Love's Epiphany: "It's like déjà vu all over again."

4 Epiphany  C   February 3, 2019

Jer. 1:4-10     Ps.71:1-6

1 Cor. 13:1-13   Luke 4:21-32

Lectionary Link

I have been preaching the lectionary now for almost 38 years.  What does that mean?  It means that I am given four assigned readings each Sunday, two from the Hebrew Scriptures and the Psalms, one from the Epistles and one from the Gospel.  The assigned readings are supposed to fit the day and/or the season.  Some associations are "no brainers" like guess what readings and topics we are assigned on Easter and Christmas and Pentecost?  But in the ordinary times during the seasons of Epiphany and Pentecost, the associations don't seem so obvious.  Sometimes the readings like the ones for today are like disparate pictures thrown into a collage and handed to the preacher daring us to find connections and themes to try to bring in aesthetic insights into the Scripture collage of today's appointed readings.

And what is is our collage for today?  Let start with one of the greatest poetic utterances about love ever written.  And this was written by Paul who is also known for his highly didactic or teaching discourse or for his reproving exhortations to his misbehaving congregations.

His poem to love follows some church discipline issues in the Corinthian church.  Apparently the Corinthian church was a very spiritually gifted church, so gifted that people competed about the value and importance of their gifts.  But this situation is often the condition of the world; we have the creativity to go to outer space, create the internet and build nuclear weapons to destroy the world but we don't seem to be creative enough to feed and clothe or give housing and health care to everyone in the world.  So what's the problem?  The problem is that we need the regulating influence of great love.  Paul wrote about this great regulating influence of love.  And what can love regulate?  Love's influence embraced, has the power for people to check their egos at the door and rather than compete with their gifts, love inspires people to harmonize their gifts for the common good.

I have always been floored by this writing by Paul because of the startling profundity.  Like when he writes, "love believes all things."  What does that mean?  For me, it means that love is like the sun shining on the good and evil and all of the conditions of freedom found in our world.  So love is profoundly honest to the free conditions of the world.  This does not mean that love accepts everything as equal in value; love is accepting the entire field of values but love is the lure for us to choose the highest values.

Since love believes in all things, it instructs to be honest about all of the contradictions within the field of freedom.  The Gospel poses such contradictions, like the familiar love, familial love, hometown love that can morph into hateful jealous love and jealous love is a woeful contradiction.   Jesus preached in his hometown synagogue and proclaimed that his life calling was to bring good news.  How did many in his hometown respond?  "Jesus, you've gotten too big for your breeches.  You're just Joe and Mary's boy."  What did the hometown folk full of badly skewed jealous love do?  His hometown folk wanted to throw him off a cliff and kill him before his time.  And isn't this what probably killed Jesus?  Jealousy about the genius and profundity of his wisdom, authority and deeds.  The good news of the life of Jesus became a threat to people who were jealous and threatened by such profound goodness.

There are better responses to the great love of God in Jesus Christ.  Being jealous is a total waste and misuse of life energy.  What is a better response?  To be called by great love to find one's ministry, mission and purpose in life.  The love of God calls us to find out who we really are as our destiny and when we discover our destiny we have the eternal sense that it always was supposed to be.  The prophet Jeremiah and the psalmist confessed that when they discovered their calling they felt like God had known them from the womb and from the time when they were completely clueless about their destiny.  When we are clueless about our purposes and destinies, we can be sure that God who is love has and knows our purpose and destiny.  And we await for the epiphanies to discover our purpose and destiny.  We await to say in the words of the master of malapropisms, Yogi Berra, "It's like deja vu, all over again!"

As gifted and as talented as we might be as people, the love which Paul wrote about is also very honestly humble: "Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things."

According to Paul, love makes us humble relativists.  In classical and many forms of modern philosophies, it is a supreme insult to be called a relativist.  But St. Paul makes the profound confession of a relativist; he wrote, "now I see only in part."  Paul and anyone can only see in part.  Relativism is admitting to having only partial knowledge.  No human being has the capacity to be all-knowing.  We can only know in part; we can only be relativists.  But what can we also know?  We can know that our part is related to the greater whole, the greater plenitude.  And so it is more honest to confess that the greater Plenitude knows us than to say that we know the fullness of Plenitude.  So the love written about by St. Paul invites us to the natural humility of admitting our partial knowledge.

And if our knowledge and our gifts are partial, it does not mean that they are insignificant.  Each one us is invited to an epiphany of the love Christ to discover our purpose and our destiny for being here in the congregation of fellow Christians.  We are to arise and take up our gifts for the benefit of this parish and we are to look to this great love to orchestrate our gifts so our egos don't get in the way.  This is how we are to grow to be more perfect in love together.

