Thursday, September 5, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Get to know our precious pearl-ness
Become a fool, so you can be wise. Let none of us boast, and also not the world, nor life, nor death, nor the present nor the future. All belong to you, and you to Christ, and Christ to God.
Paul’s dominoes fall fast and into the kingdom of heaven. I want to play this game too, this game with only one rule, “become a fool so you can become wise.” Henri Nouwen calls us each to “strip himself or herself from the illusions of ownership.” This applies to material things of course, but more even so it pertains to our certainties about God, as James Finley suggests in Palace of Nowhere:
We give God a name. We then equate God with the name we have given him, and in doing so we make ourselves, in effect, God’s God. Instead of acknowledging God as the source of our identity and existence, we make ourselves the self-proclaimed source of God’s identity. God then becomes the one made in our image and likeness.
Rarely is this our intention, but we do it anyway, and repent, and then do it again. Repent and repeat. Why? Because, Finley suggests, Adam and Eve lost track and trust of the friendship between true God and true man. In this way their selves became false, complete with broken co-creativity. They were misled, and we live a few generations further in the very same world, acting out the same darn lies.
Lacking God’s power to create tangible things, the false self creates by use of ideologies, definitions, social myths and words. The false self gives its own name to life and then, like a self-proclaimed demiurge, demands that all of life conform to its wishes.
Because my “false” self does not exist except in my own mind, we cannot proclaim or possess anything, except falsely. God loves us too much to let us.
In that love we can see a way to be with Jesus, our Savior without possessing him through our ideas and concepts.
Today’s lectionary praises Jesus, Lord and Master of the Universe. The psalm pours out songs of praises to God, to whom “belongs the earth and everything in it.” Jesus heals us, he calms the sea in storms, and he calls the fish out of the depths into Simon’s nets.
So many fish! The boats were in danger of sinking. Simon saw this and fell on his face before Jesus. “Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.”
Jesus frightens us, because his mastery is beyond our understanding. Nothing has changed in the two thousand years since Simon Peter’s fabulous catch. But we need not be afraid, even and especially of our failure to measure up to our own standards. Finley invites us each to our own precious pearl-ness in Jesus’ parable:
God’s enduring presence places the false self in a blessed insecurity. The false self is like a drop of stagnant water thrown into the raging furnace of the love of God. Even in our sins, in God’s eyes we remain the great pearl for which he has lost all upon the cross in order to possess us as his own. Even in the midst of revolt, we remain his one lost sheep for which he has wandered in the wastes of death in order to bring us back to his fold.
Can I be a witness? Am I a lost sheep who wanders off into the wastes of death, and God will never let me go? Even as I pray, I seek mastery, subtly acting like I don’t need God, but God refuses to become my accomplice.
Prayer is a journey in which – if God wills that we take only one step – one steps places us in Paradise. Likewise, if God wills we take only one step, but we take two, we find ourselves in the depths of hell—the hell of the false self that prays not to find God but only to find and establish yet one more way of finding itself.
What did Paul cry out? “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?”
Jesus called Simon to stand up again on his feet and be free from fear. He had work for Simon to do. “From now on you will be catching men.” Simon, not yet called Peter, had no idea what that meant, and in the following years, he repeatedly took one step forward and two steps back. As do I.
Peter’s surrender and obedience had to be daily, hourly, moment by moment. As does mine.
When they brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.
 (1 Corinthians 3, Psalm 24, Matthew 4, Luke 5)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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