Rule of Benedict 51
April 23, 2010
Chapter 7: 39-43 continue Benedict’s understanding of how to climb the ladder of humility. He says:
And secure in their hope of the divine reward, they go forward with joy, saying: But in all these things we overcome, through the one who has loved us (Romans 8:37). And so in another place Scripture says: You have tested us, O God; you have tried us as silver is tried by fire; you have led us into the snare and laid tribulation on our backs (Psalm 66:10-11). And in order to show that we ought to be under a superior, it goes on to say: You have placed people over our heads (Psalm 66:12).
Moreover, fulfilling the precept of the Lord by patience in adversities and injuries, they who are struck on one cheek offer the other; to someone who takes away their coat they leave also their cloak; and being forced to walk one mile, they go two (Matthew 5:39-41). With Paul the Apostle they bear with false brothers, and bless those who curse them (2 Corinthians 11:26; 1 Corinthians 4:12).
Comment: This weaving of Scripture is typical in the Rule. God is no softie when it comes to our submission to him and to others. We Christians triumph over our enemies in the same way the apostles and Jesus did: by living in humility and submission to God and others. That’s the way of life with God and his followers. Teresa of Avila let her inner voice slip out: “If this is the way how you treat your friends, Lord, no wonder you have so few of them!” (Cited by Norvene Vest in Preferring Christ)
Prayer: Lord, humility is learned in humiliation. My choice is obey or to lift up my head. Teach me to obey that I may not sin against you. Lord, have mercy on me.
Anger
April 20, 2010
We come finally to the last deadly sin: Wrath or anger.
Listen to this Jeremiad: This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, said to me: “Take from my hand this cup filled to the brim with my anger, and make all nations to whom I send you drink from it” (Jeremiah 25:15). The “cup of the wine of the wrath of God”, as the Hebrew literally says, is the cup of the righteous anger or judgment of God. God was angry with his people and with the nations in their disobedience. There is a point of no return when the axe of judgment falls upon debauchery. And God’s anger is the driving force.
In a final way, Jesus downed this judgment cup with one crucifying gulp when our judgment was nailed to his cross. But as long as the cosmos remains rebellious against God the residue of the anger of God remains as an instrument of judgment and reconciliation.
So much for God’s anger; what about ours? Since we are made in the image of God, is not anger or wrath part of the human gene pool? So we deduce then that there must be a right anger and a wrong anger since it is inconceivable to call God’s anger wrong.
Right anger serves and protects something good. The world God created is good, and we, the apex of creation, are very good even if we are desperately flawed. Anything that causes this goodness to wane or be destroyed incurs the judging wrath of God. In turn, we who are imitators of God (Ephesians 5:1-2) also make right and wrong anger choices. Righteous anger is God’s way of protecting the good, of purifying the world and our hearts. The wrong or sinful anger promotes the dark side of rebellion.
What is right anger? One time someone attempted to harm one of my children. I became a fiery and irritable 5-foot ball of anger. This kind of anger is right, fair and just. Justice and putting things to rights demands it. When the poor suffer and are taken advantage of, God is angry and we should be too. Not at God, not at ourselves. At a world system we are determined to transform in our anger. When a woman is abused in any way, our anger leads us to sympathize with her. Is justice even possible without right anger? Probably not! Until the kingdom of God comes in a final way and the will of God is done anger is the right response to injustice of any kind. Angry feelings, stemming from these situations, are not sinful. They fit well with Paul’s repetition of an Old Testament teaching to be angry but without committing sin or breaking a commandment of God. Letting the sun go down on this anger does not seem right.
The right kind of wrath is part of the life of the heroes of Scripture. Abraham beats the tar out of Lot’s rival warlords. I assure you he did not enter the war in love. Moses, by God’s voice, encouraged an eye for an eye, and made mincemeat of Egypt. And what to say of all the prophets of Israel, who railed against injustice, abuse of God’s moral law, and life in the fast lane of sin? Just as God’s wrath is positive and active so must our anger be.