When Jesus went to his hometown, people who were jealous wanted to kill him out of their lives.  Jesus comes to this place, here and now as another one of his hometowns.  Let us welcome him as the Lord of Love who is with us to help us find our personal destiny and our destiny as a parish going forwards.  Amen.

Gospel as Propriety

3 Epiphany C          January 27, 2019  
Neh. 8:2-10           Ps. 19      
1 Cor. 12:12-27       Luke 4:14-21    

Lectionary Link

What does good news mean for you and me today?  Good news changes depending upon the needs of the situation for each person in their lives.  Good news thus needs to be adjustable to each human situation.

Gospel is the English word for the Greek word euangellion.  Gospel is the name for a certain type of biblical genre.  The Christian Bible has four Gospels.  These books are writings which basically are narrative presentations of the life of Jesus of Nazareth.  And since they were written later than some of the writings of St. Paul, they are narratives written with theological and teaching purposes within the various early church communities.

Today's Gospel reading indicates to us that the gospel meaning did not originate with Jesus or the New Testament.  In the Gospel reading for today, Jesus was at a synagogue for the Shabbat liturgy.  He read from the scroll of Isaiah, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me to because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor...."  Good News in the Hebrew language is "basar," so long before the Gospel of the New Testament we should appreciate that the Gospel for Jesus derived from the prophet Isaiah.

I would like to present to you my belief that the Gospel is a very adjustable notion.  It is what the people of belles lettres literary movement called propriety.  The Gospel is the word, deed or fortuitous happening that is most appropriate for the situation.

What is the good news for the poor? Having enough for oneself and for the people that one is responsible for taking care of?  What is good news for the oppressed?  To be delivered from the oppressor who uses power to steal the dignity and freedom of people.  What is good news for the prisoner?  To be freed from the confines of wrong imprisonment.  What is good news for the blind?  To be able to see.

Some times we limit the good news simply to the people who have really bad situations in life happening to them.  But what does good news mean to the wealthy?  Good news for the wealthy would be that they have been blessed with the resources to share with the poor.

Oxfam, the organization that distributes aid throughout the world released a statistic this year.  They said that 26 of the wealthiest people in the world own the equivalent of 3.8 billion people or half of the world population own.  How can this bee good news?  It might be good news that 26 people have been able to be so wealthy because of the free market, but what about some more good news for them?  What if they truly believed that the free market gave them the freedom to make sure that the rest of the world had enough in food, clothing and shelter.  Wouldn't that really be free market good news?

The good news for the oppressors and the captors is that they can use their power to release and free those who are unjustly imprisoned and oppressed.  And those who have the blessing of sight have the freedom to help all who are blind and impaired to get equal opportunity for qualitative life.

The Gospel is good news for those where are sinners and for those who are sinned against.  The Gospel seeks what is appropriate for each situation.

In our lessons, from the Hebrew Scripture, the Gospel was the discovery of the importance of the Law.  The law is the revelation of recommended behaviors which best serve the common good.  When Nehemiah helped his people re-discover the law, it brought great joy.  The Psalmist rejoiced in the law of the God.  The goal of the law was perfection, truth, justice, clarity, purity, righteousness and enlightenment.  For Nehemiah and for the Psalmist the Law was good news.

What did the Good News or Gospel required for the Corinthian Church?  Apparently they had experienced some bad news.  What was their bad news?  It was disharmony.  Some roles and ministries of the contributions of some members were being regarded as inferior and unimportant for the success of the Corinthian church.  When people's worth is discounted it does not result in harmonious community life.

St. Paul wrote to his church about good news.  What was the Good News?  Each person has a worthy and worthwhile gift and value to the community.  It is incumbent on the community to find and to bring to expression the different gifts of everyone within the community.

When the community comes to the harmonious expression of all of the gifts of its members, then the good news of Christ is known.

What does the Gospel mean for you and me right now?  The Gospel is an adjustable propriety to what each of us needs right now.  If we are sinners then the Gospel is forgiveness and amendment of our lives.  If we are those who sinned against or those who suffer from the hardships of life, it is health, deliverance and recovery to a place of having all that we need.

Let us not limit the Gospel to writings in the Bible today.  Let us understand the Gospel as the needed and relevant message of God to each of us, right here, right now.

What do you and I need to restore our lives in the direction of what is perfect, true, right, just, clear, pure and enlightened?  That is the Gospel for us and it is available to us if we will arise to receive it.  Amen.

