DISCERNING AND OBEYING GOD’S WILL THESE CRITICAL TIMES

History is the all encompassing matrix of space and time where human beings struggle to survive, seek to realize their dreams, work with one another and against each other to secure their interest and pursue their visions, create societies that collide, mess in and dominate with one another and bring forth mind boggling inventions that extend the powers of human being to almost God-like proportions. It is therefore a matrix of creativity and conflict, of angelic and demonic intentions and actions, of plain stupidity and brilliant genius, of horrendous wars and an enduring search for peace. In history one finds St. Francis and Machiavelli, Hitler and Nelson Mandela, Marcos and Ninoy Aquino and an almost infinite range of human self realizations that range from the demonic to the divine. History is a compound of good and evil inasmuch as it springs forth from the vision and actions of human beings, who, in the Biblical understanding is a fallen creature made in the image of God; and so in them reigns a dynamic interaction between good and evil, the beautiful and the ugly in their search for security and self-realization, a restless and dynamic process where evil has the upper hand. All the great and noble achievements of the human spirit get tainted by pride and ego so much so that even its noblest response to the divine action in Christ—the church and the mission that it does—at times, get transmogrified into its very anti-thesis.

Now, great minds tell us that history—given the interminable conflicts within its bosom—may be leading the whole of humankind along with creation—is moving in the direction of disaster and death. Yet the Bible tells us that God works in history! God, traditionally conceived as omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent—an absolutely spur being plunged the divine self in the cauldron of history with all of its ugliness, deformations, hate and fury in God’s sincere and all-out passion to liberate history from the clutches of the evil one and lead all of God’s creation towards their highest and fullest consummation.

Such a claim seems to be utterly without bases; for look at the history of our own people. At the break of dawn of Philippine history what stands out prominently is foreign invasion, conquest, and later on domination for nearly four hundred years, and it was carried on under the banner of the conqueror’s sword and the gospel. Succeeding historical periods were equally unkind to the natives of the islands—the Americans came with guns and cannons employed with unimaginable brutality, and yet they succeeded in making their subjects admire, love and adore America! Ours is a history of being conquered, tamed, oppressed, exploited and dominated. Where is the God who acts in history? And how is history in our land being made right now?

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There is the seemingly interminable conflict in Mindanao—where politician and military commanders make their fortunes and earn their stars, but where poor, simple folk suffer and made victims of war. There is the reign of greed, hypocrisy, and deceit in national politics where the high and the mighty hold the levers of wealth and power and the common people are worked to the bone for a mere pittance. The harmonies and stabilities of society are no longer supported by the people’s will but by legal chicanery and force of arms. What is God doing in Philippine history?

We, as the faithful of the church, do believe that God, in spite of all the deep moral and deformations of our history, is at work in such a human, all-too human process with all of its sin and evil. But what is God doing and where is God at work? The Bible tells us that there is a divine-human synergy that is at work in history; it is the power for liberation that we see in all stories of liberation from the Exodus to Golgotha. This is the theological reality that we have to see, study and plunge in. We have to be clear about the God we believe in and know what evil makes our history sick and miserable. God calls us to join his struggles in history. It is our hope that within the next quadrennial we will achieve some clarify about where the God we worship and adore is at work, and render our obedience to him right there.

THE ACT OF DISCERNMENTThe eyes of faith

How come the prophets and other Biblical writers see God at work in history and other great and perceptive minds do not? What kind of eyes to they have? Does theological thought have any special kind of inquiry in the workings of the divine in history; or is there something really tangible concretely real that truly makes changes in history that the eye of faith sees. Moses had his “burning bush’ experience that transformed from a fearful fugitive from the Pharaoh’s wrath to a courageous leader of his people. Isaiah also had his experience of the holy in the temple that compelled him to go through a thorough moral and spiritual cleansing and became a prophet of profound discernment in the history of God’s people. We can look at the disciples of Jesus too, who were rather ordinary and simple folk who became the nucleus of the church’s mission after the ascension. And there is Paul, the greatest theologian of the church, who from being an aggressive persecutor of the followers of the way, became the chief follower himself after his conversion experience.

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What vision was vouchsafed to them? Is this vision a reality and a force that can be made ingredient in history to prevent it from plunging resolutely into a cauldron of human misery and death? What is the historical reality that became the bearer of God’s liberating activity? What kind of insight do the gospel writers have that they reported something self-transforming, earth-sharing, and life renewing and empowering in the ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ? To see what they saw is to have the eyes of faith

Jesus Christ

At the center of our faith is an event in history—the ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We have to look deep into the meaning of the coming of the human and the divine in Christ and see what it means for us as we plunge into our own history to render obedience to God’s will therein. We have to look into the kind of ministry that Jesus had and find out what compelling ideas and actions he practiced in doing his ministry. We have to look at the crucifixion—why an absolutely evil form of judgment and execution can become the symbol of the faith of justice, mercy and love. We have to look at the resurrection and see why this event that secular eyes cannot perceive as historical imbues believers with the faith, courage and power to carry on the mission of God in the world.

