Hamilton Wesley Uniting Church |
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FROM PASSION TO VIRTUE: SEVEN PATHWAYS OF TRANSFORMATION Good Friday three-hour Service. INTRODUCTION The Cross of Christ symbolizes the intersection of human passion and divine virtue. In the person of Jesus we witness the perfect engagement of human passion in the cause of divine virtue. For the rest of us though, a transformation has to occur. For as we seek to defend ourselves, and survive the real and imagined threats to our wellbeing, we habitually engage the energy of our passions in service of what Pope Gregory in the sixth century listed as Seven Deadly Sins: anger, pride, sloth lust, gluttony, greed and envy. Today I am calling these sins ‘passions’, firstly because they lead us into suffering, but secondly because they contain energy which, when rightly directed, becomes transformed into virtue; serenity, humility, right action, innocence, sobriety, non-attachment and equanimity. As today we reflect on the human passions that put Christ on the Cross, I invite you to consider how they continue to fuel unnecessary suffering in our lives and in our world. Further, how with Christ as our example, we might experience the transformation of our passions into virtues. 1. FROM ANGER TO SERENITY Anger, the red hot passion, is not in itself a sinful energy. As The implication is ‘Do not let it lodge in you. Do not let it take up residence’. Jesus looked with anger and grief at those who set out to trap him. The passion of anger gave him the energy to drive the traders from the sacred precincts of the Moving in us, anger can fuel passion for justice. Lodged in us, anger drives us in cycles of violence Denied in us, suppressed in us, it builds and bursts in volcanic eruption, often burying relationships in hot lava of hate Turned in on ourselves, it can bring depression and self-harm The worst of our anger arises from the fear that we are no longer in control; in men especially, from a sense of powerlessness. I invite you to take time to reflect on your personal experience of anger. Feel where it lodges, experience where it hurts, and if you need to, offer this hot passion to Christ that it may be transformed into a force for peace. SERENITY From a human point of view Jesus has every right to lash out with the hot passion of anger; to call down legions of angels to smite his enemies. Pinned hands and feet, he could have been driven mad by a sense of powerlessness and failure; driven wild with grief at the loss of friends and family. Instead, with serenity, and with the deep love of transformed passion, he looks upon his mother and his beloved disciple, and thinks of them, and cares for them in their need: “Mother, behold you Son…(and to the disciple) …behold your mother” When human passion is transformed into divine virtue, the heat that can burn and destroy become the balm that cools and heals. You and I have surely seen that serenity in those special people from whom it shines like a beacon. Such people are tranquil while making no apparent effort to display what we so clearly see in them. The potential for serenity is within each of us. The Cross of Christ is the point of conversion of human passion to divine virtue; anger to serenity. 2. FROM PRIDE TO HUMILITY Pride is the elevated passion, and therein, says the Proverb, lies the risk! What is often not readily understood is that pride is often driven by the need to be needed. The passion pushes people to try and make themselves indispensable. The elevation is this: “They cannot do without my help”. Biblically, pride is seen as the virtual ground of sin itself. Pride comes not only before a fall, but before The Fall, because people try to take the position of God. For this reason the The risk of course is that we overreact. False humility is not a pretty sight! Jesus would have also understood what we often do not, that underneath the cloak of pride beats a heart unsure of whether or not it is truly loved! HUMILITY The proud person needs to learn what it is that they truly need- what is genuine self-care and self-respect. Jesus perceived and lived his own needs. He could let the crowds go even if some were not yet healed. He withdrew when he needed rest and prayer. He welcomed the anointing with precious perfume. He took final refuge in The transformation from pride to humility is not self-abasement. It is true servanthood, based on a clear perception of what others need, and what we ourselves need also. Matthew Fox reminds us of the root of the word humility- ‘humus’ the earth. For him…’to be humble means to be in touch with the earth, to be in touch with our own earthiness’. Our Indigenous people can teach us a lot of what it means to be in touch with the earth, if we have the humility to learn from them! Jesus is crucified between two criminals. The one who comes to a sober estimate of who he is finds in Jesus a Saviour who does not go ahead of him, but walks beside him: ‘Today you will be with me in paradise”. The Cross of Christ is the point of conversion of human passion to divine virtue; pride to humility. 