Suffering and Entrance into the Priestly

21 Pentecost Cycle B Proper 25     October 28, 2012

Job 42:1-6, 10-17  Psalm 34:1-8, (19-22)
Hebrews 7:23-28  Mark 10:46-52

Lectionary Link

  Unfortunately it is hurricane season and Sandy is in the Atlantic this week.  She has already caused damage and loss of life in the Caribbean especially in Haiti and now she’s headed toward the New Jersey Coast.  Our prayers ascend and also let’s hope that every two bit prophet out there will just keep their mouths shut about knowing God’s will regarding suffering.  It is bad enough that terrible things happen; it is made worse when someone thinks they can know precisely why it happened and in accordance with God’s will.  The politicians who have opined about God’s will have not done a truly worshipful God any favors.  Really bad theology can keep people away from the God of love whom many of us believe that Jesus came to reveal.

  The Book of Job was written precisely for the people who thought they knew God’s will and why bad things happened.  It could have been written against some of the simplistic, cause and effect writings of the prophets who preached that Israel was suffering because of her sins.  Now this may be true in a general sense because we might say that if a person has a bad character that person is going to get into some trouble at some time; it is not true always in the specific sense of knowing how the conditions of freedom manifest prosperity and suffering in specific cases.

  And so we have the ironic writing of the book of Job.  The writer writes a story that goes against the common “popular theology.”  What was that theology?  God blesses good people.  So success means that you must be good otherwise God would not let you succeed.  And if you suffer, it means you must have done something wrong, even if you don’t know what you did.  Or you just might suffer collateral damage because of something done by someone else.

  The plot of Job tells us that Job is a righteous man but also a fortunate man.   You know the saying, “I’d rather be lucky than good,” well, Job was both good and lucky.  So in the heavenly council Satan says, “Of course Job is good, he’s good because he’s been lucky.  But if you take away his good luck, he will curse God.”  What does God say, “The bet is on; have at it with Job but just spare his life.”  And so a hurricane of woes hits Job’s life.  He loses everything and everyone and even his own health; but he did not lose his theological friends who were present to tell him the meaning of his suffering.

  If you and I actually thought that God and Satan were in some heavenly place putting wagers on whether we would have faith, I doubt if anyone of us would believe in such a God.  But the point of the story is a satire on people who believed that events in people’s lives were precisely coupled with specific knowable actions and knowledge of God's personal disapproval. The writer of Job used a satire of this theology to put this theology into question. The writer used an exaggerated simple cause and effect theology to challenge how such theology was not honest to compassion in the suffering situation.  I also wonder if the writer was not a woman?  Did you notice how the writer made a special point of mentioning the inheritance of Job’s daughters?  Could be that the story was also taking a swipe at inheritance practices of the time as well.

  The punchline of the story of Job for me is this;  “The Lord restored Job’s fortune when he prayed for his friends.”  And I think that fuller notion of prayer is not just religious acts that we do in church;  prayer is how our entire life is offered to God on behalf of others.

  When someone is suffering what is needed?  Does a person need friends who come to be completely awkward at giving care and comfort?  Suffering brings a crisis to a person and their family and community and those who are not immediately affected stand outside of the suffering.  And in their uncomfortable “rubbernecking” on the suffering of another, they often offer awkward and unhelpful advice.  We've all been in situations where we don’t know how to react or what to say and so we just open our mouths and say something that ends up being really inappropriate, stupid or not very helpful.  Friends who offer easy answers to suffering are not very helpful.  But Job survived his suffering and he did it in part for his friends.

  The Lord restored Job’s fortune when he prayed for his friends.  Did we ever view our lives as life experience that prepares us to be with the people whom we are called to help?  This is the wise theory and practice behind specialized “support groups.”  Support groups are most often closed groups; you can’t be a survivor of cancer if you have not had it yet.  And what is the message of most support groups?  We will not let our suffering make us victims.  We will let our entire life inform the meaning of our lives, not just the event of suffering that we experienced.  Support groups are based upon what I call oblationary prayer; it is when your life experience becomes shared with others.  
  People suffer because of the incredible freedom that is abroad in this world that results in all sorts of things happening.  One can say that God is pure creativity.  Another way to say that is that God is pure freedom and God shares a degree of that freedom with everyone and everything in this world.  And in a world of such freedom we can observe laws of consistent patterns in behaviors but we can also see human suffering when systems come into conflict.  An Oncologist can be fascinated with the performance of cancer cells even while such cells are monstrous in the human body.  Freedom results in the conflict of systems; freedom results in suffering.

