Sunday, January 26, 2014

Origin of the Church? Christian Befriending

3 Epiphany A      January  26, 2014
Is. 9:1-4         Psalm 27:1, 5-13
1 Cor. 1:10-18    Matt. 4:12-23
  When something is successful, there ensues this curiosity about the causes for that success.  We want to do a forensic analysis of success so that we might understand the ingredients of why things come to happen.  We cannot help but be curious about success.  This past week we had the 30th anniversary of the Macintosh computer and so now historians and biographers look back at the circumstances which brought about its development.
  I think that sometimes we project back upon the history of the church this sense that the persecuted church was not very strong and was struggling for its very existence.  I have come to think differently; I think the early church leaders were very excited and they realized that the message was very successful in forging community in an unstoppable way.   The Gospel program was becoming a sweeping social force in the cities of the Roman Empire but it was a stealthy force.  The churches built upon this social force of the Gospel began to be built in the private spaces of houses in the cities of the Roman Empire.  It was so successful and it morphed in so many ways that the leaders could disagree passionately about the forms of expression which the Christian message took.  The fact that there is so much early disagreement among Christians is a sign that it had become a social force to contend with in the society-at-large.
  I would contend that it is the success of the message which made all of the institutionalization of Christianity necessary.  When movements are successful they have to be institutionalized for standardization and organization in order to function within different settings and to give some sense of comprehensive unity.  They have to be institutionalized in order for their franchises to become operative in many locations.  In the first century after Jesus of Nazareth one was able to find the great increase in number of many home churches throughout Roman Empire.
  When success happens one needs to account for that success through tracing the origins.  But in trying to trace the story of origin, one uses those stories as the method to further spread the influence of the social movement.  You should embrace the Gospel because look what it has done for so many people in so many place.  And this is why it happen.
  The season of the Epiphany is a season dedicated to mark the historical fact that Christ and the Gospel became known across the Roman world.  How did this happen?  It is as though a great light shown in the world and began to change the world because new things were now being able to be seen.
  A great light has shown.  What is the source of this light?   And how has this light kept shining with a continuous brightness?  And so we have origin stories about the source of this light, Jesus Christ.  And we also have origin stories about the source of the continuing transmission of this light in the calling of Christ to his disciples and in the birth of the church.
  The Gospels provide us with the infancy narratives and the record of the ministry of Jesus to give an explanation account of the source of this great Christian social movement.  The light did not just get limited to Jesus of Nazareth; he was able to transfer this light to his disciples.  They were able to transfer this light to subsequent disciples and the movement grew in an exponentially profound way.
  We are often taught that the birth of the church occurred on Pentecost when the message of Jesus was seen to be universally accessible in all of the languages of humanity.  But one can trace the history and the origin of the church to something very basic, namely, befriending which took place between Jesus and his friends and students.  As their teacher, he was more than a teacher; he was an intimate mentor and friend and in the befriending dynamic which took place between Jesus and his disciple the transmission of the social and spiritual energy of the church occurred.  And it has been occurring forever.
  This befriending dynamic is the origin of the church and it accounts for the success of the church and it will be present in the future success of the church.  Where befriending occurs in our life orientation toward God, there we will find the essence of Christ;  there we will find the essence of the church.
  The church has institutionalized this befriending in the person and office of a bishop.  A bishop stands as a symbolic person of the fellowship and befriending behaviors of Christians with each other in our world today.  But a bishop also stands as a symbol of the fact that Christ-like befriending has been passed from one generation of Christians to another.  A bishop does not exhaust the essence of Christian befriending; a bishop’s symbolic personage reminds us that befriending with Christ is the birth of the church; it is the secret of the transmission of the Gospel from the past to the present; it is the symbol of our befriending fellowship with one another now and in the office of the bishop laying hands on future bishops, we have symbolized our obligation to pass on to future friends the wonderful gift of Christian befriending.
  The Church happened very successfully because of this universally adaptable Christian befriending.  The church happened because the befriending nature of Jesus of Nazareth caught on and spread and it spread like a wildfire because it was adopted to all times and cultures.
  The befriending nature of Christ continues today.  Churches fight about it. Some churches put limitations upon how they think the Christ befriending behaviors should manifest themselves.  But the Christ befriending winsomeness just keeps rolling on; the befriending Christ befriends many people for whom you and I may not have an affinity; it befriends many people who may have completely different life experiences than the experiences which we have.
  But I would ask us this:  Should we be offended and limiting about the scope and nature of the winsomeness of this wonderful befriending that happens because of Christ?  In our acceptance of our own Christian befriending should we deny the validity and sincerity how it has happened to others?
  At some point every bishop and church leader need to have the humility to admit: Wow! I do not control this Christ-befriending dynamic that is present in this world.  I do not control it even as  I and many others have been swept away by its awesome winsomeness, by it awesome good news.  And God forbid that we get in the way of someone's good news with our petty censoring ways of how we think that good news should be received.
  The birth of the church took place in the call of Christ to his disciple students and friends.  This is the heart of the transmission of the light and good news of Christ in the world.  This befriending turned out to be a wildfire in the Roman Empire and ultimately the entire world had to deal with this befriending dynamic.
  Let us be thankful for the befriending behaviors which we have had particularly those which have given us good news about being loved, being forgiven, being perfectible and being given hope for all of the possibilities of the future, enough to inspire actual choices of faithful behaviors in our lives now.
  Christ is the Light of the world.  We have received this light of Christian befriending and cannot help but let this good news go forth into the future to everyone in our lives with the release of our befriending gift of Christ to all for whom it is intended.  Amen. 

