A WAY TO READ SCRIPTURE

Recently I've been running into the problem a nasty, vengeful God. So I went in search of an essay I once wrote about this problem. It's long, but I think you may find it helpful if you're ever bothered by the picture of God who is full of anger and vengeance.

“Three Steps Forward”    

Albert Holtz, O.S.B.,  Sept 14, 2019 

There was this Christian missionary who found himself deep in the jungle, meeting with the chief of the village. The missionary asked him,  “Do your people believe in God?” The chief lowered his voice almost to a whisper, and replied, "In the evening we hear the sound of his footsteps in the treetops, but we stay away."  God is by nature unknowable to us humans with our limited intellects. So, the Lord has to reveal himself to us. 

One of the central beliefs of Jews and Christians is that God does this  through Sacred Scripture, “revelation.” So it’s obviously important to get scripture right; but unfortunately, we often don’t do so! I’d like to offer a couple of basic ideas to help us, when we’re reading or listening to the bible, to get from it the message that the Lord intended.

Firstly, the bible is a collection of 72 different books with various authors, written over a period of a thousand years, and, sensing that, we tend to read the books as stand-alone texts, rather than in their true context, as part of a unified sacred book. We seldom think of the bible as a single work, with a unified plot. But that’s exactly what it is: 

From the first verse of Genesis to the final verse of the Book of Revelation, the Bible is always heading in one single direction, toward love and unity.

One scholar said that the bible is “a document in travail.”  This means that we shouldn’t think of it as a book that is finished, and that we can just read it the way we read a cookbook or an automobile repair manual. We need to engage the Sacred Text and connect the dots, trying, with the Holy Spirit’s help, to find the direction, the momentum. We just need to keep remembering that the direction of revelation in the scriptures is invariably toward mercy, inclusion, forgiveness, non-violence and trust.

The first point, then, is that the Bible is a single work with a single, definite direction, leading us inevitably toward the fulness of LOVE: Mercy, inclusion, forgiveness, non-violence and trust.

The second point, the bible is written by human beings and is rooted in specific times and particular places, bounded by the writer’s specific culture. 

And this is a crucial point: it means that like any human endeavor, biblical revelation doesn’t proceed in a nice, smooth straight line. Yes, it has a definite direction, a goal, and leads us toward the final fulfillment of God’s love, a New Heavens and a New Earth. But it proceeds toward that goal in typical human fashion by taking 

three steps forward and two steps back.

It’s important that we develop an eye for identifying the difference between scripture verses that are bringing us three steps forward, and those that are heading two steps back, and to know how to deal with each. Otherwise we can’t manage to connect the dots, and we miss the momentum, and the 

accidental things become central, while the essential points get buried.

Let’s look first at some “three steps forward passages:” Think, for example, of the beautiful readings at the Easter Vigil: God creating the world and seeing that it is very good, God delivering his people through the Red Sea, or bringing them into the promised land where they enjoy the first crops in the new country -- this is God being faithful. We see the story moving three steps forward toward the goal when the Word becomes flesh in Bethlehem, or when Jesus gives himself up to death out of love for you and me, thereby conquering death itself to save us. Clearly these are events that bring us three steps forward.

But its just as important to be able to spot the two steps back passages that lead

in the opposite direction, away from the goal of love and unity. They’re easy to spot, too. They’re the ones in which God acts like a human! The God of vengeance, divine pettiness, form over substance, law over grace. These passages tell us of a God who keeps score so he can get back at people, a God of justice, who demands that justice be done. We can all relate to this God of the two-steps-back passages, because he’s just like us!

This God who punishes to the third and fourth generation, or who demands that towns be obliterated with women and children inside of the. This is the proprietor of hell.

Just yesterday I read about the rioting that occurred in South Africa between rival tribes after apartheid was ended. Both sides practiced a cruel form of torture and execution called “necklacing,” in which people would hold somebody down and slip a tire over his torso, pinning his arms at his side, and then set the tire on fire. 

