Showing posts with label Sermon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sermon. Show all posts

Thursday, March 28, 2024

Eucharist and Sign Value Crisis

Maundy Thursday March 28, 2024
Ex. 12:1-14a Ps. 78:14-20, 23-25
1 Cor 11:23-32 John 13:1-15


On Maundy Thursday, many Christian churches host "agape" meals as the context for the celebration of the institution of one of the chief sacraments of the Christian Church, the Holy Eucharist.

At such a meal, participants might observe that they are eating real food, as opposed to the "unreal" food that is the normal fare of Holy Eucharist.   We are starkly aware of how divorced the regular practice of Eucharist is from actual home cooked meals, or restaurant eating.

On Maundy Thursday, we bring out the quaint custom of washing feet.  In most of our lives "foot-washing" is not a real social function, it is a once a year liturgical ritual and not without shock factor of seeing leaders acting out humility in washing the feet of another person with a "so-called" lower and different station in life.

The challenge for us on Maundy Thursday is to over come the sign value gap between what is done in liturgy and what we actually do in life.

Part of the problem has been created by the historical success of the Christian movement, to the place of reverse fortunes.  The Christian movement was once an underground and hidden movement within the Roman Empire.  It became the preferred religion of the Roman Empire and subsequent Empires in the world.  It went from being but a few members to becoming automatic cultural membership whereby every born child was passively assimilated into this gigantic culturally tacit paradigm.  The automatic status of being Christian, culturally Christian was noted by the protesting Kierkegaard when he complained, "All of the dogs in Denmark have faith."

The challenge for us today has to do with reinvigorating the connection with chief Christ-like values of what we do in church, but more importantly with what we do when we are outside the church liturgical environment.

Why do we commemorate Maundy Thursday?  We do so because the nascent Jesus Movement thought it necessary to proclaim two prominent values of Jesus Christ, on which the community was founded and through which it would be endlessly perpetuated.

These two values of Maundy Thursday must be connected with life values which are practiced outside of the Maundy Thursday liturgy, and outside all liturgies of the church.

The two values are food for people, and service to one another.

Ponder the great imagination involved in the process of Christ being all and in all.  Jesus took bread and said, my life, my presence does not end at my epidermis, "This is my body and body," he said as he identified his presence with food and drink.  The food and drink is a Christly omnipresence for the life of the people of the world.  And why repeat and remember these words within community?  So to publicly verified that everyone in the community is taken care of in body and soul.  The Eucharistic gathering of the church is the social reality of the church and in face to face gathering people take note that care is given to all present.  One can appreciate how important this was in oppressed and poor communities, namely, seeing that all were having enough to eat.

Along with the hospitality of food provided in a public gathering, the very engine of the survival of the community is exemplified, namely, the continuous reciprocal service of people for each other, no matter what one's social or economic status is.   This is the value that is proclaimed in the "foot-washing" event.  The church, family, and society does not survive without the "ego-checking" service that each person provides for the lives of the members of the community.  As societies become pyramid expressions of lower tiered people serving the greedy and the powerful; the loss of the egalitarian sacrificial service is reduced to be the poor wages given to poor laborers to serve the lives of the powerful, the wealthy, and the greedy.  The foot-washing Jesus Movement proclaims a different kind of value

What do we need most in the churches tonight on this night of Maundy Thursday?  We need the liminal events of the enlightening and empowering Dismissal.  Let us go forth!

The way in which we add authentic connection of the values of our liturgy is when we are empowered to sew these values into the fabric of our lives outside our liturgies.  When we can make sure that the body of Christ is the ample food for everyone who needs food in our world, then we can come to achieve authenticity with our Eucharistic values.   When we can sew sacrificial service for each other into the every day fabric of our lives, then the foot washing liturgy will attain its full sign value.

Let tonight's dismissal send us forth to feed our world, and to spread sacrificial reciprocal service as the true Christly values of Maundy Thursday.  Amen.

Saturday, March 23, 2024

The Passion Accounts; Ignatian Method Before Ignatius

 Palm Sunday/Passion Sunday B, March 24, 2024
Is.45:21-25     Ps. 22:1-11
Phil. 2:5-11   St. Mark’s Passion Gospel


The Ignatius Method is a method of prayer and reflection deriving from one of the founders of the Jesuits, Ignatius Loyola who was born the year before Columbus sailed for America.

The Ignatius method includes a guided meditation and reflection contemplation with vivid visualization and imaginations on the events in the life of Jesus, particularly, his Passion, as a way of experiencing a Christly presence in one's life.  Of course, the Passion accounts were the inspiring textual sources for these exercises.

While we acknowledge the Ignatius Method as significant, we might also observe that the Ignatian Method is but a copy of what was already happening with the writing of the Passion Accounts.  One might say the Ignatius Method is a Practice of a longstanding existing practice.

The Gospels were written methods of the remembrance of Jesus.  They were the spiritual contemplation, reflections, and imaginations in the spiritual methods of the Gospel writers.  The words were guides in the Gospels as discipleship manuals for those being trained in the mystagogy of the Jesus Movement.

Why would I call the Gospels a spiritual method of remembrance?  They were not eye witness historical accounts written contemporaneously when Jesus lived.  They weren't written in Hebrew or Aramaic but in the common koine Greek, a lingua franca that had been in use since the time of Alexander the Great and his successor generals.

