Unforgivable Sins; Forgivable Sinners

2 Pentecost  Cycle B  proper 5 June 10, 2012  

Psalm 130     Genesis 3:8-15
2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1   Mark 3:20-35

Lectionary Link
Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, a Dutchman was the inventor who used mercury in glass tubes to standardize the recording of temperature.  Using this measuring standard, scientific laws have been stated, like "water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit at sea level."

And so I ask the question: Does stating this Scientific Law, actually make water boil?  Of course not, which leads me to my favorite quote from the philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead.  He said, "The laws of science are statistically approximate; not causatively absolute."  This was his fancy way of stating that just because science states a law, the stating of the law does not make the event happen.

Many religious people treat the words of the Bible as though they were causatively absolute: Because of the words written in the Bible, this made life happen in the way that  it did and does.

Actually, the words of the Bible are "statistically approximate" explanations of inspired people who were trying to grapple with the great problems of life.

The Genesis story as a causative scientific law does not make any sense; the Genesis story as inspired insights about human life and the human dilemma is brilliant.

Christians have wanted to make an actual historic event call the Fall into a causatively absolute event.  Why do you and I sin?  Well, it all started at a sure and certain historical event when Eve was tricked by the serpent to eat of the forbidden fruit and invited Adam to do the same and this has caused everyone after Adam and Eve to be sinful from birth.

Eve said, "The devil made me do it."  God said, "You have sinned and now that you are imperfect, you cannot live in a perfect environment because your imperfection would ruin it and so you are banished from perfection and you now must bear the effects of your sin.  And that sin will infect your environment and your environment will be full of competitive systems.  Weeds will grow and compete with your crops.  Earthquakes and hurricanes and fires will not be coordinated with your human schedule and people will be in harm's way.  People will be born with physical defects, imperfection and impairments."

Fundamentalist use the Bible in a "causatively absolute way."  Things are the way they are specifically because the words of Bible caused them to be this way.

On the other hand, one can see in this inspired story, the beautiful account of how each baby is expelled from the perfect Eden of mom's womb and is forced to live a separated life outside of mom  and learn to "fend" for oneself.  And in fending for oneself, we all eat the forbidden fruit of "selfishness," and we learn the knowledge of good and evil from the actual experience of losing our innocence by being held more and more accountable in our loss of the infant state of naïve innocence.

Life outside of the garden of Eden of mom's womb can get very complicated because we don't end up getting perfectly mentored.  We pick up the imperfections of our environments and the influences found there.  We can forget how to treat everyone with respect because as separate agents we are perpetually fending for ourselves even if it is at the expense of others.  We find ourselves craving for larger and larger pieces of the public pie even as we know that some are getting more and some less.

We can come to be frightened by our own actions and our own motives for why we do the things that we do.  And there can occur all variety of internal turmoil within ourselves.  Each of us, is more or less successful or failing in knowing how to deal with our internal lives.  There can arise the apparent lack of control of the interior lives in such chaos that there seems to be inward, powerful and impure forces which dictate acting out behaviors of addiction and harm to self and others.

In the time of Jesus, there were religious classification of psychological and spiritual states:  In the purity code of Judaism, a person's inner life could be designated as "Impure" or "unclean."  A person whose behaviors did not properly comport to some obvious community standards of "sanity" could be designated as having or being possessed by an "unclean spirit."  In the Greek of the New Testament, such also came to be call a "daimon" or demon, meaning a personified controlling impulse.

Part of the healing work of Jesus was spiritual and psychological.  Jesus was like a shaman; he had a way of getting inside of people to whisper them to peace of mind.  The ability of Jesus to whisper such wild people, fascinated everyone whose lives had suffered at the hands of such wild people.  How could Jesus be such a people whisperer?  He had to have a profound authority of an extraordinary kind, of a spiritual and divine kind.

The healing success of Jesus is something that should make all people glad.  Why wouldn't people be happy about someone being healed?  It's as though a sick person from Rochester, MN, home of the Mayo Clinic, came to Stanford hospital and got cured and the people of Mayo Clinic responding: "The cure happened because those quack physicians at Stanford used methods of the devil to make the person better.  Only authentic healing can take place through the Mayo Clinic."

The Gospel lesson is a lesson about professional jealousy that became so bad that when Jesus whispered a man back to spiritual and mental health, his competitors said, "he made a pact with the devil to accomplish this."  Those who wanted to discount the ministry of Jesus were so vicious as to call something good, evil and done through evil means."

After eating the forbidden fruit, Eve said, "The devil made me do it."  When the religious rivals of Jesus saw the healing work of Jesus, they said, "The devil made you do and assisted you to do it."

Jesus, who did spiritual work because of the Holy Spirit,  said that such a sin against the Holy Spirit was unforgivable.  And if this seems extreme, it could be that all sins are unforgivable since God cannot say any sin was or is ever "okay."  Sins are behaviors which come from a person who is sinful.  The sinner is forgivable even while the sins are not.  It may seem like a subtle distinction but it's an important one.  The sinner while in the state of sinning is not in a state of forgiveness.

The Gospel for us today is coming to know ourselves in the family of God as brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ.  John's Gospel states that we are "born not of the will of the flesh, but born of God."  We show our family identity by obeying the will of God.  What is the will of God?  The will of God is to know ourselves as forgiven.  Each of us got evicted from the perfect Eden of our mother's womb and we have come to know ourselves as wounded and separated from each other with some behaviors of alienation, behaviors of sin.  We express the will of God by loving God, our neighbors and ourselves as God's valuable children.

