Good Shepherding as Personal and Communal Calling

 4 Easter B  April 21, 2024
Acts 4:5-12  Psalm 23
1 John 3:1-8     John 10:11-16

Lectionary Link

Today is Good Shepherd Sunday and as I often do, I would problematize this topic for our times and perhaps see through some of the romantic haze that arises around reading the Gospels with profound naiveté.

I would submit to you that the Good Shepherd appointed Gospel as well as the New Testament was written for and by people who lived as an oppressed or suppressed minorities within various locations within the Roman Empire.

In the Hebrew Scriptures, shepherds were metaphors for the community leaders.  The train of such leaders were patriarchs, judges, priests, prophets, teachers, and kings.  Kings were regarded to be shepherds even though the great judge Samuel warned the people that if they wanted a king, he would in effect be a great kleptocrat.  He would be expensive to maintain and he would take the young men for his armies.  But as a reward there could be protection and some sense of law and order, and the environment to support the worship centering around the shrines and Temple.  The accounts of Hebrew Scriptures indicate that the shepherds of all sorts in Israel succeeded and failed and by the time of Jesus, the leaders or shepherds of Israel had been reduced to the council of the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem who negotiated the limitations on lifestyle and worship freedoms for the Jews who lived in Palestine.  The Jews of the Diaspora had also to find a way to exist as minorities communities within the cities of the Roman Empire.

The Roman Emperor was a leader, a shepherd of sorts, whom Jews and followers of Jesus had to acknowledge as a significant determining reality of their social lives.  The way in which followers of Jesus chose to survive was to subscribe to the strong but servile life of the beatitudes.  The beatitudes proposed a Christly martial arts lifestyle meant to be winsome to the persecutors, like turning the other cheek, blessing those who cursed you, and carrying the burden of the bullying soldier an extra mile.  Such seeming heroic humble behaviors were for survival, but also to impress the persecutors with the performance of a spiritual strength that could be winsome.

Early followers of Jesus had to live with the Caesar as the shepherd and leader of the world whose power had local franchise power expressions in petty kings, governors, and centurions and soldiers.  St. Paul asked his readers to pray for the leaders and to pay taxes.  He said they had an ordained status for creating the kind of order which allowed for the survival of even the minority communities of church and synagogue.  St. Paul was admitting that even Roman leaders could be good in shepherding society if conditions of peace allowed people to get on with their lives, even the life of following the Risen Christ.

So what is the Good Shepherd of John's Gospel all about?  Jesus was not the Good Shepherd of Rome and the Roman Empire?  Who was Jesus Good Shepherd for?  The New Testament writings were essentially private writings for very limited communities within the Roman Empire.  It was an insider's literature, meaning that Jesus was the Good Shepherd model for the mystical relationship of the Risen Christ for members of the Jesus Movement.  The Good Shepherd was the model for how Christian leaders were to treat each other and it pertained particularly for the care and mentoring of those who were most vulnerable, marginalized, and without significant community identity or power.  We have to acknowledge that the Good Shepherd model was mainly for in-house behaviors, meaning that if persons had significant power, wealth, and knowledge, the blessing of such could only be known in using it to empower others, enrich others, and teach others.

Historically, we can note that the good shepherd living lifestyle of the people of home churches became winsome within the Roman Empire.  A discerning emperor like Constantine noted how the collateral effects of the once small Jesus Movement had become winsomely popular within his empire, to the point of it becoming politically astute to adopt this life style as the preferred life style for the empire.

How does one change charismatic mystical Christianity into legislative, social, and political Christianity? 

It probably cannot be done.  How does one legislate the sublime effects?  How does one use the hammer and anvil of church law and order to convert serendipitous mystical experience into the passive assimilation of infants into the church through infant baptism?  An entire incredible alchemical theology had to arise to address the success of the Jesus Movement and reconfigure the crucified Jesus who had been hidden in the lives of mystics as the Risen Christ into Jesus as the King of history and the Empire.  Priests and bishops had to take on more public roles of authority, even to become the earthly visible vicars of Christ the King and High Priest.

We might observe that Christianity cannot be an Empire religion without losing the roots of its origin as a way of life which arose for those who were oppressed but who were animated by the inner life of having significant mystical experience to be the compensating factor in their otherwise outwardly non-ostentatious existence.

You and I who have been living mostly as heirs of the political powers who made Christianity the preferred religion, have had to live as people with power and privilege while professing a lifestyle Christian faith that was written by and for oppressed people.  What we do know is that colonial Christians of power forced many people of color, and often times, women and others with less privilege in our societies, to live the life of the beatitudes.  The life of the beatitudes is indeed an attractive lifestyle because it is driven by a sublime inner strength that baffles those who hold to the belief that the strong take what they want.  The power of the strength of the living the beatitudes is such a contradiction to the logic of the power to control through physical strength, economic strength, the strength of armies and weaponry.

How can we as people trying to live New Testament Christianity adopt the founding Spirit of our movement to our times when we find ourselves in positions of power, wealth, and education?

We can assess with charity when Christly values have inspired governments to promote and practice universal suffrage.  We can understand the victory of Christly values when governments support laws of equal justice for all, and when justice authorities understand that all are equal even when all are different.  When our governments and society bring the dignity of justice to the many kinds of different people who are in our society today, then we can say we have begin to make the values of Christ the Good Shepherd the public values of our societies.

We as Christians need to be good shepherds to the many different people within our congregations who are seeking community and families of affirming acceptance.  Without ever uniting church and state, we can model the values of the Good Shepherd as we are dismissed from our Christian gatherings to go forth in the name of Christ, to exhibit in our lives Christly values, which are good shepherd values.  Where we have power, wealth, and education, we are to use these states to continually lift the levels of each for the greatest number of persons within our society.  Power, wealth, and education are manifest in continuously reciprocal ways.  Each of us at time are in need of shepherdly care of all sorts at many times in our lives.  The strongest and seeming most self sufficient person will at times be dependent upon the care of others for something that he or she is bereft of in a time of weakness or vulnerability.

