The Priest and the Prophet

During a conversation with the local Rabbi, I told her about a novel I had written about Moses. Well, it’s not exactly the characterization of Moses that you might expect, but it’s still about the same Biblical person. Moses has two sons. The Bible simply names them: Gershom and Eliezer. In my novel, Gershom, the elder, has been the “scribe” for Moses’ mystical experiences. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view) Gershom likes to be precise and concrete. He doesn’t like to leave any possibility for the people to disobey Jehovah as a result of any misunderstanding of divine meaning. Because he’s such a good organizer, he’s been put in charge of the priests. Eliezer, the younger son, is more of a mystic like his esteemed father. He sees his own and Moses’ mystical experiences from a completely different perspective that causes him to question the kind of Promised Land they are about to inhabit. For Eliezer, the mystic, the journey to the Promised Land is not yet complete. You can see the inevitable tension that must rise up between the brothers. Well, enough about that. (If I am successful in getting some copies printed, I’ll let you know.)

Her comment to me was something like: Of course, Gershom is the priest and Eliezer the prophet and the novel is about the tension between the two.

For the sake of this blog installment, I want to consider the timeless tension between the Priest and the Prophet, particularly how it plays out in modern society and ministry. When people are ordained to ministry, they are typically called to be both priest and prophet. Is that even possible?

The purpose of the priestly function is to maintain order and tradition, and to mediate between the divine power and human vulnerability and need. Priests know the stories and their official meaning; they are competent in leading people through the rites and rituals; and they know how things “should” be done. They provide excellent pastoral care and they are expert at “comforting the afflicted.”

The purpose of the prophet is to listen to the “God that is still speaking” and communicate this apparently new divine message to people and institutions. Often what the prophet “hears” relates to the prevalence of injustice and hypocrisy. The divine message hurts on the inside if the prophet doesn’t proclaim it, and it is likely to hurt on the outside if the prophet does. While the priest is busy comforting the afflicted, the prophet is “afflicting the comfortable.”

Religious institutions are usually quite willing to pay for priestly functions, but they’re not so sure about the prophetic ones. Priests get hired; prophets get fired.

I am not implying that if people were “just” more faithful that the prophetic message would go down easier. Prophetic messages tend to be messy. They challenge what is generally accepted to be normal. They cause people to change very basic aspects of their lives with no guarantee of any desirable outcome, at least in the short run.

In Jesus’ prophetic call, he even indicates that if people listen to, and do, the will of God, they are likely to be persecuted, if not killed. I think he needs a new publicist – that message will never take!

While there is much in Christian theology and practice that is appropriately priestly and comforting, the other, more prophetic, side of the message can never be eradicated completely. The prophet still speaks to our hearts, calling us to avoid receiving comfort in ways that exclude or make life more difficult for others. The prophet calls us to exercise more compassion than judgment towards the disenfranchised while still calling systematically unjust institutions to account.

Jesus’ life and ministry did not reinforce the status quo. He saw the possibility for the Realm of God to become a reality in the present, and this prophetic vision motivated people to make radical changes in the way they lived.

As it always happens when we deal with something real, it doesn’t work to affirm just one side and vilify the other. Jesus was both the “shepherd for the sheep” and the courageous prophet who risked his very life when he stood up to the religious authorities and the full power of the Roman Empire.

If we follow Jesus honestly, we also are called to be both.

What do you think?

Wayne Gustafson
“Never place a period where God has placed a comma.” Gracie Allen
The United Church _ of Christ

Religious Experience as Nostalgia

I grew up in the church ensconced in a musical family. For me, music and worship have always gone together. I have believed for a lifetime that the addition of music to worship could only be a good thing. Lately I’ve realized that while religious music is still wonderful, like anything real it also has a down side.

Let me talk about the positive side first. For the most part (at least including the musical genres that I like) religious music makes me feel good. It finds its own way into my soul without necessarily stopping to visit the more cognitive parts of my brain. Music can even be transformative in ways that are healthy, though unpredictable. Music has maintained my connection with God at times when my thinking could not do the job. It has been very useful and enjoyable.

From the more negative side, religious music makes me feel good. Yes, I know I just said that was a positive element. How can it then be negative? The problem is that feeling good can turn into nostalgic numbness. It can turn the experience of worship into just another consumer event. If I like it, I’ll go, and if I don’t like it, I won’t.

