China’s Premier Warns Obama to Get America’s Deficit to an “Appropriate Size”

Aren’t Walmart, Target, and all the other retailers, 99% of whose merchandise is made in China, Chinese Trojan horses?

When I equipped my apartment in Philadelphia a few years ago, virtually everything I purchased was made in China, except the china, which was made in USA.

Yesterday I wanted to celebrate 50,000 hits on my website. But today I already have 50,139! I have to figure out a way to celebrate. My hits this year have already doubled those of last year. Thanks for visiting. Hope my work is helpful.

peterkrey

This is a children’s song for the story of Elijah and the Widow of Zarephath (1 Kings 17: 8-16). Click on the title to hear how it goes.

God Will Provide

Elijah met the widow

of Zarephath

Picking up sticks

upon her path.

“Bring me some water,”

Elijah said,

“and don’t forget

to bake some bread.”

“The little I’ve left

will make one bread;

Then my son and I

will soon be dead.”

“Have some faith

and put God first

and God will fill

your hunger and thirst.”

“Your flour and oil

will never run out,

that’s what sharing

is all about.”

Selfish people

never have enough,

and those who share

have more to spare.

Those with a lot,

will always want more.

Those with a little

will help the poor.

Seek ye first

the Kingdom Above

and God will provide you

with food of love.

The food of love

Will never run out

Because that’s what

Sharing’s all about!

I heard someone phone in to an NPR program say,

“Jesus the Good Samaritan would have given his neighbor health care!”

The CEO of Aetna was being interviewed on the Lehrer Report and he said that he had to strike 8 million people from their rolls to make their health insurance profitable again. He knocked 8 million people out of their health coverage for the sake of profit! What is wrong with this picture?

Correlating Timothy Gallwey’s Inner Game with Martin Luther’s Theology

October 31, 2009 by Dr. Peter D.S. Krey

Since writing the post, “Time Slows Down in the Zone” on July 26^th 2008, I have wanted to deal with W. Timothy Gallwey’s Inner Game of Tennis[1] again, because many of his insights can be correlated with Luther’s theology. I will present those insights and Luther’s correlations, which are also basically features of the Christian faith, the way it is experienced and lived. Then it will be important to answer the question, why do all these correlations exist?

In my dissertation, Sword of the Spirit, Sword of Iron, I argue that Martin Luther (1486-1546) championed spontaneity. Medieval times were characterized by mediation, that priests mediated the faith to the other estates, the princes, peasants, and burghers, for example. Luther championed immediacy. All, everyone was part of the Christian estate and they were the priesthood of all believers, who had immediate access to God and a specialized priestly estate was not necessary to mediate their relationship with the sacred.

My emphasis on spontaneity in my dissertation is well placed. Timothy Gallwey speaks of a deeper sense of confidence, while Luther emphasizes a deeper intensity of faith, which he also refers to as trust and confidence. For Luther faith is an overarching confidence in God, while Gallwey places trust in a second self. From Luther’s point of view, which is basically the Christian one, Gallwey’s Self 1 and Self 2 can be considered the old and new self in Christ. In the fourth article on Baptism in Luther’s “Small Catechism,” he writes

that the old Adam in us, together with all sins and evil lusts should be drowned by daily sorrow and repentance and be put to death, and that a new man should come forth daily and rise up, cleansed and righteous, to live forever in God’s presence.

Gallwey focuses on getting to Self 2 for the sake of peak performance at a game, but his disparagement of Self 1 is much like the Christian conception of an old self as opposed to the new self in Christ.

Gallwey’s ego-mind or Self 1 corresponds with Luther’s old self that lives out of a righteousness of works and the law. Gallwey writes of the judgmental Self 1 that interferes with Self 2, which from Luther’s theological point of view, is the self sustained by grace, already saved. Getting into this self is, however, very difficult to sustain. In Gallwey’s words, “Grab for it, and it will squirt away like a slippery bar of soap” (page 100).

In Luther’s words:

Justification is hard to hold (lubrica est, that is, it is slippery), not indeed in itself – for in itself it is sure and certain – but [in] so far as our relation to it is concerned. I often experience this myself, for I know the hours of darkness in which I sometimes wrestle. I know how often I lose the roots of the Gospel and grace, as if it were suddenly hidden from me by dense clouds. I know how slippery is the footing of even those who are experienced in this matter and can step out most firmly….[2]

Gallwey writes much the same way about getting into and slipping out of Self 2. Listen to Luther again:

Dear brother, do not be proud, or sure and certain that you know Christ well. You now hear me confessing and professing what the devil was able to do against this man Luther, who, after all, was a doctor in this art. He has preached, thought, written, spoken, sung, and read so much about this matter and yet must remain a pupil in it and at times is neither a pupil nor master. Therefore be advised, and do not shout hurrah. Now you are standing, but see to it that you do not fall[3]

For Gallwey’s suspension of judgment, we can correlate the Christian tenet that when the self has already died in baptism, judgment is irrelevant. There is no more earthly jurisdiction. Gallwey’s inner game makes the other-worldly produce the this-worldly or conversely, it makes the this-worldly reflect the other-worldly tenets of justification through faith by grace.

It is easy to change a few words of some of Gallwey statements and you have Luther’s sense of the spontaneous new life come to the fore. For example,

The first skill to learn is the art of letting go of the human inclination to judge ourselves and our performance as either good or bad. Letting go of the judging process is a basic key to the Inner Game, when we unlearn how to be judgmental, it is possible to (and here I substitute my words) “live the spontaneous, focused, Christian life” (page 17).

Thus Luther threw the canon law into the fire on December 10^th 1520, shocking the Church. Justification by faith meant no judgment. It is law-free unless you slip back into the old self. In his work, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Luther claims that to call the Christ of the new life a law-giver like Moses, is blasphemy. The Reformation gave the jurisdiction of the law to civil courts and closed the Archdeaconal and Episcopal church courts. (This is roughly speaking, because Protestant churches still had to deal with marriage and divorce.)

The legal dimension stands at the edge of personal relationships and in the courts is where social forces intersect and impact personal relations. We have individual freedom, but when we transgress a law, then we are prosecuted by the society in court, where we have to accept penalties that range from small fines even to capital punishment. Our society erases our ideology of individualism in the court of law.

Gallwey says, “It is interesting how the judgmental mind extends itself” (19). It can contaminate the whole personal individual self and also extend into a social self, where laws can interfere with a spontaneous creative life that has internalized the law, even the inner purpose of the law, also even the love of the law to its positive reaches, where a point comes that the law fails, becomes it has come into a place where it does not belong. In Luther’s terms, the freedom of the Gospel leaves the law behind.

