Pondering Honest Readings of the Beatitudes

4 Epiphany A   February 1, 2026
Micah 6:1-8 Ps. 37:1-18
1 Cor. 1:18-31 Matt. 5:1-12

Lectionary Link

In the Bible, the Beatitudes reside on a pedestal of defining the highest state of "spiritual" living, even an impossible standard to achieve.

And it is rather comfortable to keep them on such a pedestal and admit that only the heroic ever come close to living with such advanced sanctity.

I think that rather than keeping Beatitudes on such a pedestal, that we should look at them from the various subjective vantage points of the oracle of Jesus to whom they are attributed, the recipients for whom they were originally delivered, and for the many other readers who have read these exalted words from many different living conditions.

I think that any of us with sanguine minds needs to acknowledge the insights which were expressed by Nietzsche about the Beatitudes, namely, they express slave morality.  It is a lifestyle prescription for those who have been forced into the life of oppression.  There is something disturbingly wrong about all of the inferred conditions which would make the lifestyle of the Beatitudes as necessary.

The lifestyle of the Beatitudes are a recommended Christ-like martial arts style of living for how oppressed people can live winsomely with their masters so as not to rebel and live in open revolt and be killed.

The Beatitude conditions should really deconstruct them for us in poignant ways.  First by decrying the oppressive conditions which require that oppressed people live in such winsome servile ways for their own survival.

We should have our own reading dishonesty about the Beatitudes deconstructed if we live more in the comfortable lifestyles of the "masters" than the lifestyles the "slaves."  We are highly dishonest if from our comfortable lives we pretend to have an intimate identity with the very condition which generated the Beatitude lifestyle.

Let's be honest about what a healthy and salutary life means.  It means freedom from a downcast spirit, it means freedom from mourning, it means freedom from persecution, it means living in peace, it means not having people speak evil of you, it means having enough of the resources of the earth to survive, it means having enough to eat and drink, it means to live with people who practice forgiveness,  and it means to be and have people who discern God's presence.

For the original recipients of the Beatitudes and for the many oppressed people in the history of the world, including the many oppressed people by people who have claimed to be Christians, the Beatitudes was a survival discourse to live with the worst conditions of the human inhumanity.

We in our modern and Enlightenment Era have presumed to change the human condition with forms of government which have had the goal of ameliorating the blatant realities of the master/slave dialectic.  We have proclaimed the value of the individual within democracies where people have a greater equal status to control their own destinies so as not to have to live as slaves of others.

As much as we may think that we have achieved in the advancement of human rights for all, we have not prevented the perpetual return of the deliberate or unconscious exploitation of those who have power, wealth, and knowledge over those who do not have power, wealth, or knowledge.

So, how can we now re-read the Beatitudes in our post-modern era with projections of how Christ as a Good Shepherd might be manifest through us, who have a substantial degree of wealth, power, and education?

First, we should be active in every way possible to eliminate the master/slave conditions of class warfare and of the exploitation of the weak by the strong.  In short, we should be working to eliminate that very conditions which required the heroic virtues of the Beatitudes as being but the winsome living habits of slaves before their masters.

To receive the Spirit which drives Beatitude living, while we are not oppressed, means that we work to encourage and refresh the spirits of those who are dis-spirited.  we work to comfort those who are mourning the harmful events what what has happened in their lives.  We work to make peace, not to ameliorate the wealthy and powerful to "treat people better;" rather we should make peace the basis of all relationships.  We should do self work to clarify our motives so that we might see the divine because we have checked our egos at the door.  We should stand against all bias, prejudice, and injurious speech and make empathy the principle of living together.  We should find what is "right" beyond our own social setting which privileges our own affinities. We should learn forgiveness and mercy as the code of surviving among imperfect people trying to surpass themselves in future states of perfectibility.

In short, for those who have the relative comfort of adequate power, wealth, and knowledge, we should channel the Spirit of the Beatitudes in the perpetual task of overcoming the master/slave dialectic which always tempts people hell bent on the will to power, especially the will to power over others.

Or as the prophet Micah wrote:  We should do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly before God.  Amen.

