The Bible as Guided Visualization for Comfort

1 Advent A   November 30, 2025

Is. 2:1-5 Psalms 122
Rom. 13:8-14 Matt. 24:37-44

Lectionary Link

Language is co-extensive in accompanying our lives, even when we don't think or know it is.  Language is always the prior assumption for knowing or having consciousness of anything in particular.

Language and what has happened in the past, what is happening now, and language about the might have beens and the future possibilities and probabilities seem to be separate and different from the experience of life itself, but the use of language is always a version, an interpretation of human experience.  We in our cultural upbringing and training take on the stories which have precoded our experience and how to interpret what we experience.

A great text like the Bible is compendium of words about human experience; as such it provides exemplars of language which accompanies and defines significant human experience.  Since the Bible includes a significant number of human experiences, we cannot say that it is always one to one specifically applicable to each and every person now in their lives.  Every word has the potential to be an insightful exemplar for our lives but all of the biblical words cannot be applicable in a one to one correspondence with the particular current experience of any given biblical reader.

However, when the Bible is the text book designated "Word of God," for various communities, some can regard Word of God to be an omni-competent, omnipresent, conversational oracle to be sought to give specific personal advice.  By saying, "the Bible says," Bible readers can make the written text into an actual person who in prescient ways gives situational advice.  On the global scene some believe the biblical words to be precisely predictive of specific world events, especially ones which pertain to the ending of the world.  The universal and repetitive habits of humanity found in the biblical words make them a source for pairing through cross historical empathy, the experience of people in the past with our own experience.  This is not done in a predictive way but in the shared common humanity of people in the past with us.  In short, we can come to insights for our lives from the experiences of the biblical writers.

The biblical writers provided significant wishful thinking for people in distress.  And distressed people need survival discourse, the discourse of encouragement, something like the tender whispers a mother might give to a suffering child, "There there, everything is going to be alright."

The Bible provides a mothering nurturing literature, which is the equivalent of a Mother saying to a crying infant, "there, there, everything is going to be alright."  And mom might even sing a lullaby with visions of comfort.  The discourse of mother is emotionally meaningfully true, even though it may not be empirically true.

Imagine a prophet saying to people devastated by war, "take comfort, a word from the Lord will come forth from our devastated capital city and war will end and there will be a transformation of all the instruments of war into useful agricultural tools."  There is hope and wishful thinking in all people who know the devastations of war.  War and fighting is such an absolute waste; what if the resources of life could only be used for healthful activity for human welfare?  Dreams for utopia, whether they ever come to empirical reality or not, still co-exist with our warring world to comfort us but also confront us about the wrong use of human power.

The utopian dream worlds of Isaiah were superseded with more adult words of visualization of significant intervention by the divine in human situations to deliver oppressed from their dire conditions.  The adult words that came to be promulgated in the centuries before Jesus are known by scholars as apocalyptic literature, after the name of the last book of the Bible, The Apocalypse, or the Revelations, the unveiling of secret and mysterious things about the end.

With ordinary statistical knowledge we can know that endings of all kinds are always, already possible and probable, both personally and socially.  Utopian and apocalyptic literature are a functional analgesic literature for distress people.  The utopian words and apocalyptic words allow a people to continue to affirm their highest values even when the actual circumstances do not seem to support such affirmations.

Can people continue in the belief that God is good, and made this world and human beings good and when they are not, can people still believe that law and order can train us to be lawful and orderly with each other for the common good in the experience of what we call love and justice?

For modern skeptics about the value of biblical writings, especially the utopian and apocalyptic writings which have no empirical likelihood, one should remind skeptics that the omni-genre writings of the Bible served broader purpose in the lives of people without the degree of widespread literacy in our post-modern world of such expansive textuality. The genre of the apocalyptic and utopian has now moved into the realm of art and is known in both writing, cinema, and the many forms of computer generated imagery that pervades our media today.  People who criticize the utopian and apocalyptic writings of the Bible, mainly are criticizing the people who appropriate these writings as somehow being precisely predictive of when, when, and how the specific events of the end are going to occur.

How can we as followers of Christ and readers of the Bible appropriate the apocalyptic and the utopian writings of the Bible?

We can be those who affirm the visualization function of language for comforting people in distress and keeping them hopeful about the values of love and justice.  We can admit that Jesus and his followers, and many people of his time found comfort in words of visualization which gave them hope to continue to live in the belief of the superlative values of love and justice, and the possibility of repentance or transformation as being always available to humanity.

We can also remind the people of our world about how utopian and apocalyptic our popular culture is.  It is much more apocalyptic and utopian than the biblical writings because there is a proliferation of artistic presentations of what the future, the end, and the imminent intervention of "superheroes" might be.  There seems to be great social catharsis to watch a movie where the hero can intervene and interdict all the bad guys, and resolving the oppressive issue raised in the scenario.  Because the apocalyptic and utopian is seen in different ways in popular culture, we should not regard ourselves as temporally superior because the biblical writings had utopian and apocalyptic writings too, and in fact, served as models for our own modern versions.

Let us acknowledge that just as visualization is valid for pain management for terminally patients, so too the biblical utopian and apocalyptic words are visualization for pain management in suffering people.

The season of Advent which begins today, refers to the future coming of the Just One to establish justice on earth.  There is no need for us to be embarrassed about the function of visualization for our current lives, but our visualization does require a choice of visions.  Some would like to assert the visions of the dystopic where chaos prevails and where injustice and the powerful evil oppressing ones win.

Following Jesus, we choose the visualization of justice and love winning because they have a telling goodness which bespeaks the goodness that we choose to valorize as definitive of our superlative values.

Let us not be ashamed of our apocalyptic and utopian discourse, because they stand before us as the direction that we want to aim for in our lives.  Amen.

Christ the King and Earthly Power

Last Sunday after Pentecost, Cp29, November 23, 2025 Christ the King
Jeremiah 23:1-6 Ps. 46
Col. 1:11-20 Luke 23:23-33

Lectionary Link

The notion of Messiah was born in the biblical tradition as the divine conferring of leadership rights upon an individual whose identity was "divined" by the religious Judge Samuel. The very word Messiah derives from the mode of investiture, the pouring of oil, the anointing of the head of the chosen leader, the king of the people.