Gallwey uses words like “fluidity” (21), “flowing like a river,” that “our actions flow,” for spontaneity. Gallwey says that the art of letting go of Self 1 control, gives Self 2 the chance to play spontaneously (82). Spontaneity is obstructed by self-judging, thinking too much, trying too hard — all forms of overcontrol (82).

Gallwey argues that observations must be made clearly in terms of doing something correctly or in error, without making a judgment about it. Just make the observation. An error is a learning experience.

He calls Self 1 the ego-mind and Self 2 the body. Perhaps he should call it the body-mind. He discovers the fact that we can not take credit for the accomplishments of the second self. That correlates with our not being saved by works, but only by grace, that is, by the merit of Christ – in whom we are our second self, which is a pure and unearned gift, and not our merit or deserving. Here Gallwey’s insight and Luther’s, which is of course derived from the Pauline Letters, correlate rather well.

Gallwey says that Self 2 has an inner intelligence which is staggering. Here Luther’s respect for creation and the body correlate well. Luther does not relegate sin to the body and superiority and sinlessness to the intellect, the reasoning mind. Gallwey’s ego-mind is like Luther’s Dame Reason and for Luther reason in the pejorative sense interferes with our relationship to God as much as the ego-mind interferes with Self 2, when it should be trusted to play spontaneously, far exceeding the capacity of Self One’s ego-mind.

Luther’s awareness also observes the inner and outer person, in his “Freedom of the Christian.” He also concentrates on the Inner Game, because his first 19 points concern the inner person, the next 6, the outer person, and the last four, concern their social and economic relations.[4]

Trying too hard is like Luther’s works-righteousness. The old self steps in and interferes with the new self, instead of trusting the new self. That is the meaning of “Trust Thyself!” (36) It is like a parent doing something for a child instead of allowing the child to learn it.

Then Gallwey starts emphasizing that we have to let it happen, rather than Self 1 doing it. Let it happen correlates with Luther’s, “Let God be God!” The emphasis is on trust rather than control and the constant control that Self 1 wants. Allow the natural learning process to take place and forget about stroke by stroke instructions. A Luther correlate would be sin versus sins. Forget about each thing you do wrong and concentrate, focus on your trust in God. When your trusting relationship with God breaks, which is sin, then all your sins take place. Thus your sins are merely symptoms of your sin, which is a breakdown of your trust in God.

Gallwey says it is watching, getting the feel, and then letting the body do it…effortlessly. It has to happen without effort and control. Luther states in the Small Catechism’s explanation of the Third Article of the Creed: “I believe that I cannot by my own understanding or effort believe in Jesus Christ my Lord, or come to him. But the Holy Spirit has called me through the Gospel, enlightened me with his gifts, and sanctified and kept me in the true faith.”

Thus the new life in Christ is also effortless. The spontaneity entails Christ working through you. Gallwey says that you have to become passive the way Luther emphasizes passive righteousness in justification. “Letting it happen,” according to Gallwey, “does not mean that you go limp, but it means letting Self 2 [takes over]” (79). It is interesting how Gallwey argues that for trusting and respecting the body, we need a change of attitude (41). Becoming a new self in Christ requires a metanoia, a change of mind, for the transformation to take place. A critical attitude and wanting control are symptoms of mistrust (41).

Gallwey touches the problem of dogmatism (53):

When the verbal instruction is passed on to another person who does not have in his bank of experience the action being described in memory, it lives in the mind totally disconnected from experience. The chances are now even greater that there will be a split between memory of theory and memory of action (53).

Putting this in my words: Verbal instruction or teaching passed on to someone who does not have a bank of experience of the life being described in memory, can live in a world totally disconnected from that experience. Another helpful Gallwey insight: They are relying on formula rather than the feel (56). Perhaps these instructions all come from the ego-mind of a dogmatic person. Thus a Christian life can not at all be there in experience, but merely in dogmatic instructions. A person can have the feel for a Christian life or have lost the feel for it, the way a person may not have the feel for a language. Gallwey cites a dictum: “No teacher is greater than one’s own experience” (54). Perhaps Schleiermacher had good reason for connecting our theology with experience. What do we make of a theology that is adverse to experience? A dogmatic theology that does not shape a life lived alien to Christian experience is worthless. But a theology can also be performative, bringing the experience it espouses into existence.

I wonder if the word “experience” was distilled from the word “suffering,” like the word “thanksgiving” was from the word “praise”? I am very interested in the historical career of words. Reading the Bible and other old texts, I often feel that the word suffering also includes the concept of experience, before that word became coined.

Gallwey continues that valid instruction from experience can help me if it guides me in my own experiential discovery. He also emphasizes remembering the inner feel. Gallwey is, of course, instructing tennis players. He says it is necessary to have a clear picture of a right stroke of the racket and the inner feel of it. With both, one can have natural learning. For Gallwey relying on formula rather than the feel is a mistake (56). Again that reminds me of a dogmatic person. We need theology from good experience to help others learn from experience and the inner feel [the Holy Spirit] in the experience. “Natural learning is from the inside out.” according to Gallwey (68).

In my seminary days, Granger Westberg made a point about learning from the outside in. He suggested that we should behave our way into a new state of mind, rather than going from a new state of mind into new ways of acting or a change of behavior.

There are probably many missing components involved in these complex relations of the inner states and outward actions. Gallwey also emphasizes how a clear visual picture of a result needs to be complemented by the inner feel of that action. The “doing” of Westberg might relate to the external observance of an action, while Gallwey relates to the inner feel and the internal authority of one’s own experience in learning a game. The idea is learning how to learn and then discovering what is worth learning (71). Gallwey notes that the child is the greatest learner. “Learning does not mean the collection of information, but the realization of something that actually changes one’s behavior, such as a tennis stroke, [or taking regular exercise or changing one’s diet] or internal behavior, such as a pattern of thought” (72). Trying to break a habit strengthens it. Use the strategy of starting a new habit. Starting a new pattern is easy when done with childlike disregard for the difficulties (76).

Gallwey’s emphasis on letting it happen by trusting Self 2 reminds so much of Luther’s conviction that it is not by our own effort but by the working of the Holy Spirit. Gallwey says that you have to trust Self 2, your body, with the effort and all the trying and making of

Self 1 is to no avail. It has to allow Self 2 to do it. “But letting it happen does not mean going limp, it means letting Self 2 use the muscles necessary for the job” (79). For my purposes, I would say, letting the new self take over. I would then add, we are thus not passive, but active out of an inner force.