The Gospels were spiritual reflections being made accessible to Gentiles who were coming into the early communities of the Jesus Movement.  One can see the Gospels as directed meditations which arose to indicate that the early Christians believed that the Risen Christ could be known to be present again and through word and sacrament.

An important feature of words of Holy Eucharist is the notion of remembrance, or in the Greek anamnesis, which is more than simple remembrance; rather a dynamic remembrance which combines the recited words of Jesus with actions of serving the bread and the wine, and it has the effect of making the presence of Christ known again.

St. Paul wrote his own method of dynamic remembrance when he penned, "I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer l that live, but it is Christ who lives within me."  His remembrance of the crucified Christ is so real that his own identity becomes known to be wedded with Christ.

As we read again the Passion of Jesus Christ today, let us accept these words as the dynamic remembrances of the Gospel writers who like St. Paul were sharing the mystical method of their community in coming to know an identity with the ever current presence of the Risen Christ.

Since so many treat the Passion Accounts more like historical accounts rather than spiritual practice of remembrance of being identified with the Risen Christ now, the result like so much of "church Christianity" is to dwell more on the external features of the person of Jesus.  We can treat the Passion more like the Passion Play theatre or like the graphic cinematic "Passion of Christ."  This can lots of emotions and we might miss the spiritual purpose of the Passion Account, namely, the deep inward personal identity.

In my view, I think we need to return to how the Gospel accounts of the Passion were written.  They were written to be the early method of realizing the presence of Christ through the written words which helped to visualize what identity with the Risen Christ means for us now.

My prayer is that each would approach the Gospel passion account in a mysticism like St.Paul's, as a dynamic remembrance of the Risen Christ, whose realized presence can bring each of us to confess, "I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but it is Christ who lives within me."  Amen.


Friday, March 15, 2024

Continual Covenant, Priestliness, and Transformative Process

 5 Lent   B          March 17, 2024
Jer. 31:31-34      Ps. 51:11-16       
Heb. 5:1-10        John 12:20-33    

Lectionary Link

Our appointed Scripture lessons for today provide us with at least three points for consideration, which I would like to unify in this presentation for some meaningful insights.

First, God is a God of new covenant.

Time means that contractual relationship have to be continually renewed. We always live knowingly or unknowingly in contractual ways: I will do this for you; and you will do this for me and each other. The big contract that we have, whether we know it or not is with God. "I will do this for you God, and whether I regard you or not, I expect this of the great plenitude of life." In fact we could say that the predictability in what we call natural law can be seen as a contract. "If I throw an apple into the air, it will faithfully come down into my hands, given usual conditions." One could say that the entire universe makes a contract with us all of the time. That being said, we know that when it comes to human social behaviors, we are not as precisely predictable as the consistency of natural laws.


In relationship between parties with high degrees of freedom, different times require that covenant with God be articulated differently. Why?  As Joseph Campbell once observed, ancient virtue can become modern vice. Why?  People understand covenant within their limited cultural context.  The former covenants included the tolerance of slavery, subjugation of women, ethnocentric exclusivity, ignorance of recognition of diverse but significant personal identities, and diet limitations. Covenants can be understood to protect exclusive communal identity which in effect locks lots of people out, from being accepted as beloved persons made in God's image.


What does a new covenant look like.  It is a covenant which proclaims the omnipresence of God in all people by an interior law, an interior order. What is the interior order within all people?  It is having language.  It is the image of Christ, who is called Language or Word from the beginning.


Since we are ordered by language in how we speak, write and act; we need forgiveness where we have practiced disorder.  We need our inner scripts corrected by Christ the Word and great playwright of life.  And we need to practice acting out the new scripts provided by the witness of Christ. The new law written upon our hearts is this ordering process toward surpassing ourselves in excellence in future states.


Next, we are called to be priestly because Jesus was priestliness itself.


Jesus was not a Levite, and he was not a priest in the Temple, yet the writer to the letter to the Hebrews declares him to be a priest with a timeless connection to the ancient archetype of priesthood, Melchizedek.


Christ is the priest of God for humanity.  Followers of Christ are called to be priestly.  And followers of Christ have a vocational priesthood for a few designated persons, not to exhaust the priestliness of Christ, but rather to model and call the followers of Christ to their own priestliness.


And what is the nature of that priestliness?  Well, following Christ, it is to be both sacrificial offering, and offerer of that offering.


It is to make our lives of suffering an offering to God on behalf of bettering our world.

This is most poignantly experienced when we quit taking our own suffering as uniquely individual, and accept it as in solidarity with the suffering within our world.  And since we are not our own but belong to Christ, with him we offer our suffering to God because being human is to be subject to suffering as an unavoidable probability of living. 


Accepting our priesthood with Christ, means that we do not pretend to exempt ourselves from the specific requirements of the conditions of our lives which happen to us. Living all our lives as offered to God through Christ is to accept our part in being a member of the kingdom of priest to serve our God.


What does Covenant with God, and accepting our priestly calling require?


Lastly, It requires accepting the time cycles in life as being transformative and redemptive. In the words of Jesus channeled through the Gospel of John, his life was like a seed which falls into the ground and dies. It changes and becomes the sprout, stem, leaves, and fruit.


