Manna and Eucharist

11 Pentecost Cycle B, Proper 13 August 5, 2018

Exodus 16:2-4, 9-15 Psalm 78:23-29

Ephesians 4:1-16 John 6:24-35

Lectionary Link

The community which was responsible for the writing of the Gospel of John spanned the decades after Jesus of Nazareth left this earth.  The community probably consisted of Jews, former followers of John the Baptist, and Gentiles, who had gradually became the majority in the Christian communities.

The communities from where the Gospel of John came, were Eucharistic, that is, they had as their common practice the eating of the common meal of remembering Christ.  During the life of Jesus, he was not Eucharistic; the famous Passover Meal was not until the last days of his life.  The Gospel of John includes writing about how the Eucharist became the practice of their community even though the Last Supper in John's Gospel does not include words of institution and is not a Passover Meal.  The writers of John's Gospel wanted to show how the Eucharist derived from the life of Jesus and how it represented a development from the Hebrew Scriptures.

When I administer Communion and place the bread into your hand, I say, "The body of Christ, the bread of heaven."

One of the metaphors of Jesus in John's Gospel is this; he said, "I am the bread life...the bread of God is the true bread which comes down from heaven."

Where did the symbolism for the bread of heaven come from?  The Gentile members of the church had to be taught the symbolism of the bread of heaven that derived from the Hebrew Scriptures.

New members to the church would wonder about this Eucharistic meal tradition.  They would wonder why bread and wine would be called the body and blood of Christ.  In fact, outsiders who heard rumors about this secret community meal said that Christians were cannibals, because they heard about this eating of the flesh and drinking the blood of Christ.

The Eucharistic had to be explained to new members.  The cannibal rumors about the Eucharistic meal derived from people who were very literal about language.

John's Gospel is a writing full of metaphors which are not meant to be taken literal.  Jesus is not literally light, lamb, shepherd, bread, way, truth, life in a scientific empirical sense, but he is all of these in the mystical poetry of the Christians of the early churches. 

The meaning of the life of Jesus was found in the poetry of the early church and it was also found in the liturgy of the early church, especially in the Eucharist.

The gathered church received the bread and the wine as a way of celebrate the specific renewal of the presence of Christ in their lives.  If the Risen Christ is always inside of us, why do we need to be renewed in the presence of Christ?  The Eucharist is a meal of dynamic remembrance; we need to remember because we know the human tendency to forget.  We can be so distracted by other things, we can easily forget the presence of Christ. So the Eucharist is a gathering meal to remember in a liturgical way that Christ is inside of us even as close as the bread and wine that become a part of us.

So when Gentiles would see the Eucharist event, they might ask, "What's this?"

So the church leaders taught about the "What's this?" bread.   When the children of Israel complained about not having food and began to think that God and Moses had abandoned them in the wilderness, they needed a remembrance meal.

Moses offered a prayer of intercession and God sent a special frosty substance on the ground.  Moses told them to collect and eat the frosty substance on the ground.  And when the did, the people asked, "What's this?"  The Hebrew words for "What's this?" are Man na.  And so, in a quite humorous way,  "What's this?" became the name for the special bread that came down from heaven each day to remind the children of Israel that God was present to them each day of their life, even though they often forgot that God was present to them.

The early church believed that the Risen Christ was present to them each day of their lives. They did not want to be like the often forgetful people of Israel.  The Eucharist was a meal of dynamic remembrance; the church was reminded about the real presence of the Risen Christ within each member.

The early church also believed in the literal meaning of bread because the members took care of each other.  In their eating together, they made sure that each member had enough to eat, but they also understood that they did not live by bread alone.  They lived by Jesus, the Word of God, who was the living bread and whose presence was renewed and remembered in each occasion of the Eucharist.

The church has often asked about the Eucharist, "What's this?"  Because the Mass became made into the occasion to enhance the authority and power of the priests of the church, it also became the occasion for it to be abused.  The Protestant Reformers reacted against the way in which the Mass was practiced, mainly the custom of the paying for private votive masses for the dead.  Some Reformed churches diminished its importance in their churches and often reduced it to but once a month or less.  They elevated reading of Scripture and preaching to the center of the liturgy and even rid their churches of the priestly office.