This correlates with the passive righteousness that Luther speaks of in his experience of having been justified by faith. In relation to God, passive righteousness is not the active righteousness through which one is judged and found wanting, but a righteousness that imbues the believer with righteousness, making the sinner righteous. The believer also has to be passive before God in this exchange, that is, on the vertical axis. The believer has to let it happen to him or her. But before others on the horizontal axis, the initiative for being active is brought out of the person. We could say the person is passive before God, coram deo, and thus very active among others, coram hominibus.

Gallwey continues: When self 1 does it, a certain ego satisfaction is attained. But when Self 2 does it, it doesn’t feel as if it was you who did it (81). And you do not feel that you can take the credit for what transpired. That applies to doing things out of the Holy Spirit, out of the grace of God. Then as Isaiah says, all our works are thy doing, O Lord (26:12). So if they are done by our Christ-self, then we cannot take credit for what Christ has done. As St. Paul says, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal. 2:20). That saying can easily be extended to “It is no longer I who work, but Christ who works through me.”

Luther also knows that fighting the mind does not work, as Gallwey notes (82). Luther somehow identifies what Gallwey calls the ego-mind or Self 1 with the devil and advises wiles to use against the devil’s invoked temptation to surrender to depression, for example.

The devil is conquered by mocking and despising him, not by resisting and arguing with him. Therefore, my Jerome [the student Luther is counseling] join in jokes and games with my wife and the rest, and in this way you will cheat those diabolical thoughts and take good courage.[5]

Like Gallwey says old habits cannot be broken directly, they have to be replaced by new habits, Luther advises, play the piano or play a flute, avoid being alone. Luther is trying to get someone out of depression, however, which is somewhat different from unlearning a bad habit in the skill of playing a game. But the diabolical ideas that plague the depressed students that Luther is counseling resemble the self-judgment and heavy self-criticism that Gallwey is dealing with.

The best way to quiet this mind, is not by telling it to shut up, or by arguing with it, or criticizing it for criticizing you. Fighting the mind does not work. What works best is learning to focus it. (82)

That is not a Luther insight.

There is a better correlation of Luther pejorative sense of reason, which he calls Dame Reason, with Gallwey’s ego-mind and Self 1. Gallwey says, “the problem of letting go of Self 1 and its interfering activities is not found to come easy” (82). We already included citations where Luther says the same about living out of justification by faith or knowing Christ and living in the second self in the Gospel through grace. He could become impressed by himself and want credit or he could condemn himself and doubt everything he said and stood for, as if in the whole world only Luther was right. The first case he called falling off a log on the right and the second one was falling off on the left.[6]

Gallwey says that relaxed concentration with a quiet and focused mind is the supreme act (83), while Luther would say justification by faith was the supreme act, but ascribe the act to God and not to ourselves. Luther also relates to faith in a similar way. He first calls it the captain of all our works and then progresses to saying, faith is God’s work in us, with which we can have nothing to do. He moves this way from his “Sermon on Good Works” to his Babylonian Captivity of the Church, where faith has become the action of God completely beyond our competence.

Gallwey says, “Not assuming that you already know [something] is a powerful principle of focus” (85). Luther does not tire of emphasizing this same point. When he speaks about the Epistle to the Romans, for example, he writes:

It is worthy and valuable for a Christian not only to know it word for word by heart but also to indulge in it daily as the soul’s daily bread. It can never be read or pondered too often. The more one indulges in it, the more valuable it becomes….[7]

Again Luther speaks of working with a Psalm in Scripture:

You should meditate, not only in your heart but externally, aloud, so that, in constantly repeating the words, you can compare your oral words with the ones written literally, contrasting them, as it were, reading and rereading them, with diligent attention and reflection in order to understand what the Holy Spirit means by them. And be on guard that you do not become satisfied and start to think that, after reading it once or twice, you have read, heard, and spoken it enough and have gotten to the bottom of it and understood it.[8]

Another example: For Luther the Lord’s Prayer has to be thought, read, rethought, reread again and again, because its depth cannot be exhausted.

Gallwey is attempting to keep the mind focused.

The question arises how to keep the mind focused for an extended period of time. The best way is to allow yourself to get interested in the ball. How do you do this? By not thinking you already know all about it, no matter how many thousands of balls you have seen in your life. Not assuming you already know is a powerful principle of focus (85).

Gallwey writes about consciousness very beautifully.

Consciousness is that which makes all things and events knowable. Without consciousness eyes could not see, ears could not hear, and mind could not think. Consciousness is like a pure light energy, whose power is to make events knowable, just as electric light makes objects visible. Consciousness could be called the light of lights because it is by its light that all other lights become visible (91).

That passage reminds very much of the Psalms, especially “For with you is the fountain of life and in your light we see light” (Psalm 36:9). The Psalm speaks of divine consciousness that lights up our consciousness and our lives deriving from the divine fountain of life.

Gallwey continues: “Attention is focused consciousness and consciousness is the power of knowing” (92). “Our minds project what is about to happen or dwell on what has already happened” (93). This distracting mind is what Luther calls Dame Reason, which makes him furious because it interferes with his trust in God, like the ego-mind interferes with Self 2 in Gallwey. The ego-mind of Self 1 wants to do what Self 2 could do with spontaneous inspiration. Dame Reason is convinced that she created God and thus interferes with faith in God, and in the same way as Self 1 is a small light obliterating the great light, like a street light erases the stars in the sky.

At this point Gallwey gets into his discussion of getting into the zone. I have already dealt extensively with being in the zone.[9] Here I will first record more of how Gallwey describes this athletic experience and then compare it with a more universalizable religious experience like Luther’s justification by faith. A course in the Sociology of Religion, taught by Prof. Robert Bellah was helpful here.

When athletes have gotten into the zone, to start with Gallwey, they say: “I wasn’t there. Something else took over. I didn’t do it, it just happened” (98). St. Paul would say, “It was not me, but Christ in me.” The Holy Spirit took over. Gallwey continues by describing the zone further: “It comes as a gift. The secret is not thinking: the mind gets in the way” (99). That sounds very much like Dame Reason getting between Luther and God again.

