BILLTESKA

Paul's great passage about reconciliation gives me the opportunity to pick up my favorite current theme, and add something to what I said last time, when the subject was the nocturnal visit of St. Nicodemus to our Lord. You will remember that the learned and sympathetic Pharisee was puzzled by the notion of being "born from above". A clue to what that means is found elsewhere in the writings of the same author — or at least of his school of early Christian theology — where, in one of the epistles attributed to him, St. John says

Born of God, you see. Maybe that is the birth from above of which Jesus spoke to Nicodemus in John's Gospel. If so, it means that love — the fruit of the Spirit, Who blows wherever She will — is spiritual rebirth. I think that has something to do with ego-loss. Self-forgetfulness. Love is more than simple kindness or generous disposition towards others. It is more mystical, and in a sense more frightening than that. It has to do with the loss of our life, in fact our soul, with the loss of whatever it is that, if we tried to hold onto it we lose it, but when we lose it, we find real life and our real soul. Hanging-on to our little sense of self, to our little egos — is what Paul calls the flesh.  Today he tells us:

Well, the word of our version renders as human is none other than this flesh,  so in my interpretation this passage could read this way:

Could this mean that — from time to time at least — Paul has experienced a new consciousness of which he is no longer the center? It is extremely difficult to explain this to those who have never experienced it. In fact, the attempt to do so may well appear to be lunacy:

The original Greek is helpful and maybe even illuminating here: the word our translation renders as "beside ourselves”   [exesthmen] Is related to our word ecstasy. It can mean out of one's mind or beside oneself, but it can also mean something mystical: astonishment, amazement, “a displacement of the mind from its ordinary state and self-possession”.  Self-possession. There we go. Paul is referring to a transformation of his sense of self as a result of his relationship to God in Christ. I think this is also what he means by reconciliation [katallassw],  which we will get to in a minute.

Paul says that he is "beside himself", as regards God. That is, for a time Paul finds himself outside his old, limited, ego-centric consciousness — the sense of individual self into which we are born, which he calls flesh.  When dealing with fellow mortals, he has to revert to that consciousness in order to appear not to have lost his mind, because that is exactly how ecstatic people seem to others. For the sake of those with whom he is trying to communicate, he must keep up what he now sees as the pretense of the flesh— the illusion that we are separate beings — while at the same time trying to convince everyone that they are really a new creation.

That's where our lectionary leaves it today, but Paul goes on to talk, rather excitedly — even ecstatically — it seems to me, about reconciliation, which is really what all of this is been leading up to, even though our lectionary omits it entirely, and skips on to the next chapter next week! Here's how Paul concludes this passage:

Sin is alienation –  our self-definition as OTHER than everyone and everything else. This is the exact opposite of the Divine Consciousness of the Three Persons, which is Love. Sin is the opposite of Love. It is the state of individuality into which we are born. In Christ, God has come into that state with us, so that we might become the righteousness of God: so that we might join in the society of Perfect Love which I've called the Divine Consciousness. We cannot enter the kingdom of God until we have been born from above — until we exchange sin for love, flesh for spirit, ego-delusion for self-forgetfulness.

"See, If anyone is in Christ there is a new creation." The old translations render it — mistakenly in my estimation — as an individual transformation: "If anyone is in Christ HE IS a new creation."  What's wrong with this is that it is precisely the overcoming of individuality that Paul is talking about as the New Creation — the reconciliation provided by God in Christ — we are reconciled with God and with one another. I think this means more than simply being forgiven by God and forgiving one another. It is a metaphysical change, in which we are no longer in Paul's ironic phrase "in our right minds" — our worldly, or fleshly, or ego-diluted perspective, but we are "beside ourselves” or “out of our minds” — those fleshly minds, those ego-minds. We are out of those.

