Heroic Love, Forgiveness, and Practical Golden Rule Living

7 Epiphany C February 23, 2025

Genesis 45:3-11, 15 Psalm 37:1-12, 41-42
1 Corinthians 15:35-38,42-50 Luke 6:27-38

Lectionary Link

Holy Scriptures are multivocal in that they represent the voices of many writers over many years who opened themselves up to insights about how God was involved in their times and places and they offered recommendations, pieties, and behaviors about how the people of their time could find meaningful relevance of God in their lives.  This mode of being has continued for many years and still motivates us today.

The lectionary each Sunday represents the various voices of the multivocality of Scriptures by assigning a reading from the Hebrew Scriptures with a Psalm or Canticle, plus a non-Gospel New Testament reading, and lastly a Gospel reading based upon the conviction that the witnesses about Jesus present us with the core identity of our community life.  And even if we agree that Jesus is the core of our identity, various Christians emphasize different facets of even the witnesses that we have about Jesus.  Our traditions ends up be multivocality about God and multivocality about the multivocalities about God.  And if this seems oft confusing, the genius of this is acknowledging the uniqueness of each person's interpretative experience from one's own experiential background and environments.  And if the love of God is the big answer to everything, fittingly, the challenge is in the details of making love actual in context specific ways.

Probably one of the most heroic love ethics is found in the famous beatitude words of Jesus, which come to us in slightly different words on a mountain and on a plain in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, respectively.  We've read the appointed portion of the beatitudes from Luke's Gospel today.

What are the words?  What are conditions which such words reveal?  And why do I call it a heroic love ethic?

Jesus said, "I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you.

From the text of the portions of the beatitude according to Luke's Gospel, what assumptions can we make about the recipients of the writings in their lives and world?

It seems as though the word imply that people had enemies.  People were hated.  People were cursed.  People were abused.  People were having bullying acts of violence inflicted upon them.  People were stealing the clothes off their backs.  People were so needy that they had to beg.  

To the people who experienced these deprivations, they were asked to follow the golden rule.  You do not want enemies, you do not want to be hated,  you do not want to be cursed, you do not want to be abused, you do not want to have things stolen or taken from you, so imagine the very best treatment that someone can provide you and that is how you are to treat others.

When times are normal, most people are just live and let live sort of people.  Normal everyday living does not usually require the conditions of having enemies, hatred, cursing, abuse, open violence, or open stealing, and perpetual begging.

The literal significance of the beatitudes only make sense in the crisis times of a people being oppressed.  The oppression is so open and common to a group of people that they have strategic decisions to make.  Do we as powerless people try to live the law of justice, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth?  If powerless people try to respond in kind; they lose all their freedom or even their lives.  To survive, oppressed people adopt a winsome lifestyle.  "We have to be on our best performance for our oppressors so they will treat us better and so they do not get violent and harm us to death.  We need a survival ethic."

Champions of oppressed people like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. were proponents of the non-violent lifestyle of the beatitudes.  Be so good, heroically good in the face of one's oppressor such that the contrast of goodness and their own cruelty is so great that it might bring them to shame.

We need to be very honest.  The life conditions which requires the lifestyle of the beatitudes is not a situation where justice prevails.  One can honestly say that people who oppress are enemies to the people whom they oppress.  One has to be heroic to love the abusive enemy, but not the abusive mistreatment.

The saddest thing about the Beatitudes is that it acknowledges the conditions of oppression as what the true conditions of life that some people are forced to live.

We can sigh with relief when we have comfortable situations which do not require the heroic love ethics of the beatitudes.  At the same time, we should live heroically to prevent the situations of oppression from ever coming to be.

History has given us horrendous examples of oppression.  Many nations and conquerors have invaded and enslaved; some have become benign rulers as long as the populations accept the conditions of being ruled.  The conditions which brought about slavery, the holocaust, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and mis-treatment of marginalized persons in society have and still plague our world.  We ourselves are not blameless in being knowing or unknowing accomplices to behaviors which are not worthy of being associated with Jesus Christ.  Oppressor force the oppressed to be compliantly good for their survival.

We affirm the heroic love ethic of the beatitudes even as we try to build societies which do not need such heroic love.  We do need in our rather petty and selfish ways within our various communities to practice the practical golden rule love in regarding the dignity of each other and in our inevitable failures we need to make forgiveness the an important tough love act of our communal practice.

In the oral traditions of the people of Israel, a profound act of forgiveness is cited as the act which saved their ancient heir Jacob and his family when a severe drought in their land sent the sons of Jacob to a foreign land for food supplies.  The proud dreamer Joseph, who was presumed dead, but sold as a slave to Egypt had risen to prominence in Egypt.  And when his unknowing brothers came to Egypt for supplies, he revealed himself to them and forgave them for his separation from his father, his home, and them.  And this act of forgiveness made providential the suffering of his life of separation from his homeland.