Let us today learn to live by the values of the Good Shepherd.  It is perhaps the only way to convert empire and societies of people who have inherited the conditions of privilege, wealth, power, and education to the values of Christ.

Let us today be honest enough to admit that many times we are very needy and vulnerable sheep who need the help, care, and expertise of others.  And let us not forget our times of need when shepherdly care has come to us.  Let us also be shepherds of care to those who need the equalization ministries of healing, food for the hungry, provision for the poor, education for those needing to actualize their potential, and indeed the gift of the good news of Jesus the Good Shepherd, who calls each of us to do good shepherding with the gifts of our life.

May God save our societies by being good shepherding societies today.  Amen. 

Fish

 3 Easter Sunday B April 14, 2024
Acts 3:12-19 Psalm 4
1 John 3:1-7 Luke 24:36b-48

Lectionary Link

We are used to seeing on car license plates the fish sign, as a way for a person to announce that they are followers of Jesus.  Indeed the fish is an ancient symbol for Christ, perhaps older than the cross.

The fish is an acrostic as the letters of the Greek word for fish ichthus, are the letters for the names and titles of Jesus:  Jesus, Christ, God's Son, Savior.

The fish is then a symbol of Christ.  It is a single word symbol.  Can we understand also that the New Testament and the Gospels in particular are many worded symbols to express within the early Christ communities the meanings of the life of Jesus.

In the history of the church, we have continually applied the meanings of the New Testament writings within our various contexts and we have harmonized and used New Testament writings so that they might be relevance in the many subsequent settings where people have been explicating in their settings the meaning of Jesus.

The modern setting for the reading of the New Testament has been the Enlightenment era which brought scientific reason to be the throne of the preferred standard of truth.  What is the dictum of modern science when it is expressed in the logic of propositional philosophy?  A statement or proposition is meaningfully true, if and only if it was or could be empirically verified.

And so the natural laws of science became the criteria for reading ancient writings and their "meaningful truth" status.

So scientists who read biblical narratives with occurrences which violate how we understand natural laws say these things could not have happened.  Christians who realized the truths of modern science have doubled down by professing that everything that is in the Bible is true using the scientific criteria of empirical verification.

This has created a double falsehood that has been devastating for Christians and for scientists.  A scientist believes that the fundamentalistic or literal ways of reading Scripture is the only way that Scripture can be read, and they end up limiting their notion of what can be experienced as truth.  At the same time, they might be moved by music, art, poetry and acknowledge aesthetic truth.  If they would allow themselves to see biblical writings more in the realm of aesthetic and moving truths rather than scientific truths, they could be poets and scientists at the same time.  Christians who say that everything that is narrated in the Bible has to have been empirically verified, end up agreeing with the limiting of truth status to the scientific model.  They give up the profoundly moving truth of story and narrative art.

Can we appreciate the false opposition which has been created by both scientists and fundamentalists between biblical narrative and scientific discourse?

Forgive the digression, but I would return to the topic of fish and Jesus for us to appreciate the meaningful truth of the New Testament writers.

The meaningful truth of the New Testament is that many, many people were having sublime experiences, moving experiences, and these experiences were given context and meaning within their communities as experiences of the Risen Christ.  What was the empirical fact?  These experiences were happening, seemingly spontaneously and mysteriously.  The Christian community had explanations for these sublime experiences, as different as they seemed to be.

Many different people can attend a live performance of Beethoven's Ninth with complete choral performers.  And they might each have and explain the sublime effect of that artistic event differently.  But that people are effected and confess a sublime experience is a verifiable truth.

This is how we should understand the continuing occurrence of people's experiences of the sublime with explanation as being the presence of the Risen Christ.

The Christ is confessed to be Word from the beginning who is God who became totally intertwined with human flesh in a unique way in the person of Jesus.

Word is the main truth of human life as we know it.  The Gospels are textual words about Christ as the word of God.  It is undeniable that having words is the continuing sublime presence of continuing meaningful life.

Gospel writers wrote that the coming to words of the physical world in our constant perception and conscious, is in fact a symbol of the main reality of life itself, namely word always being known in the flesh and the exterior mapping of our lives.  Word as interior is also life as Spirit;  Word is really real.

But we grow up instinctually and we come to regard the external world as things which seem to have a separate existence from the entire system of words which creates the knowing of the external world as possible.  The Gospel writers and writers of all ages use the physical world as a metaphor of substantiality.  If I can see, taste, eat, touch, and hear something, I take this to be the substantial evidence of its existence.

St. Paul is the earliest New Testament writer and he did not see Jesus in the flesh.  He had a visionary experience of the Risen Christ.  In that experience Jesus did not eat with him; Jesus did not eat, bread, or fish with him or drink wine with him.  But St. Paul believe that his vision was a sublime event which changed the direction of his life.  It was a profound word paradigm shift in his life.

The early followers of Christ were a group of people who had sublime experiences which they named as experiences of the Risen Christ.  The New Testament literature occurred in the Jesus Movement decades after he lived to create a community identity for inculcating the values which surrounded the supreme event of having an experience of the Risen Lord.

And that brings us to the Risen Christ eating fish as a spiritual literature of persuasion about the substantiality of experiences of the Risen Christ.  The Risen Christ portrayed as eating fish, is an appeal to our child like sense of what is substantial.  Would we believe something is real if and only if it occurred as a seeing, touch, taste, hearing event?

Eating fish is a real physical event.  Christ is presented as doing so to prove his Risen presence.  This is the early Church writers saying, believe the reality of your experience of the Risen Christ, in the same way that you would believe an event you witnessed with seeing, touching, tasting, smelling and hearing.

The fish eating story of the Risen Christ, is an invitation for the hearers and readers of the Gospel, to believe the really real significance of the many kinds of presences of the Risen Christ who is always already known as the Eternal Word which endless guides the insides of humanity in it interactions with each other and the world outside of each human epidermis.