Jesus came to remind us that even though we lived in mother's womb we have always lived in the great womb of God, or as St. Paul quoted, "We live and move and have our being in God."  We are in God and when we don't act as though we are part of God's family, living "in God" we act out in sinful behaviors which derive from our sense of alienation from God.

Doing God's will, begins by acknowledging and discovering that we live and move and have our being in God.  Knowing this is to live a life of being forgiven and learning to cooperate with all goodness, love and justice wherever we find it.

Jesus Christ came to teach us what forgiveness means.  He came to help us tolerate and survive the effects of our "unforgivable sins" and make our hearts pure by giving us his Holy Spirit.  And in the power of the Spirit, we receive the freedom to do the will of God.  Amen.

Good Laws Can Be Used Wrongly

2 Pentecost, B proper 4  June 3, 2018
Deuteronomy 5:12-15  Psalm 81:1-10
2 Corinthians 4:5-12  Mark 2:23-3:6

Lectionary Link

We pride ourselves for being a nation of laws and the mother of our laws is the U.S. Constitution.  Laws recommend the behaviors for just and fair living together as people; because when individual people live in proximity with each other, competing egos can be a recipe for continuous conflict.  So, we have laws that recommends the personal boundaries that must be honored between people and parties.

The people of Israel were a people who maintained their identity because of their famous Law, the laws that were written in the Torah.

The Jews and Christians had quite a big problem in the first century.  The Torah was revealed as both a religious law and a law for general society.  In that way, the Torah was a law like the Islamic Sharia, since it assumed a theocratic society where religious law and social laws were united in one body of law.

In the time of Jesus, a theocratic state of Israel governed by the Torah was not the situation.  Why?  The Roman Emperor controlled the world and so Roman law was the official and telling law of Israel, even though the Jewish religious authorities could exercise a certain autonomy for the practice of religious laws within their Jewish community.

 St. Paul and Jesus both knew that the Torah was not the law that governed in the Roman World of their time.

The Jewish religious authorities were under great pressure.  They had to become rigid about the practice of their religious rules within their community.  They feared assimilation of their community to the foreign values of the Roman invaders.  Many Jews compromised their religious observance to interact with Romans.

How do the people of an occupied country maintain their separation and their community identity?  The leaders promoted with great deliberation not just the big Laws of the Torah, the Ten Commandments but also the 603 other laws of the Torah.  Under Roman control, it was very difficult for people not to be compromised by quite different lifestyle of the Roman citizens.

If we understand the situation in Palestine, we can appreciate why Jews, followers of Jesus and St. Paul were apocalyptic people.  They were realistic about Roman control; the only way Roman control would be defeated would be by a direct act of God to bring deliverance.  God delivered Israel from Egypt, but God did not deliver the Jews or the Christians from the Roman political control of their world.

What did Paul and Jesus do when they knew that the Torah would not be the law of the Roman Empire?  They taught a different kind of legal thinking which could be adapted to the situations of peoples' lives.

For St. Paul, one could say he shortened the meaning of the law to the word "love."  He wrote that if one loved, then one fulfilled the law.  How was the law of love expressed in the words of Jesus?  He returned to the summary of the law.  Jesus said, the law is all about love.  "Love God with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself."

A big issue was this:  Could the law of God be adapted to a society and a world that was not under the control of Torah law?

For Paul and for Jesus, law was all about love.

If the law is all about love, can the enforcement of laws be used for unloving purposes?  Laws can be applied in ways that contradict the greater law of love.

If it is against the law to heal someone on the Sabbath, then the law is a contradiction to the law of love.

Jesus cited his opponents for their petty application of the law.  He showed them that they were not consistent in their applications of their laws.  If they would retrieve their animal from the ditch on the Sabbath, why would they oppose the healing of a person on the Sabbath?  Even David ate the holy and restricted bread when he and his soldiers were hungry.  The religious leaders were presented by the Gospel writers as  using the laws in a petty way for the purposes of opposing Jesus and his charismatic authority among the people who were following him.

Today, we live a similar situation.  The U.S. Constitution is not Christian law; it is not Torah law.  It derived mainly from Common Law traditions in Europe and from Roman Law.

The early Christians lived in the Roman Empire; they practiced the law of love, the law of Jesus.  And the practice of this love proved to be very persuasive.  And you know what happened?  It turned out that Christians did not need an apocalyptic end of the world to take over the Roman Empire.  The power of the love of Jesus won the day.

There are Christians today who want Christian laws to dominate our society.  They decry our "non" Christian society.  But we need to remember the words and lives of both Jesus and St. Paul.  Christian evangelism is not about being able to force people to be Christians by legislation: it is about living lives of love in persuasive ways.  God's way cannot be forced on anyone because then people would not free to choose; but God's love can persuade people especially when people witness the love in the words and lives of people who have been won over to the love of Christ.

Let us have wisdom about the laws of society and the laws of church; and let us never forget to 

practice the law of love as revealed in the life of Jesus Christ.  Amen

Why Are We Trinitarian?

Trinity Sunday b  May 27, 2018  

Isaiah 6:1-8  Psalm 29
Romans 8:12-17   John 3:1-17

 Lectionary Link

Today is Trinity Sunday and therefore the topic of the sermon is obvious: Baseball.  Why? because the Trinity is too mysterious and controversial.  Just kidding. And so you won't think that my sermon is pointless, here are the points.  The words of Jesus.  The words of Paul and other New Testament writers. The baptismal formula.  The Apostles Creed.  The retroactive Trinity.  The Nicene Creed.  The Trinity for you and me.