Gallwey continues that as much as Self 1 would love to get into the zone, it can only be entered when Self 1 is left behind (99). “As trust increases Self 1 quiets, Self 2 becomes more conscious and more present, enjoyment increases and gifts are being given” (100). “If you are willing to give credit where credit is due, and not think you ‘know’ how to do it, the gifts are apt to be more frequent and sustainable” (100). In a passage like Luther’s Gallwey continues:

I’ve been courting Self 2 for a long time now, over 25 years consciously, and it comes at its own timing, when I am ready for it – humble, respectful, not expecting it, somehow placing myself lower than it, not above it. Then when the moment is right, it comes, and I enjoy the absence of Self 1 thought and the presence of joy. I like it a lot. Grab for it, and it will squirt away like a slippery bar of soap. Take it for granted, and you will be distracted and lose it. I used to think that whatever was present was ephemeral. Now I know that it is always there and it is only I who leave. When I look at a young child, I realize it is there all the time” (100).

In writing this book and wanting to transcend the game of tennis by seeing the Inner Game applying to all of life, Gallwey almost becomes theological about getting into the zone. Gallwey also tells a story about his car breaking down on a freezing night far away from any help. He experiences a kind of death of his frightened self that was so afraid of dying and starts running and runs for forty-five minutes until he reaches a house and finds help. Really he felt he was running toward life (132).

It is letting go of the concerns of Self 1 and letting in the natural concerns of a deeper and truer self. It is caring, yet not caring; it is effort, but effortless at the same time” (132).

Prof. Robert Bellah of the University of California at Berkeley compared being in the zone with Abraham Maslow’s peak experiences.[10] He said that when they occurred in athletic feats they could rival contemplative graces. Joe Montana reports entering a “zone” and no longer hearing the crowd – everything becoming one. The difference between player and game, dance and dancer disappears. The minute you worry what will happen next it is gone and you are out of the zone. Bellah confirms the discovery of Gallwey here, too. Bellah continues that it is an experience of the felt whole. The feeling proceeds through participation.

While an athlete remains an athlete, a religious experience contains life-entailments, according to Bellah. Gallwey becomes somewhat theological by also applying his insights to life beyond the game of tennis. A mystic or a saint, however, is not in a game, according to Bellah, but transcends all categories in a higher experience. One has to have had this experience it to understand it. Timothy Gallwey’s athletic experience of the zone is strong and his witness is therefore helpful as he transcends the game of tennis and begins to universalize his experience and insights in an almost religious way; he is not merely an athlete reporting about having been in a zone like Montana. According to Bellah, however, a religious experience is a felt whole, related to the ultimate, the transcendent, thus opening the possibility for a more radical set of implications. The experience of the saint is superior to that of an athlete. The religious experience is a challenge to the total self, (Bellah mentions Luther, as an example). The athlete’s experiences are partial.

Thus the religious experience is over-arching and the athletic experience is one individual this-worldly reflection of the other-worldly reality.

Thus I believe the many correlations between Luther’s life and theology and Gallwey’s Inner Game come about, because Gallwey is also dealing with a religious experience. He uses his game of tennis for a way to understand his life before the ultimate, although he is careful to remain secular. I also think that Luther sometimes experienced such a feeling and focused oneness when praying, studying, and writing. Being in a zone, might partially explain his phenomenal productivity. I know my late mentor, Prof. Robert Goeser, would just deny that explanation, the way he denied so many other explanations I attempted. Luther’s productivity according to Goeser could not be explained. But something like the zone is involved in being in the new self in Christ. Our body and mind, our whole self, caught up in the Holy Spirit, can be like a leaf blowing in the wind. But the wind is at the outer edges of physicality, while the Holy Spirit is the breath of pure life, thought, and love. There is also an emergence of the body, physicality, and creation in Luther’s theology, because he favors the Hebrew sense of religion over the Greek sense of philosophy, and marriage over virginity. Gallwey is also very much dealing with physical performance and the inner capacity involved in attaining peak bodily performance.

Let me conclude with Luther’s experience, which we call justification by grace. Luther was struggling mightily to interpret the scripture passage found in Romans 1:17:

Though I lived as a monk without reproach, I felt that I was a sinner before God with an extremely disturbed conscience. I could not believe that God was placated by my satisfaction. I did not love, yes, I hated the righteous God who punished sinners, and secretly, if not blasphemously, certainly murmuring greatly, I was angry with God and said, “As if, indeed, it is not enough, that miserable sinners, eternally lost through original sin, are crushed by every kind of calamity by the law of the Decalogue, without having God add pain to pain by the gospel and also by the gospel threatening us with God’s righteousness and wrath!” Thus I raged with a fierce and troubled conscience. Nevertheless I beat importunately upon Paul at this place, most ardently desiring to know what St. Paul wanted.

At Last, by the mercy of God, meditating day and night, I gave heed to the context of the words, namely, “In it the righteousness of God is revealed, as it is written, ‘One who through faith is righteous shall live.’” There I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous live, by a gift of God, namely by faith. And this is the meaning: the righteousness of God is revealed by the gospel, the passive righteousness by which the merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written, “One who through faith is righteous shall live.” Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates. There a totally other face of the entire scripture showed itself to me. Thereupon I ran through the scripture from memory. I also found in other terms an analogy, as the work of God, that is, what God does in us, the power of God, with which he makes us strong, the wisdom of God, with which he makes us wise, the strength of God, the salvation of God, the glory of God.

And I extolled my sweetest word with a love as great as the hatred with which I had before hated the word, “righteousness of God.” Thus that place in Paul was truly the gate to paradise.[11]

Here Luther’s struggle with the interpretation of a text (central to an angry issue he has with God) resolves and overflows into a complete renewal of his life and thought, which overflows again into a renewal of the church.

We could go on and tell of St. Augustine and his mother, Monica, being taken up as they talked at a window sill overlooking a garden[12] or even the transfiguration of Jesus, between Moses, and Elijah in the presence of Peter, James, and John.[13] Here the physical bodies on that high mountain and the whole creation become involved. But it was Reformation Day and for our purposes the correlation of Luther’s theology and Timothy Gallwey’s Inner Game, was what I wanted to bring into better focus.

[2] (D. Martin Luthers Werke, Kritische Gesamtausgabe Vol. 40.I, (Weimar: Hermann Boehlaus Nachfolger, 1883-), page 129.

[3] Ibid., Vol. 31.I, pages 255ff.

[4] See Philip and Peter Krey, Luther’s Spirituality, (New York: Paulist Press, 2007), pages 69-90.

[5] Ibid., page 8-9.

[6] Ibid., page 61 and 63. On page 61 Luther has the image of someone like a lumberjack perched on a log floating in water and trying to get a footing. I combine that with page 63 and falling off the log on either the right or the left side.

[7] Ibid., page 105.

[8] Ibid., page 122.

[9] See my post of July 26^th 2008, “Time Slows Down in the Zone” where I have already dealt with some of Gallwey’s important insights in this matter.

[10] Abraham H. Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being, (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1968).

