Gut Level God

Meditations on the Good News of Jesus
according to St. John 1:1-18 

                                                        --by Pastor Roger                        

            Several years ago, local performer Storm Large—yes, that’s always been her real name—did a one woman show called “Crazy Enough.”  It’s an autobiographical work of storytelling and song with only Storm and three musicians onstage for the occasional musical numbers that are all over the map.  

 

            I’ve never seen anything quite like it and probably will not again in life.  It’s the story of a family--Storm, her brother and her father--completely submerged in the mental illness of her mother who was in and out of more psychiatric offices and psych wards than anyone can name.  It’s the story of knowing that she, Storm, has the genetic defect of her mother and blood relatives, some of whom have developed the rare form of mental illnesses.   

It’s the story of a girl too big (Large is a fitting last name), too loud, and not pretty enough to be popular.  It’s the story of running away from herself, of looking for love in disastrous places including promiscuity, heroin addiction, verbal and physical abuse.   

It’s also the story of redemption as only Storm could tell it from her gut level experience.  In one scene onstage she writhes on the floor re-enacting the wrenching physical trauma of self-imposed heroin withdrawal and her last-ditch cries to God.  The audience is becoming physically ill with her. 

The theater is nearly dark and silent but for a few exhausted sobs from Storm who is in a fetal ball on the floor.  Then Storm begins to enact how the room she was in slowly began to fill with warmth and light and love.  Warmth and light and love.  As though life, and the ability to live, the desire to live, the hope to live, were slowly being transfused back into her soul.  No drug induced temporary high.  No hug from a mama bear caregiver.  No Hollywood exorcism by a priest wearing black.  No yoga meditation.  No soundtrack.  Instead, a physical and emotional resurrection that came from completely outside herself.  Warmth.  Light.  Love.  It came.  It stayed.  Gut level God.

 In early 2007, I had finished my parish internship and all the steps necessary for some kind of call to ministry.  What would that call be?  You might think that would be an exciting time of discovery and anticipation.  Instead, it was a horrible time of deadly spiritual warfare that nearly ended me.  Each day grew worse, and I finally called a couple of friends to ask them to pray for me.  It was a months-long battle to stay sane long enough to discern God’s call—which wasn’t going to be what the church thought should be my call at all.  You know the answer, of course, because here I am.  And I have grown to love this ministry in ways words cannot describe and which my extended family will never understand.   

I now get something at a gut level that I never did before.  It’s this:  if there is a hell it is separation from God.  Hell is not a furnace but a deepfreeze.  It is a place of utter cold.  Our best physics tell us that all molecular motion ceases at a temperature of -273 degrees on the Kelvin scale:  absolute zero.  At absolute zero, it is impossible to extract any more heat from anything.  Hell is absolute zero of the soul, the mind and the body.  Separation from God is a total absence of warmth and light and love.  You don’t ever want to go there.  God wants no one to ever go there, be there, or stay there.  Period.

             Christmas is a celebration of thanks for the birth of a child that his parents named Yeshua, meaning God (YHWH) is salvation:  Jesus, whom we confess to be Messiah, the Anointed One, the Christ.  His birth probably happened in the spring of the year when there was grass on the hillsides for sheep to graze and when shepherds could endure nights outdoors without freezing.    

 

           It probably happened in a season of a lot more daylight than we experience now just after the winter solstice.  Yet it’s appropriate for us to celebrate this wondrous event in a time of darkness and cold.  Now the messages of warmth and light and love make the most sense to us.  We have a gut level need to understand these things that stay with us.   

Martin Luther wrote the poem of our Christmas song today as a way to remember the Christmas story in verse form.  It’s something we can learn as children and carry with us all our lives.  That’s a good thing.  Although we are born as children we don’t stay children.  The darknesses that may assault us in life are far more powerful and life- threatening than the mere shortness of daylight.  We need backup.   

God’s story is far more important than a baby’s birth with stars in the sky.  It’s about a gut level God who finds us in the darkest room, a God who drives away the utter separation of absolute zero with warmth and light and love. 

 

Storm Large may never give her testimony in church.  As she said once, her mouth cop got run over a long time ago.  But she told her story in the most important place:  out of and into the real world of darkness where people live and that God comes to with warmth and light and love.  Your story is just as important as hers or mine.  It’s a gut level story because Jesus is a gut level God for all the world.  Warmth.  Light.  Love.  Fantastic news!  Thank you, Jesus!  Thanks be to God!  