The Signs of Christ

2 Epiphany C          January 20, 2019

Isaiah 62:1-5         Psalm 36:5-10       
1 Cor. 12:1-11      John 2:1-11 

  Lectionary Link

Believe it or not, priests can be mischievous; can you believe it?  I had a priest friend who was mischievous.  But my friend was special.  He was kind and generous and he loved to entertain.  One night he entertained the clergy and others, and at that time Absolut was the vodka of vodkas.  And he ran out of Absolut.  So he took the bottle into the kitchen and got a funnel and took out a plastic jug of cheaper vodka and filled the Absolut bottle and put it back on the bar.  Just a bit later, the bishop's wife fixed herself a vodka drink.  She sipped it and immediately complimented the host for serving her favorite and best vodka.  And of course my friend had a wonderful twinkle in his eyes and kept it a secret.  She believed and confessed it to be Absolut vodka, even when it wasn't.  The sign on the bottle told her what she was drinking and she was thoroughly convinced even to the point of grateful confession.

At end of our Gospel reading for today, we read, "This was the first of his signs...."  The Gospel of John uses a different word for science defying acts of Jesus; John's Gospel uses the word, "semion" or sign.  Other Gospel writers use the words "dunamis" from which we get the word dynamite signifying the "power" of the deeds of Jesus.  Another word for the fantastic deeds of Jesus is the Greek word, "ergon,"  or works.  We know the English word "ergonomics."  Sign or "semion" fits in with the linguistic basis of John's Gospel.  Semiotics is the study of symbols and symbols are what communicate meanings within language.  Language itself is inseparable from the reality that it stands as a sign for.  Language itself is a metaphor.  Why?  Because we cannot say that we understand anything unless we first admit that we use and know language.  John's Gospel begins, "In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God and the Word was God"....and the Word became particular flesh in the life of Jesus.  And this particular Word made flesh, Jesus, performed signs.  Biblical scholars believe that there was another document which they call the "Book of Signs" which has been redacted into the final edition of John's Gospel.

Semion or signs is totally consistent with Word as the foundation of human life as we know it.  A basic message of the Gospel of John is that Jesus is the Sign that God is with us.  The Gospel of John relates a variety of occasions for the signs of the presence of God with us.  The good news of John's Gospel is that no matter what happens to us, no matter what we are experiencing, Christ is with us as the complementing presence of God.  Christ lets us know that we are always, already totally connected with everything else.  And even though we live in the ocean of everything, we still have distinct and particular value to God.

John's Gospel was written very late in comparison to the other writings in the New Testament; some parts of it were redacted 5-6 decades after the early writings of St. Paul.  What we can find in the Gospel of John is a presentation of the spiritual mysticism of Paul in a narrative presentation of the life of Jesus.

In poetic ecstasy, St. Paul wrote, "Christ, is all and in all."  How can this be meaningfully true?  In John's Gospel, Christ is the Word who is God, who creates all and is in all.  If Word is God, then we who use language bear the image of God because we have and use language.  And since we use language we live in a symbolic order.  We give names to things which are not language.  As language users we are sign makers. We make signs which point to the important meanings of our lives.

The Gospel of John preacher believed that Jesus was a "sign maker."  And what does Jesus as the sign maker in the Gospel of John do?  He points to the most important meaning in the early church which was expressed very early by St. Paul in the Epistle to the Romans: Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord."

The first sign of Jesus in John's Gospel seems rather trivial in scheme of things.  Mary, the mother of Jesus, was involved in helping to cater the wedding of a friend or family member.  And shock of shock, the wedding party ran out of wine.  What an embarrassment.  Mary couldn't say to Jesus,"Go to the 7-11 and get some more wine."  But mothers can be persuasive, even to make the Son of God begin an aspect of his public ministry before he wanted.  And so Jesus did his first sign.  "Jesus, why did you waste a miracle on something so trivial as wine at a wedding?"  Let's compare this sign to the others signs in John's Gospel.  Walking on water in the storm, helping the lame man, healing a blind man, multiplying the loaves and fish to feed thousands, being clairvoyant with the woman at the well, healing the son of a Royal official and raising Lazarus from the dead.  These other "signs" seem far more important than wine at the wedding.  What is the significance of this water to wine sign at the wedding in Cana of Galilee?

When is Christ with us?  In good times and bad times; in crises and in just everyday trivial matters of life, like running out of wine at the wedding.

What shall separate us from the love of God in Christ?  What about being stuck in a traffic jam on Highway 101?  Will that separate me from the love of God in Christ?  What about all of the frustrating inconvenient events that happen many times, each day in our lives.  Christ is with us before, during and after.

St. Paul wrote that nothing can separated us from the love of God in Christ.  And the Gospel of John presented the story in a format to prove this basic meaning of the Gospel.

Today you and I need to deal with the "signs" of Christ in our lives.  The signs of Christ does not mean that we will have science defying miracles happening around all of the time as proof of God's presence in Christ.  No, the signs of Christ involve accepting the fact that Christ is as present to us as us having language, because Christ is the Word of God from the beginning who accompanies us all of the time.  And with language we are sign makers because we speak our joy, our sorrow, our pain, human suffering and much, much more because the Word hidden within us is the very power of God in Christ working to make meaning of everything that happens to us.

