Special Births in the Bible Plus the One in You

 4 Advent C December 22, 2024
Micah 5:2-4 Song of Mary
Heb.10:5-10 Luke 1:39-56

Lectionary Link

In today's Gospel account, we have read about the encounter between Elizabeth and Mary who are both expectant mothers with marvelous and miraculous conceptions.

The Bible is spiritual literature written with a purpose for communities who are continually writing to update how they believe God resided within their lives.

A theme in biblical writings centers upon marvelous and miraculous births.  Such birth stories are ways to affirm providence, that is, God's telling anointing of events and people in how God has become known.  The prophet Jeremiah understood the providential nature of his calling when he heard God say, "Before I formed you in your mother's womb, I knew you."

Providence is the outcome and once it has happened, one seeks the origin of Providence, by proclaiming, "surely, this person was great from the beginning."

There are special birth and survival stories in the Hebrew Scriptures which provide the models for the birth stories of Elizabeth and Mary.

One might say that the first miraculous birth stories are in fact the creation stories of Adam and Eve.  These are two Holy Spirit crafted people who express the mysterious combination of unseen spirit and visible material to comprise the human person.

The next marvelous birth story is that which happen to the aged parents Abram and Sarai, which was an impossible conception and birth of Isaac, a transitional Patriarch in the lineage from which the people of Israel would come.

Isaac's wife Rebekah, childless, also conceived as a heretofore barren woman and gave birth to twins, the younger being Jacob, or the originating patriarch of Israel.

The birth of Moses was marvelous in the fact that he survived Pharaoh's edict for the death of all male children of the Israelites in Egypt.  He was hidden in a basket to float on the Nile and rescued and raised by an Egyptian princess, thus the providential lawgiver of the people of Israel also had a providential salvation event after his birth.

Next, the birth of Samson to Manoah and his wife was marvelous.  An angel visited Manoah's wife who was barren and told her she would bear a son, whom she would give to the Lord as one under the vow of the Nazirite who would not drink wine or cut his hair.  Samson helped to defeat the Philistines as a Judge of Israel until he was tricked by his Philistine wife Delilah to cut his hair and lose his power.

Then there is the birth of the foremost Judge of Israel Samuel to Hannah.  Hannah was distraught because of her barren condition, and she promised to give her child to God's service if she could but conceive.  Samuel was born and he became the Judge who invested Saul and David as first kings of Israel.

The other marvelous birth came to the Shunammite woman who provided hospitality to prophet Elisha.  Her son also came to an early death before he was resuscitated by Elisha with perhaps a biblical account of mouth to mouth resuscitation.

The birth events of Elizabeth and Mary stand in the train of these famous birth stories.  John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth became significant community founders.  The community of John the Baptist provided many of the members for the Jesus Movement, and the two founders were linked closely by the Gospel writers.  They were providential figures and like providential figures, their origins had to be told in special ways.

But of course, the miraculous conception and birth which happened to Mary stands at the end of the train of special births.  The conception and birth which happened to Mary is the paradigmatic birth of the New Testament.

The Jesus Movement was founded upon the recurrence within people of a new birth, the birth of the Risen Christ within the lives of people.  How did this new birth happen?  People were overshadowed by the Holy Spirit and within their community confessed the birth of Christ within themselves, or in the Pauline expression about the mystery revealed to the Gentiles,  "Christ in you, the hope of glory!"

The miraculous conception and birth story of Mary encodes the mystery of the New Testament about the New Birth Event.

And therefore the purpose of the Gospels and the New Testament is to announce this mystery which can be ours, "Christ is born in you!  Christ is born in me!"  Please do not miss this Christmas Story.  Amen.

Messiah as Baptizer with the Holy Spirit and Fire

3 Advent C December 15, 2024
Zeph 3:14-20 Canticle 9
Phil.4:4-9 Luke 3:7-18

Lectionary Link

It is safe to say that the New Testament in part is a discussion about the meaning of the Messiah.

The writings of the New Testament stretch from the earliest writings of Paul in around the year 55 (already 25 years after Jesus) to portions which were written into the second century.

With so many writings and at different times in a time span of 70-90 years after Jesus, it would be natural to speak of the messiah as a composite of reflections representing a diversities of views and discussions.

And the New Testament is written in part, as a testimony that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah, this figure who was written about in the Hebrew Scriptures as well as the one who was referred to in various ways in the other apocrypha writings which did not attain canonical status to be a part of the Bibles of Christians and Jews.

In the Season of Advent, the very name Advent refers to "coming," but we should rather say, "comings" because Advent is used to refer to both the first and second comings of the Christ.

In our appointed Gospel, we have the interesting discussion presented about John the Baptist.  John the Baptist is presented as having to deny that he was the Messiah.  Why would such a denial be needed?  It would indicate that there were people who believed that John the Baptist was such a formidable person that his followers and others were speculating as to whether he might be this great mythic figure of the Messiah about whom public discussion was happening.

The Gospels are presented in part by former disciples of John the Baptist who made the transition from the community of John the Baptist into the Jesus Movement as followers of Jesus of Nazareth.

Was Jesus the Messiah or was John the Baptist?  A presentation of a confession from John the Baptist by one of his former followers would be useful to resolve this question.

In the words of John the Baptist, there is an interesting distinction between what he said about himself in his denial of being the Messiah, and his confession about Jesus of Nazareth.

John said, "I baptize with water, but the one more powerful than I, is coming,...and he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire."

In Christian baptism the elements are water, chrism or oil, and the fire symbolized by the Paschal Candle and baptismal candles.  The Holy Oil anointing is symbolic of the anointing or baptism by the Holy Spirit and the fire symbolizes the heat of the refiners purifying fire.

The Messianic reality of Jesus of Nazareth is being known within myriads of people as a baptism of the Holy Spirit to know the inward abiding presence of the Risen Christ.  This is the messianic difference between John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth as the members of the Jesus Movement confessed it in the Gospel.  The arrival of the Risen Christ within the lives of many people were for them his second coming.

To say that Jesus as Messiah in a spiritual and hidden kingdom has not really been regarded by many Christians as being incarnational enough, not materialistic enough, not politically evident enough throughout the world.  Christians have often fought to be the Empire of the world to prove that Jesus of Nazareth was a Davidic-like King who intervened in the world to dominate on behalf of Christians.

Christians who want Jesus to be in charge of an Empire have gotten wrong the main feature of Risen Christ incarnationalism.  The meaning of Spirit-filled people indwelt by the Risen Christ becoming incarnate again in the deeds of love and kindness of such people, not in their having political power within society.  It is a mistake for us to misinterpret what the messianic means in our lives today.  It is interior life changing power; it is not being a political state.

The baptism with fire by Jesus as Messiah and Risen Christ is for us to continue in the age of the suffering servant Jesus who remains identified with us in the continuing ordeal of this world.  We are living in the age of the always already baptism with fire, the perpetuity of life being an ordeal.

Having the Spirit of the Risen Christ during the ordeal of living is the crucible that is observed on gaudete Sunday, the Third Sunday of Advent.  How do we experience a deep inner joy even within the features of the ordeals of life when life is not always happy events for us and for many people within this world?  The Risen Christ is still within us and this world as the continuity of the ministry of suffering servant Messiah.  And so we can have the joy of Holy Spirit even while being very unhappy with specific conditions of suffering in this world which is consistently experienced as both entropy of apparent conditions while experiencing new birth and new beginning within new surpassing new states of becoming.

Within the age of the baptism of fire by Jesus the Messiah, we have the visions of the apocalyptic as affirmation of the normalcy of justice and the reality of endings making room for new beginnings of better approximations of justice being lived out within the lives of those who claim to know the presence of the Risen Christ.

Many Christians seem to reduce the ordeal of our age to a war or a game with the hope that someday our team will win when all the bad guys are punished.

The ordeal is the actual life of the free conditions of probabilities, namely, living with what actually might happen now and in the future given what has already happened in the past.

Many Christians want the end of the life of probabilities where only good wins, thus making goodness a future automatic robotic happening, and robbing morality of any significance when only the freedom to be good would persist.

I would invite during this Advent season to embrace the age of the baptism with fire, the age of the ordeal of the always already conditions of free probability for all things to happen.  We can rejoice within the conditions of the fiery ordeal because we have been baptized by Jesus the Messiah into a Holy Spirit Kingdom, who is our rejoicing in spite of the fiery ordeal.

May God give us all grace to survive and thrive within the fiery ordeal of what may happen, and may we know the messianic baptism of the Holy Spirit by the presence of the Risen Christ in our lives.  With this baptism, we have been given the joy to rejoice. Amen.

John the Baptist and Our Relationship to Fasting

 2 Advent  Cycle C     December 8, 2024
Malachi.  3:1-4      Song of Zechariah  
Philippians 1:1-11     Luke 3:1-6

Lectionary Link

If there were a patron saint for the 12 Step Program and for perpetual fasting, it might be John the Baptist.  He appears in our lectionary in Advent, a penitential season, second only to the season of Lent.  These two penitential seasons invite a corporate observance adjusting our priorities for the season to reassess our value systems and ponder how we might make some constructive changes in our lifestyle.   And not just for personal piety or personal amendment of life, but also for re-distribution of our life assets to help those who do not have adequate resources for living.

As regard fasting, John the Baptist stands quite in contrast to Jesus of Nazareth.  We are told that Jesus underwent a rigorous forty day fast in the wilderness of temptation in his encounter with Satan.  But other than that Jesus is cited by his critics as being a glutton, drunkard and one who ate with sinners.  So he was not seen as an ascetic in his lifestyle as John the Baptist was in wearing his camel skin tunic and having a diet of locusts and honey.

The goal of one in the 12 Step Program is perpetual sobriety; there is no intermittent drinking or drug use for the one who knows that he or she is addicted to alcohol or other substances.

Did John the Baptist embrace perpetual fasting because he could not attain moderation in his lifestyle and so he had to perpetually give up everything to live a sober life?  Or was his life an embracing of the vow of the nazarite, which included not drinking wine or ever cutting his hair?  Was Jesus one who had such perfect self control that he could be moderate in all things and thus enjoy all things which in turn allowed him to interact with people in a larger cross-section of society?  I apologize for such modern observations.

It could be that John the Baptist saw his lifestyle as preparation for the catastrophic end of times as people in his time speculated about.  John the Baptist was an apocalyptic prophet who chided those who came to him, saying, "who has warned you to flee the wrath to come?"  If the world as John knew it was going to end soon, the appropriate lifestyle would not be adopting a lifestyle of settling for the long haul; rather it would be the ascetic lifestyle of getting ready to face one's judge for everything that one was doing with one's life.  John the Baptist recommended that everyone else prepare to flee from the wrath to come by adopting the lifestyle of repentance, a lifestyle of perpetual renewal of the one's mind with attending amendment of indulgent behaviors, including behaviors of hypocrisy associated with phony religious behaviors.

Since Jesus is presented in the Gospels as both an apocalyptic prophet as well as a wisdom teacher who proclaimed that the "kingdom of God was already among us and within us," we might observe that his apocalyptic prophet phase derived from the time when he was mentored by John the Baptist, even to the event of his baptism.  As the extended time of the ministry of Jesus grew, perhaps the phase of his "realized eschatology" ensued as he noted the always already nature of God's kingdom.  It's important to note that Gospel writers of the early Jesus Movement cites words indicating both features of Jesus of Nazareth as they pertained to end of the world issues as imminent, the already realized kingdom of God, and delayed coming of the Son of Man in the future.

Today, we have a new fad in dieting called intermittent fasting.  With such a program the goal is to lose weight by denying oneself food for extended periods and thus allow excess fat to be burned up.

In church history, the church has had it's own program of intermittent fasting, seasonly, weekly, special days, and targeted.  Lent and Advent are fasting seasons in preparation for the events of excess: Christmas and Easter.  The church has had Friday as a weekly fast day, for which the seafood lobby are particularly grateful.  In the church calendar, Ash Wednesday and Good Friday are the two obligatory fast days of the church.  And also fasting is recommended in a targeted way to focus on issues of justice and events of dire crisis.

The Season of Advent and the example of John the Baptist invite us to assess our relationship with the practice of fasting.  Each of us face our own "days of wrath" as the Requiem Latin hymn, Dies Irae is intoned at traditional burials.  We should fast in preparation for dying a good death, meaning that we should aim for good impulse control in our life for personal health, but also for the health of our community in not being so self focused as to forsake actions of sensitive and timely care for those who need our help.  We should accept our solidarity with our fasting community during Advent in denying ourselves so as to share our excess with those who don't have the bare minimum.  Certainly in our societies, our charitable agencies depend upon end of year giving to help fund them for the entire year.  So let us join with our communities to embrace during Advent skimming from our excess to help provide sustenance for the many in our world who need the basics of life.

John the Baptist is also a reminder that we may have to adopt fasting as a way of life in the areas where we have not attained impulse control.  This may involve a wide range of our behaviors in areas of food, drink, finances, gambling, sexuality, family time, social activism and much more.  Each of us needs to have and receive insights and the grace of the Higher Power to interdict and arrest behaviors that are not healthy for us, for our families, our church, and our society.

The Season of Advent and John the Baptist are rebukes to us and our society where we have extended the Christmas Season of excess from Halloween through the New Year.

Let the Season of Advent, and the witness of John the Baptist bring us into insightful relationship with the kind of fasting which we need personally, and the kind of fasting we need for the benefit of the communities in which we live.

And as the birth of Christ has become the cause for the greatest expressions of excess; let us remember the original story; God committed the Divine Self into a baby in a very poor family.  Let us use the Advent Season and the witness of John the Baptist to prepare us by fasting to better tend to the hidden Christ Child in many vulnerable people in our world today.  Amen.

Realized Eschatology and the Apocalyptic without Contradiction

 1 Advent C  December 1, 2024
Jer. 33: 14-16 Psalm 50:1-6
1 Thes. 3:9-13 Luke 21:25-31

Lectionary Link

Can we allow Jesus to be Jesus in his own time?  Or are we so temporally provincial that we cannot help but make him palatable to versions colored with the cultural biases of our own time?  In some ways, we are always prisoners of our own times.

We often try to make Jesus contemporary to us by updating him by answering the question, "What would Jesus do now?  For example, we probably don't think Jesus in our time would tell parables about slaves and speak so nonchalantly about slavery as an acceptable part of life.  And we don't judge him by saying if he were an all-knowing super person, wouldn't he have known in his time that slavery would be regarded some day to be deeply inhumane?  And Jesus did not seem to predict space travel or automobiles in his time.

We have to allow Jesus to be Jesus expressing all the limitations of his contemporary cultural milieu.  In Pauline theology, this might be called the kenotic Jesus, the one who was the divine being emptied of divinity into mere human life with all of its limitations in the particular period of time when he lived for around thirty years.

Letting Jesus be himself in his own time is complicated by the fact that the records that we have about Jesus in the Gospels, though significant, are still written decades after he lived and in a language which was not the native Aramaic which he spoke in his Galilean region.  The Gospels are the filtered traces of Jesus into a lingua franca for his followers who were spread throughout cities of the Roman Empire after the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple.  So, in fact the Gospel writers were already asking the question, "what would Jesus do and think and say in the four to six decades after he lived, and how would Jesus be presented in a way that was specifically relevant to the church situations in the various locations where the Gospel accounts were being generated?"  The present tense of the Gospel writers would influence how the past life of Jesus would be presented by the writers and preachers who were generating, collating, and redacting the traces of Jesus as derived from the followers of Jesus and their string of continuous editors.

What were the experiences of the early Gospel communities?  Sometimes they lived suffering free, but other times they experienced suffering and persecution and even to the point of martyrdom.  Jesus became presented under the guise of the Risen Christ for the Gospel communities.  This means that he is presented as sufficient to what the coping situation required.  People suffer persecution and people live suffering free lives; the two can happen without being contradictory, and presentations of Jesus as the Risen Christ can be given to provide coping ministry to people in both situations.

The Gospel writers present Jesus as both an end-of-the-world apocalyptic prophet, but also as one who proclaimed a realized eschatology, in such sayings as "the kingdom of God is within you or among you," with already being implied.

Jesus as the Risen Christ for the Gospel writers within their writing contexts is presented as both a wisdom teacher proclaiming his presence as proof of God's realm being always already, but also being an apocalyptic prophet in the mode of John the Baptist.  In the Gospel communities, without contradiction, Jesus is able to be an affirming wisdom teacher of the current reality of the realm of God as being from creation; but Jesus is also able to be the one who bears the visualization of the end of suffering and injustice as a future apocalyptic Son of Man who comes in the clouds to be the expediter of justice.

There are people in our world who currently are suffering harm, war, injustice, terminable illness, who need the coping mechanism of the visualizations of a hero who can interdict and end the suffering and the injustice.  The apocalyptic is the truth of coping visualization of pain and suffering ending as an affirmation that health and salvation and justice are what is poignantly normal, in the face of situations to the contrary.  These visualizations function in meaningful ways even while the actual free probable conditions of life arise on a continuum of weal to woe in the experiences of people.  We live on this continuum and the Gospels were written to be a support to us as we live with the experiences weal and woe, and everything between.

Let us be thankful that the Gospel writers found through the Risen Christ various presentations of Jesus relevant to the various conditions of life.

On this first Sunday of Advent, we find a vision of Jesus as the future Son of Man to be one who interdicts time to end suffering and injustice.  How many people in our world need this vision of the interdiction of suffering and injustice now?

May the Risen Christ help us to live with the truth of freedom and time in applied and poignant coping ways today, especially as we use our freedom to promote what justice, health, and salvation means for people even while we live.  Amen.

Jesus, "So, You Are a King?"

Christ the King Cycle B Proper 29 November 21, 20212 

Samuel 23:1-7 Psalm 132:1-13, (14-19)
Revelation 1:4b-8 John 18:33-37

Lectionary Link

As Americans, we are founded upon the principle that monarchies are not for us.  But we still have Kings and Queens and their cognates in our histories, in other countries of the world, and in our popular culture.

The most accessible kings for American children are in fairy tales and Disney royalty, mostly very romantic views so as not to scare children with the terror that accompanied the reigns of many earthly kings in history.

In Europe, the royalty continue as significant features of a country's identity and they function with all of their palatial trapping remains, as tourist bait to feed the economies.  And if the royal families can engage in real or contrived "scandalous" behaviors, they can feed the tabloid media industry.  What are the royals doing today?  Inquiring minds want to know,

In other countries of the world, king-like rulers and leaders function as serious kleptocrats, personally assuming for themselves and their families and their families and oligarchs the majority of the assets of their society.  Many of them rule with reigns of terror severely limiting the freedoms of their citizenry and subjects.

Even as America does not "believe" in the validity of a monarchical government, according to the Hebrew Scriptures, God did not believe in the monarchy either.  The last great Judge of Israel was Samuel and in his time the people of Israel pestered him about their needing king like their surrounding enemy nations.  Why?  They thought that they needed a central figure who could conscript armies for the general protection of their nation and provide some enforcement for their own social order.  Samuel warned them as indicating that "we have no king but God, the Holy One," and if you want an earthly king, such a one might be able to build an army, but such an earthly king will also be a "kleptocrat" taking your properties so that he could be the wealthiest person in the nation.  He also would conscript your sons into the armies and he would take your daughters as brides to attain unity among the tribes or marry the daughters of the kings of other nations to keep from going to war.

Samuel gave in to the people's request for a king, and he anointed both kings Saul and David.  Samuel's warning from God about kingly misbehavior proved mainly true and the history of the kings of Israel and Judah recount many of their misdeeds, even though they did have their high points as well.  The history of the kings of Israel and Judah indicate that none of them was omni-competent.  First king Saul lost the kingly lineage because of his misdeeds.  David, the most famous king, arranged for the death of the husband of a woman he lusted after.  He was a troubled family man whose own son Absalom rebelled against him.  David's son Solomon, born from the mother Bathsheba who David had stolen from Uriah the Hittite, was famously wise, wealthy, and the builder of the Temple, but because he was drawn to please so many wives and concubines, he catered to many of wives' penchant for deities other than the One Holy One of Israel.

So, how could earthly kings be a model for a heavenly one?  

History has a way of forgetting faults of some.   After being dislodged from their lands in exile, the nostalgia for a king like David grew.  Would that there would be the coming of an anointed one like David and in his lineage who could restore Israel's sovereignty. 

When things are bad, heroes are needed and the myths of heroes can flourish for people who need to have some hope that they will be liberated.

The New Testament writing were generated in the era of the myth of the Messiah for an oppressed people whose lands were occupied and it did not seem obvious that the Romans were going to be defeated anytime soon.  In fact, they were brutal in putting down revolts even to the complete destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple.

The New Testament writers had to write in complete fantasy about how Jesus of Nazareth could be the Messiah, the anointed King for the world.

And the complete disconnect between world reality and Christian reality is poignantly seen in the skepticism of Pontus Pilate who is interrogating Jesus before his crucifixion.  "So, you are a king?" the skeptic Pilate, perhaps sneers with playful mocking, noting the fact that most people who are real kings do not get tried and sent to death on a cross.

The New Testament writers are writing about their spiritual reality, a reality that does not have visual substantiation for most of the world who live in the actual visible reality the of obvious king of the world, the Caesar of Rome.

The New Testament writers, pushed everything upstairs, into another realm.  Jerusalem is a heavenly one, the Temple is a heavenly Temple with a heavenly High Priest.  The church is a new Israel, a new spiritual nation.  Jesus, in the view of Pilate and most of the world was seen as weak and failed prophet who was not strong enough or intelligent enough to avoid getting himself killed.

His messiahship, his heavenly reign was only known by those who accessed the realm of his reappearings in the innumerable ways in which he did to those who called themselves his followers.

Pilate and others, could sneeringly say to all Christians, "So, you are followers of a King other than the Caesar?  Isn't that precious.  Show me your king!" 

Christ the King, or Christ the Messiah as presented by the writers of the New Testament was an apologetic for the kind of inward, "spiritual" experience which was happening in such a widespread and infectious way that required them to generate a language to explain it to themselves and to those who would experience the new kind of inwardness professed by those of the Jesus Movement.

In making the case for Jesus as the Messiah, they had to bifurcate in time, two aspects of how the messiah had been presented in the various writings which existed for them to read in Hebrew Scriptures, the Apocryphal writings, and the apocalyptic writings which are extra-canonical for the historic church.

Jesus had to be explicated as the suffering servant figure of the prophet Isaiah to make sense of the incredible humiliation which on the surface seems totally inconsistent with a figure who is supposed to be kingly like David and liberate the nation of Israel.  One might cite divergence on the particulars of the Messiah as a major difference between the synagogue and Jesus Movement going through a separation process.  For Jesus to be a more Davidic military interventionistic Messiah, the Jesus Movement using their exposure to the apocalyptic writings had to delay this aspect of Jesus the Christ to a future.

The future intervention by a Heavenly Kingly force has the function of being a needed analgesic in visualizing hope for people who have, are, and will be intermittently experiencing suffering on both personal and societal levels.

In this regard, we live in the age of the continually delayed intervention of a powerful coercive Heavenly Messiah, but the truth of visualizing actual end to pain and suffering for people is a valid truth.  One can note that much of modern society look for such temporary analgesics in the movie genres of action adventure, the utopian/dystopian, and the apocalyptic.  We should never diminish the function of the hauntings of hope with the visualizations of what can and should be ideal in what justice and love can mean for us.  We need not be apologetic for our apocalyptic vision; if not Christian, such visions still exist in the world at large even while some would mock our quaint out-dated biblical apocalyptic visions.

How might we continue to justify confessing Jesus as kingly, or as the most omni-competent model person for us?

Well, it is quite impressive for a person who has not been walking on this earth for a couple of thousand years to be a confessed pervasive presence in the lives of so many.  One might say the massive collective effects of what has been called experiences of the Risen Christ in so many people in so many different ways, would qualify as being worthy of the Kingly designation indeed.  It is a hidden kingliness within the in-Christed person.

What remains for us to validate is how Christ the Risen King becomes behaviors in our lives that are worthy of the example of Jesus of Nazareth.  Are we willing to minister to the kingly presence of Christ in the poor, the needy, and the vulnerable?  Or do we want to over-identity with political Christs in Christendoms or Christian Nationalisms?

If we want to be political about Christ the King today, let us politically care for the vulnerable and the needy and bring about justice in our society.   Let us not be tricked to be false Christian rubber stamps for manipulative greedy and powerful people who love to use Christian votes for very non-Christ-like outcomes.

Let us accept the hiddenness of Christ the King in us today, but let that hiddenness be evident in our words and deeds of love and justice today.  Amen.

To Live in a World of Change is to Have Birth Pangs

26 Pentecost B 28 November 17, 2024
1 Samuel 1:4-20 1 Samuel 2:1-10
Hebrews 10:11-14 (15-18) 19-25 Mark 13:1-8

Lectionary Link

In our appointed readings from the Hebrew Scriptures, we have an account of the marvelous birth of Samuel to Hannah.  In place of the Psalm, we have the famous Song of Hannah.  Apparently childless women in her time were treated as those who had been cursed by God so as not to fulfill their societal and family expectations.  A married woman was expected to have children and not to be able left her open to hidden and not so hidden scorn and derision of her society.  Hannah made a bargain with God, "Give me a child and I will give that child back to you."  Hannah bore the boy Samuel and gave him to the service of God at the shrine in Shiloh with Eli.

The song of Hannah is about her rescue from her social shame of being childless and it includes rebukes for those who disparaged her former condition.  It is a song of judgment against the proud.

It certainly can be seen as a model for the Song of Mary, another woman who had a miraculous conception and birth.  Mary's song is also a song of judgment against the proud and powerful.

The Song of Hannah and the Song of Mary accompany the arrival into the world of two history changing people, Samuel and Jesus.  The songs appear in literature of communities which are assessing significant changes which have taken place in their past and they attribute the changes to the arrival of these two figures, Samuel and Jesus.

Samuel arose as a prominent Judge of Israel, who combined the roles of prophet, judge, and priest in his roles.  He lived before Kings Saul, David, and Solomon and before the Temple was built.  He interrupted the priest lineage of Eli, because the sons of Eli had corrupted the practice of the priestly leadership of Israel.  Samuel was one to reestablish creditability to leadership in Israel and he is the crucial prelude for the age of a divinely established monarchy in Israel.

The writers of Book of Hebrews and the Gospel of Mark reflect upon the meaning of the changes which had happened within the people who were followers of Rabbi Jesus and who had become dispersed throughout the cities of the Roman Empire.

The were assessing what they had lost and learning how to cope with the loss and also find new meanings for living forward into the future as vulnerable communities within the Roman Empire.

What had the writers of the New Testament lost?  They had lost their sacred homeland, sacred city, and sacred Temple.  Jerusalem and the Temple had been razed in the year seventy.  The holy city and environs were uninhabitable.  All the communities associated with Judaism, including the Jesus Movement had become dispersed and forced to re-define their lives in new places.

For the writer of the Gospel of Mark, the Risen Christ was presented in story form as an oracle to the disciples.  The Risen Christ as an oracle in Mark gave words of assurance.  "Yes, the Temple and Jerusalem are destroyed and because of this crisis there will be lots of people giving proud and certain answers for why things have happened and they will want your loyalty for their claims of being God's chosen leaders.  Don't listen to them; what has happened is only another example of what has always being happening in the changes of natures and the changes in human societies.  To live with change is to always be living with birth pangs."

Birth pangs is a metaphor for living in the world of change.  It is the combination of joyful hope and the pain of the not yet.

Without a holy city and a holy Temple, the writer of the Book of Hebrews wrote about the spiritualization of the Temple and the priesthood.  The Temple had always been in the invisible heaven, the priest had always been the heavenly Advocate Christ.  The heavenly Temple as a worship center and the heavenly priestly advocate Christ, had to have earthly history for the meaning to unfold within human experience.  When earthly models of Temple and priest get altered by events of human war, the center of worship and the priestly is still eternally retained only to find new and other expressions within the visible world.

In the new Christly era of the Jesus Movement, the body of each person is a Temple of the Holy Spirit.  The collective body of believers is a nomadic, movable, and portable temple of people who are called to be priestly in the various locations throughout the world.

The birth pangs of changes have given birth to new meanings of temple and the priestly and they were painful because it included the destruction of the Temple and the holy city of Jerusalem, and the loss of the priesthood.

As those early members of the Jesus Movement endured their birth pangs of changes forced upon them by outside forces, and gave birth to new ways of making worship completely portable and of expressing priestly vocations, let us do the same with the current birth pangs forced upon us by the changes in our lives.

Let us endeavor to find ourselves as the temples of the Holy Spirit, and let us find ways to be the priestly intercessory persons to which we are called in the places where we find ourselves.   Amen.

Widows, Institutions, and Loss of Advocacy in the Empire

25 Pentecost 27 B November 10, 2024
Ruth 3:1-5; 4:13-17 Psalm 127
Hebrews 9:24-28 Mark 12:38-44

Lectionary Link

Today's lections present us with some significant losses and the various responses to these situations of loss.

We are presented the situations of two widows, Ruth and the unknown widow observed by Jesus and his disciples dropping her coins into the Temple treasury, and Jesus breaking the confidentiality of her giving by commenting about it to his disciples.  Surely, evidence of a teaching story.  How many of us tithers would like Jesus to observe what we were dropping into the offering plate and making remarks to others about the status of our giving?

Widows get their titles from having lost their husbands.  Ruth was a Moabite who married someone from Judah living in her country.  After her mother-in-law and sister also lost their husbands, they were left without the kind of family protection that was needed for widows.  Ruth decided to go with Naomi to her Judah home, as a foreigner, and she was a fortunate widow in embracing the poverty as a gleaner of the leftover grains in the field of Boaz.  Her scheme devised with Naomi attracted Boaz and he married Ruth and she became the mother of Obed, father of Jesse, father of David.  For Ruth, the family rescue and advocacy system worked, but family and tribal systems do not always work to care for widows and vulnerable persons.

Institutions with their laws, arise to require an extra-family solutions to situation of care which don't get accomplished within a family.  The laws and the institutional alms of the Temple addressed the situations of needs for orphans and widows in society.

Now fast-forward to the widow in the Temple giving her last two copper coins.  This story is replete with ironies.  One could highlight the character of the widow.  She may be the epitome of the mysterious truth that generous people are never poor, at least they never see themselves that way.  They always see themselves as having something to give.  Another irony is that the person who is supposed to be taken care of by the institution is proportionately outperforming rich fat cats in her maintenance of the Temple, perhaps even their alms fund to help other widows.