We usually think of reconciliation under the influence of our atonement doctrine: we need, individually, to be reconciled to God, because of our misdeeds, and the blood of Christ makes that possible by paying the penalty due for our sin. Indeed, the Latin word from which our word reconciliation comes can be used in this way, although the Greek is not. In a more humanistic sense, we also think of reconciliation as laying down old enmities and grudges, and forgetting about other people's offenses against us. It means all these things, but looking into the roots of the words uncovers at least the possibility of an ecstatic and mystical meaning. The Greek word we translate as "reconciliation" is related to the word meaning other as in alien. It means to change into something else, to exchange one thing for another, to interchange ­and by extension, it means to restore to favor, that which had fallen out of favor. Reconciliation in the sense of “restoration to favor” is one of the ancient meanings, but at the deepest root there is always the notion of change. Transformation. Exchange. Restoration. Interchange. I want to propose that reconciliation can mean becoming interchangeable with one another — that reconciliation means really loving your neighbor as yourself. 

Reconciliation in Latin adds another interesting connotation: coming together again, implying that some kind of previous togetherness had been lost, which is now restored. That, in fact, is the usual meaning of reconciliation, isn't it? Usually, reconciliation goes hand-in-hand with forgiveness. But I want to suggest that it may mean much more, all-important though forgiveness may be. I suggest that reconciliation is an actual change in being, which is why Paul calls it "the New Creation”. The New Creation in Christ:

Let me read the passage, substituting my own interpretation of the words:

The cancellation of trespasses is part of the reconciliation – the interchange of Being –  but it is far from the whole thing. The reconciliation of which Paul writes seems to be liberation from the prison of ego – the flesh, as he called it — as we are incorporated into Christ which means into the Mystical Body in which we are all one. The flesh is transformed – exchanged for the Body: the New Creation that is the Body of Christ. In the old, worldly, fleshly, consciousness of self — from the perspective of ego — this kind of talk is crazy: the lunatic raving of one “beside himself”, but in this new, ecstatic understanding, in which everything old has passed away — in which Paul has experienced the new level of consciousness in Christ — it is the Message of Reconciliation: the incredibly Good News that we have been changed — brought into the Eternal Communal Self: The Most Holy and Life-giving Trinity: we are "reconciled" in the sense of being brought into that Divine Being — together.

Advocate is a legal term meaning your lawyer, the one who argues on your behalf against the prosecutor, the adversary, the word for whom in Semitic languages is Satan. So, the Advocate is our defender against Satan, the accuser.

I think Satan's accusation amounts to saying that we are fools to believe that there is any reality beyond what we can see. "What you see is what you get", and you're an idiot if you believe otherwise. That is the accusation of the adversary. Our defense is the Spirit who testifies along with us, the Spirit of Hope.

As Paul says, hope is about — precisely — that which we do not see. If we could see it, we wouldn’t need to hope for it. The Advocate is the Spirit of hope, as opposed to the Satan of despair. The Advocate says to us —  to each of us in the inmost depths of our hearts —  that there is something to hope for: something Unseen. Satan (the ruler of this world) says "what you see is what you get".  Paul says:

In hope we are saved. that is why, as the Lord tells us today, it is in our advantage that He should ascend out of our sight, otherwise, we would have no hope, and there would be no future. For the redeeming work of the Incarnation to be completed, the Holy Spirit must come into the world. The Spirit of Hope must come to testify to Christ — to the cosmic sovereignty of Love. But the Spirit CANNOT come unless Christ goes “to the Father”.

The Spirit's testimony corroborates our own, but it is independent of our testimony, and more widespread. The Spirit testifies universally, in fact. Hence, the distinction between the Spirit's testimony, and our own. We testify "also", because "we have been with Him from the beginning." That is our inner longing has impelled us into the Society that lives in His Name. We now live consciously in that tradition, of which the Godman is the Beginning and the End, the Alpha and the Omega. But we, who have been with Him "from the beginning", have not been told everything. Jesus says clearly that He has things to tell us that we are not able to bear. There are levels of reality and consciousness that are simply beyond us, right now; but the Advocate will lead us into all of that. And not us alone. There is no reason to imagine that the same Advocate is not at work throughout the world — throughout the whole universe, in fact.