There will arrive in human existence new circumstances which forces radical change of life/death comparison in appearance and experience. Being in covenant with God with a priestly ministry means that we identify ourselves with the transformative processes encompassing the agony and the ecstasy and we do this with the witness of the Risen Christ providing the hope of a surpassing and reconciling future glory to do the impossible, which will provide us with a convincing meaning of suffering and the purpose of life itself.


Let us be in a renewal of our covenant with God based upon the continuing new circumstances of our lives; let us accept our priestly ministry, of being both victim and priest, those who suffer, and those who offer their sufferings to God in solidarity with the suffering of Jesus and the suffering of the world.


And finally, let us commit ourselves to continual transformation in the cycles of time, as we humbly accept the profoundly difficult transitions, in the hope of being lifted up to future glorious meanings.  Amen.


Saturday, March 9, 2024

Do We Believe God Loves the World?

Lent B March 10, 2024
Numbers 21:4-9 Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22
Ephesians 2:1-10 John 3:14-21


It is said that Einstein's once opined that the most important question in life had to do with a belief in a friendly universe.

Indeed, what do we project upon everything, everywhere, all at once?  Do we project a God involved in the universe with a divine presence, diffusely immanent and omnipresent?  Is divine omnipresence a friendly presence?  How could we know?  

Is the universe but God throwing the dice resulting of an infinite play of probabilities and giving all probabilities a degree of freedom, such that communities of freedom can unite to do collective evil or collective good?

The biblical witness and the Christian witness perhaps frames the Einstein question in a different way with a bit different language.  The biblical witness like the articulation of everything is necessarily anthropocentric because as language users we are limited to human experience.   But we also believe to be human means to partake of the sublimely human and touch the horizon of a deeper connection of all things, the connection we name as the divine presence, which contains us and always engenders a future.

In the biblical witness we posit a divine presence which is the residing place and the cause of the presence of everything, including us.  And we believe that the great Presence responsible for our becoming, made us good, so that we might be on the path of becoming better.  The lure for us becoming better is the lure of the Presence of the One we have come to call Love.

We deal with Einstein's question of a friendly universe by the belief that God is love.  The one who is love is able to make other beings who have the free capacity to also love and be loved.  The act of creation is a love act, and the continuous renewal of everything in time is the labor of the sustaining love of someone who wants every being to become continuously better or part of comprising a better surpassing whole.

One of the most quoted words of the New Testament is from our appointed Gospel.  "God so loved the world...."  So, such an expression is a belief that an omnipresence God is loving everywhere, and what could be more friendly than that?

Einstein, in knowing the potential misuses of scientific discoveries, thought that a friendly universe issue was important as it pertained to the morals and ethics of how we use our science and technology to treat each other.  We know that we have not been enlightened in the practice of friendliness toward each other so as to give everyone an equality in the pursuit of happiness and well-being.  Believing that human beings are mostly unloving and not perfectible in love might make us act as though selfish behavior is the central motivation of life.

If we, like the writer of John's Gospel, believe that God is love, how is such to be known and experienced?  Why does it often seem like God is love is the unknown secret of the universe?

The biblical writers often write about the failure of people to be loving toward God and toward each other.  The people of Israel, who are presented as God's experiment in bringing love to the world, are shown to be people who continually failed to represent a God of love.  The proliferation of the failure to love can seem to be the prevailing trend of life itself.

How does the biblical witness deal with the continual failure of people to love God and each other?  The God who has and will out live all and yet include every other being, is seen to be the best of parent.  God is seen as one who has the duration to forgive and give endless chances for amendment of life to people.

The God of love gave exemplars within human community of how people are supposed to love and be loved.  "God so love the world," that God gave a specific divine child of love to show his brothers and sisters the life of loving and being loved.  Jesus is the example of God not giving up on us and showing us the tolerant loving forgiveness of our parent God who always believes we can get better because we are made in having a genuine freedom to chose in the direction of love.

The Gospel questions for each of us today include: Do we believe that God is a loving presence everywhere in this universe?  If so, how can we and others know?  We can only know by experiencing love from others and passing that love on to others.

And if we believe that God is love, how should we live?  Following Christ, we should always chose love and try to speak and live lovingly with our lives.  Amen.

Saturday, March 2, 2024

The World as God's Temple

3 Lent B March 4, 2024
Exodus 20:1-17 Psalm 19
1 Corinthians 1:18-25 John 2:13-22

Lectionary Link

What is undeniable about the Bible is that it is a collection of texts, a collection words.  And it is evidence of the age when writing arose as technology of memory.  Text was a way of preserving the spoken words of people who had once been present.  A text is also an art form creating stories about people who never existed but were inventions of writers who believe that creation in writing was a way of forming community identity and passing that identity with certain values onto another generation.

The Bible like many of the classics, is revered because of the general paucity of writing in ancient times and the lack of general literacy of ancient people.  It is our task today to look at the words which convey the art of living for ancient people and who provide us not only with their words but with the example of being active language users to promote the very best of what language users should be doing.

