All My Relations
a sermon given by the Rev. Roger Paine
on the First Sunday in Lent, February 10, 2008
at The First Parish in Lincoln
To listen to this sermon click here.
“The heart has its reasons, which reason cannot know.”
– Pascal
READINGS:
1. Our first reading is from the book Socrates in Love by Christopher Phillips, who wrote two earlier books about the Socratic method of inquiry, Socrates Café and Six Questions of Socrates. This coming Thursday is Valentine’s Day, and so here are a few lines from Socrates in Love:
Does love have an essence? Or is love a great appearing act, that makes its presence known only when humans engage in certain types of interactions with one another? Is there an immutable form of love, or is it forever changing [and] evolving? Some of our most intimately personal outpourings of love might take the form of social reform or scientific and artistic undertakings or philosophical inquiry. To Socrates, for love to be deserving of its name, it has to have a revolutionary component... always capable of surpassing itself. In this endeavor, we rub shoulders with the immortals. (Selected from pages 305-10 and p. 22)
2. Our second reading has, for many centuries, been the traditional gospel lesson for the first Sunday in Lent. It’s a story about temptation – three specific temptations that Jesus faces when he goes off to be alone in the desert and prepare for his public ministry. From Luke 4:1-13, here it is:
Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and at the end of them he was hungry.
The devil said to him, "If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread." Jesus answered, "It is written: 'People do not live on bread alone.'"
The devil led him up to a high place and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And he said to him, "I will give you all their authority and splendor, for it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to. So if you worship me, it will all be yours." Jesus answered, "It is written: 'Worship the Lord your God and serve him only.'"
The devil led him to Jerusalem and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. "If you are the Son of God," he said, "throw yourself down from here. For it is written: "'He will command his angels concerning you to guard you carefully; they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.'" Jesus answered, "It is said: 'Do not put the Lord your God to the test.'"
When the devil had finished all this tempting, he left him until an opportune time.
The Lakota Sioux have an expression they use to begin and end every ceremony.
It’s their version of our covenant: Mitakuye Oyasin – it means “All My Relations.”
The words are a prayer of respect and honor for their sense of connection to each other,
to their ancestors, to the animals and plants, to God, and to land and sky.
They believe that every one of these relationships has something important to teach us.
I have dinner every other week with our ninth graders, as many of you know.
We’ve called it “the Minister’s Class” for years – Justin was in it two years ago.
The kids this year describe it as a “philosophical and social club” –
we discuss some of the most important things you can ever talk about in life,
and we talk about things that are frivolous but fun.
In our last meeting I asked the kids to brainstorm a list of all our relations.
Here’s who and what made it onto the flip chart:
friends, parents, boyfriends and girlfriends, self, teachers, coaches, team mates,
grandparents, places, God, animals, enemies, ideas, church buddies,
inanimate objects, and siblings – it took a while to remember siblings.
“All my relations...”
It’s quite a list – you could even say it’s an overwhelming list.
I’ve read it over many times, and I always come to the same conclusion:
the language we use in most of what we say and do – in business and in everyday life –
is far too small for the landscape of all our relations.
We need a larger language that allows us to inhabit this larger world without letting it overwhelm us.
A language that helps us have a real meeting with who and what is on that list.
I studied Greek in college for two years, and here is all that I still remember:
in English we have just one word for love, but there are five words in Greek,
and every one of them means love: eros, storge, xenia, philia, and agape.
Eros is erotic, romantic love.
Without eros, none of us would be here.
Eros can lure the most sensible person into doing the most insensible things.
But eros is also the force behind the birth of all things in the universe.
Storge is familial love.
It is the warm and affectionate love we feel within our immediate family.
It also shows up in one other context:
it’s the kind of love that soldiers in the same unit often come to have for each other.
Xenia is love for the stranger in our midst.
It is the Greek version of southern hospitality, and Zeus, the ruler of the Olympian gods,
demanded the practice of xenia from all his mortal subjects –
you were required to welcome the stranger at your door.
Philia is love between friends.
It is the deep affection and connection you feel for and with your best friend.
It is the kind of bond that, even when good friends don’t see each other for a long stretch,
when they meet again it’s as if they’ve never been apart.
Agape is unconditional love – the highest form of love.
It is love freely given with no strings attached and no thought of reward.
The conventional wisdom is that the only sources of unconditional love are God, mothers, and dogs.
But I know some modern-day fathers who’ve definitely got it in them to give, too.
Romantic love, love of family, love for the stranger, love between friends, and unconditional love –
these words give us a language fit for all our relations – except one.
And it’s the one which is the foundation for all the others – the one you have with yourself.
The story of Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness is presented as a confrontation with the devil,
but it’s really a story about Jesus’ relationship with himself.
He has gone on what some Native Americans today call a vision quest,
a search for insight and guidance on two big questions:
when no one else is around, who am I – and what is my purpose... what am I here for?
You go, alone, into the wilderness, you climb to a high place,
you fast to empty yourself so you will be more ready to receive,
and you ask the gods for direction.