Worship Revolution

161 years ago last month, a man failed in his attempt to assassinate the young Franz Josef I, Emperor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  In gratitude for this grace, the Emperor commissioned the building of a neo-Gothic church known as the Votivkirche, the "Votive Church."  It's an impressive sight, especially when lighted at night, on the Ringstrasse encircling the core of the old city of Vienna, Austria.  It's a stone's throw from the University, the Parliament, the Rathaus (city hall).  I walked past it many times during the summer of 1968 when I was a student there and lived a 10-minute stroll away.

But it's a neo-Gothic, not a true Gothic church.  It has taken Gothic architecture and given it a strong dose of overkill.  It's a church that was built as a gift to "The Church" headquartered in Rome but with political power centered in Vienna and the German-speaking empire that would last a thousand years.


The church was not built because Vienna needed more seating capacity for worship, more Sunday school rooms, a men's and women's shelter, or a food pantry.  
Like a votive candle, the church was "offered in fulfillment of a vow or in gratitude or devotion."  Doubtless, the Austrian Cardinal(s), Archbishops, Bishops and priests loved it.  Surely the Pope would have pronounced eternal blessing on Franz Josef and his family.

A tourist guide has this description:

The architect was Heinrich von Ferstel. The most beautiful historic relic in the Votivkirche is its late 15th-century Antwerpian altar, a masterpiece of Flemish woodcarving, representing scenes from the Passion. The main portal sculptures depict the four Evangelists and figures from the Old Testament, along with four patrons of the Empire’s regions. Many of the chapels inside the church are dedicated to the Austrian regiments and to military heroes.   

The interweaving of royalty and the priesthood, the reach of military power and the domain of the Holy Catholic Church had been through centuries, a millennium and a half, actually, by the time the Votivkirche was built.  There had been fights and struggles and murders, wars among popes, bishops, princes and kings.  There had been a Reformation and schisms.  There had been the Thirty Years' War and the Inquisition.  There had been the black death, famines, the Crusades, colonial empires and the slave trade.  

There had been the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, the discovery of America, the Baroque period, the Rococco, the French Revolution and the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution.  Imperial Europe was still decades away from the Great War, aka the "war to end all wars."  The United States of America had found by 1879 when the Votivkirche was completed, that we weren't so united after all.  Five years of Civil War and 600,000 American deaths at the hands of other Americans could only leave us questioning.

How could such a church be built in a world always astir?  And what went on inside such luxurious buildings?




1.  Daily masses fed by people convinced that going to mass was a good work and was necessary for their salvation. 

2.  A complex and comprehensive sacramental system in which the Church was the sole possessor and mediator of grace.  

3.  People were compelled to serve that system because it held the keys of life and death, salvation or damnation for their immortal souls.  

4.  And there were elaborate worship services with cantors and choirs and pipe organs and priests and deacons and altar boys lining up in grand imperial processions and carrying on elaborately choreographed movements with censors of incense and monstrances and genuflections and kneeling and prostrations and vestments.  All of the prefaces, the Great Thanksgiving, the consecration of the elements of bread and wine (with only the priest being allowed to consume the wine itself) were in Latin, not the people's tongue.   

5.  Not to mention kingmaking and sanctions for wars and strategic alliances and land deals and royal marriages and dissolutions of convenience...  

And some modern day people with no knowledge of Christian history wonder why there is a problem with having national flags in church.  Oh, my... 

Yet, somewhere under this grinding weight of a royal institution, a little of the work of serving the poor and the orphan was done, mostly by the sisters who had devoted their lives to Christ's service on behalf of the church...  or to the church's service on behalf of Christ.  A few bread crumbs trickled down to Lazarus and the dogs while massive amounts of wealth passed through the upper floors of the high-rise hierarchy.  As far as most people knew, it had always been that way.  And always would be.  It was a monopoly.  You couldn't know Christ apart from, or outside of, the official church.  

How?

From a movement that began with Jesus spending time among Gentiles and tax collectors, mentally ill and outcasts, from a small group that met in private homes behind closed doors and were called "The Way," how did the world ever get to the Imperial Church of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, to Notre Dame and Chartres in France, to the Votivkirche and Karlskirche in Vienna?    

It all began in 313 AD with Emperor Constantine in Constantinople/Byzantium/Istanbul.  When Christianity became not only legal but the official religion of the empire, it became royal and imperial.  The prayer circle of two or three gathered together with Christ in their midst became the grand procession of the Imperial Priesthood.  It was a worship revolution.  