In our appointed lessons for today, the famous ten commandments are presented to us.  These words are evidence that people in community were seeking best practices for how they could live together in the very best possible way.  In their wisdom story, they present Moses as a wise medium between the greatness of God and how that greatness could be funneled into human living.  The ten commandments assert that love and justice are the best ways to live in life.  The ten commandments are based upon loving one who perpetually greater than us so that we might then practice love as justice with each other, with parents, spouses, families, property, knowledge, truth, life.  This is accomplished by learning of impulse control, stated as "thou shall not covet."  Namely, if only God is worthy of the profundity of our desire, then from worship we learn to direct our desire to mere enjoyment rather than be driven to harmful addiction.

The appointed Psalm today is in part a poem of praise about the great insight of living in love and justice because of the discovery of the great insight of a law which was founded upon respecting first the one who is greater than us and then living with such loving respect for those who are most like us.

The words of the Bible include a narrative of judgments about the behavior of people when they failed to live up to their highest insight or for when they misused the very notion of being lawful.  If the commandments of loving God and neighbor are great, then so is the precise specification of what laws could mean in all of the specific circumstances of life, in how to wash dishes in the temple, or how to eat, or what is appropriate offerings to present to God.  Certainly every society knows about the proliferation of rules and law, even to micro-manage the cleaning up after our pets in the park.  All kinds of law are good, useful, and functional for community order, but when minor laws are treated with the same respect as the great laws of love and justice, then the priorities of the community can get skewed.  When legalism becomes the only valid use of language, the fullness of human experience is missed.

One might say that philosophy, the love of wisdom, is the great gift of the ancient Greeks to our world.  But what if such wisdom get reduced to saying that something is only meaningfully true if and only if it can be presented in a logical proposition?

When St. Paul had his life completely renovated by a mystical experience, he had to confront some contradiction regarding what was meaningfully true.  Jesus is God's Son, who is the Messiah, who died, reappeared, and is mystically known after he can no longer be seen.  What kind of heroic Messiah is this?  Compared with a Messiah like David, Jesus dying on the cross is a scandal.  Paul's experience also seemed to be logically inconsistent with the wisdom of the Greek as it came to the Roman era. This foolishness is presented in the skepticism of Pilate about to crucify Jesus: "So, Jesus, you are a King?"   St. Paul could have easily pointed to fact that the Greeks and Romans held to their law and logic even while believing in stories of gods and goddesses with quite fickled behaviors and violating all norms of empirical verification.

What St. Paul was showing is that in the mystical experience of love, law and logic must give way to other kinds of meaningful events within the life of people.  He, and others had this mystical experience which changed their lives and it contradicted preconceptions of people who were Jews and Gentiles.

St. Paul and the Gospel writers were trying to persuade regarding meaningful presence of God everywhere, which was made known through the appearance of Jesus Christ.  In the past one could intensively locate the divine in stories of the gods and goddesses, or in meeting places such as temples and shrines, or in revealed writings such as the law.  In St. Paul and in the Gospel, Jesus became known as the unique temple for the dwelling of God in human experience, so that each person could come to know oneself as a dwelling place of God as well.

This is the meaningful and mystical truth of Paul and the Gospel writers who knew themselves to be temples of the God Holy Spirit who proclaimed this as a meaningful experience for everyone.

The Gospel for us today is that if the heavens declare the glory of God, so God's glory can be declared everywhere, and especially within each human being.

This is the witness of Jesus as God's Temple in history, who became the Risen Christ who is able to make everyone today a temple of God's Holy Spirit.  Amen.


Friday, February 23, 2024

Living in the Universality of God

2 Lent B      February 25, 2024
Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16 Psalm 22:22-30
Romans 4:13-25  Mark 8:31-38


It is easy to confess universalism but quite difficult to practice such within our specific circumstances.  The famous cartoon quote of Charlie Brown is insightful about the great tension between good theory and experimental practice of that theory.  Charlie Brown said, "I love mankind; it's people I can't stand."

Great love is inclusive, but our narrow-minded affinities are often very exclusive and limited.  We know that God is love, and God calls us to love all but does that include the people who are thorns in my side?  Does it include our enemies?

One of the goals of St. Paul was to write the Gentiles into salvation history in continuity with the salvation history as found in the Hebrew Scriptures.  The Hebrew Scriptures highlight the tension between the universal nature of God and God's availability to everyone and the conflict of the people of Israel with all of Israel's neighbors, including those who had been pushed from land so that Israel could claim it as their Promised Land.

How can Abraham be the ancestor of a multitude of nations, while the love of God was to be only for God's favorite Israel?  How could the Psalmist implore for all the nations to praise God without specifically inviting them to do so?  How could the Temple be a house of prayer for all people, and yet entrance there not be allowed to all?

The history of salvation is the history of people who believe themselves to be favored by God, not being able to grant that favor with the true largesse of the loving heart of God.

Indeed no group of people has the same largesse of heart of God; and we have to be humble at accepting our limitation and our limited ministry to the people in our lives.

However, the universality of God always invites us to the continual expansion of learning to be more universal and inclusive of more people, even people who are outside our familiar comfort zones.

The writings of St. Paul and the Gospels are about bringing the message of God's love to more people than those who had been adherent Jews of the Temple and synagogue.  The movement of presenting God as being accessible to people who were more than adherent Jews of the synagogue and Temple was controversial.