The words of Robert Bellah, Professor of Sociology, are my notes from a lecture held on January 25^th 1996 in his course on the Sociology of Religion, the Spring Semester, at the University of California in Berkeley.

[11] Walter von Loewenich, Martin Luther: the Man and his Work, Translated by Lawrence W. Denef, (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1982), Page 84.

[12] “The Vision at Ostia,” The Confessions of St. Augustine, book 9, Chapter 10. In John K. Ryan’s translation, (New York: an Image Book, Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1960), page 221.

[13] See Mark 9:2-8; Matthew 17:1-8; Luke 9:28-36; and also see 2 Peter 1: 17-18.

Rereading the now dated Thomas Nipperdey’s Reformation, Revolution, Utopia, (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1975), I came across a few notes I had written back on August 24^th 1985. The book is in German.

Thomas Nipperdey, Müntzer vs. Luther

The position of Luther is not only a religious debate, to which different religious stances become established.  It can also be seen in all orientations: what makes Marxists or Freudians dogmatic? What makes a scientist open or un-open to a new and necessary paradigm that replaces the one s/he has been working in?

Some Lutherans have, of course, gotten into dogmatism as well. But isn’t the key here to unlocking a psychological-sociological stance, which could really help above and beyond a religious debate? In other words, Marxists, Freudians, scientists, face the same kind of problems that Luther and the Reformation faced. I believe that dogmatism derives from teachings that are caught in a world of their own disconnected from their relevant experience, thus producing the anxiety that fixes on the teaching so stringently. If the experience, from which the teachings were derived, was there; then the teachings could be presented in many different words and ways.

According to Nipperdey, Müntzer sees the person as subjectively substantial, while Luther sees the person as relationally oriented in trust, relationality brought about by words of promise spoken to the person. Thus that God sees the person as righteous justifies the person in Luther’s eyes, while for Müntzer that does not change the person substantially. Luther’s emblem or seal is the heart under the cross; while Müntzer’s is the heart with a sword thrust through it.

Here a slightly different issue of mine comes to my mind: the distinction between words spoken by a person and an evasive self behind the words. I remember the time in counseling when I could feel myself behind my words, like a solid, substantial self. Müntzer seems to refer to this aspect of a person and declares the words and orientation just “nebulous,” just a smokescreen, just a cover for the real person, not yet come to themselves. But perhaps Müntzer does not understand or has a blind-spot for how orientation and relationality is a part of the reality of a person.

In our new curriculum at Hamma School of Theology at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio, this same discussion came up: whether the person per se or the words were more the issue. The psychologists emphasized the person per se, the theologians, the words and issues. See “The Discussion with Ben Johnson.” [I’ll have to find this reference in my diaries.]

To translate a sentence from Nipperdey: “Müntzer does not look at the word that establishes the relationship with and for the believer, but at the substantial and relevantly pertaining, inner nature itself” (page 55).

At Hamma a whole debate ensued about supervisory training, those briefly trained by the psychologists like James St. Claire, i.e., trained to monitor process and ministry. One group at Hamma thought that there were no objective criteria for those who were trained. The other argued that there were valid inter-subjective criteria. Because these criteria were elusively subjective, opponents did not see those who were trained as having valid credentials. This was the position of Fred Wentz, who took a stand against St. Claire.

Nipperdey analyzes the theology of Müntzer versus that of Luther. Müntzer wants subjectivity to be substantial and quite tangible. [He can tell a believer from a non-believer and purge the latter if necessary.] He wants subjectivity to be graded and to correspond with an increasing intensity of a person’s faith. Paradoxically, this approach to subjectivity kicks over into an increasing objectivity. Much like in mysticism and Pietism, a believer was asked to give an account of the different and manifold internal conditions and thus the stage of their faith journey, to which they had arrived. That point of view made having faith something discernible and even outwardly observable. “The claim of having earnest belief objectifies itself into a law about the gradations or the steps of faith: from a description of the misery and despair that preceded the beginning of faith, a law develops that makes misery [and suffering] a precondition of faith” (page 55). “In the place of the Lutheran invisible hope and anticipation [of the promise], a reflection on the inner life and the consciousness of how much spirit and grace was substantially possessed, [became important]; and in place of a personal category, an objective, although subjectively intended, but actually, an objective category, comes into play” (page 55). Thus “the experience of faith does not place the person into a new relationship, but it takes the character of a substantial change of the person….” (page 55). This substantial change of having more or less spirit and grace corresponds to a graded increase in faith. Nipperdey concludes that Müntzer’s justification thereby “falls into a new and far more massive objectivity, which corresponds to his substantial concept of the person” (page 56).[1]

When I was writing a paper on Bonhoeffer’s Ethics, a view point like Müntzer’s made me believe that a theology corresponded to a particular spiritual place in the life journey of a person so that one could be determined by the other. Nipperday puts this belief into words: “Therefore a life allows one to make retroactive conclusions about someone’s faith” (page 56). I think that belief made me feel that a life could determine what theology someone could achieve. (See my Bonhoeffer paper!) [I also need to find that reference again, a long paper I wrote analyzing his unfinished book on ethics.]

__________________________________________________

What makes this note important to me is the ascending stages of rapture that I find in Luther’s “Freedom of the Christian.” I’m wondering how I can keep the raptured ascent from becoming objectifications of steps from spiritual nobility to priesthood to Christ and up into God. Perhaps that the ascent in faith is at one and the same time a descent in love can be a safe-guard against such spiritual objectifications. I try to define persons relationally as well in terms of being before God, before others, before the self, and before the world, that is, in the four coram-relationships. I know that Luther levels hierarchies and thus I present the stages of ascent and descent always in tension with one another. What’s more faith and love are both pure gifts of grace, for which Jesus Christ alone receives the credit.

While I was typing these notes, Kierkegaard’s existential stages of the life of a person came to my mind, which he names the aesthetic, ethical, and religious stages, which a person goes through on the way to an authentic self. He envisions these three modes of existence and theorizes leaping from one sphere of existence into the next. I have to give some thought to how his existentialism might relate to my theorization about the ascent through the stages of spiritual nobility. It is obvious right away that my stages, which take place in the opposition or in the dialectic of faith and love, all seem to be religious. I have to give Kierkegaard more thought, especially because his existentialism needs to be integrated with a more sociological philosophy as well.

_____________________

[1]Luther presents his position quite clearly: Justification lies Extra nos, without us, in Christ. “Therefore a Christian is not formally righteous; [s/he] is not righteous according to substance or quality — I use these words for instruction sake. [S/he] is righteous according to [his or her] relation to something.” (Luther’s Works, the Weimar Edition, Vol. 40.II, pages 352 f.)