The Advocate, Jesus says, “ will prove the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment: about sin, because they do not believe in me; about righteousness, because I am going to the Father and you will see me no longer; about judgment, because the ruler of this world has been condemned.”

1.   Wrong about sin: the mistake is to imagine that sin is anything other than a failure to love, that sin is the transgression of code of behavior; while sin really is the despair that thinks Love is not the Ultimate Reality. What is what —  I think  — what the Godman means by saying of the world, "they do not believe in me"

2.   Wrong about righteousness: righteousness is a way of life, a path. The path to God presumably, the path that Jesus takes to the Father, the "right path", that the world rejects. "He leads me in the paths of righteousness for His Name's sake". " The Lord knoweth the way of the righteous in the way of the ungodly shall perish." Maybe the mistake of the world is also to imagine that "righteousness" is one unique path. We can testify to our own path and its righteousness (our hope that it is leading us in the right direction), but the Spirit testifies to much more, according to the same Gospel passage.

The Godman says that the world is mistaken about righteousness, "because I am going to the Father and you will see me no longer." What can this possibly mean? How does the fact that Jesus has withdrawn from our immediate sight prove that the world was wrong about righteousness? This is pretty opaque, but how about this: hope in that which is unseen is a positive virtue, a state of spiritual consciousness higher than the supposed "righteousness" of following orders, and higher even than the immediate association with the Godman in His earthly Incarnation. Insofar as the world imagines that the right path is the path of certainty, either in following rules or in the material presence of Jesus, it is a mistake. This mistake is corrected by Jesus’ disappearance. As long as He was visibly present, there was no need for hope — in fact no possibility of hope. The Advocate could not come, Jesus says, as long as Jesus Himself was with us. The Spirit of Hope is given only after He goes to the Father, after He has taken that “Path of Righteousness”

3.   Wrong about judgment: God's judgment has two sides: condemnation and vindication. The world is wrong about judgment because it seems to the world that Jesus has been destroyed while in fact it is the would-be destroyer who has been destroyed. Jesus is vindicated in that the ruler of this world has been condemned. That ruler is none other than our old adversary, Satan — the prosecuting attorney, the spirit of hopelessness who tells us "what you see is what you get, there is no more, hope is just self deception, and your story is over when you die." Or – worse – God is going to GET you, when you die - But that spirit has been condemned by the judgment of God, and the ruler of this world is cast out, in Jesus’ words, as the Advocate, the Spirit of Hope, pours into the world. To the hopeless world, wrong about judgment, this Spirit is a sign of imbecility or intoxication. "They are filled with the new wine." But to those who accept the Good News proclaimed to them in their own language, the new Hope is the fulfillment of an ancient prophecy:

All flesh.  Here is the distinction again between the particularity of our own tradition and the universality of the testimony of the Spirit. The Holy Prophet Joel proclaims that God will pour out the Spirit upon all flesh, and then goes on to say that — as it were in addition — your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions and your old men shall dream dreams. You (we) are going to get the Spirit, sure enough, but don't think it's only you, because "I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh."

And our own sacred tradition clearly places this universal prophecy in the mouth of Peter, as an explanation of Pentecost.

Now Pentecost. Looking back, There are three levels of meaning to Pentecost: life renewed, Torah, and the illapse of the Holy Spirit. I think it may be possible to connect them with the three ways in which the world gets it wrong.