Our problem is with the wrong anger, the Cain kind of anger that acts to destroy brother and neighbor (raising Cain we say). Rather than love, hatred digs its ugly claws into the seat of anger. The passage in Genesis 4 tells us that Cain branded his moral compass with the seal of internal anger. He then nursed the internal scar until it broke through his skin in the form of a hateful killing club.
But physical violence is not the only anger we commit. Pride, greed, and envy often lead to backbiting, slighting, or demeaning language against our neighbor. “How many reputations have you killed, O unrestrained anger?”
Then again, angry feelings are not always served piping hot or sported at the tip of the tongue or dangled on the sleeve. Often vengeance is calculated in the frigid temperatures of anger. Stafford (Disordered Loves, 82) quotes this Spanish Proverb: Vengeance is a dish best eaten cold. Vengeful anger injures with a deliberate word (a disposition of character that calls a neighbor a fool, Jesus said), withholding goodness, or ongoing unforgiveness.
And this: Displaced anger. I had to stop the other day when I realized I was beginning to react angrily to a situation. I quizzed my soul: Why are you angry within me? My soul admitted: I am angry at the injustice of a previous situation and because you haven’t let go of it, you’re wearing your anger on your sleeve in this other situation.” Touché! I took a mental shower and returned to my usual self.
Put away your wrong anger? But where? On the cross where Jesus traded hate for love. Those who walk with the master train their souls to respond with love when hate is more natural, when vengeance is pleasurable, and when keeping that angry piece of our minds we’re so willing to part with, right where it belongs: On the lips of prayer.
Psalms 1-2
April 12, 2010
Psalm 1: Another look.
Walking on the way is a familiar metaphor in Scripture. It pictures the pursuit of the moral life as marked by God. People of faith (all kinds of faiths) have known that more than human wisdom is needed to negotiate a life well lived, a good life. This brings up the question of whether we can be good without God, the question of the ages. If I were to answer this question honestly and personally (from personal experience), I would say: “I know that I can be somewhat good. But I cannot be the best I can be in goodness without God.” And he who settles for some goodness by self-will when all the goodness he can be with God is at his disposal is a rank fool.
Yes, belief in God does not exempt the saint from doing foolish or immoral things. And there’s plenty of atheists who live lives worthy of saints. Question them, however, and they’ll admit that they are at a loss to explain their own moral lives coherently to your or their own satisfaction. They cannot adequately answer “Why should we be good?” The moral life has no obvious authority. Reason alone cannot justify it. The desperate need for it in society, and in human nature, are not sufficient to explain why we should be good. Only God’s will and God’s call can make perfect sense of the inherent necessity of being good.
God not only answers the question of why we need to be good but the ultimate answer to how we can be good. We have tried, all of us to walk, stand, and sit not with the bad of the world. Not one has ever succeeded (except the One in whom there is no guile or sin). No matter whether we have the genius of Ben Franklin, the moral vision of Martin Luther King Jr. or the dogged perseverance to alleviate poverty of Mother Theresa. Our strategies for tooting our own goodness trumpets sound like clanging cymbals. Lowering the bar of goodness is a bankrupt way of doing goodness. The demand is sky high, the will and the natural capacity worm low.
In Why Bother Being Good? The Place of God in the Moral Life, John Hare articulates what we need. “We need moral faith… the faith that it is possible for us to be morally good in our hearts and the faith that the world outside us makes moral sense… We have to believe that our capacities have been transformed inside [ourselves]… and that “the world outside is the kind of place in which happiness is reliably connected with a morally good life.” (cited by Miroslav Volf in Against the Tide: Love in a time of petty dreams and peersiting enmities.
