Temptation of Jesus: Finding God's Timing for our Lives

1 Lent        A      March 1, 2020

Gen 2:4b-9,15-17,25-3:7  Ps.51:1-13

Rom. 5:12-21         Matt. 4:1-11

Lectionary Link

If Jesus did not write any of the New Testament, can you even imagine someone who was close enough to Jesus to be able to write about the event of his temptation.  The temptation of Jesus is a Gospel oral tradition and it was used by the church to teach lessons and give insights about living.

This event is full of the symbols of the biblical salvation story.  We might explore some of those teaching symbols which are embedded in this as we look for insights to inspire us during Lent.  

Let us consider the sweeping corporate identities relating to Adam and Christ and the return to Eden.  Let us ponder the anatomy of the experience of temptation.  And finally let us consider a contrast of the devil and angels.

The Bible is divided upon into two corporate personalities.  Humanity is said to be in Adam and we are given an invitation to be in Christ.  Does this mean that an actual man Adam sinned therefore making us all sinners?  Doesn't seem fair.  No, this is a teaching metaphor of a collective identity.  As human beings we all share in the very same human situation with all of its possible variety.  We are together  in the human dilemma.  Adam means both a man in the creation story but also the collective humanity.  The Garden of Eden Story is the story of the fact that we are often in the state of being naïve and vulnerable to be tricked and doing things that we are not ready for.  The Garden of Eden story is a story of insights about how we became moral beings, knowing good and evil.  Adam and Eve did not have the moral intelligence and muscles to resist the trickster serpent.  It doesn't seem fair but the free conditions of our world often find us as naïve and vulnerable to be tricked into doing things about which we cannot fully perceive the consequences of.  So in Adam as human beings, we find ourselves in need of hero to rescue us in our situation.  Jesus is the given hero.  When he returns to the Garden to relive the Adamic event, the Garden has become a deserted wilderness filled with wild beasts.  The serpent is now confronted in the person of the devil.  Jesus had just heard the heavenly voice declare him at his baptism to be God's beloved Son, and then the Spirit drove him into the wilderness and required of him a 40 day fast.  If one fasts for 40 days and survives, the portals of one's interior life becomes open to every sort of hallucinatory manifestation.  Jesus was open to the words of the devil, "So Jesus, you've just had the baptismal announcement that your God's special Son, we'll see about that.  You know what I did to Adam and Eve and I've lots more tricks for you."  Humanity needed a hero who could be tempted in all ways and more and resist, and so be the beginning of a new humanity.  And so we have the invitation to be "in Christ" and have eternal life.

What insights can we understand about the human test of temptation from the temptations which faced Jesus?

The temptations of Jesus show us that the key ingredient of temptation is to force mistiming in our lives.  Did God want Adam and Eve to eat of the Tree of Life?  Did God want humanity to know how to be moral and know good and evil in responsible ways?  Yes, but on the divine schedule when it was appropriate and they were ready.

Is food good?  Is safety good?  Is the esteem of friends and society good?  All of these are good things but they are wrong if partaken of at the wrong time.  The same Jesus who provided bread for thousands was not able to confect bread for himself even as a mirage in his temptation stupor.  Why?  Because as God's child, he was on God's time schedule.  There will be bread in its time but not as some trick in a dream-like state.

Is safety good?  Like falling from a high place and being rescued?  Yes indeed.  Jesus would fall into the hands of the Romans and be put to death on the cross and be rescued by a resurrection announced by an angel, but only in God's time.  Such a temptation was against God's timing.  Such a temptation tried to make Jesus a biblical literalist.  "Jesus, the Psalmist said you can jump from a high place and the angels will catch you.  So go ahead and jump.  You're the Son of God.  You can overcome gravity with angels spotting you."  This includes the common temptation to treat poetry as literal science.  The bane of religion today is literalism, fundamentalism.  How much human cruelty has been promoted because people who believe they are religious, treat poetry as science and use it to harm others.  Let us keep our poetry and our common sense lives in proper function.  We can be both poets and scientists.  Let us not be wrong in our timing to interpret in a literal or a figurative way.

Another mistiming in our lives has to do with how and when we appropriate personal esteem.  The anchor of personal esteem is to know that God declares us to be a beloved child of God.  Yes, it is good to receive appropriate affirmation from our family and peers.  It is very nice to be appreciated.  But one of the most sought after drugs in the world is the drug of excessive fame.  Each of us has the temptation to narcissism.  "If one person likes me, then it is even better if millions adore me."  John Lennon got in big trouble when he stated that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus.  The temptation of Jesus involved the ultimate Faustian bargain.  Remember Faust sold his soul to Mephistopheles for fame.  A person can feed the narcissistic aspect of one's personality and make the Faustian bargain for fame and adoration.  One can literally deny the esteem of being God's child and becomes the devil's deputy in order to feed the endless need for adoration.  This temptation to trade the esteem of being God's child for the wrong kind of fame was resisted by Jesus.  And as we know, Jesus became famous because of death and resurrection and not because he became a political demigod or Caesar serving the devil.  God's Messiah had a completely different schedule.  Don't mistime how to get the esteem and the fame of one's life.  Jesus showed us the way to esteem and fame.  It involved God's will, God's timing for the fostering of our true worth to ourselves and others.