The famous Judge Samuel offered that God did not really want kings, but the people clamored for leadership like their enemies who had kings to conscript armies to protect their people or raid other countries to seize assets for their countries.  Samuel warned them that kings would take property for his own and take their sons for battle.  In a sense Samuel was warning them that the more absolute the power, the more likely a person with such power would be corrupt.  The people prevailed upon Samuel and Samuel divined the selection of the first "messiah," the first man to be anointed with the oil of divine selection as King of Israel.  And indeed Saul, failed mightily and gave way to his successor David, who also failed significantly, but who also had profound success to become the model for a future utopian Messiah who might return Israel to something of their days of Davidic glory.

The history of the kings of Israel both in the united kingdom and divided kingdoms reveal that their kings were relatively good and bad, and the biblical writings provide  critiques of their reigns based upon their faithfulness to Torah religion.  In this regard, many were found to be wanting, and faithfulness to the Torah was used as the criteria for assigning reason for the woes and the blessings which came to the people Israel.

The divine right of kingship is not unique to the Hebrew Scriptures; other nations had their own versions, and in the time of Jesus and the early church the Roman Emperors were venerated as gods and sons of gods.  The association of deity with leadership was well known.

Jesus came into the world where the Caesars were proclaimed to be gods and sons of God.  His followers had both the Roman models and the models which derived from messianic thinking of the Hebrew Scriptures and the apocalyptic writings expressing the hope for the intervention of some special anointed one.  Some charismatic leaders were regarded to be potential candidates for being the promised Messiah and they gained followers but were put down by the authorities as a threat to the power of the Caesar and his local authorities.  John the Baptist, Jesus, and others died because they attained among their followers the designation as being perhaps the promised Messiah.  The Zealots who tried to mount military resistance to the Roman authority brought about years of various Jewish wars which were crushed by Roman military intervention.

The followers of Jesus came to spiritualize his afterlife as a continuing known personal mystical presence to them, who indeed would be for the time being, a King in the realm of their interior lives.  As many came to confess Jesus the Christ, as the king of their hearts, a very significant social movement ensued.  As the movement became successful, it become institutionalized for promulgation of their message and values, and the appearance of writings about Jesus and the movement  is evidence of the institutional success of the movement.  The writings included both Jesus as one who was coming again as a King, but in the significant and continuous delay of his return, Jesus was presented as the realized King in the hearts of many people.

The movement was so successful within the Roman Empire that by the fourth century the Emperor Constantine, reversed the notion of the divine right of kings; he designated the Imperial right of the Christian faith to be the preferred faith of the Empire; he only demanded that the bishops gather and agree upon a unified presentation of Christianity in the Empire so that the Empire would not be politically divided because of Christian religious disputes.  The results of the Council of Nicaea really took over a century to come to significant unifying effect.

Since Constantine, the church has had various reciprocal relationships with kingly power in the world, and religious leaders have had the power to confer in the name of God and Christ, the right of the monarch to rule.

The origin of what has become the Feast of Christ the King came about because of the rise of suspicion about the divine connection with any earthly authority.  One of the most famous philosophers of suspicion was Karl Marx.  He assigned theology to the realm of ideology on behalf of royalty and ruling elites to maintain their oppression of the poor and the peasants of society.  Hence the noted designation of religion as the opiate of the people.  The Bolshevik revolution was a secularization of political power.  Tsars, kings, and queens proved too be all too human in their kleptocratic ways, their corruption of power.  In Marxism, religion was regarded to be an enemy to the type of communal utopia which was to be the preferred way for people to live.

Pope Pius XI,  in 1925 saw this secularization of political authority to be a threat to the influence and mission of the church vis a vis political governance.  The secularization of political power was seen as a real threat for Christian influence in society, hence the Feast of Christ the King was proposed as a way to re-assert the reconnection of people of faith with a perfect exemplar of political power.  The feast we have today at the end of the season of Pentecost and it remains for us a liturgical event to present the ideal model of political leadership, namely uncorrupted power.

This feast, of course, cannot avoid all of the irony of Christ as King.  The inscriptions above the head of the dying Jesus on the cross proclaiming him as a king, were the mocking ironic words of the Roman Empire.  But for Christian readers of these mocking words, they were secrets about the King who had ascended in their hearts as a rallying figure of mystical, spiritual, and social/communal identity.

The feast of Christ the King for us today is a reminder that no earthly king is omni-competent enough or kind enough to embody the perfect use of power.  Earthly leaders fail, because the earthly wielding of power becomes too easily the Machiavellian ends justifying the means.  Power for all too human corruptible people, becomes the end itself.

We need still the functioning of a utopian Messiah King to deconstruct the tendency for humans to be corrupted by power.  We continually need to be reminded that the divine gift of power is to be used for the shepherding care of people, particularly, those who are most vulnerable and without power in our world.

Let us admit that Christ as King is still elusive for us and our world, but Christ the King can still become incarnate within us as our words and deed conform to the kind of loving care which Jesus exemplified for this world.  Let this functional vision of Christ the King be for us the spiritual and moral exemplar as we continually try to surpass ourselves in the practice of love and justice.  In this way we can make the hidden Christ the King evident in our acts of love.  Amen. 

Imagine

23 Pentecost, Cp28, November 16, 2025
Isaiah 65:17-25 Ps. 98:
2 Thes. 3:6-13 Luke 21:5-19

Lectionary Link

John Lennon wrote and sang a song entitled, Imagine, which is sheer utopian thinking.  And it was a popular song, and it remains a sentimental popular song because to be human is somehow to have the proclivity we call hope be the perpetual carrot in front of our life to motivate us in our work burdened and hungry lives.

And we might blame God for taunting us with the hope for things which are impossible and that can never become actual, that is, in the sense of everything, already, all at once becoming completely harmonized without any harm being done.

To live is to be haunted by utopia.  Utopia really means "no such place," but it still functions for us to chart a preferred direction in life.  How many spa and work out places are called "utopia," and it really means "no such possible bodies," but you should really still to practice and train in the direction of getting better even if you can never be perfect.

The "imagined life," the utopian life is as ancient as human language users.  It is found in Plato's Ideals; it is the parallel existing inner world to the actual world that includes the full range of probable outcomes and happenings from the agony to the ecstatic, and lots of just plain drudgery.

We moderns can be very partial and permissive of John Lennon's Imagine, even though it is quite pollyannish and naive, while being very critical of religious people, biblical people whose very way of life might be called utopian or hopeful imagining.

Do we permit secular imagining while eschewing biblical imagining because it seems to be of a different order?

Our readings from Scripture today are about the Bible being a book whose alternate title might be called, Imagine.

None of us think that the words of John Lennon's song are going to become literally true, and yet they function for us in a profoundly sentimental way because of a naive painful nostalgia for a perfect life that never was.  Hope can make us think that we once partook of the perfect which has somehow been lost forever, the paradise forever lost.

We can mock the Isaian utopian writer who writes that God is going to create a new heaven and a new earth.  Why does the writer need this new heaven and new earth?  Because of infant mortality, human mortality, exile and loss of homes, and because of the predator-prey relationships which characterizes the animal world, and the seeming social Darwinism of the strong and fit dominating the weak and vulnerable.  The Isaian writer wrote his "Imagine" poetic song long before John Lennon wrote his, bespeaking that it must be very human for people to continuously write their own "imagine" scenarios.  From the experience of hope, humanity is impelled to write their own "imagine" scenarios, not because they think that such impossible utopias will ever be widespread, but because the impossible perfect can inspire the temporal sporadic, serendipitous, and even the intentionally labored for better outcomes.

After the pre-exilic utopian writings of Isaiah, a different kind of literature of imagination came to be.  In the post-exilic period with influence from the Persian environment, what scholar call the apocalyptic genre of writing come to be.  It is found in the post-exilic prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures, it is found in the intertestamental writings of the Apocrypha, such as in the book of Enoch, and it is found in many other writings which John the Baptist, Jesus, and those with access to literature knew about.  Living under the Roman conquest created a hopeful desire for imagining a different world.  There were imagined heroic messianic figures who could intervene and deliver people from oppression.  Imagine that there could be judgment and punishment exacted for those who were the oppressor.  Imagine that faithful people could still hold their beliefs in a God of justice.  Imagine believing in a God who had imminent active love toward us.  Imagine a way to make the actual world of pain and injustice be dealt with in a resurrection afterlife where wrongs could be made right.

Different apocalyptic preachers and prophets acted in literal ways about their discourses of imagining a soon apocalyptic end with the arrival of new kings within the Empire which knew the Caesar to the only king.  Many of these apocalyptic zealots were crushed by the Roman armies as well as their social movements in the various Jewish Wars.

Many Christians who had their apocalyptic Imagine stories, had to adjust them to a continual delay for actual fulfillment even while proclaiming the kingdom of God as already being realized by the experience of the Holy Spirit, namely the parallel inner reign of Christ the King within the lives of those who were privileged with the revelation of this new version of the song, "Imagine."  "If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have come and fight."  This phrase from the Gospel of John's Jesus on trial is an acknowledgment of the lack of a complete over lap of the kingdom of God and the kingdom of this actual world.  God did not nor does not have and will not have an earthly Empire.

Today, many Christians still resort to the "Imagine," aspect of their stories of hope. It is natural to do so even while popular entertainment culture is completely dominated by "imagined" better worlds.   Some biblical interpreters try to work out in literal ways the impending apocalyptic events within our world events in a one to one correspondences as if ancient writers had prescience insights like some Nostradamus on current events.  Such literal interpretations have always proven to be wrong, meaning that they have misinterpreted the functional meaning of hope which come to our language products.  Others are content to acknowledge the incredible diversity which the phenomenon of hope inspires in visions of utopia.

The Gospel for us is that we should not be ashamed of hope or of the stories of hope which can profoundly influence the direction of our lives personally and socially toward a better excellence.  For us Jesus Christ is personified hope, who teaches us how to be related to Hope itself, as we try to instantiate in our words and deeds specific acts of love and justice which befit this Christ of Hope.  Amen.

Preservation versus Time

22 Pentecost C 27 November 9,2025

Haggai 1:15b-2:9 Psalm 145:1-5, 18-22
2 Thes.2:13-3:5 Luke 20:27-38

Lectionary Page

I entitled this sermon Preservation versus Time, to highlight one of the basic dilemmas in life, namely, how do we maintain as much as quality of life for as long as possible knowing that such quality as we know it will eventually end in our deaths?

What we call the preservation instinct is the natural proclivity to maintain our lives and in our human social settings, we not only are concerned about that we live but also how we live.  And we are concerned with how we live given the fact that our family and friends cease to live in the event of death.  We ponder their condition in their afterlives, which we cannot know with experiential precision, and we ponder our own afterlives, which we cannot know in advance, and we wonder about reunion with our departed loved ones.

One of the functional living purposes of religious faith is providing strategies for living within this dilemma of preservation versus the changes of time which threatened the permanency of any state of existence.  Is there continuity of singular identity even while everything is in a state of change and becoming?  And will our lives in time have continuity with our lives in our afterlives?

We learn to live with the unanswerable mysteries of life through the insights of perpetual "talking cures," which include the language of imagining what might be as a comfort for living with what actually is.

Without presuming to know the specific and certain writing contexts of any biblical writing of our appointed readings from the New Testament, from the words themselves we can assume they derive from people who are concerned about the afterlife of the individual and the afterlife of the community and social order.  In this regard, one can say that our readings deal with the personal afterlife contrasting subjective and objective immortality, and one deals with the relationship with a social notion of the afterlife in what might be called the apocalyptic event and its relationship to subjective or individual immortality in the afterlife.

Christians did not invent the notion of resurrection; it was already present in the writings of the Hebrew Scriptures having perhaps coming into their writings from their time in exile.  It was seen more as eventual justice and restitution to answer the question of theodicy, namely, how can we present a notion of a just God when God's chosen people seem to be in perpetual oppression.  The notion of personal resurrection is found in books like Daniel, as well as other non-canonical inter-testamental non-canonical apocalyptic writings.  It was embraced by the religious party of the Pharisees, who accepted a broader base of reading as precedence for holding personal resurrection beliefs.  Another party, the Sadducees accepted only the Torah for establishing belief precedence and they oppose resurrection beliefs based upon this interpretive principle and they could not find evidence of personal resurrection within the books of the Torah.

Jesus is presented by the Gospel writer who held views of personal immortality more in keeping with Pharisees than the Sadducees, and this disagreement is the context for the riddle quiz which the Sadducees pose to Jesus, a riddle which is full of irony.  The Sadducees who did not believe in the resurrection posed more of a question about there being marriage in the afterlife, because of their belief in objective mortality through the bearing of children.

The levirate rule in the Torah required the surviving brother of a dead brother to marry his brother's widow so as to maintain the objective immortality of the deceased brothers in the offspring bore with the widow.  This would be but a "procedural and designated objective" immortality since the children's actual father would not be the deceased brother.

The words of the response of Jesus indicates the that the two notions of immortality were not compatible because the life of the subjectively immortal in their new afterlife  no longer needed marriage and children to perpetuate their objective immortality.

The logic of subjective immortality likened the afterlife of people to that of the angels.  And angels do not marry.  And further Jesus dealt with the exegetical problem of the Sadducees as whether the Torah made reference to the resurrection.  Jesus reminded his interlocutors that the Torah refers to God as the God of the living, which would mean that the Patriarchs, Moses, and the prophets would be living on as angels.

The writings of The Epistles to the Thessalonians in part deal with the delay of the end of the world in the anticipated great day of Lord.  What would happen to those who had died before the great day of the Lord?  What do we do if some people are preaching that it has already occurred?    Obviously, the leaders of the churches were trying to comfort people who were faced with confusion and anxiety regarding how their lives would be preserved individually and how the entire social order would be transformed in some impending catastrophic transitional Day of the Lord.

For those of us today, we live in the delay of our own personal deaths and in the delay of the world has we know it coming to some catastrophic end.  The delay of each traps us in this great dilemma between preservation and time.  We know that we are changing and we know that we know ourselves having continuity while we live in time, but we are not sure about what kind of preserving continuity happens after we die.  We are in fact dealing with the thought of discontinuity of personal identity after we have died with ourselves and with others.  The Gospel is not so much about solving this issue as to providing hope for us while we continuously live in this dilemma.

One might make a anachronistic metaphor from artificial intelligence to re-appropriate the words of Jesus regarding the afterlives of people.  Jesus stated the the children of the resurrection are like angels; the word angel means messenger, a permanent and lasting messenger.  A synonym for messenger might be a living word, a living communicative being.  In artificial intelligence everything and every person has the potential entering the data storage of all language products, but as an actual person of history who can be maintained forever in this large data storage and called forth in juxtaposition with all other people who have entered the data base.

Imagine God as the ultimate Large Language Model Reservoir of all who preserves all and is able to preserve through all time everyone and everything and have them meaningfully harmonized in their attaining this subjective and objective immortality in the great preserving reservoir of the divine.

If this be but a metaphorical expansion of Gospel hope for the afterlife, it can be but in the Scriptural tradition of providing hope for the living under the conditions of Preservation versus Time.  The Gospel is a lifestyle of hope for people living the dilemma of preservation versus time.  Amen.

The Bible as a Record of Exemplars

21 Pentecost, Cp26,  November 2, 2025
Habakkuk 1:1-4; 2:1-4 Psalm 119:137-144
2 Thessalonians 1:1-5 (6-10) 11-12 Luke 19:1-10

Lectionary Link

The Bible is a book of presentation of human exemplars in various life situations and the life of those exemplars are assessed vis a vis how the various assessors regarded their relationship to the divine.

Our appointed readings provide us with a variety of exemplars.  The first being the prophet Habakkuk who understood himself to be a seeming helpless oracle in times of distress and trouble for him and his people.  The troubles were so pronounced and so out of his control, he could only know himself as being a watchman, a spectator looking for the purpose and meaning that might arise from his dire situation.

And this is true to the human experience which comes to every human in life; the situation of needing courage to accept the things that one cannot change.  And what is the active response during the event of required courage?  What am I learning from this for myself and the community of people with whom I dwell?  How can I live better and how can this experience of distress create grooves of ministering empathy for people who will face loss in the future and need someone to sit with them in a sensitive befriending presence?

The Psalmists were poetic exemplars who provided hymnody in poetic form for the community to express their woes and to express joy and support for their highest community values.  And one of the highest values for the Psalmist of the 119th Psalm is the supreme place of justice in the life of the community.  The entire purpose of the law and the precepts was to teach the approximation of justice in human living.  The Psalmist is a communal teacher of the singular importance of justice, and as an example for us, we should let our lives wax as poetic as possible with lives of lived justice.

The stated writers of Second Thessalonians were Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy who were companions and leaders in the Pauline communities.  As leaders, the example that they provided for their community was giving encouragement and positive reinforcement to the people of their churches.  There is a difference between manipulative flattery and the mentoring art of helping people be better through words of encouragement, and words of appreciation.  Letting people know how important they are to you comes from the maturity of egoless leadership.  When people are freed from the narcissistic or childish tendency of needing praise and able to wield words of encouragement in the genuine mentoring of students and people with less experience, we can find the examples of what good leadership is.

The last example provided from our readings today is the example of Zacchaeus as he came under the influence of Jesus Christ.  Zacchaeus is the example of someone caught in dilemma of identity.  He was a tax collector for the Romans, but he was also Jewish.  He really had no accepted status from either community.  He was used by the Romans to collect taxes from his fellow Jews, and therefore despised by his fellows for being a "sell-out" to the oppressors.  The message of Jesus was that everyone needed to be on the path of transformation, no matter what their personal circumstances were.  Jesus is presented as the example of the one who did not pre-judge others because of their circumstance; rather he saw every person as sheer potential for becoming better, and so he was the one who offered Zacchaeus and everyone to take new steps on the path of transformation.

What have we learned from our biblical exemplars in our appointed readings?  First, sometimes we might be like Habakkuk and caught between a rock and a hard place, and we must merely watch, and learn, and survive the experience of loss so that we might become more sensitive companion mentors of the bereaved.

From the Psalmist, we learn that we are called to be poets in praise of the supreme value of justice for ourselves and our community.  We are to live justice, sing justice, teach justice as our way of life.

From the witness attributed to Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy, we are to be leaders in providing encouraging mentorship to those who need to assisted in their life towards excellence.  To be mature in leadership means that we have known a high degree of inner esteem such that we have an abundance of good will and good words to dispense to those who need providential words to help them progress in the spiritual growth.

Finally, we need to learn from Zacchaeus in his encounter with Jesus, that no situation is helpless from the offer of personal transformation.  We need to rise above the stereotypes that others have about us or that we may have internalized ourselves and accept the fact that though not perfect, we are always already, perfectible.

Jesus, is the supreme human exemplar of God inviting everyone, everywhere to continually surpass ourselves in excellence, because the image of God on our lives means that we always already have the hope gene within us for perfectibility.  Jesus Christ is the witness to God's continual welcoming lure and empowerment for all to be on the path of transformation in human excellence.  Amen.

The Apocalyptic, Dying Proclamation, and Mercy

20 Pentecost Proper C 25, October 26, 2025
Joel 2:23-32 Psalm 65

2 Timothy 4:6-8,16-18 Luke 18:9-14

Lectionary Link

Rather than trying to force some unifying and totalizing organization upon the biblical writings, even when the lectionary makers try to match readings for a given Sunday for preachers to present a seasonal or Proper specific theme for the week, it is probably more accurate to acknowledge how the various writings in the biblical collection are more context specific to their writing occasions than to an overall scheme which any of them were privy to.

The Psalmist was a poet and he attributed a great Personality behind the cyclic patterns of nature as well as those which stood out because of the attention getting magnitude.  For the Psalmist, nature events were signs of God.

Biblical writers also read nature events as portents for human community, particularly in the literature which pertained to the end of life as we know it for the human social order.

The proto-apocalyptic portion of the Prophet Joel might be called a preparation writing for the end of life as humans have known it.  For an individual, writing for a personal end might be called a dying proclamation, or a very sad version of such would be a suicide note.  The writing that we have from the Second Epistle of Timothy purports to be a dying proclamation of St. Paul.  It does seem to me to be a redacted version of  how disciples of Paul would want him to address the impending ending of his life.  His dying proclamation seems too confident, and maybe too specifically presumptuous about what his afterlife reward would be: a crown of righteousness given by the Lord.  Why does anyone need visions of hyper reward in the afterlife unless it is presented as motivational encouragement to a community that is not experiencing much real time reward?  The dying words refer to his own experience of personal abandonment in his ministry.  Such words are diagnostic of the internal struggles which Paul and the early Jesus Movement experienced.  The words are also apocalyptic because they refer to the longing for the day of the Lord's appearing.  Like the Prophet Joel, and the many other portions of apocalyptic writings in the biblical and extra-biblical writings, the afterlife is viewed as a great reward and correction for how bad things have been for those who trusted God in the times of their lives in their various missions.

In many ways the Bible is a collection of books containing writings about people who held to the normalcy of justice that gave rise to the analgesic imaginations of an everlasting future where correction, reparation, and reconciliation would occur so that justice as normal could ultimately be upheld as a current comfort.

Given the personal ending in death that each person will face and given the fact that large groups of people also face possible catastrophic endings at various times; how should we as human beings live?

The Gospel parable about the self-righteous religious leader, and the contrite tax collector provides some clues to the Christ-recommended way to live.  We should live hoping for the mercy of God as it is filtered through the particular consequences filtered toward us in the vulnerable circumstance of life itself.  And we should live with mercy toward each other not presuming to have superior cause to have contempt for other people because of their differences from us in their life experience.

The Gospel for us then is this: Mercy.  Mercy from the God of All and in All and how the all is funneled to us in our life situation.  And knowing mercy, we should live with mercy toward each other because of the vulnerable situation of what may happen to any of us at any time in the realm of the probable.

Lord have Mercy.  Christ have Mercy.  Lord have mercy upon us, sinners.  Amen.

Prayer as Persistent Nagging for Justice

19 Pentecost C proper 24 October 19, 2025
Jeremiah 31:27-34 Psalm 119:97-104
Timothy 3:14-4:5 Luke 18:1-8

Lectionary Link

We might not think that ancient people had the scientific method for attaining greater accuracy in understanding causation, but they did have what we call common sense and with their five senses they could judge repetitive patterns of behavior in the natural world, even to gain assurances about predictable repetition.

One might say that their wise ones came to try to apply common sense thinking to human behavior in coming to the promulgation of laws.  The authorities of societies came to enforce their insights on what makes human interaction more or less successful for their goals of a smooth running social order, even though the fickle freedom of human beings wasn't so predictable as the sun appearing every cloudless day in the sky.

If common sense might be called a natural human habit in probability theory, one might say that law making is the effort to extend probability theory into the realm of human interaction for the purpose of social order.

Moses and the giving of law is presented in Hebrew Scriptures as perhaps the major revelation to humanity.  The Hebrew Scriptures also include the narrative about how the law cannot exist as perfect legislation in a vacuum; it needs models, enforcers, adherence, continual teaching and social and liturgical promulgation of the law to guarantee it a prominent place in forming the identity of the people.  The Hebrew Scriptures also narrate how all these important supporting elements of the law were often missing and they cited the lack of social support for the law to be the cause of the demise of their social order.

We read an appointed Psalm of praise and delight for the law, an acknowledgment for the importance of the law to not just the identity of the people but for the social order.  However, the Prophet Jeremiah laments the lack of the supports for the law and the resulting social chaos of future generations suffering because of the misdeeds of former generations.  He wishes that the law could be written upon the heart, on the inside of each person.  He desires the day when the law could be made obvious to all wishing for perfect guiding consciences to be within each person.

Why indeed is the law important?  The law is important for guiding probable behaviors of people.  But what does the record of human behavior reveal?  It reveals that law do not guarantee good human behaviors.  Having laws do not guarantee that bad thing won't happen to you.  Having laws do not guarantee that there will be honest authorities.

And that is the truth of any law; having laws do not always cause people or events to be just and fair.  Life still has to be lived vulnerable to what may happen, vulnerable to an entire range of probabilities.

The vulnerability to what may happen is expressed in the famous Serenity Prayer, associated with many of the 12 Step programs.  God, grant me the serenity to accept the things that I cannot change, courage to change the things that I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Jesus told a parable about the unjust judge who would not give justice to a poor widow, but the widow nagged the judge until he got tired of her persistence, and he gave in.  The woman wanted to hold the judge to his purpose for being, namely just rulings and she had the nagging courage to to believe that she could change him.

Prayer is in fact the belief that no matter what may happen, the right thing to happen is the practice of justice.  The unjust judge represents the reality of probability; good things can happen and bad things can happen, and when bad things are persisting, we can lose heart and believe that what is bad is to define what is normal about life.  And this is where the faith is the persistent affirmation, aspiration, and longing for the triumph of goodness and justice over what is evil and unfair.  This faith is the faith of Jesus, an interior law, the New Covenant Law of the Spirit written on the heart to be continually expressed in begging prayers for what is right and just.

Nagging prayer means that no matter what is happening to us we cannot compromise to accept anything less than goodness or justice as what is to be the normal condition of life.

Jesus presents nagging prayer for what is good and just as sort of psychic energies which build and tip the scales of probable outcomes toward what is good and just.  The parable is a teaching about being persistent always about what is good and just, and this persistence can have cumulative effects in bringing about what is good and just.

The writer in the Pauline tradition in Second Timothy implores the younger ministers to be faithful in this righteous tradition and to be patience in teaching what is good and right.  The tradition of the law and the tradition of Jesus Christ need exemplars in word and deed to promulgate continually and persistently what is good and just.

Let us today appreciate the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament writings to be insights for living with probable conditions of life, and let us be especially deliberate when injustice seems to reign to be persistent in prayer and action to help bend the arc of history towards better expressions of justice.  Amen.

Living on the Continuum of Health, Justice, and Freedom

18 Pentecost, C proper 23, October 12, 2025
2 Kings 5:1-3, 7-15c Psalm 111
2 Tim. 2:8-15 Luke 17:11-19

Lectionary Link

Our Scripture readings laid out before us today presents us with two utterly different situations of human existence, both calling for a radical redefinition of faith: one defined by exile and imprisonment, the other by disease and isolation. How does one express faithful living when one is ill and shunned and when one is oppressed without significant agency for resistance? 

One of the most terrifying situations of faith is being forced to adjust to situations of oppression and injustice.  The history of the world includes the history of people having to adjust to situations of injustice.  The people of Israel were conquered and carried into exile several times in their history.  They had no military means of defense or freedom from their conditions.

And what about the many African American slaves who for years were forced into their condition?  What about the conquered native people of America who were forced from their lands and imprisoned on designated reservations within the land that once was their own?

The birth of Christianity came to a minority people within the Roman Empire.  The notion of slavery was so pronounced that "being a slave" became a prominent metaphor within the Jesus Movement.  The thinking might have been, "if we live in the social condition of slavery and oppression, then let us accept the only valid condition of slavery, "namely being a slave or servant of God, even as Jesus the Son accepted the conditions of human slavery, of being the divine emptied into human life."

How do people who profess being slaves and servants of God live in a world which practices slavery and oppression because in a kind of social Darwinism, "Might makes Right, so deal with it?"

To survive in this world, Native Americans and African American slaves were forced to live in their conditions.  From their situation Native American spirituality helped to keep their identity as peoples of the Great Spirit.  From their situation of slavery, African American with their spirituality lived the essence of the Beatitudes of Jesus far better than their white slave owners could even dream about.  From the position of Justice being what is Normal about good human living, it is horrifying to think about the kinds of adjustments forced upon Native Peoples and African Americans in slavery.

We find a similar compromising solution to Israelites in captivity offered by the words of Jeremiah.  Jeremiah encouraged the exiled peoples to make peace with their conditions, and live winsomely and gain the favor of their overlords with life examples.  The alternative was to be in open resistance and lose their lives.

Israel in exile created what we know that Judaism has become, and the exile also influenced what the Jesus Movement became.  While in exile, crucial theological insights borrowed from Babylon and Persia came into the tradition; things like resurrection, heaven, hell, messianism, and the eschatology which created the conditions for the apocalyptic genre of literature which so defined the ministries of John the Baptist, Jesus, and St. Paul.

As the people of Israel lived winsomely in exile, they won the right of return to their land, and they brought with them an identity which had become supplemented without having access to the Temple and their homeland.  From abroad they were able to build the myth of a homeland and a past which formed their identity as a people which became the spiritual cement of their survival.

If being a slave of God and Christ became a major metaphor of the New Testament, one could also say that salvation is a major theme of the New Testament.  In some circles salvation is reduced to the post-death event of being "saved" and going to heaven, or being "unsaved," and going to hell.  Such are trivializing of the holistic notion of health which is implied in a true Gospel which meets its definition of being "good news."

The stories of Jesus are presented as indicating that God is the God of health and salvation for all people.  They are presented as rebukes to people who present God as one who shuns certain people, especially ones own "enemies."

The story of the lepers healed by Jesus instantiates several theological themes of the early Jesus Movement.  First, health is a universal need.  No one's community deserves it more than another community of people.  Jesus is presented as the one representing a God who offers health to all and not just to a "supposed favored" community.  The story also includes an embarrassing poke: one's enemy can actually be more thankful about God's healing and goodness.  It is a rebuke to those who think that our own community deserves health and salvation more than others, hence why should we be thankful for what we think we deserve as God's favored people?  

The story reminds us that we all live on the continuum of degrees of health, and as such we need both the grace of an inclusive God and an inclusive community to help us live on the continuum of health, a life that ultimately will know the entropy of death.

Finally, we are reminded about a favorite metaphor of St. Paul, which is reiterated in the reading from Second Timothy : the prisoner.  Paul was a prisoner for Christ and for the Gospel.  Paul regarded this as part of his identity of being a servant or slave of Christ.  His spiritual life involved him knowing himself to be in an identity with Christ, with his life, death, resurrection, ascension and glorification.

St. Paul saw his identity with Christ as his way of adjusting to the prison conditions of life, the conditions of oppression, the conditions of affliction, and the condition of being exiled from his heavenly abode.