The Psalmist reminds us in the songs for worship that time means waiting for good things to happen so as to give providential context to contrast the less than good things which comes to anyone.  We are reminded that there is something about love which can bring us to eventually confess providence.

The writings of the New Testament happened in times when the heroic love ethic of the beatitudes was required of oppressed people who often lacked advocates within the Roman Empire.  Part of the reason of the love ethic of the beatitudes is based upon the fact that both Jesus and Paul were apocalyptic preachers.  We have to love heroically now because this age, this life, and our bodies are passing away, and it is going to happen very soon.  To preach hope, Paul wrote that we would have a new spiritual body which would be imperishable.  We will leave our bodies which are subject of oppressive conditions to the dust of the earth.  But while we are still alive we are to live heroically loving lives as a witness that our inner lives have partaken of new creation of resurrection spirituality.

Whether we need an apocalyptic narrative about the end of life as we know it, or just hope in our preparation for good deaths, we need love, which sometimes requires the heroic, sometimes near the impossible grace of forgiveness, but mostly just practical and commonsensical regarding the dignity of each other as we live in our multivocal communities, because we're all different.

May God give us heroic love, if we need it.  May God give us practical golden rule love, because it is the art of living well.  May God give us forgiveness when we need to receive it and when we need to offer it.  And may God give us continuing visions of always having a future, in life, after life, after life, after life......Amen

Wrestling with the Logic of the Beatitudes

 6 Epiphany C, February 16, 2025
Jeremiah 17:5-10 Psalm 1
1 Corinthians 15:12-20 Luke 6:17-26

Lectionary Link

We romantically place the Beatitudes upon a pedestal of lofty ideals, even while in our practical lives we contradict their literal implication.  And if we're honest, we must admit that we don't really live the life of the Beatitudes or even aspire to, and so we should honestly wrestle with them in applicable situations where their meaning might have some significant coherence.

Should anyone desire to be poor, sad, hungry, and persecuted and call such conditions blessed, or favorable?  This would be like wishing for bad luck.  To wish for such conditions for oneself might be regarded to be masochistic and such would be a significant pathology of poor psychological health.

The philosopher Nietzsche was so troubled by the logic of the Beatitudes, that he called them a system of slave morality.  The master morality for him was the preferred morality because it is honest to the will to power which expresses psychological health.  Nietzsche called this slave morality of the Beatitudes, a transvaluation of values, as in a switch to calling poverty, persecution, sadness, and hunger, good, and conversely designating wealth, happiness, being well fed, and popularity as bad.

I don't think that we should concede the meaning of the Beatitudes as being bad psychology or as the flipping of the morals of a good life on its head.

The Beatitudes appear in slightly different forms in two of the Gospels, Matthew and Luke.  Biblical scholars note that Matthew and Luke re-use the writings of the Gospel of Mark, but they also have access to another literary tradition, which scholars designate as "Q," meaning Quelle, or the German word for "source."  The Beatitudes occur in this "Q" source.

How might we understand the lifestyle significance of the Beatitudes?  I would call the Beatitudes, a Christly martial arts required by people who have conditions of oppression forced upon them.  They either have to adopt a winsome style of living in order to survive their oppressive conditions or die in open resistance.

For members of the churches at various times in the first centuries, the conditions of oppression were a fact of life.  How do we live when the powers that be threaten our very existence and our freedom to practice our faith?  How do we live winsomely, and fly under the radar to avoid being crushed to death?

Ironically, in colonial missionary work done after captor nations came to foreign lands, the Beatitude living was forced upon indigenous peoples.  In the oppressive practice of slavery, the slaves had the choice of living winsome lives for their slave masters or face horrendous consequences if they tried to resist or escape their slavery.  In these forced conditions, Nietzsche was right in calling it a "slave morality."  However, I think it is better called a profound martial arts lifestyle of living with the worst situation of life and doing it in such a ways as to be winsome, and even awe inspiring.  This does not mean that the conditions which required such heroic living is how the God who called us to love our neighbor as ourselves intended life to be.

So it is not enough for us to admire the heroic lifestyle of those who have been forced to live in conditions of oppression.   The Gospel means the good news of liberating the captive and the ending the conditions of oppression.

What should our response to the Beatitudes be now today?  It should be to love God and our neighbor as ourselves.  And what does loving our neighbor as ourselves mean?

It means ending poverty through sharing, it means comforting the sad and the mourning, it means ending bias, prejudice, and marginalization of people, it means everyone having enough to eat.

Let us today, be sad that the Beatitudes had to be an extreme martial arts lifestyle for oppressed people to survive.  Let us be thankful for those who have heroically lived this lifestyle and survived.  But let us be those who love God and our neighbors as ourselves and do all in our power to bring about the good news of the Gospel conditions of all having enough, all being comforted, adequately fed, and having their dignity affirmed.  This is what the beatitudes should mean to Christians who have wealth, power, and influence, because in the words of Jesus, "to whom much has been given, much is required."  The Gospel question of Jesus for us today, is what is required of us in loving our neighbor as ourselves.  Amen.