Church as Christ Befriending and Fellowship

3 Epiphany A January 25, 2026

Is. 9:1-4 Psalm 27:1, 5-13
1 Cor. 1:10-18 Matt. 4:12-23

Lectionary Link

One of the themes of the Season of Epiphany, is the call of Christ. Epiphany being a manifestation or coming to awareness of the significance of the life Jesus Christ happens because certain people were befriended by Jesus in such a significant way that this special befriending set off a domino effect of continuous cross generational befriending which accounts for the presence of the churches in our world today.

Today, we read the account of the call of Christ coming to fishermen on the Sea of Galilee and Jesus told the fishermen, from now on you will fish for people.

Jesus was a fisherman of people; he fished and caught the fisherman, and told them that they would henceforth be doing the same.  What does this fishing for people mean?

I believe that this metaphor of fishing for people means the special kind of befriending which takes place between people and in this befriending a person becomes persuaded about some new values in one's life that initiates new decisions and often a change of direction in one's purpose of life.  A re-valuation takes place and one's priorities become reassessed.

For church administration reasons and because Christians have perpetual disagreed, the very imitate and charismatic dynamic of befriending gets reduced to administrative acts for standardizing conduct and doctrinal purity.  When we ponder the rite of laying on of hands in what is called apostolic succession, we can make this liturgical event the real meaning church succession and success from generation to generation.  We can easily reduce charisma to administrative office for church discipline.

But when the charism of befriending is replaced with mere office or rite, the church can be but like another secular business and miss the reality of what is involved in apostolic succession.

Why do people become more Christ-like?  Because they are baptized, confirmed, ordained, or absolved in official rites of churches?  I would suggest that the Christ-like charism happens in the wonder of befriending which happens when interior values are exchanged in such winsome ways that another person becomes convinced by those exchanged values which happen in the events of befriending.

One who has been befriended in this wonderful succession of befriending in the mentoring process which accounts for the enduring presence of the communities of Christ, are people who are embraced by the mystical communion of what is called "fellowship"  koinonia.  A fellowship or koinonia is the mystical result of the exchange which happens in the dynamic events of befriending.  One who has been befriended, proves that befriending reality,  in turn, by becoming a befriender of others.  A befriender of others is one who lives in winsome ways with values that make the Christ-like lifestyle attractive and desirable.

And this is what Jesus meant in the saying about making fishermen, fishers of people.  Jesus invited his followers to this wonderful dynamic of befriending, because befrienders are those who have been touched and released to have activated their own gifts and charisms, such that they learn to live winsomely with persuasive values which in turn attract others to the befriending process.

The season of Epiphany means that the befriending dynamic was not limited to race, or nation, but was open to all.  This is why the Christ values became attractive to people beyond Palestine who were not really familiar with the meanings of what it meant to be ritually adherent as a Jew.

Let us today live winsomely in this befriending tradition of Jesus Christ.  Loving our neighbors as ourselves is a winsome lifestyle that will draw others into this befriending dynamic and into the mystical experience of fellowship, communion with God and each other because we experience a deep sense of connection based upon mutual care.

Let this Epiphany season for us be a discovery and re-discovery of this wonderful dynamic of befriending because of the winsome values derived from Jesus Christ.  Amen.

Epiphany: Meanings of Manifestation

2 Epiphany A January 18, 2026
Isaiah 49:1-7 Psalm 40:1-12
1 Corinthians 1:1-9 John 1:29-42

Lectionary Link

Epiphany means manifestation.  It is the season to ponder the manifestation of Christ to the world.  It is the season of pondering the manifestation of God in Christ.  We are used to the religious words and they can become so banal in their use that we think we know what they mean.  But what does Epiphany as manifestation actually mean?

We must admit that our faith lives, our biblical lives, our church lives are lived out within the public ground of human language.  To come to language in body language deeds or acts, in speech, or word is to have converted the silent inner world where language derives and to have the mystery of language itself "float" to the known public surface in some language product of speech sound, writing, or body language deed.

Epiphany is based upon some assumptions, namely, that humans have some inner access to an unknown which comes into the inner language sphere and is spoken or written as God.  And this God is so inward, and so beyond language, we can only say we know the emanations or energies which proceed from this great Unknown.  And this coming to language in its many forms is a revelation, an unveiling of the unknown, or an Epiphany.  An Epiphany about God is a Theophany.  Rudolph Otto called these experiences the idea of the Holy.  Epiphany or manifestation is giving specific event context to the holy sublime.