I hope you are excited about the Gospel of John as I am.  I hope that you will embrace the fact that Christ as Word is present in you as you are a worded being, makings signs and creating meaning in everything that happens to you.

We as a parish are called to be at the work of making meaningful signs pointing to both the hidden and obvious presence of Christ in our lives now and in our future.  Let us not ask whether we are a successful parish or a failing parish?  Let us ask ourselves if we are accepting the signs of the Risen Christ in our midst, in the trivial event, in the crises and in the events of celebration.  Amen.

Why Baptism?

1 Epiphany  c       January 13, 2019   

Isaiah 43:1-7                Psalm 29       

Acts 8:14-17       Luke 3:15-17,21-22

Lectionary Link Some people may ask, "Why baptism?"  Why should someone be baptized?  Why should  parents baptize their child?  Isn't it just a silly superstitious rite to assure ourselves that we and our babies will be free from hell? 

Why baptism?  Why any human behavior?  Why graduation ceremonies?  Why birthday celebrations?  Why rites of passage rituals?  Why initiation rituals to get into a fraternity or sorority?  Why are people ritual beings?

Baptism partakes of human social behavior, so why do we have defend baptism as being meaningful when lots of initiation behaviors seem to be less rational than what Christians believe about baptism.

Christians baptize even as Christians disagree about many things regarding baptism.  Baptists detach the grace of God from the baptism event.  They say baptism is a public declaration of faith after one has already attained the assurance of salvation by asking Jesus into their heart.  So baptism can only be done by an adult or by a person whom a pastor believes to be of an appropriate age of accountability.  Episcopalians and Catholics and others do not separate an actual experience of grace from the baptismal event.

So why baptism?  And further, why would Jesus the one whom we proclaim as the Son of God, undergo the rite of baptism by John the Baptist?

Why Baptism?  Well, we are human and we know ourselves to be human because we have language.  What does having language mean?  It means that there is more than one person in the world.  We have language as proof that we are social people who are made to be in relationship with each other.  The use of language is evidence of our relationship but it is also the most important means of relationship through speaking and through our body language deeds.  Our entire lives are a witness to the fact that we have language because we are made to be in relationship with each other.

Baptism is a ritual way of enacting and celebrating the belief that we are related to God and to each other.

What was happening in the baptism of Jesus?  Jesus as God's Son, was saying to John the Baptist and to all people who witnessed his baptism, "I am not too great or too aloof to be identified with you John and you my fellow members of the human community."  So,ity it was natural for Jesus to express his solidarity with human within their own communities.  Jesus went to the synagogue community.  Jesus went to the Temple.  Jesus taught in the streets, on the hills and the plain.  Jesus was a community person.  He celebrated his relationship with other people.  In fact, he elevated relationships, even the one's frowned on by religious society.  He embraced women in a society that segregated men and women.  He touched leper and other folks who were said to have unclean spirits and those who were victimized by religious rules of quarantine.  Jesus was with humanity; he became so much "with humanity" that he died with humanity, because every human being must die.  Jesus was God being so baptized, so immersed into humanity that he  even went to the terminal place of humanity, death itself.

What else happened in the account of the baptism of Jesus?  The voice of God the heavenly parent proclaimed, "This is my beloved Son and with him I am well pleased."  The Baptism of Jesus was a Trinitarian event because God the Father declared, God the Spirit Dove  was made evident on the life of Jesus.  And Jesus was identified and revealed as God's beloved Son.

Why do we get baptized?  Because we believe certain things about ourselves and about God.  We believe that we have language and that we are made for relationship with each other. We also know how difficult good relationship with each other can be.  We know that we need to have Higher Power help to be good at human relationship.  In baptism we seek the best support of a helpful community.  So we make vows to our helpful community.  And the community makes vows to us.  And we believe that God wants to be with us in the vows that we make to each other.  And when we baptize in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit we are seeking to constitute the elements found in the baptism of Jesus.  Like Jesus, we present ourselves to the human community of support.  Like Jesus, we seek to know the invoked presence of God's Spirit upon us.  And like Jesus, we want to be acknowledged by the heavenly parent as a beloved son or daughter of God.

Baptism is only a silly ritual if it is isolated from its profound meanings and devout practice.  Today we are going to renew our baptismal vows and they can be a reminder to us of our abject failure to keep them.  Or they can be the vision of what we are continually called to be.

And what are we called to be?  Sons and daughters of God.  Sons and daughters of human parents in relationship with men and women as our brothers and sisters.  We are called to be working to have better relationship with God and with each other.

Let this new year be a renewal year for us in the realization that each of us is a beloved child of God, gifted by God's Holy Spirit and placed in a particular place with particular people to love, serve and minister the Good News of Jesus Christ.  Amen.

