Simon Magus

SIMON MAGUS LIVED in Samaria and was the Houdini of his day. He made small boys climb ropes and disappear. He sawed pretty girls in half. He pulled rabbits out of hats and levitated volunteers from the audience. And he made a good thing of it too. He got top billing, drove a BMW convertible to work, and wore nothing but silk next to his skin.

Then one day Philip came to town on a preaching junket, and Simon Magus got religion in a big way. When the altar call was given, he was the first to come forward. He then got himself baptized, and Philip added him to the team.

After a while the apostle Peter came down from the head office in Jerusalem to see how things were going, and before he was through, he conferred the power of healing on some of them by laying his hands on their heads. The healings struck Simon Magus as the most spectacular trick he had ever seen in his life, and he offered Peter hard cash if he'd lay his hands on him.

God didn't belong to the magicians' union, Peter told him, and as for the hard cash, he knew what he could do with it. He said that maybe if Simon Magus repented, God would overlook what had happened, but he didn't make the prospects sound too hopeful. There might still be hell to pay.

Knowing when he'd been upstaged, Simon Magus begged Peter to use his influence with the Lord to get him off the hook and then steered clear of the old fisherman for the remainder of his visit.

Acts 8:5-24

-Originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words  

Simeon

JESUS WAS STILL IN DIAPERS when his parents brought him to the Temple in Jerusalem "to present him to the Lord" (Luke 2:22), as the custom was, and offer a sacrifice, and that's when old Simeon spotted him. Years before, he'd been told he wouldn't die till he'd seen the Messiah with his own two eyes, and time was running out. When the moment finally came, one look through his cataract lenses was all it took. He asked if it would be all right to hold the baby in his arms, and they told him to go ahead but be careful not to drop him.

"Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation," he said (Luke 2:29), the baby playing with the fringes of his beard. The parents were pleased as punch, and so he blessed them too for good measure. Then something about the mother stopped him, and his expression changed.

What he saw in her face was a long way off, but it was there so plainly he couldn't pretend. "A sword will pierce through your soul," he said (Luke 2:35).

He would rather have bitten off his tongue than said it, but in that holy place he felt he had no choice. Then he handed her back the baby and departed in something less than the perfect peace he'd dreamed of all the long years of his waiting.

Luke 2:22-35 

-Originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words  

Sex

CONTRARY TO MRS. GRUNDY, sex is not sin. Contrary to Hugh Hefner, it's not salvation either. Like nitroglycerin, it can be used either to blow up bridges or heal hearts.

At its roots, the hunger for food is the hunger for survival. At its roots the hunger to know a person sexually is the hunger to know and be known by that person humanly. Food without nourishment doesn't fill the bill for long, and neither does sex without humanness.

Adultery, promiscuity (either heterosexual or homosexual), masturbation—one appealing view is that anything goes as long as nobody gets hurt. The trouble is that human beings are so hopelessly psychosomatic in composition that whatever happens to the soma happens also to the psyche, and vice versa.

Who is to say who gets hurt and who doesn't get hurt, and how? Maybe the injuries are all internal. Maybe it will be years before the X rays show up anything. Maybe the only person who gets hurt is you.

In practice Jesus was notoriously soft on sexual misbehavior. Some of his best friends were hustlers. He saved the woman taken in adultery from stoning. He didn't tell the woman at the well that she ought to marry the man she was living with. Possibly he found their fresh-faced sensualities closer to loving God and humanity than the thin-lipped pieties of the Pharisees. Certainly he shared the Old Testament view that the body in all its manifestations was basically good because a good God made it.

But he also had some hard words to say about lust (Matthew 5:27-28), and told the adulterous woman to go and sin no more. When the force of a person's sexuality is centrifugal, pushing further and further away as psyches the very ones being embraced as somas, this sexuality is of the Devil. When it is centripetal, it is of God. 

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words  

Sermon

"DON'T PREACH TO ME!" means "Don't bore me to death with your offensive platitudes!" Respectable verbs don't get into that kind of trouble entirely by accident.

Sermons are like jokes; even the best ones are hard to remember. In both cases that may be just as well. Ideally the thing to remember is not the preachers' eloquence but the lump in your throat or leap of your heart or the thorn in your flesh that appeared as much in spite of what they said as because of it.

Paul said, "Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!" (1 Corinthians 9:16). Jesus said, "If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were fastened around your neck and you were drowned in the depth of the sea" (Matthew 18:6). People who preach sermons without realizing that they're heading straight for Scylla and Charybdis ought to try a safer and more productive line of work.

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words  

Senses

TASTE AN APPLE. Taste salt.

See the sunlight on the wall, the deer track in the snow.

Hear the luffing of the sail.

Smell the rose, the dead mouse behind the wainscoting, the child's hair.

Touch the hand that is touching your hand.

Although we have been taught better, it is easier to assume that nothing that lies beyond the reach of our five senses is entirely real than to acknowledge that what we know about reality through the five senses is roughly the equivalent of what an ant crawling across the front page of the New York Times knows about the state of the world.

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words