As moral people, who are imaged as walking in that blessed-is-the-man-tableau, which the psalmist paints for us in Psalm 1, we, who are moral people bent on a goodness that is not our own but gifted to us by God, are convinced that we need not do what is morally reprehensible in order to be happy. Unless we are persuaded by this, as the Psalmist of Psalm one evidently is, we cannot satisfy the demands of morality. We will think otherwise and cease to try to be moral if we believe “that we will be miserable when we do.”
The moral faith necessary for leading moral lives (why should we be good?) demands faith in God. He alone is able to “transform hearts and providentially lead the world in such a way that (in the end) virtue will unite with happiness.” Believers and non-believers alike may not realize that God is at work in the heart and in the world to marry virtue and blessedness. God ordained and performed the ceremony of that marriage. Ultimately on a cross.
To truly live abundantly (to walk, stand, and sit in attachment to a Righteous God), is to walk on the way that God marked, with God, before God, and for God.
Prayer: Dear God, I know deep within that my moral goodness can only come from you. Even the moral faith that I need to do the right things in life and believe I can be pleasing in your sight is a gift from you hand. I, in my own power and might, try as I may, have no natural capacity to be good. The good I know to do, I do not, I cannot do. Thanks be to God, who in Christ Jesus, my Lord, charted the way of goodness for me, and has given me the Spirit of God to convince me that I should be good and enabled me to be good. Help me even more today to remain convinced that virtue for me, as it is for all your people then and now, is necessarily tied to blessedness. Blessed is the man indeed. Amen.
Rule Of Benedict 50
April 10, 2010
7 is the chapter the Rule elaborates on living humbly with God and others. Verses 35-38 address the fourth step on humility: quiet obedience and acceptance of life in spite of hardships.
The fourth step of humility is that if in this very obedience hard and contrary things, even injuries, are done to him, he embraces them patiently with silent acceptance, and does not grow weary to give in, as the Scripture says: He who perseveres to the end shall be saved (Matthew 10:22). And again: Let you heart take courage, and wait for the Lord (Psalm 27:14). And showing how the faithful ought to bear all things, however contradictory, for the Lord, [the Scripture] says in the person of the afflicted: For you we suffer death all day long; we are counted as sheep for the slaughter (Romans 8:36; Psalm 44:22).
Paul says in Philippians “do all things without grumbling”. I may grit my teeth and obey. I may obey dutifully but attitudinally inwardly be rebellious. I may think myself obedient when truly I’m indifferent.
Deep commitment to Christ is not obtained in life’s peaks but in the mire of life’s troughs. Our love is deepened in the troughs and our love motivates our going further along the road less traveled among many of us today: The Way of the Cross.
Prayer: Dare I ask you for perseverance and endurance? Shall I enter willingly into sufferings (mine and yours to complete), denial, and crucifixion? Is there no other way? Narrow is the way and few there be who find it. Lead me on this way though my ego be killed. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God who knows the way of grief and suffering, shame and abandonment, have mercy on me.
Fasting 2
April 8, 2010
What do you do when you are faced with sorrow in and around you? What happens in your soul when you encounter tragedy or experience a sacred moment? There is certainly no shortage of pain and hurt in our world, in our lives. And if we live attentive lives we are bound to encounter divine sacred moments or events in life. What responses are appropriate for such a time as these?
Often the Bible joins prayer with fasting as a way to respond to life’s not so happy side. Prayer is natural in such times because of real helplessness when facing such unhappiness or grave event. The psalmists, for example, often lament life’s miseries, attacks of enemies, and the distance they feel toward God. Prayer is spirit/Spirit conversation.
Fasting, on the other hand is body talk. It’s our body responding to grief and sorrow, to sacred moments. Scot McKnight says in his book on fasting that at the very core of fasting is empathy with the divine or participation in God’s perception of a sacred moment. When death occurs God is grieved. When his people sin, God grieves. When his people are oppressed God experiences sorrow. Fasting is our participation in the grief of God and of others. It is important to get at the truth that fasting is a response to events or circumstances that already happened. Fasting is not an instrument to get what we want from God. In fasting, we are gifted with the opportunity to pay attention to God, feel the compassion of God for us and for others, and live in the freedom or grace given to us to serve God by doing his will.
