Who's an Apostle?

Early this morning – actually very early, I was visited by a memory of a time I was asked what an apostle was.  It is interesting and perhaps revealing what memories arrive unsought in the wee hours of the morning.   That time is often referred to as the witching hour for good reason.  They often seem to be memories of events that are not high on the agenda of things that you want the world to know about.  That was not necessarily so in this case.

My response to the question was, “an apostle was someone who has seen the risen Christ.”  Now this is not what might be called the usual definition.  The word usually refers to the disciples of Jesus particularly those who were sent to spread the Good News of Jesus Christ and evangelise.  The entry in Wikipedia notes:

An apostle (/əˈpɒsəl/), in its most literal sense, is an emissary, from Greek ἀπόστολος (apóstolos), literally "one who is sent off", from the verb ἀποστέλλειν (apostéllein), "to send off".^[1] The purpose of such sending off is usually to convey a message, and thus "messenger" is a common alternative translation; other common translations include "ambassador" and "envoy"

My answer to the question of apostleship was one that I didn’t give much thought to at the time either before or after giving it.  It was based on the apostleship of Paul who claimed that he was an apostle based on his vision of Jesus Christ on the road to Damascus which occurred after the resurrection. 

He makes this claim to being an apostle a number of times including the opening salutation in this letter to the Romans, “Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God,”.  The criterion for seeing the resurrected Jesus is also address in the first chapter of Acts by Peter:

So one of the men who have accompanied us throughout the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John until the day when he was taken up from us—one of these must become a witness with us to his resurrection.’ (Act 1:21-22)

My early morning musings led me to wonder if this is a good definition for Christians today.  After all none of us were there during the forty days between the Resurrection and the Ascension.  And very few of us can claim to have has a Road to Damascus experience like Paul.  So, what can it mean to have seen the resurrected Christ in our lives today?

If we take St. Paul as a model or type of the modern Apostle, Paul had his life completely changed from a fervent persecutor of the first followers of Jesus, to someone who can be seen as responsible for establishing what became the Christian Church.  After all, Jesus Christ did not set out to found the new religion of Christianity.  Paul understood that his vision of the risen Christ was a call to metanoia - to repentance.   He followed that understanding with action and changed his whole life.  Actually, he didn’t change completely.  He was just as fervent and dedicated – you might say fanatical - after the experience as before, just in a good way.

We can see the risen Christ in our lives as a call to repentance – a call to change course in our lives when it goes off course and misses the mark.  When our lives run into roadblocks to becoming the people God created us to be, we can watch for those signs of the risen Christ who comes and set us straight – probably not in as extreme a way as in Paul’s case -- but perhaps it might just be in another way that is hard to ignore.  Above all we can put these experiences into how we live our lives as Paul did.

That will be a true blessing on your journey. 

High Tech and High Touch

Last Friday, Lorna and I “attended” the graduation ceremony for our oldest grandchild, Thomas.  Of course, in this time of the COVID-19 pandemic we did not attend the ceremony in person.  It was held by the all-pervasive ZOOM on the internet.  It was wonderful to be able to be part of this event as we were about 2000 km away at the time at the cottage in PEI and would not have been able to attend otherwise.

This experience brought to mind a phrase that was popular back in the long-ago time when the internet was just beginning to come into common use.  This was probably in the early 80’s – that’s the 80’s of the last century and not the 1800’s although it might as well have been it seems so long ago.  That phrase was “high-tech and high touch.”  As I recall the idea behind the concept of high-tech/high-touch was that technology would bring new opportunities for all the world to be in touch in new and wonderful ways.  It would bring a world of possibilities for people to connect with others regardless of where they were.

I haven’t heard the phrase in many years but there have been many developments in social media such as blogs - I have one for some time now http://anotherfoolforchrist.blogspot.com/ but blogs are old news and have almost gone the way of rotary dial telephone.  There is also Facebook which is not as old but is now the realm of old fogies.  There are things such as ticktock or is that Tiktok which I know nothing about and the all-pervasive twitter which Donald Trump made famous for misusing until he was banned from it.  I am able to say I have never tweeted and in my darker moments have thought that those who tweet are twits.  But some might say in response don’t knock it until you try it.

The high-tech part of the prognostication seems to have been fulfilled with a vengeance.  However, I am not so sure about the high-touch part.  Having worshipped at the temple of the great god Zoom, I am aware of the limitations of the touch when we meet in this or similar media.  It does allow us to touch others regardless of where they are in this wide world.  However, the touch is not what I would call high.  There are limitations to meeting this way and on social media in general – at least in my somewhat limited experience.  However, I have attended conferences, workshops, worship services and meetings.  I have even co-led a few workshops via Zoom.  I have even entertained a group of people on Zoom.  I can conclude that the touch is not that high – certainly not as high as in person.  At the moment we are in quarantine at the cottage and there is very little touch allowed outside my bubble so I am grateful for all the touch available via the internet.  I will continue my exploration of the touch of high-tech next week.

May you be blessed and keep in touch on your journey. 

All-embracing Perfection

 Spare me perfection. Give me instead the wholeness that comes from embracing the full reality of who I am, just as I am.

—David Benner, Human Being and Becoming

 

You can be either broken or you can be broken open.