For Jesus, alone in the desert, it’s not God but the devil who shows up –
to tempt him at what he assumes is an opportune time: he’s alone and he’s hungry.
It would be a mistake to imagine the devil here in a cartoonish way,
complete with horns and cape and a forked tail,
because in real life, the devil never shows up looking like that.
No, the devil is attractive, friendly, and intriguing.
The essence of a real temptation is that it’s possible – we could do it if we choose to.
If it were impossible for us, it wouldn’t be a real temptation.
The devil believes that Jesus really can do any of the things he suggests.
So he just encourages him to prove it – to go ahead and strut your stuff.
Jesus is starving, so the first temptation is about hunger: turn this stone into a loaf of bread.
When Jesus refuses, the devil tries something more subtle:
I’ll give you all the kingdoms of the world – they’re all yours, if you will worship me.
It’s the Faustian deal: power in exchange for your soul.
Jesus says, “I’m sticking with God.”
So the last temptation is closest to home – because it is about identity:
if you really are the son of God, throw yourself down from this high place,
and let the angels come to catch you and set you down safely.
Jesus sidesteps this one by quoting scripture: “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”
I would like this story more if we got to see Jesus really struggle with each temptation.
Wouldn’t you like to be able to turn a stone into a loaf of bread?
It’s not just the momentary wow of it – think of all the hungry people you could feed!
Peter Gomes, Harvard’s chaplain, remembers that when his grandmother’s doctor advised her
to avoid temptation when it came to the foods she ate,
she looked at him and said, “Better to die from havin’ it than wantin’ it.”
So I wish we could have seen Jesus struggle with himself in this story,
and later on in Luke, we do – it’s when we see a good person wrestle with hard choices
that we learn something, by example, about what it takes to do the right thing.
And we need those examples, because the problem with a covenant like “all my relations”
is that we spend almost no time apprenticing ourselves to the disciplines necessary
to have a real exchange with the people and the issues on the outer circles of all our relations.
The temptation is to say,
“I’d much rather be more present for the 5% of my relations I most love and cherish
than try to enter this 95% I don’t know much about, much less how to be of any real help.”
And if we try to enter that 95%, we can easily be overwhelmed by the sheer size of human tragedy.
So here’s a Socratic question for you:
when it comes to all our relations, what are we capable of?
I believe that we are capable of more than we think we are.
In a new book out called Experiments in Ethics by a professor of philosophy at Princeton,
he says our best hope for a better world is to establish more situations
in which people’s better selves can flourish.
When Christopher Phillips, the author of Socrates in Love, was just thirteen,
he fell in love with Socrates’ idea that we can be our own best expert questioners.
He was in middle school near the beginning of public school desegregation,
and instead of walking to a new school less than a mile from his home,
he was bussed across town to a run-down school in a mostly black neighborhood.
The bus got him there before dawn, and the early-arrivers gathered in the cafeteria,
the black and white students usually sitting apart, at either end of it,
but when the ends filled up, there was a zone in the middle where kids mingled.
One morning, sitting in that middle zone, young Chris blurted out a question.
He had been reading Socrates’ Apology on the bus.
So he asked, “What makes life worth living?”
Sitting near him was a black student twice his size named Roy.
Roy was the star fullback on the football team, and no one had ever heard Roy say much.
Everyone but Roy was looking at Chris as if he had just landed from another planet,
but Roy said, “I ask myself that question every day.
Why do I get up to come to this miserable excuse for a school?
Once I told my mom I wasn’t going to come. She slapped me upside the head and said,
‘You are going to school because you are going to make something of yourself.
You are going to become a doctor or dentist and make our community proud.’”
Then she quoted MLK to her son:
“You’re going to show everyone that nothing’s impossible if you set your mind to it,
that what matters most isn’t the color of your skin but the content of your character.’
“That,” Roy said, “is how I’m going make my life, her life, and everyone else’s life more worth living.”
Everyone looked at Roy, dumbfounded.
One of his best friends was about to laugh, but when he realized how serious Roy was
he nodded and said, “Man, I hear that.”
A white boy named Evan said, “I thought I was the only one whose parents told them stuff like that.”
So there, in the middle zone of the cafeteria, xenia – the love that reaches out to strangers,
and philia, the love between friends, and storge, a sense of kinship and connection,
all came into being because one boy asked a question and another boy responded with his truth.
Love is both an essence and a great appearing act.
We can let it lie dormant, backstage, or we can put into the play.
I believe that we are capable of more than we think we are, and that a good church
can push us to have the conversation that we’re not having but need to have
in order to live more courageously and give love a revolutionary component.
In our Opening Words to begin this service we said:
“My life apart from you is not as strong.
Yes, I have danced and I have told stories at my own fire and I have sung well.
But when I am with you, my friends, I know better who it is in me that sings.”
Love is a great appearing act, and when we help it happen, we rub shoulders with the immortals.
Happy Valentine’s Day!
Amen.
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