  So the question is not why suffering happens; the question is when it does occur, what do we do?  And what is the biblical answer?  Well, there are many biblical answers.  The reason that we have so many prophets today making simplistic pronouncements is because they existed in biblical times too.  We know that because the Book of Job had to be written to counter the simplistic formula of suffering and blessing.

  My preferred biblical answer to the problem of suffering is this: God restored the fortune of Job when he prayed for his friends.  "Job, your suffering gave you experience that you have that is so unique but it will make you available to other people in ways that you have not been available to them before.  Your suffering has now made you a priest to people."

  Jesus was not a priest in the Temple during his life, but the writer to the Hebrews believed that Jesus was the very essence of what defines a priest.  His life, death and suffering were viewed as his life offered on behalf of humanity and that is what made him a priest.  We, the church are too hung up with the priestly office, when we should emphasize that the entire nature of the church is priestly.  Your experience as it is offered to the people to whom you are called is what makes you priestly.

  I would like for everyone of one us to embrace our experience and come to understand that we are valuable to the rest of the community because of our experience.  The question for each of us is this:  Can I embrace and accept my experience in all of its breadth?  Can I accept that I am not an island in this world?  Can I accept that my experience can be a gift to others as I offer it as a prayer to God and to the community?

  If you and I can offer our lives, with its suffering and joy to God and to our community, we have entered the priesthood of Job and the priesthood of Christ.  Can we do that today?   If so, in a very, very unofficial way, I, with no authority at all, now so ordain into the priesthood of Christ, every person here who is willing to offer their lives as prayers for the community.  Amen.

Puppet Show on the Meaning of Halloween

A lesson about Halloween

Puppet Show starring Roary the Lion

Roary:  Roar…Good morning boys and girls.  My name is Roary the Lion.  How are you today?

Do you know what holiday is coming up?

What is it called?

It is called Halloween.

Can you say Halloween?

Do you know what Halloween means?

Does it mean we get dressed in costumes?

Does it mean that we go Trick or Treating?

Yes, it does mean that but I want to tell about how we came to have Halloween.

Are you ready?

Okay….

Can you say, “All Hallow’s Eve”

All Hallow’s Eve.

When people began to say, “All Hallow’s Eve” real fast it began to sound like Halloween.

If you say All Hallow’s Eve real fast…it can sound like Halloween.

All Hallow’s Eve, All Hallow’s Eve, All Hallow’s Eve,   Halloween!

Do you know what All Hallow’s means?

How many of you know what a super hero is?

Is Batman a superhero?

Is Superman a superhero?

Are Ninja Turtles superheroes?

Are Power Rangers superheroes?

Also we have other kinds of heroes like princesses.

Snow White.  Belle.  Oriel.  Cinderella.

And at Halloween we wear costumes of superheroes and princesses.

We also have other heroes like baseball players.  The San Francisco Giants?

And football players?

And we have famous Olympic gymnastic heroes?

But do you know what All Hallow’s means?

It means All Saints.  Can you say All Saints?

Have you heard the word Saint?

What church are we at today?  We're at Saint John's church today.

Who was Saint John?  St. John was a famous hero.  He loved God and he helped other people to love God.

Have you heard about St. Mary?  St. Mary was a hero too.  She was the mother of the baby Jesus.

So saints are heroes.  They are God’s heroes.  They are heroes of our church.  And there are many heroes who did some very nice and kind things.

All Saint’s Day or All Hallow’s Day is the day when we celebrate all of the heroes who loved God in a very special way.

And so the evening before All Saint’s Day is called All Hallow’s Eve or Halloween.

It is the Day before the celebration of God’s famous heroes.

So as you put on your superhero costumes and your princess costumes remember God’s heroes.  And they are called saints.

And you are called to be a hero too.  You are a hero when you are kind and good.

Can you say, Thank you God for Halloween?

Can you say, Thank you God for heroes?

Suffering Is Honest to the Conditions of Freedom

21  Pentecost b P.24  October 21, 2012

Job 38:1-7, (34-41) Psalm 91:9-16

Hebrews 5:1-10 Mark 10:35-45

 Lectionary Link

   It might be interesting to be able to know the future in precise details unless; the predictions for the future were always for misfortune and bad luck.  Would we want to know the future if we knew for sure that it would be bad luck?  I don’t think that we would; so it is enough for us to use wisdom to understand probabilities and try to take the necessary precautions. 

  The disciples of Jesus wanted for Jesus to guarantee them the knowledge and promise of a future success for them.   They wanted to be promised specific success and specific promotion:  “Jesus, could we sit next you in the best seats of your kingdom?”  And Jesus could not claim access to such future knowledge.  Only his Father could know that and if we understand the plentitude of God to be the one who Jesus called Father, Jesus was simply saying that the future can only be possible, it is not yet actual.