The Magi and the Meaning of the Epiphany

The Epiphany C     January 6, 2019

Is.60:1-6,9      Ps. 72:1-2,10-17

Eph. 3:1-12   Matt. 2:1-12

Lectionary Link

The Christmas Pageant director always encounters a dilemma when it comes to the Magi or the Three Wise-men or the Three Kings.

Directorial decisions have to be made and usually directors depart from the Gospel text when it comes to the three Wise-men.  Most Christmas Pageant and creche scene place the Three Kings at the manger even though in the Gospel story the three Wise-men were never at the manger.

One only has so much room for scenery in the chancel and so one takes license with the placement of the Three Kings.

By calling them Kings, we are already taking license with the text, because they were Magi, the plural of magus, the same word from which we get magician.  So, they were probably sages associated with the wisdom schools of the time in foreign countries including astrology as a prominent "science" of their time.  The Psalmist wrote, "the heavens declared the glory of God," and the Gospel writers believed the birth of Jesus to be an event of the glory of God to which the heavens and all creation responded.  The magi were also regarded to be kings because of references in the Hebrew Scriptures about Kings coming to pay homage to some exalted figure.  And the Hebrew Scriptures provided the template for telling the story of Jesus.

Beyond the pomp and pageantry of the Kings and Magi which they do add to any pageant, is the function of the Magi story in the Infancy Narratives that arose late in the development of the Jesus Movement.

The Magi Story is the theology of St. Paul placed in a story to emphasize that the Gentile mission was God's priority from the beginning.

Is God available to everyone?  Is the God of the Hebrew Scriptures available to everyone?  The very notion of God would imply that God is universal?  How could God be truly a God if God was only for one tribe or nation or group of people?

It is more important to say that we are God's people than to say that God is my God or our God, the God who specifically belongs to the Episcopal Church, or to any religion or religious group.  For God to truly be "catholic," God must be universally accessible to all.  

Are water, air and food necessary to human life?  Yes, indeed.  God must be regarded to be as necessary and as accessible to human life as water, air and food, to be worthy of the designation of God.

So what's the problem?  The problem is when people become such exclusive gatekeepers of God, that they make God in the image of their own small rituals and practices rather than let God be God.  Members of all religious group can be guilty of over-associating the Great God with their petty practices and they can end up misrepresenting God.

St. Paul, a Jew and a Pharisee, wrote a theology of Gentile Christians in his letter to the Roman churches.  Paul wrote that through Jesus Christ his Lord he had: "received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles for the sake of his name."

To bring about the obedience of faith among the Gentiles.  This sums up the meaning of The Epiphany, which means the manifestation of Christ to the nations.

Jesus in his own time and place was much more limited within specific religious parties of Judaism even though the control of the Romans of Palestine brought Gentiles into his life. 

How did the leaders of the early church present the Gentile mission in a teaching narrative of Jesus of Nazareth?  They understood that the Gentile mission was a message about the universal accessibility of God's love to everyone.  The magi story represents that the meaning of the birth of Jesus is that God is available to everyone because God took identity with a specific person Jesus, to indicate that God takes identity with us all as our heavenly parent.

The early Christian leaders who were Jews, searched the Hebrew Scriptures for the universal themes.  They read that the Temple was to be a house of prayer for all peoples.  They believed that Abraham was a father of all faith before Israel and Moses and the Law even existed.  They noted that Jonah preached to the foreigners of Nineveh.  They noted that Elijah healed a foreign general Naaman.  They quoted Isaiah about God's salvation being brought to the ends of the earth.

Peter and Paul had to accept the fact that such a mission of universal salvation was not going to be quickly implemented within the existing religious parties of Judaism.  These parties had a universal message but their invitation was more limited; "you have to come to us to receive a proselyte baptism and begin a life of ritual conformity."  What Peter and Paul learned is that people were having spiritual experience without ritual conformity;  Peter and Paul adopted their theology to what was happening in the spiritual lives of Jews and Gentiles.  A person could receive the birth of Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit and still be a ritually conforming Jew or they could be a Gentile who did not observe all of the ritual practices of the synagogue.

The Season of the Epiphany is about the program of the universal salvation that was offered in the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  The story of the Magi is a story for the Epiphany because they are placed at the birth of Jesus signifying that it was God's intention to expand the universal message of creation, the promise of Abraham and the messianic meanings of the Hebrew Scriptures to all of the peoples on the earth.

And we are the recipients of this expanded message of universal salvation.  It has given us a bit different mission than Judaism but what it means is that we believe that God is actively coaxing people to accept their belonging in God's family.

