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Risking vulnerability

Sojourners Magazine, Nov/Dec 2002 by Verhulst, Kari Jo

Reflections on the revised common lectionary, Cycles A and B

BIBLE STUDY

I used to wake at 3 a.m. with a start, jolted awake by the certainty that we had made God up. Given the dispassionate nature of the world, and the banality of our cruelty and self-- absorption, the idea of a loving, present God seemed overwhelmingly absurd-a feeling as sad as it was terrifying. Thus it has been a great and humbling relief to discover that I exist in the company of millennia of God-lovers who also awaken to this dreadful sense of improbability. Those wiser than I-rabbis and poets, theologians and preachers-locate these midnight churnings squarely within the life of faith. I heard one say that if you're not convinced you're making it up at least a third of the time, you're spiritually dead. "So," I now say to myself on nights like these, "this is what it is to be alive."

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To live in the Triune God is to "accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete," to borrow from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Living in the hope of our fundamental confession-that God, who is, has come in Jesus to dwell irrevocably with and in us, full of grace and truth-requires a radical abdication of control, reminding us that it is God, not us, who has both the power and the responsibility to make good on God's promises. This release of control renders us vulnerable even as it frees us to receive. For God's promises are effective-they free us to risk disappointment and give us the courage to relinquish our most critical defenses, so we can grieve past disappointments and permit ourselves to desire and yearn once again.

Advent attunes our ears and clears out our hearts so that the Creator of all can awaken us from numbness with the sharply vulnerable cry of a newborn. Spend these days praying for the freedom to risk hoping again. Make it a discipline to bring your disappointments and hungers-including your fear of hoping, your terror of aloneness-before God. a

Karl Jo Verhulst, a Sojourners contributing writer, is an al.Div. student at Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

NOVEMBER 3

No More Masks

Micah 3:5-12; Psalm 43; 1 Thessalonians 2:9-13; Matthew 23:1-12

Jesus' public castigation of the scribes and Pharisees comes after their many attempts to lock Jesus Into debates that would expose his Interpretive hand. Concerned with preserving the truth entrusted to them, and quite possibly hoping he would show them a way out of the inherent compromises that attend leading a people living under occupation, the quandaries they threw Jesus' way revealed an inability, if not a refusal, to consider that their own beliefs and leadership were themselves in need of a radical renewal.

Jesus does not criticize their praxis or teachings per se, but rather their failure to remember that their religious tradition was a received gift, not a fixed deposit. Their phylacteries and fringes were given as tactile reminders of who they are-covenant children of the uniquely sovereign God. Yet they have turned them into barricades that secure their prestige and privilege. Rather than teach holiness and fidelity in such a way that their people were freed to love and serve God and one another, they turned the tradition into a burden "grievous to be borne," as the King James Version words it (Matthew 23:4).

Human beings possess a remarkable ability to turn any good gift into a self-protecting commodity. While the exaggerated pomp of the scribes and the Pharisees makes them easy targets, this text calls us to recognize our own fortresses of arrogance or fear, which prevent us from giving ourselves away. What in our own religious worlds and priorities do we turn into masks? What of our own beliefs-- about ourselves, about God, about others-do we treat as possessions, rather than as ways into life in the always-dynamic God?

NOVEMBER 10

Healer and Restorer

Amos 5:18-24; Psalm 70,

1 Thessalonians 4:13-18; Matthew 25:1-13

The call to watchfulness narrated by the parable of the 10 bridesmaids is stark In its demand for vigilance. Its surface meaning seems simple enough: Keep awake, and tend to that which will equip you to recognize and be received by the Son of God, lest you be left outside as a result of your own negligence.

But the timing of the kingdom, and the bridegroom's return, bends and twists around our sense of past, present, and future. The day of reckoning is located at an unknowable day and hour (Matthew 25:13), yet takes place within the kingdom-come, an event that the passage's beginning suggests is yet in the future: "then the kingdom of heaven will be like this" (Matthew 25:1). The kingdom is not yet, and yet has come; it precedes the coming of the Son, and yet is brought by his coming; it is a state of being and place in time, and yet is always erupting and just around the corner.

This disregard for linearity challenges our fixed creation-fall-redemption paradigm. The reconciling, recreating work of God that Jesus announces is not confined to that moment in history. Jesus' life, death, and resurrection do not change God or God's way of being to and with us. Rather, Jesus makes known to us the healing, restorative work of God, which has always been and always will be, and which can heal and repair both past and future.

Risking vulnerability

Sojourners Magazine, Nov/Dec 2002 by Verhulst, Kari Jo

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