   In the various communities of those who wrote the Bible, there was different reflection upon how can one be guaranteed success and how one could ward off suffering and failure.  There are certain writers who thought they had discovered some success formula.  If you are righteous and obey God, then God will give you success.  However, if suddenly one does not have success and one suffers loss, using that same success formula, one must admit that bad things happen because one is really bad and thus deserves bad luck, even if one’s badness does not seem particularly evident to the one who has to suffer.  How can a suffering baby understand his own sins for such suffering?  And why would a baby be singled out for punishment because of a parent’s sin?  So the success formula really does not work when the punishment of suffering does not seem to fit precisely with any obvious crime.  Other writers in the Bible challenged the formula for guaranteeing blessing simply because it seemed as though in so much of the history of Israel, God’s chosen people suffered a lot.  And it is not always easy to find a one to one correspondence between the suffering and the particular crime that caused the suffering.  And so we have the book of Job as a testament to the fact that some bad things can happen to good people.  In this morality play, in the final scene, God speaks directly out of the whirlwind.  And what does God say?  God essentially said, “the plentitude of God and life is much bigger and older than you Job; you are but a tiny particle on the plentitude of life and so you cannot possibly know why everything happens in the way in which it happens.  Job, you are not fullness of life, you are not God, and so you don’t really have to know everything.  And you certainly don’t have to even pretend to know everything.  And Job, all of those people who pretended to know why you suffered, they were very presumptuous and they owe you an apology and I want you to pray for them in their narrow “know it all” views.”

  People who want future guarantees are people who want to exert a sense of control where they have no control.  The control that we have is acting in wisdom on probabilities; not in any precise knowledge of a future event, good or bad.

  This very same debate governed how various groups wanted to discuss a future messiah.  In some people’s mind Jesus could not be the messiah precisely because he suffered.  A triumphant hero would not be subjected to Roman crucifixion; a triumphant hero would rout the Romans out of Palestine and reestablish a kingdom in Israel like King David did. 

  The group of Jews who later became the Christian community believed the messiah to be a suffering servant.  A God who intervenes in history and knocks some heads is not how Jesus the messiah came to be understood.  Granted, many Christians who proclaimed Jesus as a suffering messiah, decided to delay the triumphant messiah until a future end of history when the one who suffered would be the one who judges.  We need not believe in a precise future narrative but it is quite normal to believe in the victory of justice, even when we cannot fully understand how it will actually happen.  People in every age will spin stories of future justice, future freedom from suffering from pain, simply because we believe that justice and freedom from pain is normal and desirable.  If injustice and suffering seems to prevail, there is still no reason to submit to suffering and injustice as what defines a good life.

  The writer of the letter of Hebrews said that Jesus learned obedience through what he suffered.  And what does suffering teach us?  It teaches us submission to the greater order of all that is.  We must submit in our minds because the infinite number of things in mutual relationships is too vast to understand.  This is not fatalistic thinking; it is the sheer fact of quantity.  The quantity of events in my life and life experience is much less than the plentitude of all of life and of God’s life.  After we do everything in our might and power to work for freedom from pain and suffering and injustice, we find that we have to obey or submit to what is, or what actually happens to us.  This kind of submission is how we avoid denial.

  The Christian life is not a life of denial; it is not a system of giving us easy answers about how we can secure future exact and precise blessing and success, such as the disciples of Jesus wanted.  The Christian worldview does not tell us why suffering occurs except for allowing that true freedom is happening in our world.  What Christians understand is that God in Jesus suffers with us.  God understands the full implications of true freedom in this world and God suffers with us to acknowledge the reality of freedom.

  Yes we are tempted to want a method and theology to guarantee a future of success and exemption from suffering and injustice.  But that is not realistic and it is not honest to God or honest to Jesus.

  Jesus asked his disciples if they could drink of the same cup that he did and be baptized with the same baptism that he had.  They said yes and Jesus agreed.  Indeed, Jesus’ identification with the suffering was very complete and so will ours be.  In all of the occasions of life, the freedom in this world results in various amounts of suffering but also the blessing of success and fortune.  To be human is to be submitted to freedom and freedom’s mysterious consequences in actual occasions.  This is honest to life; this is not some religious huckster message promising you specific blessing or freedom from suffering.

  In faith, like Job and Jesus we submit; we obey the dictates of the permissive freedom of all that has happened.  And we are baffled because we are smaller than towering plentitude of events within which we live.

  In faith we believe that God, who is all, registers and knows our present condition and lets us know from within and from without that we are cared for with a personal care.  And in faith we know that we need to be servants to each other; our hands need to be the hands of God to help each other.  In faith, we know that if God really honors freedom, then we need to use our freedom to serve as much as we can to counter the freedom that permits injustice and suffering.