Dear friends, accept the sublimity of your experience of the Risen Christ.  Amen.

George Augustus Selwyn

George Augustus Selwyn
April 11, 2024

Lectionary Link
Ephesians 2:8–10
Psalm 96:1–7
Matthew 10:7–16


George Augustus Selwyn was a man of his time, as we are people of our time. As prisoners of our time, we cannot help but be temporally provincial. We live compromised lives knowingly and unknowingly with things that are tacit in our culture that are not good for people now or for people of the future. We approach people of the past with the charity which we want for ourselves.


The era of Bishop Selwyn was the colonial era. I grew up on the romance of the famous explorers and famous missionaries who left the comfort of their homes and made long grueling trips to foreign peoples with foreign customs and different languages. In my early 20's I lived in Iran for four years in Shiraz where Henry Martyn had come to translate the New Testament into Farsi. In my Near Eastern Studies, I read the accounts of E.G. Browne, Lord Curzon, Richard Burton, and T.E. Lawrence. In a cursory view of our calendar of saints, we can find a common feature of the lives of the saints; they left the comfort of what was familiar and traveled to bridge great cultural divides in order to become bi-lingual and bi-cultural enough to communicate the message of Christ.


In our Christology, we believe that Jesus is the one who traveled the furthest from home to be completely bi-lingual in the experience of divinity and humanity so as to communicate across the great divine/human divide of difference. As we know, not everyone did or could receive his message about the nature of God. For a long period of time the message about Jesus was an underground message within an Empire which had the cult of the Emperor who was not to have any contenders.


What was the nature of the colonial times? England and other countries were in the wake of the Enlightenment, industrialization, and an expanding mercantile system to bring raw materials from colonies around the world. The native peoples of the colonies were in the words of Tennyson, the White Man's Burden. What was that burden? The burden was having the responsibility to bring Christianity, Civilization, and Commerce to people of color in the colonies established throughout the world. And in the cruel practice of slavery, it was commercializing of people as a chief commodity.


George Augustus Selwyn was privileged enough to attend Eton and Cambridge. At Cambridge he was a member of the first crew team in what became the annual rowing competition with Oxford. After graduation he returned to teach at Eton, and soon after was ordained deacon and priest. In 1841, he was consecrated at Lambeth as Bishop of New Zealand, just a year after New Zealand was made a British Colony. On his voyage to New Zealand, he learned Maori from a native on board, well enough to preach and teach in Maori on his arrival. He also learned ship sailing on the voyage, a skill he used when he traveled to various places in New Zealand. He was known for his organizational skills and these skills were required in New Zealand. He also experienced the same sort of inter-church issues which were exported to the colonies from the homeland. Bishop Selwyn was more of a high church Tractarian and the missionaries were mainly low church evangelicals. What does smells and bells have to do with evangelism?


Bishop Selwyn was perhaps like many of his age in being blind to the linkage of the message of Christ with the Imperialist practices of the Empire. And while we might feel today that we have arrived at rebuking critiques of the colonialism of people of Selwyn's age, we can still carry with us a sense of having a superior culture and superior religion, something which surely contradicts the humility of Jesus Christ.


I think that persons of colonial Christianity and we as post-colonial Christians have not faced up with honesty the supreme irony of the New Testament. The irony is that the New Testament was written by and for oppressed people who did not have full status within the Roman Empire. The only way that I can understand the beatitudes is to see them as Christly martial arts living by oppressed people so as to survive and win favor from their oppressors. Those who lived the beatitudinal martial arts lifestyle could impress with such winsome behaviors.


We live as inheritors of Empire Christianity. And we pretend with great contortionist gymnastics that our experience is similar to the people of the New Testament. When in fact, by force, white colonialists required people of color to live the life of the beatitudes so that we could be proud of them as our "well trained pets."


Thankfully, contained within the Gospel is the demise of Empire Christianity. Why? If you preach the love of Christ, the hearers eventually are going to say or think, "We really love this Jesus whom you preach, but we want the same and equal dignity that is part of this good news of Christ."


St. Paul once wrote a rather backhanded thing: I rejoice not in how the Gospel is preached, but that the Gospel is preached.


We can say the same about Bishop Selwyn and about ourselves. Selwyn was concerned that he preached the good news, and we still find ourselves with this goal.


With the Psalmist, Bishop Selwyn and we, too can agree, God is truly most catholic. Kata holos means on the whole. God is more on the whole than Anglicanism, Roman Catholicism, or any other religious faith. The Psalmist implored the entire earth to sing to the Lord. God belongs to everyone.


With Bishop Selwyn, we would also agree with Paul that it is not the works that we have done which gives us divine citizenship or status, rather it is grace, original grace of God's image upon us, and realized grace when we accepted God as our parent.


Finally with Bishop Selwyn we can agree with our appointed Gospel, that the Gospel needs strategies or it remains a highly kept theoretical secret. The appointed Gospel lesson provides us with the passage that has been reduced to what is called evangelical poverty, one of the counsels of perfection. The joke on Episcopalians is that we've not excelled at evangelical poverty. Remember the joke from your seminary professor asking, "why were Episcopalians last to arrive on the frontier?" Answer: They were waiting for the invention of the Pullman Car, so they could arrive in luxury.


I don't think that this Gospel is about the monastic practice of evangelical poverty. It simply exemplifies that the Gospel needs strategies appropriate to the time and place. And isn't that what the life of the church on all levels is about? Finding strategies appropriate to our situations to get the good news out to the people who need to discover it.


You might notice that the strategies parallels the strategy which Jesus saw in his own life when he read from Isaiah: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. After reading this passage, Jesus told his listeners, "I resemble in my ministry these requirements of the good news. In Hebrew, "basar."


The year of the Lord's favor is the realm of God at hand. The message appeals holistically to bodies, souls, and spirits of the people who need to know the good news of their lives.


For us today, embracing evangelical poverty should mean ridding ourselves of any kind of personal or cultural baggage which gets in the way of letting people know the full dignity of Christ. Amen.