Lastly, we are told that the devil was "diabolos."  And we are also told that Jesus was ministered to by angels.  Diabolos literally means to "throw apart," or divide.  It is the opposite of symbol, which means to "throw together."  Devil and demons and are those inner constituents, parasites on one's inner formation, and they integrate every horrible things that has happened and manifest as an inward accusing liar and they won't let you sew together your inner world with the event in your exterior world with what might be call peace.   We are vulnerable to inner forces which want to throw us apart and keep us from honoring our birthrights as children of God.  The ministering angels can be the messengers of uniting the symbolic order of one's inner life in congruence with one's external life.  The angelic is how we message our inner life to the outer world in the ways that are peaceful and in God's good timing.  When we have the sense of honoring God's timing in our lives, we sense the ministry of the angels.

As we begin Lent, let us remember that Jesus was tempted.  So will we.  We will be tempted to mistime things in our life experience. When and how to gratify desire.  We will tempted to be literal when we're supposed to be poetic.  And we can be tempted to want the wrong kind of recognition.

In our trials and ordeals, let us remember our birthright as children of God.  This is the basis of our esteem as people.  Let us be mindful about the timing of what we do in our lives.  The way that we resist temptation is to pray, "Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.....and in God's good time."  We know that we are in Adam in our human vulnerability; let us also know that we are in Christ, as we are led by our hero to learn God's timing for our lives.  Let us ride on the coattails of Jesus to find good timing in our lives.

With God's grace and following Jesus, our hero,  we will find God's time for our lives and resist temptation.  Amen.

Recovering Hypocrites?

Ash Wednesday        February 26, 2020

Isaiah 58:1-12        Ps.103       

1 Cor. 5:20b-6:10    Matt. 6:1-6, 16-21

Lectionary Link

Welcome to our annual face painting event.  Our foreheads were painted with the invisible oil of Chrism when at our baptism it was said, "You are sealed with the Holy Spirit in baptism and marked as Christ own forever."  We belong to Christ in our life.

Tonight the ink is the black of palm ashes.  We recognize our dual natures; our spiritual and our physical.  In the creation story, we were made with dust and deity as the Spirit formed the human person from the clay to become our body and the Spirit left something of the divine upon us in the formation.  The conjoining of spirit and dust left a mediating soul, nephesh, a soul of mind, emotions and will, to negotiate between our bodies and the divine image spirit upon us.

Today we cherish the unity of body, soul and spirit, even as we know that at some point in the times of our lives this unity will suffer division.  The body, our flesh, will like a wooden home burned by fire, will eventually return to dust.  Our bodily home will return to dust.  And we use the ash paint to retrace the mark of our first branding.  We confess that we will still belong to Christ in our deaths.

We know that our bodies will return to dust, and so we prepare for this, in part in this Ash Wednesday liturgy.  The ashes represent in our imaginations the fast forwarding of our bodily lives to their ashen state.  Like Native American Braves going to war,  we paint our face with the image of our future state as preparation and as spiritual, emotional, and intellectual inoculation of our lives against the death that we know that we will face.

This is not a macabre scene of Goth-like face painting; this is a poignant reminder to cherish our lives in which our souls and spirits are unified with our bodies.  It is to cherish our lives and the lives of other with the best of holy living as the only way to celebrate the unity of body, soul and spirit.

This is event is not an event of private piety even though we feel it in a very personal way; it is a deeply social event because just as we are personally connected in body, soul, and spirit, we are also irretrievably connected with each other and with all brothers and sisters in our world.  We don't live alone; we live in community.  We are our brothers' keeper; we are our sisters' keeper.  The law was given to us to let us know that we belong to each other, together caring for each other and being committed to justice for each other.

We know that our bodies are connected to this earth as well.  And if we steal from the good earth by mistreating our environment we are harming our brothers and sisters of the future.

Today, you and I are invited to a holy Lent.  I would suggest to you that as the words of Jesus rebuked the hypocrites of his day, the actors of piety who did not perform justice, so too, we are the hypocrites who bear the rebuke of the words of Jesus.

And if we be hypocrites, I would suggest there is only one kind of hypocrite to be; let us be the good kind of hypocrite, what I would call "recovering hypocrites."

How do we become hypocrites?  We divide the first and second great commandments.  We might say that we love God and point to all of our religious behaviors as proof of our love of God.  But these practices become hypocritical if we do not show an equal commitment to love our neighbors.

The Isaian prophet was rebuking his people for having religious fasts and religious behaviors without having the behaviors of care for the people who were neighbors in obvious need.

So today let us admit our hypocrisy.  Let us admit that we often are proof of "do as I say and not as I do."  The positive aspect of being a recovering hypocrite is the fact that we always proclaim a perfect standard which we always are failing at completely living up to.  God is holy and perfect and asks us to keep and profess this high standard even while we know that we can never attain it.