3. FROM SLOTH TO RIGHT ACTION I always try to be careful about accusing someone of laziness. People who present as slothful can appear as such for other reasons. The depressed person is usually not helped by being adjudged lazy and told to get up and get on with it. De-motivation from long-term illness or unemployment is not easy to shake off. Sometimes the driven high achievers judge others unfairly from their excessive Protestant work ethic. To see someone resting content with what they have drives them mad! Sloth can be a little more subtle than apparent laziness. It can manifest in the unwillingness or inability to decide on a course of action. The slothful person is continually weighing options, but failing to commit, perhaps out of a sense of inadequacy. This does not seem like an energetic passion, but the energy is in fact being wasted. As Helen palmer sees it “By keeping available energy siphoned off into essential tasks, a kind of holding action develops in which there is never enough energy in the system to fact the conflict that surrounds going after personal desires.” Sloth can be dangerous. We can fall asleep at the very time when we most need to stay awake. As one person wrote of their experience in Nazi Germany: “They came for the Jews but I was not a Jew so I did nothing. They came for the disabled but I was able-bodied so I did nothing. They came for the Gypsies but as I was not a Gypsy I did not object. The came for the Homosexuals but I was not gay so I stayed quiet. Finally when they came for me, there was nobody left to speak out!” That helps us to see fear at the root of sloth. In Jesus Parable of the Talents, the servant accused of sloth is the one who hides his talent in the ground. His defence is that he was afraid of his master. “Could you not watch with me one hour?” Jesus asks his disciples in RIGHT ACTION The love of Christ is our wake-up call. And so the writer to the Ephesians exhorts “Awake, sleeper, and rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.” The virtue that corresponds to the passion of sloth is not ‘action’ but right action; action that is focused on what is needed. Jesus was not frenetic. He was focused. He made his choice, paid the price, and walked the path to the end. He understood that the people who crucified him did so not because they were inherently evil, but because they were asleep. “Father forgive them, they do not know what they are doing.” When Jesus rises to life, so to do his followers. No longer afraid, they are energized, motivated, focused, compassionate. The Cross of Christ is the point of transformation from human passion to divine virtue; sloth to right action 4. FROM LUST TO INNOCENCE When they hear the word lust, most people think of sex! This misses the primary point. Lust is essentially about power. Its passion is to dominate. Its fear is that if it does not overpower it will itself be overpowered. Its motto is ‘get them before they get you’! The psalmist describes this energy as ‘wanton craving’. It is this human urge that Satan tries to exploit when he tempts Jesus to bow does before him, and so receive dominion over all the kingdoms of the world. Such temptation is not easily resisted! The sexual connection is there of course, and it is no coincidence that so many powerful leaders are also infamous for their sexual exploits; from King David to King Solomon, from President Sukarno to President Kennedy. Rape, including rape in war is likewise an act of domination, just as sexual abuse is a misuse of power imbalance in a relationship. Without the sexual connotation, lust can also be used to describe the gratuitous mocking and scourging of Jesus after his arrest and right onto the Cross. It is not enough to convict and to execute. The victim must be abused to elevate the sense of power of the perpetrators, as if to extinguish their doubts about their own virility. When Jesus preaches about the danger of “looking at a woman with lust” he is not condemning the ubiquitous wandering eye, but the actual intent to forcibly act out the passion. That, says Jesus, is risky, risky behaviour, and it would be better to be without an eye or a hand than to be guilty of enacted lust. In The Lord of the Rings, lust for total power, lust for complete revenge, is what drives the evil Lord Sauron to breed an army of super-goblins, the Uruk Hai, and unleash them in a driving march to obliterate the innocent of a relatively unprotected world. The passion of lust is shameless. It destroys without pity. Listen as it marches! INNOCENCE We should not underestimate the cry of dereliction “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?”. This is not a game; a prearranged gambit between Jesus and God the Father. This is the cry of abandonment of the truly innocent, overwhelmed by wanton, lustful, brutish force. It is also the cry of innocent faith, which under duress falls back on the familiar opening words of Psalm 22. If however we can read on we see the undiminished trust of the Psalmist: “Do not be far from me, for trouble is near” and then “All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord”. Childlike faith continues to trust the love of the parent even in the face of seemingly overwhelming evidence to the contrary. When we stop seeing enemies at every turn in the road, insinuations in every remark, criticism in every glance; when we become aware of the futility of trying to gain power over everyone or everything that seems to threaten us; when revenge no longer satisfies; then we are moving from lust to innocence. When that change starts to happen, the Cross of Christ is truly the point of transformation from human passion to divine virtue; lust to innocence. 5. GLUTTONY TO SOBRIETY Gluttony is not just about food; it is also the drivenness for excitement and adventure. Anything but having to face the anxieties of the present moment! The glutton is addicted to adrenaline. The glutton wants to try everything. Life is a taster’s menu; tapis is clearly preferred to a pile of meat and three veg! Another word for the passion of gluttony is intemperance- always wanting too much of a good thing. A modern expression of this is rampart consumerism. Shop till you drop! This is sometimes a sign that a person is afraid of missing out; or perhaps substituting consumption for the more painful, and difficult process of working out what it is that we actually need to face for the sake of our physical, emotional and spiritual health. A moving story of the transformation of gluttony to sobriety is that of Sam Gamgee, close friend of Frodo Baggins in Lord of the Rings. Sam is a portly fellow whose main focus is the next meal; until a greater cause demands his allegiance and his energy. He and Frodo are dying of thirst and starvation by the time they complete