Let us rejoice in the message of the Epiphany.  God is manifest to all.  And God is love.  Jesus is an expression of God's love to us.  And it is our epiphany to experience God's love through the birth of Christ within us, and be received into the company of Magi, made wise by having an Epiphany of Christ.  Amen.

Nice Play Shakespeare

1 Christmas  C     December 30, 2018

Is.61:10-62:3     Ps. 147:13-21

Gal. 3:23-25,4:4-7  John 1:1-18

Lectionary Link

Youth Sermon for December 30, 2018

1-William Shakespeare was and is probably the greatest playwright of the English language.  Actors for more than four hundred years have wanted to perform his words.  It could be that William Shakespeare performed in his own plays because he was an actor too.  He was a playwright and an actor, and he probably directed too.  He was quite a genius with words both in writing and in acting and in the directing of his plays in the English language.

2-We might understand God as the playwright of the entire world.  But not just the playwright but also the star actor in the great play of the entire world.  Why could we say this?  The writer of the Gospel of John might think so too.  The Gospel writer wrote "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.  And everything came into being through the Word."  So, God as Word is the creator or playwright of us existing as human beings.

  

3-But the Word is not just the great Playwright.  The Word became the very best actor too.  The Gospel writer wrote, "The Word became flesh and lived with us."  So, we understand Christ to be the eternal Word and the Playwright of life itself; and Jesus is the star actor of the great play of life created by the Eternal Word Playwright.

4-But is this just some nice poetry?  Does it have any practical meaning for our lives?  What does it mean for us that the Word creates everything?  What does it mean that the Word became flesh in Jesus and lived with us?

1-It could be that what makes us human is the fact that we are language users and our lives are made up of collections of words.  Even though we might think that we are flesh and bones and blood and nerves and brains with thought and hearts with feelings.  Flesh, bones, blood, nerves, brains, hearts and feelings are words that we use to describe ourselves.  Words are what we use to find meaning for our lives.  The best meanings of our lives are what we call truth.

  

2-To find and know truth in our lives, we have to find the best meanings.  To find the best meanings, we need to find people who can be the very best examples for us to teach us the best meanings for our lives.  That is what we believe about Jesus Christ.  He was the best Actor in the great play of life.  He taught us, and he lived the very best meanings of life.  He taught us how to find the best scripts in life to live.  And he gives us the very best acting lessons.

3-In the theater, acting is only pretending to be the person that you are playing.  In the real play of life, acting is not pretending.  It is trying to live out the very best script in all that we do or say.

4-Sometimes we find ourselves acting some bad scripts.  Sometimes we have some bad habit of speaking and acting that we just keep repeating.  We have learned these bad scripts from following the examples of some not so perfect actors and by having some imperfect directors.  We sometimes have accepted less than perfect scripts to follow.

1-What do we do when we find ourselves as bad actors in a bad play with some bad scripts?  The first thing that we do is to accept our freedom.  As actors we can choose the scripts.  As actors we can choose the directors of our play in life.  As actors we can choose the acting teachers to help us do our very best.

2-A good actor is always hoping to get better. A good actor is always looking for better roles.  He or she might look at all the roles that have been played.  An actor might want to play the same role again on stage because he or she might think that the role can be performed better.

3-Today we are about at the end of the year.  We are about to finish Act 2018 of our lives.  Today we may want to be the theater critics of Act 2018 of our lives.  How was our acting this past year?  Where did we improve and get better than we did in 2017?  Did we eat more broccoli and other healthy foods?  But more importantly, how did we do in the most important roles in life?   How did we do with love?  Kindness?  Self-control?  Patience?  Faith?

4-Let us review the scripts that we have followed in 2018 as we prepare for the next big play of our lives, the year 2019.  To write the scripts of our lives for 2019, let us consult the scripts in the Bible to improve our new roles for 2019.  Let us especially study the life of Jesus as our model of best behaviors.  Let us choose good role models who are in our lives now to help write the scripts for 2019.

1-Now the new year can seem like a big challenge and sometimes when we are on the big stage of life we can feel all alone.  But we should remember that we have an entire cast and crew of fellow friends and Christians to help us be the very best in our roles for the New Year.  Don't try to do 2019 alone.  Accept the very best advice and support from the best supporting cast in your life.

  

2-And remember when you think that you are alone on the stage of 2019, remember you have something better than cue cards when you forget your lines.  You have the very best prompter of all; you have God's Holy Spirit inside of you whispering what you need to say and to do.  God's Holy Spirit is with you as you walk on the stage of 2019.

3-Okay.  First Scene of Act 2019.  Quiet on the set. Camera.  Action. Roll.  Break a leg in the New Year!  Good luck.  God bless us as we follow Jesus.  We have been given the Word of God and Jesus as our acting model and teacher.  And may we have many curtain calls at the end of the year.  Amen.

