Lectionary Reflection for Easter 3A on Psalm 116:1–4, 12–19

THE TRANSACTIONAL TREADMILL

In the last few decades, I have become increasingly aware of the transactional nature of the faith in which I was raised. Despite growing up in the Methodist Church, the foundations were the standard evangelical emphases of the penal substitution theory of the atonement, the need for “making a decision for Christ”, and the conviction that God responded to unwavering faith and unquestioning obedience. In this framework, God answers prayers when we “ask in faith, without doubting”. Because “whoever doubts is like the surf of the sea, tossed and turned by the wind. People like that should never imagine that they will receive anything from the Lord” (Jas. 1:6–7).^¹ And if our prayers are not answered (in the sense that God gives us what we want), it’s because our faith is too small or weak, there is sin in our lives, and/or we have not been faithful in giving God our tithes.

This transactional perspective also shaped my work in pastoral ministry. I was taught to identify people’s “felt needs” and preach sermons that would meet those needs, while creating a worship experience that would attract people and satisfy whatever they felt made a service “good”. Over the years, Church has increasingly become a “market-driven activity, shaped and defined exclusively by the perceived desires of the progressive church-going consumer”.² To do church, then, meant creating a transaction in which people would be willing to exchange their time, energy, and money for a desirable religious product—and success was measured by “bums on pews” and money in the bank.

For many of us, personal and collective faith is defined by this transactional religious system, which fits comfortably into our capitalist, transactional world. But it has the same consequences as the rest of our transactional culture: the constant need to perform, the relentless fear of failure, the ever-present risk of burnout, and the inability to relax and enjoy our lives and relationships because we are always measuring, judging, and conforming to fit in and succeed.

Today we are also witnessing a much more sinister result of building our faith and lives on the transactional treadmill. You can draw a straight line from a transactional faith to a transactional church to a Christian nationalism which believes that God is honoured when Christians “gain influence or ‘take dominion’ over seven key areas of culture: religion, family, education, government, media, business, and the arts”.³ It is this quest for dominion, rooted in the conviction that Christians who wholeheartedly believe and obey (a transactional) God will prosper in this life and be richly rewarded in the next, that has given rise to Trumpism, the MAGA movement, and all of the political, economic, and military chaos that plagues us right now.

One of the great scandals of Jesus’ message and mission is that he was the opposite of transactional. He forgave people without them asking or promising to change. He refused to participate in the transactional systems of his day. When challenged for breaking the sabbath by performing healings, he turned the system on its head, declaring that the sabbath was created for us—to set us free—and we were not created for it—to be imprisoned and controlled by it (Mark 2:27). In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus revealed that God is not a transactional God, and that the reign of God is defined by non-transactional grace, welcome, inclusion, and justice. But of course, those who challenge and seek to opt out of the dominant, transactional system of our world pay the price, and Jesus was executed as a political revolutionary.

You don’t have to be a follower of Jesus to experience the pain and stress of living in a transactional society. We all suffer under the pressure of constant performance, the loneliness of needing to balance the scales in every interaction and relationship, and the constant demands of ‘tit-for-tat’ justice. In response to all of these stressors, many of us live in chronic ‘fight-or-flight’ mode, our sympathetic nervous systems on constant alert with few or no opportunities to slow down and allow our parasympathetic nervous systems to calm and comfort us. Over time, all of this chronic stress takes a toll on the body—it is not just a spiritual and psychological problem; it literally threatens our biological health.⁴ But when our bodies and souls start to reveal the unsustainability of our culture, and we begin to resist those who benefit from keeping us bound in a transactional way of being, we will often find ourselves rejected, insulted, accused, and even punished. And that’s when we need a way to rest, restore, and reorient ourselves in the midst of the transactional treadmill.

FINDING RESTFULNESS

In this Easter Season, we speak a lot about Christ’s resurrection and how he returned to life after his death. For some theological purists, the definition of resurrection begins and ends there. But from a biblical, theological, and experiential perspective, it makes more sense to view the resurrection of Christ as an archetype of all the ways human beings are robbed of life and find ways to recover their vitality. Healthy faith is an essential ingredient in this quest for fullness of life, and as Sam Harris notes, “A review of the psychological literature suggests that mindfulness in particular fosters many components of physical and mental health: It improves immune function, blood pressure, and cortisol levels; it reduces anxiety, depression, neuroticism, and emotional reactivity”.⁵

While I recognise that Sam Harris would probably baulk at the way I am about to frame this, I am convinced that we all have an inherent longing to experience ourselves and our world as sacred,⁶ and our quest for a sacred life is a strong antidote to the chronic stress that our transactional society imposes on us. I find myself increasingly speaking about the need many of us feel to “weave a sacred life”, and I suggest that there are four primary threads that make up our “sacred weave”: science, scripture, spirituality, and sacred practice. Psalm 116:1-4, 12-19, which is included in the Lectionary for Easter 3A, offers a profound and poetic vision of how these four threads can be woven together and how they can lead us into the resurrection of sacred rest in a world that constantly leads us to physical and mental exhaustion.

At first glance, the psalm may seem to be nothing more than another reflection of transactional faith. It starts with the writer declaring, “I love the Lord because he hears my requests for mercy” (116:1 CEB). Then later, the psalmist asks, ”What can I give back to the Lord for all the good things he has done for me?“ (116:12 CEB) and follows this up with two promises to “pay my vows to the Lord” (116:14, 18 NRSV). On the surface, these words seem closely aligned to the transactional language of so many contemporary churches. But of course, the psalmist didn’t live in our modern, transactional world, and a closer look reveals that there is something deeper and more intimately relational going on here. And so, using my four words as a framework, I invite you to explore this Psalm as a guide to finding restfulness in our restless and stress-inducing world.

THE FOUR THREADS OF A SACRED LIFE

Science

Having explored the biological, psychological, and spiritual impact of our transactional world and the destructive dysfunction it has created, we begin by exploring the psalmist’s experience. Verse 3 describes some kind of trauma, crisis, or struggle that the writer faced: “The snares of death encompassed me; the pangs of Sheol laid hold on me; I suffered distress and anguish” (NRSV). There are hints here of the fight-or-flight response kicking in, but by crying out to God, the psalmist chooses to be open to the divine presence and the sacredness that still permeates the world.