It was then that a large number of humble priests and monks left the city for the desert and the wilderness.  They had to get away.  

How could one accept the grace of God and not be humbled and transformed by that?  How could one, after all, be wealthy and comfortable and propserous--while others were hungry, homeless and living in filth--and call oneself a Christian, a follower of Christ?  How could one be a Christian and not give up nearly everything?  How could one be greedy for ever more power and wealth and find no conflict with the way of Jesus?  

How could worship ("church," if you will) go from neighborhood prayer service to production and performance spectacle?  How could it go from gathering in humble homes to building royal "palaces" as sanctuaries--and not have lost its way entirely?  

The Desert Fathers wondered that.  So have I.  So do I.  Still...  

Meanwhile, Emperors can build votive cathedrals at taxpayers' and peasants' expense, and be given Divine blessing for their good deeds.  Souls of the poor can be held hostage all along the way.    

Worship has never been the same ever since...

Next time:  "The Quiet Churches"     

  

Early Worship

It probably began as a conversation or a song.  People repeated in chants what they understood of the Divine and their relationship.  Early peoples understood their weakness and vulnerability very well.  Heat, cold, floods and famine shaped life profoundly.  Not to mention the absolute mystery and unpredictability of diseases.  Lifespan was short, and the majority of children did not survive the first six years of life.

Death was always at the door.   Some force had power over this.  If there was a way to offer gifts and sacrifices to favorably influence that power, people were surely for it.











Cycles of life and activity developed around patterns of the seasons and phases of the moon.  There were times for the people to gather and reflect on the mysterious powers that shaped the world and their lives.  Talking to this power, praying to this power, praising this power, being taught and instructed by this power through the words and deeds of prophets and holy persons became deeply embedded in human life.  It created a moral framework in which people understood the rules of life and their place in it.  And it moved people to do powerful and courageous things on behalf of the people.


Such as spending time in fasting and meditation and prayer to be open to the messages of the Divine.  Also, to trust the Divine power to give them strength in battle against human enemies for the good of their families and neighbors.

Judaeo-Christian traditions of worship that have come to us rely on millennia of human experience and spiritual life that provide much of the framework and vocabulary by which we conceive of spiritual matters and who/what we are as human beings.

Every spiritual system in human experience has had one common feature:  etiology.  That is, the body of understanding and explanation for how things came to be.  After all, what's one of the most ubiquitous questions the three-year old asks with each new awareness of the world?  Why?  Why is the sky blue sometimes but not other times?  Why does the moon come and go?  Where does the sun go?  Where did earth come from?  Where did we come from?  Why are we here?

We live with those questions and concerns even as adults.  We add more to the mix.  What is life for?  What makes sense of me and my life?  Why am I here?  Why do bad things happen to good people?  Why does/doesn't God do something about all this?

Those are still valid questions even today when we know far more about the cause of diseases, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and the solar system and universe.  Who/what are we in all of this?  What does the Divine Creator do these days?  What still fits and shapes my life?  Who is my neighbor?  And what does that mean?  Is there good news to be had today?  Where does it come from?  What does it say?

In the worship of the Israelites, there was a deep tradition of reviewing the moral code, or receiving instruction by reading/repeating parts of the sacred texts.  And discussing its meaning for the people gathered.  There was sacrifice to atone for the sins of the people and to say thank you to God for the gifts of harvest.  The song of the people in music and spoken/sung words and notes was a part of that.  The Psalms were always a part of the expression of the people--both the joy and celebration in good times and the heartache and wailing in bad times.

There was time for singing and dancing.  There was time for silence and contemplation.  The Selah interspersing the segments of longer Psalms was probably a musical interlude in which the hearers could savor and ponder the meaning of the words just said.  Music helps us think with our hearts.  

It was prayer.  Thanksgiving and lamentation.  All together.  Sometimes, the best prayer doesn't ask for a thing.  It simply does an adequate job of stating what is.  It lays all the junk and brokenness right out there.  In pieces.  

Water and fire and food have nearly always been a part of worship.  Fire for light in darkness and consuming the offerings.  Water for washing and cleansing and purifying.  Food both for giving and receiving and sharing together.  We people are least hostile, most community-like, when we share food together.  We are more peaceful, more thankful, when we are fed.  Inside and out.

It gives us the opportunity to know and care about each other, to punch a few holes in our isolation.

