Naomi King (@revnaomi) tweeted a great question recently: “What are your favorite #inspirational quotes about abundance?” Her prompt reminded me of how critical a theology of abundance is to a healthy spirituality. In contrast, a theology of scarcity can spiral into an unhealthy spirituality. A search for the words “abundance” and “scarcity” on my computer turned up the following quotes: [Read more...]

Two pictures have been independently circulating on Facebook. Presented together they serve as both an interesting juxtaposition and as commentary on one another. To be fair, the first picture is too sweepingly dismissive of all conservatives as being of one simplistic type. Nevertheless, Galbraith, a well-known economist who died a few years ago, does speak an element of prophetic truth here given the resurgence of interest in Ayn Rand’s philosophy of selfishness among many prominent conservatives. The most bizarre aspect from my perspective is that many of these Ayn Rand toting conservatives are regular church attenders who experience no cognitive dissonance between their politics of selfishness and the way of Jesus. A word of caution: this critique should not be read as an implicit endorsement of the Democrat Party, which has its own issues of (among others) being beholden to corporate interests.

The second picture is more ironic, as one would expect from comedic satirist Stephen Colbert:

Selfishness is natural. We are all born as egocentric infants, but the way of Jesus calls us to expand our love of self to include the love of God and neighbor. Indeed, Jesus teaches that The Second Greatest Commandment is to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18 / Matthew 22:39-40 and parallels). The philosopher Beatrice Bruteau, in her book The Holy Thursday Revolution, writes that we tragically misunderstand Jesus’ Second Greatest Commandment (and hence misread Jesus’ life and teachings overall) if fail to see that Jesus is in many ways being quite literal in his emphasis on the importance of learning to love your neighbor as yourself. She writes:

If we cannot love our neighbor as ourself, it is because we do not perceive our neighbor as ourself. We perceive the neighbor as precisely not ourself, but as a potential threat (or potential aid) to ourself…. The Holy Thursday Revolution undertakes to change our perceptions so that it will become possible for us fully to love our neighbors as ourselves.

The “Holy Thursday Revolution” is when, after washing his disciples’ feet (a profoundly nonhierarchical and unselfish act), Jesus says, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another” (John 13:34). Thus, rightly understood, the way of Jesus calls us toward a life of ever-expanding concentric circles of inclusion: from only worrying about yourself and what you will eat and drink (Matthew 6:25) to a compassion for all people, friends or enemies (Matthew 5:44). Bruteau’s book challenges us to see that authentically living the way of Jesus will change both our self and our worldview such that we increasingly begin to experience ourself as deeply in connection — or, better, in communion — with all people, even all Creation. Hence, we find ourselves truly able to practice The Second Greatest Commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself.”

Lest we neglect what Jesus called The Greatest and First Commandment “to love God” (Deuteronomy 6:5 / Matthew 22:37-38), perhaps here we can also glimpse the spiritual truth in a teaching from the 12th-century French abbot St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who, in his essay “On Loving God,” talked about the stages we move through as we practice Jesus’ Greatest Commandment.

At first, as we have seen, we love ourselves for our own sake. In Bernard’s language, this infantile stage is “the first degree” of loving God. Loving ourselves is somewhat paradoxically still the love of God because God is in, with, and beyond all things. As Augustine wrote, “God is closer to us that we are to ourselves” (“interior intimo meo et superior summo meo,” Confessions 3.6.11).

As we (hopefully) mature, we begin to love God for our sake, for what God can do for us. Mystics call this stage “purgation.”

If we continue to grow, we learn to love God for God’s own sake. In the Christian contemplative tradition this stage emerges from experiences of “Illumination.”

Many too often assume this level is the highest achievement, but Bernard spoke of an even higher point in which we love ourselves for God’s sake. The mystics call this stage “Union.” The transformation of our worldview at this level (what some speak of as nondual perception) is what Bruteau means when she says that, “The Holy Thursday Revolution undertakes to change our perceptions so that it will become possible for us fully to love our neighbors as ourselves.”

There is so much more to life, God, the universe, and Christianity than is contained in Ayn Rand’s philosophy, but paradoxically Rand’s promotion of the “love of self” is — if rightly, expansively, and evermore-inclusively understood — a path of profound transformation in line with the way of Jesus. However, many notions of selfishness, as critiqued in the two cartoons above, are childish, immature, and are impoverishing our nation’s political discourse. I can understand (although I disagree) justifying one’s selfishness based on Ayn Rand’s “Objectivism,” but don’t justify your selfishness in Jesus’ name.

The Rev. Carl Gregg is the pastor of Broadview Church in Chesapeake Beach, Maryland. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.

The New York Times reports that,

This weekend, hundreds of pastors, including some of the nation’s evangelical leaders, will climb into their pulpits to preach about American politics, flouting a decades-old law that prohibits tax-exempt churches and other charities from campaigning on election issues. The sermons, on what is called Pulpit Freedom Sunday, essentially represent a form of biblical bait, an effort by some churches to goad the Internal Revenue Service into court battles over the divide between religion and politics.

The Alliance Defense Fund, a nonprofit legal defense group whose founders include James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, sponsors the annual event, which started with 33 pastors in 2008. This year, Glenn Beck has been promoting it, calling for 1,000 religious leaders to sign on and generating additional interest at the beginning of a presidential election cycle.