  Jesus learned obedience and submission in his suffering.  And from this we can know that God suffers with us and lets us know that it is our calling to use our freedom to serve those who suffer and to promote justice in a world where injustice can truly occur.

  Let us today, not be humiliated by the great mystery of God and by the great fullness of life; let us be humbled by knowing our limitations but let us also know that God permits us in our human limitations to know some wonderful events of grace, love, faith and hope.  And if our human limitations are expressed in life occasions that can only be called grace, love, faith and hope, then we can be thankful indeed.  And in our thanksgiving let us be generous in service.  Amen.

The "Next" Commandment

19  Pentecost bP.23  October 14, 2012

Job 23:1-9, 16-17, 10-15  Ps. 90

Hebrews 4:12-16  Mark 10:17-27

Lectionary Link

  In history of religion most religious people have tried to make theological explanations for both prosperity and suffering.  In the Hebrew Scripture tradition and the history of people who have practiced the faith we find various theologies or explanations for why God’s people sometimes experience prosperity and why they experience suffering.  And sometimes these competing explanations come into conflict within a community; sometimes some of God’s people are successful and some apparently are not.  So why do some people prosper and some do not?

  The story of Job was written by a wisdom writer who wanted to oppose the sort of Pollyanna theology of prosperity which said, “If you keep the law and obey God, then God will bless you with success and prosperity.”  So we have Job, a righteous man who suffered the loss of everything by God’s permissive hand behind the scenes.  Job challenged all of the theologies of prosperities of his friends and the writer of Job was saying, “Bad things do happen to good people, even righteous people, even people who keep the law.”

  We also have theories of suffering and prosperity within our own modern culture of secular individualism.  We can naively think that people in any society rise and fall solely due to their individual merit while we deny that lots of people have a larger safety net than others in whether  they are successful or not.  I also have noticed that entertainment figures use New Age religions to give a justification as to why they are successful and why they are justified or destined to receive a disproportionate amount of the fame and wealth in our world.

  In our appointed Gospel we have presented to us an encounter between Jesus the wisdom teacher and a wealthy young man who was very interested in the law.  One might say that this wealthy young man was someone who wanted to use Jesus to verify why he was so successful.  This young man was one who was proud of his accomplishments.  This was a young man who believed in success through his individual merit.   This is a man who wanted to use the law as a check list and a resume of his success.  “The ten commandments?  I’ve done them, piece of cake now can I have a real challenge?  Rabbi Jesus please give me a real challenge.”  Be careful what you ask for?

  If I were to characterize this Gospel paragraph, I would call it a theology of the “next commandment.”  What is the most important commandment for any person?  It is the “next commandment.”  Jesus was not going to let the young man rest on the laurels of his success with the past commandments, he challenged and gave him a very hard next commandment.  “Sell all that you have and give to the poor.”  How many of us would like to have that as our next commandment?  Maybe we’re thinking, “I’m not too proud of my performance of the other commandments, give me some time Jesus, before you give me that commandment.  And surely on my death bed all of my material possessions will be given up by me.”

  What I would assert to each of us is that we need to always be working on the next commandment.  And what is the next commandment?  It is something different for each of us based upon our own circumstances.  For people like Job who don’t know the rhyme or reason of their suffering even when his friends are trying to give the easy answers, the next commandment in suffering is to just hold on in faith in knowing that one is not exempt from some of the probabilities of genuine freedom in this world.  It can be a great challenge to be working on the next commandment because the next commandment involves applying excellent response to the specifics of our situation now.  And excellence will means something different for every person.

  What is the next commandment for you and me now?  What is the next commandment for your family and for our parish?  We can rely upon our past good records as providing us with the character to keep on keeping on, but we still have to work and accomplish the next commandment.

  So what is the next commandment for you?  For someone in a skilled nursing center, the next commandment may involve an acceptance of the limitation of the body and not letting the past criteria for successful living be the current standards that one places upon oneself.  The next commandment for each of us involves an honest assessment of what we need to do next to progress in excellence.  What do I need to do next to be better in the art of Christian living?  I really cannot tell you what you need to do next.  I cannot tell you what your next commandment is; all I can tell you is to look for it and don’t avoid it.

  What is the next commandment for St. John the Divine parish?  What do we need to do to be the very best parish now?  We have some challenges facing us because of the ever changing circumstances in our demographics.  We have challenges for ministry and for financing and for outreach.  No, our conditions do not exhibit the conditions of the suffering Job but we can only embrace the conditions that face us now.