Sunday School, February 16, 2025 6 Epiphany C

  Sunday School, February 16, 2025    6 Epiphany C

Themes in a sermon

In martial arts like Karate, or in a soccer game many things can happen.  Some things are fortunate for your team and some things are lucky for the other team.  A game is full of free events.  Some things we can control and some things we can’t.  Sometimes we seem to be lucky and sometimes we don’t.

Life is like that.  We would like that only lucky things happened to us.  But life is not like that.  When we’re learning to walk as a child we fall and get bumps.  We also fall when we ride our bikes.  We scrape our knees.

Some people have to live with more bad things happening to them than others.  The people who were the friends of Jesus and his early followers had to live with some difficult circumstances.  What do we think about people who live with some very hard things and who seem to be happy and content?  What about a person who cannot walk and needs to use a wheel?  What if that person becomes a very good wheel chair basketball player and learns how to be joyful happy?   What do we think?  We think “Wow!”  This person is like a hero.

The words of Jesus in beatitudes were written for people who had to learn how to be happy and content even when lots of bad things were happening to them.

To be blessed is to learn how to be content and happy even when we are not lucky, even when everything is not always comfortable for us.

Jesus came to teach us to live by faith.  Faith is the ability to learn how to live with bravery and contentment no matter what happens to us.  Just like in the soccer game, we have to be able to play when we are winning or losing so in our lives we need to learn how to live with joy when it seems that we are winning or when it seems like for a short time we are losing.  To be blessed is to always live with this joy of just being able to play the game of life.

Liturgy:

Intergenerational Family Service with Holy Eucharist

February 16, 2025 The Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany

Gathering Songs: Father I Adore You, Blest are the pure in heart, God is so Good

Liturgist: Blessed be God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

People: And blessed be God’s kingdom, now and for ever.  Amen.

Liturgist:  Oh God, Our hearts are open to you.

And you know us and we can hide nothing from you.

Prepare our hearts and our minds to love you and worship you.

Through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

Song: Father, I Adore You (Christian Children’s Songbook, # 56)

Father, I adore you, lay my life before you, how I love you.

Jesus….

Spirit…

Liturgist:         The Lord be with you.

People:            And also with you.

Liturgist:  Let us pray

Set us free, O God, from the bondage of our sins, and give us the liberty of that abundant life which you have made known to us in your Son our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Litany of Praise: Chant: Alleluia

O God, you are Great!  Alleluia

O God, you have made us! Alleluia

O God, you have made yourself known to us!  Alleluia

O God, you have provided us with us a Savior!  Alleluia

O God, you have given us a Christian family!  Alleluia

O God, you have forgiven our sins!  Alleluia

O God, you brought your Son Jesus back from the dead!  Alleluia

Liturgist: A reading from the prophet Jeremiah.

Blessed are those who trust in the LORD, whose trust is the LORD. They shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream. It shall not fear when heat comes, and its leaves shall stay green; in the year of drought it is not anxious, and it does not cease to bear fruit. I the LORD test the mind and search the heart, to give to all according to their ways, according to the fruit of their doings.

Liturgist: The Word of the Lord

People: Thanks be to God

Liturgist: Let us read together from Psalm 1

Happy are they who have not walked in the counsel of the wicked, *

nor lingered in the way of sinners.

Their delight is in the law of the Lord, * and they meditate on his law, day and night.

They are like trees planted by streams of water, bearing fruit in due season,

with leaves that do not wither; * everything they do shall prosper.

Litany Phrase: Thanks be to God! (chanted)

Litanist:

For the good earth, for our food and clothing. Thanks be to God!

For our families and friends. Thanks be to God!

For the talents and gifts that you have given to us. Thanks be to God!

For this day of worship. Thanks be to God!

For health and for a good night’s sleep. Thanks be to God!

For work and for play. Thanks be to God!

For teaching and for learning. Thanks be to God!

For the happy events of our lives. Thanks be to God!

For the celebration of the birthdays and anniversaries of our friends and parish family.

   Thanks be to God!

Birthdays:  Parker Andrews, Kendra Scott, Jillian Dent, Ashley Church

Anniversaries: Bob & Joyce Groth

Liturgist:         The Holy Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ according to Luke

People:            Glory to you, Lord Christ.

Jesus came down with the twelve apostles and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast of Tyre and Sidon. They had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. And all in the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed all of them. Then he looked up at his disciples and said: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets. But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry.

Liturgist:         The Gospel of the Lord.

People:            Praise to you, Lord Christ.