Don't Forget the Mysticism of Christmas

Christmas Eve  C       December 24, 2018

Is. 9:2-4,6-7          Ps.96:1-4,11-12        

Titus 2:11-14        Luke 2:1-14  

Lectionary Link

Most of us admit that Christmas is quite an imposing holiday.  It literally means the "Mass of Christ," referring to the Eucharist which celebrates the birth of Jesus.  But Christmas has grown way beyond the Mass of Christ.

It has become quite a social, cultural, entertainment and commercial phenomena unlike any other holiday.  It has become so much more than the observance of the "Mass of Christ" for the celebration of the birth of Christ.

And we might want to go all "bah humbug" on all the extra trappings which Christmas has accrued.  Or we may just want to regard it all as a great smorgasbord of religious or cultural activity from which we pick and choose for our own religious and secular observances.

One could cite the success of the evangelization of cultures by Christmas.  Even the Christmas date was a way to replace a Roman pagan festival and convert the social energy that once was expressed for the Sol Invictus event into the Christ event.  One might say that Christmas continues to evangelize; around the world the word Christ in Christmas is proclaimed, and it invites anyone with access to Wikipedia to look up Christmas and study further the origins and the meanings of Christmas.  As crass as Christmas commercialism can be, the culture of excess in gift exchange, extends beyond personal gifts exchanged to help most of the charities to be able to survive for the rest of the year.  Certainly St. John the Divine is willing to accept big Christmas gifts this year, as always.

The popularity of Christmas as a cultural and commercial phenomenon might intimidate us in the religious profession as we watch more children line up to see Santa Claus than come to the manger to see baby Jesus.  We see diminishing church attendance even as the Black Friday crowds stampede the malls.  Christmas sermons streamed and blogged get but a few hits compared to all of the Amazon.com traffic and youtube Christmas music.  So, we can be intimidated about the things which Christmas has become other than the celebration of the birth of Jesus.

I, myself, am less concerned about all that Christmas has become; I am most concerned about the mysticism of Christmas.  I am more concerned about the inner event represented in the New Testament writings about the meaning of the birth of Christ.

In a significant way, we can say Christmas began after the actual birth of a baby named Jesus.  Christmas began as the mystical teachings of St. Paul and the apostles who experienced the birth of Risen Christ within their inner lives.   Paul and the apostles were not at Bethlehem.  They did not know Jesus growing up as a boy in Nazareth.

But Christmas for Paul and the apostles began after the resurrection appearances of Jesus.  Christmas, you might say, began after Easter.  Why?  There was a spiritual phenomenon which created the Jesus Movement and this Movement became the churches of gathered people in the cities of the Roman Empire.  Many people experienced this spiritual phenomenon.  How did they talk about this mystical experience?  They said that Christ had been born in them.  And what happened to them when they had this experience?  They said that they were overshadowed by the Holy Spirit.  They said they had unspeakable joy and peace and faith and goodness and self-control.  The mystical experience of Christ being born within them also created friendship beyond birth family; it created a community of people with common interest and purpose.  Something so good had happened within them, they wanted to share it others to see if the experience could be replicated in the lives of others.  And you know what?  It did.  The recurrence of this mystical experience into the lives of many people shocked the leaders of the Jesus Movement.  They knew that the success would not diminish because they knew that another Higher Power was responsible for the mystical experience.  The Higher Power of Holy Spirit was the explanation given for making the birth of the Risen Christ occur in the lives of increasingly more and more people.

Before Bethlehem was written about, the birth of Risen Christ happened in the lives of many people.  And it kept happening and it created communities in many places.  And these communities wanted to teach the mysticism of the birth of Christ into their lives to anyone who would want to have this experience.

What did the leaders do?  They created spiritual manuals for their membership and for those who were being initiated into this interior event of the birth of Christ.  But the early churches were still very much minority communities in the Roman Empire.  They could not be public gatherings.  Home churches could not even have the same public profile that synagogues had attained in the Roman cities.  House churches had to "fly under the radar" to avoid too much public attention.  Their teachings and writings had to be private to their communities and their writings had to be cryptic, that is, they had to hide their mystical reality within an actual story.  The Christmas stories hide the elements of the mystical birth of Christ in spiritual ways that were understood by initiated members of the churches.

So how is the mysticism of the early church hid in the Christmas stories?  The Virgin Mary is the paradigm of all persons who knew the conception and birth of the Risen Christ within themselves?  It was not of human origin; one's life was overshadowed by the Holy Spirit to experience the birth of Christ.  But Mary and Joseph had physical and social reality too.  The birth of Jesus happened in Bethlehem.  For the early Christians, "Bethlehem" represented the physical location of their lives when they experienced the birth of Christ in themselves.  Paul's Bethlehem was on the road to Damascus.  Bethlehem fulfilled the ancient Scriptural reference to the city of David.  The early Christians following, Paul believed that this experience of the birth of Christ into one's life was a very providential event and was regarded to be the furtherance of universal salvation that was predicted in the writings of the Hebrew Scriptures.

