Christmas and Continuing Baby Bliss

Christmas Eve December 24, 2025
Is. 9:2-4,6-7 Ps.96:1-4,11-12
Titus 2:11-14 Luke 2:1-14

Lectionary Link

The ascendency of Christmas in popularity both within churches and within many different cultures over the more theologically important Holy Week and Easter liturgy, is due the topic being more child friendly than the Holy Week and Easter observances.  Yes, Easter is indeed the happiest of endings; the Jesus who was born was brought to a cruel death, but he came back to life as the hero on whose wings the rest of us so choosing, can also have assurance of life after life, or life after the death which occurs in everyone's life.

And we certainly edit and censor the Christmas pageant not to include the slaughter of the holy Innocents by Herod, or the forced migration of the Holy Family to Egypt for fear of their lives.  We too, are editors of how we tell the Christmas story, just as the original writers were editions of their perspective of what the continuing experience of the life of Christ meant for the people of the local guilds of people who gathered and who became so evident for their "new" beliefs that they are dubbed as "Christians."

Christians were "anointed" ones, in the Spirit people, who themselves were surprised by the effervescence and group dynamic of this catching infectious enthusiasm, that they had to to try to account for this effervescence, its origin and the genius of its effective working.

The group of Christians had to account for the dynamics of what they were experiencing.  Experiencing this inward anointing and enthusiasm was like a genie that needed a bottle to contain it and to give it a concrete social reality, to teach it, to perpetuate a spiritual methodology, a mystagogy to initiate people into as a rule of life.

The didactic writings and mystagogy of St. Paul came before the Gospel writings in the institutional process of the burgeoning Jesus Movement.  St. Paul's mysticism was founded upon the experience of coming into an identity with Christ, a losing of the notion of a separate identity from Christ by the power attributed to the death of Jesus.  "I am crucified with Christ, but I live, not I but Christ lives within.  The life I now life I live by the faith of Christ."  Not the faith "in" Christ as some external person, but the faith of Christ within me as this new alter personality of being able to check my ego at the door.  In the Pauline writings, this experience was the mystery of the ages, "Christ in you the hope of glory."

So how does this Pauline mysticism come to attain origin discourse and how is this mystical experience encoded within an actual narrative?  It happens in the teaching modes of the Gospel writing.  It uses narrative to encode mystagogy.  The secret of the Gospel is not to read them literally but mystically, and spiritually.   We are to read the Gospels as "parables" which means that one has to come to the inward experience of the mystery to understand the intended meanings or one is lost in a childish and even idolatrous literalism.

And if Christmas has been overly childified, the Christmas narratives reside within the overall child motif of the Gospels.  The Christmas story encodes the orientation into Wonderhood which the Christian mystagogues were teaching to their initiates.

The brilliant but very literal Nicodemus did not understand the mystery, the one that oracle Rabbi Jesus proclaims:  You must be born again.  How does the literal Nicodemus respond?  How can I get back into my mother's womb at my age.  Can we appreciated that the child motif, namely, the birth motif is a chief metaphor of the Jesus Movement, a Movement that exists because people had, have had for centuries, and are having now, these new birth experience which have the contextual coding of this identity with Christ.

What we know within this great big world of diverse experiences and mutual happenings, we can experience a sleeping baby, and in the baby's dream state, the baby smiles and coos.  And we're in wonder and we're jealous without admitting it.  This baby bliss has power over us because this baby is experiencing the innocence of the pre-linguistic state where good and evil or anything at all have not yet been designated.  And we want to get back to innocence; and it is within us an unretrievable memory and we can only access it in projecting on the baby in bliss.

Everything about a baby is not bliss as any parent knows who has to attend to such a vulnerable one, but the baby bliss experience co-exists in this world of experience of everything else, including the world of cruel tyrants, mystic magi, and peasant shepherds.

And what else did oracle Jesus say?  He has hid the mystery from the wise and revealed it to infants.  This is a rather enigmatic way of saying the pre-linguistic, the extra-linguistic, the oceanic meditative state of Wonderhood can be known within everything else that happens in life.  And the one who knows initiation into this state of Wonderhood is blessed indeed to know a saving accompaniment to everything else which happens in one's life.

Let us tonight enter into the baby bliss tonight.  Let us embrace the linguistically inaccessible blisshood that resides within us in our memorial vaults but has been neglected and repressed by the many cruel things which have happened on our way to the knowledge of good and evil.

The baby bliss hood which we have forgotten is still in and with us, and when our adult egos too often formed by the paranoia producing hard knocks of life repress the original oceanic wonder at the edge of our inner consciousness; when our egos can crack and soften and receive this babyhood bliss as the warmth which melts hardened egos, we can know the peace and bliss without having any external reason for doing so.