Sermon – Father Phil

Children’s Creed

We did not make ourselves, so we believe that God the Father is the maker of the world.

Since God is so great and we are so small,

We believe God came into our world and was born as Jesus, son of the Virgin Mary.

We need God’s help and we believe that God saved us  

     by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

We believe that God is present with us now as the Holy Spirit.

We believe that we are baptized into God’s family the Church where everyone is welcome.

We believe that Christ is kind and fair.

We believe that we have a future in knowing Jesus Christ.

And since we all must die, we believe that God will preserve us forever.  Amen.

Litany Phrase: Christ, have mercy.

For fighting and war to cease in our world. Christ, have mercy.

For peace on earth and good will towards all. Christ, have mercy.

For the safety of all who travel. Christ, have mercy.

For jobs for all who need them. Christ, have mercy.

For care of those who are growing old. Christ, have mercy.

For the safety, health and nutrition of all the children in our world. Christ, have mercy.

For the well-being of our families and friends. Christ, have mercy.

For the good health of those we know to be ill. Christ, have mercy.

For the remembrance of those who have died. Christ, have mercy.

For the forgiveness of all our sins. Christ, have mercy.

Youth Liturgist:          The Peace of the Lord be always with you.

People:                       And also with you.

Song during the preparation of the Altar and the receiving of an offering

Offertory Hymn: Blest Are They #127 Renew!

Refrain: Rejoice and be glad! Blessed are you, holy are you.

               Rejoice and be glad! Yours is the kingdom of God!

Blest are they, the poor in spirit, theirs is the kingdom of God.

Blest are they, full of sorrow; they shall be consoled. Refrain

Blest are they who show mercy: mercy shall be theirs.

Blest are they the pure of heart; they shall see God! Refrain

Doxology

Praise God from whom all blessings flow. Praise Him, all creatures here below.

Praise Him above, ye heavenly host. Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Prologue to the Eucharist

Jesus said, “Let the children come to me, for to them belong the kingdom of heaven.”

All become members of a family by birth or adoption.

Baptism is a celebration of birth into the family of God.

A family meal gathers and sustains each human family.

The Holy Eucharist is the special meal that Jesus gave to his friends to keep us together as the family of Christ.

The Lord be with you

And also with you.

Lift up your hearts

We lift them to the Lord.

Let us give thanks to God.

It is right to give God thanks and praise.

It is very good and right to give thanks, because God made us, Jesus redeemed us and the Holy Spirit dwells in our hearts.  Therefore, with Angels and Archangels and all of the world that we see and don’t see, we forever sing this hymn of praise:

Holy, Holy, Holy (Intoned)

Holy, Holy, Holy Lord, God of Power and Might.  Heav’n and earth are full of your glory.

Hosanna in the highest.  Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. 

Hosanna in the highest. Hosanna in the Highest.

All may gather around the altar

Our grateful praise we offer to you God, our Creator;

You have made us in your image

And you gave us many men and women of faith to help us to live by faith:

Adam and Eve, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Rachael.

And then you gave us your Son, Jesus, born of Mary, nurtured by Joseph

And he called us to be sons and daughters of God.

Your Son called us to live better lives and he gave us this Holy Meal so that when we eat

  the bread and drink the wine, we can know that the Presence of Christ is as near to us as  

  this food and drink that becomes a part of us.

The Prayer continues with these words

And so, Father, we bring you these gifts of bread and wine. Bless and sanctify them by your Holy Spirit to be for your people the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ our Lord. Bless and sanctify us by your Holy Spirit so that we may love God and our neighbor.

On the night when Jesus was betrayed, he took bread, said the blessing, broke the bread, and gave it to his friends, and said, "Take, eat: This is my Body, which is given for you. Do this for the remembrance of me."

After supper, Jesus took the cup of wine, gave thanks, and said, "Drink this, all of you. This is my Blood of the new Covenant, which is shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins. Whenever you drink it, do this for the remembrance of me."

Father, we now celebrate the memorial of your Son. When we eat this holy Meal of Bread and Wine, we are telling the entire world about the life, death and resurrection of Christ and that his presence will be with us in our future.

Let this holy meal keep us together as friends who share a special relationship because of your Son Jesus Christ.  May we forever live with praise to God to whom we belong as sons and daughters.

By Christ, and with Christ, and in Christ, in the unity of the Holy Spirit all honor and glory

 is yours, Almighty Father, now and for ever. AMEN.

And now as our Savior Christ has taught us, we now sing,

Our Father: (Renew # 180, West Indian Lord’s Prayer)

Our Father who art in heaven:  Hallowed be thy name.

Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done: Hallowed be thy name.

Done on earth as it is in heaven: Hallowed be thy name.

Give us this day our daily bread: Hallowed be thy name.

And forgive us all our debts: Hallowed be thy name.

As we forgive our debtors: Hallowed be thy name.