What the Gospel writers and New Testament writers believed is that Jesus Christ gave a positive, public, linguistic manifestation of God for humanity in a most exemplary way.

Imagine God as the Sun and Christ as a mirror bearing the image of the sunlight on earth.  And the reflection of this light is the manifestation.  Jesus, himself as presented within the Gospels is seen first as a reforming reflection of God's light to the people of Israel.  But the Gospels also hint that the direction of reflection of the light on and though Jesus as a mirror of God's light comes to shine beyond the land and people of Israel; he becomes known as the light to world beyond the Jews and Judaism. 

St. Paul believed that his churches were comprised by people who had "revealings" of Jesus Christ.  We can safely say that Epiphany, Revelation, and Theophany  are synonyms for the manifestations of the divine to human beings.  The New Testament is about events of the Holy Sublime which occurred in the lives of people, and these events occurred within the interpretative context of attribution of meaning as being Christ events, or Holy Spirit events.

The Epiphany of Christ is really about how Jesus Christ became publicly manifested as a determining interpretive reason for the experience of the Holy Sublime within community.  Interpretation gives identity to experience.

To explain this, the early church understood this, through the words of John the Baptist, as Jesus being one who baptized people with the Holy Spirit.  Speaking in analogy, God as the Sun, emits rays upon a Mirror, Jesus, who in turn shines on other people who have activated within themselves their God-image and who further become mirrors of the Christ light to others.  Epiphany is about the transmission of the manifestation of the light of God through human history.

The church in history represents people who continue to know this reflected light which derived from Jesus as a founding Word of God event for people, through whom they could begin to interpret their lives differently, as God touched, as holy, as knowing the power of transformation from within because they had received a new power of agency in their lives.

Epiphany or manifestation simply put means ours lives have been made different because the interpretation about the meaning of our lives because of the appearance of Jesus Christ, first in his historic person, and then in the succeeding transmission from person to person of the interpretive framework to give a positive content to the holy sublime event of knowing the mystery of God within us.

Let us be thankful for the emanations, the risings from the holy mystery within us to the Eternal Word of Christ who has given us the language for interpreting our lives as touched by God, loved by God, gifted by God, and then given us freedom to be meaningful servants for the benefit of the good of the world.  Amen.

Baptism: Realizing Childhood of God Status

1 Epiphany A January 11, 2026
Is.42:1-9 Ps. 89:20-29
Acts 10:34-38 Matt. 3:13-17

Lectionary Link

In a cursory glance at human behaviors within all cultures, people are ritual beings.  Rituals are prescribed communal behaviors done with ceremonial intensity as a sort of play acting to teach and inculcate the chief values of the community.  Ironically, most people are born into society but then have to go through ritual process of becoming a practicing member of the society.  What ritual practice indicates is at some point beyond the natural place of birth, and the nurture that we receive from our communities, the individual within the community must choose to be a member of the community as an adult agent of the values of the community.   A child has automatic belonging within a family; but an adult has to ratified that passive belonging through the ritual process of fulfilling membership roles within the family or society.

Where religion and society are one, the rituals of society and religion are unified.  When religions exists in secular society, the secular rituals and the religious ritual are separate and different.

The presentation of Jesus in the New Testament is of a person who was born into a society where rituals were prescribed and practiced.  Jesus was Jewish, but the Jews did not control the land where he lived.  The Jews did not have "ritual" control over their homeland of Israel.

Today is a day when we ponder the ritual practice of Jesus, in his submitting to the rite of water baptism by John the Baptist.

The baptism of Jesus might baffle us as it is also presented as baffling the one who was to ask to officiate at his baptism.

We come to the baptism of Jesus, just as the writers of the Gospel did.  We know the end of the story.  We know about the many titles of Jesus.  We know that writer wrote about the baptism of Jesus with all the meanings being a progressive explanation toward what Jesus had become as the Risen Christ in his afterlife in the early Jesus Movement communities.