We have wise instruction from God in the Judaeo-Christian tradition.  We have Sabbath time out for God and each other, not because God is a vain and needy God who will go off to pout and toss lightning bolts if he/she doesn't get praised right on Holy Day.  No, the Sabbath was made for us because we need it and all it brings.

Early worship established that.  But more than once along the way, we've lost the idea.

Which gets us back to that first question again:  WHY?

More to come...

R.  

Why Worship Anyway?

Over a year ago I went on an excursion.  I didn't leave my house but visited a bunch of church websites.  What was the first thing churches wanted to show me?   Interesting...   






Many churches showed me their buildings.  Some showed me their pastors doing a kids' message on the step of the altar platform.  Some showed me groups of happy workers apparently doing landscaping or yard work around the church building.  For some, it was their choir all bedecked in primary colors and smiling brightly.  Still others obviously were proud of their massive pipe organs.  Some showed me groups of standing worshipers in ecstatic response, arms a'waving.  Others, of course, big praise bands.  

Often, there was a focus-group designed paragraph about "who we are."  Carefully chosen words such as "caring, serving, welcoming, loving, diverse, inclusive" followed as their self-chosen affirmations.  All positive, of course.  Though, curiously, I never found the word "humble" in any of them.  Many had mission or vision statements about "bringing Christ to the nations"--as the old Lutheran Hour radio motto said.  

It's no wonder church websites look much like those of other community organizations.  We are, after all, just that.  However, as a friend said long ago, churches are "just the same--only different."  I hope.  But back to the web search...  

One website stood out from all the rest.  Its welcome mat, the first thing a web visitor might see, was not a statement about the church itself.  In fact, it wasn't a statement at all. It was a question:

                                     Why?  

Why bother?  Why spend time doing this at all?

What followed was breathtaking.  It led me on a journey that was far more like a poem than a densely packed self-proclamation or committee-crafted mission/vision statement. 

There was space between the lines for me to breathe and ponder.  

It talked about life.  It wasn't an ideal, idyllic portrayal of a church that had it all together in a world coming apart.  It also wasn't a judgmental condemnation of that world.

It was the most honest thing I found in the entire excursion.  It rang true.  It sounded like the world I live in. It sounded like the world that Jesus lived in.  

Better, it sounded like the world that Jesus lives in.  It sounded real.

I was immediately engaged.  I wanted to know more about this church.  Not because it had better answers.

It had better questions.  More accurately, because it had questions at all.  With Jesus there in the middle of them.  

I've never known answers to come in the absence of questions.

"Why?" seems like a very good place to begin.  

Jesus is there in the middle of that.  Thanks be to God!  

Amen.    



    

Questions...

Another mass shooting. Another troubled young man. Two words: male socialization. There are any number of extra security measures, scanners, surveillance cameras, metal detectors and bullet-proof materials we can put up around everything from preschools to Amish schools to porta-potties to churches and malls and airports and courthouses to military bases themselves. 

All will be at best band-aid diversions from addressing the root cause: male socialization. Let's start today by asking the question at home, in school, at church and at work: WHAT AM I HERE FOR? 

 I love the scene in Rob Bell's short film "Name" in which he describes the wrestling match between God disguised as an angel and the struggling shepherd, Jacob, when the angel asks, "What is your name?" The question really asks, "Who ARE you?" Then this line from Bell's narration: How much of our pain in life comes from not knowing how to answer that question? 

Indeed. Bullets. Nerve gas. Pressure cooker bombs... Who ARE we? And what ARE we for? I'm not fearful that the answers would terrify me. I'm more convinced that the silence would break my heart.

We Hold These Truths...

...to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...

The little document drawn up in that hall in Philadelphia back in '76 could have used a few footnotes.  It would be nice to know who the signers of the document considered "men."

Most likely, they thought the definition itself to be "self-evident."  Men????  Why, people like ourselves, of course!

Certainly not people of color, nor the "merciless Indian Savages" (ref., section 10 of the Declaration), could be considered "men" who had been created equal.  Created?  Sure!  But equal?   Equal to ourselves?  Not this side of Eternity!!!  Or the Atalantic.  

We are not so different from these men of 237 years ago.  We have some grand visions, some very flawed ones.  

But here's an oddity for us to consider.  They had mutually pledged to each other "our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor." 

They said in higher sounding words: 
This is how we will live as of today. 
This is worth living for. 
This is worth dying for. 
So be it!

Amen.

