The Apocalyptic, Dying Proclamation, and Mercy

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

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

Lectionary Link

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prayer as Persistent Nagging for Justice

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

Lectionary Link

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Living on the Continuum of Health, Justice, and Freedom

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

Lectionary Link

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Faithfulness in Quantity and Quality as its Own Reward

16 Pentecost, C proper 22 October 5, 2025

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

Lectionary Link

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heavenly Values Are Available Now

16 Pentecost, Cp21, September 28, 2025

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

Lectionary Link

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sayings of Jesus about Wealth

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

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

Lectionary Link

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Being Lost as a Metaphor of Being Valued

14 Pentecost, Cp19, September 14, 2025
Exodus 32:7-14 Psalm 51:1-11
1 Timothy 1:12-17 Luke 15:1-10

Lectionary Link

The Gospel writers present Jesus as one who represents God who is a heavenly parent who wants everyone to be valued as a member of this universal family.

In the teaching parables of Jesus, he uses the metaphor of being lost.  What might be implied in this metaphor of being lost?

Something is lost because it is needed, valued, and useful to our lives.  If a person is lost, it means that person is valued by those who have lost the person.  One can note the panic that sets in when a young child is lost in a mall, a store, or a neighborhood.  Why the panic?  Because the lost child is a deeply valued member of the family.

One could expand this metaphor as a metaphor of insight for the entire human-divine situation.

If we propose that God is the heavenly parent and every human being is a valued child of God, something which our own Declaration of Independence asserts, we know that the actual human situation through history reveals that many, many, people have not and do not live in situations where they are valued and cared for.  This means that many people are lost, but maybe they aren't even lost, because no one is looking for them.  There are many people who are not valued enough in social situations even to attain the status of being lost.

The ministry and words of Jesus was to expose the situation of many people being uncared for, and especially by the religious leaders of his era.

Jesus came to raise the dignity of all people to state that many people were lost, that is, they had fallen through all the safety nets of any social care and were unrecognized and unworthy of dignity and value.

Along with the assertion by Jesus that many people were lost, and in being declared lost they were thus declared as valuable to God, Jesus came to be the supreme seeker of the lost.  He came to represent God as a seeker who valued people to reveal their identity of being members of God's family.

One can apply this same metaphor to the record of the Hebrew Scriptures.  God is the loving creator of all who made humans in the divine image.  The giving of the law can be understood as rules of recommended behaviors for people to treat each other in dignified ways so as to value their lives, and such behaviors are those which flow from honoring the parent God of the human family.

A good portion of the Hebrew Scriptures are in fact a bemoaning of people who do not honor the rules which protect the acceptance and dignity of people.  And by not honoring the best practices for human interaction, many, many people became lost to dignified treatment.

Jesus, in the train of the prophets of the Hebrew Scripture, came to declare the human situation of his time; many, many, people were alienated from the conditions of basic dignity and care.

Jesus came to be a seeker of the lost.  And in so doing, he was also declaring the nature of God as a caring parent, who was seeking the graceful reconciliation of people within the divine family, the family of all humanity.

St. Paul, is presented in the writings attributed to his corpus, and the writings about him, to be one who in his pre-conversion life misunderstood the message of Jesus and his followers.  When Paul was converted from his misunderstanding of God and Jesus, he became one who became an apostle to Gentiles, affirming that in Christ, there could not be "lost" Jews, Gentile, male, females, slave, or free; rather there was to be one family of God living under the beneficent care of God and this care was poignantly exemplified in the life of Jesus Christ.

For us today, we are to be in the ministry of Jesus, first by properly representing God as the parent of all who values all persons with dignity and the rights which indicate the dignity of being a loving and loved child of God.  Amen.

New Family and New Family Values

13 Pentecost, Cp18, September 7, 2025
Jer. 18:1-18   Psalm 139:1-5, 12-17
Philemon 1-20 Luke 14:25-33

Lectionary Link

Among the crowd of concert goers, a woman once approached the pianist Van Cliburn, and gushed, Mr. Cliburn, "I'd do anything to play like you play."  Supposedly Van Cliburn responded, "No lady, you wouldn't, especially practice."

Among the throngs of people who admired and followed Jesus around because he was the latest prophetic phenom on the scene apparently Jesus could hear them wishing out loud, "Jesus, I'd do anything to be like you."   And Jesus offered some rather harsh reality checks to these groupies who perhaps were treating him like the latest fad.