Why are we Christians Trinitarian in our beliefs?  Mainly because of the words of Jesus both from the oral tradition and from the oracle tradition of the words of Jesus.  The oracle tradition are the words that Jesus channeled through the Holy Spirit because he gave the disciple authority to speak in his name and they like Paul could say, "We have the mind of Christ."  The words of Jesus promote the relationship between Jesus as his Father.  He taught his disciples to regard God as their intimate parent, even to be on a mommy/daddy intimate relationship with God.  To teach such intimacy of God, Jesus was the uniquely intimate Son of God who invited us to be brothers and sisters and sons and daughters of God.  The intimate relationship with God involved a conduit Person, the Holy Spirit.  And Jesus promised that this Holy Spirit would continue to be his Conduit relationship with his followers after he was gone.

The words of St. Paul, many of which came to textual form before the words of Gospel, include the relationship of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, sometimes included in a formulaic benediction in his writings, invoking the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit equally upon the lives of those in his churches.

The Trinity was crucial to the Christian Rite of Initiation, Holy Baptism.  The last words of Jesus found in the Gospel of Matthew was the evangelical command:  Go into all the world and preach the Gospel, making disciples and baptizing them in the Name of the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit.  If you have been baptized, you were baptized in the Name of the Trinity.  These are the essential words of the Christian Rite of Holy Baptism.

Part of the early baptismal rites included questions regarding one's belief.  Do you believe in God the Father?  Do you believe in God the Son?  Do you believe in God the Holy Spirit?  Each baptismal candidate responded, "I believe in the God the Father.....I believe in God the Son....I believe in God the Holy Spirit."  This question and answer format for the baptismal rite became what we know to be the Apostles Creed which is still used in question and answer form at baptism, but also at Morning and Evening Prayer as well as in the Rite of Christian Burial.  At one's baptism one confesses a belief in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.  One does not make a confession about how God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit are understood in their relationship.  The relationship confession about the Trinity would come later in the history of the early churches when the Nicene Creed was generated.

Next, I would like to mention what I call the "Retroactive Trinity."  By this I mean, that if the Trinity is how God always was, how can one find the Trinity in Hebrew Scriptures?  The Jews do not confess a belief in the Holy Trinity; they confess a strict monotheism.  How can Christians claim the Hebrew Scriptures of the Jews as being Trinitarian.  Christian apologists found the Trinity, "retroactively" in the Hebrew Scriptures.  I'll give one example: The Creation Story includes the Holy Trinity.  God the Father Spoke the Words of Creation.  Jesus Christ was the Word of Creation that God the Father spoke.  And the Holy Spirit was the Breath and Wind of God which moved over the face of the abyss to cause creation to happen.  There you have it: Retroactive Trinity.  All three were involved in Creation.

Next, is the Trinity of the Council of Nicaea in 325.  One can say that it wasn't until then that the public consciousness of the Trinity was so evident.  The Trinity had moved from being hidden and implicit during the time of Jesus and the early church to becoming explicit doctrine and canon law in the aftermath of the Council of Nicaea in 325.  In the Nicene Creed we have the Trinity as an administrative, political and legal truth of the Church.  The Apostles Creed is about "that you believe in God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit."  The Nicene Creed is about "how you believe in God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit."  Why did this become important?  Christianity was successful in the Roman Empire.  The Emperor Constantine, like typical politicians, embraced this success of Christianity, but he also was aware of the fighting between Christians.  Christians disagreed about God and about how they expressed the relationship between God the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit.  Constantine called the Bishops of all the churches in the Empire to gather in Nicaea to standardize Christian teaching so that disagreements would not divide his empire.  The Council of Nicaea was a heated Church Convention.  It ended with a Creed and statements of Canon Law.  In the Creed, it is state that God is Three Persons who are equally God in their personal substance.  The bishops used Greek philosophical notions to speak of God as three Persons who were equally One God.  The majority vote of bishops won at Nicaea, but a majority of Christians were "excommunicated" because of the Council of Nicaea.  The Canon Law stated, "If anyone believes to the contrary of what we have stated, let them be anathema."  This is a polite way of saying, "let them go to hell." It took more than a century for the beliefs of Nicaea to become generally accepted, because many local rulers continued to protect bishops who did agree with the teachings of the Council.

Today, we in general accept the formula of the Nicene Creed, probably without thinking about what they mean.  We probably do not appreciate the Greek philosophical distinctions used by the Church Fathers to state the relationship between God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.  So, where do you and I stand with the Trinity today?  When you pray, who do you pray to?  Do you give Jesus more time than the Father or the Holy Spirit?  When you pray to God, do you just assume all three?  When you meditate how do you understand the involvement of the Trinity?

How can you and I appropriate a functional and relevant understanding of the Trinity for our lives today?

I begin with John's Gospel.  In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.  All things came into being through Word.  You and I are human because we are worded beings; we are language users and because we use word, we name everything including ourselves as language users.  And we name human experience.  We name the experience of God in human experience.  We can easily name God as our Father or Creator, in the sense that we know we did not self create; we came from a Plenitude of Everything.  Secondly, we accept our worded-human experience as a valid way to come to know about God.  What gives us permission to regard our human experience as a valid way to know God?  This is where God the Son is known.  God became human and embraced and validated human experience as a way to know God.  How could humanity know God if God did not permit the Divine Person to be Bi-lingual.  Jesus as God's Son is proof to us that God is bi-lingual knowing both the divine and human experience completely.  If we speak about God, the perfect bi-lingual Son is unavoidable.  Next, in our human experience we are aware of not being alone.  Space between us is not a vacuum.  There is a conduit between everything that allows mutual experience to be conducted.  How can you know me if you are not me and how can I know you without being you?  The Holy Spirit is God's Omnipresence which means that mutual relationship is conducted between us and within us.  I regard this to be the unavoidable mystery of God in human experience and this Mystery is the Holy Spirit.