The Word Became Flesh; The Word Became Text

2 Easter B April 7, 2024
Acts 4:32-35 Psalm 133
1 John 1:1-2:2 John 20:19-31

Lectionary Link

The Gospel of John includes in it some interesting meanings regarding word and language.

John Gospel states that Word is the beginning of life as we humanly know it.  All things have existence because of Word.  Word as the beginning of life is also equal or co-extensive with God.  John's Gospel bluntly states, "The Word was God."

But according to John's Gospel, that Word which was God, became flesh.  That is, Word that was God became total body language in the person of Jesus.  Total body language of God, Jesus lived with us as God with us, and what did this Jesus, the total body language of God with us do?

He did signs.  The Gospel of John includes a book of signs, and each of those signs are messages about when Christ is with us; in the trivial, like needing extra wedding wine, in the sickness of a child, in the loss of not being able to walk, in the loss of sight, in the storms of nature, the need for food for the masses, and the loss of life of a family member.  These signs in the Gospel of John were meant to teach us to read the spiritual meaning in a natural human event.

The Gospel of John is also about how to read the very writings of the Gospel of John.  The words of Jesus in the Gospel of John mock literal meanings, like an old man getting back into his mother's womb, like the disciples thinking it was good of Lazarus to be asleep, like a blind mind being able to see and the seeing Pharisees actually being blind.  Like the offense that some take about being cannibals eating the flesh of Jesus.  The writer of John's Gospel asks the readers to understand spiritually with the natural carrying those spiritual meanings.

The Gospel of John has Jesus equating spirit and spoken word.  What is spirit?  It is a metaphor of a word meaning wind or breath to refer to some hidden reality.  What did Jesus say?  "My words are spirit and they are life."  The words of anyone's life are one's spirit or the hidden code which guides one's life.  One is constituted in and out through one's words, and the effects of those words are known in one's spoken words, written words, but most importantly in the body language deeds of how we behave.  Everyone can say, "My worded life inside and out, is my spirit or the mystery of who I am."

What might be the hidden question within the community of the Gospel of John?  Can we trust our experiences of the Risen Christ which are not like the eye-witnesses of the people who actually walked and talked with Jesus?

I would argue that perhaps the main punchline of the Gospel of John is found in our doubting Thomas Story.  And this punchline is a plug for the validity of the written words about Jesus being themselves post-Resurrection appearances of Jesus able to inspire faith and belief in Jesus as Son of God and Messiah.  The writer's punchline is this: "But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name."

The Gospel of John is not really an eyewitness account of Jesus written while Jesus walked the earth; it is an apology for the validity of the many post-resurrection appearances of the Risen Christ within the lives of people who were living in the year 90 and later.

Christ is the eternal Word, who became with us in specific body language person of Jesus, whose worded life was spirit and abundant life for us and was a Sign of God being with us in all manner of life situations.

And now in the year 90, should we fear that the memory of Jesus will die and be lost because all the eyewitnesses are dead and gone?  No, just like the Hebrew Scriptures became a technology of memory to retain the long history of salvation, so too the writing of the Gospel of Jesus Christ would carry with it the Spirit of the Risen Christ and inspire continuously the belief in Jesus as the unique Child of God, and one who was anointed by God for a most important message of God for everyone.

John's Gospel: The Word was in the Beginning.  The Word was with God.  The Word was God.  The Word creates the differentiation of everything.  The Word became a Body Language Person, in Jesus.  The word of Jesus was spirit and life.  The Spirit and Life of Christ is Risen and Alive and present with us.  John's Gospel retells in a narrative parable style, the life of Jesus and this parable encodes the faith reality of the Risen Christ being the sign of God with us within every life circumstance.

The doubting Thomas story is a story that concludes with the writer of John writing, "And the Word became my text about Jesus so that you can believe that he is the Son of God and Messiah."

You and I pray today,"May the Eternal Word, become flesh in us today, so that we might live and speak the good news of Jesus Christ, Son of God, who has embraced us all as children of God."  Amen.

Easter Living, A Way to Have an Honest Relationship with Time and Change

Easter Sunday, March 31, 2024
Acts 10:34-43 Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24
1 Corinthians 15:1-11 Mark 16:1-8

Lectionary Link
 

When we compare the past and the present, sometimes we might like the past better than the present, and sometimes we might like the present better than the past.

But our comparison is irrelevant because we cannot stop change or time.  Whether we like the present better than the past or not, we still must orient ourselves to the present in realistic ways.

The disciples and friends of Jesus who once had hoped for someone who had not yet been born, found that special unforgettable person.  Jesus was the unforgettable person of their lives.

We are very selfish about the people we love because they make us better.  They make us feel hopeful, they bring out of us things about ourselves which we could not discover without them.

We would like to freeze-frame our lives with the people we love the best.  We don't want the very best of relationship to change or end.

The friends and disciples of Jesus were not unreal about life and death.  They knew that people live and die.  But it seemed drastically unfair that their best friend would be gone in his mere thirties.  Surely we could grow old with Jesus and have him do our funerals.  It reminds me of the young man at his grandmother's funeral who said to the priest, "I hope you will also do my funeral."  And the old priest thought, "Well, I'm going to be long gone before you die."

The disciples and friends of Jesus have become for us a part of the Christian program of Easter living.  What is Easter living?  It is living realistically with the fact of time and change.

And what is the hardest fact of time and change?  The hardest fact of time and change is when starkly apparent discontinuities occur.  When we can visibly note the starkest of change, the experience of loss can be great.  And the greatest discontinuity for us as humans is death.

All things considered, we'd rather be alive and have those closest to us alive as well.  This is our preference, even though we begrudgingly know that at certain age our bodily functions diminish to the point of not having the quality of life of body and mind that we desire.  It is easier for us to accept death as discontinuity in a very mature old age, than to experience the seeming untimely death before one's time.

What the disciples of Jesus did not know at his death is that they would be a part of his continuity after his death.  They would be important witness to how the dead Jesus would continue in their lives and in the life of the world as the Risen Christ.

And again on this Easter Sunday, we return to the events of this transition phase in the continuity of Jesus of Nazareth to become the Risen Christ, not just from and for Nazareth, but for all the people of the world.

The resurrection of Christ in story is about the transitional occasions of the appearances of the Risen Christ to his friends who had been devastated by his death.  His appearances provided for his friends and disciples a continuity of his former life with his afterlife.  They were given the assurance that their friendship with Jesus would continue into their future, and they would continue to know him.

The transitional continuity of Jesus in his post-death appearances indicate that his continuity was different in aspect and abilities.  He seemed to be able to tele-port from Jerusalem to Galilee in a moments time.  He seemed to be able to appear suddenly through locked doors.  He could eat a meal of fish to prove the substantiality of his continuity with his previous self.  He could hide his identity and suddenly reveal it in with an abrupt unveiling.

The fact of the resurrection of Jesus is the fact of the continuity of Jesus after his death.  But it is also the fact of the distinctly different states of appearance for this future continuous Risen Christ.  The continuity of Jesus as the Risen Christ has continued in the lives of people for many years now.  St. Paul had a different experience of the continuity of Jesus than did Peter, the disciples, and the women who visited the empty tomb.  But the different experience of Paul was a valid experience of continuity with Jesus, and so is our experiences of the Risen Christ.

The resurrection of Christ teaches us to live realistically with time and change, both with the more seeming gradual changes but also with the great and stark seeming discontinuities, such as the poignant and profound event of death.

How can we bear to lose the visual and tactile continuity with our beloved ones?  How can we bear to lose our favored ways of interacting with our beloved ones?

What the resurrection of Christ teaches us is that everything is retained and sustained in the future.  What we have to learn is how to accept and appreciate that what is retained and sustained is always different than it was before.  And adjusting to the differences in future continuity is the most difficult for us who live after our loved ones have died.

But the truth of the resurrection is the truth of life itself.  Life is spontaneously sustaining into the future and in this sustenance all that has come before is retained in continuity but in various degrees of different continuity in appearance and consciousness.

And if we are worried about the loss of recognizable continuity in our lives, let us also remember that as long as language users exist, then the eternal Word will be the continuity of life as we know it.

The Risen Christ is also the Eternal Word from the beginning, and as the Eternal Word, our continuity is forever memorialized in the memory of the Eternal Word forever.

Today, on this Easter Sunday, let us not forget that the resurrection is not a single magical event that happened to Jesus; rather it is a process of sustaining life which manifested itself in a poignant way in the life of Jesus Christ.  With the resurrection as a way of life, we do not deny the reality of time and change, and the extremely painful transition of death; but resurrection gives us permission to accept the continuity of ever future life, even the future life of reunion with those with whom we always feel like we have unfinished relationships.

Today we celebrate the continuity of life that happened to Jesus in becoming the Risen Christ, and we ride this resurrection energy for our continuously different future lives.  Alleluia, Christ is Risen.  The Lord is Risen Indeed.  Alleluia.  Amen

The Vigil as a Rosary Bead of Salvation History

Easter Vigil   B      March 30, 2024

Genesis 1:1-2:4a [The Story of Creation]
Genesis 7:1-5, 11-18, 8:6-18, 9:8-13 [The Flood]
Genesis 22:1-18 [Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac]
Exodus 14:10-31; 15:20-21 [Israel's deliverance at the Red Sea]
Isaiah 55:1-11 [Salvation offered freely to all]
Baruch 3:9-15, 3:32-4:4 or Proverbs 8:1-8, 19-21; 9:4b-6 [Learn wisdom and live]
Ezekiel 36:24-28 [A new heart and a new spirit]
Ezekiel 37:1-14 [The valley of dry bones]
Zephaniah 3:14-20 [The gathering of God's people]

Romans 6:3-11

Mark 16:1-8

Lectionary Link

To do an inclusive homily for the Vigil, I would like for us visualize a special rosary consisting of beads, and each bead on this rosary represents an event of memory in how our relationship with God has been understood and record in Holy Scriptures.  Let us ponder the inherited insights which we have received to inform the stories of our past.  Our identity as people has been forged within these great stories and in the Vigil event we return to review these story milestones.

Creation

Our origin story of creation is obvious insight that all that has ever been has come from some great BEFORE.  How does awareness of differentiation happen within the plenitude of everything?  The Genesis story says it happens when speaking arises.  God says, and speech creates the awareness of differentiation of all things.   And human beings are at the top of the chain of beings and human beings are speaking beings, beings who name the diversities within their environment.  The creation story includes the insight of lost innocence in humanity discovering moral significance, with the real freedom to make bad decisions.

The Flood

The next bead on our rosary of salvation history ponders the circumstances of humanity having the freedom to be so evil that there is a need to start over with but a remnant of people and animals.  The story about the great Flood should be seen from the view of the gift of the rainbow in the insight revealed about God.  God does not destroy humanity even when humanity interprets the furies of Nature as punishment.  We are often caught in the conflict of the systems of nature and the human community, often being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but the rainbow is the promise of life after life, and life after much death and destruction within this glorious system of the free play of probabilities.

Abraham's Sacrifice of Isaac

Humanity has had to deal with the issue that time and aging means perpetual loss.   Life is perpetually the loss of the state of what comes before to what comes after.  How do we come to have useful meaning from the reality of perpetual loss?  The past is sacrificed or voluntarily given up for the future.  The story of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac is a story about having faith in God who gives us insights about how to sacrifice for beneficially outcomes.  One can see in the story an insight about humanity moving from the false view of God wanting human sacrifice, to the obvious fact of carnivore societies where animals are the meat food for humans.  In carnivore human society, animals are sacrificed for the sustenance of people.  To be human is to deal with the reality of sacrifice.  With faith, we endeavor to make what we must lose work for the benefit of a better tomorrow.  Isaac became a sacrificed who lived, bespeaking the notion of being living sacrifices, namely, giving up selfish behaviors for the good of others.