Originally, beginning fifty days after Passover, the ancient Hebrews celebrated the feast of the first fruits of the growing season. The Earth again yields sustenance. It is time for rejoicing, because God has blessed us with continuing life. This festival of fertility and renewed life came to be associated with God's covenant —  His deal with humanity through Moses on Sinai: you obey my commandments, and I will set you up in the promised land of fertility and prosperity. So the feast of Pentecost became the commemoration of the giving of the Law on Mount Sinai. The Law is divine guidance in the Way of Righteousness. But the Law, which is a reliable guide, is not to be confused with the Lawgiver. The Law, written in stone, must not become a stone idol which we serve in place of God. God Whom the Holy Apopstle John says IS Love.  All the Torah (the Law and the prophets) hang on the commandments to love, which we have been considering this season:

·        love God and love your neighbor, and

·        it is impossible to love God Whom you have not seen if you love not your neighbor whom you have seen, and

·        Those who say they love God but hate their neighbors are liars, and

·        The only way we can love God, in fact, is by loving our neighbors.

That is the Spirit of the Law, as distinct from the letter written in stone. The commandments written in stone are gracious, as far as they go. But to imagine that the whole Path of Righteousness —  the entirety of our journey to God — is accomplished by obeying these commandments is to have a heart of stone. Several places in holy Scripture we find the metaphor of writing the Law on our hearts. God promises through The holy prophet Jeremiah that our hearts of stone will be replaced with hearts of flesh — living flesh upon which the Law of love may be inscribed.

Clearly, this is the third meaning of Pentecost as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles. So, in summary,

·        Pentecost is the feast of the first fruits, of the renewal of creation, Pentecost celebrates the sovereignty of life and love over death, throughout the cosmos, Pentecost celebrates the hope that Love is stronger than death, the hope that is the opposite of sin, which would have us believe that death rules, which is what the world thinks, which is why Jesus says “they are wrong about sin.”

·        Pentecost is the celebration of the giving of the Law on Sinai, the opening of the path of righteousness, which the world gets wrong by imagining that the Way of the Righteous means obeying rules.

·        Pentecost is the Transfiguration of the cosmos by the Holy Spirit, which is the real meaning of the Judgment of God.

God pours out the Spirit upon "all flesh", replacing stony hearts with hearts of flesh, and writing upon them the Law of Love. The illapse of the Holy Spirit is not confined to the Apostles, or to the baptized (as we heard in our course-reading of the Acts, two weeks ago). The Spirit goes wherever She wishes. So now all these Galilean disciples begin to proclaim the Good News of the Reign of Love in foreign languages. The great miracle of Pentecost is trivialized by reducing it to glossolalia — speaking in tongues. The important fact is that all those people from all the cultures of the earth heard the Good News in a language they could understand.

This means a lot more, I think, than faithfully translating the terms of our own cultural tradition into foreign languages. The Spirit of God fills the world. That means that the Good News becomes intelligible to all peoples and cultures, according to their own cultural paradigms, religious traditions, habits of thought, world-views, and so on. We testify to the Reign of Love, according to our own cultural tradition, but the Spirit of God testifies too, independently of our testimony.

For the Spirit is poured out upon all flesh. So we have in Pentecost a progression: fertility celebration of the first fruits, celebration of the life-giving Law on Sinai, and the pouring out on all flesh. But that is not the end of the story. From now on, looking forward from Pentecost, living in the "season after Pentecost", it is our mission, as the Collect says, to proclaim the Gospel “to the ends of the earth.” Perhaps that task is larger than the mere the delivery of a translation of the Good News as we understand it in our own tradition, perhaps — no, probably — it means the realization of the Beloved Community of all flesh, upon which — as on this day — the Holy Spirit has poured Herself, in Jerusalem.

John the Divine, John the Theologian, John the Beloved Disciple,  makes it clear: love is everything. Whoever loves is born of God and knows God. He also makes it clear that he is talking not about our love for God, but our love for one another. Not that we loved God, but that God loved us. He doesn't even mention our love for God until the very end of the passage:

 I take this not as a description of duty — those who love God are obliged to love their brothers and sisters also — but as a simple statement of fact if somebody loves God it must mean that they love their brothers and sisters also, because without love of neighbor, there is no love of God.

Jesus said, The second commandment, to Love our neighbor as ourself, is like the first. This means that it is equal to the first — it is the same as the first.