Finally, why is it relevant to refer to God as Persons?  As people we define God as the greatest.  To speak about God is to use the superlative case of human attributes.  One of the highest things we think about ourselves is that we have personality.  A person is someone who is in relationship.  Being relational persons is what defines human psychology and sociology.  And if we want to speak about a great God, we believe that Ultimate relationship begins with God as a dynamic union of Personalities.  In confessing God as Trinity, we believe that love expresses perfect relationship between persons.  And we confess that Perfect Loving United Relationship begins in God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

And so I confess the Trinity as being unavoidable in my relationship with God today.  I hope that the Trinity will be for you today, not just a confession or church doctrine, I hope it will be your intimate love relationship with God today.  Amen.

Is Jesus Translatable and Does He Have a Future?

Day of Pentecost   May 24, 2015

Acts 2:1-21  Psalm 104: 25-35,37
Romans 8:22-27  John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15
Lectionary Link

Today is Whitsunday, and probably more people were in Virtual Church on the Eve of Whitsunday than have ever actually been in church.  The Eve of Whitsunday occasion was of course the Royal Wedding of Prince Harry and the American actress, Meghan Markle.  And with the wedding and the FA Cup on the same day, one could say that Britannia Ruled the Waves again, the air waves of world public attention. The world watched the wedding and such a wedding is what we can actually be unified about.  I don't think that this wedding will bring an errant colony back into the United Kingdom, but it was an Anglican witness to the feast of Pentecost which we observe today.  I'm not even referring to the fiery sermon of our Presiding Bishop Michael.  I did feel sorry for the wedding guests who probably were not accustomed to such sermon energy; it's hard to keep a stiff upper lip when your jaw has fallen on the floor.

The liturgy, the music, the fiery sermon were all very special and unique but the liturgy was a distinct Anglican witness to the feast of Pentecost.  How so?  The liturgy was taken from the Common Worship, which has been a Book of Common Prayer Supplement for the Church of England since the year 2000.  One could notice the use of  more contemporary English language in liturgical forms for the Marriage Service.

The Book of Common Prayer is a historic and public event of the recovery of one of the original impulses of the Feast of Pentecost.  How so?

For many years, the Western Christian Church was trapped by limiting the public prayers of the church to an uncommon language for the people of England, Latin.  Latin was for the clergy and the scholars and in the church, the liturgy was "performed" on behalf of people who did not understand what was being said.

On the day of Pentecost, fifty days after Easter, a mighty statement of universality was proclaimed.  What was this great statement of universality?  It was demonstrated that the message of the love of God in Jesus Christ could be translated into all of the known language of the world.  The message of Christ was not just for those who been born in the Hebrew language tradition; the message of Christ was to be made known and accessible to everyone in the world.

When the Book of Common Prayer came to be used in 1549, it represented a recovery of the Holy Spirit of Pentecost.  With Common Prayer, we celebrate that God's life accessible to everyone.  The name of Jesus, Emmanuel, means God with us and if God is with us God communicates with us in ways that we can understand and in the languages of our understanding.   And we today, continue in the Pentecost tradition as found in our Book of Common Prayer.  But we do not use the Book of Common Prayer as a way to establish these prayers as exclusive prayers.  They are model prayers in our English language to encourage us to make at all times and all places our prayers common and natural to the ways in which we've been taught to offer our very best communication with God and each other.  We don't have our wonderful Book of Common Prayer as the exhaustive prayers of the church; they are model prayers for our corporate use and they are meant for us to be inspired to speak prayers in ways that are common to us when we prayer in private or when together.

Pentecost means that the love of God in Christ is translatable to everyone in this world.  And it our Pentecostal ministry to live our lives in such Holy Spirit inspired ways that we translate the meaning of the love of Christ to the people whom we meet.  This is our Pentecostal duty.

What else does Pentecost mean for us today?  The words of Jesus in John's Gospels tells us what Pentecost means?  It means that even though Jesus left this world, he would still have an endless future in this world.  What did the church of the Gospel of John understand Jesus to be saying to them? "When the Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who comes from the Father, he will testify on my behalf.... it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.....I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you."  Why did the Gospels get written?  Why did the letters of Paul and the other New Testament writers get written?  Because through the Holy Spirit, the message of Jesus Christ continued to be made known in the world.   The future of God the Father and God the Son is guaranteed because of the Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit is the inner personal constitution of Christ as God's Word from the Beginning and God's word from the beginning keeps being transmitted and perpetuated into every new generation of people.  The Holy Spirit is the transhistorical presence and reality of Christ.  God the Father and Jesus Christ have a future in our lives because of the reality of the Holy Spirit.

Today on Pentecost Sunday, you and I are invited to "get in the Spirit."  And we literally can't do that, why?  Because the Spirit is God's Omni-presence that we always already live in because God is the Container of all life.  We "get" in Spirit by recognizing that God already contains us.  Getting into the Spirit means we give up alienation from God.  Letting the Spirit get into us means that we intentionally accept the apparent work of God's Spirit leading us into the fruits of love, joy, peace, gentleness, goodness, patience, faith, self-control and humility.

Let us today, as we begin the season of Pentecost determine to translate the love of God in Christ into the languages of the life styles of the people who are brought into our lives.  And let us accept the Holy Spirit as the future of Jesus Christ in our world and also as our continuing future with God beyond our earthly lives.  Amen.

Mothers Pray; Jesus Prays too

7 Easter  B    May 13, 2018

Acts 1:15-17, 21-26   Psalm 1

1 John 5:9-13  John 17:6-19

Lectionary Link

Today on the Sunday after the Ascension, we've read the Gospel which includes the "true Lord's Prayer."  What is often called the Lord's Prayer, is more rightly called the "Our Father" or the pray that Jesus taught his disciples to use.

The "Lord's prayer" in John's Gospel, which is more of a mystical discourse, is not found in the other Gospels which were written before John's Gospel.  One does not fully understand how anyone could have gotten so much access into the private prayers of Jesus to be able to give a verbatim account of a prayer of Jesus.

John's Gospel was written rather late and so it includes within it the beliefs, practices and the mysticism of the early church.  The form of writing was done by writers who believed that they had the "mind" of Christ and so such inspired writers could be oracles for the prayers of Christ whom they believed to be ascended and was seated next to God the Father and who was interceding on behalf of his disciples and friends.  One clue of this might be the phrase: "While I was with them...."  So if Jesus was no longer "with" the disciple when he was offering this prayer, where was he?

This prayer discourse of Jesus teems with so many meanings, I can only edit a few from it for our faith meanings today.  I would suggest to you a few words to ponder from this prayer attributed to Jesus, perhaps in his ascended state and channeled through the Gospel writer.

Here are some Johannine words: Name, World, Being One and Sanctify.

Onama is the Greek for "name."  The name of God and the name of Jesus is a big thing in the Gospels.  To know the name of God and Jesus was not like getting a listing of names from a directory.  Knowing the name of God and Jesus was a very secret and mystical thing.  Knowing the name of God and Jesus occurred when one had come into an intimate relationship with God and Jesus.  In the Hebrew Scriptures communities and until today, the name of God was unknowable in the sense that it was so great one could not presume to pronounce it.  But we Christians, have presumed to pronounce it as "Jehovah" or "Yahweh."  

An Arab proverb is based upon a belief that there were 100 names of God but human beings only know 99 names because the 100th name is a secret.  Hence the riddle: Why does the camel always have a silly grin on his face?  Because he knows the 100th name of God and he is not telling.

Jesus stated in his prayer, "I have made known your name to them."  And what was God's name for Jesus?  It was Father.  Or for St. Paul, God's name was the intimate word for Father: "Abba."  Simply "Daddy! " Who can rightly use the name "Daddy?"  Only a beloved child who has this special intimate, adoring and adorable relationship.  Such a name seems so secret and restrictive because it means that one has come into the qualifying relationship to know God in such an intimate way.  Jesus was saying that he had such an intimate relationship with God as his Father to be qualified to bring his disciples from his credible status to a similar intimate relationship with God so that as children we could know God in such intimate personal terms as "Daddy" or "Mommy."   On this day, "Mommy," might be a fitting name of intimate relationship with God, too.  Jesus shared an intimate familial relationship with God with those who were made sons and daughters of God.  The Gospel for you and me today:  You and I can be on intimate terms with God too.

The next word of the prayer of Jesus:  World or in Greek Kosmos.  In John's Gospel, God loved the world, God came to save the world, but humanity being a part of the world was not supposed to love the things of the world or be of the world.  So world meant all of the external created order but also it meant having a wrong relationship to the external order, in the sense that we project our desire upon all of the things in our world and are often brought to idolatry reflected in our addictive behaviors.  Jesus told Nicodemus that he needed to be born again or born from above.  He needed to be born and live from within the inner spiritual world so that he could love the world through God's love and not through addicting desire.  In this prayer of Jesus, Jesus asks that his disciples might attain this right relationship with the world.  Our interior lives need to be so rightly constituted that we know how to relate to the external world with care and concern and enjoyment but avoid idolatry and addiction.  The Gospel for you and me today:  Let us learn to love the world through God's love and not be slaves to our projected desires.

The next words are "that they might be one as we are one."  In John's Gospel Jesus said, "I and the Father are one and if you have seen me, you have seen the Father.  In John's Gospel, Jesus also claimed identity with the holy name of God when he said, "Before Abraham was, I am."   In a world of diversity and difference how can we talk about unity or oneness?  I am not you, you are not me; how can we be one?  The unity of identity found in what might be called a harmony is what characterized the sense of belonging or merging and this is found in the language of mystical experience.  I have become one with all things.  St. Paul experienced this identity and merging with Christ:  "I have been crucified with Christ and I live, yet not I, for Christ lives within me."  

In contrast the neurotic man, Woody Allen wrote about his mystical experience, he wrote, "I am two with nature."  Being two with nature and all things expresses the alienation of sin.  Accepting the One Community of Everything in a profound sense of connectedness is the Oneness that Jesus prayed that his disciples would know and experience.  He prayed that they might know this oneness of intimacy, just as Jesus knew it with his Father.  Sometimes church leaders use this prayer to talk about unity among all of the Christian groups, but the oneness is much more profound than simple church agreements.  The Gospel for you and me today:  Jesus prays that we will have this continuous mystical experience of connectedness known through harmonic relationship with everything.

The last word from the prayer of Jesus that I would like for us to consider is "sanctify."  This is one of those special religious words used so often that we don't know what it means.  And even when we say, to sanctify means to make holy, what does holy mean?  Jesus prayed for his disciples: "Sanctify them in the truth; your word is the truth."  This is the way that I understand sanctify:  It means to be drawn to participate and devote oneself to the highest possible value of life.  Life and the life of words is a process of attaining values in life.  Attaining value is a progressive adventure of life and we are helped to attain values by the most enlightened examples in our environment.  The Ten Commandments set the worship of the One God as the supreme value of life.  Following the 10 Commandments and living in an environment that enforces them can help us teach, practice and learn right social behaviors but the commandments as coming from our external world can present us with demands that we find them hard to live up to.  This is why we need the interior expression of the Higher Power of the Holy Spirit.  The work of the Holy Spirit is to sanctify us.  That is, the Spirit calls us to our most inward Self and from this Inward Self we attain the power to keep the law of self-control over the behaviors of our lives.  Jesus said to the Father, "Your word is truth."  Jesus also said that such words were Spirit and life.  We need to discover the inner constitution of the words of our lives to maintain us in the highest values.  The progressive discovery of life is to discover sublime values and then organize in intentional ways our entire lives around these sublime and supreme values.  The intentional organization of our lives around the sublime values of our lives is how we participate in the sanctification of our lives by God's Holy Spirit.

Today, we are asked to believe that Jesus in his ascension into the interior abode referred to as "heaven" is there praying for us and the people of the world.

What is he praying?  That we identify with God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit and so know the secret and intimate name of God as children of God.  That even though we live within the attractions and distractions of the external world, we learn how to live in this world and love the world through the love of God and not through addicting desire. Thirdly, we learn the secret of unity in the midst of difference and diversity.  We choose the harmony of oneness in difference and always live in the Spirit of connectedness and integration with all that is.  Finally, we live sanctified in God's truth; that is we accept the Sublime presence of God found in the highest values known to us and we intentionally organize our lives around these sublime values.

Today on Mother's Day, let us be thankful that our mothers never stopped praying for us.  And in so doing, they entered into the prayer ministry of Jesus Christ, who ever prays for us and in and through us.  Amen.

Is Mom a Prayer Ninja?

7 Easter  B    May 13, 2018

Acts 1:15-17, 21-26   Psalm 1
1 John 5:9-13  John 17:6-19

Lectionary Link

Georgie came home from school one day and said to his mom, "Mom, did you come to school today?"  His mom said, "No, Georgie, I was not at your school today; why do you ask?"  Georgie said, "Well, when I was at school, it felt like you were there.  I thought someone was behind me rubbing my back and shoulder.  And I would turn around to greet you and then not see you.  Why did I think and feel and act like you were with me?"  Mom said to Georgie, "Georgie, I've got a little secret; I am like a silent Ninja Mom.  I can make you feel like I'm with you even when I'm not."  Georgie said, "Wow!  Is that for real?  How do you do that?"  Mom said, "Well, I'm not really a Ninja Mom, but I do have a secret."  Georgie said, "What is your secret?"  Mom said, "Well, I pray for you all of the time.  And because I pray for you, I feel connected with you all of the time.  It is like the thoughts of my prayers develop long reaching arms and hands and follow you around during the day when I cannot be with you.  So when I pray for you, it is like I am magically with as a Ninja Mom."  Georgie said, "Wow!  That's cool.  So when I alone, I can just think about you.  When it is dark in my bedroom at night, I can know that you are with me."  Mom said, "That is right Georgie, but also when you thinking about taking a cookie from the cookie jar right before dinner, I am there with you too."  Georgie said, "I guess that is when I would pretend you're not with me.  But why are we connected with prayers?"

Mom said, "Jesus was God's Special Son.  He prayed to his Father and he always felt connected with God his Father.  Jesus also prayed for his disciples and friends.  He asked that they might feel connected to him even when they did not see him.  He prayed that they might have a relationship with God the Father, like the one he shared with God his Father.  And when Jesus did not see the disciples; when he was gone from this earth, his prayers reached out and touched his disciples because he left his Holy Spirit inside of each of his disciples.  This is how we can be connected with each other even when we don't see each other.  And when we pray for each other we can celebrate our connection."

Georgie asked,"Mom, can I be a prayer Ninja too?  Can I reach and connect to you and dad and nana and papa when I pray?"  Mom said, "Yes, you can and I am very happy to know that you will pray for me."

Georgie said, "Mommy, Happy Mother's Day.  I love you.  Thank you for being a special Prayer Ninja for me."

Mom said," Georgie, Let us thank Jesus who prays for us and helps us each to be prayer Ninjas."  Amen.

Goal of Life: Friendship with Christ

6 Easter b         May 10, 2015
Acts     Ps. 33:1-8,18-22
1 John 4:7-21      John 15:9-17      

Lectionary Link What is the official name of the Quakers?   The Religious Society of Friends.  And certainly such a designation would find some basis in the Gospel of John.

We have read the words of Jesus to his disciples:  "I have called you friends."  This comes immediately after the discourse on the Vine and the branches and the injunction to "abide" in Christ.

I think one of the ways that we can understand this Gospel lesson today is something like a "graduation" ceremony.  What happens when one gets a diploma?  One receives certification from a governing body.  The diploma gives a person the permission and privilege to begin to practice a career or a profession.  Why does one receive a diploma?  One has followed the rules and the requirements for the particular degree.  One learns the rules and the requirements of a profession so that one can teach others to do the same and so that one can model the rules and requirements by the practice of one's life.

Jesus said to his disciples, "I no longer call you servants or students subject to teaching conditions of rules and regulations.  Your status has changed, you have graduated and now I call you friends, fellow teachers of our program to promote a loving friendship with God and a loving friendship with each other.