In the writing context of the Gospel of Mark, within the Jesus Movement community, the presentation of this story had other meanings and messages.  The writer of Mark knew that the Temple had been destroyed; the Temple institution was finished.  The answer for the demise of the Temple and the priesthood was the belief that the institutions were under judgment.  Sometimes we might over-simplify the notion of divine judgment treating such judgments as though God was in heaven micro-managing the sins and intervening with corresponding punishment.  The Greek word word for judgment is the word that we get the English word "crisis" from.  Judgment is crisis and crisis is judgment.  The Temple community, the synagogue communities, the community of John the Baptist, and the Jesus Movement were all under crisis because they did not have advocacy within the Roman Empire.  The status for "minority" religious and ethnic groups which were viewed as potential threats to the Emperor and his surrogates was always tenuous.  One could say that living in the Jesus Movement during the time of the Roman Empire in the late first century could be defined as crisis living.

Crisis living requires adjustments.

How did the Jesus Movement interpret the demise of the Temple?  What would the Jesus Movement do without a Temple and a Temple priesthood?  The writer in the letter to the Hebrews understood that the earthly Temple, in a platonic-like philosophy of forms; the Temple was understood to be but a copy of the true heavenly one.  And the eternal priesthood deriving from the mysterious Melchizedek, had a phase of being copied in the Levitical priesthood, but the Risen Christ assumes the fullness of the priesthood as the great heavenly High Priest.  And the new Temple became dispersed within the bodies of people who were now inhabited by the Risen Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit.  As Paul declared, "your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit.  And the High Priestly Christ makes the members of the church priestly in their perpetual intercessory ministry within this world.

Crisis requires adjustments for us today too.  Our world empires and forms of political governance often make us live in and with crises.  In times of crisis, it often happens that the most vulnerable do not adequately get taken care of.  The institutions of governments do not always succeed at some basic care needs for many people who do not have advocacy, so the church as the new extended family needs to be present to help the vulnerable in the ways that the gathered church can help.  A gathering for a meal in house churches within the Roman Empire gave the church members opportunity to assess the situation of vulnerability of each person gathered and respond by giving the needed care.

Today, as ever, we need to assess the current crises which face us in our various locations and situations.  We need to accept our priestly intercessory roles in taking care the vulnerable in our midst.

May Christ our High Priest, given us wisdom in the crises which confront us today.  

Rightly Representing What We Believe about God

 24 Pentecost 26B November 3, 2024
Ruth 1:1-18 Psalm 146
Hebrews 9:11-14 Mark 12:28-34

Lectionary Link

Jesus was not from the line of Levi so he was not in the priestly lineage.  But in the metaphorical titles that the early church gave to Jesus, he was a prophet, a priest, and a king.  The early church believed that he was the superlative case and the essence of what being prophet, priest, and king means.

The writer of the book of Hebrews confesses Jesus as the great heavenly High Priest, deriving from the pre-Levite figure of Melchizedek, the mysterious King/priest of Salem who received tithes from Abraham.

According to the writer of the book of Hebrews, the Risen Christ intercedes at the heavenly altar for humanity.  The essence of intercession is offering the service of one's life for others in words of prayer and in deeds of life.

In our appointed Gospel, Jesus replied to the scribe that loving God and one's neighbor was more important than the entire system of animal sacrifices the offerings of which were one of the main functions of the Temple priests.

The animal sacrificial system of Judaism was replaced by the followers of Jesus in asking disciples to be living sacrifices, offering the entirety of ones words and deeds as being on behalf of loving God and our neighbors.

And who is our neighbors?  As much as the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament seem to the text books for Judaism and Christianity, they both indicate that God regards everyone to be neighbors as people made in the image of God.

However, in human community, the human situation of everyone does not turn out to be equal in dignity and in favorable circumstances.   Holy Scriptures proclaims teachings to equalize the situation for those not so fortunate.  The Psalmist wrote that God cares for the stranger and sustains the widow and the orphan.  The great Law to love God and our neighbors as ourselves is divine law to equalize the blessing among all people and to alleviate the conditions of deprivation for the suffering.

And that brings us to the example of Ruth?  Who is Ruth?  She is a foreigner, a Moabite, and a widow.  She has a deep affection for her mother-in-law Naomi, and after her husband and father-in-law had died, she decides to go with Naomi in her return to her native Judah.  Ruth was a foreigner and a widow in Judah, but she met Boaz who manifested a care for her, a widow, and she faired well as a foreigner in Judah.  In fact, she as a foreigner is listed in the messianic lineage of Jesus.

The message for us today is that we are to represent the truth about God to our world.  What is the truth about God?  God cares for the vulnerable, and we are given the great commands to love God and our neighbor to practice a equalizing love and justice to represent in the very best way that God cares for the vulnerable.

Let us endeavor to rightly represent the God who cares for all our neighbors, especially those most vulnerable.  Amen.

All Saints' Triduum: Other Observances of Easter

 All Saints' Day B, November 1, 2024
Wisdom of Solomon 3:1-9 Psalm 24
Revelation 21:1-6a John 11:32-44

Lectionary Link

All Hallowtide includes the Triduum of All Hallows' Eve, All Saints' Day, and All Souls' Day.

As Easter centers upon the resurrection of Christ as he was known in his various re-appearances after his death, the All Saints' Triduum centers upon what the resurrection means for famous followers of Christ, and for the lesser known souls who are the local saints in our own lives.

In this Triduum, we deal with the same issue that is engaged in the resurrection of Jesus: Can we believe in the perpetual continuity of identity in time of the human person?

The issue of personal identity in time, involves identity and difference.  How is it that I am the same person now than I was when I was an infant?  I am the same person but continually different with the accumulation of states of becoming.  My older self is a different self than my younger self yet I remain the same person.

When we ponder a post-death state, what can we know about us having older selves in our afterlives, and ones in continuity with the same persons that we are now?

Without have any exact empirical evidence of what the afterlife is like, we resort to the afterlife of the community which survives the deceased proving that in life and death we remain communal.