And this is the mystagogy which is hidden in the Christmas story for us.  Let the baby bliss of Christmas be the warming and melting fire for our egos so hardened by life's harms and hurt, and let this bliss give us the hope of new agency of being about to be better to and for ourselves, to our families and communities, and peacemakers of love love and justice in our world today.

Merry Baby Bliss Tonight!  Enter afresh into Wonderhood tonight.  Amen.

Almah to Parthenos as Mode of Mystagogy

4 Advent A, December 21, 2025
Isaiah 7:10-16 Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18
Romans 1:1-7 Matthew 1:18-25

Lectionary Link

The formation of "good news" clubs or guilds were occurring in cities throughout the Roman Empire for many, many decades in the first and second century.  The Greek word synagogue was the word for gatherings of Jewish worshippers, and synagogue would be a word that might also be called "proto-church" for followers of Jesus who still maintained their ritual adherence to Judaism.  As Gentile followers of Jesus became a more common happening, and as tension grew in the Jesus Movement regarding whether ritual adherence to Jewish practice would be required of the Gentiles, the context of Greco-Roman meant that the gatherings became designated as ekklesia, or churches.  And these churches became social realities, clubs, or guilds which paralleled such guilds for Greco-Roman local gatherings which had patron deities and gathering places and ritual meals.

The ekklesia or church or churches incorporated Greco-Roman contextual available practices with the scribal and rabbinical traditions of Judaism.  How does one generate a teaching program to express the values of these arising "good news" guilds as a way to validate the seeming spontaneous even ecstatic experiential events which were occurring within these effervescent communities?  The New Testament writings are evidence of the institutional process of these arising communities of "esprit d'corp" people.  They are evidence of scribal people, or people with the wealth and privilege of literacy generating literature.  This meant they had the means of production of texts, which was no mean or easy feat of the time.  We cannot impose our more widespread notion of literacy and textual production upon the times where literacy was uncommon.

The ekklesia or churches produced texts which might be called mystagogy or mythogogy.  Myth and mystery go together and express a deep appreciation of awe and wonder about great truths in which we are over-shadowed because we cannot control them by our limited understanding.  The story traditions of the Gospel were generated by scribal people who were committed to teach their mystagogy and mythogogy within communities of people who were energized by their personal enthusiastic experience to the point of wanting to share this enthusiasm with as many as might happen onto the serendipity of such a grace event.

The Gospel scribes were writers in lingua franca of the day which lingered because of the conquering of the world by Alexander the Great, even one who was said to have been a king born with a divinely miraculous birth.  Alexander was called the son of god.  The Gospel scribes knew about Homer and the Greek literary traditions as it had been received and altered by Virgil and others.  The Gospel scribes also knew the scribal and rabbinical traditions and practices of Judaism.  The palette of literary models which they had were quite expansive, but they each had their own literary genius to add unique flavors to how they would write their discipleship manual in Christian paideia, Christian education.

The Gospel of Matthew story about the origin of Jesus Christ is an example of the elements of Christian paideia, Christian Education, or being given orientation or catechesis into the mythogogy or mystagogy of the Christian church.

The Matthew story of the origin of Jesus is derived in part from the Hebrew prophet Isaiah but not before being mediated through the Greek language which provided a way to teach the mystagogy of the church regarding the experience of the Christ nature within oneself.

How so?  The New Revised Standard Version of the Bible correctly translates the Hebrew word, "almah" as the "young woman with child."  However, the Matthew scribe read the Book of Isaiah in the Greek translation, the version known as the Septuagint.  The Septuagint Greek word for "almah" was "parthenos," and this word could mean young woman, but it could also mean "virgin."  The Matthean scribe used the Greek "word" parthenos to mean exclusively "virgin."

Why was this use important for Matthean mystagogy?  The members of the various Christ communities believed that their lives were "over-shadowed" by the experience of the baptism of the Holy Spirit, whereby the life of Christ was known to be within them in a mysterious way, so mysterious, that it was an experience of the extra-human, an experience of the life of the divine within oneself.

Throughout the Gospels, Jesus is the parable speaker, meaning that the Gospels were written in plain stories which encoded the spiritual meaning for the members of the community who had come to know this new birth.  One of the main messages through the oracle Jesus of the Gospel of John, is "don't take words literally, but understand them spiritually."

As we arrive at Christmas this week, we know that we have inherited the infantization or childification of Christmas as many read the story literally rather than literarily.  We read for the sheer delight of the plain words of the story, rather than for the mystagogy which the story encodes.

And the story is a great story, but it is the invitation to the mystagogy of the church, as it was stated in Pauline terms, "Christ in you, the hope of glory."

The Advent warning for us is this: Don't throw out the new birth experience, with the story of the birth of the Christ child, or you might miss the point.  Amen.

Utopia and Messiah: Freeze Framed Event or Process?