So it should keep us always as humbled recovering hypocrite, always on the path of repentance.   Let this day be the first day of our Lenten program to admit ourselves into the program of recovering hypocrites.  Let this Lenten season inspire us to plan some recovering behaviors, of more prayer, more study, reading the Bible, giving up bad habits to devote our energy to causes of care for other people and our earth.

Would you join me in this season of Lent in a program of recovering from hypocrisy? With the help of Christ and the Holy Spirit, may we become more successful at holding together the first and second great commandments: You shall love the Lord your God with all your life resources and love your neighbor as you love yourself.  Amen.

Change as the Process of Spiritual Metamorphosis

Last Epiphany A      February 23,2020

Ex.24:12,15-18,      Ps.99        

2 Peter 1:16-21  Matt. 17:1-9

Lectionary Link

Today in our Collect, the prayer for today, we asked that we might be changed into the likeness of Christ, from glory to glory as we behold the light of his countenance.

One of the basic requirements of human life is to learn how to deal with change.  To be human is to become aware of the passage of time.  And in our aging, we know ourselves as appearing to be different in time, even as we try to cover up the aging process cosmetically.  In our physical, lives we experience entropy, the running out of energy because the end of our physical lives is death.  But we encounter in our lives a counter force to the forces of entropy; we experience in our inner lives the optimism of assuming that some part of us will live forever.  We ponder the possibility that we will recognize ourselves as ourselves in the afterlife in a continuity with who we have been in this life.

In our lives of change how do we live toward the person that we might continue to be, rather than toward our physical homes, our bodies, which are in decline?

The word for transfiguration in Greek might be better translated metamorphosis and all of learn about this in elementary school science class as we were taught to observe the changes in the life cycles of butterflies.  And the church is so fascinated with butterflies, that the butterfly hatching out of a dead looking cocoon has become an oft used metaphor for the resurrection of Christ.

What insights can we gain from the metamorphosis of Jesus Christ event on the Mount of his special Epiphany, called the Transfiguration?

First, we know that the writers of the Gospels revisited themes from Hebrew Scripture to show the surpassing greatness of Jesus.  The event of the Transfiguration was presented to be akin to the event of Mount Sinai.  Moses had a shiny face in his encounter with God; the face of Jesus shone on the Mount of the Transfiguration.  The clouds and the elevation are in keeping with the traditions of describing significant manifestation of the divine.  In biblical symbology, cloud, elevation and light signify mystery, closeness to the divine presence of elevated realm and enlightenment through divine encounter.  Biblical landscape corresponds to personal inscape in the spiritual metamorphosis of those baptized and on the mystical path.

The chief gift of the former covenant was the Law.  The gift of the New Covenant is the person of Jesus Christ.  This contrast is presented in the description of the Transfiguration.

The apparitional appearances of Moses and Elijah meant that followers of Jesus believed him to be in continuity and in succession with the great traditions of the Hebrew Scriptures.  Moses and Elijah were mountain men; Moses saw God on Mount Sinai.  Elijah heard the still small voice of God in a mountain cave.  Elijah called down fire from heaven on the altar on Mount Carmel as he confronted the prophets of Baal.  To the members of the Judaic faith, the poignant references of Moses and Elijah on the Messianic resume of Jesus were important.  How can you go wrong in following Jesus if Moses and Elijah followed and affirmed him in their afterlife appearances?

The Transfiguration event stands between the baptism of Jesus and his resurrection.  The heavenly voice is heard again, like at his baptism, to proclaim Jesus as God beloved Son.  The lit face of Jesus is like a preview of what his appearances will be like in his resurrection.

Further, the Transfiguration visionary event allowed the friends of Jesus to witness a special experience of Jesus, Moses and Elijah.  Jesus invited his willing friend to climb the mountain with him to receive epiphany insights.

The sharing of the visionary event with his friends, is also an invitation for us to embrace the metamorphosis of the presence of the Risen Christ in our paths of mystical transformation.  Since change is inevitable in life, how do we embrace, and process change in the best possible way?  We do it in spiritual metamorphosis with the Risen Christ.

One of the natural tendencies of spiritual metamorphosis is our resistance to change and, in such resistance, we interpret the apparent absence of Christ as the real absence of Christ.  In spiritual metamorphosis, we prefer certain spiritual states over others.

We all perhaps prefer butterflies to cocoons, even as we know that there is not butterfly without the cocoon and the life of the cocoon is equal from the life of the butterfly, equal but different.  In faith, we have to learn how to accept the equal presence of the Risen Christ within the different phases of spiritual metamorphosis.

The mystics have written about the apparent states of deprivation in their mystical journey, as caught in the cloud of unknowing, or the dark night of the soul, or the state of purgation.  When Jesus said on the cross, "My God, why have you forsaken me," is this not the state of the apparent absence of God?

When Peter was on the Mount of the Transfiguration, he wanted to build tents or shrines for the three heroes to have permanent dwelling places.  This meant that he could try to retain endlessly a particular "butterfly" state of Jesus Christ.  Peter, like us, wanted to live on the mountain top; he did not want to descend to the demon possessed valley anymore.

