OPIOID SPIRITUALITY REWRITES THE BIBLE TO KEEP IT SAFE

Were you a slave when you were called? Do not let it trouble you – although if you can gain your freedom, do so.                                                                                      1 Cor. 7: 21 (New International Version)

If a slave when called, do not accustom yourself to it; rather if you can indeed become free, make the most of it.                                                                                      1 Cor. 7: 21 (Hart translation)

Notice the difference. David Bentley Hart in the footnotes to his new translation of the New Testament offers a persuasive case that do not accustom yourself to slavery is a more accurate rendering of Paul’s Greek than the grin and bear it translations that we have heard all our lives. The NIV prescription of passivity is far and away the norm and has been so since the Bible was translated into English. 

All translations reflect the cultural, political, and socio-economic context of the translators and those who pay them and adopt their translations for Church use. The King James Version is said by some to be slanted with a decidedly monarchist bias. But my questions are: 

1.     What underlying assumptions would lead us to translate a verse as telling slaves to be content in their slavery when it is at least arguably possible to translate the verse to tell them to resist? The resistance translation makes more sense with the rest of the passage which says that Christ has turned all those power relationships on their head;

and it better accords with  Paul’s usual teachings which constitute him as the original liberation theologian. For freedom Christ has set us free. Galatians 5: 1. Would the author of those words tell a slave to just put up with it?

2.     Does the Bible, our sacred text, shape us into a domination system people – or has the denomination system shaped the Bible? Perhaps it is chicken and egg. 

We no longer use the Bible to defend slavery. 1 Corinthians 7: 1 has been an embarrassment for over a century. But we have continued to translate it do not let (being enslaved) trouble you. I think this prescription for passivity reflects something broader than the slavery issue. I find a ubiquitous assumption that religion – or more aptly spirituality– is about cultivating indifference, a calm acquiescence to life with all itsslings and arrows, especially subservience to the domination system, what Paul called the Principalities and Powers of this present age – though Paul clearly called Christians to place Christ above those Principalities and Powers; and New Testament scholars from the liberal Walter Wink to the conservative N. T. Wright see Jesus as a lived rebellion against such worldly domination. But in popular religion, we shake our heads sadly at famines, epidemics, and atrocious violations of human rights saying such things as, It’s God’s will. Everything happens for a reason. We’ll understand it all by and by. 

I see a consumer demand for an opiate of the people religion.  Against that opioid spirituality, German theologian, Jurgen Moltmann[i]proclaims a hope that sets us at odds with the status quo. Moltmann, says,

. . . (E)xperience and hope stand in contradiction to each other . . . with the result that . . .  man is not brought into . . . agreement with the given situation, but is drawn into the conflict between experience and hope.

In the Apostolic era, Christians were committed to transformation rather than passivity. Do not be conformed to the ways for this world. Rather be transformed by the renewing of your minds. Romans 12:2.  In the Patristic Era, Christianity took a stand against Manichaeism, which saw evil as an active force in the cosmos while goodness was inherently passive and indifferent. Augustine rejected the Manichaeism of his youth in favor of Christianity and upheld a theology that participated in the world in a transformative way for the sake of God’s Kingdom Mission.[ii]

The orthodox tradition of Paul and Augustine insists on a tension between Christian hope and the worldly status quo. Against that orthodox tradition, there is decidedly a history of opioid spirituality and carrot and stick religion used to keep people in line.  It is the Jurgen Moltmanns and the Leonardo Boffs, the so-called radicals, who are in line with the ole timereligion of the Early Church. 

What do we expect from the Church in the face of wildfires, rising sea levels, genocide, and human trafficking? The do not let it trouble you translation, or stand up, raise your heads, the kingdom is near[iii] -- engage the world for Christ, engage the world with the transforming power of a love that shows mercy and demands justice. 

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[i]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jürgen_Moltmann

[ii]That is an admittedly simplistic statement of Augustine’s complex political theology. He was no revolutionary, but he did insist that Christianity participate in the mire and the muck of worldly politics for the sake of insinuating God’s Kingdom values into the mix. See, Garry Wills, The Confessions of a Conservative.https://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Conservative-Garry-Wills/dp/0140055630/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1545520587&sr=8-1&keywords=the+confessions+of+a+conservative

[iii]Luke 21: 25-36

A WISE SONG

Today’s lessons are about wisdom.

The idea of wisdom in the Bible

grew out of crafts like tent making and carpentry. 

Craftsmen learned that you can do things well or badly. 

There is a right way to go about our work.

As time went by they came to see life itself as a craft.

Life can be lived well or badly. 

Wisdom is simply the art of living well.

Much of the Bible is about how to live well.

Living well helps us sleep at night, get along with our friends,

         and make the world around us a better place. 

Many people have the notion that wisdom must 

         be something very solemn.

It must frown and look very serious.

Wisdom is always wagging its finger at our foolishness.

  

But Paul paints a different picture of wisdom.

He says, 

         “Be careful then how you live, not as unwise people but as wise.