To illustrate how fasting is a response, consider the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur or Day of Atonement that Leviticus 23:27 speaks of. On that day Israel confessed its sins, God covered (atoned for) their sins, the temple was purified, and reconciliation occurred.
So here we see that a “grievous sacred moment or event in the life of the people of faith. On that day they confessed sin and found atonement [covering, erasure] and forgiveness.” On that day the people of God practiced a form of denial of themselves. That means they afflicted themselves or “afflicted their throats.” This is fasting: afflicting ourselves by withholding from our throats the comfort of food in response to the grievous sacred moment. The third element in fasting is the response that is the repentance that is represented by fasting bodily.
Why all this talk of fasting? Because the Church in North America is facing such a need to call on God in prayer and fasting in response to grievous sacred moments in our present day society and church. Our litany of sins is too long to number. But the Holy Spirit has a handle on that and in our groaning our Lord Jesus will intercede to the Father on our behalf. In order to enter fully into this sorrow (the prevalence of sinfulness, the lack of a desire for holiness even in the church), we are called upon, as the Israelites had in the past, to respond in prayer and fasting (humbling ourselves before God). Our Day of Atonement is ever present. Shall we not enter where many before us did, even our Lord Jesus Christ?
Would you consider joining me in responding to our lack of holy living or grievous sacred moments, with broken hearts? If you are able, and have no medical cause not to, would you set aside one day a week (Sundown to sundown. If that is too much, aim for one day every two weeks or a month) to fast in response to the situation we find ourselves in? I will set aside Mondays (Sundown Sunday to sundown Monday) of each week to pay attention to God, to see and feel compassion for our plight in the church and the world, and to act and receive the grace or freedom to seek God’s favor in our land. I am inclined to think that if God would answer our prayers (fasting is praying with our bodies), cover our sin, and heal us with holiness by his Holy Spirit, fasting would be part of our response.
Make us alive again to your presence, O God. Give us the vibrant faith we need to live holy lives. Give us one and all in your church to become robust sharers of the Good News and disciple making servants of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. In our dire strait, awaken and transform us for Christ’s sake. Amen.
N.B. If you are reading this and wish to respond to this call to fast in response to the grave situation in the church and society today, would you be so kind as to comment by saying “I will do my best with God’s grace to join others in fasting and prayer.”
Fasting 1
April 8, 2010
The Role of Fasting in Spiritual Awakening
Most exhorters to spiritual awakening like to mention the duet instruments of prayer and fasting. These Siamese twins are prevalent in revival talk. But how does fasting work? Biblically that is?
Confusion about fasting abound. Many writers consider fasting as an instrument to get things from God or to get God to act in response to something we need: direction in life, some answer we need desperately. In the case of revival some Christians call on us to fast in order for God to favor us with revival. This is of course well intentioned. However, it is a biblically an inaccurate reason to fast. This is not wrong per se. But to be true to the Scripture, fasting is not about getting things from God. We may get results that come after fasting but not because of it. There may be an outcome to fasting, but the outcome, whether there or not, is not the same as the reason to fast. We don’t fast in order to get something from God. Rather, biblical fasting is mainly about responding to something God is doing or to something that has already happened in life.
That something is a key to understanding the reason for fasting. I am convinced that those through whom the Holy Spirit of God used to usher in His awakenings, revivals, and transformation knew what biblical fasting is. They knew to fast because they knew the reality of society and church. They did not fast to bring revival; they fasted in response to what they saw in society and in the church. Their intended goal was to respond rather than to make things happen. Fasting to make things happen is like making deals with God: “I fast, you dispense revival.” Well, God is not in this business of making deals.