Lead us not into temptation: Hallowed be thy name.

But deliver us from evil: Hallowed be thy name.

Thine is the kingdom, power, and glory: Hallowed be thy name.

Forever and ever: Hallowed be thy name.

Amen, amen, amen: Hallowed be thy name.

Amen, amen, amen: Hallowed be thy name.

Breaking of the Bread

Celebrant:       Alleluia! Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us.

People:           Therefore let us keep the feast.  Alleluia!

Words of Administration

Communion Hymn: Blest Are the Pure in Heart, Hymn # 656, in the Blue Hymnal

1          Blest are the pure in heart, for they shall see our God;

            The secret of the Lord is theirs, their soul is Christ’s abode.

4          Lord, we thy presence seek: may ours this blessing be;

            Give us a pure and lowly heart, a temple fit for thee.

Post-Communion Prayer

Everlasting God, we have gathered for the meal that Jesus asked us to keep;

We have remembered his words of blessing on the bread and the wine.

And His Presence has been known to us.

We have remembered that we are sons and daughters of God

    and brothers and sisters in Christ.

Send us forth now into our everyday lives remembering that the blessing in the

     remembering that the blessing in the bread and wine spreads into each time,

place and person in our lives,

As we are ever blessed by you, O Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Closing Song: God Is So Good  (All the Best Songs for Kids #31)

God is so good, God is so good, God is so good, He’s so good to me.

He cares for me (3x), He’s so good to me.

I’ll do His will (3x), He’s so good to me.

He is my Lord (3x), He’s so good to me.

Dismissal:    

Liturgist: Let us go forth in the Name of Christ. 

People: Thanks be to God! 

God Calls, as We Call God, and Grace Can Happen

 5 Epiphany C February 9, 2025
Isaiah 6:1-8, [9-13] Psalm 138
1 Corinthians 15:1-11 Luke 5:1-11

Lectionary Link

One might say that a call from God is the way in God communicates to a person or people the divine will for humanity.  The Bible is full of many events of God's calling of people; they are so many that the category of calling has to remain open because in time, new callings will happen in new ways to more people, and callings will happen to the same person multiple times in one's life.  Why?  Because the intentions of a loving God, calling all people to love never finishes.  Sometimes the call requires something very simple and sometimes the call comes in difficult times requiring something more difficult because of human weakness or because of the opposition of contrary people.

As people theatrically inclined, we often want to be knocked off our horses by thunderbolts from heaven because such an event would seem to be more obvious than events in our everyday mundane lives.  We should not neglect or fail to acknowledge God in the mundane; for Elijah, God came in the stillness, not in wind and the fire.

Perhaps we want a wonderful theophany like the prophet Isaiah when like a dream his inside world and his outside world became indistinguishable and he saw things that the outward looking does not normally see.  He experienced the grandeur of the divine and such made him aware of his smallness and his uncleanness.  He felt totally unworthy.  And yet this man who felt unclean and unworthy was called to deliver perhaps an unpopular message to people who did not want to hear the message he was commissioned to bring.

If God calls us, the Psalmist reminds us that we call God.  Calling is a two way action.  God calls us and we call God.  Why?  We find ourselves ever needing help.  We don't find ourselves omni-competent to tasks of life which seem to be required of us.

God is always calling to us.  And whether we know it or not we are always calling, we are always talking to someone on our insides.  We are always using words, borrowed words from and to the Eternal Word itself.  And yet we don't always know that we are talking and calling to the Eternal Word itself.  The Psalmist teaches us that in our talking, we can accept the fact that we are borrowing the words of the Eternal Word, and that in fact it is upon the ground of Eternal Word that we are talking, and we are calling.  We are calling in words, and asking for more words, more words to help us.  And we want those words also to be in the choreographed body language and nature language deeds of safety, protection, purpose and kindness towards us.

One of the most telling historical facts of the New Testament writings, does not come from the Gospels which were written rather late; it comes from the earliest writer, St. Paul.  St. Paul wrote in the  sixth decades that he knew Cephas; he knew Peter who had known Jesus of Nazareth.  This perhaps the most telling chain to establish the historical fact of Jesus of Nazareth.  St. Paul had an Christophany, an epiphany of the Risen Christ; yet he needed his Epiphany connected with the Jesus of Nazareth who was known by Peter, James, and the Apostles.  St. Paul did not let his calling remain an individual, self-edifying event; he had it verified within a community of people who also shared a range of varieties of callings of the Risen Christ.

The Gospels include the traditional stories about how the original companions were called by Jesus.  For Peter, it included many calling events, including an event when a non-fisherman Jesus meddled in the fishing specialty of Peter, James and John and told these expert fishermen how and where to fish.  Peter, a prideful fisherman was rebuked by this success of Jesus, this one who had the audacity to tell these long-time fisherman how to do their jobs.  Peter, like any of us, can have humbling experiences when insight comes from unsuspected sources.  Sometimes we have to let the surprising success of grace humble our prideful selves, and then we need to realize that we need such grace to bring good news to other people.  There is nothing omni-competent about any of us such that we don't need grace to attend us in being accepted by others to deliver to them something good about their lives as it pertains to God's love, and the freedom to be able to love better.