  Why is it that the wealthy cannot enter the kingdom of God?  I think it is because the kingdom of God has to be inherited as a son or daughter of God.  Wealthy people, whether in the wealth of their own money or the wealth of their own merit believe that they deserve the kingdom of God.  They completely miss the “state of mind and the state of spirit” for recognizing the way in which Jesus saw God’s graceful kingdom.

  This should also tell us about our next commandment.  We cannot make ourselves enter the kingdom of God by performance.  We can open our hearts to accept the grace of being in God’s kingdom and act accordingly.  We do not perform our next commandment in order to get into the kingdom; we do so through the grace of already being God’s sons and daughters and by letting others know that they too share in the God’s graceful kingdom.  We cannot deserve something that we already have and that has been given by God.  The wealthy young man was trying to earn something he already had and therefore he and all who were similarly wealthy were isolated from its benefit.

  The Gospel of Jesus proclaims to us the inheritance of God’s kingdom; we’re doing nothing to deserve it, however with our actions we can expand our appreciation of the grace of God that is always and already a part of our lives.  It is through grace that we take up the next commandment of our lives towards excellence, not to get into the kingdom of God but as proof of the God of love.

  Let us acknowledge the wealth of God’s grace and love today and accept our inheritance in God’s kingdom of love.  And let us work on our next commandment in life as good stewards of God’s grace.  Amen.

Riddle of the Camel and the Eye of the Needle

Gospel Puppet Show

October 14, 2012

  Jesus, and the rich young man Solomon

Solomon:  Jesus, I’ve heard so much about you.  And you have become a famous teacher and many people are following.  You must have an important message.

Jesus:  Hello Solomon, how can I help you.

Solomon:  Well, you know that I’m interested in God.  I’m very interested in the law.  And I am interested in doing what I can do get into this kingdom of God that you are talking.  What do I have to do?

Jesus:  Have you kept the commandments?

Solomon:  Of course, I have.  I haven’t killed anyone and I don’t steal.  I don’t have to steal since I have lots of money.  And I don’t tell lies.   Those are very easy for me to do.  Tell me something really important to do so I can get into your kingdom.

Jesus:  Okay, Solomon, I’m going to give you another commandment.  I’m going to give you another rule.  Are you ready for it?

Solomon:  Yes, I am ready for it because I want to do it to get into the kingdom of God.

Jesus:  Okay, Solomon, here is your next commandment.  This is what I want you to do.  I want you to sell everything that you have and give it to the poor people and then come and follow me.

Solomon: Oh no.  How can I do that?  I am very rich.  If I sell everything then all of the people in house will not have money to live on.  How can you ask me to do such a hard thing?

Jesus:  Well, it is true that you do not have any practice in being poor.  There are lots of people who are good people but they still are poor.

Solomon:  I don’t think I can follow your rule.  I’m going have to leave and think about it.

Jesus:  Boys and girls, what do you think?  Should Solomon sell everything and give all of his money to the poor?  Is this how a person becomes a member of the kingdom of God?   Here is a riddle for you:  It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.

And do you want to know the answer to the riddle?

You cannot do anything or buy the kingdom of God.  Why?  Because everyone is already in the kingdom of God.  I am very sorry that Solomon did not know that he was already in God’s kingdom.  He thought that he had to do something to get something he already had?

How did you become a son or a daughter?  By being born.  And after being born you have to accept yourself as a son or daughter in a family.  And by being born you are a child of God…you can’t do anything to earn it.  So you have to accept being a child of God and then just act like a child of God.

So do you understand the riddle?  It is impossible to enter the kingdom of God because you never left it.  God has created the world and it is God’s kingdom and everything is in God’s Kingdom.  What God wants us to do is accept that we are in God’s kingdom.

Repeat after me:  I am in God’s Kingdom.

I am a child of God.

I will act like a child of God. 

A Puppet Show on Wonder

Puppet Show

October 17, 2012

A lesson in Wonder

Father Phil:  Boys and Girls, I want to introduce to you the famous Roary the Lion.  Here’s Roary!

Roary:  Roar!  Roar!  Hello boys and girls.  How are you today?  Roar!  I want to play a game.

Father Phil:  Roary, what game do you want to play?

Roary:  Let’s play “Stump Father Phil”

Father Phil:   Stump Father Phil.  Can you tell these children what that means?

Roary:  Stump Father Phil means that I am going to ask you questions that you can’t answer.

Father Phil:  Are you sure?  How will you know that I don’t know the answer.

Roary:  Well, I bet I can make you say, “HMMM, I wonder.”  And make you stroke your chin.  Here’s the first question.  How many stars are in the sky?

Father Phil:  Hmmm, I wonder!

Roary:  See I gotcha.  How many leaves are on all of the trees in Morgan Hill?

Father Phil:  Hmm, I wonder!