Sunday, January 19, 2014

Curiosity and the Call of Christ

2 Epiphany A      January  19, 2014
Is.49:1-7          Ps. 40:1-10
1 Cor. 1:1-9      John 1:29-41
  One of the themes of the season of the Epiphany, the season of the manifestation of Christ as the light of the world, is the theme of the encounter of Christ, or the call of Christ.  Christ called the disciples and they followed.  As stories it seems rather simple but now we have institutionalized the call of God in Christ to be something that happens to those who end up in the specialized roles of leadership in the church in the ordained ministry or religious life.
  A simple encounter with Jesus cannot get you into ordained ministry anymore, in fact, if one thinks that one has too many actual encounters with Jesus, it often means referral for psychological evaluation.
  The truth of the history of church would indicate to us that the success of the church has many explanations, different explanations because the teachings of Christ have been universal enough to be adopted to many different cultural settings.
  I have recently come to think that the success of the church had to do with the message of Jesus getting out of rural Galilee and into the cities as a social club format for providing the people going through urbanization, identity clubs and socialization advocacy networks within the city.
  If we look at Christianity today, where is it growing the most?  In the Southern Hemisphere.  Some people like to give simple explanations; it is because the people of the Northern Hemisphere have rejected Christ and it is because the peoples of Africa and South America are really the faithful ones to the real truths of primitive and pure Christianity.  At the same time, sociologists would say that the people of Africa are ripe for Christianity and Islam because of the rapid urbanization which is taking place.  People uprooted from tribe and village need identity clubs in the city to introduce them to modernization which has not fully spread its effects to the countryside.
  We should not be offended by the many scenarios for the call of Christ throughout the world or even within Morgan Hill. The call of Christ has been adaptable to many situations and it will continue to be adaptable.  Part of what we are trying to do here at St. John the Divine is to understand more clearly how the call of Christ can be adopted to our situation here.
  In the Gospels we find some insights about the call of Christ.  The call is social in nature, that is, people get referred to Jesus Christ by people they respect.  John the Baptist was respected enough to have his own community of followers.  But the historical record proves that John the Baptist and his community were too parochial, too locally based on the Jordan River.  John’s message could not become an effective message in the cities of the Roman Empire.  So the disciples of John made the transition to Jesus.  Jesus was baptized by John, perhaps his first curate or assistant but John did not let his ego get in the way when he observed the excellence of Jesus.  He referred and recommended his own disciples to Jesus.  They came, they saw and they told their brothers and friends who also came and saw Jesus for themselves.
  You see how origin stories about the call of Christ simplify the subject matter for the purpose of the teaching occasions in the places where the Gospel words were preached and written down.   The location of  John the Baptist and Jesus in the story would have been geographically distant from the people who heard these words in a city in the Roman Empire and the actual geography of the Gospel story would not have had much meaning for the people in cities throughout the Roman Empire..  They weren’t written to be geography, they were written to explain the dynamics of the call to Christ which was engaging people who were drawn to these new Christian clubs called churches.
  The call for you and me here today is still both an individual and social thing.  Many Christians in America and in Europe have experienced the material abundance of our cultures and so we do not have socialization crisis in our lives.  We can be more independent units and pick from an entire array of clubs and groups to find the kind of fellowship that we want to advocate our values in our society.  But in other places and in other times the church has been the dominant social force for people who are trying improve their life in a new place.
  In the Roman Catholic Church today, you have one sector of the church who find significant identity because of the Catholic educational institutions stretching from elementary through very fine universities.  They find identity in such “catholic” cultural expression of higher education and Notre Dame Football and Jesuit Universities' basketball.  The attendance of the Catholic church would be down in the United States except for immigrant peoples who arrive and struggle for a new start but who find attending Mass to be a significant factor in the process of setting down roots and getting established and finding friends and advocates in a new place.  The church is a place to meet "expats" who speak the native language and the church provides the meeting space to foster the identity of immigrants in the United States as their new location.  People who have been here from birth do not need the parish church to function in the same way for them.
  The call of Christ involves for you and me the significant self-love of curiosity.  Curiosity is being drawn to a vision of who I am and what I can do and become in the future.  People like Jesus had such mentoring charisma that people said, “I don’t know what I really want to be, but I do know that I want to be more like that man Jesus in the art of living.”  The call is the same today.  It is successful dealing with our curiosity about who we can become in the future as we are informed by examples of excellence.
  At St. John’s today you and I are in this process of being called but also being the voices of Christ as ones who are doing the calling.  We are possessed with curious self-love to want to surpass ourselves in a future state by seeking out mentoring examples, but at the same time we are to be the voice of Christ and the helping hands of Christ that are used to call others because ironically, we are to be examples to others and each other to improve our art of excellent living.
  Let us continue to be curious about the next phase of our call towards excellence.  But let us also make ourselves available to be watched by others so that something of Christ can reflect from us to others in their own unique phase of responding to Christ.
 Today, let us re-commit ourselves to making our parish a place where this dynamic of the call of Christ to us and through us happens in only the way it can happen through us.  May we all continue in the call of Christ today.  Amen.