St. Paul saw the Hebrew Scriptures as a witness to the universality of God for everyone, and for him, it meant that he understood the Gentiles as being pre-figured in the story of Abraham and in the universality of God written about in various parts of the Hebrew Scriptures.

Although the Gospels were written as though they are in the time of Jesus, they really are written from the perspective of people who knew the experience of the Risen Christ 25 to 55 years after Jesus had left the earth.  This is clearly in the Gentile age of the Jesus Movement.

What made the Jesus Movement more universal than the synagogue experience, was the mysticism of the early Jesus Movement.  This movement was based upon the experience of the Risen Christ being a spiritual experience of many people.  The teachings of Paul and the Gospels included a spiritual methodology for taking on an identity with Christ through a visualization of events in the life of Jesus.  One could be "crucified and raised" with Christ as an interior power of identification in the overall program of education, called repentance, meaning literally continual renewal of the mind.

One of the catch phrases of the early Jesus Movement was to take up one's cross and follow Jesus, a dying to one's soul life of former mind to receive a renewed mind, an after mind.  Repentance or metanoia literally means "after mind."  Instead of being a David-like external military messiah, Jesus, as Risen Christ,  was an interior power for the transformation of lives one at a time in the secret place of people's soul.

Taking up the cross of Christ was like the phrase of identity in Pauline spirituality, "I have been crucified with Christ."  St. Paul and the Gospel writers believed in the universal accessibility of knowing identity with the Risen Christ who was the sublime presence of a person knowing oneself as a child of God.

Let us today, as we are shackled with the limitations of our life experiences and fearful unwillingness to recognize God's relevance to everyone, let us acknowledge that the sublime experience of God can come to all and let us acknowledge such God-dignity upon the lives of all today.  Amen.

Friday, February 16, 2024

Lent and Living with Probabilities

1 Lent B      February 18, 2024
Gen. 9:8-17           Ps    25:1-9  
1 Peter 3:18-22         Mark 1:9-13

Holy Scripture sometimes places together in proximity the notion of temptation, trial, and ordeal.

In the Our Father, we pray, "lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil."  Or the contemporary translation, "save us from the time of trial and deliver us from evil."

Temptation, trial, ordeal, and evil have to do with probabilities in life, which for many are unavoidable.

The lessons from Scripture for today, might pertain to some insights about the covenant that we live in with God, each other and with life itself.  The covenant that we live is our baptismal covenant.  And what is this covenant?  It is a strategy within community to live best with the probabilities of life.

The probabilities of life include everything that may happen to us and how does one prepare for such a great task?  What does one desire when faced with many weals and woes of what may happen to us?

We cannot be unrealistic about freedom; freedom is.  Things happen.  And we have only varying degrees of control over what happens to us in life.  So to have a baptismal strategy is prepare ourselves to live with the probabilities in life.

And what do we desire in living with the probabilities in life?

We want good timing.  We want to be doing the right things, at the right time, and in the right way.  This means that we need training, wisdom, and insights about avoiding what is harmful and unworthy.  We also need to be taught about what is good and beneficial to us and those in our life.  And we also need training to know how to bear up when the things over which we have no control confront and afflict us.

Good timing in life is a desirable goal to have, but to find good timing and to have optimal responses to trouble we need to have training and practice.  And this is part of the reason we have the season of Lent.  Because we know that things can go wrong, how do we purposeful deny ourselves so as to be better prepared to face the conditions of unchosen exigent threats.

The reason athletic teams have pre-season extended training periods is so they can simulate actual game conditions in preparation for the possible game events.

What did Jesus actually have to experience in his life?  Rejection by his family, criticism and persecution by religious leaders, being called crazy or mad, being called one who had a demon, being threatened, being called a drunkard, being called a sinner, being called blasphemous, mocked, betrayed by a disciple, denied by his disciple, abandoned by his disciples, tried for false charges, being  flogged, and being crucified.  How could Jesus be prepared for these?

Those who knew Jesus best believed that he was prepared in an ordeal of an extended temptation.  In his interior life, Jesus had to be prepared for everything that was going to happen to him.  The synoptic Gospels give us accounts of the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness, a time like a Vision Quest which would tempt his role in controlling the timing of his life.

Jesus understood that he had to live in God's will, God's timing.  The temptations of Jesus in the wilderness are presented as efforts of that inward accuser to get Jesus to do things in the wrong way, at the wrong time, for the wrong motive.  The result of the temptation was Jesus being true to the timing of God for his life.  He was to eat, he was to attain glory and fame, and he was to die, in God's time and way and not in the timing of the evil one.

Where you and I have freedom, means that mistiming is the chief temptation of our lives.  Lent is a season for you and I to ponder continuously good timing for what we do and say.  If probability is the rule of the freedom of life, then you and I need to have insight and wisdom about where we exercise our freedom in what we do and say.

Lent is a good season of probability training for us.  We can use this time to simulate what might happen to us and prepare for how we can maintain ideal timing in our potential responses.  Prayer, Study, discerning from Scripture strategies of ideal timing, seeking community support, and doing the good preventive work of giving alms; these are ways that we can prepare in constructive ways for living with the vast probabilities of life.

So much of this, like the temptation of Jesus, is interior work, because we have to be inwardly prepared before we take on the details of our mission and work in our lives.