Roary:  I Gotca again!  How many leaves of grass are on the front lawn?

Father Phil:  Hmm, I wonder!

Roary:  I Gotch again!  I am stumping you Father Phil.

Father Phil:  Well, you are stumping these boys and girls too.  The boys and girls have been stroking their chins too and saying, “Hmmm, I wonder.”

Roary:  Well, you know learning in life is about wonder.  I wonder about numbers and letters and when I wonder I want to learn.  And all of these boys and girls are coming to school because they wonder about many, many things.

Father Phil:  Wonder is a wonderful thing.  Do you know another word for Wonder?  It is the word “Awe.”  Can you say awesome?

Roary:  Awesome!  I like that word.  I use it a lot.  I must have lots of wonder in me because I say Awesome all of the time.  Can the children say “Awesome?”

All:  Awesome!

Father Phil:  We say that God is so big and great and we say that God is Awesome.  If God made this world, the trees, the stars and the sky of outer space then God is bigger and greater than this world.

Roary:  So can we say that God and this world are Awesome?

Father Phil:  Yes we can!  God is Awesome.  This world is Awesome.

Roary:  What holiday is coming up?

Father Phil:  Children, what holiday is coming up?  Halloween.

Roary:  At Halloween some people talk about being frightened and saying “boo.”  Even though I am a strong lion, I still don’t like to be frightened.

Father Phil:  Do you know that there is a good way to be scared?

Roary:  No, what is a good way to be scared?

Father Phil:  The good way to be scared is to have wonder.  When we have wonder we drop our jaws and we say Wow!  That awesome.

Roary:  Well, I like wonder and awesome better than being scary.

Father Phil:  Well, I think that means that we can have an awesome and wonderful Halloween and not a scary Halloween.

Roary:  Boys and Girls, do you want to have a wonderful and awesome Halloween?

Father Phil:  Roary, you’re awesome!  Thank you.  Boys and Girls can you say, “Roary, you’re awesome!”  Let’s give Roary a big hand.

A Puppet Show on Joy

Puppet Show

October 10, 2012

A lesson in Joy

Father Phil:  Boys and Girls, I want to introduce to you the famous Roary the Lion.  Here’s Roary!

Roary:  Roar!  Roar!  Hello boys and girls.  How are you today?  Roar!  I’ve got to clear my throat.  I must have swallowed a hair ball.  Roar!  Cough!  Okay what do you want, Big Daddy Phil.

Father Phil:  Roary, they don’t call me big daddy.  They call me Father Phil.  But now that you’re here, would you help teach us a lesson today?

Roary:  Okay, what do you want to teach?

Father Phil: I want you to teach these children about joy.

Roary:  Joy?  I once had a cousin named Joy.  How do you think she got the name Joy?

Father Phil:  Well, joy is something very wonderful and that’s why we want to learn about joy.

Roary:  Well, first do you think these children can help me spell joy?  It’s only three letters.  Give me a “J”.

All:  “J”

Roary:  Give me an “O.”

All: “O”

Roary: Give me a “Y.”

All:  “Y”

Roary:  And what does that spell?

All:  It spells joy.

Roary:  Yes, it spells joy.

Father Phil:  Roary, but we need to do more than spell joy; we need to understand what joy is.

Roary:  Well, first of all joy is a wonderful gift from God. 

Father Phil:  How do you know it is a gift?

Roary:  Have you ever seen a baby smile?

Father Phil:  Yes, I have seen lots of babies smile.  I love to see babies smiles.  It makes me very happy.

Roary:  Well, joy is a smiling baby.

Father Phil:  Is joy the same thing as happiness?

Roary:  It is like happiness but it is more than happiness.

Father Phil:  How is joy more than happiness?

Roary: Joy is a gift from God.  Happiness depends upon what happens.  Did you know that that you can have joy but also be sad?

Father Phil:  How can I have joy and still be sad?

Roary:  Well, when you fall scrape your knee, are you happy?

Father Phil:  Well, no.  I am sad to hurt my knee.

Roary:  But even when you hurt your knee and when you are sad, there are so many other good things in your life.  Like you have parents who love you.  A teacher will give you a Band Aid.  Your puppy will still be friendly to you.  The sun will still shine.   The trees will still be beautiful. 

Father Phil:  So just because one bad thing happens to me to make me sad; at the same time there is so much that is good and lovely and beautiful in this world, I can still have joy in my life because life is still very good.

Roary:  Bingo!  Joy means you know deep in your heart that life is still very good, even if sometimes you are sad about something bad that has happened to you.

Father Phil:  You know that I don’t know why a baby smiles.  A baby cannot talk and tell me why she is happy.