Israel's Deliverance at the Red Sea

There is something sad about needing fantastic deliverance stories.  Why?  It is the sad fact of human history that people mistreat each other to the point of oppression and slavery.  Divine intervention to save a people fleeing from slavery is a wonderful story but how much better it would be for people to treat each other with kindness and share the ample resources of the world?  The Bible is often story about humanity's own misanthropic behaviors and therefore needing divine intervention to save us from ourselves.  What about the poor chariot drivers who were killed in the sea, each but doing the bidding of the Pharaoh who required them to do so?  While the Red Sea story may seem like a heroic one, it is in fact a story about human hatred being overcome by drowning deaths.  The human epic is the constant effort to escape from being enslaved, but also never to become those who use power to oppress or harm others.  In our efforts against the selfish ego, we need to know graceful moments of being helped by the higher power.

Salvation is offered to all

The writer of Isaiah wrote about a call of God going to all nations.  The seeming natural tendency for all people is to try to speak exclusively for God and make God into the totem of one's tribe or people, and even use God as propaganda for the legitimacy of one's own nation.  For religion to be honest to God, God cannot be limited to any particular group of people.

Learn Wisdom and Live

The Hebrew Scriptures include wisdom writings.  Wisdom is the human ability to use language and thinking to arrive at pragmatic love and justice in life.  Wisdom is the discovery of the proper purpose of everything in life, especially in justice being the proper relationship between people.

A New Heart and New Spirit

The Psalmist requested a new heart and renewed spirit.  The prophet wrote that the heart is above all things exceedingly wicked.  Dealing with the worst of interior motives is a great human dilemma.  If we believe that God made us good, how do we get to that which is our original goodness and act from that place?  The prophet Ezekiel believe that there would be help for us to discover the deepest creational goodness within ourselves.  The image of God upon us can be activated and found to be a new heart and new spirit.

The Valley of the Dry Bones

Ezekiel's vision of the valley of the dry bones is a poignant reminder that the situation for those who wrote the biblical books was more often than not dire and unfavorable.  If one thinks that they Bible is a book for only the historical winners and triumphant, one is misreading it.  Sometimes survival depends upon merely the vision of things being different, even ideal, even utopian and fantastic.  For those who criticize people of faith for being people who spin stories of wish fulfillment, we might argue that part of the inherent condition of human goodness is to have hope.  That hope always needs projective stories of what such hope might mean in the direction of what is ideal for humanity.  The salvation story is a story about people being unapologetic about hope, and having hopeful stories motivate the direction of our future behaviors.

The Gathering of God's People

The gathering is actually a re-gathering.  Sometimes we don't not know the value of being at home until we've lived away or in exile.  The image of humanity in exile and away from the familiar is evocative of the state of alienation that we often find ourselves in.   The gathering is the occasion for collective effervescence being energy of joy and hope in the experience of original blessing. 

In the reading from the letter to the Roman, St. Paul writes the goal of Christian mysticism; identity with Christ, or identity with the image of God within each person.  According to Paul, we are buried with Christ in his death and raised with him in his resurrection.

And finally, the empty tomb narrative.  Christ is not in the tomb, he is risen to be known within each person.  Christ is Risen Indeed!  In you.  Alleluia. Amen.

The Spirituality of the Passion

Good Friday   March 29, 2024
Gen 22:1-18 Ps 22
Heb.10:1-25 John 18:1-19:37

Lectionary Link

On Good Friday, it is a good time to remind ourselves about the writing process in the coming together of the New Testament writings.

The Gospels are placed at the front of the New Testament and since they present narratives of Jesus, the logical assumption is that they were written first.  But in fact, they were written much later than the writings of St. Paul.  Paul's writings were letters with teaching, practical administrative advice to the members of his churches, and I would say that Paul established the mystical teachings of the church.  Paul did not see Jesus of Nazareth or walk or talk with him.  He was not present when Jesus was seized and crucified by the Roman authorities in Jerusalem.  He was not in the post-burial aftermath of Jesus in being privy to a post-resurrection appearance of the Risen Christ.

He did have a mystical experience of the Risen Christ, which was authoritative for him, and the mystical experience of knowing the Risen Christ through a spiritual presence became the standard experience for the early members of the Jesus Movement.

So, what was Paul's experience of the death and resurrection of Jesus?  From the Pauline writings: "I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death."  Also Paul wrote, I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me."

The history of Jesus for St. Paul was the history of his mystical experiences of the Risen Christ.  When Paul met Peter and James, who had walked with Jesus, he did not regard his experience of Christ to be inferior to those who had been eye-witnesses.

The narratives of the Passion and Death of Jesus were written long after St. Paul wrote about his mystical practice which became the normative practice of the early Jesus Movement communities.

When the Gospel genre of writing happened, decades after St. Paul's writing, there has happened within the reading of the New Testament, a tendency to separate the mystical experience of Paul with the death and resurrection of Christ, with the seeming eye-witness narratives of the death and resurrection of Christ.

The Passion and crucifixion narratives can be given preference over the mystical theology of Paul, because they seem to be "before" the Pauline writings.

On this Good Friday, I believe that we need to assert the primacy of the Pauline mysticism of the death and resurrection of Christ, to the Gospel narratives.  The Gospel narratives are in fact a genre of visualization narrative to serve the event of mystical identity of person with the life of Christ known through the indwelling Holy Spirit.

I believe that treating the Passion Accounts as merely historical events divorced from the mysticism of Paul, accounts for how church cultures in our history have slipped into anti-Semitic behaviors toward the minority Jewish communities.  If one divorces the narratives of the Passion from the mystical theology of Paul, which actually preceded the writing of the Passion narratives, then one can feel justified in acting out against so-called "opponents" of Jesus who killed him.  This involves making all Jews of all times be stereotypically identify with figures in a visualization of the Passion of Christ.  The visualization was meant for spiritual practice and not for exactness of eyewitness account.  Being crucified with Christ is to be on a path of love and reconciliation with all people including Jews and Gentiles.  