Sunday, January 12, 2014

Jesus, Superman, Baptism and Christian Clubs

1 Epiphany A      January  12, 2014
Is.42:1-9         Ps. 89:20-29
Acts 10:34-38     Matt. 3:13-17


  Long before the digital world took over, some of us grew up in the high literary culture of comic books.  The hero of heroes of the comic book culture was Superman.  The author of this story obviously borrowed from the biblical story.  Kal-El is sent hurling through space in an escape capsule by his father Jor-El from the planet Krypton and he lands in Kansas and is adopted and though he is from Krypton, he is Earthly enough to become known as the mild mannered Clark Kent.  He progressively becomes aware of his other-worldly powers even as he hides them in the earthly human Clark Kent.  As the mild-manner newspaper reporter he is situated to be aware of the circumstances where heroic interventions are required.
  The comic book literary experience of the hero genre was engaging to us.  We, the readers, were the privileged insiders as to the full identity of Clark Kent, while those in the story, Perry White, Jimmy Olson and Lois Lane and all of Metropolis were kept in the dark.  The authors let the readers know what the characters in the story do not know.  The hidden incognito hero story-line is a story line that has been repeated in successful comics and cinematic presentations many times over.
  A story reader knows that the ignorance of people in the story is much more profound than any current ignorance in our lives now.  What is the story line of admitting what I don’t know now?  What I don’t know about other people now has no context for me to even talk about.  What I don’t know now will only have engaging meaning in hindsight when I find out what was truly was happening when I was ignorant.
  This is the genius of narrative and story.  The reader gets to read about the past with knowledge that the original characters are portrayed as not having.  This illusion of art is what makes it so embracing.
  Narrative is how the Gospel was told because the Gospel writings were forging the identity of a club of people who were gathering to survive their lives lived within the Roman Empire.  Urbanization was a fact of the Roman Empire.  Nomadic people and people who were forced into exile were people who needed to have smaller group identity to negotiate their identity within the cities of the Roman Empire.
   The baptism of Jesus is a story about his initiatory rite into humanity.  The encompassing of   humanity by the divine is the story of Jesus.  Kal-El appeared earthly enough to pass as Clark Kent.
  Jesus is the hero whose identity is known and revealed and told in progression by the Gospel writers.  These writers were providing something like we, young boys felt when we received a crisp new Superman comic book, that we secreted away in our secret club or secret fort and we felt special in that club in the midst of the outside world of parents and teachers and all other authorities.
  The Christian Clubs in the Roman Empire gave people an identity.  The Christian Clubs had an initiatory ritual known as baptism.  With baptism you began that progressive incorporation into the Christian Club and this would give you an extended family to help you negotiate your existence within the Roman Empire.  The Roman Authorities were visible enough through soldiers and authorities to be threatening to those who did not have authority; the Roman authorities were not omnipresent enough to completely take over private lives and in those private lives one had to learn to practice lodging behavior to survive.  Old family, tribal and clan systems often broke down in the cities and so the function of the Christian Clubs within the city became formidable in the lives of the members of these Clubs, these churches.
  Modern society has changed the church.  Church has come to have a more compartmentalized specialty.  We have made the church into such a holy and special gathering of people, it has become somewhere we don’t want to go very often, maybe but an hour occasionally, but then we want to retreat to our man-caves or women salons and do the really clubbish things which excite us, like watching the 49ers or all of the other exciting things that we apparently don’t find in church.
  I would submit to you that these early churches were very engaging entertaining clubs which provided significant social function for the people drawn to join them.  Churches used to command a larger role in the socialization process of belonging.  Christians were a bit secretive in the Roman Empire because one did not want to be too open or visible to raise any question about any possible political opposition to the Emperor and his surrogates.
