March 14, 2010
Knowing God – Cautiously
Thoughts on the First Readings – Joe Frankenfield
4th Sunday in Lent
Joshua 5:9, 10-12

What are we to make of the God of Israel? On the one hand, the God of the Hebrews extolled and commanded justice and loving care for people, including the poor and foreigners living among his people. On the other, he led his tribes in driving out the inhabitants of Canaan, allowing and even approving the merciless killing of men, women and children to create a homeland for them.

It’s a common observation that while God created humans in his image; humans also created God in theirs. That’s often true, often unavoidable and often tragic.

Faith tells us that the Creator of the universe loves us. Beings who truly love are persons. We are persons. It’s natural to give God a human face. Still we take great risks attributing our qualities to the Creator. Even our best characteristics are polluted with fear and self-interest, not because we’re evil but because we’re finite beings possessing infinite imaginations. When we ascribe human qualities to God, God always comes out looking contradictory.

People frequently ask why a loving God allows war and death. In the Hebrew Scriptures God not only allows war and death, he repeatedly commands war and death – ruthlessly.

For Christians, a lot of assumptions begin to fray at this point. We know Jesus taught: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven (Mt. 5:44-48). We can’t square this with a God who sanctions the killing of whole armies and the slaughter of widows and children to create a homeland for his favorites.

Were the God of the Hebrews and the God of Jesus two different God’s? Hardly. But we possess incompatible descriptions of the one God.

Describing God carries huge consequences. We do well to go about it humbly and cautiously. Unless we are supernaturally wonderful, imaging God after ourselves is perilous indeed.

There is much wisdom in anchoring what we know of God in the historical person, Jesus of Nazareth and holding everything else with a very loose grip.

March 7, 2010
Stop Praising the House and Grab a Hammer
Thoughts on the First Readings – Joe Frankenfield
3rd Sunday in Lent
Exodus 3:1-8,13-15

“Take off those muddy shoes before you come in! Don’t you dare track up this kitchen; I just washed the floor!” As a kid I thought my mom simply didn’t want more work. As an adult I realized how much she wanted a nice place for us all to live. Taking my shoes off outside wasn’t just for my mom’s sake; it was for all our sakes.

That insight came back to me as I reread the story of the burning bush. It sounds as though God is displaying a bit of divine egotism. But God’s admonition to Moses not to approach with dirty feet isn’t about God’s ego; it’s about seeking respect for what God’s doing for humanity and, specifically, for the Hebrews enslaved in Egypt. God wants to impress on Moses that he’s being recruited into an act of liberation implications of which are beyond his comprehension.

It’s important to remember that those who composed the Bible’s stories wrote within the customs and characters of their experience. They could do nothing else. Since magnificent undertakings were the work of kings and pharaohs, the Bible portrays God as an ancient Mediterranean potentate. In Jewish history their liberation from Egyptian servitude and their conquests on the eastern end of the Mediterranean formed the core of their identity. Honor paid to God was honor paid to God’s accomplishments.

The Gospel of Matthew [7:21] quotes Jesus, “Not everyone saying, ‘Lord, Lord’ is part of the Reign of God; only the one who does my Father’s will.” Jesus worked to get folks to realize that we don’t praise God for God’s sake. We praise God for our sake. Praising God reminds us of what God is doing in our lives and encourages us to involve ourselves with his actions. If we remember this, our faith will deepen and mature.

It will be easier to keep our home free of all those muddy footprints too.

March 1, 2010
Thoughts on the First Readings – Joe Frankenfield
2nd Sunday in Lent
Genesis 15:5-12

When ancient Hebrews told the story of how God used Abram to sire their nation, they used language and customs of their time. To guarantee that his gift of land would be perpetual, God followed a common contract ritual. Jews of that era found it natural. We find the story exotic.

We face a similar situation. To maintain a united and orthodox understanding of God and our relationship with him church authority has enshrined language and images from centuries, even millennia, past. Much of it is foreign to us.