I sometimes get nostalgic about certain events from my past and music can evoke that nostalgia. But I don’t think or see clearly, either about the past or the present, when nostalgia hits. I grew up singing hymns with certain lyrics, but I have discovered that some of those lyrics no longer reflect my present theology. If I’m feeling nostalgic, then I don’t even notice the friction. (By the way, while I’ve talked about music in particular, almost any aspect of past worship experience is capable of producing nostalgia.)

But I want my religious experience to be more than consumerism and nostalgia. I want to be challenged to think more broadly, even when that requires me to experience discomfort. From a larger perspective, I’m afraid that nostalgia is killing the church today. What was meaningfully nostalgic for one generation may drive the next away.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ is not fundamentally comfortable. It is certainly not designed to legitimize behaviors that are deemed acceptable in the worlds of government and business (although it is often used in just that way). While it’s good to have a warm sense of belonging in the Realm of the God of love, the larger purpose of that gospel is the propagation of loving relationships, not just in the personal realm, but across societies.

I suspect I will always love religious music, but, please, God, don’t let me settle for nostalgia.

What do you think?

Wayne Gustafson
“Don’t place a period where God has placed a comma.” Gracie Allen
The United Church___of Christ

Was Jesus a Socialist?

During the presidential election season and even more as the economic stimulus bills wend their way through the legislative process, many of President Obama’s adversaries have been accusing him of spreading “socialism.” This raises several questions for me:
1. Is the charge accurate?
2. What is socialism and why is it such a threat?
3. Was Jesus a socialist? And
4. From the perspective of Healthy Liberal Christianity how much influence on our economic system do we want Jesus’ teachings to have?

We have to begin with definitions. Socialism usually is understood according to two related definitions: it is an economic system in which the state owns everything and makes decisions about distribution of wealth, and/or it promulgates the value of a more equitable distribution of wealth in a society. We could launch into a detailed discussion about the technicalities of socialism, but that probably wouldn’t do us much good. It might help, though, to add the definition of capitalism, our economic system, as a system of private (and corporate) owners who are in competition with one another in a free market.

So what might Jesus have to say about these economic systems? Jesus stood in the tradition of the ancient prophets of Israel who periodically railed against the economic and political “domination systems” of their day.
(According to Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan in “The Last Week,” domination systems have three characteristics: They include political oppression, economic exploitation, and religious legitimation of the first two characteristics.)
Jesus didn’t talk about economic systems directly, but he certainly lifted up the all too present realities of poverty and hunger in a way that could be taken as an indictment of the existing system, but his point was probably not about the replacement of one economic system with another.

He does refer to some of the consequences of too much reliance on material things and on earthly power. He noted that it was exceedingly difficult for people to participate in the Realm of God if they were rich. In another place, he noted that the distinction between what belongs to Caesar and what belongs to God was a false distinction. For Jesus, all belonged to God. When he spoke about the characteristics of the Realm of God, he did not use economic or political terms. He used the language of love. In other words, social policy was to be based on people mattering to each other, not on competition (where the devil necessarily takes the hindmost).

As long as we try to determine the best economic system, we are missing the point. Healthy community is based on people caring about each other so that needs are met. It is never about the ability to become wealthier than someone else. Jesus makes it clear that people and relationships are more important than empire or the accumulation of wealth.

It is interesting to me that the defenders of capitalism argue that the opportunity to create more wealth is the only real motivation for creativity, productivity, and progress in a culture. Jesus and the prophets make it clear that such social/economic systems will always collapse eventually under rampant greed. Said differently, economic systems that are solely based on the amassing or distribution of wealth are not sustainable, particularly to the degree that they are “systems of domination,” whether by the state over the people or the wealthy over the poor matters not. Is it not possible that creativity is its own motivation to create healthier social structures?

We could argue that some socialistic principles might be more consistent with Jesus’ message, but that does not make Jesus’ message socialistic. The character of economic systems is largely determined by locating the source of the power to make people comply. Whether that power comes from the state or from market “forces” doesn’t matter – both are domination systems that have oppression as their central feature.

So that my writing today does not become simply an unrealistic, utopian dream, we must ask one final question. What are the practical means we can use to teach ourselves, our neighbors, and our children to love? If we are to promote the Realm of God, we must struggle with that question above all others. I think that is the challenge facing the church today. I believe that alongside our human capacity to compete, we also carry the human (or even divine) capacity to care. Let’s work to bring it out.