When I read that I said to myself, “Oh yeah! That’s hell! That’s what our God does to us if we’re bad! " The passages in the bible that talk about this kind of a God, those in the “two steps back” column, are strangely attractive to lots of people. Plenty of good Christians are very reluctant to let go of this very understandable God. 

We want God to mete out strict, blind justice to everyone: Divine justice is the same as human justice: “retributive justice,” for example, in which retribution is part of a carefully balanced system.

This idea of a perfectly balanced, reasonable system of justice was picked up by St. Anselm and then by Thomas Aquinas. They developed it into a theology of the cross, the theology of atonement: Original Sin was an offense against God, an infinite being, and therefore the only way for justice to be balanced would be that the sin must be expiated or atoned for by some infinite being. So, God’s Son, who shared in the divine nature, was sent to be crucified and die to satisfy the Divine demand for atonement. I picture God glaring angrily at us humans and growling, “Now look what you made me do!” But at least the scales of justice are balanced, and Jesus has thrown himself between us and His angry father whose wrath needed to be calmed.

We could call this “redemptive violence.” We make God very small, and draw him into our own ego-driven need for retribution and punishment. (Isn’t this circle of violence and retribution exactly what Jesus came to undo?) 

There is another way, of course, to understand the mystery of the cross. It’s said in dozens of different ways in both the Jewish Scriptures and the Christian. God, out of pure, spontaneous love for his creatures, decided to come in person to set things right. By taking on himself our sins, by grappling with death itself, he overcame sinfulness and conquered death itself, and rode from the dead, bringing us along with him to live forever in the Kingdom of the New Jerusalem (see the final chapter of the Book of Revelation). When we gaze on the cross we should be seeing not the piece that the Father demanded for our sins, but rather the ultimate spontaneous act of God’s love for us. The cross is our gateway to heaven.

 Notice where all of this started: Not with God but with us humans. We made the first move by our sins, and God simply reacted, and was bound by the laws of justice and balanced scales and so on. Poor God is now subject to the limitations of the human mind, and is not completely free to act out of spontaneous, infinite love. But at least the system is comprehensible to us: It’s familiar and therefore comfortable, like a favorite pair of slippers. We’ve got God in our pocket. 

This is why so many of us get nervous with the "three-steps-forward" God, such as the Father we meet in the parable of the Prodigal Son. We say to ourselves,  “I know what I would have done if I were that father.” But Jesus came to tell us, “Well, you are not that Father, his ways are far above your ways. His love overpowers every other consideration.”  

Some of us are uneasy when Jesus pardons the woman taken in adultery, because he seems to be condoning sin. 

Our headmaster has a phrase he uses when he’s in a one-on-one situation with a troubled student. Maybe the kid is struggling with a terrible home situation, and his grades are dropping, and the word is that he’s starting to smoke pot. So, here’s the scenario: The kid comes into Fr. Ed’s office and slumps into a chair and stares at the floor. Then after a few minutes of conversation about how bad things are, Fr. Ed says, 

“Marcos, look at me.” The kid raise his head. The headmaster holds the kid’s stare for a second or two. The he says.

“Marcos, I want you to realize something. Listen, because it’s super-important: God loves you just the way you are, right now. In the midst of all your pain and struggles and sins, God loves you just the way you are.”

Marcos’ eyes start to fill with tears, and whispers, 

“No one ever told me that before.”

Not surprisingly, we don’t manage to tell our kids about the three-steps forward God, since we’re not comfortable with Him. Instead we’ll fall back of the humanly understandable God of two-steps back; we say things like, “See, God punished you!”  “Your sins offend God.” (That’s an interesting concept, when you think about it -- a God who can be “offended.”) “God is watching your every move”. (Yikes! If I let myself think about that all the time, I’d go crazy pretty quickly, I imagine.) 

