Simplicity
As we’ve talked about the Sermon on the Mount over the past several weeks, something about the appeal of these words of Jesus began to dawn on me. And last week at South Padre, the appeal of those words became even greater as they got mixed in with the vision and smell of the ocean.
Here’s what I wrote one morning there after sitting with others on a sixth floor balcony the night before, watching in quiet community the breaking of the waves on the shore below:
“These sounds, too, are the voice of God..the rhythmic, symphonic music of the world to which crabs by the hundreds are dancing side-step, and through which gulls and pelicans are sailing in eternal crescendos. And I have been allowed to listen in! We have been able to listen in to the sounds of God creating, and have been able to see the measures of his music written in white-capped notes across liquid pages of the ocean’s roar.”
All right, yes..places like that carry me away. I can’t help it. And I hope they always do, because places like the ocean, or the mountains, or a field of wildflowers give me, give all of us, the opportunity, if we allow them, to see just beyond the edges of God’s fingertips and to feel the air move against our faces as he passes near us.
The attraction of these places is precisely the same attraction of the words of the Jesus’ Sermon. In those places, and in these words, God becomes knowable. There’s no humanly inspired doctrine between God’s mountains and our eyes. There is no Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant theology standing between us and the ocean. In the words of Jesus here, we are hearing our Father’s intentions, with no human interpreters standing in the way.
The appeal of the mountains, the ocean, and these words of Jesus is this.. this is the word I brought back from the shoreline of South Texas with me: Simplicity. These things simplify my understanding and love of God. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about:
Matt 6: 22 “The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light; 23but if your eye is unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!”
In Jesus’ day, a ‘healthy eye’ meant generous. It was an idiom, a part of speech like when we say someone “hit the ceiling.” People would have heard that simply, exactly as he spoke it. Listen how simple Jesus makes it: “The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if you’re generous, your whole body will be full of light; but if you’re stingy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!”
That’s exactly what it says! It is profound in its simplicity. Jesus tells us earlier in the sermon to be like Light, and then he tells us that the secret to being like Light is to be generous. Simple simple simple. But people don’t like ‘simple.’ Listen to what another preacher, who is steeped in doctrine and complicated theology, does with those same verses. I find this both amusing and heart-breaking at the same time. This is from a big church in Dallas. Just listen:
“The meaning of our Lord appears to be something like this: the activities of the body are directed according to the light which is received through the eye. When that organ is sound and functioning properly, perceiving objects as they really are, the whole body is illumined, and we are able to discharge our duties and to move with safety and circumspection. But if the eye be blind, or its vision faulty, then we perceive objects confusedly and without distinction, and then we stumble as if in the dark, and cannot perform our task or journey properly, being continually liable to lose our way or run into danger. So far all is simple and plain. But what, we may ask, is connoted by the "eye"? And what is here signified by "the whole body"? That these are figures of speech is obvious, but figures of what? It is at this point the commentators vary so much in their explanations.”
And then he goes on to quote too many of those commentators.
He takes the simple and elegant words of Jesus and turns them into a testimony to his own intellectual abilities. He turns that which is divinely simple into something complicatedly human. Now I’m not just indicting that preacher for doing such a thing, I’m pointing the finger at myself and all of us: we’re all good at building gaudy and elaborate monuments to ourselves out of the simple, powerful, and eternal understandings offered by God to us. Because those understandings of God, offered by God, are centered around his son and our becoming like his son. And that’s not easy to do while tending to an always-hungry, power-seeking, and applause-needing ego.
Jesus did not come to start a new religion. He didn’t come to be the founder of Christianity. He ministered, lived, taught, and died for the reform of Judaism. The Sermon on the Mount is all about taking the Jewish scriptures out of the private vaults of the Jewish leaders, and opening those scriptures, first to all other Jews, and then the world.
Simple.
But then that Jewish movement got turned into institutional Christianity and everything started to become complicated again. The egos of humans took the self-sacrificing, out-reaching, generous example of Jesus and turned them into the justification for greed, power, and nationalism. Instead of following a man in a muslin robe into meals with sinners, Christians began following men in high hats and expensive robes onto boats with cannons. Instead of walking in the footsteps of a man who treated women, foreigners, and even his enemies as beloved, equal children of God, the institutional church came up with doctrines and rules, ego protecting dogma that would insure the superiority and privilege of some over others.
The beautiful simplicity of Jesus became the complicated religious and political scheming of mankind. The simplicity of following Jesus into a life of sacrifice, generosity, and always growing circles of love, became a complicated, difficult, and- let’s face it- sometimes boring life of being good, following the rules, don’t do this, don’t do that, sit still, sit up, stop laughing, and don’t you even think about having anything to do with those people over there.