Today, let us continue to pray, "lead us not into temptation, save us from the time of trial, and deliver us from evil,"  but let us also work during this season of Lent to learn good timing in our lives, doing and saying the right things, at the right times, for the right motives, and so progress in our desire to be more Christ-like.  Amen.





Wednesday, February 14, 2024

Ash Wednesday: How Will We Be Recycled?

Ash Wednesday   February 14, 2024
Isaiah 58:1-12 Ps.103
1 Cor. 5:20b-6:10 Matt. 6:1-6, 16-21

Lectionary Link


Did you ever think that before we came to know about atoms and other sub-atomic particles, that a fragment of dust or ashes might have been regarded to be the smallest entity in life?


Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return. The mere observation of the body put on fast forward either through fire or through long decaying in an ossuary, rendered the conclusion that when the bodies breaks into its smallest fragments, it is but a collection of dust. As dust and ashes the body is eventually recycled into the environment over time depending upon the environment into which bodies are disposed.


How should we think about dust and ashes now that we have come to believe in the existence of atoms and sub-atomic particles? What does our delving into the hyper-microscopic world do to our dust and ashes metaphors? And how does our knowledge of atoms and the sub-atomic world affect our understanding of our Ash Wednesday Scripture readings?


The ancient people, like us, knew of the mystery of the unseeable microscopic and the sub-microscopic worlds. They used metaphorical words like heart and spirit to speak about the inner mystery of life within our bodily flesh. The ancient people, like us knew that the flesh has a shelf life, and the flesh has a event of separation of the inside sub-microscopic life of heart, spirit, and soul from the body.


Even though humanity in many ways has believed in the inward life of soul and spirit, it does not diminish the preferred connection of our inward life with our bodily lives. For all intents and purposes, we rather be living, so much so that we cherish living, and we mourn when we lose people from the realm of the living, and we hope that they continue to live in some way. We hope that they have some substantial continued being, one even as substantial as they were in their bodies which become ashes.


St. Paul wrote about having treasure in our earthen vessel. The words of Jesus exhort us to build up treasures in heaven, in such a way that they cannot be degraded like our bodies which break down back to dust.


Ash Wednesday is about contrasting how our bodies will eventually be recycled with how the mystery and worth of our personhood will be recycled.


Most of us will not make the history books, even while we might be retained for a generation or two in memories within our family and friendship circles. So how will the mystery of our lives be recycled and retained? This is the building of treasure part of our future.


An act of kindness, mentoring a person, and myriads of deeds of love and justice will remain recycled as the fuel of hope forever. Building up the secret treasures of heaven means that we will be bricks in the wall of time forever, unable to be removed and forever contributing with what has been, is, and will happen.


The liturgy of Ash Wednesday is about cherishing our mortal lives so much that we "make hay while the sun shines." That is, we develop our inward lives of language to code our body deeds, our speech, and our writing with the mystery of the treasures of heaven, even the mystery of love and justice played forward forever through our interaction with the people of our lives.


When we think about it, words are mysterious in what they are and how they come to be within us. They are sub-atomic, even sub-microscopic but they are poignantly effective in manifesting the values of our lives through deeds, saying, and writing.


We are given this life in our bodies so that we can develop the treasures within, about which the words of Jesus and Paul refer to. Let us cherish our lives in our bodies so much by developing our words in action lives which determine the legacies that we have with the people in our lives now, but also become the future chain of becoming for the people whom we influence who live beyond us and influence people for their futures.


May God help us cherish our lives in our declining bodies, so that we are mindful to build the basis to influence the enhancement of goodness for people now and in the future. Let the treasures of love and justice from us be how the best part of us is recycled forever. Amen.






Friday, February 9, 2024

Transfiguration: Mystagogy, Language and Light

Last Epiphany B February 11, 2024
1 Kg 19:9-18 Psalm 50:1-6
2 Corinthians 4:3-6 Mark 9:2-9

Lectionary Link

People who often are referred to as "fundamentalists," are people who prefer a particular form of interpretation of the texts of Scriptures.  But such fundamentalists are selective in applying their method of interpretation, and they would say that they are not totally locked into one form of interpretation.  For example, when the words attributed to Jesus indicate that he is light, life, resurrection, shepherd, door, gate, way, vine, bread of heaven, or the words about him such as lamb of God, fundamentalist interpreters would says that such uses of words are metaphorical and figurative, but not literal.  By not being literal, it would mean that Jesus could not be empirically verified to be actual light, life, shepherd, lamb of God, door, gate, vine or bread from heaven.  Fundamentalists, then are not people who interpret everything in the Bible as though they are events that have to be able to be empirically verified to be meaningfully true.  But they will then regard events presented by biblical writers which truly defy natural law and the laws of science as being empirically verified.    Such things like biological actual virgin birth, chariots carrying people into heaven, walking on water, and other impossible natural events which are done by Jesus and the biblical heroes, are not seen as figurative, teaching, visionary events, but as events which were empirically verified.

What is lost in such inconsistencies in biblical interpretation is the nature and purpose of the biblical writers and how the nature and purpose of the writers chose to present their sublime message within the style of their preaching and writing.