         Do not get drunk . . . But be filled with the Spirit as you sing

         Psalms and spiritual hymns among yourselves, 

         singing and making melody to the Lord in your hearts,

         giving thanks to God . . . at all times and for everything

         in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

The first thing to see here is that wisdom isn’t a solemn lecture.

It’s a song.

Wisdom is pleasurable, like a melody in the heart. 

Wisdom isn’t dour and judging. It’s playful like music.

The second thing to notice about wisdom

         is that it recognizes a basic truth about reality.

It’s a gift. It’s all a gift. 

The sunrise and the moonset are gifts.

The friendship of another person is a gift. 

Our very ability to breathe, to laugh, hear the rain on our roof –

         it’s all a gift.

There is a wise way and a foolish way to handle wood.

It’s starts by recognizing it as wood and not copper.

There is a wise way and a foolish way to handle life.

To handle life wisely,

 we must first see it for what it is -- a gift.

Paul was writing in Greek and the Greek word for gift is charis.

What shall we do with this gift of life, this gift of everything.

Obviously, Paul says, we say “thank you.”

In our lesson where Paul says “giving thanks,” 

he uses the Greek word eucharistein. 

That’s where we get the word Eucharist.

But Eucharist in the Greek isn’t just 

a thank you note on pretty stationery.

Eucharist means a gift back, a return gift, a thank you gift.

So what can we give God?

God has given us our very selves.

In thanksgiving for God’s primal generosity,

         we give something to match God’s gift to us.

We give God ourselves. 

This is the great gift exchange of the spiritual life.

God gives us our lives.

We give our lives back to God.

We place ourselves on this altar 

         to be blessed, broken, and given back to us

         enriched by love and grace and mercy. 

St. Ignatius of Loyola prayed,

         “Accept O Lord my memory, my will, my imagination, my understanding.

         All that I am and all that I have you have given me.

         I give it all back to be disposed of according to your good pleasure.

         Grant me only the comfort of your presence and the joy of your love.

         With these I shall be more than rich and shall ask for nothing more.”

That, my friends, is the core meaning of the Eucharist.

And it is the heart of wisdom.

1st EPISTLE GENERAL OF DAN: Getting Our Needs Met

Authentic Christian . . .  spiritual practices are not just about getting in a zone or having an experience. They are about opening ourselves to God’s love flowing through us into the world. 

-- 18^thEpistle to the Nevadans

    

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.

It goes without saying we live in a time of social disintegration. The Church seems pre-occupied with planning her own funeral while political extremists swirl into increasingly bizarre paranoid delusions and gun up. Democracy teeters on the brink. The left and the right both spin out increasingly fine-tuned rules to condemn each other in a Manichaean politics of mutual demonizing. That is the context in which we do – or do not do – our religion.

Looking to do my small part for civilization, I was recently at All Saints Church to be trained for a Get Out the Vote community walk. The IAF organizer built our training around a summary of Monsignor Philip Murnion’s Forming Parish Community.  https://www.amazon.com/Forming-parish-community-sociology-developments/dp/B0006WWHA8/ref=sr_1_9?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1533839130&sr=1-9&keywords=Philip+Murnion

Murnion’s book is like a bucket of cold water dumped on my benumbed consciousness. He says, 

Authentic parish life must enable people to enter into 

public life and must offset temptations to retreat into

a privatized, pietistic religion. 

Murnion raises basic questions about our project, starting with: what is the 21^st century religious/spiritual consumer looking for? What does the market demand?

We basically want to feel better. We want to relax and get happy. Secular life is often stressful, anxious, hostile, painful, and a whole array of feelings we’d obviously rather avoid. Alcohol, drugs, and diverting entertainment are our main ways of managing that unpleasantness. Religion is generally perceived as a competitor in the stress relief market. We are seen – and we see ourselves -- as a purveyor of spiritual opioids. Marx famously said, Religion is the opiate of the people, and we believed him. 

One may, for example, learn to meditate in ways that calm the mind and lower the blood pressure. Or one may go to a charismatic religious weekend to sing happy songs and enjoy a psycho-socially manufactured high in which one is deliriously happy about something though it is not clear what that something is. It doesn’t matter. We feel better. Calmer mind. Lower blood pressure. Feeling happy. Those are not bad things. They are indisputably good as far as they go. It is the same with pain relief. 

Many of us participate in regular church activity expecting a lower dose of the same opioid. The familiarity of ritual and music can help us escape the turmoil at work or home. But the crucial ingredient is harder to notice because it is colorless, odorless, and tasteless – church chit chat. There are unspoken, even unconscious, norms for our conversation at Church, things we routinely say, and other things we do not say. Church chit chat is crucial to the conspiracy against consciousness.Thou shalt not be aware.[i]

We are not aware of the unspeakable until someone speaks it. For example, there was recently an uproar about the government separating immigrant families at the border. It had happened under the administrations of both parties, though more aggressively under the current administration. Leaders of both political parties spoke out against it. Laura Bush condemned it. The President’s wife and daughter condemned it. The President reversed the policy. By this point, there really was no controversy. 