The Jesus who dared to touch lepers and other untouchables was reduced to an embroidered cross on a colonial flag. The Jesus who said “turn the other cheek” and then showed how that was done, was turned into an excuse for launching ships of war. The Jesus who invited women and children to come near him, because God loved them, was historically twisted into the mouthpiece and champion of the Third Reich, and those Bosnian perpetuators of “ethnic cleansing.”
Why do we need, why do we so desperately need these chapters 5, 6, and 7 of Matthew again and again and again? Because the Sermon on the Mount reminds us again about the simplicity of a one on one relationship with God. We are reminded by Jesus, told by Jesus, that that relationship is not based on our ability to memorize scripture, pay our tithes, or to do good works. It is based on God’s acceptance of us, as screwed up and as poor in spirit as we already are.
“If you’re generous, your whole body will be full of light; but if you’re stingy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!” We need to remember that the one who said that was not speaking from an air-conditioned television studio. He was sitting on a rock. He had no home to call his own, and he was dependent on others for his daily bread. Yet, he is known 2000 years later as the Light of the World because he was the Light of generosity in a world always ready to go dark under the veil of human stinginess.
It is so simple, Jesus told us: depend on others as they depend on you. It is so simple, Jesus demonstrated to us: love your neighbor as yourself. It is so,so,so simple, it is the theme of everything Jesus said and lived: be generous. Don’t be stingy. Give yourselves to others. “store up for yourselves treasures in heaven..where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
Chapter 6, beginning at verse 25: ‘Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink,* or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.”
Beginning in about the year 2700 BC, the first indigenous people began to occupy the longest inter-coastal island in the U.S.- known today as South Padre Island. We’ll get to that name in a minute. Indians lived on the island, moving back and forth between it and the mainland for over 4200 years. They were the Karankowa Indians. For 4200 years, they lived on the generosity of God. They fished during the day and gathered up those side-stepping crabs at nightfall. We would, from the perspective of 21st century, call their lifestyle primitive. They lived for generations without money, Walmart, or television in a place where they depended on each other, and the ocean, for their daily bread. For a period of time 20 times longer than the U.S. has been a country, the Karankowa lived in community with each other, and with God.
The problem was, in the eyes of the Catholic missionaries who began arriving on the island in the early 1500s, these Karankowa didn’t know the proper name of that God, and they would need to learn it. So they were taught that name under the auspices of the holy royal family of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, a family whose royal claims were of course supported and protected by the Church in Rome.
The Spaniards put the Karankowa to work, building missions, clearing ranchland on the island, and building and launching ships on the mainland for the Spanish assault on the gold of other Indians throughout Mexico and Central America. Man had entered the forest- stingy man, men with bad eyes- ungenerous, selfish natures.
After having lived on the Island for 4200 years, it was only 350 years before the tribe was extinct. Gone. Forever. Killed off in large part by the guns, germs, and steel of the remnants of the Holy Roman Empire, the last several hundred members of the tribe died in a mass suicide in the 1850s rather than convert to the Christian religion they had been experiencing, and become slaves to the new Island owners. Who were former missionary priests, and who had been given the island by the Mexican government in 1829. Padre Jose Balli- you can still see his statue as you exit the Queen Isabella bridge to his Island from Port Isabel.
But squint your eyes, even now, even from a sixth floor balcony, and it is possible to get a glimpse here and there for increasingly longer moments, of what it once was like, what the world was like once upon a time for those other generations of peoples created also in the Image of God. The light of the moon, reflected in eternal rows of white capped waves reveal birds- terns, gulls, pelicans- even at nite, flying just above the ocean’s surface- feeding and flourishing in the reflections- the generous reflections- of God on this part of Creation. Without a single thought toward sowing or reaping or gathering into barns, these also beloved creatures of our father live and move and have their being.
Look closer at the shoreline now. Great vast growths of kelp roll to the beach from massive growths beyond the breaking waves. Kelp, feeding fish, once having fed Karankowa Indians, pouring forth as a by product of their underwater photosynthetic activity, tons of life-giving oxygen into the atmosphere: God’s largesse, God’s generosity.
And across the dunes below, the spreading, reaching tendrils of ivy and wetland grasses reach with deep rooted perserverance through million year old sand toward pockets of fresh water. In response to that life giving moisture, they bloom in magenta, lavender, and blue fire- lilies of the dunes, not a single worry, no worry or toil. But they shout to all who would hear them of our God’s- their God’s, our God’s- generosity.
Simplicity. It is shining through the clutter all around us, if we look for it with our good and generous eyes. It echoes in the words of Jesus, if we choose to hear them with our good and generous hearts..