Kairos—the fullness of time

The New Testament speaks of “the fullness of time,” which assumes a certain understanding of a divine ordering of history wherein a kind of ripeness appears when something liberator and revelatory event happens. It is possible to discern the moving mystery that makes us human within the matrix of history? What does the fullness of time reveal? That God is at work in history but with varying intensities—rather smooth and muted at certain times, and revolutionary and dramatic in others? Do they require different forms of obedience from us? Of course we are aware that great theologians in the past and the present speak of history as a linear progression from a specific beginning that moves to a middle—which is a prolepsis anticipation of the end—and finally to the end time that ends history and inaugurates the kingdom of God. How and where do we locate our space within such a historical line of God’s redemptive activity? Or shall we go back to a cyclical understanding of time where all historical points are equidistant to the center which is the source of their power and meaning? Is it possible to look for the cerotic moment in Philippine history—are we right three now? How do we participate in bringing that cerotic moment? Or do we just wait and see?

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Tools of socio-political analysis may help us understand what our critical problems in our history are: how they developed, what sustains them, where their power lies, and where they are going to lead us. Marxist analysis of society has been a tremendous force among the young and the radical intelligentsia now for many years; some say that the Marxists vision of reality is but a secularized version of the Gospel perspective---what ideas do they share in common and where to they diverge? We must remember that socio-political theories do have their own full understanding of things and we have to be careful about bringing in the assumptions, their methodology and vision for the future as well.

The act of obedience

Our theme is not designed to enable us to have an understanding of how God acts in history. Its primary intent is to lure us into acts of obedience to the will of God who is at work in history, and be bearer of the divine grace, liberation, healing and reconciliation. It is in the act of obedience that we, the disciples of Christ, can have a personal and real encounter with him—not merely in the world of prayer and spirit, but in the concrete, harsh, pitiless world of history where the real wrestling of humans with one another take place and where grace passes judgment or librates?

Obedience demands repentance; a radical about face, a turning of the self inside out; in fact, a sincere denial of the self that the spirit and power of the Christ may enter in. There is so much that we should be in deep repentance for. We may have borne the Gospel for the fame, influence and power it may give to our persons, and not because of God’s demand to pursue His kingdom and its righteousness. We may have born the gospel insincerely—to make us look good and acceptable to the eyes of the world. We may have accommodated the values and ways of being of the world into the life of the church and our other institutions, and we are hardly aware of it. We may be articulating the Gospel to prop up ways of being that are oppressive and exploitative of people—and think that we are preaching the good news. We have to go into a deep exploration of our acts of unfaithfulness, careless theological musings, and embrace of new and titillating ideas that work against the spirit of Christ.

We cannot make ourselves morally and spiritually clean; it is the grace of God in Christ that brings that about in us – God’s action in Christ to liberate us and transform us. We must totally and sincerely accept, and surrender ourselves to Christ, for us to become new beings in Christ. We do not seek perfect moral rectitude, but simply an honest and sincere acceptance of the gracious offer of our Lord, and we trust that he would empower and give us the courage to go out into

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the world and render our obedience to him. What God in Christ give us is a ‘new being,”—that is entirely the work of grace, and it is out of that new being that real courage to be springs forth that has the power to participate in what God is doing in history.

The form and dynamics of our obedience is spelled out by the apostle Paul in his letter to the Philippians. The form of Christ is his abandonment of his divine right and privileges which speaks of his mercy and his love, and his dynamics is his total identification with sinful and broken humanity as he took up their cause and fought against the powers that oppress and exploit them. We should go deep in study and meditation on this Philippians verse and discover what forms of obedience we should render to our Lord in these critical times.

We should also go into a study of the Gospels—focusing on the ministry of Christ and discover how he positioned himself with respect to the political formations of his time that do correspond to our own: he stood in opposition to the establishment, he was definitely not with the Scribes and the Pharisees who were his tormentors, neither was he with the purist Essenes, and he rejected the way of the Zealots, the armed revolutionaries. So where in the political stream can we locate the comrades of Christ in the current struggle for justice and peace in our society? Jesus definitely moved in the direction of God’s kingdom in his ministry: where in our contemporary struggle might that be?

Behold I am doing a new thing, can you not see it?

The UCCP has traditional and varied ministries some of which have become controversial. Perhaps, one of the problems of our church, and other church groupings as well, is that they are deeply moving in the same groove in their traditional ministries. We go into evangelism, engage in various forms of mission, and even plunge into newer ones, and we do them routinely that by the dint of constant repetition we may be missing the whole point of mission. In fact, evangelism was encouraged by the Marcos regime inasmuch as he believed evangelism, would divert the energies of people to the building of his new society and away from revolutionary pursuits! We ought to see what new thing the Lord is doing in our midst.

The prophet Isaiah speaks for the Lord, and says, “Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not see it?” (Isa. 43:19) and the old order of things that have decreed the harmonies an stabilities of life have become not only boring, but oppressive and exploitative. Market forces which were deemed the great

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democratic engine of modern economics now largely serve the interests of the high and the mighty and are oppressive and exploitative of the poor and the weak— and God takes the side of the lowly and the nothing, so something breaks forth right in our midst.