After the issue had been basically resolved, one of our congregations had a Vacation Bible School. The following Sunday, a priest in the course of celebrating the successful VBS said seeing families brought closer together was a stark contrast to the separation of families that had gone on at the border. One member walked out in angry protest. Did he disagree with everyone about family separation? He did not say so.[ii]The priest’s offense was mentioning something morally painful. He did not come to Church to hear about such things. Church is a place where nothing painful or difficult is to be spoken of or even remembered. This is our happy place. Pass the scotch and a tab of ethylmorphine, please. 

Let us be fair. Life is hard. The First Noble Truth really is suffering. I have my own anxiety disorder. I get it. I do not blame anyone for wanting some relief. That brings us to the second big question: Does Christianity have that to offer? 

The answer is: yes but not in the way we expect. The whole Marx quote is: Religion is the opiate of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. Their real happiness. 

Authentic Christianity is not the spiritual opioid churchianity that conspires against consciousness, artificially calms our minds, gets us happily hooked on a feeling, and makes sure no one says anything upsetting. Christianity is not escapist. If religion is as Marx described it – and churchianity is – then Christianity is ironically what Marx calls the abolition of religion. Remember what Monsignor Murnion said, Authentic parish life must . . . offset temptations to retreat into a privatized, pietistic religion. That privatized pietistic religion is what Marx called the opiate of the people. 

I don’t like Bonhoeffer’s term religionless Christianity because it sounds like spiritual but not religious individualistic piety. But that’s the very opposite of what Bonhoeffer meant. If you put it together with his classic Life Together, in which he argues that the Church is the essential meeting ground of Christianity, there is no way he was espousing private piety and spiritual individualism. His Christianity was religionless because it wasn’t a quid pro quo deal for a happy afterlife. It wasn’t an investment or fire insurance. It was not private palliative piety. It was Christian because it was a disciplined life of prayer and committed action in the world, the kind of action that led him to die for opposing fascism. Bonhoeffer explicitly rejects the spiritual anesthesia project in favor of infinite compassion. 

         

         The human being is called upon to share in God’s suffering

at the hands of a godless world. Thus we must really live in that godless world and not try to cover up or transfigure its godlessness somehow with religion.[iii]

By religion he means the whole conspiracy against consciousness, the assurance it will all be alright and is already alright deep down. 

Here’s the problem for Christianity. We are striving for union with God, striving to become Godly. But this is a God who chooses to become human, to share our human nature, to live and die as one of us. Our journey to God loops back to the real world, to messy humanity, to where we started. 

         And the end of all our exploring 

Will be to arrive where we started 

And to know the place for the first time.[iv]  

Paul invites us, have the same mind in you that was in Christ Jesus. That’s Christification right? How cool is that, to become like Jesus! But what is it like to have the same mind as Jesus who though he was in the form of God did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being in human likeness?[v]Jesus invites us to follow him by taking up our cross.[vi]

How does that brand of religion appeal to people who have problems enough already and just want to feel better? Feel-good religion, be it charismatic, contemplative, or whatever, is what the people demand. It sells, doesn’t it? It sells because it is what Bonhoeffer called cheap grace. Cheap grace is what Marx called the illusion of happiness. Where’s the beef? 

Human beings are built to be channels. God’s love flows through us into the world. When we allow that love to flow, it gets us into all manner of trouble, it entangles our lives with humanity in all its chaos, it leads us not away from this darkling plane[vii]but deeper into it.Now here’s the kicker. That is where true joy is to be found. It isn’t a shallow high. On the contrary, it breaks our hearts – open – to let the love in and out. 

When a channel acts like a reservoir – as when we act like spiritual consumers instead of servants – all we get is a blockage. Love isn’t love until you give it away.[viii]

The irony in the spiritual life is that we all want to get our needs met, but we can never get our needs met until we forget about getting our needs met and lose ourselves in God – not God as an abstract idea or a reassuring fantasy – God in the fat lady in Franny and Zooey,[ix]God in the refugee, God in the hospital administrator, God in the street bum, God in the blackjack dealer, God not on a throne in heaven but commingled inextricably into our broken humanity. We may not want to go there. But that’s where the treasure is buried. And, guess what, we’re already there. 

And the end of all our exploring 

Will be to arrive where we started 

And to know the place for the first time.[x]  

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[i]Alice Miller, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware

[ii]This walk out was not an isolated protest. Multiple preachers have told me that in the same time period they mentioned the separation of families at the border. Multiple laity walked out. None of them said they supported taking toddlers away from their parents. But they were quite angry the subject had been raised at all. 

[iii]Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters from Prison.

[iv]T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding

[v]Philippians 2

[vi]Matthew 16: 24

[vii]Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach

[viii]The Aggrolites, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiV4Ul2zaz4

[ix]https://www.shmoop.com/franny-and-zooey/fat-lady-story-symbol.html

[x]T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding