2 Pentecost Cycle B proper 5 June 7, 2015
Psalm 130 Genesis
3:8-15
2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1 Mark 3:20-35
2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1 Mark 3:20-35
Lectionary Link
One of the reasons why the Bible has fallen out of favor in our modern times is due to the fact that many people of faith out of fear and respect for modern science began to defend the Bible in the wrong way. People of faith were intimidated by modern scientists and skeptical philosophers who regarded the meanings found in the Bible as being inferior and out-dated truths. So, many Bible defenders began to defend the Bible as being true in the scientific way and in the way in which we define the truth of modern journalistic eye-witness reporting. And in defending the Bible in these wrong ways, what has become known as fundamentalism has become a way of religious life for many. I do not question the validity of faith of fundamentalists; I do question their misguided defense of the Bible and their faith in a limited method of interpretation.
The Bible is chock full of inspired meanings; it is a reservoir and encyclopedia of flashing insights which we can find to be relevant to our lives of faith but we attain those meanings more through artistic devotional reading than we do through the scientific method. The proliferation of modern knowledge has divided life knowledge and life experiences into so many different genres and life expressions. We have politics, entertainment, sports, futurism, ethics and religion, all as separate categories today. The Bible united all of these categories within one life expression because the biblical literature used to comprehend or encompass the life experience of the peoples who did not have the massive amounts of information which we have today.
I find it hilarious that modern skeptics would belittle the biblical messiah even while we live in modern cultures of so many super-heroes in our entertainment world that it is surely hypocritical for modern people to criticize biblical messianism when modern hero-fantasies make the biblical messiah look rather reserved. We moderns have moved the messianic motifs out of religion and placed them into genres of cinema, science fiction and the mytho-poeic.(see Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit and Harry Potter and all of the Superheroes).
For us as biblical Christian, it behooves us to uphold the inspired biblical meanings in the modes of discourse appropriate for the perpetuation of these aesthetic meanings which inspire faithful living towards love and justice.
The biblical writers attempt to provide us with wisdom insights about big questions, like how did we come to know good and evil. How do we know ourselves to be moral agents?
What are the ancient insights about the moral adventure that we live as human beings? Why is that have come to know that we define human behaviors as right and wrong? Well, according to our proto-mother Eve, in short, "The devil made me do it." Or in her case the trickster, the serpent enticed Eve and then Adam to do a harmless thing at the wrong time for the wrong reason, namely eat the forbidden fruit. Something like telling our children not to get into the cookie jar, not because cookies are bad; it's just timing as when to eat the cookies which is the issue.
Did you and I ever consider in our lives that we in our naive ignorance have been tricked by agents of confusion and lies to do benign things at the wrong time and in the wrong way and experienced things as natural as "eating a piece of fruit" as being events which initiated our journey down a wrong path? We mainly are ignorant about the power of our own desire. Desire shines through us and is known as a magnetic energy which is drawn toward some object or person or action which is pleasing. There is nothing bad about us, about desire or about pleasing things, it is the timing involved in how we act out. And that is where we get tricked. We can become like helpless deer caught in the headlights; we can seem tricked by the situation because if the magnets of desire are turned on and focused upon an object, it seems like it is destiny to know this as something which is good and right. Morality is learned in the aftermath of projected desire.
Hindsight is 20/20. We often see things better with more experience and more information. So in many ways moral judgments of good and bad are formed in the aftermath of the experience of unfavorable and unpleasant consequences. I have often felt that growing up in wisdom is the perpetual task of living with the decisions that we have made in former states of ignorance of not having all of the information which we have come to have after so many trials and errors. In our aging wisdom we wish the impossible; I wish that I had been able to act as a young person with the benefit of all of the wisdom which I have gained from having made so many mistakes.
The vastness of life events and the variety of pleasing objects on which desire can be projected mean that there is always a trickster lurking to take advantage of our ignorance and so we can be tricked into doing things which we discover afterwards were not in our best interest or the interest of others.
The biblical writers were trying to write about the poignant impact of our moral dilemma. The biblical writers believed that the serpent trickster lurking in the world has been demoted to becoming a snake on the ground to bite at our heels, even as the snake on the ground will know the crashing boot of human beings on its head when we attain wisdom in the aftermath of the temporary victories of the trickster who takes advantage of our ignorance.