Remember the Gospel were written about life before the Risen Christ and the experience of an empowering Holy Spirit.  In this age people could aspire for great things only to be disillusioned to find that they could not live up to their aspirations.

Even among his special followers, Peter thought that he could follow Jesus through anything, and he even bragged about being able to do so.  But Peter denied Jesus when the going got tough.  Peter, before the experiences of the afterlife of Jesus and the experience of the Holy Spirit wanted to love Jesus but could not do it.

The words of Jesus in the Gospel about hating one's own family seem extreme unless we appreciate the hyperbole of comparison in the literary context.  Most people seem to think that they love their family members even though the situations of actual family life often prove to be rocky and uneven in how even family members struggle to live together well.

And if struggling family love is difficult, so difficult that there are often harshness of words and actions which seem to be more expressive of discord and hate; just imagine the kind of love needed to leave the comforts of family and follow an itinerate prophet who lives off the land and has none of the consistent comforts of a stable home life.

To love Jesus to be able to follow him, would make family relations seem like hatred in contrast.

The hyperbolic words of Jesus are reminder to people not to be too proud about their ability to follow Jesus.  And each of us might ponder the following:  If what St. Francis of Assisi did is definitive of what loving Jesus and following him means, then how are you and I doing?  In comparison, our love for Jesus might seem so trivial as to be a mockery, a hatred of sorts.

I would invite us to consider some insights from these shocking words of Jesus.  First, they confront us from following Jesus as simply the latest fad.  To follow Jesus as a mere religious fad is easy to do with the crowd.  For many, the religion of Jesus and the many evangelists who speak and perform in his name is like a circus act.  It is mere entertainment.  How many of the great religious crowds gather for the sheer entertainment of it all for the crowds?  How much of religion is "mob religion?"

The many disciplines of discipleship involves the consistent and repeated practice of goodness, and very hard love, very hard justice.  It involves the self denial of service.  It involves the perpetual checking of the ego at the door.  It involves sacrifice.  In the formation period of the early communities of the Jesus Movement, the love of Jesus often brought conflicting loyalties to previous family and friends.

Let us understand the rather stark words of Jesus about "hating one's family," as a reality check to a crowd of people who were being challenged about wanting religious entertainment contrasted with devotion to one who could bring about a significant change of values in their lives.

Let us also understand the programmatic and teaching impact of the Gospel writing written for people many decades after Jesus.

One can divide the lives of disciples into their lives before their encounter with the Risen Christ, and their lives after a mystical encounter with the Risen Christ.  One could not be a mere religious spectator of holy people, holy writings and holy places, after an encounter with the Risen Christ.  

St. Paul confessed that his life had been changed from a life of hating Jesus and his followers to a life of loving the Risen Christ and giving life for the service of the churches.  The result for Paul is that he knew Jesus to be the one who created a new and alternate family of God.  In this new family, Paul called Timothy and Philemon his brothers, Apphia, his sister, even as he called the runaway slave Onesimus, his son because Paul had become his spiritual father.  The following of Jesus Christ became an alternate lifestyle from the lifestyle of merely being in and having a natural family.

You and I can know a conversion to this new family of Christ and it can present quite a contrast to the kind of experience that we have in our natural families.  The love of God in Christ requires that we love profoundly beyond our local family ties as we accept our admission into a greater family, the one that is known when we discover the image of God upon our lives and the lives of all people.

The Psalmist wrote about the wonderful experience of being fully known by God.  In lovely poetry the Psalmist wrote about the encounter with God within his very being at the place where the image of God within him became apparent.

Today, let the shocking words of Jesus be a reality check to us about making our faith lives into but being spectators of religious entertainment.  Let us open ourselves to image of God rising to be known in us as an encounter with the Risen Christ through the power of Holy Spirit.  And let this experience initiate us continually in loving values of the family of God in Christ.  Amen.

 

Biblical Words as Oracles of Our Highest Values

12  Pentecost, Cp17, August 31, 2025

Jeremiah 2:4-13 Ps. 112

Heb.13:1-8        Luke 14:1, 7-14

Lectionary Link

The notion that what is greater than us communicates with us in specific purposeful ways for determining future actions is a wide spread notion.  Modern scientific laws are readings about the behaviors of nature that seem so consistent that they become a predicable guide to human behaviors, as practical as not keeping our hands from being burned in a flame of fire.  And we've come to rely on weather prediction for guiding our activities; but what about events which pertain to making decisions regarding our human behaviors within our own communities  and other communities in our world?