What governed the writings of the writers of the New Testament?  It was the mystical experience of the Risen Christ.  Jesus who was dead and gone, was being experienced in a different way by many people, and the people who had these experiences joined together and invited others to be facilitated into this experience of the Risen Christ.  Experiences of the Risen Christ were different for different people, and so they could not be related in the way which science replicates the experiments of natural science.

The biblical writers were pushed into the moving language of aesthetics to try to express the sublime experiences of their lives.  Sharing these experience were less like boiling water in beakers in a laboratory with fellow lab mates, but more like being with a group of concert goers in being moved by the sublime presentation in a work of art.  Literal language of science is too drab to express the sublime experiences which happen because of art, the experience of being loved, the experiences of seeing justice realized, and the mystical experiences of a human superlative which gets confessed poetically as God and Son of God.

The very practical, didactic and very poetic tradition of St. Paul, and the Pauline traditions, pre-date the writings of the Gospel.  The mystagogy or instructions in the spiritual mysteries of the Risen Christ came to different presentation in the Gospel form of writing which came to promulgation after the writings of St. Paul.

The Gospels are a different kind of mystagogy than the writings of St. Paul.  They re-present the experience of the Risen Christ within a narrative of Jesus as parable, a figurative writing encoding the mystical practices of the church.

By taking the narratives of Jesus and reading them as empirically verified, historical eye-witness accounts, reader miss the important spiritual practice of the early communities of people who confessed and shared this experience of identity with the Risen Christ.  This identity was stated by Paul, as "Christ in you, the hope of glory."

The transfiguration, which literally, means metamorphosis, is part of the presentation of a spiritual parable of Jesus, as the Risen Christ who is given a visualized Jesus narrative as a way of inspiring the imagination of how Christ is in us.

Mystagogy is language used in a way so that it can bear witness to experience of the sublime.  The Gospel writer of Mark knew the body of symbolism found in the Hebrew Scripture.  The Gospel preacher believed/knew that Jesus was in succession with the great heroes of the past, with Moses and Elijah.  Their reputation was such that in the literature of time of Jesus, they were regarded to be time-space travelers.  They could and would be apparitional figures who would reappear to mark new paradigms of spiritual advance.

So, we have the parable of the transfigured Jesus.  Jesus takes his disciples up a mountain alone, into the clouds and he becomes the filament for an event of light.  And the apparitional Moses and Elijah appear with him to affirm him as the logical succession of their mission, and such event happens on behalf of the disciples in this event of Mystery and Light, in knowing Jesus in a very special way.

In two events in the Gospel of Mark, God the Father, declares with an audible voice to Jesus in the presence of others, "You are my beloved Son."  There is another declaration of Jesus as Son of God in the Gospel of Mark, and that is at the death of Jesus on the cross, when the Roman centurion declares, "Truly this is God's Son."

Mystagogy is teaching about the interior event when Christ in us is the hope of glory, the hope of having esteem and worth in our lives. We can appreciate the figurative audience positions of the identity of Christ as Son of God.   One is at the Jordan with John and the crowds there, the other is with James, John, and Peter in the encounter with Jesus, Elijah and Moses, and the other is the outsider, the Roman Centurion, who was able to recognize the sublime even being such an outsider.  We have our own "audience" position in knowing the Risen Christ, within us as Son of God, helping us to realize ourselves as child of God.

The Gospel of Mark encodes in a parable of Jesus the mystical experience of the people who know that the Risen Christ in within themselves and as he is glorified in being manifest as God's unique Son, so too we are invited to know ourselves as sons and daughters of God.

And in this path of mystagogy, we are invited to the being made Christ-like metamorphoses of spiritual growth.  Yes, we may prefer the mountain top and butterfly events, but they accentuate sublime points in the continuous metamorphosis that we are called to in ever become more Christ-like.

Let us embrace the metamorphosis in becoming more Christ-like, which the event of the transfiguration invites us to.  Amen.




Saturday, February 3, 2024

Historical Medical Anthropology and Gospel Healing

 5 Epiphany B  February 4, 2024
Isaiah 40:21-31 Psalm 147:1-12, 21c
1 Corinthians 9:16-23 Mark 1:29-39


Salvation might be considered holistic healing.  It is so embracing, it also pertains even to how people regard  the afterlives of their loved ones and their own afterlives before they die.  To live, in part is always to be thinking about life and death issues.  This is why salvation is a relevant issue.

Salvation or holistic health might be seen as viewing health upon a continuum of what we can know about being healthy and the negligible factors, or unknown factors in being healthy.  Probability number crunchers say today that 25 percent of longevity is determined by genetic factors.  Other factors might be the risk of one's environments and lifestyles, as well as nurture and personal habits of health.

What did physicians in the time of Jesus know?  Did they know about viruses, bacteria, and germs?  About mental health, did they know about how early trauma could create dissociative disorders when a person can manifest a legion of personalities?

We might look with some skepticism on medical practices of the past, even as we might look with skepticism upon some medical practices of the present.  Not everyone subscribes to the healing powers of crystals, except the one who confess that they have had positive results. 