John knows nothing about our love of God, except in our love of our brothers and sisters. There is in fact no such thing as human love of God except in our love of one another.

So, we have to understand today's Collect carefully :

Truly to know God is everlasting life. But It is too easy to think of this as a matter of believing the right things about Jesus in order to get the reward of everlasting life as a result of our knowledge. St. John makes it clear that true knowledge of God is found in love — love of our neighbor. With that interpretive key, the petition "to know your Son Jesus Christ to be the Way the Truth and the Life" and "steadfastly follow His steps in the way that leads to eternal life"  must be understood as a prayer to follow His commandment to love one another as He has loved us, which means without limit, even unto death. The footsteps of Christ lead to Calvary.

John goes on to talk about the "atoning sacrifice" of Christ:

As you know, I think there is a big problem with the notion of atonement or expiation, as bequeathed by the Middle Ages to Western Christianity — both Catholic and Protestant. As Timothy W are, now the Metropolitan Kallistos, asked packed house at the Greek Cathedral in Oakland a couple of years ago "to whom would such a price be paid"? So, I looked up the passage and, as usual, found something interesting. The verb translated as "atoning sacrifice" is related to the word for mercy: as in Kyrie eleison.  One form of this word is the name for the covering of the Ark of the Covenant, the "Mercy Seat". On the Day of Atonement, this covering was sprinkled with sacrificial blood, changing it from the Seat of Judgment to the Seat of Mercy. Clearly, the Blood of Christ is the propitiation for our sins, in the language of the religious imagination of Temple worship him. St. John, however, enlarges that imagination.

Our sins are our failures to love one another. God is not mad at us for that, and we don't have to do anything to appease God. The "atoning sacrifice" is not something we do for God, but something God does for us. The Sacrifice of Christ cancels our failures to love, absorbing them, or — better yet — filling up our lack of love with the love of God. Not that we loved God but that he loved us. This perfection of what is lacking in our love for one another also makes it possible for us to love one another.

Hear the word ought does carry the sense of an obligation. We are obliged to love one another because God loves us; but if God's sacrificial love for us imposes an obligation on us, it also confers at the same time the capacity to fulfill it. The Cross — the new Mercy Seat — is the expiation of our sins in that the Cross perfects human nature:

The perfection of divine love in us — in our love for one another — is not just the way to eternal life: it is eternal life and the knowledge of God.

Whoever! Think of it! And consider it along with that mysterious little announcement in last week's Gospel:

We do not know who those other sheep are, but it is safe to say that they are not to be found among those who say the correct things about Jesus' Identity. They are, after all, "not of this fold". What we do know is that

“Name” and “saved”. The thread running through today's propers is the idea of the "name", which Peter links to “salvation”. This can cause unnecessary trouble. These two words, need to be unpacked.

Which brings us right back to the Collect. If we are the Good Shepherd’s sheep, He knows our names — our personal names. That means he knows everything about us. That is the significance of the word, "name". It is shorthand for a person's identity, especially public identity — how the person is known in public, the person's reputation.

The same is true of the Name of Jesus. It is shorthand for everything that is known about Him — and maybe everything that is not known, as well.

·         All the stories that were circulating about His healings and exorcisms,

·         His teaching about love and forgiveness, His condemnation of mercilessness and moral hypocrisy and the love of money,

·          His solicitude for the poor and the despised, and above all,

·         His defeat of death by His own self-sacrifice on Calvary: all of these mighty acts are contained in His Name, which, Peter says, "saves" us.

But there is more: because His Name refers to His whole Identity, the Holy Name of Jesus also refers to Emmanuel, God-with-us. In other words, it refers to him to that which we can never know, but only adore: the perfect union of infinite divinity with finite humanity, in one single Person, named Jesus — Yeshayahu — which means, literally, "God saves."

