Bridging the gap
Commentary
Bridging the gap from the divine to the human, from God's
world to the human scene, from the heart and mind of Christ to us
ordinary folk, is the task of what we call revelation or
disclosure. We humans are not "naturally" in God and God is not
naturally in us. We have too little imagination to conceive the
ways of God; too little courage to take on the hard things; too
little moral fabric to embody the divine. Naturally.
The Bible shows many ways in which people make efforts to do
the bridging. The readings for today show three of these. One is
intellectual, apologetic: we make the faith credible by tying it
in to the way people think, and show them how plausible is the
mode of God's approach in Christ. A second way is moral: by being
generous in the face of suffering, we replicate something that
those who would follow him will find in Jesus -- patient
acquiescence combined with real courage. But it is finally
experiencing the love of God in Christ and then expressing it
that we will see the most bridging going on.
We cannot picture hearing all this just once and "getting it."
The disciples did not and since it is not in the "natural" skein
of things, we who inhabit a very natural world are not equipped
by ourselves to get it. The circle of believers grows when people
speak in such a way that others want to hear more. That is in the
story from Acts. Second, it grows and is reinforced when others
see generosity and kindness, patience and strength when things go
wrong or bad things are done. But from biblical times to our own,
the Spirit moves most effectively when those who "get the
Spirit," which means who "get to get the Spirit," exemplify and
enlarge the circle of love.
Grist For The Mill
Acts 17:22-31
Success stories are often told to inspire us, so that we can
copy the successful ones and, it is inferred, have some victories
of our own. But they can also defeat us. We don't measure up to
the athletes and heroes, the business wonderpeople or patriots;
why try? Maybe we do better to hear some failure stories. Here,
in a way, is one.
"If you cannot preach like Paul ..." some have sung. Paul is
one of those great success stories. He out-argues, out-converses,
out-converts others; we picture coliseums full of people
responding. Yet here at Athens, according to Luke-Acts, he tries
his best to meet the locals on their terms -- and fails. Well,
this was not a total failure: "Some scoffed, but others said, 'We
will hear you again about this.' " But Dionysius and Damaris
"with others with them" did join him and become believers. Not a
stadium full, but a phone booth full. So, not a total failure,
but not a total success.
What went wrong? Paul tried apologetics of an uncompelling
sort. It sounded credible when this account had him quoting "one
of your own poets." That's known as ingratiation to an audience,
speaking the local language, showing intelligence and finesse and
skill and cunning. But it was only one more example of what does
not work. You cannot sneak up on people. You cannot use sleight
of hand. You cannot dazzle them with the margins and hope it will
make the center easier to grasp.
No, people are smart, not dumb. They know that the story of
the resurrection makes different demands on one than do arguments
about religion, about God being around us and in us. We can sneak
up on people intellectually so and so far: but then comes
witness, a different story.
1 Peter 3:13-22
This is a day in which forms of witness preoccupy us. Paul did
well at tangling with the Greeks, but in the end failed to be
compelling. 1 Peter was written to people who had to do well in
order to stay alive; or at least to make sense of suffering; or,
certainly at least, to be credible to others.
The advice given complements the kind of thing Paul tried. He
wanted to commend himself by showing intellectual sympathy with
the audience, according to Acts. But 1 Peter is showing a more
compelling way to witness, to stand for the things of God, to
represent the divine and Christlike way in a world that is short
on such representations. That way is the way of suffering.
The good thing about this letter is that it does not appeal to
a martyr complex. It is simply realistic; good people can suffer
for doing good, as Christ did. Whether or not "we" are called to
the forms of suffering that the early Christians knew, we are
called to the extraordinary in any circumstance. Paul Ricoeur
wrote an essay on "The Hermeneutics of Testimony": witnesses who
risked their necks are heard especially clearly when they speak
and do the things of God. We think of the witness of Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, who suffered all the way; of Martin Luther King, who
suffered many things short of death before he suffered death --
all the while becoming even more credible.