What do you think?

Wayne Gustafson
God is still speaking!
The United Church___of Christ

A Non-Anxious Presence

Anxiety is at epidemic proportions in our culture. There are lots of legitimate reasons to feel anxious: finances, insecurity about work, family issues, addictions, and a desire to belong, to name only a few. And people employ many approaches in their attempts to manage anxiety. In many ways our economic, political and religious climates actually promote anxiety: “You should be afraid and anxious, but come to me and I’ll take care of you – for a price, of course.”

We might say that our culture has bought into the Madison Avenue approach: there must be something that you can consume, something that comes from outside of yourself, (and I have it for sale), to make your situation better, or in religious language, to save you. The consistent problem with all of these approaches is that the “cure” costs so much in payment and dependency that you end up even more anxious than when you began. There is also an implied disclaimer in these “helpful products.” If you don’t get help from this, then there must be something fundamentally inadequate about you. (and by the way, I have something to sell you that will fix that problem, too.)

How have we come to place where every intervention increases rather than decreases anxiety? I think much of the problem is with some of our largely unexamined “core beliefs,” those beliefs that are so embedded in our understanding that it doesn’t occur to us to question them. Many of those “core beliefs” are summed up in the work of Rabbi (Family Therapist and Pastoral Counselor) Edwin Friedman,

Before his untimely death, Friedman was an eloquent spokesperson for a radically different way of being in the world. He talked about three temptations that separate a human being from a god, noting that we end up creating even deeper anxiety when we violate any of these. The three temptations are in the realms of knowledge, power, and death (God’s are considered to be omniscient, omnipotent, and eternal). Whenever we believe that we should be able to be all knowing, all powerful, or eternal, we sow the seeds for our own demise, and of the resultant anxiety. Many of us violate all three of these at once when we believe that given enough knowledge, power, and time, we should be able to fix anything.

The most dangerous “core belief” is tied up in the word “should.” If we believe that the world “should” work in a particular way, we delude ourselves. The “purveyors of essential knowledge” make lots of profit on these “shoulds.” If we have the right dietary knowledge, we’re led to believe that we can live longer. If we have the right parenting techniques, we will generate successful children. If we have the right car, clothing, perfume and deodorant, we will have a successful romantic life. If we have the right theology, then God will take care of us. The list is endless, and our urge to consume all these “right” answers is insatiable.

Eventually, we may discover that life is too complex and varied to “make sense” in the way we think it “should.” Apparently, life is fundamentally ambiguous; that is to say, incomplete pieces of the truth can be discovered on all sides of reality, even when those pieces appear to contradict one another.

Friedman goes on to identify one of the prime characteristics of maturity as the ability to remain non-anxious in the midst of an anxiety-laden system. He reminds us that we all grow up in systems (families) that probably contain more anxiety than necessary and we learn characteristic methods to try to reduce the anxiety. But because those approaches are predicated on false “core beliefs” about what is possible and healthy, they don’t work. Still, we tend to get more anxious believing that they “should” work.

So, is there a way to move from high anxiety to low anxiety – to be a less-anxious presence? Friedman addresses this question by identifying some more realistic core beliefs. For example, he believed that the primary goal in life is to become a mature self who is capable of entering into relationships without being in a perpetually reactive state. When productivity or perfection becomes the goal instead, anxiety naturally increases.

Another factor Friedman identifies has to do with whether you are doing your own “work” of individuation or if you are using your attempts to fix or save other people as a way to validate yourself. One of the unambiguous realities of life is that you can only do your own work. You can be in relationships – in fact that is preferred – but you just can’t take credit for the success or failure of anyone else.

One final thought – reactivity that is born of fear and anxiety is always destructive. So, it can be seen as an act of love to learn a less anxious way of being.

Jesus said, “God loves and accepts you, so don’t be afraid or anxious.” He might have said, you can’t earn your way into heaven, God has already prepared a place for you (whatever that means).

Finally, when it seems that nothing else is possible to ameliorate the situation, you can always breathe, remembering that the words for breath and spirit are the same in many languages.

Be not afraid – and love.

What do you think?

Wayne Gustafson
“Never place a period where God has placed a comma.” Gracie Allen
The United Church__of Christ