The Gospel lesson crystallizes the human dilemma in a different way. Religious folks and family folks are presented as being so alienated from the truth, that they have come to call what is good, evil.
Jesus came to alienated humanity. Humanity is often alienated from being able to recognize our divine origin in creation. Humanity has lost its bearing and calling to live as the family of God. Jesus came to heal the human condition. Jesus came as a people whisperer to calm the tortured hearts. His deeds were so awesome that the official gatekeepers of religion became jealous. How did Jesus whisper these tortured people back to peace of mind? What did they say, "Well, the devil made him do it." Some of his own family members believed him to be mad. The religious authority believed him to be in league with the devil to be able to perform these events of people whispering. It would seem that the public Jesus had become uncomfortable for his family; they were called in to do an intervention. "Jesus, don't do this. Don't get us in trouble with our neighbors and the religious authorities." And so it was announced: "Jesus, your family is here to intervene. Surely you will go home with them and live a peaceful life."
But how does Jesus reply to the announcement of the presence of his family? Jesus' notion of family was greater than mere flesh and blood. Family membership is in the divine family of God's creation. And we activate our true identity as sons and daughters of God when we seek to know and to do God's will. God's will is for health, salvation, love and justice. And when these things are done, it is a great offense to attribute acts of health, salvation, love and justice as being inspired by the enemy of God.
Jesus came to help humanity recover from the living in the great lie, the lie that we belong only to ourselves and to our human families. The great truth is that we were made by God and made to be God's sons and daughters. With Jesus as the exemplary Son of God we were given insight to recover our original blessing of being made in the image of God. God's DNA, God's Spirit is upon us and when we know this and live this we celebrate our membership in the family of God. And we commit ourselves to know and to do the will of God as our lifetime task. Knowing and doing the will of God has to do with learning to control the energy of desire and how we use its energy to interact with the people and things of our world. Doing the will of God is learning about proper timing of when to do things.
My friends, we are always going to live this life tricked by what we don't yet know. So the trickster will still bite us in the heel. But when we are bitten, we can exercise our boot to stamp the head of the snake of our past errors. We can triumph and live forward with a new wisdom which arises from knowing our past mistakes and mistimings.
The will of God is to know wisdom after our mistakes and progress on the way to further excellence in being members of God's family, and brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ. Amen.
One of the reasons why the Bible has fallen out of favor in our modern times is due to the fact that many people of faith out of fear and respect for modern science began to defend the Bible in the wrong way. People of faith were intimidated by modern scientists and skeptical philosophers who regarded the meanings found in the Bible as being inferior and out-dated truths. So, many Bible defenders began to defend the Bible as being true in the scientific way and in the way in which we define the truth of modern journalistic eye-witness reporting. And in defending the Bible in these wrong ways, what has become known as fundamentalism has become a way of religious life for many. I do not question the validity of faith of fundamentalists; I do question their misguided defense of the Bible and their faith in a limited method of interpretation.
The Bible is chock full of inspired meanings; it is a reservoir and encyclopedia of flashing insights which we can find to be relevant to our lives of faith but we attain those meanings more through artistic devotional reading than we do through the scientific method. The proliferation of modern knowledge has divided life knowledge and life experiences into so many different genres and life expressions. We have politics, entertainment, sports, futurism, ethics and religion, all as separate categories today. The Bible united all of these categories within one life expression because the biblical literature used to comprehend or encompass the life experience of the peoples who did not have the massive amounts of information which we have today.
I find it hilarious that modern skeptics would belittle the biblical messiah even while we live in modern cultures of so many super-heroes in our entertainment world that it is surely hypocritical for modern people to criticize biblical messianism when modern hero-fantasies make the biblical messiah look rather reserved. We moderns have moved the messianic motifs out of religion and placed them into genres of cinema, science fiction and the mytho-poeic.(see Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit and Harry Potter and all of the Superheroes).
For us as biblical Christian, it behooves us to uphold the inspired biblical meanings in the modes of discourse appropriate for the perpetuation of these aesthetic meanings which inspire faithful living towards love and justice.
The biblical writers attempt to provide us with wisdom insights about big questions, like how did we come to know good and evil. How do we know ourselves to be moral agents?