The known afterlife of Jesus is how Jesus has been retained within the lives of so many people for so many years.  It is uncanny how the memory of Jesus can be retained and passed onto so many people for so many years.  Our experience of the Risen Christ is known through his being so memorably borne in so many individual experiences.  It is quite amazing that the countless number of experiences of the Risen Christ are so radically diverse and different, one wonders how they can be categorically clarified as deriving from the Risen Christ.

It is an amazing social, cultural, and historical phenomenon that so many persons have claimed relationships with the Risen Christ in so many ways, times, and places.

The effects of these relationships with the Risen Christ have resulted in the creation of diverse communities of persons who have lived out what they referred to as their relationship with the Risen Christ.

Some of these in-Christed persons who arose in very local situations, became widely known because their manner of life gained attention.  Just as the original disciples deeply missed Jesus after he was gone and so they retained his memory, the saints of the church made impressions in their own times and in such profound ways that they created a corporate memory of their lives which became widespread.  In the history of the church, the memories of these saints have been retained in written record, stories, and legends.  There have been times in the history of the church when the church leaders have made Jesus so holy and unapproachable to lay persons, but available and accessible primarily to the clergy that the vast number of laity depended upon the mediation of the clergy for access to Christ, via the sacraments.

In this situation, the famous saints, and local saints were regarded to be more accessible to lay persons.  In the age of hagiographies, the writings about the saints and the piety of personal connection with them filled this need of people to have accessibility to holy people who were conduits to the Christ.  The devotion to and veneration to saints became a common practice.  St. Mary grew in prominence as a favorite and accessible mothering and intercessory saint for many Christians.  She retains that role for many Christians today.

The hagiographies were coupled with an entire system of establishing a "canonical" sainthood.  The official church practiced a process of "quality" control regarding whether a saint had the official sanction of the church.  One can appreciate that religious charlatans to deceive the masses regarding saints, their stories, and relics have always been an issue to deal with.

Anglicanism formed in the time of the Enlightenment and the Reformation.  Among Anglicans, some have followed the rather severe Calvinist tendency to dispense with the saints and their intercessory roles, because, after all, anyone can go directly to Jesus without the need of mediation by Blessed Mary, the saints, or the priests.  More broadly, Anglicans have accepted that the belief in the Communion of Saints, that we confess with the historic church in the Nicene Creed, is not an empty confession.  Rather, the Communion of Saints is the continual application of our belief in the resurrection of Christ, locally adapted in time and place in the lives of people who know themselves to be in Christ, and Christ in them.

The Triduum, the three days of All Hallows' Eve, All Saints', and All Souls, are anthropologically sound because they are real about the grief that we feel in missing the important people of our lives when they are no longer accessible to seeing, hearing, and touching.  It is not good grief resolution to pretend that the people we lost were not and are not continuing factors in our lives.

Why would we think it just fine to have hero hall of fames in every area of life, and then think it as detrimental to the life of the church, as if, the people who loved Christ the best would want their lives to be in competition with devotion of Christ?

In sports, it is common to have Halls of Fame, not just for the greatest athletes who were best known in professional sports in our country; but also for state, city, and town athletes who made their impressions with their athletic feats.

In a similar reasonable way, in the Church we have All Saints' Day and All Souls Day.  People do not live with great saints, but people do live with influential Christ-filled souls who impact our lives in significant ways.  Some of those souls may go on to be known widely and when such significant people died, it is faithfully consistent with our belief in the resurrection to assume that they live on in the continuing unseen family of faith.  If we talk to people whom we love when they live and ask them for help and favors, blessings, and good wishes, there is no reason to think that such communication should cease after they have gone.  And there is no reason to believe that any communication within the Communion of Christ, would be a diminution of the supreme place which Christ plays within our lives.

Let us today accept the anthropological soundness of the All Saints' Triduum.  Let us embrace it as "good grief" in response to beloved people whom we have lost to death, and let us offer thanksgiving and appreciation, for them being in the "apostolic" succession of bringing Christliness to our lives.

Let us embrace the good grief of the All Saints' Triduum today.  Amen.

How to Live in the Freedom of What Might Happen

23 Pentecost Cycle B Proper 25 October 27, 2024
Job 42:1-16, 10-117  Psalm 34:1-8
Hebrews 7:23-28 Mark 10:46-52

Lectionary Link

The Psalmist wrote, "I will bless the Lord at all times..."  And the the skeptic might reply, "Really?"  Why would you bless the Lord in this world of diversity which experiences the terrible inhumanity of people with each other?  Why would you bless the Lord when so many innocent people are caught in harms way of disasters and unwanted plagues and sicknesses?

Sometimes people seem to reduce God to a self evidential cosmic karma machine, meaning that God's blessings and curses are evident in what happens to anyone.  And if you have more bad things happen to you, it is because you are more bad than good.  And if you are lucky enough to have more good things happen to you, it must mean that you are more good than bad, so God as cosmic karma authenticates one's goodness through the resulting good luck.

People are often attracted to the "good luck and prosperity theology."  They use it to justify their own comfortable lives as being validated by God.  "I'm lucky because I'm good.  You're unlucky because you're bad."

The writer of Job wrote a rather satirical wisdom story to challenge the naive view that bad things happen only to bad people and that bad things are actually punishment for their corresponding badness.

Job was a good law abiding man and yet in the conditions of freedom in his life lots of bad things happened to him.  Job's friends tried to convince him that he knowingly or unknowingly had been a serious transgressor and his bad luck was an arising punishment for his sins.

Job might be tempted to doubt his Torah lifestyle?  What the use of trying to follow the rules if so many bad things happen to me?  And anyone can look at what happens to people and note that really bad and greedy people can seem to have more success and good luck than those who adhere to the law.

We follow the rules not to guarantee good luck for ourselves; rather we follow the rules to promote the best values for living well with others.  The rules will help us because in the realm of community behavior, they are actuarial wisdom about making careful choices in our community relationships.  And if we follow those rules, we can avoid results that occur from having undisciplined lives.