Roary:  Well, I think God made babies to know joy and so they smile just because they are alive.  And that’s how you know that joy is a gift from God.

Father Phil:  Thank you Roary for teaching us about joy.

Roary:  You’re welcome.  And boys and girls can you be thankful for the gift of joy?

Father Phil:  Now let me see a big joyful smile.

Roary:  Can you say, “Thank you God for the gift of Joy!”

All:  Thank you God for the gift of Joy.

Roary:  Bye, bye and have a very joyful day!

Father Phil: Bye, bye Roary and thank you for the lesson about joy.

   

Which is the Greater Principle, Love or Failure at Love?

19  Pentecost Cycle b proper 22 October 7, 2012

Job 1:1; 2:1-10    Psalm 26

Hebrews 1:1-4; 2:5-12  Mark 10:2-16

Lectionary Link

  One of William Shakespeare’s most popular plays in his time was the tragic love story Romeo and Juliet?  Isn’t it significant that there is something very gripping about star-crossed lovers who are  not given permission by their society to fulfill what love requires, namely, to be  with one’s beloved.

  What is perhaps our favorite definition of God?  We say that God is love.  And so there must be something divine about love.  We might even view creation as the total sense of togetherness that we experience in life.  Love is general in that we unavoidably belong with everything else, but love is very particular in that it is intensely experienced as  personalized magnetic forces which are scattered within the world and it happens that people are drawn to particular other people.

  The story of Adam and Eve is not a historic event; it is the theological explanation about why people are attracted to each other.  Why did Eve exist?  God saw that Adam was lonely and so there had to be someone enough like Adam but not Adam to deal with his lonely heart.  There had to be another person for Adam.

  The story of Adam and Eve is a primordial love story of humanity in that each person confronts one’s own loneliness and deeply yearns for companionship and even desires a soul mate.  But what has happened in human society? The great quest for love and one’s soul mate gets reduced to what the society needs for division of labor and for the politics of relationship between families.  The notion of finding one’s soul mate gets reduced to mere human breeding for procreation for farm hands and for survival of the species.  And when love is taken out of human relationship and it is reduced to fulfilling the role requirements of humanity then the value and importance of love is lost.

  And what happens?  It’s time to bring in the lawyers.  Marriage and love is reduced to the fact that love is absent and marriage has failed.  And so the great love story of Adam and Eve is reduced to the priority of something like the legal document called a prenuptial.  A prenuptial is going into a relationship with one’s fingers crossed; it is a lack of faith.  It is a belief in disillusionment before it even happens.  It is the elevation of Murphy’s Law to the high principle of life.  If my relationship can fail, it probably will and so I have to take steps for that eventuality.

  This is what Jesus confronted in his encounter with the religious lawyers of his time.  Jesus confronted the fact that marriage relationship had been reduced to the loss of utility of a person in a marital role.  Some rabbis thought that a woman could be divorced for something as trivial as not being able to make good soup.  This emphasis was a great sin against the great love story of Adam and Eve and the loneliness of heart that gets resolved when two people in love find each other.

  What if you were on an airplane and every five minutes the flight attendants came onto the public address speakers giving you advice of what to do in the eventuality of a forced landing.  You would get nervous and angry.  You would rather that they shut up and let the thought of safe arrival to your destination be the dominant goal of the entire flight.

  Jesus came to a group of religious lawyers who talking more about the inevitability of divorce rather than the divine superiority of love.  And Jesus simply stated the principle of the great primordial love story of Adam and Eve.  Remember it was not good for Adam to be lonely.  Remember that finding the love of your life is to a large extent what human life is all about.  And then Jesus did what he often did; he brought in the kids to get adults to unlearn all of their skewed priorities.  See these kids; they understand God’s way, God’s rules, God’s kingdom, God’s order.  They understand need for others, dependence and they understand love.  They know it when they receive it and feel it.  So become like these children if you want to regain your native new-born in the Spirit Selves.

  Part of the problems for adults and the question of love is that we can get bogged down by all of the politics and the details of the social context.   Jesus found the religious leaders arguing about what to do about human failure in a way that elevated human failure to the same level as success in loving relationship.  As adult we can get so jaded by failure or we can get so angry that people don’t agree with our view, we can easily lose perspective.  There are many interpreters who would elevate meaning of this Gospel lesson to be solely about how heterosexual marriage should be practiced in society today.  I would argue that this would miss the entire point that Jesus was making since if we look at the diverse cultural details of how covenant relationships have been practiced in the last 6000 years of humanity, we could not elevate any details of any particular setting to be the final definition of marital practice.