The early Jesus Movement was all about friendship and befriending.  One can understand the Gospel of John as a discipleship manual within the Jesus Movement.  The goal of Christian spirituality was to come to know Christ as one's friend.

The friendship experience with Christ represented a break through event in discipleship, in mystical training.  At first one can seem like a servant in the process of discipleship.  Training oneself to learn new behaviors can seem at times to be very difficult.  It is like discipline in any path of excellence.  Like learning to play the piano.  One practices and practices and struggles with endless scales and it can seem boringly repetitive but suddenly there is a break through; it's as though the piano chooses you and all of the rules of practice become automatic and suddenly one is possessed with lyricism and the piano seems to say, "you are my friend."

In the mystical practice of the early Christians, the members were attracted by a spiritual path of realizing a special friendship with Christ.  There was the camaraderie with fellow devotees on the spiritual path.  There were teachers who encouraged disciples and students to keep on the path.

Becoming a friend of Christ is to arrive at lyrical spiritual experience.  You are my friends if you do what I command you.  How can love and commandment be mentioned together?   St. Paul wrote that to love is to fulfill the commandments of the law.  Love is lyrical living and it is when following the commandments have become so internalized that they have become the habit of one's life.

One could say that they main reason that the Gospel of John was  written was so that people could come to know a friendship experience with Christ.  In friendship there is a permissive freedom that does not happen when one is not a friend.  In friendship there is such a mutual regard without divisive rigid egos.  It is not difficult to lay down one's life for one's friends.  The life referred to here is the "pseuche" life/soul life, or the particular ego state in how one's emotions, mind and will are constituted.  With one's friends one does not worry about hurt feelings, or having different opinions of the mind or freedom of choice.  In friendship love, there is mutual regard of being in the peak state of relationship.

Jesus spoke about an intimate friendship.  John's Gospel presents a dynamic Trinitarian friendship.  Friendship begins within God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  The image of divine friendship spills into the created order.  Jesus told his non-mystical literal disciples, "If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.  The Father and I are one."  Jesus had arrived at a place of never seeing himself as being apart from the Plenitude of God.  He was always, already one with God."  And this is the kind of friendship energy and relationship which he offered to his disciple students.  This befriending tradition is what built the early church.

The Gospel of John is a mystical manual for us today.  We are offered the experience of being a friend of Christ.  We are invited to let God's Holy Spirit energize the Christ nature within us so that we too can know ourselves as being one with God the Father.  How so?  Because we are learning to live our lives as never being seen as living in separation from All that Is.

Even though John's Gospel does not include an explicit reference to the Trinity, it is a teaching about the holy friendship within God that becomes known and shared with us.

You and I are to come to know this dynamic friendship with Christ as the foundation of our personal esteem.  If we know this holy friendship with Christ, we cease to be people who seek constant affirmation and adoration from others.  As we come to a friendship experience with Christ, we can be those who model friendship as the way life should be lived.  We arrive at allowing the nature of Christ to be known through us with the behaviors of friendship love.

Today, you and I are invited to friendship with Christ because he said that the dynamic friendship that is found within God, is also shared with us.  Everything that we do in the church and in our liturgy is to support the quest to know this friendship with Christ.  Amen.

Jesus Calls Us Friends

6 Easter b         May 6, 2018
Acts     Ps. 33:1-8,18-22
1 John 4:7-21      John 15:9-17      
Lectionary Link

What is one of the greatest gifts of life?

Is it a new bicycle?  Or a new doll?  Or some new clothes?  Or a new car?  Or a new house?  Or a new job?

All of these things might be good things and good surprises, but can you guess what the very best gift in life is?

The best gift in life is friendship.  When one discovers a friend one finds the best gift of life.

Jesus told his disciples.  You are my friends.  And as my friend, I will share with you everything.  And the best thing that Jesus shared with them was to have a relationship with God his father.

Jesus as the best friend of all, shared what was best.

He said that he would share his relationship with God as his Father.  So, Jesus told his friends; I'm like your brother, because you are sons and daughters of God too.  We are all members of God's family.

But you know what is said?  Not everyone knows that they are members of God's family.  Not everyone knows that Jesus is their friend.

Do you know what Jesus did to solve this problem?

Jesus told his students; you are my friends.  You have graduated from my school and now you have to go into all the world and tell and show all people that God is their Father and that I am their friend.

And so gather here today.  We gather today because Jesus has made us his friends.  And he has let us know that we are sons and daughters of God.

He has let us know that his life can be known within us by God's Holy Spirit.

God is pure friendship.  God is the Friendship of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  And the friendship of God has been given to us when God's Son, Jesus came to show us how to be special friends of God and friends with each other.

Today, we celebrate our friendship with God and with Jesus and with each other.  And we celebrate the Friendship energy that is in us and around.  That friendship energy is the Holy Spirit.

Let us be thankful today for the gift of friendship with God and let us be thankful for the friendship that we have with each other.  And let us not forget to share this friendship news to more people and invite them to be with us as our new friends.   Amen.

Holy Sap?

5 Easter     B  April 29, 2018

Acts 8:26-40 Psalm 22:24-30

1 John 4:7-21  John 15:1-8

Lectionary Link

Alex:  Last week, we read about Jesus being the Good Shepherd and we are sheep of his flock.  This week we move from animal metaphors to plant metaphors and we can understand this metaphor about vines and branches, because everywhere around us we can see vineyards.  Jesus said, “I am the vine and you are the branches.”  And he also said that “God the Father is the Vinedresser or the one who takes care of the vineyard.”  I am wondering where we can find God, the Holy Spirit, in this metaphor about the Vine and branches?

In this metaphor, we would have to say that the Holy Spirit would be the Holy Sap.  That does not sound very nice, because we know it is not nice to call someone a “sap.”

But sap is like plant blood.  It is what keeps a plant alive and well.  So, the Holy Spirit is the Holy Sap, or the flow of life between the branches and the vine.   The Holy Spirit is our connection with Christ and because we have the Holy Spirit we can abide in Christ and Christ can abide in us.

What does the sap allow a plant to do?  It allows a plant to have leaves, blossoms and fruit.  Jesus said that we should bear fruit in our lives.  St. Paul said that there are fruits of the Spirit.  And my friends are going to share with us the fruits of the Spirit.

Stephanie:  Love is a fruit of the Spirit.  Love is so great, that love is the best definition of God.  God is Love.  It is not enough to say that God is love; we also have to love each other and that is not always so easy.  This is way we need the life-giving sap of the Holy Spirit to help us achieve the great fruit of living, the fruit of love.  And one of the fringe benefits is, we can write Country Western Songs, too.

Rebecca: Joy is a fruit of the Spirit.  Joy is different from happiness.  Happiness depends upon what happens; joy is something that we can have even when unhappy things are happening in our lives.  Joy is a fruit and a gift of God and it is like magic.  Why does a tiny little baby smile?  It could be that joy is an original gift of God and fruit of the Spirit because we are just happy and don’t know why we are happy.

Chike: Peace is a fruit of the Spirit.  Peace happens outside of us when people stop fighting and when wars end.  But peace is something inside of us.  If we can find peace inside of us, it will help us be peaceful with each other.  Peace is such a great fruit of the Spirit that we pass the Peace each Sunday, to remind ourselves how important it is for us practice kindness and forgiveness.

Catherine:  Patience is a fruit of the Spirit.  Why do we need patience?  Because we cannot have everything right away when we want it.  We have to wait for many things in life.  Sometimes it is not easy to wait for things.  Patience is required because we live in Time.  Time means we have to wait for new things to happen because we cannot do or have everything all at once.  If we have patience we can learn to wait for the many good things that God wants for us in our lives.  Amen.  I can’t wait for my sermon to get done.  Patience, Catherine, Patience!

Sasha: Gentleness is a fruit of the Spirit.  Why do we like little babies and puppies?  There is something very attractive about gentleness.  Innocence and gentleness awakens something in us and when we see gentleness, we want to be gentle too.  Everyone needs the comfort of gentleness in life because life can bring sadness, suffering and disappointment.  We often need gentleness to heal us and make us feel better again.  This is why gentleness is an important fruit of Holy Spirit.

Daniella: Goodness is a fruit of the Spirit.  We need goodness as a special gift of God’s Spirit because when bad things happen, we can begin to believe that bad things and evil are stronger and more normal than goodness.  The life of God’s Spirit within us is like a deep well of goodness.  This helps us to remember that Goodness is what is natural and normal in life and it reminds us not to let evil and badness have more power in this life than they deserve.  The Fruit of the Goodness helps us to flex our goodness muscles and overcome evil with good.

Alec: Humility of is a fruit of the Spirit.  I wish I could say that I was proud of my humility but that would be a contradiction.  We can be proud of ourselves and have self-esteem but at the same time we can make room for other people to be proud of themselves and have self-esteem too.  When we have the fruit of humility, it means that we have learned to make plenty of room for other people.  A story in the Bible says that the original sin of Lucifer, the Devil, was Pride.  He thought that he was bigger than God and so he revolted.  With the fruit of humility, we can recognize God’s greatness and that God’s greatness provides enough room for everyone.  When we are humble, we do not need to tell people how great we are; we let our actions speak for themselves.

Caroline: Self-control is a fruit of the Spirit.  To be patient we need the fruit of self-control because we can’t have everything exactly when we want it.  We have to have some very strong muscles inside of us to be able to say “no.”  We cannot speed all the time; we have to have the ability to take our foot off the accelerators of our lives.  Self-control means that we all have to learn to be our own heroes, because learning to control our behaviors is the biggest challenge all our lives.  We have to control what we do and say and when we take on some bad habits, we really need the fruit of self-control to help us enjoy the good things through portion control.  If we learn self-control, we can all become our own superheroes.

Rylie:  Wow, there are lots of good clusters of grapes growing on our branches as we remain connected with Jesus as the Vine.  We want to continue to bear the good fruits of Spirit.  We want the Holy Sap of God Spirit flowing inside of us to keep us abiding in Jesus Christ.  We are in the season of spring when we can see the blossoms on the tree.  We want to be fruitful Christians.  And we can be as we abide in Christ.

Jesus, you are the vine and we are your branches.

Holy Spirit, you keep us connected with Jesus to help us grow fruits of the Spirit.

God, we are able to love because you are love.

We thank you for joy, no matter what happens.

We pass the peace because we want to live in peace.

We ask for the strength of Patience to be able find the right time to do the right things.

God, give us gentleness because we often need your comfort and we need to know how to comfort others.

God, in the freedom of life let us make goodness the winner over evil.

Holy Spirit, grant us humility which can be natural as we worship the greatness of God and realize how small we are in this great universe.

And finally, God, give us the fruit of self-control.  Let us learn to do and enjoy everything at the appropriate time and in the appropriate way. 

God, thank you for Jesus the Vine and thank you for the fruits of the Spirit.  Amen.