What we aspire to in our Gospel understanding of the Eucharist is the celebration of its full meaning.  We believe in both the literal and figurative meanings of the Eucharist.  Even though bread is a symbol of participation with Christ in the Eucharist, it is not divorce from the requirement that we have to ensure that everyone has enough to eat.  We believe that Christ is really present in the Eucharistic element even while we don't try to pretend to know how Christ is literally present, except that Christ becomes literal in our hands and hearts as we literally work and act to do the works of love and kindness in our world.  When we do the works of Christ, we make Christ literally present within us.  And that a significant literal presence.

The Gospel challenge for you and me today is to respect the Eucharist both by regular participation in the remembrance liturgy but also by Eucharistic living.  In the Eucharist we ask for heavenly assistance to be able to sit down in peaceful fellowship with one another and invite the entire world to be a part of this love feast as well.  We respect the Eucharist as a meal of remembrance because we often forget that we belong to Christ and that Risen Christ is within us.

Today we come to the altar today and we say, "What's this?"  Man na?  And we believe that we receive the body of Christ, the bread of heaven; the blood of Christ, the cup of Salvation.  Amen.

Jesus: Bread Man, Water Man

10 Pentecost cycle b proper 12     July 29, 2018

2 Kings 4:42-44  Psalm 145: 10-19

Ephesians 3:14-21 John 6:1-21

Lectionary Link
When we read the Gospel of John, it is easy to just access the story aspect of the Gospel presentation of a narrative of the life of Jesus.  We treat the Gospel text as an eye-witness direct report even though we know that such a text involves massive time-lapsing; three years of ministry collapsed into 21 chapters of writing.  Time-lapsing involves editing, re-editing and further redactions as words of and about Jesus get handed on from person to person in eight decades after Jesus and then some "final" editor finally puts together what survives to be found in the various earliest codices that we have.

What we forget is that the writer or writing editors of the Gospel of John's are theologians who are presenting the significance of the life of Jesus to various groups of people who gathered in the Jesus Movement communities.  The people who gathered came from increasingly heterogenous demographic groups.  Such persons would have included those who came from the synagogue traditions with influences from the various rabbinical "schools."  They would have come from those who had been devoted to the liturgical tradition found in the Temple of Jerusalem which had the priestly caste as presiding authorities until the destruction in the year 70.  Christian congregants would have been former followers of John the Baptist; they would have come from the class of what today we call the "unchurched," or to coin new words, "the un-synagogued" or "un-templed."  By this I would mean a group of Jews in Palestine who were not observant of the purity codes and thus because of their "sinner" classification or their "designated sickness" could not but be outsiders to the gatherings which frequented the synagogue and the Temple.  Jews who interacted in compromising ways the Roman authorities were called publicans and sinners and for their livelihood they were regarded to be in sinful state of assimilation to the foreigners who were a part of the great class of sinners:  Defiled and Impure.  The Christian congregants in the communities of the Gospel of John would have been Gentiles, soldiers and those who did not find adequate spiritual or social identity in the cult of the Temples for the various gods and goddesses in the Greco-Roman Mystery Religion traditions.  Christian congregants would have been part of the urbanization movement in Roman society; the house churches would have been a welcoming community for nomads to the city neighborhoods as they explored a new identity in a new place.  From the letters of Paul, it would seem that the Christians by dispensing with the purity codes of Judaism, made the Christian message more conducive to participation by Roman citizenry and Christians could pretend that Caesar was a "fake god" who was good for peaceful social order even while Christians believed in a higher kingdom of God which could co-exist in a parallel manner with the Roman Empire.

It would be naïve to believe that the writer of the Gospel of John was not aware of the demographic diversity of the Johannine communities.  The writer of the Gospel of John also was aware of the liturgical practices of the community; the regularity of baptism and Eucharist.   The writer would not have been blatantly anachronistic; the writer would not have assumed that the liturgical practices of the Johannine communities were fully developed in the time of Jesus, who would have regarded himself to be an observant Jew who visited both Temple and synagogue, not withstanding the reforming words of his "rabbinical" school.