3 Advent A December 14, 2025
Is.35:1-10 Ps. 146: 4-9
James 5:7-10 Matt. 11:2-11

Lectionary Link

The Bible is literature and as such it must be appraised as such.  Literature is writing art, one of the language products that has developed because of human beings are language users.  Written language is a technology of memory; it has allowed ancient language events to be remembered and then repeated in successive communities for many years.  For many people, for so long, the Bible was the dominant public language event and it is written in so many different discursive styles because the writers were trying to represent in language the modes of being human before God.

The Bible had to be for many the omni-competent language event onto which many people could project the oracle words of God.  The Bible as artistic literature is written in accessible story forms and it was meant to be read by the literate for the mostly illiterate public for whom it was to be an oracle of God's words.  One of the main units of language which helps the memory retain information is the "story."  The Bible includes many stories, written, brought to language to teach communities and to inculcate communal identities.

Biblical stories contain features of literature that are repeated because the goal is to promote recommended behaviors for the people for whom the teachings are devised.

Two stories modes are the use of the utopian and the ideal person.  A hero is one who does great things to build the best of all possible worlds.  Eden, utopia, paradise, and heaven are language forms to promote best of all possible worlds.  Prophets, wisdom sages, and messiahs are the ideal persons, the heroes who are to exemplify ideal people who are doing the work of building better worlds.   The Bible stories contrast the worst world of sin, death, and hell with the best worlds of love, everlasting life, and heaven.   The Bible stories contrast the worst people of hatred, idolatry, and cruelty with the very best people of love, kindness, and healing.

We live by and through the stories which have come to code our lives with the social identities which we have taken on.

What kind of stories might be told to people who were conquered and carried in exile to distant lands to serve the captors?  You might tell dream stories of returning to one's homeland just as the Isaian writer wrote about in the 35th chapter.  Even if the return is not imminent, it still has the truth of the comfort of hope.   Discourse of of hope is true to the need of comfort even if not a certain impending empirical reality.

What kind of poetry would you write about the one, about whom none greater could be conceived?  Like the Psalmist of Psalm 146, you would expound upon one who was kind to the the weak and vulnerable.  Why would you expound upon the greatest as being anything less than loving and kind?

And what if you lived in religious minority communities that were suffering and without the freedom to live openly your values because of an oppressing cult of the Caesar?  You might envision the end of oppression where a greater One comes to bring the very conditions of what a truly great one would do for love and justice among people.  The writer of James used the metaphor of a farmer waiting patiently for the time of harvest while enduring the hardships of preparation for the same.

And what if one is like John the Baptist, thrown in prison tempted to be in despair about the value and effectiveness of one's preaching and message.  "I thought that I was preparing for the messianic; is that going to be defeated?  Will my mission be completed by the surpassing and succeeding one?"  Jesus told the messengers to go and tell John that the values of the Isaian messiah were being accomplished, good news for the poor, and the prisoners, and health to the afflicted, and sight for the blind.

What we need to appreciate about a story is the sense of final closure it gives in terms of human comfort.  Why do people like hero and action adventure in the cinema?  In less than two hours the hero can with great endurance and effort, defeat evil and bring a dilemma to some final resolution.  And even though the process of life means that across the vast earth human dilemma is on-going and never ceasing, we can get a sense of some final closure in the moment of resolution in the story of the hero.  Such stories give us the sense that justice can be actual in our lives, and it is a moment of comfort for us in faith, and the worthwhileness of believing in goodness and justice.

How do stories of the heroic messiah and the better worlds of the future function for us?  Rather than thinking of heaven or utopia or of some utopian ideal hero or messiah in the singular freeze frame final mode which stories fool us to believe; we should understand these stories as providing inspiration for the process of the ideal and the messianic.  For us it means that in our churchly practice, we are to live the values of love and justice.  And it means in our personal lives we are to live and manifest the messianic values of realized love and justice. Such conditions and actions are not some final freeze frame stop the world attainment but inspiration for surfing the passage of time by being in the process of becoming more heavenly in our communal living and becoming more messianic or Christly in our life actions.  May God continue to lead us on the heavenly and the messianic path today.  Amen.

John the Baptist, the Saint of Advent

2 Advent A December 7, 2025
Is. 11:1-10 Ps.72
Rom. 15:4-13 Matt. 3:1-12

Lectionary Link

We might call John the Baptist, the Advent saint, because he dominates the lectionary readings from the Gospels for Advent.  He is even more prominent than the apocalyptic lectionary portions for Advent, and John coupled with the apocalyptic helps to teach the dual comings observed in the Advent liturgies, namely, the first coming of Jesus in the birth of Jesus, and the second coming of Christ in some future event.