The notion of the divine as an incarnate Logos, particularly in the person of Jesus, and generally in the notion that humans cannot help but organize and interpret their world because they possess language, means that human experience is governed by what is always being communicated.  We can perpetually be seen to be talking within ourselves and to ourselves even as we talk to each other.  We can perpetually interpret our very situations as messages to read and how we read our situations determines our actions.

Because we have language, we live as sign makers and sign readers.  Human life is based upon the notion of communication itself.  And those who do not or do not yet have fully developed language abilities cannot help but be those who are read as signs by others, as in the case of parents trying to read the signs of a crying baby who cannot offer the higher signs of actually saying what is the cause of their crying.

Humanity has always been on the quest for higher knowledge to have as it were, some insider information on how to attain advantages for better living.  And so one can note the oracular features in the history of humanity.  An oracle is a communication which comes from beyond specific human control such that one can say that direction has been received or communicated from a higher source, even of divine origin.

An oracle, implies a talking or orating deity or higher source of guidance.  The Psalmist proclaimed that the heavens declare the glory of God, meaning that as poets we anthropomorphize the skies as speaking entities.  The ancient and continuous practice of astrology instantiates a "speaking sky" which reveal to humans with star reading traditions the connection of their lives with something beyond their own sense of earthly limitations.  Ancient people practiced augury, even divining the entrails of carcasses by trained readers to give directions on the battlefield and for life.

There is within the biblical tradition, the understanding of people being used as oracles of God.  The Hebrew Scriptures provide many examples of human persons as those who channels messages of God for their communities.  The prophets were regarded to be oracles of God's word, because they told us so.  "Hear the word of the Lord, O house of Jacob.  Thus says the Lord..."  The words of the prophets were often rebukes against their people for their unfaithful behaviors.  Since the words of the prophet are known to us as written words we understand that those who collected words, edited and redacted them later were presenting their writing for inspiring community values and behavior in the various writing contexts when they were presented to their communities.  Not only were persons regarded to be oracle but the written Scriptures had a continuing oracular function within the community.

When the Psalmist writes in the voice of God using the first person, the Psalmist is presuming to know what God would want presented in the poetic, and intoned prayers of the community gathered for prayer.  The Psalmist assumed that if God used direct words to us, this is what God is saying to us.  The portion of the Psalm that we have read today is in the voice of God which means that the oracular function was known in the liturgies where the highest values, the divine values were channeled through those gifted hymnodists.

In the collection of the writings which have come to comprise the New Testament, the oracular function of sacred writing continued to be the custom of the church.  Written words in contrast to spoken words appear to have a fixity to them, even though the interpretations of them can be as diverse and changing as oral speech.  The fixity of the text gives the sense of permanence and changelessness, which give a normative sense of preservation for the oracles of God.

The written words of the New Testament are oracles about the chief oracle of God in the Christian tradition, namely Jesus Christ.  Jesus is poetically called the Logos, the Word of God, in essence, the Oracle of God to humanity.  Jesus as the oracle of God to humanity spoke and through his ministry presented the chief values for forming communities.

In the appointed Gospel today, Jesus is presented as one who reveals the human tendency to seek status and we are reminded to rely on the reward inherit in the act of doing good, whether we get recognized for it or not.  If we seek public honor without the merit of performance, then we may become vulnerable to know the humiliation of being exposed as those who want recognition without performance.

The writer of the book of Hebrews pens oracular words of what the example of Jesus inspires within enlightened community: Welcoming strangers, honoring spousal relationships, avoiding greed and the love of money, respecting leaders, and taking every opportunity to do good.

Today we have read words of Scripture which derived from many different circumstances, and they attained the status as oracles  for the values of God for people living in the communities which have received the oracular tradition of Holy Scripture.

What you and I can ponder today is our own understanding of what our highest values are for living, living well within community.  But we also ponder the oracular function which occurs in the modes of how our highest values have been communicated to us and inculcated within our community life.  Let us be thankful for the oracular phenomenon in our lives whereby we have come to be persuaded about the importance of love and justice.  And let us be thankful for our chief Oracle, Jesus Christ, whom we believe to be the bi-lingual speaker of divine things to our very human lives.  Amen.