Four Types of Suicide according to Emile Durkheim

Dr. Peter Krey, June 19^th 2002

(Note that because this post did not pick up the lines, I have also scanned a copy with them.)

In his important book, his study of suicide, Durkheim is trying to show that something as private and individual as suicide can be sociologically determined.

In trying to understand suicide sociologically, Durkheim concentrates on two sociological variables, integration and regulation, and argues that too much or too little of either creates conditions in which suicide becomes more likely.^[1]

INTEGRATION and REGULATION

ALTRUISTIC SUICIDE results when an individual is too strongly integrated into his/her group, e.g., in a traditional religious group or into the army, so that s/he easily sacrifices her/himself either for the sake of the group or because s/he cannot face its disapproval. Egoistic suicide on the other hand, results when an individual is not integrated very strongly into any group at all, when s/he recognizes nothing higher than her/himself and has few social supports in time of trouble. Excessive social regulation produces what Durkheim calls fatalistic suicide, and he gives the example of the suicide of slaves who are unable to influence at all the rules under which they must live.  The opposite of excessive regulation, the case where regulation is weak or inadequate, is what he calls anomic suicide. Where inordinate desires and fears develop with no clear expectations or rules of conduct, the resulting disorientation can lead to anomic suicide.^[2]

^[2]Ibid.

All Saints Day November 1^st 2009, Bethlehem Lutheran Church

Isaiah 25: 6-9a Psalm 24 Revelations 21: 1-6a John 11:32-44

Saints are Made out of Grace

Yesterday was not only Halloween but also Reformation Day. Martin Luther chose October 31^st in that year of 1517 to nail his Ninety Five Theses or 95 Points against the church door at Wittenberg. At that time a professor usually marshaled 100 points challenging opponents to a debate. They never went right to a hundred. Luther stopped at 95. With them he wanted to drive corruption and evil out of the church and out of the hearts of believers. His first point or thesis read, “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, “Repent,” he meant that our whole life should become one repentance.”

Luther’s call for repentance was heard and the great reform of the church began. Because of the protest of the Reformation against a church unwilling to reform, we are called Protestants. And we at Bethlehem are part of that tradition and a great tradition it is. Because of Luther’s teaching, you and I are called to be saints. We don’t wait for a pope to go through a rig-a-ma-role to canonize us. Out of our baptisms, we all come as new selves equal to popes, cardinals, bishops, and priests. Thus Luther declared us to be the priesthood of all believers – as St. Peter said, “[We] are a royal priesthood, a peculiar people, a holy nation, called to declare the praises of him, who called us out of the darkness into God’s marvelous light” (1 Peter 2:9).

Now saints are often depicted as two dimensional characters, as goody-two shoes, nice guys, milk toast kinds of people, like angels playing harps in heaven. But saints are made out of flesh and blood. They are complicated and nuanced people.[1]

Thus Luther said, no, we are sinners and saints at one and the same time. Like a recovering alcoholic, we are recovering sinners; and like they do in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, when they begin by saying, “I’m an alcoholic;” we begin by saying, “I am a sinner.” But we are the sober saints, who are “justified through faith for Christ’s sake by grace.” That is article four of the Augsburg Confession.

So that we are saints is no merit or deserving of our own. “For it is by grace that we have been saved through faith, and this is not of our own doing, it is the gift of God – not the result of works, so that no one can boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9). That we are saved is a pure gift of God, we cannot earn it by doing righteous works. I could set myself afire, immolate myself as some monks have done for a certain cause, but that would not make me a saint. It is by grace that we are saints.

God lifts us sinners up and carrying us in the power of his almighty love, works all kinds of miracles through us. We can do what is humanly impossible to accomplish, because we let God work through us. In the words of Isaiah, “Yea, may all our works be thy doing, O Lord” (26:12b).[2]

Luther himself is a good example. He said it is not by our works that we are saved. But Luther’s Works stand on library shelves over 100 huge volumes strong and we ask, “How could one man have written so much?” Meanwhile he was also a professor, pastor, preacher, translator, hymn-writer, musician, and leader of the Reformation, in addition to being a writer. As a professor he taught classes at Wittenberg University. Philipp Melanchthon was Luther’s close associate, who wrote the Augsburg Confession. Luther and Melanchthon sometimes had from 200 to 600 students in their classes. Luther also preached regularly in the Wittenberg city church. Not only that, but Luther never left his monastery, while all the other monks did. He remained in the Black Cloister, married the run-away nun, Katie von Bora, and gave shelter to refugees and students, who waited for him to come down the stairs and recorded everything he said. That is where his famous Table Talks come from. He translated the Greek New Testament into German in 1522 and the illiterate peasants learned how to read from it. Then in 1534, with a group of other scholars, he translated the Old Testament from Hebrew into German. Not only the Protestant, but even the Catholic Bibles have based their translations on his.

Tyndale, the great master of languages, studied under Luther, and began translating the Bible into English. Henry the VIII had him assassinated for it. Only the priesthood was supposed to read the Bible (even though they didn’t) and they said to allow common people to read it was “casting pearls before the swine.” That was their attitude. Luther refused to hide important issues from the common people by keeping them all in Latin, in a language they could not understand. Tyndale was inspired by Luther to translate the Bible into English and therefore Henry VIII’s assassins killed him and Coverdale had to finish his work.

Luther also wrote many hymns. Over ninety, I believe. My brother Philip and I translated nine of them in our book, Luther’s Spirituality. He was also quite a musician, who played the lute, (a stringed instrument like a guitar), and he had a fine singing voice. But back to the point: How could Luther have written all those works, been a pastor, professor, translator, and been the leader of the reform and renewal movement of the church in his day? The answer is: God worked through him.

We saints of God are sinners, but when we let God fashion us anew through faith, then a heavenly power, a power from on high, makes us accomplish what is humanly impossible to do.

We can see how Jesus accomplishes a whole train of miracles each one greater than his previous one. The Gospel of John calls them signs. They are the signs that point to God’s saving work on earth. Jesus heals the blind, the deaf, gives voice to the mute, makes the lame to walk, heals the sick, cleanses a leper, raises up Jairus’ daughter from the dead, stops a funeral procession and wakes up the son for a widowed mother. In our lesson here, Jesus raises up Lazarus from the dead after four days, when his soul no longer hovered over his body, but had already gone beyond, up into heaven.

On the earthly side, Mary believed that her brother would be raised on the last day, but Jesus was going to raise him in the here and now. “If you believe, you will see the glory of God!”