The writer of John's Gospel would present Jesus as the seed origin of the spiritual and liturgical practices which came to prevail in the Johannine communities.

Baptism and Eucharist were the conscious practice of the Johannine communities.  The Gospel of John presents Jesus as the who originates the shape of the practice of both baptism and Eucharist.  The discourses of Jesus in John's Gospel were first instantiated in teaching story events.

Jesus was a water man and a bread man.  The Johannine writers showed how Jesus was in continuity with famous water men and bread men found recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures.

Moses and Elisha were bread men.  Through their intercession people were fed in marvelous ways.  Moses interceded before the appearance of the famous "manna" or heavenly bread to fed the people of Israel.  Jesus, too, was one who fed the multitude.  The Eucharist was the practice of feeding the church with the heavenly bread that was identified with the Real Presence of Jesus being within the life of each Christian communicant.  The Eucharist was the social reality of a continuous feeding of the multitude.  The feeding of the multitude in John's Gospel is the story recounted to present the extended discourse of Jesus on how he was the manna which had come down from heaven.  Hint.  Hint.  He was Eucharistic bread which perpetually fed the church as people ritually realized the presence of Christ to be renewed into the most prominent identity of their spiritual and social lives.  That the Eucharist, the breaking of the bread, was continuing to gather the Johannine communities more than 8 decades after Jesus was proof that multiplication of loaves was a continuing miracles that originated with Jesus.

Moses was a water man; his intercession resulted in the parting of the Red Sea.  He brought water out of Rocks.  Elijah and Elisha were water men, floating ax heads on the water and parting waters of the Jordan by striking it with their mantle.  Noah was the water man of the flood.  New Testament writer presented baptismal waters as waters of death and waters of cleansing.  Coming out of the water of baptism was regarded to be a symbolic rising from the death of being buried with Christ.  When the story of Jesus walking on the stormy waters was told, it was a reaffirmation of rising above the death of water and triumphing because of the miracle of knowing an identity with resurrection of Christ.

The writer of John's Gospel goes to great pain to translate Hebrew words and Judaic concepts because the writer was aware of those who did not share any of the Hebraic tradition from which Jesus derived.

Let us appreciate the functions of the narrative of Jesus in John's Gospel.  The writer was so encouraged and surprised by the success of the Christo-mysticism in the Johannine community, the writer preached about the special origin of the living identity with the Risen Christ, in the life of Jesus of Nazareth.

We today are still a part of this living tradition of baptism and Holy Eucharist which derived from Jesus and which has been enriched and transmitted through the Gospel of John and through many other Christian communities in the past 2000 years.

Today again in our Eucharist, we celebrate that the Eucharist was regarded to be the miraculous identity rite of the community that wrote the Gospel of John.  And it is our identity today as well.  Like the young boy who gave his packed lunch to prime the pump of generosity which comes from the blessing of Christ, we offer our gifts at hand in our lives in the Eucharistic offering on the altar.  We seek the miraculous blessing of Jesus to return to us in our service the gifts of being renewed in the presence of Christ.  The writer of the Gospel of John believed that the Risen Christ was relevant to the world in the eight decades after Jesus.  You and I are many more decades away from Jesus of Nazareth, but we still can be renewed in our identity with Christ, the eternal Word in profound ways.  Let us seek our renewed identity  with Christ today.  Amen.

What Does Sickness or Health Mean?

9  Pentecost P.11     July 22, 2018

2 Samuel 7:1-14a Psalm 89:20-37

Ephesians 2:11-22   Mark 6:30-34, 53-56

Lectionary Link

When one reads the Gospel accounts one can often get the impression that the ministry of Jesus was something like the resident doctors in a large city ER hospital.  One gets impression that Jesus is constantly being thronged by sick people who want to be healed.  It sometimes seem like his healing role is even greater than his teaching roles in the Gospel.

The prominence of sick people that are part of the Gospel record invites us to understand sickness in the time of Jesus.