Called to Oblation on the Sabbath

 11 Pentecost, C p 16,  August 24, 2025

Jer. 1:4-10   Psalm 71:1-6

Hebrews 12:18-19,22-29  Luke 13:10-17

Lectionary Link

 

In our quest for increasing our adequacy for wise living through adding continuous best practices to all phases of our lives, we might ask ourselves about the adequacy of the biblical texts which we read in our faith tradition. What is the use of reading old writings from many years ago?

For operating our cars? Building a website? Medical health? Political organization and labor practices? We certainly find many of the cultural practices of the ancient cultures where biblical texts were generated to be "out of date," and not to be followed for most of the specific tasks of our modern scientific dominated lives, so what can we gain from the Bible and from the appointed reading for our liturgy today?

One ancient posture which is also a modern human posture is that no matter how far we have progressed in our knowledge of the world and how things work and our increasing understanding of causal relationship, we can never escape the poetic posture. There has been, is, and will always be Plenitude beyond our grasp, enough to evoke awe and humble us even in the pride of the knowledge that we think we have obtained.

The biblical readings remind us to honor our poetic calling in attending to the potential of the experience of the sublime.

One such experience of the sublime was written about by the prophet Jeremiah. He had the experience of being called, being known by the towering Plenitude whom he deign to call his Personal God. It is quite natural to resist one's personal significance in the face of Plentitude. Why am I made to feel that the Great Plentitude of the universe is mindful of me? I am but a boy, a child, without adult resume to feel like I have a purposeful vocation except to practice normal self-maintenance within my society. Why is it that I am now feeling impelled to go beyond what I thought my intended purpose of life was?

Jeremiah had the poetic experience of a calling? He probably was surprised that his natural and regularly exercised gifts were being challenged for a specific societal purpose. Jeremiah, like many, had the gift of discernment and insights which gave him the gift of assessing the character of the people around him, and the character of the political and religious leadership of his time. Whether he liked it or not, Jeremiah's character brought him to be a critic of people in his setting. And not everyone likes a critic, especially those in power.

Jeremiah is an example to us of the sublime experience of knowing a purpose, a calling within the Plenitude of Everything. May each us find our purposeful connection in our time and place with people because the experience of having the creative gifts of one's life find outlets is a vital human experience of the sublime.

The Psalmist also expressed the sense of finding a refuge within the great Plenitude. Gratitude is the experience that we can know when we feel as though we are "kept and watched" by the Great Being, even while "being kept and watched" does not mean that we have been exempted from significant events of pain, suffering, trial and the ordeals of living within the many changing in times with natural disasters and community conflicts. As human beings, we can know the experience of finding refuge during crucial times, and such experiences make us like the thankful Psalmist.

The writer of Hebrew refers to the event of the revealing of the holy name of God, as the event of fear, not of some mere phobia, but the fear known as deep reverence. From knowing this awesome reverence, biblical writers wrote visions of possible good outcomes; they wrote about a Plentitude which included having a better future, even one which could integrate the meaning of one's lived life, for the greater picture of fitting into the life of God, the Great Plentitude after our lived lives.

For the Gospel writers, Jesus was the one who best funneled the meaning of the Plentitude of God into human experience. In our Gospel, Jesus as the healer and wisdom teacher challenged the very narrow understanding of how one could honor the meaning of the meaning of the Sabbath. For the legalists, restful prayer on the Sabbath meant the avoidance of work, but Jesus, the wisdom teacher showed the legalists how inconsistent they were in their use of the law as they endeavored to find fault with him.

For the legalist to heal someone on the Sabbath was a violation of the Sabbath work taboo. But he reminded the legalists that they rescued and fed their farm animals on the Sabbath because it would be unkind not to do so. If one could tend to farm animals on the Sabbath, how much more should not sick people be attended to, not just on the Sabbath, but on any day.

Healing the sick does not violate the Sabbath intention. First responders and health care people work on every day because sickness does not obey Sabbath law schedules.

Perhaps the greater lesson which Jesus taught was the validity of the prayer of oblation, not just on the Sabbath but on every day. Oblation is the body language prayer of kindness that we are to offer at all times, and certainly we offer the oblations of kind and careful healing acts on the Sabbath.