Let us accept the many callings of God which are coming to us; let us accept that we have words going on inside of us always which we have borrowed from the Eternal Word at the basis of knowing itself; let us accept the fact that ultimately we are calling and talking from and to the Eternal Word.  And let us accept our call to call others to the truth of a loving God, calling us to love better, and who shows how to do this best in the life of Jesus Christ.  And let us not over-estimate our charm or eloquence to convince people; let us ask for grace to meddle in people's lives toward loving God and each other.  Amen.

Goodness: Our Story and We're Sticking to It

 3 Epiphany C January 26, 2025
 Neh. 8:2-10 Ps. 19
1 Cor. 12:12-27 Luke 4:14-21

 Lectionary Link

The actual conditions of living bring an obvious insight that we live within the conditions of weal and woe, and when the conditions of woe seem to be prominent, we might even think that what is woeful will eventually be victorious.

However, in the middle of what probably can happen, there has occurred the experience of hope and when language users came to point of pondering this feeling of hope, they came to believe and express this presence of hope as arising from an original goodness.  It came to language users to think that hope and goodness were so poignant that they had to be named as indicative of a Personal Proto-language user, even the Divine One.  This Divine One must have wedded language to the awareness of things existing, and from the Divine Speech, good things came to be known.  Language users in the middle of the experiences of good and bad and everything in between, came to proclaim this Original Goodness as the anchor and purpose of our human existence.  The biblical Psalmist even anthropomorphizes the heavens and states that the heavens declare the glory of God.  The heavens tell us that there is a glorious Goodness at the basis of life itself.

The biblical witness, is Goodness is the Original Blessing and it is our story and we're sticking to it.  The living of this original goodness has required endless attempts at human strategies to make it actual in human practice.

The biblical witness of Hebrew Scriptures proclaims the Torah, the law as the ability to discover best human behaviors and promulgate them, as the promotion of the original goodness of existence.  The biblical witness is a record about what happens when people forget the best behaviors and lose their worthy exemplars.  Our lesson from Nehemiah today, is a celebration of the rediscovery of the Law, the Torah for the people.  Good news returned to a people trying to regroup in their homeland; the law as the strategy of knowing goodness was good news for a people who had been long captive in exile and for those who had stayed behind who had lost touch with their most important Rule of Life.

The prophets of Israel were certainly aware the conditions of woe.  The human condition included many people in poverty, people in actual blindness and intellectual and spiritual blindness, and people living in conditions of oppression by the powerful and the greedy.  The prophet Isaiah said these conditions required one who could re-state the original goodness of life, one with good news for the poor, the blind, and the oppressed. He wrote that these very conditions of bad new gave him his calling to good news.  His good news calling was to bring people out of poverty, to enlighten people to see, and to free people from oppression.  And when Jesus of Nazareth read these words of the prophet Isaiah, he confessed that this calling to bring good news was the purpose of his life.  And not surprisingly, Gospel or good news has become the title for the books about Jesus.  Jesus became for us the supreme exemplar of what good news looks like in human saying and doing.  Jesus became the personal exemplar of the original goodness of life.  And it is the expression of this good news that we seek to promote in our living today.  Our life calling should be about lifting people out of poverty, enlightening people with knowledge and wisdom, and ending every de-humanizing condition of oppression.  This is the Gospel program which the witness of Jesus has given to us.

And how does this good news mission get energized.  St. Paul believed that the Holy Spirit energized the followers of Jesus with the impartation of gifts for the common good, not to glorify the gifted person, but to edify the common good with love.

Let us accept the gifts of the Spirit that we have been given to edify the poor, the unenlightened, and the oppressed and do it from the motive of love.

Many people might scorn our vocation of good news today.  Freud would call it our sorry illusion.  Marx would call it our opiate to dull us to our sad conditions.  But we are not those who would mock hope as some cruel hoax to motivate us to always believe that life can be better for us and for everyone.  The cruel hoax is to believe that evil, badness, greed, mass ignorance, sheer power to oppress, are going to win the day, so you should just give up.

We don't have the illusion that goodness has fully won; and yes we do rely on hope as an analgesic, our opiate from the pain of what can be healed, enriched, enlightened, and freed.  

People who do not believe in the Gospel program do not want to acknowledge the valid and mysterious reality of hope which is an important survival but unseen energy to accompany in our lives so that we can continually assert the original goodness of our existence.

If hope is our illusion and our opiate, then it is the evidence of our original goodness.  That our story and we're sticking to it.  Amen.