John the Baptist as an desert dwelling ascetic who was under the vow of the nazirite, was aloof from society, in contrast with Jesus who was very much interactive with people even to be called a glutton and drunkard because he ate with sinners and interacted with harlots.  John the Baptist made people come to him and they came and he verbally dressed them down for their behaviors and demanded that they amend their lives and undergo the ritual of baptism, as if, implying they needed to be re-converted into an awareness of their standing with God.

John proclaimed a new community of people in that his baptism made all newly baptized proselytes of this new faith perspective; it did not matter whether they were religious leaders or adherents to Jewish ritual requirements.  His message, even if delivered like a drill sergeant, was persuasive and effective.  It was effective enough to get him killed for his popularity, according to Josephus, even while the Gospel says it was because he offended Herod's new wife.

He was cause for the religious leaders to feel threatened regarding their own authentic religious practice.  He was also like other prophets of the time, one who had a following and thereby considered as a potential Messiah, a potential political threat to the local authorities who administered the province for the Caesar of Rome.

As for knowledge about John the Baptist outside of the Bible, the famous historian of the era, Josephus wrote more about John the Baptist than about Jesus, even information which contradicts the Gospels.  In Josephus,  John the Baptist died for political reasons of his popularity and not for rebuking Herod about his marriage.  In Josephus we find that the famed girl dancer who was tricked to ask for John's severed head is named, Salome.

One could logically assume that if John the Baptist has more written about him than Jesus in the history written by Josephus, it could mean that John and his community were a formidable social movement.  And with all the mostly favorable writing about John the Baptist in the Gospels, one can assume that the Gospel writers were making an appeal to the community of John the Baptist to move on to Jesus as perhaps the logical successor leader for the community of John.  The officiant at the baptism of Jesus was John the Baptist at the insistence of Jesus.    This might be an indication that John had been a mentor of Jesus in his pre-ministry days.  At least, these are conclusions one could draw from the presentation their relationship in the Gospels.

They were both apocalyptic preachers, preacher of the hope of a great intervention on behalf of the oppressed.  In this sense, they were both realistic about the Roman Empire and its grip, not only on Palestine, but also on the entire world.  They were realistic in that they only thought that some great cosmic event would upset the power of the Roman Empire, or any Empire.  As expectant prophets, they had messages of hope, which included a, "great things can happen message; so hang in there."  Just like floods and earthquakes can happen, cosmic things can happen.  This great event might be understood in various ways since Christianity is built on the reappearance comings of Christ in encounters with some of his followers.  Again his departure is written about but he continued to appear to many in many unique ways, as he did to Paul, and as he did through the experience of the indwelling Holy Spirit giving people a sense that Christ had come to them and given them a new identity with Him.  So Advent is about the alway future coming of Christ to the people of this world.

But John the Baptist is also linked to the first coming of Jesus.  Jesus had a miraculous birth story; John had a marvelous birth story.  In the meeting between two expectant mothers, Mary and Elizabeth, the story indicates that the gestational John leaped in his mother's womb as if we was recognizing Christ child before either of them were born.  One realizes how the Gospel writers told the story of John the Baptist as the one who would prepare the way for Jesus Christ.

We have inherited this story tradition of John who is interpreted as being an important opening act and supporting actor for the main star of the New Testament communities.  And we would not be over-reaching to suggest that the community of John the Baptist might be regarded as a pre-existing proto-church to the eventual communities of the Jesus Movement.  The followers of Jesus would most likely have been highly motivated to persuade followers of John to become followers of Jesus, just as some of the prominent disciples of Jesus had done.

Where does that leave us today in our appropriation of John the Baptist, the saint of Advent?  Since like Lent, Advent is a penitential season, John the Baptist functions as a sort of liturgical police in reminding us not to hurry to the excess of the season of Christmas.  John stands to us as the model of a life built on fasting from any excess so that perpetual devotion to God might be practiced in intentional ways.  John's message of repentance is not a negative message of "you can't and you shouldn't do this or that."  It really is the positive message about human perfectibility in being able to surpass ourselves in excellence each day.  John's message is this:  Because God made you perfectible; you should walk on the path of perfectibility.

It is no secret that the early church believed that people could have an event and continual events of transformation which might be called a new birth or being born again.  As the Christmas story encodes the new birth mystery for each person, during the Advent season, we invoke the memory of John the Baptist to remind ourselves of our perpetual preparation for the birthing process in knowing ourselves to be children of God.  The Advent liturgies which include a recitation of the life of John the Baptist are annual rememberings of our spiritual journey of continual renewal, and we prepare to be renewed again at Christmas, even as we gather to inculcate and perpetuate these Advent values once again in our community.

Before we hasten to the excesses which often characterize our Christmastide, let us ponder the soul of St. John the Baptist, who lived just on enough, so that he could devote himself to higher values of living.  Let us learn from John the Baptist to be fasting people, so that all might have enough, and so that all might know that they can be on the path of perfectibility.  Amen

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.