  The Gospel of the words of Jesus for me is this:  God is Love.  Humans are lonely for God.  But God is too unlike humans to be adequate to human loneliness.  Humans need other humans to cure another aspect of their loneliness.  But acknowledging general loneliness and general need for love is not enough, there has to be Adam and Eve, namely, there has to be particular love experienced between two people in a special way that enables human loneliness to find the therapeutic cure for loneliness.  The Gospel is also this:  find your child-likeness again to be able to recognize the experience and priority of love.

  The warning of our Gospel is the same warning of Romeo and Juliet:  Human societies can actually make love a tragic event.  Why is it that human societies often build up barriers to people who have found their soul mate to being able to be honest to love and honest to God?

  Let us not forget today that the Gospel of Jesus is in fact the truth of the great love story.  God is love.  The primordial couple found committed love to each other as the cure to loneliness.  Today, let us pray that we can know God as love.  Let us know that we are called to Love.  But let us be thankful when we have found specific love with someone.  And let us be happy and hopeful for all to be able to find and express specific love with someone else.  Let us not be tricked into making divorce, failure at relationship the dominant topic of life;  let us hold onto the fact that God is love and God calls us to love and indeed we can have wonderful love with another person.  Amen.

Puppet Show on Curiosity

Puppet Show

October 3, 2012

Topic Curiosity

Father Phil:  Hi, Mary, how are you doing?

Mary:  I’m doing fine.  And look at all of these boys and girls here.  What are they doing here?

Father Phil:  I think they came here to see you.

Mary: Me, why would they come to see me?

Father Phil:  Well, I think they like you.  Boys and girls don’t you like Mary?  Give Mary a big hand.

Mary:  Father Phil, I need to ask you some questions.

Father Phil:  Okay, ask me some questions.

Mary:  How many stars are in the sky?

Father Phil:  I don’t know.  Millions or billions.  There are too many to count.

Mary: Why don’t you know how many stars there are?

Father Phil:  Well, I can’t fly into the sky and count them all.  There are too many of them.

Mary: So, how many leaves are on the trees in Morgan Hill.

Father Phil:  I don’t know.  There are too many to count.

Mary:  So how many hairs are on your head?

Father Phil:  Well, in the front of my head that easy.  No hairs on the front of my head.  But on the sides and the back there are too many for me to count.

Mary:  How many little tiny ants live in Morgan Hill?

Father Phil:  Again, I don’t know.  And they are hidden under the ground so I can’t count them all.

Mary:  Why are some clouds round?

Father Phil:  I don’t really know.

Mary: How many walnuts do a squirrel eat each day?

Father Phil:  Well, I don’t know.  I’ve never lived with a squirrel.

Mary: Why do leaves fall off the tree in the fall?

Father Phil: Because the season changes and it is part of the way that a tree grows.

Mary: Why do seasons change?

Father Phil:  Because the earth spins and tilts away from the sun.

Mary: Why does the earth tilt away from the sun.

Father Phil:  Well, I’m not sure.

Mary:  Father Phil, you have not given me many answers.

Father Phil:  You are right.  This world is so big and there is so much to know.  Can I ask you a question?

Mary: Okay.

Father Phil:  Mary why do you ask so many questions?

Mary:  Well, I don’t know.  Maybe I just want to know things.  Maybe that is the way that I am made.

Father Phil: Well, that is the way you are made.  You are made to be curious.

Mary: Curious.  What does that mean?

Father Phil:  It means that you are always asking “why?”  I think that God made us that way.

Mary:  God made me curious?  Is that good?

Father Phil:  Yes, it is very good to be curious because that means you always want to learn new things.

Mary:  Like learning science from Miss Christie?  Or letters in Miss Sue’s class or numbers in Miss Virginia’s class.

Father Phil:  Yes, Mary you are made to be curious about everything.  But we also have to have parents and teachers to help our curiosity.

Mary: Why do we need help with our curiosity?

Father Phil: A young baby might be curious about seeing a fire.  But should we let a baby or anyone touch fire?

Mary:  No, they would get burned.

Father Phil:  So we always need help from people who know more than we do so we can be safe.  Do you want to be safe?

Mary:  Yes, I want to be safe.

Father Phil:  I want to be curious but I also want to be safe.  That is a good lesson for today.

Mary:  Are you going to teach these boys and girls to be curious and safe?

Father Phil:  Mary, will you help me teach these boys and girls?

Mary:  Okay.

Father Phil:  Okay boys and girls, let’s all say:  “I thank God that I am curious!”

All:  “I thank God that I am curious.”

Father Phil:  I also want to be safe.

All: I also want to be safe.

Mary: Curious but safe, that is a good lesson.

Father Phil:  Mary, thank you for helping us learn our lesson today.  Curious but safe.  Can everyone give Mary a big hand?