Biblical fasting is always in response to life and to God’s actions. A life well lived is never short on sacred moments, tragedies, and sorrows. A life lived in the presence of God cannot but respond to such pain. The most natural response we humans have at our disposal to deal with life’s sacredness, and pain, its joys and sorrows, is to abstain from food. Tragedy or sorrow always demands a response. Notice how we refrain from eating at the death of a loved one or in case of serious injury! Often in Scripture the response to such life events is prayer and fasting. Not for results but as a way of entering the sorrow of our lives and that of others.
We have such a prevailing condition in our society today as well as in some of our churches. A tragedy of huge proportions has taken place over several decades in our country and our churches. The situation has become intolerable. Sin is rampant in and outside the church. Our dropout rates are phenomenal. Life completely sold on God (regeneration) is rare in our midst. It’s not the norm. Many of the people who are called by God’s name are not living up to that name.
Shall we not enter into this sorrow? Shall we remain aloof to this tragedy? Shall we not embrace our divine call to enter into the action of God and respond by prayer and fasting, as our Jewish/Christian heritage teaches us to do?
The first aspect of a call to fasting is to see the reality, the bleak reality of nominal Christianity (Christian in name only). The reality that says I can call Jesus savior but never mind him as Lord. The reality that says I’ve got my ticket stamped for the train whose destination is heaven, but never mind the ride there. I’ll just grin and bear it, if I can. Cheap grace is living without self-denial, without willful sacrifice, without intentional dying to our selves. This is the broad path and gate.
Spirit of the Living and Loving God, fall fresh on your Church!
Spirit of the Living and Loving God, fall fresh on me!
Melt the dross of my sin and cleanse me from within.
Give me eyes to see, the brokenness in and around me.
And seeing, help me to enter into the sorrow, the tragedy,
In fasting response to Thee.
Rule of Benedict 49
April 7, 2010
Chapter seven is the longest chapter so far in the Rule of Saint Benedict. Today we look at verse 34. The divisions of the chapters I have been following come from a book I’ve referred to periodically called Preferring Christ by Norvene Vest and the translation of the Rule itself is done by Fr. Luke Dysinger, OSB (Order of Saint Benedict).
7:34 says: The third step of humility is that for the love of God a person submits himself to his superior in all obedience; imitating the Lord, of whom the apostle says: He was made obedient even to death (Phil 2:8).
Benedict here is direct as he has been all along. He has advocated that to live by the Rule around which a group may gather means to have a humble spirit. The first step in the ladder toward humility (the Ladder of Humility is attributed to Cassian from whom it is believed that Benedict borrowed it):
A person always keeps the fear of God before his eyes. We tend toward self-exaltation. Keeping our lives in the fear of the Lord moves us in the direction of humility.
The second step is not to love our own will (or kingdoms or actions). humility demands that we do not gratify the desires of the flesh but to trust in the Lord’s will and to live in a kingdom of his making, submitting to its actions and rules.
The third step, in verse 34 quoted above is to learn obedience to someone further along the Road less traveled. That’s what Benedict means by superior.
Comment: The third step on the Humility Ladder is hard to do. In the Christian tradition in which I live and work, we prize the individual’s right to live out her call as an individual. Often the way this works out borders on individualism, a plight seen in the Dream of many in the West. I am the captain of my ship, the master of my own destiny. Letting someone else direct my life, to whom I am responsible for the choices I make (beside God, that is) is not part of my tradition. Yet I see the benefit of humbly submitting to someone who is further along the Way.
Humility must move from the inward aspects of our lives (pride, fear of God, desiring the will of God) to outward expressions such as surrendering to the direction of another person of God’s choosing who may input into my life, and may encourage further obedience along the journey of faith in God.
Prayer: Dear God, help me to be willing, as I listen to those who are further along the life everlasting, to be obedient to the unmistaken voice of God. Help me to be humble and search out someone who may listen to your movement in my life and to do as he advises. Lord, have mercy, and guide me, and enable me to be obedient to those who have known true obedience through humility.
Can It Be?