The clear direction of the bible, as unmistakably set out by Jesus, is toward love, forgiveness, openness, as modelled by Jesus, who is introducing us to the Father who is all-loving and who is not bound by our predictable rules of retributive justice or our human wish for vengeance. 

All a sinner needs to do is turn around (repent) and, like the prodigal son in the parable, show up at the father's doorstep. No necklacing, no getting out the account ledger to add up your sins.

And when someone objects, “Hey, necklacing is in the bible, and so is the fact that white people are superior to the sons of Ham, and that we should destroy people who don’t believe in our God!” Jesus gently urges that person to let go of the easily-understandable two-steps-back pages of the bible, and embrace the more difficult mysterious passages, the ones that reveal to us a God who is so loving, so beautiful that He's incomprehensible to us.

Let's all pray for one another, that the "three-steps-forward" passages in the bible may lead all of us together toward the final goal of infinite, everlasting all-inclusive Love, the Kingdom of God, where we hope to live together with Him as one loving family forever and ever.

BEING AN APOSTLE

 The following post concerning this Sunday's Gospel was written by Rev. Greg Friedman, OFM and was presented as a video on the NCCB  web page of the Daily Lectionary Readings.

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Jesus is the compassionate Shepherd who is moved for those who are troubled and abandoned. What’s more, he enlists his followers to act as he did. He calls twelve disciples and sends them to announce the same message which Jesus has been proclaiming and to act as he did: cure the sick raise the dead cleanse the lepers, cast out demons.

Scripture scholars suggest that today’s text shows how the apostles' mission mirrors that of Jesus, that these instructions were originally intended as practical guidelines for the itinerant missionaries of Matthew's community. Of course in preserving such a text Jesus intends for us, the successors of Matthew’s community to adopt the same missionary guidelines. 

It’s not just a job for the original twelve, nor for canonized Saints. I’m sure that those first disciples of Matthew's community did not have much difficulty identifying who needed healing or who was troubled in spirit and so we’ve got to ask ourselves. 

Preaching to the nations

How can we heal? Who among us is spiritually dead? Where are the lepers of our day? where are there demons to be cast out? We all know people who are sick and spirit live as though dead, who have been infected with the world‘s evil, 

Jesus is sending us with his power to cooperate with him in healing and in liberating If you look at the list of those first twelve, we can see that following Jesus isn’t a path of fame. It may rather lead to obscurity. Aside from a few gospel mentions and some traditions and legends outside of the scriptures. most of the disciples lives remain unknown. 

Neither do we have to be perfect to follow Jesus after all among his disciples there were those who denied betrayed and deserted him, Jesus came to sinners not the righteous, and I doubt that we can do much worse that the original twelve.

BEING BREAD

 

JESUS THE BREAD OF LIFE 

Today is the Solemnity of The Body and Blood of Christ. Corpus Christi. 

During this week the mass lectionary has led us through Chapter 6 of John’s gospel, the so-called “Bread of Life Chapter.” After recounting the miracle of the loaves and fishes, John continues with such familiar passages as:

35 Jesus said to them, ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. …48 I am the bread of life. 49Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. 50 This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. 51 I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.’ 52 The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, ‘How can this man give us his flesh to eat?’ 53 So Jesus said to them, ‘Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. 54 Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; 55 for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. 56 Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. 57 Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. 58This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live for ever’  (John Ch. 6).

SLEEPING WITH BREAD 

There’s a little book entitled Sleeping with Bread by Dennis Linn et. al. The title comes from at story told at the beginning of the book: “During the bombing raids of WWII, thousands of children were orphaned and left to starve. The fortunate ones were rescued and placed in refugee camps where they received food and good care. But many of these children who had lost so much could not sleep at night. They feared waking up to find themselves once again homeless and without food. Nothing seemed to reassure them. Finally, someone hit upon the idea of giving each child a piece of bread to hold at bedtime. Holding their bread, these children could finally sleep in peace. All through the night the bread reminded them, 'Today I ate and I will eat again tomorrow.'”