The meanings are retraced.  What was the logic of the baptism of Jesus?  And by John?  Jesus who had undergone the rituals of circumcision and presentation was regarded already to belong to his religious community.  The Gospel writers had to seek for some logic about how the pre-resurrection was becoming the post-resurrection Christ.  If Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, Lamb of God, Great High Priest, why did he have to submit to the baptism?

The Gospel are retelling a narrative life with the belief that Jesus lived out the meaning of God with us, or the name that had been suggested to them from the prophet Isaiah.  The name Immanuel.

If Jesus is God with us, Jesus is God emptied into human form, as the Pauline hymn states,  and so Jesus did very human things including the ritual practices of his specific communities.  I say communities because, it seems that Jesus not only was familiar with the practices of synagogue and Temple, he also participated in the prophetic movement within Judaism which is seen in the ministry of John the Baptist.  John the Baptist, even as an aloof ascetic was charismatic enough to attract a following and even generate a community with the seeming extra-liturgical rite of baptism in the Jordan as a way of publicly signifying a new life style commitment.  Judaism had the practice of proselyte baptism for non-Jews convert to the faith.  Why did Jews need a baptism?  This is an indication of an addition ritual practice in a reformation movement.  Was John's baptism and message meant to complement or succeed the message and practices of the synagogue and Temple?  Did his message and practices compete with the rabbis and the priests of synagogues and Temple?  Why did Jesus within his birth into Judaism need to be associated with John the Baptist?

Without knowing all the specifics of the details in the life of Jesus in his, we assume that Jesus was highly associated with John the Baptist and his community.  We might even assume that John the Baptist was a mentor for Jesus and given that eventual followers of Jesus had been previous disciples of John the Baptist, we can assume that what became known as the churches had grown in Palestine from the model of the community which surrounded John the Baptist.

Jesus became baptized, immersed,  into humanity; he was fully human initiated so that humanity might discover their initiation into solidarity with the divine.  As the Eastern Orthodox notion of deification or Theosis states: Jesus became human that humanity might realize the divine image upon our lives.

The baptism of Jesus is presented with a divine heavenly proclamation:  Jesus is declared to be the beloved Son of God on whom God's parental pleasure resides.

Beyond our attempts to figure out the purpose of the baptism of Jesus, we look for the meaning of our own communal baptismal practices.  The grace of baptism is the recognition that we too as God's children can be those who have esteem because we can in our very interior beings know that God is pleased with us and that the divine favor resides within us in the full spectrum of what may happen to us.

Churches will disagree and argue about the rite of Christian baptism; how much water, adult, infant, ordinance, sacrament, who can officiate et. al.  In the arguments about the best or ordained practice of baptism and perhaps prideful sense of exclusive access to thinking that one's own faith community does it best, we can miss the big point.  God from creation wants people to know themselves to be children of God bearing the divine image, and doing so by living lives of love and justice with each other.

My prayer would be that each person would know the baptismal reality of the heavenly voice declaring them as a beloved child with God's parental favor.  This is a vital interior affirming esteem which is especially needed when one's environment does not always provide the nurturing affirmation.  Baptism is being made into people who have the maturity to live into this higher inward affirmation in the life of the virtues.

Our belief about Jesus in his baptism is that he is the Exemplar of God choosing solidarity with humanity to provide us with the example and grace of finding our solidarity with God, through living the godly Holy Spirit values of love, hope,  faith, justice, and kindness.

Let us not argue about the baptism of Christ or our own specific ritual practice of baptism; but let us know the affirmation of our lives as children of God and let us live seeking to affirm each other as beloved children of God.  Amen.

Postlogue to the Christmas Pageant

2 Christmas A January 4, 2026

Jeremiah 31:7-14   Ps 84:1-8

Eph. 1:3-6,15-19a Matthew 2:1-12

Lectionary Page

     Today, the Revised Common Lectionary gives us the choice of three Gospel readings, as we approach the Eve of the Epiphany.

     The choices involve postlogues of the Christmas Pageant, one being indications of a kind of "proto-bar mitzvah" of Jesus in the Temple conversing with the rabbis at the age of twelve having been mistakenly left there when he did not get into the caravan going back home to Nazareth.  Other appointed Gospel lessons pertain to the threat on the life of the Christ Child in the account of Herod killing of the Holy Innocents using information derived from the Magi, who returned to their home without avoiding King Herod and not giving him any information about the birth of this Scriptural predicted rival king.  Herod's  threat forced Mary and Joseph to flee in exile to Egypt and await a safe time to return to their home.