So tonight, I am here to say, "I like Christmas,in fact, I love Christmas."  You and I can pick and choose from all of the Christmas trappings in our culture, but the question for me and you is this?  Has Christ been born in me?  Has Christ been born in you?  How would we know it?  Love, joy, peace, forgiveness, self-control, sacrificial giving, friendship, hope, faith, practicing justice, helping the needy and vulnerable, and patience.  You and I know the birth of Christ in us by the fruits of this birth which initiated the transformation of our lives.

Tonight, I salute you as I would the Virgin Mary; Congratulations on the birth of Christ in you by the power of the Holy Spirit.  But not just in your inner lives; you have locations like Bethlehem and Nazareth.  You and I have places to let the birth of Christ live and grow in us and make a difference in the Bethlehem and Nazareth locations of our lives.

Christmas, by all means celebrate it, but don't forget the origin of Christmas: the mystical birth of the life of Christ in us.  Merry Christmas and congratulations on the birth of Christ, in YOU!  Amen.

Meaning of John as Gestational Gymnast

4 Advent C     December 23, 2018

Micah 5:2-4   Song of Mary     

Heb.10:5-10   Luke 1:39-56

Lectionary Link

 Luke 7:28b-35. I tell you, among those born of women there is no one greater than John; yet the one who is least in the kingdom of God is greater than he

When ancient writings survived, they became more venerated.  The survival of writings were proof of their continuing popularity within communities of people who found their meanings useful.  Survival was manifest in their actual "printing" technologies.  When text faded from the scroll of papyrus, it had to be re-inked.  The re-inking of the text was proof of the popularity of the text and so texts which lost their usefulness or relevance within a community were left to fade away and disappear.

The ways in which the Gospel texts have come to serve the church calendars should not keep us from trying to achieve insights into the function of the text when it was first written.  The context of the early Jesus Movement trying to convert the followers of John the Baptist is more relevant to the actual meaning of today's Gospel than meanings that we have come to have for it in our Advent-Christmas lectionary purposes.

Above I quote a later passage from Luke which obviously is a rather blunt oracle saying of Jesus  in the early church comparing the experience of the post-resurrection Holy Spirit filled Christian and the experience of John the Baptist and those who used John the Baptist as the most adequate message about God and about God's kingdom.

How were followers of John to be convinced to become followers of Jesus, followers of the Risen Christ who had an experience of the Kingdom of God which surpassed John the Baptist?

How do we know the experience of the Risen Christ and the birth of Christ into one's life surpasses what was offered by John the Baptist?

Well, John as an adult said that Jesus and his ministry was the preferred message and not only did John believe that as an adult, he even responded as prenatal John to the prenatal Jesus.

Prenatal John in his mother's womb leaped in response when Elizabeth his mother met with Mary who was "with child," with the Christ child.

So the pre-natal John without any cultural bias was responding to Jesus even before either of them were born.  Could there be any more fascinating preaching appeal to the followers of John the Baptist than this wonderful story of expectant moms?   Elizabeth's word helped to create perhaps the most popular prayer in the world, the "Hail Mary."  "Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb."

Before we rush into all the meanings which have accrued for John and Jesus in our Advent and Christmas observances, let up remember the primary function of the message being used to convince the followers of John the Baptist to graduate to the experience of following Jesus.

In the mystagogy, the teachings of the mystery of Christ born into one's life, or the mysticism of the early church, the birth of John to Elizabeth is contrasted to the birth of Jesus to Mary, somewhat like the Pauline comparison of the states of "chosenness" of the birth of Ishmael to Hagar and Isaac to Sarah.

John the Baptist baptized with water; Jesus baptized with the Holy Spirit.  The birth into John the Baptist was very important, but the birth of Christ into a person happened as one was overshadowed by the Holy Spirit to realized that one of "conceived by God and made a child of God."

We often get caught up in literal story and forget, neglect, miss the mystagogy that the early Gospel preachers are conveying in the Advent and Christmas stories.

The birth event of John and Elizabeth and his life teaching were to be preparation for the birth event of Christ into each person willing to say to God, "let it be to me according to your word."

Mary's song, a song of praise about the event of the experience of God's favor is to be the song of everyone who has realized the Christ event within the soul as the hope of glory in one's life.

As we enter the Christmas season and are so thrilled to keep the stories as external happenings in some past history, let us not forget the mystagogy which motivated the early preaching of the Jesus Movement.  These writings were preached and delivered by persons who were completely thrilled with the birth of the Risen Christ within their lives.  And I hope you have that thrill too.  Amen.