As I listened to the readings from the “Bread of Life Chapter” this week I kept seeing the image of those little war orphans sleeping peacefully in their beds, each holding on to a piece of bread. For those suffering children the bread meant much more than calories and carbohydrates. It was a promise, an encouragement. In the midst of a chaotic war-torn world, the bread was a reassuring, palpable presence, the gift of hope for tomorrow. When Christ says, “I am the bread of life,” isn’t he giving himself to us as a promise, an encouragement, a reassuring palpable presence, the gift of hope for tomorrow?

BEING BREAD

But there’s more to this “bread of life” business than Jesus’ giving himself to us in the Holy Eucharist. For one thing, remember that where the other three gospels have Jesus instituting the Eucharist at the Last Supper, the Gospel of John does not. Instead it tells how Jesus washed the feet of his disciples (Jn 13:3 ff.). The episode ends with Jesus commanding the apostles: "14 So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. 15 For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you” (Jn Ch. 13).

Jesus Washing Feet

The readings at this time of the liturgical year are full of such commands, commissions and sendings. The angelic messengers at the tomb tell the women, “Go, tell the disciples…,” the disciples are commanded "Go into Galilee,"and the risen Lord appears to the disciples and gives them the commission to “Go forth into the whole world…” The first reading today (Friday) was the story of Saul’s conversion on the Road to Damascus; once again someone’s life is interrupted by a peremptory command from the Lord: "Stop what you’re doing and go do this for me."

Combining the themes of the Bread of Life and of these various “sendings”, it's easy for us to imagine Jesus saying to us, his followers, “I am the bread of life, and now you have to go forth and be bread as well. In the midst of a chaotic materialistic world, be bread for one another, be a reassuring, palpable presence, be the gift of hope for tomorrow for your brothers and sisters.  I want you to be bread for one another."

I preached on this theme in the homily at today’s community mass. On the way to the sacristy after mass I passed a basket on a table in the gathering area in the back of church. A hand-lettered a sign on the basket is labeled simply “Food Pantry.” The basket was overflowing with canned goods and a big box of Special K. I smiled as I thought to myself, "Well, it’s not exactly bread, but some of our parishioners sure know a great way to be bread for the poor families in our neighborhood.”

As I continued toward the sacristy I started wondering who I'm supposed to be bread for in the next day or two. Hmm... Maybe it's you?

TRINITY AGAIN AND AGAIN

 

Last Sunday was Trinity Sunday. After celebrating the events of Easter, the Ascension and Pentecost, the Solemnity of the Holy Trinity is so abstract and seemingly removed from our everyday lives that the pews tomorrow morning will be filled with faithful Christians politely stifling yawns. I sense that often the homilist is doing he same. This estrangement from the rich mystery of the Holy Trinity is one of the central tragedies of Western Christianity.

Each year I post or re-post some reflections on the Trinity with the hope that someone reading them may begin to peer again into this most beautiful and most neglected part of our faith.

 I've now read Richard Rohr's  The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation at least four times; in this post I'll try to summarize some of his main thoughts.

Rohr points out that some of the greatest difficulties that people (both believers and non-believers) have with Christianity are avoided it we change our perspective and stop thinking of God as an isolated monarch observing the world from afar and occasionally intruding into it, and who seems intent on keeping count of sins in order to punish us for them when we die. Fr. Rohr proposes that we look at God in an entirely different way -- in terms of the ancient model of "trinity" which never caught on in the Western world, but has been at the center of the theology of the Eastern churches, and is behind much of St. Paul's thought.  

An understanding of God as Trinity is such a radically different way of looking at the divine, that I have to keep re-reading it to let my mind adjust to the new perspective. And each time I read one of it short chapters, the new perspective makes more and more sense. I think I've blogged about it already, but the book is really worth further reflection.