Did Jesus Have an Eye-rolling Moment?

 2 Epiphany C January 19, 2025
Isaiah 62:1-5 Psalm 36:5-10
1 Cor. 12:1-11 John 2:1-11

Lectionary Link

Do some people get moved to tears while listening to Beethoven's Ninth?  Yes.  Does everyone who listens to Beethoven's Ninth get moved to tears? No.  Should everyone who listens to Beethoven's Ninth be moved to tears?  That is a very aesthetic question and even if from one's own preference one thinks everyone should cry at the performance of Beethoven's Ninth, such preference cannot make it happen or even prove that it happens for the same reason for everyone who is driven to tears.

But it is historically true to say that some people are moved to tears by listening to Beethoven's Ninth.

In a similar way it is historically true to say that many people in the last two millennia have had what they call experiences of the Risen Christ.  One can characterize such experiences as mental illness and provide endless alternate explanations for such experiences, but only by denying what those who have such experiences say themselves about them.

The Gospels are not written "autographs," which is to say we do not have any original copies.  And scholars think that original is misleading in the sense that there was a single inspired Gospel writer who took dictation from beginning to end of each textual production.  What is more likely is that the Gospels represent writing process within various communities at different times, and the process represent re-editing and redactions to fit the many various situations in which the traditions about Jesus of Nazareth were brought to provide community identity.  The earliest copies of some New Testament book date from the late second century and we are uncertain about what specifically happened in the textual process for nearly 150 years, with the fullest early copy of the New Testament that we have did not occur until around 350.

The textual transmission process of the Gospel might be what in legal testimony would be called a series of hearsay.  So and so said that Jesus did and said this to so and so who said that a previous person said that Jesus did and said this, and on and on until various forms of this hearsay comes to text as a technology of memory to preserve it in some final way through the written word.

The writer or writers in the textual tradition of the Gospel of John can be said to be persons who claimed to have experiences of the Risen Christ, or experiences of what they called a new birth, being born of the Spirit.  The writers of the textual tradition of John's Gospel had probably read the other Gospels but decided for the promulgation of the witness of a Christ identity within their community, they used decidedly different presentations.  No parables, but signs and attending long discourses from the mouth of Jesus.  The mystical sub-text of the writers of John's Gospel is this:  The Risen Christ experienced through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit is a telling Sign of God to you, to us within all of the probable conditions that can come to us.  Life narratives of Jesus are presented as parables explicating the Sign of the presence of the Risen Christ in the array of what might happen to us in life.  And the physical aspects of the story are not literal; they embed the spiritual meaning of Christ in us, the hope of glory.

And where can the signs of Christ be found?  In illness, in being paralyzed and unable to walk, in the sickness of one's child, during the storms of nature, in the death of one's family member, in the hunger of the masses, in blindness, in being thirsty...all of these conditions are portrayed in John's Gospel as human situations which can know the presence of the Risen Christ.  And these are very serious conditions indeed.  But all of life does not consist of serious conditions, most of life consists of the mundane, the quotidian, the ordinary, the drudgery, and lots of small frustrating things, when even the trivial matters seem to conspire against us.  Someone took my parking space and I was late.  My child is heart broken for losing his basketball game.  There was a hundred dollar mistake made on my utility bill....life is made up trivial stuff that is not life threatening, but only irritating in upsetting what we would wish or desire.

So, it is very interesting that John's Gospel begins with the first sign being on the scale of human priority, a very trivial thing.  The wedding party ran out of wine.  Boo hoo, big deal.  It might make one be a little cynical, like we feel when the football players and basketball players thanking Jesus for helping them win the games, the same Jesus who let their opponents lose the game.  If winners need to thank Jesus for success in the trivial then so do the losers, because winning and losing is all the same as to whether the Risen Christ is present.  The cynic might think, well Jesus is taking up all his time tending to lottery winners, bingo winners, game winners, beauty contest winners, and just letting those poor children starve in terrible conditions throughout the world.

One wonders if Jesus is not presented as having an "eye rolling" moment with his mother when she asked him to take care the wine shortage.  "Mom, if they already finished the wine, they are drinking too much and they do not need to drink anymore.  Shouldn't they be cut off?  And when does a rabbi have to supply the liquor?  I guess it has to do with that commandment to honor one's mom and dad?"  I can imagine Jesus changing water to wine in the minds of the drinkers who had drunk too much and who really needed to be hydrated with the best refresher of all, yes, water.

The seeming water of ordinary life needs to accompanied by the inward eternal Word to inform meaning purpose of life and existence.  We don't have to live in the external world bereft of it being vivified by the accompanying imaginations of an Inner Word life which excites, inspires, and imparts the kinds of meaning which make life worth living, words of love, hope, kindness, connection with others and with our best human vocation.