Offering kindness toward the health of anyone is the meaning of the Gospel. And when someone experiences a restoration of health, they understand with gratitude a sense of finding a refuge in life and in reverential awe they can replicate in personal ways the words of poetic praise for the sublime sense of being recognized within the Plentitude of everything. Amen.

Surface Peace, Contemplative Peace

10 Pentecost, Cp15, August 17, 2025

Jeremiah 23:23-29  Psalm 82
Hebrews 12:1 – 14  Luke 12:49-56

Lectionary Link

We can tout the Bible as a book of peace, but that would be far from the truth.  Peace or peacefulness in time is only temporary states of no conflict, war, troubles, hassles, or disagreement that co-exist with certain and eventual conflict, war, troubles, hassles and disagreement.

Our biblical hero Jesus was proclaimed the Prince of Peace; he is the one who whispered the interior lives of people to restful calm, he is the one who greeted people with a greeting that has become the chief hello greeting in the Arabic and Hebrew languages: Peace be with you.  Certainly this greeting expresses the sentiment of a very desirable state of existence.

Our hero Jesus is quoted as saying some things about peace which contradict his Prince of Peace image.  His coming was not to bring peace but a sword and division.

The Gospels as parables of Jesus to inform the communities which preached him as the value setter of their community, understood the wisdom words of Jesus to be insightful for what they were going through in their lives.  And what were they going through?

Community divisions.  The New Testament is a story about community break down and disagreement among, one might say sincere parties.  St. Paul had "sincere" disagreements with Peter, who was also sincere.  St. Paul had sincere disagreements with other followers of Jesus whom he verbally trashed as being those whose god was their bellies.  The disciples were presented as ignorant and competitive followers of Jesus who had petty ego trips about who would have the best positions in the administration of Jesus which was soon going to take over the earth.  Lots of "sincere" biblical people disagreed openly, even in ways that certainly did not seem peaceful.

The New Testament is hardly peaceful in the presentation of various apocalyptic scenarios.  In some of the visions, the Pax Romana of the Caesar, a peace that came from eliminating rivals, would be replaced with the apocalyptic peace of a conquering heavenly hero.  Such an apocalyptic peace would be achieved with divine violence.  Indeed, what kind of a peaceful book is the Bible?  Biblical visualizations about how a future utopia would be achieved were not peaceful and they seem to smack with "in the end, my side is going to win."

The life of the famous heroes of faith listed in the book of Hebrews is hardly about their peaceful lives.  It is is about their harsh struggles through which they maintain a faithfulness to the Divine, whom they believed to be the only stabling peaceful and consistent event occurring during the tumult of their surface lives.

The history of the people of Israel is told around their failure to maintain their covenantal relationship with the Shalom God of Israel.  The story of Israel is a story about people who continually lost their peace.

It is insightful to say that peace and time do not mix.  Time is the succession of different occasion with different people and different events.  Sometimes successions in time seem peacefully continuous but often successions in time are painfully conflicting.  In every field and areas of life paradigm shifts can result in painful disagreements, even horrendous and harming conflicts.  What we can say about time and peace, is that sometimes the appearance of peace seems to occur, and indeed we are grateful when peace seems to be our surface experience.

If peace cannot prevail in the events of time, what then is the value and the meaning of the highly touted peace of Christ?

What can be said is that people can know a deep inner contemplative peace even while the surface events of life contradict the very meaning of peace.

Contemplative Peace can occur as a graceful event as being surprised by No thing, No word, No thought, No Picture, just as a deep, deep No thing that one is able to say that has always been stably there and continues to be so no matter what is happening on the surface.  Even though I use the words "no word" to indicate the reality of something that is there, I know it is there, even though I can only continue to use words to speak about the "wordless" peace.  When everything else seems to be changing, this contemplative inner experience peace seems to hauntingly stable.

To find this hauntingly stable peace, is to learn to simply be the carrier for this peace, and to let it rise and distill "upward" through one's thoughts, emotions, feelings, and attain directional status in how one lives one's life in the many surface events of one's life.

Let us appreciate the distinction between surface peace and contemplative peace, but also their relationship.  Let us understand how contemplative peace can be plumbed to make events of surface peace actual healing events in our world.

Let the contradictory words of Jesus about peace inform us on how contemplative peace can rise in us to whisper our life situations to a peace of being better able to sew the occasions of time together with healing purpose.  Amen.