 

A poor Christmas Pageant director has to make editorial decisions.  One can only herd cats so long, that is, the highly improvisational children of the Creche Players, since little angels and shepherds do not take stage cues well, and in fact often do whatever they want with appropriate rewards for their cuteness.  Pageant directors edit out things like the death of the Holy Innocents and the flight to Egypt.  Such things are not "child friendly" for Christmas hope and optimism.  Pageant directors also have to harmonize the birth accounts of Matthew and Luke and they expand the identity of the magi even while they determine the exact number of magi and wrongly have them visit the manger at the same time as when the shepherds visit.  One can forgive the pageant directors for making directorial decision given the diversity of script items and the cast of antsy players.  From references in Hebrew Scriptures, since the heavens declare the glory of God, the magi are also kings following a drone-like hovering star, who come to pay tribute to the future superior king.  And since there are three gifts, then there must be three kings and thematically, the three kings go with the song derived from this famous trio.

We can easily stay in the childification mode of Christmas because to delight children and entertain them and be entertained by their joy is a worthy state of being to live in.  But if we stay in this childification mode we might miss the very adult theological intent of the Christmas stories, the programatic presentation of the narratives, and indeed the mystagogy in the writings serving as devotional manuals in the Christ communities which developed in a century of decades after Jesus lived.

The Gospel writers were wordsmiths who were familiar with the literature available to them in their settings.  They knew about the Caesars and who had been divinized, had divine conceptions, and astronomical events cited at the times of their births.  They also had the writings of Hebrew Scriptures and the events in the life of Moses came to have narrative equivalents in the telling of the story of Jesus.  The Herod in the time of Jesus is the Pharaoh in the time of Moses, who like Pharaoh called for a general infanticide.  Moses is the one who went back to Egypt after his escape to Midian Wilderness to lead the people out of their slavery in Egypt.  Jesus is presented qua Moses as one who came out of Egypt to lead a new people in a new way to a different kind of Promised Land, a new kind of lifestyle.

And the Magi are mystagogically all foreigners who came to reverence the birth of a special person.  Or mystically speaking, the Magi represent all people who in wisdom access the experience of the birth of the Son of God nature, within their lives.  The Magi represent the presentation that being a child of God was open to everyone and not limited to Jews or any particular group of people.  Christo-centric religion was the belief that even if all people did not actually become persuaded about Christ, everyone could become persuaded about Christ and were welcome to the community which proclaimed the Christ-birth within the lives of all.

The Epiphany is about the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles.  And what this meant for the Christo-centric faith was that all were welcome to know the birth of the life of Christ within themselves, which was in fact a claiming of the original blessing birthright of being made in the image of God.

What the Christmas Story meant for the early followers of Christ was that no one could be denied their childhood status with God because of their prior social conditions or place of birth.  On the Eve of the Epiphany, we say, "Viva the manifestation of Christ to all," and to those for whom "Christ" is not a contexual linguistically accessible notion, we say, "Viva the manifestation of the rising image of God upon anyone who comes to know themselves and everyone else as God's child."  Amen.

Trapped in the Language Loop and That's Okay

1 Christmas  A     December 28, 2025

Is.61:10-62:3     Ps. 147:13-21

Gal. 3:23-25,4:4-7  John 1:1-18

Lectionary Link

The writer of the Gospel of John probably had read the other Gospels and did not choose to repeat traditions about Jesus—about how he was born or even about his baptism by John the Baptist. Writers usually write with their immediate listeners and readers in mind, and with a motive of being winsomely persuasive about how they understood their favored values.
A major issue in life is how we give positive content—even revealed positive content—about things which seem to be common in human experience but often are tinged with so much non-specific, mysterious vagueness. This is not because they aren't real, but because they have a protean and malleable aspect in how they come to be applied to individuals in different ways. What are examples of such non-specific, mysterious, vague stuff? It is what we might call the Sublime: love, joy, peace, justice, and God. These are words common to people, but when one tries to pin such words down, they turn out to be mysteriously vague events that many people nod about with knowing winks, as if there were some precise harmonic convergence over such words.