April 5, 2010
We celebrated Easter Sunday yesterday. The churches were full. Unusually full. Many have done their duty nodding their allegiance by their twice a year obligatory attendance at church. How large a percentage of “Christians” is this worldwide is hard to estimate. Vestiges of Christ remain among many in Western “Christianized” societies. Now life can go back to its usual drabness in the midst of a chaotic dog-eat-dog world.
Knowing Christ is life. Life that is stamped eternal, in kind and content. Life that saves from drab existence. “Salvation is life,” says Dallas Willard. A life that God infuses in us by various instrumentalities the chief of which is the Holy Spirit of God. Eugene Peterson calls this life Practicing Resurrection.
Those who practice resurrection life have God’s life: self-initiating, self-directing, and self-sustaining. They don’t have this life from within. It comes from without, from God. But when life comes to humans from God (Regeneration, or Salvation as life) is takes on the characteristics of God-life. This God-life is the activity of God penetrating “the darkened world of the human soul and begins to act in it and around it” (from Spiritual Formation as a Natural Part of Salvation, quoted from D. Willard in Life in the Spirit: Spiritual Formation in Theological PErspective, ed. Jeffrey P. Greenman and George Kalantzis, IVP Academic). This life invasion is the stuff of poetry, and song. Charles Wesley wrote of it (Willard quotes this stanza from Can It Be That I Should Gain) to describe this salvific living:
“Long my imprisoned spirit lay fast bound in sin an nature’s night; thine eye diffused a quick’ning ray, I woke, the dungeon flamed with light; My chains fell off, my heart was free; I rose, went forth and followed Thee.”
Now that the resurrection celebration has taken its rightful place on the calendar, and the crowds have finished their Hosannas, I pray that resurrection life will take its rightful place every minute of our existence, who remain as church people. Let’s arise with Him, go forth, and follow Him, demonstrating that by loving God and loving others we are truly practicing resurrection.
Benedict’s Rule 48
April 3, 2010
Chapter 7:31-33. Previously Benedict had said that the first step of humility is that our existence is always lived in the presence of God. This ever present God is our motivation to overcome evil desires that tempt us to live according to our will. So Benedict’s logic here is don’t love your own will. Here’s how he puts it:
The second step of humility is that a person does not love his own will, nor delights in gratifying his own desires; but carries out in his deeds that saying of the Lord: I came not to do my own will, but the will of the one who sent me (John 6:38). And again it is written: Self-will deserves punishment, but necessity wins a crown.”
Comments: The training of the will to die is slow work.It’s constant work. We can’t help but will; will what is good and will what is bad; will with right motives, or with wrong motives; will that is self-protective and will that is others empowering. Benedict, in answering life questions defaults to Jesus and Scripture. He saw no better way. Christians still see no better way. There is none. Jesus offer us nurture that is heavenly as we trust him and feed on him and eat his book. He also desires very much that we imitate him. He did not do his own will (it was not his will to be shamed, humiliated, suffer ignominy, or die. It was his Father’s will. He lived God’s actions in his life; he lived the kingdom of God. So his promise is that in imitation we would succeed as he did. Do the will of my father, he says.
A disciple is not above his teacher, but when the disciple is fully formed, he will be like his teacher. My spiritual formation is undertaken by none other that the Spirit of God. Learning to relinquish my will for that of the Other is imperative. How I make this my own may be different than how others do it. For me, it is the constant observation of Jesus in his love of his Father and the people around him. It’s dependence on the grace (enabling) of God to help me do what I am not able to do in my own will. One of the hardest things in life is to discern whose will governs our actions. When my heart is being shaped by Jesus through intimacy with him in prayer and eating his Word, I am very much aware that my actions are imitative of His. When I’m feeding on my own self-will and the will of the World, my actions are imitative of the world. This is axiomatic in the Christian life.
Prayer: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me. I am ever so tempted to do it my own way when your way is always better, holy, edifying, God-honoring. I repent of my self-willful self and bow humbly before the Lord of my life. Amen.
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