What commends Christ to others most is his presence in people
who give an accounting of the hope that is in them "with
gentleness and reverence." That happens as readily in a hospital
room, on the job, in family circumstances, in the public forum,
as it does in the concentration camp. Which means: not easily,
not often, but, by the grace of God, on occasions. And it is
these occasions that make Christ's way alluring still.
John 14:15-21
All the texts on this Sunday that is devoted to witness imply
but the Gospel states openly: the power to re-present God in the
form of the resurrected Jesus is not our own. There has to be an
outside source, here defined as the Advocate, the Paraclete, the
one "called to the side of" others. In verses following this text
we find that some of the disciples, or at least Judas ("not
Iscariot"), were bewildered. Why were they insiders? What did all
this mean?
Jesus had given the clue already in the earlier words in the
Gospel. In faith those who had heard Christ and followed him
already knew this: "Spirit of truth," if not by name, then by
effects. And the effects were direct: this Spirit "abides in you"
and "will be in you."
Talk about bridging distances, gulfs, gaps, and disparities.
Truth, in this gospel, refers to all the reality there is. This
is the Truth that created and creates the universe and all life
in it. This is the same Truth that comes in Jesus, who is called
the Way, the Truth, the Life. This is the point at which in a
newer age the New Age comes along and wants us to turn gnostic.
Certainly, Jesus is imparting some arcane knowledge, some secret
learning, some cultic ways, some insider's information.
Sorry: on those terms he is disappointing. He says he will
reveal what is in the bosom of the Father, and then simply points
to himself. But with that pointing comes some identification; he
embodies, brings, and is love. "Those who love me will be loved
by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them."
When the curtain of mystery is pulled back, the hidden disclosed,
we find that it all comes to focus and center in Jesus' love.
FIRST LESSON FOCUS
By James A. Nestingen
Acts 17:22-31
Looking on from some 2,000 years distance, it is possible to
see two worlds meeting as the Athenians gather to listen to the
Apostle Paul in the Acts account. Though one has assumed
dominance, there is vibrant hope that the other -- not so much a
view as a person -- will assert control.
The first is that of the Athenians. Citizens of a fabled city,
they inherited a tradition that they passed on through the Greco-
Roman world to the West. According to this view, the truth is
propositional -- a set of statements arrived at through
observation of the external or internal realities, by which a
person comes to know the nature of life itself and can thereby
get hold of a piece of the future.
It has worked, particularly in matters that are physically
detached and repeatable. Examining things, deducing the forces
that move and condition them, the heirs of Athens have produced
knowledge and with it, a technology that served an illusion of
mastery even while its limits bear in upon us in looming
catastrophe.
But for all the progress, this view of the world has hardly
moved beyond the Athenians of the Acts text in its understanding
of God. For as well as it does with things, it is only sure of
what can be reduced to numbers. " ... So they would search for
God, and perhaps grope for him and find him ...," blind to the
mysteries of human relationships, stopped at a vague sense of
creation.
Paul speaks from a different world, one in which the defining
center is relational. The truth is not so much a proposition as a
person. To know the truth is more than reciting formulas: it is
knowing, better, being known by, that person, Jesus of Nazareth,
"... a man whom he appointed," in the words of verse 31, to judge
the world in the light of God's redeeming purpose.
Easter is the turning point. It releases us from a thingified
world in which "... the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone,
an image formed by ... art and imagination" and therefore at
human disposal. Thereby, the resurrection brings us into a new
creation, one in which the God who creates out of nothing and
raises the dead holds us in both the exposure and the promise of
Christ's judgment, "... that at his coming, every knee shall bow
and every tongue confess ..." (Philippians 2:10-11). It is a
risky proposition, at least from an Athenian point of view: to be
carried beyond things, numbers, illusions of mastery into the
spontaneity of a child, confident in the righteousness of the
redeemer.