The writer of the Gospel of John was trying to give positive explanation and description to impart a delight in the experiences of the Sublime. How does one give the unworded fullness of the "impinging All" any positive content? We can only do so by using words. The prologue of John's Gospel, which we read at Christmastide, is the proclamation of permission for us as mere humans to be caught within the language loop. By this, I mean that ultimately everything, if it is to have a knowable existence, has to come to language. It has to pass through the threshold of non-linguistic being into being signified in language. We are caught in the language loop because we have to use language to signify everything that is not language.
How did the writer of John's Gospel confer a blessing upon our being trapped in the language loop? The writer used language models that he was familiar with from the Hebrew Scriptures, whose opening words were about the divine creator as a language user, bringing things into known identity through the speech of the divine One. God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. There was a familial unity between God, the one who said, and the actual Word that God said. The writer of John piggybacked upon the God of Genesis as a Speaking Creator who was One with the Divine Word and wrote: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God; the same was in the beginning with God. And everything came into being through the Word."

The writer of John's Gospel also knew literature from the Greco-Roman corpus. In the Hermetic tradition, particularly in the Shepherd of Poimandres (the Shepherd of Man), the writer refers to Logos as the Son of God. John's readers were familiar with the Logos as divinity. By wedding the language of Logos with the Genesis creation story, the writer of John wrote about how everything which in infancy has a wordless or "negative" status can come to have "positive" status by attaining a worded existence.
This, in the modern era, is poignantly known in the story of the sight, speech, and hearing-impaired Helen Keller. Receiving language through the signing of her hands and in activating her language, her entire world was created. Her world went from an entirely negative status to a positive status when things could finally be brought to language for her.
The writer of John is confessing that we, too, are human language users caught in the language loop, and that is okay because we cannot be otherwise. Why? Because God, as the mysterious vagueness of God, can be known by us in a positive way because God takes identity with the emanating and arising Word. That Word completely gave positive wording to the flesh-and-blood life of a person, Jesus. We, as human beings, needed to have a superior Exemplar of how to live our worded lives.

The amazing feature of the presentation of Jesus in the Gospel of John is that Jesus, as a Word Master whose words were spirit and life, is presented as one who taught us how to use words—especially about God and about each other. As the Word Master, Jesus consistently warns us: Don't be crassly literal. In John, the literal mind is the "silly" mind, as when Nicodemus was told he needed to be "born again" and responded: "But Jesus, how can I climb back into my mother's womb?"
John's Gospel is a presentation of metaphors on steroids. Poetically, in action-signs and tautology, Jesus is described as the God-exemplar for humanity: Life, Way, Truth, Light, Good Shepherd, Servant who taught service, Lover who taught love, Vine, Christ, Messiah, Alchemist of water into wine, Calmer of wind storms, Walker on stormy waters, Calmer of fearful hearts, I AM, Son of God, Resurrection, Healer of the blind, and Bread from Heaven.
People who try to read John's Gospel as though it were a series of empirically verifiable events are trying to put poetry into literal straitjackets. It does not do justice to modern history writing, and it does not do justice to the Holy Sublime which the writer was sharing from his mystical experience with the Risen Christ.
Today, you and I are invited to accept our lives within the human language loop. Imagine the life of Helen Keller, who had language ability but could not activate it. The mystery of her not-knowing was frustrating and dreadful; all she could do was instinctively react like a frightened animal. But coming into her language, she was able to give positive content to her life experience, and her life was created from the Void of Negative Unknowing.
Let us be glad that our Christian tradition affirms that God is co-extensive with Word. Let us happily be trapped in our language loop as we try to act out in our fleshly lives what Word means—what love, justice, peace, self-control, and God mean. Because God, by definition, means "that than which none greater can be conceived," we must always be at the vocation of generating positive word-content to fill up the Divine container of All.
If the Word is God, we—in the image of God—are also word-makers in speech, text, and choreographed deeds. Following God as Word, let us go forth as playwrights, generating endless language products as befits Jesus, the Word made flesh. Amen.

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.