  Gospel stories and literature were the art of the community; it was entertaining art; it was initiatory art.  In the Gospel literature a member of a Christian Club was a privileged reader who had special knowledge about the resurrection appearances of this hero Jesus.  But in knowing end of the story, the reader could relive in engaging excitement all of the human limitations which this hero took upon himself.
  The Gospel writings and other letters and writings were passed around and received with excitement in these “club” churches.  Christians met and had this incredible social identity club into which they were initiated by baptism.  Why baptism?  Because Jesus himself was baptized.  And because Jesus had surpassed John the Baptist and because many of the followers of Jesus had come from the community of John the Baptist, it was important to hear it said that John recognized the excellence of Christ.  But at the same time, the risen hero Christ, accepted his complete solidarity with humanity in locating himself within a specific community led by John the Baptist. 
  The risen Christ, the super-human being, was also Jesus of Nazareth in all of his limitations. 
  There is always a logical problem in hero stories.  If Superman is great enough to catch criminals and people who are falling from buildings, shouldn't he also have been great enough to prevent the necessity of the rescue in the first place?  That is the same problem which the Gospel writers had to deal with….yes Christ is really great and super and wonderful but at the same time God and God’s super One did not exercise the preventive efforts to make salvation and rescue and healing unnecessary.  It is the difference between asking God to prevent illness and asking God to heal us when illness has happened.  So the super hero cannot be so super as to avoid most of the consequences of freedom in this world.  The super hero has to be great enough to surf the waves of true freedom in this world and even the freedom that brings the phenomenon of death.
  The Gospel writings within the early church clubs gave their members an initiatory inculcation into the group values.  The Gospel clubs recount the story and the meaning of the story of Jesus their hero.  Jesus was God becoming initiated into full humanity within a ritual such as baptism so that men and women might be baptized or initiated into the realization of the divinity, the eternal spirit nature that has to be released or energized in order to experience the Higher Power of God’s Spirit to change one’s life.
  You and I today want to be initiated into the divine; you and I want to be initiated into the Sublime.  You and I want to know that our lives are touched by a Higher Power of delicious purpose.  Since we have the freedom to worship, we don’t have to do it in secret clubs with just a few writings to read like the monthly comic books in my young boys club or like the few early writings which were passed around in the early Christian communities.  Because of the acceptance of the church in our society, we have relegated the church to a compartmentalized spiritual category and we say it is holy and special; but then we go elsewhere for the other fun and social identity of our lives.
  I am trying to make the point of the relevance of the Risen Christ and the Gospel and the Church to our entire lives.  It is not a special compartment; the risen Christ can be in the places where we are finding our secret sublime fun, if we will simply allow Christ to be connected with all of the sublime and wonderful experiences of our lives.
  Baptism is not being initiated into church life; it is a celebration of birth into abundant life itself, God’s life, because we live and move and have our being in God.   Baptism is the invitation to  hear the Great Within cry to you and me, “You are my beloved son and daughter.  With you I am pleased.”  To hear these words within us is the experience of profound affirmation to be, to love, to search, to discover, to wonder, to find goodness, to express as much of the possibilities of hope through faithful acts and deeds.
  Can we see how excited people must have been in these early Christian clubs within the cities of the Roman Empire?  Can we appreciate the identity that they received from initiation into the Risen Christ?
  Can we be honest about how our parish functions in our own lives now?  The parish may not have the same impact in our lives as those early Christian clubs but can we liberate the message from being but a sacred compartment on Sunday, and understand the reality of baptism being our initiation into the life of God, who has said to each of us in the loudest silence of our souls, “You are my son and daughter, with you I am well pleased.”  Amen. 

