Prospecting Week 3 - Transformation

July 22, 2012  Week 3 Prospecting

Series: Prospecting for Gold: Finding Treasure in the Bible
Anchor: Prospectors and Miners
Frame: The Path of Personal Transformation
Thread: Prospectors skits, “God Is Still Speaking” song

Psalm 137
1 By the rivers of Babylon

    we sat and wept, remembering Zion.

    2 On the willows there

    we hung up our harps.

    3 For there our captors taunted us to sing our songs,

    our tormentors demanded songs of joy:

    “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

    4 But how could we sing a song of Yhwh

    in a foreign land?

    5 If I forget you, Jerusalem,

    may my right hand forget its skill!

    6 May my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth

    if I ever forget you,

    if I ever stop considering Jerusalem

    my greatest joy.

    7 Remember, Yhwh, what the children of Edom did

    the day Jerusalem fell,

    when they said,

    “Tear it down!

    Tear it down to its foundations!”

    8 Brood of Babylon, doomed to destruction,

    a blessing on those who will repay you

    for the evil you have done to us!

    9 A blessing on those who will seize your infants

    and dash them against the rock!

Shirley J reminded me that we have not talked about another kind of mining: strip mining. It is a devastating example of human hubris and greed. We will shear off whole mountains in order to get to the minerals. And it isn’t only mountains. Growing up in North Dakota I saw where they were strip mining for lignite (a soft form of coal). Huge trucks, as big a buildings, scraped off the layers of soil and rock until the lignite was exposed and then huge drag buckets gathered it in. I remember hear that they saved all the soil and upper layers because they were required by law to restore the landscape to “its original contour or better” (emphasis mine). Not only did we humans think that the earth was ours to do with as we pleased, but then we got the idea that we could improve upon it when we were done. Now the requirement to restore the land is not bad. I have seen the remnants of early strips mines which were not constrained by that requirement. Huge piles of dirt in ugly spires and trenches gouged like huge scars still exposed to the sky.

I was reminded that sometimes we strip mine the bible. We shear off and dispose of material that we find distasteful, violent, undecipherable. My fear about this kind of editing is that it leaves us with a bible that simply reinforces the way we live our lives and the way we see the world. Strip mining the bible makes it safe and keeps it from challenging us to engage in any kind of inner transformation. And Borg contends that transformation is what the spiritual path is all about:

“As the path of life, this relationship is the path of personal transformation. It is the path of liberation from existential, psychological, and spiritual bondage to the lords of convention and culture. It involves dying to an old way of being and being born into a new way of being. It is a life lived in accord with radical monotheism: centering one’s life in God rather than in the rival lords of culture and convention.”

So I wonder if some of those difficult parts of the bible, the parts we don’t like, might be the grist that brings us into transformation. The teachings of Jesus are like that. Jesus did not only heal and feed people. He not only told parables about good Samaritans and spendthrift children welcomed home by prodigal parents. He also said that to follow him one must take up their own cross first. Again Borg points this out: “for John the way or path of Jesus is the path of death and resurrection understood as a metaphor for the religious life. That way—the path of dying to an old way of being and being born into a new way of being—is the only way to God.” And unless we are suicidal (and I hope we are not) the subject of dying, of our own death is often a difficult one to approach.

I am aware of my mixed metaphors here. Strip mining is a terribly destructive way of transformation. The spiritual life, though, is also about transformation and when we allow ourselves to practice Borg’s “radical monotheism” we give up ourselves as the center of our universe and allow God to be that center. The death of the ego may well feel something like strip mining. It is no mystery that many of us resist transformation until there is no other alternative.

Psalm 137 is an example of a thoroughly strip mined passage. It opens with a beautifully poignant lament about how the Israelites in their exile hung their harps on the willow trees because they could not sing their songs for the amusement of their captors. We have kept and treasured that mournful image. What we have strip mined away is the last half of the psalm. The mood changes from mourning to anger, violent anger. The poet want retribution, wants the Babylonians to feel the kind of pain Israel has felt and more. And then that shockingly naked rage that prays a blessing on those who kill their oppressors’ little children.

Would the psalmist really have rejoiced at such infanticide? I hope not. But by excising that part of the psalm we insulate ourselves from that part of us that sometimes rages nurtures murderous thoughts. What are we to do with such raw emotion? What are we to do with parts of the bible that are this humanly honest? I pray that we allow it to transform us. Maybe by hearing the awful violence of our rage spoken aloud, we can recognize it for the insanity it really is. It may shock us into letting go of our anger instead of acting upon it. That kind of rage is all about our own pain, all about us. To release that anger may be a step toward the transformation allows God to be the focus of our lives and not the pain inflicted upon us by others (no matter how horrific).

I think the gopher I’m chasing here is that real transformation is not at all easy, and our attempts to make it easy in fact can keep us stuck in our sameness. And my point with Psalm 137 is not just to introduce an “R” rated passage from the bible. My hope is that people may experience some reassurance that when life is difficult and painful and rage-filled that we may in fact be in the crucible of transformation. Real life hurts like hell. But we are not created only to suffer. We are created to experience the kind of love that sees us through hell until we are transformed into that life-giving love itself.