What are the ancient insights about the moral adventure that we live as human beings? Why is that have come to know that we define human behaviors as right and wrong? Well, according to our proto-mother Eve, in short, "The devil made me do it." Or in her case the trickster, the serpent enticed Eve and then Adam to do a harmless thing at the wrong time for the wrong reason, namely eat the forbidden fruit. Something like telling our children not to get into the cookie jar, not because cookies are bad; it's just timing as when to eat the cookies which is the issue.
Did you and I ever consider in our lives that we in our naive ignorance have been tricked by agents of confusion and lies to do benign things at the wrong time and in the wrong way and experienced things as natural as "eating a piece of fruit" as being events which initiated our journey down a wrong path? We mainly are ignorant about the power of our own desire. Desire shines through us and is known as a magnetic energy which is drawn toward some object or person or action which is pleasing. There is nothing bad about us, about desire or about pleasing things, it is the timing involved in how we act out. And that is where we get tricked. We can become like helpless deer caught in the headlights; we can seem tricked by the situation because if the magnets of desire are turned on and focused upon an object, it seems like it is destiny to know this as something which is good and right. Morality is learned in the aftermath of projected desire.
Hindsight is 20/20. We often see things better with more experience and more information. So in many ways moral judgments of good and bad are formed in the aftermath of the experience of unfavorable and unpleasant consequences. I have often felt that growing up in wisdom is the perpetual task of living with the decisions that we have made in former states of ignorance of not having all of the information which we have come to have after so many trials and errors. In our aging wisdom we wish the impossible; I wish that I had been able to act as a young person with the benefit of all of the wisdom which I have gained from having made so many mistakes.
The vastness of life events and the variety of pleasing objects on which desire can be projected mean that there is always a trickster lurking to take advantage of our ignorance and so we can be tricked into doing things which we discover afterwards were not in our best interest or the interest of others.
The biblical writers were trying to write about the poignant impact of our moral dilemma. The biblical writers believed that the serpent trickster lurking in the world has been demoted to becoming a snake on the ground to bite at our heels, even as the snake on the ground will know the crashing boot of human beings on its head when we attain wisdom in the aftermath of the temporary victories of the trickster who takes advantage of our ignorance.
The Gospel lesson crystallizes the human dilemma in a different way. Religious folks and family folks are presented as being so alienated from the truth, that they have come to call what is good, evil.
Jesus came to alienated humanity. Humanity is often alienated from being able to recognize our divine origin in creation. Humanity has lost its bearing and calling to live as the family of God. Jesus came to heal the human condition. Jesus came as a people whisperer to calm the tortured hearts. His deeds were so awesome that the official gatekeepers of religion became jealous. How did Jesus whisper these tortured people back to peace of mind? What did they say, "Well, the devil made him do it." Some of his own family members believed him to be mad. The religious authority believed him to be in league with the devil to be able to perform these events of people whispering. It would seem that the public Jesus had become uncomfortable for his family; they were called in to do an intervention. "Jesus, don't do this. Don't get us in trouble with our neighbors and the religious authorities." And so it was announced: "Jesus, your family is here to intervene. Surely you will go home with them and live a peaceful life."
But how does Jesus reply to the announcement of the presence of his family? Jesus' notion of family was greater than mere flesh and blood. Family membership is in the divine family of God's creation. And we activate our true identity as sons and daughters of God when we seek to know and to do God's will. God's will is for health, salvation, love and justice. And when these things are done, it is a great offense to attribute acts of health, salvation, love and justice as being inspired by the enemy of God.
Jesus came to help humanity recover from the living in the great lie, the lie that we belong only to ourselves and to our human families. The great truth is that we were made by God and made to be God's sons and daughters. With Jesus as the exemplary Son of God we were given insight to recover our original blessing of being made in the image of God. God's DNA, God's Spirit is upon us and when we know this and live this we celebrate our membership in the family of God. And we commit ourselves to know and to do the will of God as our lifetime task. Knowing and doing the will of God has to do with learning to control the energy of desire and how we use its energy to interact with the people and things of our world. Doing the will of God is learning about proper timing of when to do things.
My friends, we are always going to live this life tricked by what we don't yet know. So the trickster will still bite us in the heel. But when we are bitten, we can exercise our boot to stamp the head of the snake of our past errors. We can triumph and live forward with a new wisdom which arises from knowing our past mistakes and mistimings.
The will of God is to know wisdom after our mistakes and progress on the way to further excellence in being members of God's family, and brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ. Amen.
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