Spiritual metamorphosis is learning to embrace dynamic change.  It is learning to have faith that the same presence of the Risen Christ is with us whether in the dark valley of human loss or on the mountain top of such apparent presence when faith is easy.  

We can be like Peter too in our spiritual lives.  We want to build a permanent dwelling place at the place of our significant spiritual break through.  We try to build rituals, readings, practice and songs around those breakthrough events.  And the assumption is that our spiritual growth has reached it height.  One of the pitfalls of trying to retain the states of our significant spiritual break throughs, is that we make them final and we can judge as lacking people who have not had that same superior experience that we had when we went on retreat.

Yes, we retain the insights of our mountain top experiences; but in spiritual metamorphosis, we are given a mountain top experience, only to see higher mountains which remain for us to climb, and to get there, we must go through valley, desert, storm, cloud and darkness and the exertion of another ascent.

The event of the Transfiguration is presented to us as we prepare for the ordeal of the forty days of Lent.  The church calendar is program which presents to us the rhythm of the life of spiritual metamorphosis.

Today, let us be reminded that we are dealing with change gracefully by accepting the path of spiritual metamorphosis as the Risen Christ asks us to identify with him as he works the process of transformation in our lives.

Enjoy the mountain top!  Enjoy the butterfly events!  But in faith let us also know that Christ is equally present in the valley, in times of loss, times of sin, times of failure and times of disappointment.  In the times when we seem deprived of the apparent presence of Christ, we need to recall the mountain top experience as a reminder to keep on, keeping on because we are in spiritual metamorphosis.

I wish for you many mountain top experiences and from them I pray that you will have the faith to celebrate the equal presence of the Risen Christ in all phases of our spiritual metamorphosis.  Amen.

Pirate Making Portion of the Beatitudes

6 Epiphany   A    February 16, 2020   

Sirach 15:15-20  Psalm 119:1-8

1 Corinthians 3:1-9  Matt.5:21-24,27-30,33-37

Lectionary Link

Today, we've read from the portion of the Beatitudes which I have called the pirate making portion, and so I have donned the corresponding costume.  "If your eyes causes you to sin; tear it out and throw it away....and if your right hand causes you to sin; cut it off and throw it away....."  And so I am here to say that I resemble those remarks because in my life my right hand and eye have often been involved in sin.   And if everyone is honest, all of us would be even more maimed than a warring pirate; we would be totally impaired before a holy God, especially if such a God subscribed literally to the ancient "lex talionis," the law of the claw.  An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

How is it that we have decided that we don't have to live totally impaired lives before a holy God?  Because we have come to believe in God's mercy and forgiveness.  We have come to believe in God's tolerance of us as we live imperfect lives on a path of perfectability.

The beatitudes are artistic wisdom performance discourse from the mouth of Jesus.  Jesus performed this wisdom on behalf of lowly people who did not have significant community religious standing or inclusion because they couldn't keep up with all the religious rules.  It was also delivered as a rather severe polemic against religious figures such a scribes and Pharisees who had come to practice the exclusion of lots of people from God's love and grace.  How were they practicing exclusion?   They used the law as punishment and not as method of teaching the great principles of the law of loving God and one's neighbor.  For them the law was more about incarceration rather than rehabilitation.  Jesus came to say that the fulfillment was the law was to be the rehabilitation and instruction of our lives, not for our punishment.

When you perform all the ritual rules, the referees can be around to observe and check you off on their attendance and performance charts.  You can attain great public status by performing all of the required ritual and people can think that you are jolly good fellows and lasses.  You can be publicly praised for all your "righteous" behavior.  But from all of these strokes for good public religious behavior you can take it upon yourself to become the judge for those who are not doing as well as you are in keeping the public ritual practices.  Keeping the legalistic religious ritual can become equated with rightness before God; not keeping the ritual means that others can be regarded as not being right with God.  So one can begin to feel justified before God by keeping all of the religious rituals.

This is the mindset which drew from Jesus his rather hyperbolic and exaggerated discourse.  "Guys if you really want to play hard ball with the law and righteousness, you have to deal with righteousness on your insides.  On the outside, you may be following the religious rules because you can, but what's going on inside?  Are you hating your brother and sister?  Are you calling your brother a fool and an idiot?  Are you having greedy thoughts, lustful thoughts, prideful thoughts, are you trivializing the rules of divorce to even divorce your wife because you don't like her soup?  God who sees your insides demands internal holiness, so God could practice the law of the claw, "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth," with you."  Do we see how in the exaggerated speech of Jesus, he uses reductio ad absurdum; he showed the legalists the logical conclusion of their practices and how silly and contradictory such practices are.  We can use religious rules to look good in public, even while our insides can be rotten, especially rotten with negative judgments of other people who we want to compare ourselves with as being unfavorable because they are not keeping "our rules."

Jesus was teaching people that the laws, no matter how good and expansive you apply them cannot do the inside job.  And they can't make you perfect before God.   All people might do well with 9 of the 10 commandments but that 10th is the kicker.  Thou shalt not covet.  Thou shalt not let your desire focus wrongly on anything.  The inside desire is the real problem.  Jeremiah wrote "the heart is exceedingly deceitful and who can know it?"  Sigmund Freud wrote that the unconscious mind is polymorphously perverse.  The Psalmist begged, "Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me."

People can become legalistic as way to whistle in the dark as they try to avoid being honest about all of the contrary ways that inner desire can throw up in one's life.

Did Jesus have a problem with the law?  No, he didn't.  But he said don't use the law for the public performance of vows, to announce, "Look at me I'm really good at keeping the law."  Just let the law be good behavioral probability theory, a yes or a no, in recommended behaviors for avoiding some major problems in life.  Let the law teach you how to approximate justice.  You know, if you don't lie, don't kill, and don't steal, honor your family, your life will go better.  That's good behavioral probability theory.

Jesus was announcing that the performance of any law does not make one righteous; why?  Because we still have to deal with our insides.  It means that we are always in need of God's mercy and grace to make up what we lack.  It means we cannot compare ourselves with others to judge them harshly or to accept their harsh judgments.  God's grace is always relative to each person's life experience, which means we can't judge each other.  For me to be better today than yesterday, means something different for you and everyone else.  Personal repentance and God's grace is uniquely applied to each person; therefore we can't judge each other harshly.

But we do.  We can be so perversely competitive that we can ruin even good things.  St. Paul noticed that the Corinthian Church was ruining ministry, which is a good thing.  They did this by creating competition between Christian leaders.  The appearance of success in ministry is very relative.  Watering and planting is just as good as harvesting, though we may think that the ones who have the success of harvest are better than the people who plowed and planted without seeing any results.

What is the law of ministry?  Just do it, where you are.  We present ourselves to God to do what we're supposed to do where we are and damn the consequences or the results.

In ministry and in life, Jesus reminds us through the Sermon on the Mount, that it is in God's grace and forgiveness that we live and no matter what rule of life that we find ourselves committed to.  We cannot judge others as being bereft of God's grace because we know that our interior life is not always pure.  God can create in us the heart of the Holy Spirit who co-exists with our polymorphously perverse interior lives and thus present us as worthy to God, even as we tolerate ourselves in our unfinished condition.  And we humbly tolerate other people with forgiving and non-judgmental living.

Let us appreciate the stark language of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount as an invitation not to take our petty systems of legalism as a valid reason to judge others.  Let us understand that the high standards of the Sermon on the Mount bring us to one conclusion: accepting God's grace and forgiveness on our life journey.  And if we can accept it for ourselves, then we will also offer it to everyone else too.  And this is the Gospel.  Amen.

Be Salt and Light

5 Epiphany  A     February 9, 2020        

Isaiah 58:1-9a, (9b-12)  Psalm 112:1-9  

1 Corinthians 2:1-11  Matt.5:13-20

Lectionary Link

Since ordination, I have adopted the discipline of being a liturgical preacher.  What that means is that I accept the appointed lectionary readings for each Sunday, whether I like them or not.  Whether I feel like I want to preach on them or not.  The lectionary is part of the general curriculum of the church as we together read the same portions of Holy Scriptures on any given Sunday, and we use the Revised Common Lectionary, which is shared by other Christian Communions and denominations.

What are some of the challenges of lectionary preaching?  One, there is always too much to preach on since we read two selections from Hebrew Scriptures,  from the Torah, the writings, the prophets and the Psalms, and sometimes the Apocrypha.  We read from the Epistles or Acts of the Apostles and from the Gospels.  There is a natural tendency to focus on the themes in the Gospel, since we focus upon the life Jesus and we use the rest of the Scripture readings to, as it were, point to Jesus and his significance.   The second problem is that because the writing situations of biblical writings are so different and separated often by many hundreds of years, it is hard to find a way to match all of the themes into a unified theme for the day.  Sometimes one wants to scratch one's head and ask, "Why did the person who selected the reading choose this reading?"  And usually that is the lesson which gets avoided in one's preaching.

Sometimes to try to do justice to all of the Sunday readings, one might want to just compose ad hoc aphorisms to highlights some of the insights that arise from one's reading.  And so I offer some ad hoc aphorisms.

A major problem for people of faith is to disconnect what we do in church with the life outside of church.

The prophet Isaiah was concerned about the disconnect between religious practice and living.  He was suspicious of religious fasting when there were many starving people in society who had the involuntary fast of not having enough to eat.  What is the point of playing "righteousness" games in church liturgies, if justice is not practiced in society and church society for all people?

The Psalmist also opines:  What good is it to celebrate the blessing and fortune of one's wealth, if one does not lend to the needy to help them get started and if one's fortune of great wealth comes at the expense of the vast majority being quite poor?  Wealth is only a blessing if it allows one to be like God and share it abundantly.  The very few people who own most of the wealth of our world today miss the most important feature of having the gift of prosperity; which is sharing it in creative ways so the rest can have enough in gainful labor for the same.