“There should be no government intrusion in the pulpit,” said the Rev. James Garlow, senior pastor at Skyline Church in La Mesa, Calif., who led preachers in the battle to pass California’s Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage. “The freedom of speech and the freedom of religion promised under the First Amendment means pastors have full authority to say what they want to say…. Pastors have been bullied and intimidated enough.”

The so-called “Pulpit Freedom Sunday” seems to be a case of demagoguery: “a strategy for gaining political power by appealing to the prejudices, emotions, fears, vanities and expectations of the public — typically via impassioned rhetoric and propaganda, and often using nationalist, populist or religious themes.” As the saying goes, “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.”

In other words, there are some on the Religious Right who desire to establish the United States as an exclusively Christian Nation in opposition to the vibrant religious pluralism that has emerged in the wake our Constitutionally-guaranteed religious freedom. The Washington Post has written that, “Dominionism is defined as the tendency of politically active conservative Christians to try to control government. Writer Michelle Goldberg simplifies the definition down to: ‘a movement…which says Christians should rule the world.’”

Pulpit Freedom Sunday seems like a dangerous farce to me: a situation of fake outrage meant to cynically galvanize political power. When pastors such as The Rev. James Garlow say that, “The freedom of speech and the freedom of religion promised under the First Amendment means pastors have full authority to say what they want to say” and that, “Pastors have been bullied and intimidated enough,” they conspicuously fail to mention two important facts.

First, far from being “bullied and intimidated” by the government, all members of the clergy benefit from government-sponsored tax breaks. Perhaps myself and other members of the clergy should relinquish their benefits. I have recently blogged to this effect in a post titled, “Atheists May Have a Point on Clergy Tax Breaks.”

Second, pastors are welcome to assert their first-amendment right to freedom of speech to endorse political candidates (or whomever or whatever else) from the pulpit. But, first, these members of the clergy and their currently tax-exempt churches should send a large check to the U.S. Treasury, because the IRS should revoke their tax-exempt status. Claiming persecution from the government while simultaneously benefiting from government-sponsored tax breaks is crying wolf, the height of hypocrisy, and behavior that should be expected from a petulant child, not a religious leader. Moreover, the conflict between the First Amendment and the law against campaigning from the pulpit is perhaps precisely why all tax-breaks for clergy and religious organizations should be repealed — thereby curtailing one avenue for the state to silence the prophetic voice of the church and other religious groups.

Yes, funding religious groups could become more difficult if congregants could not submit their offering plate donations as tax deductible, but perhaps such a sacrifice would reveal whether the true loyalties of congregants are to their bank account or to God.  As Jesus said, “You cannot serve God and wealth” (Matthew 6:24/Luke 16:13). Jesus’ most authentic teachings are some of the hardest to hear, much less to follow. Remember that Jesus was sentenced to death at the hands of the Roman state when he became threat to the Roman powers that be. Thus, my ingrained tendency is to side with the separation of church and state. When Christians speak, we shouldn’t have to worry about whether we are biting the hand that feeds us because we shouldn’t be fed from Caesar/Uncle Sam in the first place.

The Rev. Carl Gregg is the pastor of Broadview Church in Chesapeake Beach, Maryland. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.

Whenever I hear commentators blaming natural disasters on God’s punishment for human sin (most typically on sexual sins like homosexuality, adultery, divorce, pre-marital sex, or abortion), this week’s Hebrew Scripture lesson from 1 Kings 19 comes to mind. We read in verses 11 and 12 that God is “not in the wind” of the hurricanes like Katrina which struck New Orleans. Similarly, God was “not in the earthquake” (or the tsunami) such as that which struck Japan back in April, just as God was “not in the fire” such as those which blazed through the southwest earlier this summer — at least God was not in any of those events in the sense of the simpleminded theology that attributes destruction to divine vindictiveness.  However, we learn paradoxically at the end of verse 12 that God is fully, abundantly, and mysteriously present in the “sound of sheer silence.” And if we can silence, if only for a few moments, all those other voices emerging from the whirlwind of our daily lives (the voices of the newspaper, the radio, the television – the voices of the Internet, co-workers, and others) then we might begin to hear the voice of God that within us, with us, and beyond us in the sound of sheer silence.

Application: Practicing the Sacrament of Silence

At the end of this sermon, there will be a minute of silence.  I invite you to use that time to listen gently for how God might be calling you today in regard to the concerns of those people and situations for which you prayed earlier during our time of prayer for the world.

As a way of transitioning into this time of listening silently for God, I invite you to hear the words of Thomas Merton, the twentieth-century Trappist monk from Kentucky.  If you are comfortable, I invite you to close your eyes as you listen to these words.  I will repeat it once, and then you will have another minute to listen contemplatively to God in silence.  Merton writes:

It is precisely because I believe that “we are not alone” that I find hope even in this most desperate situation.  We do not have to transcend ourselves in the sense of pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps.  We have, rather, to respond to the mysterious grace of a Spirit which is infinitely greater than our own.

It is precisely because I believe

that “we are not alone”

that I find hope

even in this most desperate situation.

We do not have to transcend ourselves

in the sense of pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps.

We have, rather, to respond to the mysterious grace of a Spirit

which is infinitely greater than our own.

Notes

The quote is from Thomas Merton, “Final Integration,” in Conversion: Perspective on Personal and Social Transformation,” edited by Walter E. Conn (Alba House: New York, 1978), 271-272.