The Sign is knowing the Accompanying Risen Christ as the interior Eternal Word within oneself that can always already give us wonderful attending Meaning to the purpose of our lives, in the small crises of life and in the major crises of our lives.

John's Gospel proclaims that the Risen Christ is the interior Eternal Word of God which is able to come to meaningful expression within all of what might probably happen within our lives.

So, today again we pray, Eternal Word of God, be the great Sign in our lives today as we traverse the trivial and the great and everything in between.  Amen.

Baptism: Jesus' and Ours

1 Epiphany C, January 12, 2025
Isaiah 43:1-7 Psalm 29  
Acts 8:14-17 Luke 3:15-17,21-22

Lectionary Link

Through birth we are unintentionally initiated into the communities of our births and these communities stamp intentional meanings upon our lives based upon the inherited traditions within the language of the cultures of such communities.

The practice of Christian baptism is an intentional community ritual process of stamping meaning upon a person's life within the community which practices such an intentional ritual as baptism.

Baptism as a ritual process has been given theological meaning, and it in turn becomes a communal ritual for stamping those theological, or supremely prized human values upon the life of the newly initiated.

The early church believed that Jesus of Nazareth was born into a family which practiced ritual behaviors, the ritual behaviors which forged the identities of Jews in Palestine of his time.

On this day when we observe the Baptism of Jesus, as well as baptize candidates for Holy Baptism, it behooves to ponder insights about this ritual practice of Christian Initiation.

Certainly baptism predates Jesus, and while the Matthean derivative church at some point understood that Jesus commanded his disciples to baptize in the name of the Trinity, baptism did not originate with Jesus, nor with his own baptizer, John the Baptist.

The Greek word baptizo is the regular word meaning to dip or immerse.  It is the Greek word used in the Greek translation of Hebrew Scriptures, called the Septuagint, for the Hebrew word meaning the same, taval.  In the practices derived from the Torah, mikvah is the name of the ritual bath, and tevilah is the act of immersion.

In Judaism a ritual immersion occurred when non-Jews converted to the faith, in a proselyte baptism.   Other immersion rituals accompanied the ceremonies to remove defined states of impurity.  Such immersions were to be done in "living waters," such as streams or springs or facsimiles of the same.

The desert man John the Baptist is sometimes regarded as one who was influenced by the semi-monastic desert communities of Qumran associated with the Dead Sea Scrolls, some of whom were called the Essenes.  These communities practiced ritual immersions, even daily and repeated.  Ceremonial washings before prayer occur within Judaism as well as in the practice of Muslims to this day.

Certainly one can understand the universal use of water as a substance of cleansing of the body, and of the utensils of our lives.  Water as actual cleanser has incredible sign value as symbolizing the human quest for spiritual cleanliness as instantiated in the Psalmist plea for a clean heart and right spirit.  The words of Jesus to the Samaritan woman present the Spirit as being like an interior spring within the person making the interior cleansing a reality and fulfilling of the request for a clean heart.

What does the meaning of the baptism of Jesus mean then?  Did Jesus need to be cleansed from any impure state?  Did Jesus need to be received into Judaism?  The early church believed that a perfect Jesus did not need baptism for cleansing or for repentance.  They also believed that having been born a Jew and fulfilling the ritual requirements of Judaism, including circumcision, that Jesus did not have to be received into Judaism.

Following the Pauline Christology, Jesus was regarded to be the divine emptied into a mere human, but best human being, and this emptying meant being limited to particular events in time, human events in time.  This emptying of the divine into the merely human was a process of the divine being identified with the merely human such that events such as birth, circumcision, and baptism as expression of human solidarity in being included within the ministry, mission, and community of John the Baptist instantiated what God with us meant in human terms.

The baptism of Jesus might be expressed in a slightly different way but reflect a similar meaning as the ancient statement of Orthodox Church in the theology of theosis.  God became one with humanity so that humanity might become one or know union with God.  Jesus is God being baptized into the particular community setting of John the Baptist, so that we in the particular community settings of our baptisms might understand that we are baptized into God, in whose milieu we live and move and have our being as divine "off springs."

Indeed our baptisms are different directionally than the baptism of Jesus.  Jesus is the expression of God becoming known as one with humanity; our baptisms are the expression of us realizing the image of God upon our lives so as to live our lives as children of God, loving our divine parent, and loving our fellow children of God, by the practice of mutually influencing each other to best loving behaviors in this great wide family.

Let us be thankful about baptism as a celebration of a divine family event.  This is an event of living into our identity.  As the early church practiced this identity ritual, it was being buried or immersed into the death of Jesus as an inner power to counter the bondage of a past determined by habits of sin, and rising from the waters of death to become the new creation to which we are called.

Jesus our sibling, as Exemplar Human Being deigned complete family identity with us so that we might live up to our original identity, inheritance and blessing as those who bear the image of God.  Amen.