They did not draw up this declaration after years of war, bloodshed and eventual capitulation by the British.  1776 was years before what we call "The Revolutionary War."  The Declaration was not part of the surrender documents signed by the British, after which the American colonists finally sighed, "At last we can think about being free--because we have won a military victory."

No.  They became free when they had declared themselves to BE free of George III of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. 

 Amen.  

Yet, to die for is the number of times we have failed to embody and insist on the most basic concepts of the Declaration.

Or when we have willingly let go of them because we were honestly afraid of being that free.  Or couldn't be bothered to take the effort.   

It's wonderful at this national holiday celebrating the birth of our nation to remember that it was not a military victory that founded it.  Rather, it was the birth of an idea.  Honor members of our military, veterans for sure.  Always.  

But honor others even more highly:  people not afraid to speak and write and live the highest ideals and vision of which we human beings are capable.  Honor our best thinkers.  Especially the ones who are willing to pledge their lives in the cause of these ideas.

Living here requires more of us than being allegiantly inert, dutifully uniformed, steadfastly inactive, loyally blind, unconvinced of the common good.

Living here requires more than complacently thinking that we are kept "free" by a volunteer military that over 98% of Americans will never participate in. 

Freedom is not the same as safety and security with which it is too commonly conflated and confused.  Safety and security exist in the absence of threats and violence.  Freedom exists in the presence of activity.  Freedom exists not in its having but in its doing.  It must be exercised or it asphyxiates.      

In honor of the visionary forebears who thought their way to freedom before anyone ever fought their way, here's Roger's "Pledge of Performance":

I recognize, and I accept the privileges and the responsibilities of citizenship in these United States of America.  And I pledge my very best efforts in the faithful exercise of both my whole life long.   

May such truths become self-evident.  Soon.  Always. 

Amen.

Paper or Plastic? No problem!

http://www.flixxy.com/convert-plastic-to-oil.htm

This Japanese man supposedly has invented a plastic-to-oil distillery.  Hmmmm? 

Seems simple enough, agreed. Several basic questions that come to mind for me:

1) How much energy input is required to achieve the output?

2) Some plastics are more complex compounds than others. What happens with the residues that surely remain with some? 

3) Some plastics surely give off very noxious gases as they are being heated. I doubt that they simply sit in the retort and quietly transform themselves into gaseous petroleum. Are these gases condensed in the water, or do they escape and themselves become a source of atmospheric pollution?

Best way always to "solve" problems is to make as little of the problem as possible in the first place. Nearly all products we make, sell and purchase here are WAY overpackaged and WAY under-durable. I'd like to know more about the plastics distillery, but don't have time to do any research.

Some years back, I looked into the business of motor oil bottles... ugh!  What do we do with those?  Why the near total absence of recycling available for motor oil bottles?  The brand new, unused motor oil that ends up in landfills every year because people are too impatient to completely drain oil bottles before disposing? It's the equivalent of about 3.5 Exxon Valdez oil tankers.  Every year.  Every...  year.  Why? 

Over a decade ago, the US Department of Energy patented a process for cleaning the excess oil from plastic bottles, even the film residue that remains after thorough draining, using CO2 as the solvent. In the process, the CO2 is captured and recycled, not released. So far as I could tell, only one company in CA was engaging in the process several years ago, operating on state grant money that was probably budget axed after the original 2-year grant.
A friend and I once collected several large cases of plastic oil bottles, flattened them, and shipped them down to CA. Of course, the big question is whether more energy was spent in shipping than retrieved by the recycling process.  We felt good for a few minutes, but solved nothing.    

This defies reason, intelligence and civilization, of course. Since motor oil bottles are sold in every community on earth that has motor vehicles, there should be a closed loop system everywhere for the recovery and re-use of these containers. Oil filters, too.  Sure... 
If you want to hear anger and annoyance on the other end of the phone, merely call a local recycling resources hotline and ask the poor person who answers the phone where to recycle oil bottles locally. The usual response is something bordering on "Stop asking me that @#$%^&* question, you *&^% idiot, before I blow my @#$%^&* brains out--or yours if I could just get at you first! I HATE THIS JOB!" 

Should be a local, universal system to do this.  Just as there should be for things like dry cell batteries, compact fluorescent bulbs, shoes and baby diapers for the people who can't or won't wash cloth ones.

Why not?  Simply this. All problems are solvable if we decide we want to. No problems are solvable if we decide that we can't because we have already decided that we won't. Problems aren't problems at all.

People are problems.  Problems go away when our thinking changes.  

Jesus wept...  And I don't think it was over gay marriage.  

R.