Sunday, January 5, 2014

The Magi, Christocentric Judaism and the Pizza Effect

2 Christmas A January 5, 2014
Jeremiah 31:7-14   Ps 84:1-8
Eph. 1:3-6,15-19a Matthew 2:1-12


   Today is the last day of Christmas and tomorrow is the Feast of the Epiphany.  And on the twelfth day, according to the song, your true love gave to you twelve Lords a leapin’.  If you’ve ever watched the House of Lords in session on the telly, you would find that hard to believe.  It’s more like twelve Lords a sleepin’.
  What the lectionary gives us on the twelfth day of Christmas and the Second Sunday after Christmas is the story of the magi who came from the East to visit the Christ Child.
  To understand the literary function of the magi story, it might help us to understand something about the Jesus Movement and the Christ communities of the first ten decades after Jesus lived on this earth.
  To give us a sense of the situation, I would like for us to consider a culinary phenomenon which also could be viewed as a metaphor for sociological process.  I would call it the pizza effect.  Though Italy gets credit for the name, flat bread or open pie with spices and various sauces on top can be found almost everywhere and in many places in antiquity.  Pizza probably derived as a food of the masses; it was a quick way to bake flavored flat bread.  It was vendor portable and so could be hawked on the streets quite easily.  It was so basic that one could put on it whatever happened to be in the larder on the day.  It was so basic and so good it traveled with the nomadic communities wherever they went.  Pizza underwent a major paradigm switch because of those Americans; tomatoes and tomato sauce and paste derived from the Americas and were taken back to Europe and tomatoes have become so much a part of the pizza tradition that it is hard for Americans to even think about pizza without tomato sauce, even though pizza has lots of varieties without tomato sauce.  Today, each American city brags about having the best and most authentic pizza.  And Chicago hails deep dish pizza and New York retorts, “Fuhgeddaboudit. Pizza has to be flat and skinny.”  I don’t think that there are any American pizza chains in Italy but there are some pizza makers there who cater to American deviant pizza taste.  It is rather presumptuous for Americans to make authentic pizza claims in Italy.
  The Jesus Movement experienced its own dynamic something like the pizza effect.   Jesus was a populist rabbi within the Judaic tradition; an apocalyptic rabbi who had a sense that great changes were going to come to his world.
    He was not around for those changes.  Jesus of Nazareth was not around after about the mid-thirties.  And the first New Testament writings did not occur until the mid-fifties with the writings of the man who was associated with perhaps the greatest paradigm shift in the history of the Jesus Movement.  St. Paul was involved in this paradigm shift.  It was a shift that was more profound than the effect of tomato sauce in the history of pizza.  St. Paul, a rabbi, noticed that Gentiles became infused with the Spirit of Christ and that they manifested obvious moral and spiritual changes in their lives; and they did not even have the benefit of circumcision and they did not keep the Jewish calendar nor did they observe the dietary rules.  They had the evidence of spirituality without the identity markings of Judaism.  So Paul had to rethink what the community of Jesus Christ would be like in the cities of the Roman Empire where a variety of people were brought into contact with each other comprising churches or sort of egalitarian social clubs for fellowship within large cities.    Could Jews and Gentiles live together within a community of faith that derived from Jesus of Nazareth?  Could slaves and slave owners actually be friends?  Could men and women have places to meet with social protection and dignity?  What would Jewish followers of Jesus have to give up or to tolerate to receive Gentiles into the community and live together?  Would Jewish followers of Jesus have to sacrifice too many of their religious practices to be able to tolerate living in a community with non-Jewish members?  How can you cook kosher in a kitchen that has already had pork prepared in it with all of the cooking utensils?  It is hard to purify a kitchen with “mixed” use.