The Psalmist and the writer of Job present some wisdom about God, and it includes the wisdom about God's weakness.  Ironically, God is the greatest because God encompasses everything as the container of everything.  God is the greatest in freedom, and that freedom is proportionally shared with every creature and thing in creation.  For human life to be truly morally and spiritually valid and not machine like, real and true freedom must exist.  And this is where the weakness of the great God is known; God does not interfere with genuine freedom within the order of things.  Therefore we and God, are vulnerable to the entire field of probability in a truly free world.  So, all combinations of good and bad things happen to good or bad people and we can know about probable happenings but we cannot know why, when, and the precise time schedule for such events.  The inscrutable combinations of causal actions of freely acting agents cannot be precisely known.

We have to accept the vulnerability of the world of probabilities, like Job did, and like the Psalmist did.  But this situation is not the condition to disbelieve God; it is the proof of God's greatness as the purveyor of genuine freedom in our world.

The purpose of the words of wisdom in the Bible and of the Gospel for us today is to know how to live best given the actual conditions of what probably will and can happen to us and anyone in this life.  And how does God inform us how to live given the always already uncertainties of what might happen to us?

Jesus was found among us a the God-person who was to show us how God lives with the freedom of the world and how we should live with the way life actually is.

Given that good and bad outcomes and events occur, Jesus is God's message to us that God shares our vulnerabilities to what might happen.  And the witness of Jesus affirms our preference for good things, like health, sight, salvation, love, kindness and justice.  Jesus is God's affirmation that it is normal and natural to prefer life, freedom, love, justice, health, and kindness.  The ministry of Jesus is presented as a healing ministry bespeaking that health is always a preference over disease and sickness.  The really big cosmic issue of health is what one might call salvation.  Salvation is the holistic well-being of the person in this life and the next, but also for the life of the entire universe.  There is a greater health of reconciliation beyond the individual experiences of health or disease or death which we experience.

God as the great container of this cauldron of freedom in which we live is also the eventual health and reconciliation of all that happens, and Jesus came to proclaim this life of reconciliation health to us.

How should we respond to the biblical readings for today?  We, like the Psalmist can bless God at all times, in spite of the troublesome things which might be happening to us and to our world.   We can be thankful for the genuine freedom abroad in our world because it makes our moral choices truly valuable.  We can follow Jesus, as God's chief exemplar for us, in his ministry for the healing of the people of this world.  We can find our Christ-like vocations in preaching freedom to the captives, by loving mercy, doing justice, and walking humbly before this great God of freedom.

God has given us Jesus as the divine lure for how we can best live within the free conditions of life: Be healers, lovers, and cherish goodness, kindness, and justice.  Amen.

God in the Whirlwind of Life

22 Pentecost b P.24 October 20,2024
Job 38:1-7, (34-41) Psalm 104:1-9, 25, 37b
Hebrews 5:1-10 Mark 10:35-45

Lectionary Link

In the wisdom book of Job which challenges the shallow idea that good luck is the defining sign of God's love and blessing, Job is presented as the example of bad things happening to a good person.

The various dialogues between Job and his friends, God and Satan, and Job and God are warnings to human beings about being too certain of causality in all manner of things, especially in presuming to know in precise and full ways why bad or good things happen to anyone.

In the last dialogue of God speaking to Job, God does so from the whirlwind, the storm, the tempest.  In a twister all things are put in motion and they lose their permanent location.  All one can do is to watch the spinning and wait for things to land into a location.  The realm of probabilities is the possibility of all things in time getting shuffled and rearranged, particularly from the perspectives that have been familiar to us.  What probably can happen to us and anyone can and will surprise and baffle us at times in our lives particularly when we've gotten used to sameness of the things which have been happening to us.

God from the whirlwind bespeaks to me of the great whirlwind of the body of probabilities which confronts us at anytime in this life.  In this great body of probabilities, all infinite things are in infinite causal relationships with each other, so how can we as particular and limited beings understand precise causality in the great realm of probabilities?

The writer of the book of Job essentially proclaims that Plenitude of Possibilities and Probabilities is too great for us to know because we don't have the capacity to bear them. Hence, we need to be very careful about presuming to know too much about what causes all specific things.

Bad things can make us victims, but when people assume that bad things happen because we have done something bad, then we are made twice the victims.  How can coping and healing and recovery happen when we are made twice the victim by people who victimize people with bad luck by piling guilt upon them?

How are you and I to relate to God as this great realm of probabilities?  We cannot help but be worshipful like the Psalmist.  "O Lord my God, how excellent is your greatness! you are clothed with majesty and splendor." God's greatness is the complete realm of probabilities of creative freedom and this is awesome. We cannot help but be humble and humbled about the genuine freedom of things to happen.

Like Job, we can often wonder if we have an advocate, a lawyer, a redeemer, in the midst of this great realm of what can probably happen.

The witness of the Gospel is that Jesus is the advocate and redeemer of humanity. How so? By being the priest of God to humanity. The writer of the book of Hebrews understands Jesus to be the priest of God to humanity? And what does being such an eternal priest mean, as opposed to the mere temporal priesthood of the Levites or of the church? It means God taking on an intercessory identity with human experience. It is the emptying of omni-probability into a particular probable person Jesus who is made completely vulnerable to the human cycle of birth to death. And he is known in the afterlife as a foretaste of our future afterlife. In short, Jesus is the funneled emptying of the divine into serving the entire human condition, to show a way to live through the varying probabilities of what can happen to any of us.

From the Gospel of Mark to the writer's community, the words of Jesus re-echoed the service nature of what it means to best as a human being. The disciples of Jesus are presented as people who want to be served with high positions in a triumphant Christ the King Empire. And Jesus said, "Wrong, my kingdom, my realm is within the actual conditions of human probabilities, and within this realm, to be your human best is to be one who serves others.

Jesus says that we are given ministry as wisdom, power, knowledge, and material resources to serve those who do not have the same to experience the needed dignity and joy of life. We are called to an enlightened view of causality which is: We are to exercise the ministry of causing justice, forgiveness, peace, and the well being of the vulnerable people in life with the gifts of our lives.

Jesus was the priest of God to this world, the church is the priest of Christ to the world, and the church has particular ordained priests, not to exhaust what priesthood means, but to remind the church about her priestly ministry. Our priestly ministry is to have a identity with people for the purpose of intercession and insightful service to their needs.

Let us embrace the service ministry to which we are called and commissioned by Jesus Christ. We do not know all probabilities in the whirlwind of life, but we do know that with the gift of service to others, we can be in the flow of causing future goodness. Amen.