Democracy, facile communication, universal education, the equality of all people and individual rights are fundamental realities for us. Advances in the sciences have fundamentally changed the way we perceive reality. In addition, many possess an unprecedented amount of power for controlling their daily lives. These facts make our world drastically different from the world that gave rise to our religious language and imagery.

There are those who say that “everyone knows” what the prayers and rituals are saying. Sometimes people do. But the language of faith is becoming more and more remote from everyday existence. Consciously and unconsciously we find religion in an increasingly isolated corner of our lives.

Theologians work on this problem. They search out ways of making faith understandable to us. In the nature of things they bump heads with the bishops whose job it is to make certain that our ancestors’ experience of God is fully handed on. It’s a messy process that never stands still and is never finished.

As profound change chases profound change today, nothing substitutes for deepening our faith knowledge. We can’t wait for someone to hand us a new dictionary that translates what we hear in church and read in scripture. We need to grow more confident in pondering our faith and making sense of it ourselves and in conversation with one another. The doctrine that the Holy Spirit guides all baptized people will become a practical reality for us or our faith will end up in the attic of our lives.

February 21, 2010 Lent
To Live With Courage
Thoughts on the First Readings -Joe Frankenfield
1st Sunday in Lent
Deuteronomy 26:4-10

“If you decide you’re going to do something, give yourself to it completely. If it’s not worth your full energy, put it aside and find something that is. You owe that to yourself and to everyone else.” A wise counselor said those words to me many years ago when I was in college.

Giving life one’s full energy isn’t easy. We want to hoard our limited resources. Others’ acceptance, our own ego, our energy, our time, possessions, all these are finite.

Still, part of us recoils from living by halves. We dislike it in ourselves and we pity it in others. Young folks scorn a guarded life partly sensing that its roots lie in cowardice and partly dreading that they themselves may ultimately yield to the same fear-filled accounting. Old folks view it with the sadness of witnessing a profound loss.

“I have come that people will have the fullness of life,” said Jesus [John 10:10]. The gift of faith is the courage to live fully, to give all of ourselves to whatever we are doing: to give ourselves without hesitation to the future that God promises.

The experience of God’s inestimable care and generosity in creating our universe and us within it and the experience of Jesus, the personal touch of God’s love in history, overcome the fear of our own woefully inadequate resources. It is unimaginable that God who accomplishes such magnificence and revealed such love will not bring its potential to fullness.

We begin every Eucharistic Prayer remembering all the good that God has accomplished. Then we pray that God will complete the work he’s begun: the work of Christ in and through us. We don’t recall this for God’s sake. We recall for our sake.

February 14, 2010
God’s Word Is Good
Thoughts on the Second Readings – Joe Frankenfield
6th Sunday in Ordinary Time
1 Corinthians 15:12,16-20

Rain was dripping from a gray March sky several years ago when a student walked into my office and plopped in a chair. “Last night I decided I have to live as though there’s a God, whether there is one or not. It’s the only way I can have any hope what I do makes any difference. On a really good day just trying to make things better works as its own reward. But there are too many tiresome days like this to make it with only an intellectual reason for getting fired up. Most days I need to really believe that what I’m doing will make a difference not just for me but for other people.

“And I really hope there is a God because winter lasts way too long around here and I’m not that good at pretending.”

I had to laugh. I knew he wrestled with this issue more, or more vocally, than most. But he was a very honest guy who needed things to make sense. His decision was so human – kind of sad, but very human. He wanted to make sense of his faith.

Why would Paul have said that if God hasn’t raised Jesus from death, our faith is empty? Millions of people have faith in God who know nothing or care nothing about Jesus’ resurrection.

The fact is that we know God’s love and promise through Jesus: God’s presence in our world. If God has allowed the good life Jesus lived to simply end denying him his role in the world he revealed, Jesus’ life failed and the ground of our faith is empty. We can differ in how we explain it. We can differ in how we imagine it. But if God wasn’t faithful to Jesus past life as we know it, then God has no meaning for us.

We need a meaningful God, a God who lives up to his promise and our hopes. There’s no faith without that. None of us are that good at pretending.