Mary said, “Lord, he has been in that tomb for four days and it is filled with the stench of death and decay.”

In a deep disturbance of weeping and anger, Jesus called Lazarus out of his tomb and like in a Halloween horror film, Lazarus comes out shrouded and covered in white strips of cloth, in which they wrapped the dead in those days. He must have looked like a zombie stepping out of the tomb’s entrance, but he was alive and Jesus said, “Unbind him and let him walk!”

We are staring something in the face that is quite humanly impossible. But all things are possible for God who raised Jesus Christ from the dead and created this whole world. And all things are possible for the saints, the sinners, who come to God for forgiveness, and through whom God brings life, love, abundant life, fulfillment, and salvation to the people of the earth.

We marvel at this story and rightly so. But if you have worked in a hospital, you hear “Code 99” or “Code Blue,” or some such other alert, and then you see doctors and nurses all rush to someone who just died, give them electric shocks, beat on their chest, and using many other methods, revive the person once again. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Such a person later on in life, of course, dies again, but Jesus is giving us a sign that God will raise us all up on the last day, when the trumpet sounds, and God prepares the great heavenly marriage feast for us, for all the saints, who from their labors rest.

That’s when we want to be in that number, when the new Jerusalem descends from heaven like a bride all adorned in her wedding gown, and God comes down to be with his people. Ah, sickness, suffering, pain, disease, and death will be no more; neither will droughts, famines, and epidemics; nor storms, earthquakes, floods, Tsunamis, and global warming. All these things will be past and not be able to cause harm any more. Death will be behind us and we will be with God, who will wipe every tear from our eyes. Immanuel! God will be with us and will be our God.

That exchange from the end of Psalm 24 is about the children of Israel approaching the gates of Jerusalem with the Arc of the Covenant and shouting to the gate-keepers to open them. Like those people of Israel carrying the Arc into the gates of the Holy city of Jerusalem, all the saints of this church who are carrying Bethlehem into the marvelous promises of our salvation, will stand before the gates of heaven and shout:

“Open up the gates! Open up you everlasting doors, so Christ, the King of Glory can come in.”

And on the jeweled walls of the holy city of the New Jerusalem, the saints who are the gate-keepers will ask, ask the saints who are carrying Bethlehem into the promised future: “Who is the King of Glory?”

And we will answer, “It’s the Lord, Jesus Christ, the Lord strong and mighty, mighty in the battle, for he vanquished our sin, death, and the devil.”

And again the gate-keepers will ask, “Who is the King of Glory?”

And we will answer, “The Lord of Hosts. Jesus Christ is the King of Glory!”

And the gates of heaven will open and we will enter into the New Jerusalem. We will receive our seats around the welcome table, receiving there God’s wonderful gift of salvation, prepared for all the saints who from their labors rest. Amen.

Communion Blessing: The saints are made of flesh and blood;

They’re sinners who live out of God’s love!

A children’s song for Children’s Time:

Why Should I be Sad and Blue

Why should I be sad and blue

when I know what God can do?

I’ll simply call on Jesus’ name,

so gladness fills my soul again.

For saints are made of flesh and blood;

They’re sinners who need love!

[2] This captures the sense of this Isaiah passage and makes it into a prayer.

Pentecost XX October 18^th 2009

Isaiah 53: 4-12 Psalm 91: 9-16 Hebrews 5:1-10 Mark 10:35-45

We Can’t Have Christ without his Kingdom

Some explorers were trying to be the first to get to the North Pole with their dog sleds filled with supplies and equipment. They would take off at six A.M. in the morning, go at top speed all day and until the evening. You know, “Mush, you huskies!” That’s how they made the dogs run. And in the evening they would take out their compass and sextant to check their progress, (because they didn’t have a GPS, a Global Positioning System, in those days,) and to their surprise, they would be father from the North Pole than when they had started out in the morning.

The question to ask is why?

They discovered that they were on an ice-flow that was heading south faster than their dogs could run them north!

I read this story in a book about family systems. The point of the story was that individual effort could not succeed if we didn’t take account of the system. Larger invisible social forces also play a role in our lives, as for example: millions of houses have had foreclosures. The people involved were not all irresponsible. There are thirty million Americans unemployed. They are not lazy. There are social forces larger than any individual operating in our lives. Like, it is one thing to paddle your canoe up a river against the current and quite another when you are going with the current. In that case you’ll say, “Look at how successful that fellow is, how strong, how decisive, how skillful!” But no one points out that he is paddling his canoe with the current. He could pick up his paddle and do nothing and he would still go forward: as Luke Skywalker says in Star Wars, “May the force go with you!” Meanwhile the poor fellow paddling against the current could work until he is blue in the face and still be going backward. As the saying goes, “If hard work made you rich, every mule in Latin America would be a millionaire!” But your labor for the Kingdom will not be in vain!

When Jesus proclaimed that the Kingdom of Heaven is near at hand, he was proclaiming a new system, a new order. He was making the space in our old human order for a new order that new persons could participate in. It is not the order of this world and because we go to sleep, become blind and deaf as those North Pole explorers, the order of this world creeps into our churches, and before we know it our lives begin to be lived according to our human order and not according to the Kingdom of God that Christ proclaimed.

The language we use for it is “backsliding”. But when using that word, we usually think of someone starting to drink again, or going back on drugs, getting caught up in pornography; or someone who stops going to church, stops praying and reading the bible. But a whole church can backslide and lose sight of its mission, can think that we need members to save our church, rather than becoming disciples, sent out by Jesus to save the sorry folks, who are blind as bats, deaf as doornails, and laden with heavy burdens of debt, un-forgiven debt.

Now the same way that we look at the order or system, we can look at debt from an economic point of view. Individually we sin and need forgiveness, but we also become debtors and we need to get out from under all our debt, especially from those credit cards, reducing our desires and saving more. It is so hard to pay off those credit cards! In our system people make money with their money and some keep loaning money and paying interest for it, that is, some make money with their money; the money of others costs them dearly. They pay for their money. That’s what interest is.

Back in St. John’s one of the deacons kept praying that her sons “would not be the tails but be the head.” I thought that expression must have come from Africa. But reading the last chapters of Deuteronomy (28:13 and 44), it’s in there – it’s in the Bible. There it says that the debtors are the tail of society and the creditors are the head. It says be a lender of money and not a borrower or you will be the tail of the dog and others will be your head, wagging you whichever way they want.