The Gospel challenge for us today might be this: Let us not be those who oppress, shun, enslave and imprison.  Let us be those who proclaim God as the welcoming one for the salvation and health of all.  And to the degree that we know sickness, shunning, enslavements, or oppression, let us seek grace to know how to live with faithful winsomeness.  But let us never forget to be thankful because Thanksgiving is the sealing of the relationship between the giver and the receiver.  Amen.

Faithfulness in Quantity and Quality as its Own Reward

16 Pentecost, C proper 22 October 5, 2025

Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4 Psalm 37:1-10
2 Timothy 1:1-14 Luke 17:5-10

Lectionary Link

It is easy from the hyperbolic words of Jesus to literalize them and then to present the real Christian life as the stage performance art of having the faith magic to cast mulberry trees into the sea.  

Or we could understand the enigmatic words of Jesus as sayings in the tradition of a wisdom teacher who is presented as having both a public ministry and a very private and individual master/disciple relationship with individuals.

These words of Jesus are being written down by teaching scribes who are trying to present a new way of life within the religious landscape of the various expressions of Judaism as well as the many forms of the Mystery Religions which were part of the Romanizing habit of an omnivorous empire using both sheer force as well as political syncretism of local religious traditions to promulgate the Roman legitimacy to be the ruling glue of the world.

The words and the traditions which surround the life and ministry of Jesus needed scribal teachers, and the writing of the Gospels were evidence of a movement that had widespread communities with local charismatic leadership but without the coherence to be a viable institutional entity within the Roman Empire.  The coming together of the Gospel writing traditions and the eventual formation of a canon or collection of writings with enough widespread usage to attain status as the official text book of the church that could represent many local churches with a degree of standardization was part of the unifying dynamic of a movement becoming institutionalized for longevity within the Roman Empire situation.

When we read the various paragraphs that have come to the canonical Gospels, we might ask the questions about the origin of the written words.  Do they retain fragments of how Jesus of Nazareth speaking in the Aramaic language and having become transmitted for decades to be used as subject matter for writers in the Greek languages to create, as it were, disciple manuals for their various gathering of disciples?

And as we ponder the great difficulty of knowing the original contexts of these Gospel words, we are left to our own readerly intuitions based upon our own contexts of how we have understood and used these words in our own lives.  And we cannot presume to have final authoritative meanings for these words, even while we seek for their functional relevance to our own lives of faith, and we know that various confession communities try to assign final or preferred meanings which is basic for their own community cohesion and discipline.

In our appointed Gospel reading for our liturgy, we have read two vignettes about faith.  There was a request from the disciples to Jesus: Increase our faith.  This might beg the question, how is faith a matter of quantity?  The answer includes the riddle of comparing the smallest with perhaps a very great event.  Having faith the size of a mustard seed could result in some great supernatural act.  The point is that faith is a quality of living, and whether one is doing something very small like helping one's neighbor or something big and heroic, each is but a single act of faith, the very same faith.  But where is faith as quality related to faith as quantity?  How does one come to have the quality of being faithful?  By the continuous accumulation of single faithful acts.  With the collection of faithful acts, one's life is likely to become habitually faithful in small deeds and great and heroic deeds.

The second vignette provides a different sort of insight about faith.  A slave or a modern day worker lives in a situation of having a job description.  There is a contract which defines the tasks of the worker.  A typical job description does not include the clause: "Upon the completion of a task, the employer is required to heap boundless praise upon the employee for doing his job."  Yes, it would be nice if the boss would occasionally thank the employee but the typical work situation is governed by the contractual definition of duties.

The hidden wisdom in this vignette might be this: doing faithful acts are their own reward; one does not do them in order to be praised.  And because each small mustard seed acts of faith is its own reward, the eventual award of coming to have the habitual character of faithfulness is its own reward as well.

The Gospel message for all the various people, including us who processed these Gospel words attributed to Jesus might be this: Being faithful is not for getting some future reward of praise; rather being faithful is its own reward for doing what is good and right both in the specific act of faith itself, but also in the value that each act of faithfulness has in contributing to the accrual of such body of deeds to form the habitual character of a life of faithfulness.  This is an important lesson for each of us as disciples of Christ to learn.  Amen.

Heavenly Values Are Available Now

16 Pentecost, Cp21, September 28, 2025

Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15 Psalm 91:1-6, 14-16
1 Timothy 6: 11-19 Luke 16:19-31

Lectionary Link

An obvious reality in our world today is what is called the wealth gap.  One percent of the world possesses a third to forty percent of the world's assets.  The bottom fifty percent own only two percent of world's assets.  One might say that the wealth gap is more like a grand canyon between the haves and the have nots.

The prominent religious skeptics of the world blame religion for providing the ideology for the very few to own the majority of the wealth of the world.  Karl Marx called religion the opiate of the people because religion gives the poor hope for the afterlife so that they can tolerate their less than heavenly, even hellish current lives.

And this might raise a question which biblical people might ask.  Does visualizations of what the afterlife might entail absolve the people who live from working for justice?  And further does Jesus believe that messages from the afterlife would change the hearts of the wealthy and the greedy?

The Gospel of Luke includes a parable which Jesus told about the afterlife and the potential of messages from there affecting the behaviors of the living.

In the parable, Lazarus is a leper who begged for years at the gate of the house of a wealthy man.  And when they both died, they found that in the afterlife they had, as it were, traded places.  Lazarus was in the bosom of Abraham, signifying his comfortable post-life abode.  The rich man was in the torment of flames, so much so that he wished for but a drop of water to be given to him.  In the afterlife there was a great canyon which separated the rich man from Lazarus and Abraham, and they could yell messages to each other across this great canyon.  Apparently, the great wealth gap of life had become reversed in the afterlife.

The wealthy man in his afterlife knew he could not change his fate, but he began to worry about his surviving family.  So, he made a request of Abraham.  He asked Abraham to send Lazarus back to life to warn his family about their greedy ways.

But Abraham told the rich man that if his surviving family did not practice what was given to them by Moses in the law and in the messages of the prophet, then they would not believe the message of Lazarus even if he were sent back to life to warn them.