—Paul Tillich, Theologian  

 One of the mistaken challenges of the Christian Church is the effort to make Christians strive for perfection.  Now this is perhaps understandable as Jesus tells us to be perfect, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Matt 5:48).   The problem with this is that to my way of thinking, this is a surprizing thing for Jesus to say.  Being fully human, he must have known that there is little or no chance of people achieving perfections this side of the Heavenly Kingdom being established on earth.  However, there is an answer to this apparent quandary.   One commentary noted that a better translation of this passage from the Aramaic would be ‘all-embracing’ rather than perfect.

Being far less than perfect myself, this is a hope that I cling to with all my strength.  I can strive to be all-embracing – although that is a challenge every day.  Conversely, there is no hope that I will be perfect during my time on this earth.  Indeed, I believe that the expectation that Christians should be perfect has done more harm than good.  It encourages people to believe that when they fail to be perfect in thoughts, words and deeds and this in turn, may lead them to believe themselves to be beyond hope.  On the other hand, they may desperately try to hide their imperfections from others and from themselves.  They may deny the parts of themselves that they consider are imperfect.  Carl Jung identified that aspect of ourselves as the Shadow.  The Shadow is the part of our psyche which is the container for all those aspects of ourselves which are unacceptable.  We deny those aspect of ourselves either consciously or unconsciously.  There can also be aspects or traits which are commendable or positive which we have denied in ourselves such as abilities which have been neglected.  However, for the most part they are the negative, unacceptable aspects which we do want to acknowledge in ourselves. 

We can see this play out in our culture where in many situations, failure is a black mark against you at best or unacceptable at worst.  Despite the assurance by some that failures are necessary on the road to success; failures are for the most part somethings to be avoided.  The concept of failure as a positive thing has not truly penetrated our collective psyches.  It is something which is held against us and can be a source of shame.  However, failure can be something to be embraced as addressed in the quote for Paul Tillich above.  It is the breaking of our ego-driven armor which we build up around ourselves in an often desperate and mistaken attempt at self-preservation, that leads us closer to others and to God.  We are broken open to allow God and others into our lives.  No one expressed this better than Leonard Cohen, “there is a crack in everything.  That’s where the light comes in.”  That light, the light of Christ, allows our light to shine in the world. 

May you be blessed by the light on your journey.

The Power to Choose

 Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

—Viktor Frankl

 

Last week, I took in a very interesting interview of Stephen Fry by Jordan Peterson.  It can be found on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFFSKedy9f4.   Now I have not generally been a great fan of Jordan Peterson given his rather confrontational style to people younger than himself  and their perhaps at times over the top reactions to challenges in their life.  I have been a great fan of Fry as a Renaissance man of great intelligence, creativity, and erudition.  In the interview, in which my assessment of Peterson rose a few notches, they discussed a very interesting image of how people might react if they were on a rather unstable boat which began to tip to one side and was threatening to overturn.  One of them, perhaps Peterson, postulated that everyone would run to the other side of the boat causing it to over turn the other way.  He put this in terms of consciousness saying that because the people were conscious of the original instability, they would react in a way that caused the very thing they were trying to avoid.   In my view, I believe that it would be due to insufficient consciousness.  The people involved would have reacted instinctively without having the ability to choose their response.  Now I must caution that I may have some of the details of this wrong as my memory can be less than perfect and I may have skewed the details to fit my premise.  However, I believe the premise is accurate. 

Originally, when I came across the quote from Victor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor and best know for his classic book, Man’s Search for Meaning, I planned to reflect on the quote regarding the difficulty of people actually being able to choose in a conscious manner not unlike those people on the unstable boat.  However, the revelation last week of the discovery of the buried remains of 215 children at the site of the former Kamloops Residential School motivated me to shift my focus this morning.

The question facing Canadians this morning is, in the space between the stimulus i.e., the terrible revelation of the effect of the terrible chapter in Canadian history and our responses, is how do we choose to respond to that information?  As a middle class, now more than middle-aged, white Canadian man, my reaction may be to run to the other side of that rather unstable boat of the Canadian treatment of indigenous peoples in our history which continues to the present day in many respects.   I can say that this revelation is evidence of a terrible chapter in our history but it is one that has affected me in only peripheral ways in my life.  I can also perhaps choose to acknowledge and be at least somewhat conscious that I have been a beneficiary of a system of Government which was built, in part, on the Governments’ treatment of indigenous people which broke or ignored treaties and treated indigenous people as at least second-class citizens at best and less than human at worse.  This is not a comfortable place to be – on the other side in reaction to the boat tipping further off kilter. 

I have had a few excursions into the unstable waters of indigenous history in Canada.  I participated in a Blanket Ceremony while studying theology and have been in gatherings where I have been purified by sweet grass.  These entered my consciousness for a while but did not stay in my conscious awareness to a great extent. 

The knowledge of the discovery of the remains was shocking to me and I am left in the uncomfortable position of not knowing how I can choose to respond to that stimulus.  I will have to sit with that uncomfortable tension and see what is born out of it.  I hope that it will be, in the words of Friedrich Von Hugel, ‘divinely intended tension’.

Blessings on your journey through these troubled waters.