These passages from Holy Scriptures present to us another way of viewing the world which does not conform to a natural survival of the fittest dynamic of all life; namely to preserve oneself first, at the cost of every other weaker being.  That natural selfish preservative facet of human life often comes to dominate how societies organize themselves and if law did not intervene with the threat of punishment, our world would be simply the powerful over-whelming the weak.

How do we over-come the natural tendency?  We need an experience of an inner power and wisdom of self-control to act beyond the instinct to preserve ourselves at all cost of others.

When I lived in Iran, I used to buy sandwiches from street vendors, some of whom would translate their menus into English.  One of my favorite vendors had posted:  Mind sandwiches and Language sandwiches.  This was quite humorous since they had gone to the dictionary and translated the Farsi words for tongue and brain, into English.  Wow if I could improve my language and mind through eating a sandwich that would be special indeed.

St. Paul suggested something quite radical regarding how he had become converted from persecuting the followers of Jesus to becoming a follower himself.  St. Paul confessed that he had had a brain transplant.  He said, "We have the mind of Christ."  Now that's quite a transplant.  But this is quite consistent with the message of Jesus and John the Baptist about the requirement of repentance.  Repentance in Greek is "meta-noia," the after-mind, the new mind, the re-newed mind.  And what does a new mind do?  The new mind sees things differently; the new mind sees things that it did not see before.  St. Paul called this "spiritual" seeing or insights.

What is the result of this new kind of spiritual seeing?  One of the results is that we become spicy people.  What does spice do to ordinary food?  It enhances new taste that was not previously known.  We are called to be the most basic spice of all, salt.  And the good news from Dr. Jesus is that he does not say we have to be low-sodium people; no, we are to be salty in enhancing the ordinary life experience of the people of this world.  What does being spicy mean?  It means that we activate our charisma in a way that helps to make us winsome to the people we need to be winsome with toward the Gospel values.  You and I are called to release continuously our charisma so that we can be salty, spicy people to help people discover the spiritual aspect of their lives.

We are also called to be lights of the world.  We are to live enlightened lives in thinking, in emotional intelligence, in social action and in justice because people need to find light and people need to find out the spiritual salt and spice of their lives.

We are called to be salt and light in this world.

What is the key to living lives of salt and light?  Jesus suggests that we understand law not as simply religious behaviors, like going to church or doing religious things; the law is simply the after description of authentic living.  The prophets criticized their societies for having religious rituals and legalism without the practice of authentic justice.   Jesus criticized some of the religious leaders of his time as being those who were duteous about prescribing religious ritual acts but the rituals were not connected with the true human needs of people.  

The way in which God's law is fulfilled happens when the law becomes the very description of how we live; it is why St. Paul wrote, "love fulfills the law."  When our life activity becomes salt and light for this world, then the law becomes fulfilled.  

Jesus was saying, "Do not hit people over the head with the Bible as a book of religious rules; rather let people read the deeds of our lives and say, "wow, that's the law of God, that is law of love and justice fulfilled in action."  The fulfillment of the law is when people see us live enlightened lives of love and justice.

So today, let seek to be salt and light through authentic living  and in such living people can read and discover the fulfillment of the law of God.  Go forth today and be salty people.  Be spicy people so that people will know that our lives are enhanced by the light of Christ.  Amen.

Jesus Was Ritual Participant and Innovator

The Presentation    February 2, 2014

Malachi 3:1-4   Ps.84:1-6

Heb. 2:14-18    Luke 2:22-40

Lectionary Link

   In ordinary time in most years, this would have been the Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany but because a Feast of our Lord falls upon Sunday, this feast takes priority and so this Sunday is the Feast of the Presentation, which ironically is also a feast for the mother of Jesus, since it is forty days after the period of "ritual impurity" following the birth of a child and according to rules she could re-enter the Temple and the public community with accompanying ritual offerings.  The 1928 Book of Common Prayer retained nuances of this in the Rite called the Churching of Women, which thankfully now is just Thanksgiving on the birth of a Child, since even the slight suggestion of impurity about the post-partum days is rather repugnant to us.    This day is also  called Candlemas, representing that Simeon referred to the Christ child as a light to enlighten the nations, a main theme of Epiphany.  It is a day when candles were traditionally blessed in the church.   I guess we today could have you bring your LED light bulbs to be blessed as a modern day counter part.
  It just so happens that today is also the day of two secular feasts, known as Super Bowl Sunday and Ground Hog Day.  Super Bowl Sunday is not an official Feast of the church, though it does affect attendance.  Ground Hog Day is an American folk holiday derived from Pennsylvania Germans and shows the genius of male lodging drinking behavior logic.  It has become a tourist event for Punxsutawney and if Punxsutawney Phil sees his shadow, then winter will be long. Preacher Phil got out of bed this morning and saw his shadow; does that mean that Lent will now 60 days this year instead of 40?
  I would like to make a ridiculous link between the cult movie Groundhog's Day and the Feast of the Presentation.  Jesus of Nazareth manifested his solidarity with human by being a completely ritual participant.  Jesus was circumcised on the 8th Day, he was presented on the 40th Day, he went to Temple and Synagogue, perhaps when he was mistakenly left in the Temple as a young boy, he was talking with the rabbi in preparation for something like a bar mitzvah, and we know that Jesus was baptized and we know that he attended synagogue and he observed the Passover meal.  Jesus was a ritual being.
  You may remember the plot of the movie Groundhog's Day.  Phil, the loud mouth weatherman gets trapped in Punxsutawney by bad weather while he's there to cover the "rat."  Strangely, Phil suddenly wakes up each day and is faced with reliving the exact events which happened the day before.  But something strange happens; Phil learns through being forced to repeat the same events.  He is able to begin each repeated day with a cumulative foreknowledge and he becomes someone who finally learns through repetition such that he wins the love of a colleague who had previously thought that he was a real jerk.  The moral of the story.  We have to repeat lots of things in the life and we are given repetition so that we can finally get it right.
  Life provides us only so many totally new happenings.  Life involves the repetition of things that happen over and over again.  Life is not a straight line, it is a spiral  so every morning we return to getting up and completing the same routines.  One of the purposes of repetition is the continual practice to do thing better.  And if we get good at something, like brushing our teeth, we don't even think about the repetition anymore; we have it on automatic redundancies and so we able to turn our attention to learn new things through repetitive learning.
  Positive repetition might be called good habits; negative repetition might be called bad habits or even addiction.
  How does human community inform and teach the best habits of human repetition in our behaviors?
  One of the way we promote the best of human behavior is from the ritual life of the community of faith.  The ritual life involves putting in holy playful rites, a representation of the great insights which came to people like Abraham, Moses, David and the prophets.
   Rituals are special repetitive acts within the overall life of repetition of people.  The rites concentrate the essence of the faith events which are meant to dissolve like a sugar cube and affect the rest of the repetitions in our lives toward positive repetitions of love, kindness, justice and hope.
  Jesus participated in the ritual life of his Judaic context.  But the repetitions of the life and ministry of Jesus were so profound and unique that the church was inspired to add to our ritual life in order anchor our community identity upon these Jesus inspired events.
  The Feast of this Day involves the purification of Mary who was allowed to come out of post-partum hiding after 40 days and bring her child to present at the Temple.  It was the ritual representation of the Passover event; a gift of a lamb was offered in the place of the eldest son to redeem his life.  At the presentation Mary was there offering gifts to redeem her son Jesus with gifts of turtledoves, symbolically borrowing the life of the son whose life belonged to God.
  Our Christian life is organized around ritual behaviors.  These behaviors are not meaningless; they are special repetitions and are devoted to dynamically remember the reality of the presence of Christ.  In our ritual life, we renew our identity with Jesus Christ.
  Jesus lived his life totally presented to God as God's special child.  St. Paul said we should also live lives presented to God.  "Brothers and sisters, I urge you through the mercies of God to present your lives, bodies and souls, totally acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service, spiritual ritual, spiritual worship.
  We can learn from the ritual life practice of Jesus as we enter into the remembrance rites which were inspired by his witness.
  Today, again we present ourselves to God at this altar.  In the gifts of bread and wine, we offer and present ourselves, our souls and bodies.  And as a gift we receive a renewal in the presence of Christ, signified in the partaking of the bread and the wine.  How close does the bread and wine get to us?  It becomes us, signifying how Real the presence of Christ is within us.
  The life of Jesus was completely presented to God; let us follow Christ in living lives fully presented to God.  Amen.

Divided by Having a Common Savior?

3 Epiphany A      January  26, 2020

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

Lectionary Link

George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde and others have said that the British and Americans are people who are divided by having a common language.  As Churchill asked Ike before D-Day, "General, why do you Yanks say SKEDULE;  we Brits, say correctly, SHED-UEL?"  And Ike replied, "Well, that's what we learned in SHHOOELL."

How many Communions, churches, and denominations call themselves Christian in our world?  Starbucks are more unified in their coffee products and shops than Christians are in their beliefs and practices.  We can ironically say that Christians are diverse people who are divided by having a common Savior.  What is more divided than the practice of Christians practicing "closed communion" with each other?

Yesterday, on January 25th, we finished the week of Christian Unity which is between the celebration of the Confession of St. Peter and the celebration of the Conversion of St. Paul.  This week of Christian Unity is the aspiration for Christians to pause and take note of what we agree on so that we don't let our differences result in the hateful excommunication of each others.

Holding unity and difference together in perfect reciprocity is the great task of life.  We are one humanity but living in significant differences.  We are one America but we are always threatened by the extreme polarization of our differences.  One might even think that Americans are living in the state of perpetual excommunication of each other, with different parties declaring the other as American heretics.  Americans are people divided by having a common Constitution, Pledge of Allegiance and Flag.  In fact the unity/diversity dynamic is even more local; husband and wife are often persons divided by having a common marriage.  Mother, father, son and daughter are often persons divided by having a common family.  On and on, the dynamic between unity and diversity are the big waves of life on which we try to surf without crashing to harm.