their quest and are rescued by Gandalf’s eagles from the molten slopes of It is ironic that Jesus’ enemies accused him of being a glutton and a drunkard, especially given his teaching from the mount: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled” (Matthew 5); or the more blunt assertion in Luke 6 ‘Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.” What is it that you really need? SOBRIETY Sobriety is the state of being able to continue on a course of action without having to introduce diversions or exciting secondary plans. In Luke 9 we read “When the days drew near for him to be taken up he set his face to go to The transformation is occurring in us when the drive to get more and better begins to be replaced by a single-minded desire to do the right thing; when our focus is drawn in to the sharp clarity of compassion and justice. For those of us who live in relative comfort and affluence, this may be about the most difficult transformation we ever need to undergo. Some would make the path easier with offers of cheap grace, or assurances that affluence is part of God’s plan for us. However hard we may try though, there is no way around it. The Cross of Christ is the point of transformation of human passion to divine virtue; gluttony to sobriety. 6. GREED TO NON-ATTACHMENT Greed is yet another passion that is rooted in fear; a survival instinct that drives us to accumulate and hoard for ourselves. I am not sure when our society is going to stop paying the price for the creed of the eighties- “Greed is good”. Only yesterday I heard about a woman in the Greed is different to gluttony. Gluttons want to experience everything, preferably in the company of others. Greed is stingy; it holds on to things, keeps its possessions, guards its space, even keeps knowledge to itself. The truly avaricious person does not want to share. Their greatest fear, usually irrational, is that others will take what they have. This attachment is a source of deep suffering. The tragedy of Scrooge is that much precious energy goes into acquiring and holding on to things, to the point where, as the Proverb says, it takes away the life of its possessor. Not only that; it robs us of the joy of sharing. NON-ATTACHMENT “Imagine all the people sharing all the world?” Is this a dream? If so, it was a dream come true for the early Church as described in the second and forth chapters of the Book of Acts. It would be naïve to deny that many such experiments in true community become nightmares of conflict. Even in people who are being transformed, holding on to what sustain our lives is a survival instinct that will never be completely obliterated, and perhaps that is not always such a bad thing. Knowing that makes the life of Jesus even more remarkable. All he has is fully, totally shared; and right to the end, freely given. “It is finished” is a cry of acceptance, the love-offering of his life complete. The miracle of Jesus’ death is that what is so freely given is never finally lost. “The light has come into the world, and the darkness could not overcome it”. Love never ends, for as This is the paradox of greed and non-attachment- the more we cling, the tighter our grip, the surer it is that we will crush the life out of that which we want to possess. The virtue of non-attachment is the gift of freedom to be who we are and for what we were created. The Cross of Christ is the point of conversion of human passion to divine virtue; greed to non-attachment. 7. ENVY TO EQUANIMITY If anger is red, envy is green! The grass is always greener somewhere over there, and the passionate drive is to get from here to the pastures that are clearly more lush and lovely! Envy is fuelled by the belief that others are enjoying an emotional satisfaction that is being denied to oneself. The envious person always feels deprived, and until the passion is transformed will always long for the imagined bliss of elsewhere; the imagined satisfaction that everyone else undoubtedly has! David envies Uriah for his wife Bathsheba, and his envy drives him to murder. Hear again the Proverb “Wrath is cruel, anger overwhelming, but who is able to stand before envy?’. And not only is envy a danger and source of suffering to others. This passion can drive a person to depression and self harm, especially when they feel alone in their plight. Matthew states that Pontius Pilate ..” realized that it was out of envy that they (the Jews) handed him (Jesus) over.” Mark specifies that it was the Chief Priests who acted out of envy. Clearly they resented his usurping of their authority and wanted him out of the way. This may well have been the passion most responsible for putting Jesus to death. Does envy keep us on the move, never satisfied with who we are or what we have? Worse still, does it ever cause us to trample over the lives of others to get what it is we think we need? EQUANIMITY The conversion point for the person driven by envy is in the prayer of relinquishment, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” Or, in the words of the Psalmist, “The Lord is my shepherd. I have everything I need. He leads me to green pastures”. Beside the still waters, the passion of envy subsides. The virtue of equanimity floods the spirit. Everything is now in balance, and there is peace beyond understanding. Instead of being driven by compulsive attraction to the unattainable, the person now recognises that what they really need is at hand and within reach. The hymn writer Charles Wesley penned these words from the standpoint of the virtue of equanimity “Thou O Christ art all I want. More than all in Thee I find. And so Jesus speaks his last words, words of prayer, words of acceptance, words of life for those who have ears to hear: “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” The Cross of Christ is the point of transformation of human passion to divine virtue; envy to equanimity. |
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