Here are the notes of a talk I gave to the parents of the Religious Education Program Here at St. Mary's Church. I offer them because, although it was a gamble to try to treat the topic in a short time,  the parents seemed to "get it," and had lots of good questions at the end.  So, here goes: Richard Rohr with an admixture of Fr. Albert.

IS GOD A “SUBSTANCE?”

Aristotle  (Greek philosopher 384-322 B.C.) composed a list of ten qualities or “categories” of things (e.g. "location", “quantity” and “quality”). For our purposes we need to consider just two of these: “SUBSTANCE” and “RELATIONSHIP”.

A “Substance” is something independent of everything else (a tree, a stone), while “Relationship” obviously requires something else for its existence (daughter, father).  Substance was for Aristotle the highest category, precisely because it does not depend on anything else for its existence, but can stand on its own.

By 2nd-3rd Century, Western Christianity found itself using Aristotle to prove that this God of ours, the Holy Trinity, was a substance. We wanted a “substantial” God, a god whom we could prove was as good as any pagan god. And so it was that God became an object of our study, just like any other thing in the created world. (Can you see trouble coming?)

GOD AS ZEUS

Several weeks ago I was sitting in on a class of seniors as they studied Homer's Odessey. I was startled to hear one of the warriors praying to "Father Zeus." I could see how easy it would have been for converts from Greek pagan religions encountering Jesus’ idea of "God the Father," to immediately identify Jesus’ “God the Father” with their familiar Greek "Father Zeus," the all-powerful one who sat alone on top of Mt. Olympus and hurled thunderbolts on people any time he felt like it, but especially when he got angry.

This image of a vengeful, fearsome Zeus-God whose approval is only conditional and can be lost or earned, could not be farther from the doctrine of the Trinity, in which God is pure love. Since God is love, God can't not-love us, no matter what we do. God can never stop loving us. On our end, however, we are free to deflect or interrupt the Flow of divine love in our lives -- that's called sin, which is its own built-in punishment, and hardly needs God to intrude in order to punish us for being outside the dance.

SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF ZEUS-BASED RELIGION

The Zeus-God keeps score; he gets even, he metes out punishment to those who don’t measure up.

Zeus-based religion becomes the grim pursuit of mastery over a system of requirements and obligations.

A Zeus-based saint is someone who has mastered the system and knows how to avoid getting God angry, and who scores very high on all the criteria for holiness. 

GOD AS TRINITY

Western Christianity is so bound up with this image of a solitary vengeful, fearsome Zeus-God sitting alone atop mount Olympus, whose approval can be earned and lost, that we find it nearly impossible to get along without this kind of God. This God is, after all, very comprehensible -- there’s no mystery involved, and in such a view God follows all of our rational rules and expectations.

But this image could not be farther from the idea of God as Trinity, as the flow of love in the world. The Trinity is a divine, universal circle dance that includes all of creation, from electrons whirling around nuclei to galaxies strewn across the immensity of space. We humans are included in the dance, in the “flow.” 

If God is Love, then, by definition, God can't “not-love,” no matter what we do. God can never stop loving us. 

On our end, we can deflect or interrupt the Flow of love in our lives, we can isolate ourselves from the divine circle dance, but the Spirit is always working to draw us back into it.

Jesus in the gospels reveals himself as “Son of the Father” and “one with the Father,” giving clear primacy to relationship. God is not, nor does God need to be a “substance”  in the sense of something independent of all else: God is relationship itself! Although it took Christians a couple of centuries to come up with the doctrine of the Trinity of Father, Son and Spirit, Jesus already spoke about “I and the Father are one,” and said “the Spirit blows where it will.”

And St. John wrote that “God is love, ” God is relationship, while St. Paul wrote lots of tantalizing things that work best from a trinitarian perspective.

The Father, Son and Spirit love one another, God is this mutual loving, the Divine Dance. And we are all involved it that Dance, along with everyone and everything in creation, from neutrons and molecules to exploding stars and galaxies.

SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF “TRINITARIAN” RELIGION

Holiness: A holy person is one who can stay in relationship at all costs.

-People who are toxic (psychopaths etc.) are always people who cannot maintain relationships - they run from them. Loners, lonely people, cut off from others.

“Sin” means blocking the flow of the Trinity’s love and conversely

a “saint” is one who allows that love to flow freely and visibly in his or her life.

Salvation is the readiness, the capacity, the willingness to stay in relationship.

The Holy Spirit helps us in this difficult task of maintaining relationships. If we refuse to give others any power or influence over us (“You’re not gonna convince me!” “You have nothing to teach me.”) then we’re spiritually dead.

Kingdom of God, the central metaphor of Christ’s teaching: "My kingdom is not of this earth." It is a new way of relating to God, to others and to self. The Kingdom is relationships: it’s what characterizes the spaces between us: love, forgiveness, generosity.

Most of Rohr's comments about the Trinity are not his, but reflect the thinking of many saints, mystics and theologians over the centuries whose thoughts and writings have been overshadowed by the Aristotelian mindset of the Western Church. On Trinity Sunday we might pray that one day our modern western idea of God may give way to a Trinitarian concept of a God who is unconditional love and who is the dynamic force that animates all of creation, inviting us to become part of the Divine Dance. 

THE PHYSICS OF PENTECOST

This morning  our Father Maximilian at our community mass gave a homily that I found so interesting that I asked him if I might use it as my post for Pentecost. And so it is with gratitude that I present his words hoping that you will find them as moving as I did.

When I was working as an engineer at the Naval facility in White Oak, MD, a young man in his early 20’s came to work in my department for three months. I noticed not only how diligent he was at his work, but also how attentive he was to the needs of the other employees. He was always ready and willing to lend a helping hand and go the extra mile. He had genuine goodwill. I could tell that he was brought up well, and, of course, I assumed that he was a practicing Christian. 

One day, I met him at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. He was

there for choir practice. He sang in the choir. It didn’t surprise me. But when I spoke to him, I was surprised by what he said. 

He told me that, although he sang in the church choir, he didn’t believe in God. 

When he said that, I immediately recalled something that my father said to me when I was a child, at a time when I was going through a period of doubt. I told my father that I didn’t think that I believed in God anymore. He said to me, “That’s OK. God believes in you.” 

That was one of the most powerful things that was ever said to me. From that, I learned that God works through our goodwill. We may have strong doubts about God, but our goodwill is proof that God’s Spirit is at work in us. Even when we are having difficulty giving assent with our minds, we give assent with our hearts through our goodwill. 

I shared this thought with that young man. I also shared a thought about fire and combustion, the two of us being engineers. I said that when we light a candle, we tend to think of the flame as being transferred from the lighter to the candle wick. But that is not what happens. 

The photons which make up the flame coming from the lighter provide heat to the

candle wick which triggers a combustion reaction from within the candle wick itself, and the flame that you see coming from the candle wick does not consist of photons transferred from the lighter, but photons that were already right within the wick bound up in the proton-electron bonds in the molecules of the wick, and which become released as the combustion proceeds. 

What has happened is that something which is already there is released not only to be seen but also, if allowed, to trigger combustion in other things around it. The presence of those spiritual photons within him has a divine origin. 

The photons of spiritual life - of spiritual light - were already there in him waiting for the fire of the Holy Spirit to trigger the combustion of religious fervor so that they could be released into the world to contribute to the divine light and divine life in the world. 

The divine life is already there in potency; it just has to be actualized. This divine light is hidden within every person; it just needs to be released by the combustion of faith activated by the Holy Spirit. Although we do not activate the combustion of faith in another person, our words of witness and our acts of loving service can be the occasion in which the Holy Spirit ignites the combustion of faith in another person.