Let us approach the reading of the Passion again as the visualization which occurred after the mystical theology of St. Paul, when he proclaimed, "I have been crucified with Christ."  If we try to do the Passion without the mystical theology of dying and rising with Christ, then we will have merely externalized Jesus events, and missed the mystical process of transformation of our lives that is intended by those who were inspired to write the writings which became a part of the New Testament.

Let us accept our identity with Christ in his death, accepting our part of the world suffering because of the genuine freedom which is in our world needed to affirm moral and spiritual authenticity.

On Good Friday, let us once again affirm our Christ-identity and with Paul confess: "I have been crucified with Christ."  Amen

Eucharist and Sign Value Crisis

Maundy Thursday March 28, 2024
Ex. 12:1-14a Ps. 78:14-20, 23-25
1 Cor 11:23-32 John 13:1-15

Lectionary Link

On Maundy Thursday, many Christian churches host "agape" meals as the context for the celebration of the institution of one of the chief sacraments of the Christian Church, the Holy Eucharist.

At such a meal, participants might observe that they are eating real food, as opposed to the "unreal" food that is the normal fare of Holy Eucharist.   We are starkly aware of how divorced the regular practice of Eucharist is from actual home cooked meals, or restaurant eating.

On Maundy Thursday, we bring out the quaint custom of washing feet.  In most of our lives "foot-washing" is not a real social function, it is a once a year liturgical ritual and not without shock factor of seeing leaders acting out humility in washing the feet of another person with a "so-called" lower and different station in life.

The challenge for us on Maundy Thursday is to over come the sign value gap between what is done in liturgy and what we actually do in life.

Part of the problem has been created by the historical success of the Christian movement, to the place of reverse fortunes.  The Christian movement was once an underground and hidden movement within the Roman Empire.  It became the preferred religion of the Roman Empire and subsequent Empires in the world.  It went from being but a few members to becoming automatic cultural membership whereby every born child was passively assimilated into this gigantic culturally tacit paradigm.  The automatic status of being Christian, culturally Christian was noted by the protesting Kierkegaard when he complained, "All of the dogs in Denmark have faith."

The challenge for us today has to do with reinvigorating the connection with chief Christ-like values of what we do in church, but more importantly with what we do when we are outside the church liturgical environment.

Why do we commemorate Maundy Thursday?  We do so because the nascent Jesus Movement thought it necessary to proclaim two prominent values of Jesus Christ, on which the community was founded and through which it would be endlessly perpetuated.

These two values of Maundy Thursday must be connected with life values which are practiced outside of the Maundy Thursday liturgy, and outside all liturgies of the church.

The two values are food for people, and service to one another.

Ponder the great imagination involved in the process of Christ being all and in all.  Jesus took bread and said, my life, my presence does not end at my epidermis, "This is my body and body," he said as he identified his presence with food and drink.  The food and drink is a Christly omnipresence for the life of the people of the world.  And why repeat and remember these words within community?  So to publicly verified that everyone in the community is taken care of in body and soul.  The Eucharistic gathering of the church is the social reality of the church and in face to face gathering people take note that care is given to all present.  One can appreciate how important this was in oppressed and poor communities, namely, seeing that all were having enough to eat.

Along with the hospitality of food provided in a public gathering, the very engine of the survival of the community is exemplified, namely, the continuous reciprocal service of people for each other, no matter what one's social or economic status is.   This is the value that is proclaimed in the "foot-washing" event.  The church, family, and society does not survive without the "ego-checking" service that each person provides for the lives of the members of the community.  As societies become pyramid expressions of lower tiered people serving the greedy and the powerful; the loss of the egalitarian sacrificial service is reduced to be the poor wages given to poor laborers to serve the lives of the powerful, the wealthy, and the greedy.  The foot-washing Jesus Movement proclaims a different kind of value

What do we need most in the churches tonight on this night of Maundy Thursday?  We need the liminal events of the enlightening and empowering Dismissal.  Let us go forth!

The way in which we add authentic connection of the values of our liturgy is when we are empowered to sew these values into the fabric of our lives outside our liturgies.  When we can make sure that the body of Christ is the ample food for everyone who needs food in our world, then we can come to achieve authenticity with our Eucharistic values.   When we can sew sacrificial service for each other into the every day fabric of our lives, then the foot washing liturgy will attain its full sign value.

Let tonight's dismissal send us forth to feed our world, and to spread sacrificial reciprocal service as the true Christly values of Maundy Thursday.  Amen.

The Passion Accounts; Ignatian Method Before Ignatius

 Palm Sunday/Passion Sunday B, March 24, 2024
Is.45:21-25     Ps. 22:1-11
Phil. 2:5-11   St. Mark’s Passion Gospel

Lectionary Link

The Ignatius Method is a method of prayer and reflection deriving from one of the founders of the Jesuits, Ignatius Loyola who was born the year before Columbus sailed for America.

The Ignatius method includes a guided meditation and reflection contemplation with vivid visualization and imaginations on the events in the life of Jesus, particularly, his Passion, as a way of experiencing a Christly presence in one's life.  Of course, the Passion accounts were the inspiring textual sources for these exercises.

While we acknowledge the Ignatius Method as significant, we might also observe that the Ignatian Method is but a copy of what was already happening with the writing of the Passion Accounts.  One might say the Ignatius Method is a Practice of a longstanding existing practice.

The Gospels were written methods of the remembrance of Jesus.  They were the spiritual contemplation, reflections, and imaginations in the spiritual methods of the Gospel writers.  The words were guides in the Gospels as discipleship manuals for those being trained in the mystagogy of the Jesus Movement.

Why would I call the Gospels a spiritual method of remembrance?  They were not eye witness historical accounts written contemporaneously when Jesus lived.  They weren't written in Hebrew or Aramaic but in the common koine Greek, a lingua franca that had been in use since the time of Alexander the Great and his successor generals.