Jesus would talk about the Kingdom of Heaven or the new order in terms of a new wineskin. The new people were the new wine and they belonged in a new order, a new wineskin. When new wine is poured into a new wineskin, when the wine expanded it would stretch out and you would have no problem. But when you put new wine into an old wineskin that had already stretched as far as it could go, then it would burst, and all your new wine would spill out over everything and be lost.

Jesus said the same thing by speaking about old and new cloth. If you sewed a new patch on an old garment, the new patch would shrink in the wash and tear from the old garment, because it had already shrunk. Jesus was saying that the new person filled by the Holy Spirit also had to be in a new order, that is, the new Kingdom that he was proclaiming and introducing. When Jesus proclaimed this new order, he established it, and our churches confess Christ, but often we are slipping in and out of his new order and are backsliding into the old order.

What does the new order look like? Jesus is the Lord of this order and it is the place where Jesus reigns. We confess that Jesus is the Lord of it when we confess the Apostles’ Creed. In the Black tradition, we say, “King Jesus.” He is the Son of David, the peculiar King. What kind of a king writes poetry and plays the harp, then dances naked before the Ark of the Covenant in the procession bringing it into Jerusalem? His wife saw him from a window and rejected him afterward.

Like David, Jesus is our sovereign king, but do not let your hearts be troubled and neither let them become afraid, he is a suffering servant king. In his exalted position Jesus says, “I am over you, so I am your servant and the servant of all.” Now the word “servant” is just the old word for a slave. When the Europeans first saw the Slavic serfs in the Middle Ages, they had been beaten down so low, they started using the word “slave” for “servant.” (The word seems to have Latin roots, too.)

Now when we belong to God and enter the reign of God, we become the people of God’s possession. To become great is to become a servant. Moses was the leader back in the Old Testament and he knew that God was the King and he was the servant of God, Ebed Jahwey, in Hebrew. He did not lord it over others and he was not a tyrant over others. We all become servants and Jesus is not only our servant, but our suffering servant, our Melchizedek, which means, our King of Righteousness in Hebrew.

So James and John, the sons of Zebedee had it all wrong. They were thinking in terms of the old order. “Let us sit at your right and your left in your glory?” They wanted honor, status, and power – and they did not realize that they were heading south on that old ice-flow, farther way from the glorious suffering that the new order is made of. It makes you drink the bitter cup. It makes you go through the baptism that tests your metal.

At home we used to joke: “Are you a man or a mouse?”

“Shut up and pass the cheese” we’d answer.

Just go through the trial of loving and taking care of someone stricken with Alzheimer’s. They not only no longer recognize you, they start saying embarrassing and violent things sometimes. You love them for who they were. It is a cup of joy, but also one filled with suffering. Just be part of an aging and cantankerous old congregation. It is a cup of suffering. Let us be faithful and fill our cups with patience, loving kindness, and be gentle to one another. A fellow had a fight with his wife and she was later in a car accident. How he wished he had said, “I love you,” before she left! Getting old makes us have to cope with so much that we often become too edgy with others. But a faithful community is a cup filled with joy.

Now I’m not saying that you won’t see that joy through a whole lot of tears. But our tears do not only wash out our eyes, but also our soul, like the rain washes out our old days and makes them fresh and new. Ah, you just see and feel how thankful the grass is for all the rain.

So our Lord did not come to be served, but to serve and to lay down his life as a ransom for many. We confess Jesus with our lips, but like James and John, we don’t get it. Like, I’m a man. I want to be served! If I get rich, I’ll have people work for me! We just don’t get it. The same thing happens in the church. If I come to church I want it to serve me. John F. Kennedy would have said, “Ask not what the church can do for you; ask what you can do for the church!” God nudges us to do something for the kingdom, some mission, and we say, “Let the pastor do it” or “Let George do it!”

But look at Jesus. He says, “I’m going to serve you” and “I’m not a tyrant, who wants power over you. I will be your slave and I’ll be the slave of all people.” When Jesus humbles himself that way, we dare not step on him, but allow him to open our eyes and ears, and especially our hearts, so that we humble ourselves.

We can’t change the system, the way we used to say. Things are much more complicated than that. One theory speaks about a life-world and two systems, a political and economic system. The two systems are there for the life-world and not vice versa. That gets complicated. We need to pray for the in-breaking kingdom. We need to ask Jesus to come and open the space in our human order for his new order, the reign of God. They say that Michelle’s mother, Marian, is wearing out her knees praying for her daughter and Barack Obama. We all need to, because the new order breaks in with our change of hearts. When we see our greatness in our helpfulness – when we give up the power with which we try to control others and live by trusting each other, it breaks in among us.

Have you heard of the couple front? A husband and wife go everywhere together; never is one seen without the other – and people say, “See how they love one another.” No way. He does not trust her, so he never lets her be alone or out of his sight!

Lenin said, “Trust is good; control is better!” In the political system, you need control. But that kind of power and need for control causes havoc in relationships. So become more trusting. We need control at times, of course. You have to control a child, when it could run into traffic.

But Jesus gives up his control over us and says, “I’ll be your slave and the slave of all people. Now you can sit in the council of God. You come and sit on my throne and I will sit on your lowly stool.”

In our prayer this morning[1] it says, “All of God’s greatness pours into goodness” lifting up all the people of the earth. “Shape us into willing servants” we prayed. Our hearts say, “Thank you God, for not hearing us! We didn’t mean it!”

You certainly know what happens to us when we give up our power: we get trampled under foot. We become rugs that people clean their feet on. We get walked on, treaded on, trampled into the ground. What do they say in Texas? “Don’t tread on me!”

But that’s our baptism and we soon get overwhelmed. “Help us Lord, the water has come up to our neck and I’m about to go under and drown!”

But did you think you would escape death? Does Bethlehem think it can escape death? No way! But if we go down doing God’s mission, helping the people that God loves, then the power of God and the Holy Spirit becomes unleashed and lifts us up into the renewal of Christ’s glorious resurrection. In this sense, we can say, “May the force be with you!” In that glory there is no left or right, no up and down, but just an unbroken circle full of helpfulness and service bringing life, abundant life, love, and blessedness. Amen.

The DUAL of

(P • ~Q) v (~P • Q), that is,

(P and not Q) or (not P and Q) ,

is

(P v ~Q) • ( ~P v Q), that is,

(P or not Q) and (not P or Q).

De Morgen’s laws are essentially duality principles.

1.      (P • ~Q) v (~P • Q)

2. ~ [(P • ~Q) v (~P • Q)]

3.      (~P v Q) • (P v ~Q)

See my post on the duality of the “XOR” and “IFF”, that is, the exclusive “or” and the “if and only if”, where  I derive the two definitions of the strong “or” from one anther.