I hope that my words served as such an occasion for that young man. After his three-month period in my department, I didn’t have any more contact with him, but I feel confident that the Lord had continued to work through his goodwill and that he eventually came to the point of assent with his mind as well. 

May the combustion of faith which burns in our hearts burn with ever greater intensity with the fire of love, so that, through the light that comes from the combustion of faith, hope, and love within each of us, help to serve daily as the occasion for the igniting of the combustion of faith, hope, and love in people around us!

STRENGTH IN THE SPIRIT

 This week’s post builds on a New Testament verb that I've reflected on before. I’m posting again an old homily with a couple of revisions and insertions, hoping that you might find it useful.

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In the middle of today’s first reading we see  Paul and Silas returning to Lystra, Iconium and Antioch. This is remarkable because at the beginning of the reading  Paul has been stoned and left for dead by a mob in Lystra. Luke explains to us the reason why they are returning to those hostile towns: 

After Paul and Barnabas had proclaimed the good news to [Derbe] and made a considerable number of disciples, they returned to Lystra and to Iconium and to Antioch. They strengthened the spirits of the disciples…” (Acts 14:21). They returned to strengthen the hearts of their brothers and sisters.

The verb “to strengthen” is a form of sterizo, “to make something more firm, solid.”  It’s the root of our word “steroids.” We know that body-builders take steroids to "bulk up" their bodies, and some professional athletes us them illegally to help build up muscle tissue and increase body mass. I’d like to look briefly at how the root-word sterizo is used in the New Testament. Three examples offer us plenty of food for meditation.

First, we’ve already seen the verb used in describing Paul and Silas in the passage quoted above “strengthening the hearts” of the Christians in Lystra, Iconium and Antioch.

 A second  use of our verb occurs in the first chapter of the letter to the Romans. Paul writes:

"For I long to see you, that I may share with you some spiritual gift so that you may be strengthened (sterizo)..."

Then, in the First Letter to the Thessalonians he tells the church there: 
“we decided to remain alone in Athens, and sent Timothy, our brother and co-worker, to strengthen (sterizo)… you in your faith, so that no one be disturbed in these afflictions.” 

In each of these three passages, there is also a  parallel verb that expands on the idea of sterizo, “strengthening.”  In each of these passages we find the verb parakaleo. Among its many meanings we find “to encourage, exhort.” It gives us our word “paraclete.”   

On our first passage we read “they returned to Lystra and to Iconium and to Antioch. They strengthened (sterizo) the spirits of the disciples and encouraged (parakaleo) them to continue in the faith,saying ‘It is through many persecutions that we must enter the Kingdom of God’.” (Acts 14:21-22).

The passage from Romans reads, more fully, “For I long to see you, that I may share with you some spiritual gift so that you may be strengthened (sterizo), that is, that you and I may be mutually encouraged (parakaleo) by one another’s faith, yours and mine (Rom 1:11-12) 

Our third quotation reads, again more fully: we decided to remain alone in Athens, and sent Timothy, our brother and co-worker, to strengthen (sterizo) and encourage (parakaleo)  you in your faith, so that no one be disturbed in these afflictions (1 Thess. 3:1-3)”

So, we see how the first Christians “built up” one another: by encouraging one another to bear up under trials and persecutions.

Thus, we have this special pair of verbs: First, sterizo expresses the first Christians’ sense of strengthening one another, of “bulking one another up.  And second, that beautiful Pentecost verb parakaleo, that tells us how they strengthened one another by encouraging each other,  by being “paracletes” to their brothers & sisters. The first Christian  churches, you could say,  were communities on steroids!

Imagine for a moment a monastery on steroids, in which the members strengthen one another and build up one another by  their words and deeds of mutual encouragement.
Maybe sterizo and parakaleo can suggest a vision for us as we enter a new era in our community's history: picture Newark Abbey bulked up on steroids!

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Think about your role within your family, community, workplace and so forth. Does your presence make that group stronger? Are you a source of