The notion of the healing reality of the placebo effect highlights the connection between the mind and the body.  In medical anthropology, and historical medical anthropologies, we discover that specific practices of healing exist within the communities which promote and accept those practices.  Medicine men, shamans, witch doctors, and others fall within the class of what might be called "folk medicine," and such practitioners of "folk medicine" might regard this designation to be the pejorative designation given by those of modern scientific medicine with a superiority complex.  As our world has gotten smaller, we know that ancient medical practices of the East, such as acupuncture, have been brought within an expanding umbrella of what is regarded to be acceptable and valid medical practice.

And still we regard with duck sounds, those who we regard to be practicing medicine for profit and rely upon the ignorance of their client base.  We refer to them as "quacks."  But with the placebo effect, a patient might say, "I may have been treated by a quack, but it still made me better."

As we approach the "folk medical" practice of Jesus which is listed in the Gospel, we can find a variety of healing practices, and different modes of treatment.  The "folk medicine" of Jesus indicates that the physical body was like a building which is inhabited.  The living people within a building or a home, are those who maintain the outer structure which is always already dealing with the effects of age and time.

The Judaism of the time of Jesus included a system of public health, because health is social in how it is practiced within community.  There was a diagnostic or classification system for optimal and negative states of being, as they related to a person within their community.  There was a binary system of designation of things and states of being as clean or unclean, pure and impure.  There were rules for how one could make the transition from being unclean and impure into an accepted state.  There were recommended states of public quarantine or removal from community contact;  there were public validation rites performed by the priests, with rites of ritual purification to allow a person re-entry into a community.

The Gospels narrates bodily conditions of people with physical ailments: blindness, fever, leprosy, lameness, deafness, muteness, and unknown conditions causing death.  The Gospels also present people with what might be better called psychological and spiritual conditions, or people with the resulting behaviors due to  childhood and life traumas.  If we know of PTSD, dissociative disorders, and many other traumatic mental health disorders today which have their root in earlier traumas in the lives of people, we can be sure that people in the time of Jesus, as in all times, had their psychological and spiritual health problems.

As an external condition like the disease with visible skin phenomenon of leprosy was designated as being a state of uncleanness requiring segregation from "clean or healthy" society, so too persons with manifestations of chaotic internal and emotional disorders which left them with uncontrolled behaviors, such persons were said to have "unclean spirits."  Having one's internal being declared as impure or unclean would be quite a severe diagnosis to have.  People of every era have feared persons with mental health disorders.  Their unpredictable behaviors create a public fear which governs the ways in which they have come to be treated.   Our history includes the history of prison, asylums, and bedlams to quarantined those designated with "unclean spirits."

How might we attain some insights for ourselves in our reading of this Gospel healing story today?

First, we might regard it to be something like a psychiatric practice of the time of Jesus.  The rabbinical literature indicates the practice of exorcism as the religious public health treatment of people who were so troubled by invisible causes, that it had the designation of being an "impure and unclean" state.  In the history of health and illness, and even today, there is still a negative perception of persons with the seeming invisible effects of mental health disorders.  The Gospels chronicles the negative designations for "sick" people, but also the personal and social treatment technique of Jesus.  Rather than shunning contact with such people, he offered both personal and social acceptance to give comfort for such persons and their families who suffered.

The Gospels portrayed Jesus as one who prevailed in his own psychological being.  His temptation to face the interior principalities and powers centering around a great inward Accuser is recorded in three Gospels.  The Gospel writers understood Jesus to be such a person of internal fortitude that he had a resulting charisma to be a people whisperer.  He could heal the inner selves of others because he had prevailed within himself against the internal forces of accusation.

The exorcism stories also highlight a chief vocation of life, namely, the reconstituting our inward lives so that we are acting out in the behaviors of kindness and love.  The Psalmist requested of God, "Create within me a new heart, and renew a right spirit within me."  Also the prophet wrote, "the heart above all thing is deceitful."  Salvation of holistic health is about the recreation, the reconstituting of our inward lives so that the springs of our motives and action can be pure, clean, and righteous.  To this regard, John the Baptist, stated that beyond baptism with water, Jesus baptized with the Holy Spirit and with fire.  The stories of exorcisms exemplify Jesus as the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit, who can be the cleanness of heart and renewed spirit within us.  The Holy Spirit is the one who makes the Risen Christ present within us as our new internal identity.

The Gospel narratives also present a spiritual cosmology.  The Risen Christ is the one who is above the principalities and powers of darkness in heavenly places.  The exorcism stories within the Gospel indicate salvation as the overcoming of evil with good which results in people being about to express the fruits of the Spirit, being self control, with love, joy, peace, hope, patience, gentleness, and goodness.

Today, we still seek interior health, renewed internal state of being.  We seek a comprehensive body, soul, and spiritual health, and we come to Jesus as the one who models this health for us, as he is now known to us as the presence of the Risen Christ.

We also know that the health of Jesus was restoring people to community.  We as the church are to be a community of health by welcoming and including people.  Health is communal in dimension and all can be in some state of unhealthiness as any given times.  This means we need the health of a loving, inclusive, welcoming community to express the full meaning of health as community completeness.

Following Jesus today, let us aspire to be a healthy community, within which we can practice the healing power of the love of Christ.  Amen.

 

Eucharist and Sign Value Crisis

Maundy Thursday March 28, 2024 Ex. 12:1-14a Ps. 78:14-20, 23-25 1 Cor 11:23-32 John 13:1-15 Lectionary Link On Maundy Thursday, many Christi...