It used to be that gays and lesbians are the popular whipping boy of society—they are made objects of ridicule, derision and fun, and largely marginalized in the ways of being of civilized society; and society has been quite oblivious of the rare kind of gift and genius so many of them harbor in their being. Some of their pairings issue in novel as well as noble ways of human togetherness that give the lie to the old and jaded way of looking at them with scorn and superciliousness.

Women have long been marginalized in our society; they are the invisible ones—they toil for long hours without recompense and yet are not given their rightful due. Social values and restrictions have denied them the right to fully explore their potentialities as human beings and are socially condemned to play what is considered as distaff roles in society. Something new is springing forth from the ranks of women; something that exposes the pride and ego of men, that exposes their weaknesses, but something that releases the energy, genius and vision of women.

For far too long, Christians have believed and behaved that their faith is the truth, and is the absolute truth, and all other religions are vain human attempts of getting at the truth and that they are a fertile ground for Christian evangelism. But there have been authentic human realizations of grace and goodness within non-Christian communities with such spirits as Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, the Buddha, Confucious and so many others beside whose personal lives a lot of Christians are put to shame. It is the height of hypocrisy and blindness not to recognize sucn authentic human spirits and to wonder whether the God we worship does not in fact make the divine self present in other religions. Then there is the contemporary “clash of civilizations’ underneath which are two ways of being in society each with a compelling vision for the future, that instead of exploring ways to peace have devoted their energies to the ugly task of mutual domination. A triumphant gospel is in violation of the kenotic passage in the Philippians—and so the aboriginal form of Christ, breaks out again and comes out as new! There is a need to engage in an honest dialogue wit other religions and discover ways by which religious plural communities can rise to mutual understanding, camaraderie and peace.

There are many more; and we should venture forth into that exciting territory where the Gospel allows us to perceive the new things God is doing. What kind of

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reflections can we see in the EDSA events—was our God at work there, or was it a purely human event without any divine participation? If there is, is this not a new thing?

Reflection on acts of obedience

We are journeying with God; Christian communities are not static forms of fulfilled humanity, but are communities of struggle against sin, evil, and all their forms as they move on towards the coming kingdom. Our acts of obedience while they are acts that serve others and fulfill us are also veritable encounters with our Lord wherein we are given a deeper understanding of ourselves, God’s mission and our God.

In this final phase of the quadrennial, we will look at our acts of obedience in the past years—even the years beyond our present quadrennial well into the years long gone, and see new dimensions of meaning of self and world as well as new forms of obedience that may be lurking in them, and if indeed, we experience being changed into the likeness of Christ from one degree of glory to another.

In the bible we see a spiral development upward of the theological-spiritual consciousness of the people of God; from henotheism to radical ethical theism, from triumphalism to being a light to the nations through a suffering servant-hood, from an unbridgeable distance between God and human beings to their oneness in Christ, from an exclusivity of salvation in Christ, to a loving kindness that springs from the human soul.

In an age of religious pluralism, how do we do our evangelistic work? Is syncretism the new thing, or shall we go into a new kind of religious ecumenism that does not bring together various forms of belief into one systematic corpus, but allows each faith to stand on its own uniqueness and essence and engage in a dialogue and sharing of what each religion has.

What about worship and liturgy? Far too much cloistered liturgical forms of worship has been done through the years and still is being done, and perhaps God is calling us to worship and God where ‘cross the crowded ways of life” such as we find in people demonstrations for justice, freedom and peace which are also ways of overcoming the denominational barriers of the ecclesia that separate and alienate us from our brothers and sisters who worship the same God. God’s people’s people at worship could also be an expression of God’s people of a vision of a new socio-political order, or God’s people struggle against an undemocratic military regime like

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what we now have in our land. Then worship will really be alive and a force in giving obedience to God’s will.

Looming large in our lives now in God’s creation, as Paul says, “the whole of creation has been groaning in travail,”—the apostle may have meant something different from what we now experience wherein the relentless drive of human beings for power and profit has been inflicting irreparable damage to creation’s life sustaining powers. God calls the whole humankind together to help restore creation as the physical basis of God’s covenant wit those who have surrendered themselves to Christ. There is an imperative need to devise new life-styles that would take mute and silent creation into the exciting journey towards the kingdom of God. We have to find out what these possibilities might be.

As we reflect upon our encounters with God in our acts of obedience, we have to see what developments take place that reveal the new thing that God is doing. How do we interpret the EDSA events? We may be on to something quite theological novel here that could lead to new ways of Christian discipleship. Do we see a theological development in the Biblical story—or is the theological self-understanding of the Bible unchanging from Genesis and Exodus to Revelation?

If there has been a change, what is it? Is it the relation between God and human beings? Are they so absolutely different essentially from one another—or is there a basic kinship and affinity between them such that in the world of history you cannot have one without the other? This is a critical question in looking upon ourselves with respect to our obedience to God’s will in history.

Levi V. OracionFor the Faith and Order CommissionWinterheimer and RoviraDumaguete CitySeptember 8-9, 2009

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