One could say that "sick people" were an entire demographic group of people during the time of Jesus.  When you and I think about sickness, we think about medical diagnosis of a condition that deviates from what we regard to be our normal condition of health.  We live in a world of rhetoric about medical and pharmacological interventions; every other television commercial invites to a medication to suggest that our doctors prescribe.  With all of advances in medical knowledge, it does not seem that we regard ourselves to be any healthier than the people of any other period.  We are obsessed with being healthier, even while we break the obvious rules of health which involve eating right, exercising and avoiding stress.

The general aging process of life means that everyone is always already sick and careening toward the entropy of death.  Health therefore is relative; but it probably means that we are comfortable enough to at least be on our way to living the age of life expectancy in our place and time.

During the time of Jesus, the class of sick people was a religious and public health designation.   The purity code of the time classified life situations into categories of being clean or unclean, pure or defiled.  People with sickness were designated as ritually impure.  This designation would keep one from the being a part of the community as long as the symptoms persisted.  Sickness is always communal; when one person is sick, a host of family members are also involved and so the effects of someone being designated as unclean because of their condition left lots of people and their relatives in the state being ritually impure or they would be unobservant in their religious practices because they had to support their "sick" relative.

There were also theological overtones that went with being sick, including blaming the victims.  A person must be sick because he or she or their family member must have done something wrong to incur such a condition.  In the time of Jesus, it was very important to be lucky or able or well, because if you weren't you could be marked.  You had to bear the mark of being unclean and therefore not worthy of certain religious society because you did not want to infect the community with one's curse exemplified by the symptoms of one's illness.

The throngs of "sick" people that went after Jesus is an indication of a large number of the populace who had no religious standing because of their condition.  The other class of unclean persons, were the publican and sinners, those who had to interact regularly with the Roman Gentile officials and soldiers for their livelihood and so did not observe the ritual purity rules.

Sick people and sinners were a large class of people in the time of Jesus.  And what did Jesus do?  He usurped the role of the priests by ipso facto declaring sick people clean and pure and by declaring sinners, forgiven by God and therefore made clean by God.  Jesus noted that the classification of so many people in his locale as unclean sick people and sinners, did not truly represent the God of the prophets who said that good news meant the inclusion of the blind and the sick and the oppressed and the broken-hearted.  The healing salvation of Jesus primarily involved the declaration of God's love and mercy for all people, especially the sick and the sinners.  The salvation and healing presence of Jesus essentially meant the proclamation of the accessibility of God to all.

King David desired to build a house for God; his son Solomon was the one who built the famous Temple in Jerusalem.  The prophets reminded their people about God's House.  God's House was to be a house for all people.  People could not be segregated or separated from God's presence because of sin or sickness.  We come to God because we need God and want to clean up our act.  If God is only available to the people who have already cleaned up their act, lots of people are missing out on access to God.

The sinners and sick people of the time of Jesus believed that if they could touch the fringe of the clothes of Jesus, they could be forgiven and healed by being declared as clean and acceptable to God.  In the Jewish wardrobe  the fringes or hem of a garment had special significance.  Some included decorative tassels and often the special fringes (tzitzit) were worked into a rounded hem of the robe.  The shawl with the fringes signifying the commandments of God were a sign of the mantle of a prophetic office.  People in faith, paid tribute to the prophetic office of Jesus in reaching out to touch the symbols of his office.  But Jesus did them even better; he touched them; he placed his hand on them thus granting them full accessibility to him and his message about the declaration of the cleanliness of those who once had to live under the classification as unclean sinners and sick people.

During the time of Jesus and Paul, one's group identity was an issue.  One could be observant Pharisees and Sadducees in good standing.  One could be a follower of John the Baptist.  One could be Gentile.  Who am I?  Am I a member of the synagogue?  Am I a Gentile not allowed in the synagogue?  Am I a person victimized as unclean because of sickness or my failure to attain ritual purity?  Am I disqualified from ritual purity because my job requires me to interact with Gentiles?  Paul solved the citizenship issue; he wrote that our citizenship is in heaven.  The new temple is the temple of the connection of believers in God's grace and mercy.  People, not a building is what makes up the universal household of God.