The Gospels were spiritual reflections being made accessible to Gentiles who were coming into the early communities of the Jesus Movement.  One can see the Gospels as directed meditations which arose to indicate that the early Christians believed that the Risen Christ could be known to be present again and through word and sacrament.

An important feature of words of Holy Eucharist is the notion of remembrance, or in the Greek anamnesis, which is more than simple remembrance; rather a dynamic remembrance which combines the recited words of Jesus with actions of serving the bread and the wine, and it has the effect of making the presence of Christ known again.

St. Paul wrote his own method of dynamic remembrance when he penned, "I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer l that live, but it is Christ who lives within me."  His remembrance of the crucified Christ is so real that his own identity becomes known to be wedded with Christ.

As we read again the Passion of Jesus Christ today, let us accept these words as the dynamic remembrances of the Gospel writers who like St. Paul were sharing the mystical method of their community in coming to know an identity with the ever current presence of the Risen Christ.

Since so many treat the Passion Accounts more like historical accounts rather than spiritual practice of remembrance of being identified with the Risen Christ now, the result like so much of "church Christianity" is to dwell more on the external features of the person of Jesus.  We can treat the Passion more like the Passion Play theatre or like the graphic cinematic "Passion of Christ."  This can lots of emotions and we might miss the spiritual purpose of the Passion Account, namely, the deep inward personal identity.

In my view, I think we need to return to how the Gospel accounts of the Passion were written.  They were written to be the early method of realizing the presence of Christ through the written words which helped to visualize what identity with the Risen Christ means for us now.

My prayer is that each would approach the Gospel passion account in a mysticism like St.Paul's, as a dynamic remembrance of the Risen Christ, whose realized presence can bring each of us to confess, "I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but it is Christ who lives within me."  Amen.

Continual Covenant, Priestliness, and Transformative Process

 5 Lent   B          March 17, 2024
Jer. 31:31-34      Ps. 51:11-16       
Heb. 5:1-10        John 12:20-33    

Lectionary Link

Our appointed Scripture lessons for today provide us with at least three points for consideration, which I would like to unify in this presentation for some meaningful insights.

First, God is a God of new covenant.

Time means that contractual relationship have to be continually renewed. We always live knowingly or unknowingly in contractual ways: I will do this for you; and you will do this for me and each other. The big contract that we have, whether we know it or not is with God. "I will do this for you God, and whether I regard you or not, I expect this of the great plenitude of life." In fact we could say that the predictability in what we call natural law can be seen as a contract. "If I throw an apple into the air, it will faithfully come down into my hands, given usual conditions." One could say that the entire universe makes a contract with us all of the time. That being said, we know that when it comes to human social behaviors, we are not as precisely predictable as the consistency of natural laws.

In relationship between parties with high degrees of freedom, different times require that covenant with God be articulated differently. Why?  As Joseph Campbell once observed, ancient virtue can become modern vice. Why?  People understand covenant within their limited cultural context.  The former covenants included the tolerance of slavery, subjugation of women, ethnocentric exclusivity, ignorance of recognition of diverse but significant personal identities, and diet limitations. Covenants can be understood to protect exclusive communal identity which in effect locks lots of people out, from being accepted as beloved persons made in God's image.

What does a new covenant look like.  It is a covenant which proclaims the omnipresence of God in all people by an interior law, an interior order. What is the interior order within all people?  It is having language.  It is the image of Christ, who is called Language or Word from the beginning.

Since we are ordered by language in how we speak, write and act; we need forgiveness where we have practiced disorder.  We need our inner scripts corrected by Christ the Word and great playwright of life.  And we need to practice acting out the new scripts provided by the witness of Christ. The new law written upon our hearts is this ordering process toward surpassing ourselves in excellence in future states.

Next, we are called to be priestly because Jesus was priestliness itself.

Jesus was not a Levite, and he was not a priest in the Temple, yet the writer to the letter to the Hebrews declares him to be a priest with a timeless connection to the ancient archetype of priesthood, Melchizedek.

Christ is the priest of God for humanity.  Followers of Christ are called to be priestly.  And followers of Christ have a vocational priesthood for a few designated persons, not to exhaust the priestliness of Christ, but rather to model and call the followers of Christ to their own priestliness.

And what is the nature of that priestliness?  Well, following Christ, it is to be both sacrificial offering, and offerer of that offering.

It is to make our lives of suffering an offering to God on behalf of bettering our world.

This is most poignantly experienced when we quit taking our own suffering as uniquely individual, and accept it as in solidarity with the suffering within our world.  And since we are not our own but belong to Christ, with him we offer our suffering to God because being human is to be subject to suffering as an unavoidable probability of living. 

Accepting our priesthood with Christ, means that we do not pretend to exempt ourselves from the specific requirements of the conditions of our lives which happen to us. Living all our lives as offered to God through Christ is to accept our part in being a member of the kingdom of priest to serve our God.

What does Covenant with God, and accepting our priestly calling require?

Lastly, It requires accepting the time cycles in life as being transformative and redemptive. In the words of Jesus channeled through the Gospel of John, his life was like a seed which falls into the ground and dies. It changes and becomes the sprout, stem, leaves, and fruit.

There will arrive in human existence new circumstances which forces radical change of life/death comparison in appearance and experience. Being in covenant with God with a priestly ministry means that we identify ourselves with the transformative processes encompassing the agony and the ecstasy and we do this with the witness of the Risen Christ providing the hope of a surpassing and reconciling future glory to do the impossible, which will provide us with a convincing meaning of suffering and the purpose of life itself.

Let us be in a renewal of our covenant with God based upon the continuing new circumstances of our lives; let us accept our priestly ministry, of being both victim and priest, those who suffer, and those who offer their sufferings to God in solidarity with the suffering of Jesus and the suffering of the world.

And finally, let us commit ourselves to continual transformation in the cycles of time, as we humbly accept the profoundly difficult transitions, in the hope of being lifted up to future glorious meanings.  Amen.