If unity and difference is a fact of the process of life, we need to learn how to exploit the strengths of unity and difference while minimizing the threats of both.  Unifying absolute power, corrupts absolutely, think Hitler and Stalin.  Splintering and isolating diversity creates chaos and open and even hurtful conflict.

The Church of Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit was a Gospel which in essence was saying we do unity and diversity in the most adequate and beneficial way.  We don't do it through the unity of a Caesar with an army able to force such unity; we don't try to limit unity as simply an isolated ethnic group consisting of ritually observant Jews.  This kind of unity is not accessibly offered to the entire world.  St. Peter and St. Paul believed that the unity and diversity dynamics of the Baptism of the Holy Spirit should be brought to the entire world in accessible and unrestricted ways.

But stating the aspiration of finding the best balance between unity and diversity is easier said than done.  And St. Paul found this out real quickly.  There was conflict arising within the Corinthian church to which he wrote.  Why?  Members of the Corinthian church were saying to each other, "My guru is better than yours.  I take my marching orders from Paul, or from Cephas, or from Apollos," or others were saying, "I take my orders directly from Christ."  Indeed Paul discovered that the Corinthian church was a church divided by having a common Christ.  One can see that much of the persuasive effort of St. Paul in his letter of Corinthians is devoted to persuade them to honor the diversity of ministry while serving the One Holy Spirit.  And the tour de force of Paul's letter to the Corinthians is the Love Chapter where he wrote that you can have everything, all the gifts, all knowledge, all sacrifice, but it means nothing without having Love.  Loving each other is what allows unity in diversity; not a trivial "liking" each other in having the same affinities on ritual rules or teacher preference.  These minor affinities cannot unify if they are magnified to be the primary basis of unity.

So what is the key to evangelism or the good news of God in Jesus Christ?  The Gospel lesson for today presents to us some of the original insights about evangelism.  Jesus of Nazareth called some simply fisher folk.  James and John and Peter and Andrew.  What do you think is the dynamic ingredient in the call of Christ?  It is love.  You won't willingly and cheerfully follow someone whom you don't love.  Jesus loved the people he called and they loved him.  This dynamic relationship is what is essential to the call of Christ.  How did Christ love these fishermen?  He went to where they were located in location and vocation.  He was not recruiting people with impressive resumes.   Most American Presidents have to have gone to Harvard or Yale.  Most English Bishops have to be Oxbridge people; graduates of either Oxford or Cambridge.  Jesus loved and called people because he went to where they were.  He did not say, "I'll check your resumes and make sure you have studied the Torah in the Hillel School, the Shammai School or Gamaliel School of rabbinical studies.  If you have the correct degree in the study of the Torah, I'll consider hiring you for the evangelical task."

No, what did Jesus say to them?  He said, "Follow me, and don't burn your bridges in your previous life experience.  You learned much as a fisherman.  You learned the patience of waiting for the catch.  You learned to accept the "how many," of the catch.  You learned community during the wait as you shared stories during rain or sunshine, or wind or calm.  So all of these virtues you learned in fishing, I want you to transform in learning how to relate to the people in your future.  You fishermen really love fish; well you evangelists are really going to love people whom you will meet.  And this love is going to help you call and catch people because your love is going to be shown in how you reach out to people where they are."

They will know that we are Christians by our love.  Love is the secret to evangelism.  Love is the secret to finding the ideal balance between unity and diversity.  And love is not easy because it involves the regard of justice, of giving each person his or her due.  Love is not the easy, mushy liking of others; love involves the deep regard for people for whom we might not have any natural like or affinity.

Today you and I are still called to fish for or catch people, but not a predators who want to feel good about ourselves if we can get people to agree with our Christian point of view.  "Wow, if I can get more people to agree with me and fill the pews that means my view is better."  No, church growth for its own sake, is not the loving and regarding call of Jesus Christ to which we are invited.

Today, you and I, are invited to catch people through the practice of accepting love of Jesus Christ.  And the people whom we accept may not be popular to other people.  Many churches have divided over who can be acceptable followers of Jesus Christ.  Many have left the Episcopal Church, Lutheran Church, Presbyterian Church and Methodist Church regarding who can be acceptable followers of Jesus Christ and full participating members within the church.

Today you and I are not here to agree about who our gurus of faith are.  We are not here to agree on all manner of taste, politics or sports teams.  We are here to be together to seriously engage the practice of love which guides the wisdom of finding how to honor unity and diversity in our midst.  And in finding a love which reconciles unity and diversity, we go forth to fish for people.  We invite them to be involved in our humble, always incomplete efforts at the practice of love; a love that honors the unique difference of each person, even while agreeing that the practice of love enables me to have the power to check my ego at the door to be involved in all of the good things we can do together as united Christians.  

So to live together well and to evangelize effectively, you and I have been and are called to follow Jesus Christ in the practice of Love. Full stop.  Amen.