In our course reading of the Acts of the Apostles, we didn't hear the first part of the story, in which Peter had healed a disabled man. That is, Peter had restored him to health, made him whole. When he says to the court of temple officials that

 he is talking about healing. The root meaning of "salvation" is "healing". We are used to the convention that "salvation in the Name of Jesus” means that the Name of Jesus is our ticket to heaven after we die. But, as Peter's explanation of the healing miracle suggests, it really means that health and wholeness is found in the Name of Jesus. We hope and trust that this new wholeness includes our personal survival of biological death, but the Name is neither a magic formula, which, if uttered, will cure the sick, nor a password to get us into heaven. The Name of Jesus is His reputation, His story, His "narrative", as it is currently fashionable to say. The word, Jesus, means  “God saves”. That Is Jesus’ identity: God's saving act, and that means healing. The restoration of wholeness. We are so used to thinking of "being saved" as being rescued from something unpleasant (such as being fried eternally in the flames of hell) that this root meaning of salvation as perfect health can be obscure.

The religious authorities ask Peter to explain how he was able to restore the disabled man to wholeness, by what authority, by what name. His answer is: "in the Name of Jesus". When he says that the only name given under heaven by which we must be saved is the Name of Jesus, it is in the context of this question about healing. As the disabled man was "saved" by the Holy Name, so are we. We too are healed, made a whole. Now, the first-person plural — we — is a little bit ambiguous here. It can mean every one of us severally, as individuals, but it can also mean all of us together, which is what I believe it actually does mean. The healing of that man in Jerusalem was a sign of collective healing. "The Name by which we must be saved" is the Name that saves us all, together. Salvation is corporate, not individual. We are saved as individuals by being cured of our individuality. Salvation — wholeness — is communal. Salvation is moving out of individual life into inter-personal life; salvation is Participation in the Community of salvation, which is to say Communion with the Inter-personal Deity.

By itself, the fact of the fortunate man's restoration to individual wholeness in his own body, is not of much importance, except to himself — probably not important enough to attract the attention of the religious authorities. It would have been a curiosity, but not an occasion for a summit conference. Perhaps the fact that they did take an interest signifies that healing (salvation) has ramifications for the whole society. They noticed healing because it was publicly linked to the Name of Jesus. The Name of Jesus displays the power of God making all creation whole —healing all that ails the community of God's creatures.  God certainly can repair the disfiguration of the disabled individual. But that restoration to wholeness — that salvation — is really significant as a microcosm of the salvation of the whole disfigured creation, our restoration to the common life intended by God in the first place: communal salvation in the Name of the only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ. The Church is the beginning of that common life, and it is the Church that proclaims the Name and live in the Name.

In the Epistle, the beloved disciple John tells us that God's commandment is "… that we should believe in the Name of His Son Jesus Christ and love one another…" To believe in the Name of Jesus is to trust the Church's story about Jesus, as summarized by Peter. To do anything in His Name, means to act on the basis of that story. To live in His Name is to make that story the center of our own personal consciousness.

This But it doesn't end there, because life in His Name is life together. Salvation in the Name of Jesus is the healing of our separation from one another, growing out of the illusion that there is such a thing as "individual life", and the growing into the sense that we are all beloved members of one Cosmic Organism, which we call His Body. In short, to believe in — to live in — the Name of Jesus, is to love one another.

The Good Shepherd knows each of us as individuals, and calls us by our individual name. He calls us by our names. By myself, I have no name. I get my name from others. My name is how others know me. My name is a sign of relationship — of personhood, as opposed to individuality. The Good Shepherd not only calls us by our name, but also, for the sake of His Name, He leads us in the right paths. He leads us as a flock, not as individuals. In fact, He leads us, by our personal names, away from our natural condition of individual separation from one another and into the "right Path" of communal being, beside the still waters of trust in His Name , making us to lie down in the green pastures of love for one another — love for all the other name-bearers, whose names are know him to Him, Who also prepares for us a table — the Eucharistic table — in defiance of death, Who anoints us with healing oil and our cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow us all the days of our life, as He leads us — together — to dwell — also together — in the House of the Lord, forever.