplate the Holy in wonder. It’s as if the Bible is saying: don’t go there except in awe... like looking at the Cosmos... and beyond. “How long, O Lord? Will you hide yourself from us forever? Before you ever formed Yahweh, however, is quite another matter: we know the Lord, Yahweh intimately in the Bible. Yahweh is close to us; operates in history; speaks to us and Yahweh as Lord calls us and uses us as spokespersons, like Moses and Jesus. Thus Yahweh, is the polar opposite of the Unknown God.. Our friend, Tony Equale, is a mystic and has just written a book entitled: An Unknown God. But remember the quote from Paul, standing in front of an altar at the Areopagus in Athens and the inscription: “To an unknown god.” to which Paul responds: “What you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you for “in him [Yahweh] and in his messenger [the Messiah], “we live and move and have our being”(Acts 17:23-28). Only in biblical revelation do we find intimacy with God, not through our wisdom nor our searching for God, but through God coming to us and interacting with us, through God calling us. This is the amazing enigma in biblical spirituality: we know nothing of God, and yet, we know the Lord, Yahweh, intimately. Let me review three aspects of this intimacy with Yahweh and with Jesus which confirms the oddity of our closeness to God in history, in the flesh and especially in others. I use these terms because for most religions history is ephemeral, the body corrupt and the others, that is, the poor and oppressed, the wretched of the earth, as a contradiction to a God’s Justice and Mercy. Yet the Bible says God operates particularly in them even though it doesn’t seem so. This paradox is essential to understanding biblical spirituality. God in history. The first amazing thing about biblical spirituality is that Yahweh is the center of attention from the Exodus onward and the Exodus is all about history. Both Judaism and Christianity are historical religions. To a degree, so too is Islam, because it was born in Judaism and Christianity in the Middle East and North Africa, and because Muslims also believe in Abraham, Moses and Jesus. Our biblical encounter with Yahweh begins in the historical reality of imperial Egypt under Pharaoh. In Genesis, we find a mix of history and mythology, but the Exodus is all about history and often it isn’t pleasant history; indeed, often confrontational, what we might call bad news: the Egyptians oppressing the Hebrews as slaves or Moses called to confront Pharaoh demanding that he “let my people go.” Conversely, this means that the Word of God in history is hope-filled which means that we humans can change history. Moreover, the prophetic word doesn’t talk about God in abstract terms, like omniscient, a Greek concept, but rather about what God is doing in history, which means that Yahweh is about liberation and justice. For most religious folk, such historical spirituality seems like a contradiction in terms. God in the flesh. The Greek word for flesh is sarx, which means precisely that: our fleshly bodies, our weak frames, our sickly and aging lives, our transitoriness... bodies which we put into the ground which are eaten by worms and dissolve into dust. It is this totally ephemeral nature of our bodies and our sinful acts via the body, that make it so hard for most religious persons to see the body as anything but contrary to how we about God: who is pure, perfect and eternal. This is precisely why the Christian belief in the Incarnation is so repugnant to many people. The idea that God, the eternal, would intermingle with something so fleeting, so pasajero (in Spanish), so historically temporal and so sinful in moral terms, is precisely why we affirm that God was in Christ and just as human as we are. In Confirmation classes, I used to tell kids: “Remember, Jesus had to go to the toilet just like we do.” In other words, God created our bodies and sees nothing evil per se in our humanness and its frailty. Indeed, without our bodies what good works could we accomplish? Like the Creation, God saw the body as good: “I will remove your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” –Ezekiel 36:26 God in Others. The emphasis on “the others” is precisely the point of this dichotomy. The Bible isn’t talking here about our families, our friends, our neighbors or our compatriots, but about those who are unlike us: the poor & oppressed, brown Indians and black Africans; Communists and Muslims, lepers and the crazies, the nobodies of this world, the wretched of the earth. As the Mexican theologian, José Porfirio Miranda, says: “the others are not among the many pearls on our necklace,” the near and the dear, but rather those who, as we say, “no sirven para nada,” good-for-nothings. They are the ones God loves in particular, the ones Jesus picked to be his disciples, the damn Samaritans and hated Palestinians, the damn kikes or fucking gooks, the name US soldiers used for the Vietnamese. In softer tones, the others are often denigrated women or inconsequential children, hated tax collectors, evil Taliban. Miranda says, descriptively: The cry of the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the alien is truly foreign to this material world. ... The strength of these others resides precisely in its weakness and its foreignness in this world. —Marx & the Bible, p.66 Yet God hangs out with them; they were Jesus’ primary concern; and this is the meaning of the “preferential option of the poor.” Judeo-Christian spirituality is defined by these others and by how we treat them! Mr. Kissinger, our job is to proclaim that ‘justice must roll down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.’ Your job, Mr. Kissinger, is to work out the details of that irrigation system. A fuller answer to this moral-spiritual quandary can be found in our gospel today, in one of the longest parables in Jesus’ long repertoire of evangelical instructions to his disciples as his Passion drew near. This parable, about the kingdom of God, as we just heard is about landowner of a huge plantation [the world] who went on a long trip (symbolic of God’s disappearing friom us for long periods), leaving us, his servants, behind to tend the fields and invest the talents the master has left to us. The key issue in the parable was what did two of those servants do while he was gone, just as God is asking you and me here and now: “What have you done here on earth, in your life, during your moment in history?” One of them said, “Well, I took the five talents you gave me and invested it wisely and made five more, and here I give you back ten in return.” And the Master said: “Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been trustworthy in a few things, now I will put you in charge of many things.” But when the servant, who had received only one talent, came forward, he said: “Master, look, I planned to return to you much more that this first servant, but I ran into some hard times. I invested that one talent in the stock market and I did nothing but pray that the stock would increase in value, but somehow it collapsed and now I have nothing to show for it, I’ve lost everything but it wasn’t my fault, I just had some bad luck.” And the master said to that servant [and to all the other stockbrokers, investors and hedge fund operators in America today]: “You wicked and lazy slaves, who have done nothing... throw them all into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” — Matthew 25:14-30 This may not sound like spiritual advice but more like an ethical choice, but biblical spirituality is hidden within its passion for justice and in it’s calling us to build the reign of God here on earth. The uniqueness of biblical spirituality is that it isn’t based upon intellectual logic or even theological premises but on good news for the poor and hope for the oppressed. The early church understood this because Jesus was first and foremost a prophet living out the messianic mission described by the Jewish prophets which Jesus knew it well and quoted it constantly. But by the end of the first century, the church fathers became uncomfortable with the gospel and turned increasingly to Gnosticism and Christologies, that is, to doctrine and dogma, suffocating the spirit of the Word of God. Along with that came the focus on the end-time of history and the hope of being with Christ in heaven. As the Jewish prophets say: “that’s none of our business.” The hermeneutic of the Bible involves methodological principles for interpreting the Scriptures and that hermeneutic is nothing less than Jesus Christ himself: what he said and even more what he did. As Naím Stifan Ateek says: To understand God, therefore, the Palestinian Christian, like every Christian, begins As C.H. Dodd explains: “Perhaps one of the most striking features of the early Christian movement was the re-appearance of a confidence that man can know God [intimately and personally in the messianic prophet from Nazareth, Jesus, the prophet from Galilee]. Amen.
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