Pause for an inter-Gospel aside.  In the Gospel of John, written by one who probably had first read the Gospel of Luke, and we find a Lazarus of Bethany who was brought back to life from his grave, and the result was that even the religious leaders did not believe.

The message from Jesus in the form of a parable is this:  the message about the afterlife or from the afterlife will not change the behaviors of people who live now.  Do not use the afterlife as an excuse for not doing the work of love and justice in this life.

Religious people often use the notion of reward and punishment in the afterlife as a method of influencing people's choices about religion.  For many religious people salvation mainly is about whether a person will be in heaven or hell after they die.

This parable of Jesus indicates that the heaven on earth values have come to be known through the law and through graceful wisdom and when performed such values are their own earthly reward for the benefit of the doer and for the people of the earth.

In the Lord's Prayer, we ask that God's will be done on earth as it is in heaven, which means that this earthly visible life has a parallel interior realm which includes the superb values of love, justice, kindness, and self control.  This realm is always already accessible and we should not need motivation about our status in the afterlife to do the required justice to bridge all the gaps in our world which keep people from treating each other with dignity and respect, let alone ensuring that everyone has enough of the needed things in life to live well.

The parable of Jesus about Lazarus and the rich man in the afterlife is a message for us to get on with the work of love and justice because those heavenly values are accessible to us here and now.  Amen.

Sayings of Jesus about Wealth

15 Pentecost, C p 20, September 21, 2025
Amos 8:4-7. Psalm 1131

Timothy 2:1-7 Luke 16:1-13

Lectionary Link

You cannot serve God and wealth!  The word of the Lord!

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for the rich to inherit the kingdom of God.   The word of the Lord!

If the wealthy cannot be saved then who can; with God all things are possible.  The Lord of the Lord!

Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.  The word of Lord!

Sell all that you have and follow me.  The word of the Lord!

To whom much is given, much is required.  The word of the Lord!

The poor you always have with you, but you will not always have me.  The word of the Lord!

Take nothing for your journey, no staff, nor bag, nor bread, nor money—not even an extra tunic.  The word of the Lord!

Lay not up for yourself treasure on earth where moths corrupt and thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourself treasures in heaven.  The word of the Lord!

How might we frame the sayings of Jesus on wealth given that they probably came to writing in situations far from Palestine and many, many years after Jesus lived and they came to the early textual form in a different language than what Jesus spoke in his native tongue?

Do his sayings result in contradictions, the same kind of contradictions which occur because contexts can impart different and even seeming contradictory meanings to such words about wealth?

Why would one say that one is blessed to be poor?  Are these words to comfort people who actually are poor? 

I offer a variety of sayings about wealth from Jesus not to pretend that I know or understand some final or correct meaning, but simply to seek some insights for how you and I might grapple with what we regard wealth to be in our own experience and to ponder something that might be Christ worthy with the wealth of our lives.

Obviously, wealth is contextual and related to circumstances within human situations.  Wealth can be materially understood or spiritually understood.  The words of Jesus prove this distinction in the two versions of the beatitudes: blessed are the poor in spirit, and blessed are the poor.  One refers to a poverty of material conditions and the other refers to a poverty of the inner character as it pertains to the life of virtues.

The variance in the wording of the different beatitudes may indicate the nature of the economic status of the people to whom the words were addressed.

To whom might actual poverty be a blessing?  Any cursory reading of the New Testament indicates that John the Baptist, Jesus, and the early writers in the Jesus Movement understood that there would soon be an end of the world.  If the world is going to end soon, one does not need to plan for having creature comforts of homes and possessions and family.  St. Paul was an apocalyptic proclaimer as well who believed that those alive would soon be raised in the air with those who had died.  Therefore he recommended that people remain like he was, unmarried and unencumbered with family pressures, if they had the discipline to do so.

Wealth was seen as contextual for the evangelical missions for the persons who were sent out to proclaim the message of the kingdom of God.  Jesus told the evangelists to travel light and live as it were, off the kindness of the people who would receive their message.  Again the notion of having wealth was seen as being a hinderance to mission effectiveness.

The injunction against ownership and wealth was the impetus historically for creating two different tracks for Christian living.  Once the church was on its way of becoming successful, ordinary Christians were enjoined to follow the Ten Commandments; extra-ordinary and heroic Christians were enjoined to be more literal about the more spartan words of Jesus and Paul.  The monastic movement became a different track of Christian living as monks and nuns were to embrace the counsels of perfections which meant beyond the Ten Commandments, they were to commit to lives of poverty, chastity, and obedience to their clerical and religious community hierarchies.  Again another contextual understanding of wealth and relationship to wealth given the fact that the imminent end of the world did not happen and Christian people had to deal with reality of settling in with a new regard of the latter days, being merely that people would always be living in the latest days.

The Gospel words, you cannot serve God and wealth is set up with a parable of Jesus which encapsulates his assessment in contrasting how greedy people process desire and a wish for how the children of light might also process human desire.

The parable uses a negative example to make a rebuking judgment with an implied recommendation.  In the parable an embezzling employer knows that he's been caught and so he takes steps to ensure his future employment with his boss's debtors by forgiving them their debts.   Jesus commends the scheming embezzler as he wishes that the children of light were also as diligent in how they do life planning in having wisdom about the circumstances of their lives.

You can serve God and wealth.  But  only with an understanding that one can have wisdom to make the many forms of wealth in life to be used in the service of God and for what the kingdom of God might mean in bringing good news to the people in our lives.

The Gospel issue is not about pitting God against wealth or wealth against God; the issue is our relationship to God and wealth and that means that we need to avoid letting anything in this life becomes an idol which blocks the potentially worshipping energy of desire meant for God become  focused upon lesser objects.  The Gospel life, the life of transformation is the life of the sublimation of desire such that everything can be transparent pass through for our desire returning the energy of desire as the energy of worship of God.  In understanding our desire in this way, we are honest about the engine of desire in our lives, but we also acknowledge the need to channel it back to God while we let it pass through many necessary things in our lives for our daily use and enjoyment.  This kind of surfing of our desire allows us to combine enjoyment of life's necessities even as they assist our service to God and the benefit of our world.  In this way we let can work to make the wealth of the world serve God and the many people who need to know the benefit of a widely spread wealth.  Amen.