  St. Paul represented the universalization of a Christocentric Judaism, a Christ-centered Judaism, within the cities of the Roman Empire.  This Christocentric Judaism which involved accepting Gentile members was political and social in nature; the social reality of the Roman world is that it placed the nomadic populations in proximity with the local residence of the cities.  There was a need for a community; a sort of “home away from home” kind of extended family to help mediate a person’s existence within a city of the Roman Empire.  The Christocentric or Christ-centered Judaism of St. Paul was successful enough to comprise a variety of these home churches to give people social identity centered around a devotion to Christ.  It resulted in helping Jews and Gentiles to live side by side in successful fellowship with one another and it was so successful that this pluralistic community began to pass judgments upon communities that wanted to remain separated..  The synagogues that wanted to retain their Jewish purity of practice began by the year 80 or so to excommunicate followers of Christ.
  We can further note the “pizza” effect in the sociology of early Christianity.  St. Paul’s writings were written before the Gospel writings.   That is not to say that authentic oral traditions of the Gospel did not pre-exist the writings of Paul, but it meant that the oral traditions of the Gospel were edited and written to take into account the coming of the message of Jesus Christ to great success within the Gentile communities.  Just as tomato sauce changed the pizza, Gentile acceptance of Christ changed the appearance and the presentation of the Gospel writings.
  How could the Gospel writers who were Christ-centered Jews, account for the acceptance of Christ by the Gentile community?  Since Gentile Christianity had become as common as tomato sauce on pizza, the Gospel writers had to have origin stories to incorporate the validity of Gentile Christianity.  Where was the origin of Gentile Christianity in Scriptures?  Well it was there from the beginning.  It was there in the Torah and it was in the other writings of the Hebrew Scriptures.
  For St. Paul, the Gentile people of faith were children of Abraham, the father of pre-Hebrew faith.  With Christ, the non-Jewish line of Abraham was let back into the lineage of authentic faith in God.  The Temple was supposed to be a house of prayer for all people.  The Psalmist and the prophet Isaiah wrote that kings of the earth would come and pay homage with gifts for the promised one.  So the magi came to receive kingly identity in Christian tradition.    In telling of the universalization of a Christ-centered Judaism, the story of the magi became an origin story about the drawing of the Gentiles into the community of faith.   The Gentiles traveled long and far from their socio-ethnic background to come under the influence of the Jewish populist rabbi Jesus.  The Gentiles gave their best and their all for the birth of the life of Christ into their lives.  They gave the gold of their life earning; they gave the frankincense of their rising prayers to God and they brought the medicinal myrrh as symbols of health and salvation.
  So the magi story was used by the Gospel writer to explain why the Christ-centered Judaism had come to many people in the cities of the Roman Empire.  They were magi; they were wise because in their wisdom they would not compromise with those like Herod who wanted to limit their faith and their worship to exclusive communities.  The magi refused to participate with the extinction of the message of the Christ Child.
  The Gospel,  much like pizza has in our day, has become a universal phenomenon.  It has morphed and habituated itself to many new countries and situations.  The magi story tell us that there is something so good about the birth of Christ into the world and into us that we are compelled to change our lives toward excellence and share for the cause of this excellence the very best of lives.
  So people, enjoy your pizza today, of any variety but Christ is one greater than pizza and who is offered to us again today under the species of Eucharistic bread and wine.  This perhaps is the greatest culinary spirituality of all.  Come today and partake of the Christ; and bring your best gifts to Christ today.  Amen. 

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