Jesus Christ is the cornerstone of the new temple, the church, the body of Christ and everyone is welcome into the body of Christ.  Jesus Christ is a universal presentation of God who lets everyone know that by the virtue of being human, they are declared to forgiven and healthy to know access to God's grace.

To be human is to live within communities which define sickness and sin.  Each of us have our own classification of what it means to be clean or unclean, acceptable of unacceptable.  Jesus Christ is a reminder to us to be careful about implying that God has a bias against any person because of the conditions of life of any person.  Jesus Christ came to declare the unclean sinner as forgiven and thus made clean; he came to declare the sick person as clean and therefore able to live in the healthy regard of God and one's community.

Today let us accept that Jesus Christ has forgiven us and made us clean and acceptable.  Jesus Christ has declared us clean and healthy, even as our aging bodies often tempt us not to believe this.  And if Jesus has declared us clean and healthy, this is how when should live with each other; with grace, love, mercy and forgiveness.  Amen.






   

Eulogy/Obituary for John the Baptist

8 Pentecost Cycle b proper 10     July 15, 2018

Amos 7:7-15   Psalm 85:8-13

Ephesians 1:3-14  Mark 6:14-29

Lectionary Link

Perhaps it is time to offer a eulogy and obituary for John the Baptist since we have read the account of his death today from the appointed Gospel.  John was in the lineage of those "plumb" crazy prophets like Amos; those prophets had a vision of what was plumb or perfectly upright for their worlds and they spoke about everything which did not line up with their vision of what was "plumb" in what they believed God ask for people in their behaviors.

I would like to offer these words of thanksgiving and celebratory remembrance for the life of John the Baptist.  In his life, one might say that even though he was not a Christian, he was proto-Christian and his ministry resulted in the arising of a community of followers which might be called the "proto-church."

Our dear John, has been extolled widely in the main text books of the church, in the Gospels.  The Gospels are the good news about Jesus, but they also include lots of news about the life of John the Baptist.  For good portions of the Gospel writing John is given almost a parallel status with the surpassing figure, Jesus Christ.

What kind of birth did John the Baptist have?  In the biblical birth traditions John the Baptist had  a marvelous birth.  His birth was like the births of Isaac and Samuel, in that he was conceived in a woman of elder age or who was declared barren, certainly of post-menopausal age.  The birth of Jesus is called miraculous because his conception is attributed to his Mother Mary being over-shadowed by the Holy Spirit.

John was probably six months older than Jesus.  When Mary visited her relative Elizabeth,  during their pregnancies, we are told that the gestational John did some flips in his mother's womb signifying in the early church that John recognized Jesus the Messiah even when he was in still his mother's womb.

John was born to the elderly Zechariah and Elizabeth.  Zechariah was a priest, meaning that he was probably a Levite and a Sadducee.  John the Baptist had priestly lineage but the rite that John is most associated with is baptism.  John did not follow in the profession of his father.

John was likely one who was committed by his parents to the vow of the nazirite, like the famous Judge Samuel.  A nazirite drank no wine and did not cut his hair as signs of  his vows.  John's camel hair tunic and belt did not make him a GQ man, and with his diet of grasshoppers and honey, he was more of a wild man spectacle.  When a child was such an unexpected marvelous gift of God, the parent reciprocated by giving their child to God's special calling for his life.  However, John apparently did not study in the Vatican equivalent in the Jerusalem Temple.  He spent time in the wilderness and perhaps learned from the semi-monastic Essenes who inhabited the Jordanian wilderness.  They were a sect of Judaism with apocalyptic beliefs about divine intervention to end life as it was known.  John, in his ministry, warned his audience about fleeing from the wrath to come.  A big wrath hung over all of Palestine in the form of the Roman Empire.  The oppressed Jewish people in Palestine had developed some political structures to negotiate a way to survive the occupation of their land.  So rightly frightened they were about assimilation through compromise with the Gentiles, they had to double-down on their purity codes to keep themselves distinct.  But in making the purity code so rigid, they left lots of Jews who were condemned by not being properly observant Jews.  And if you weren't a completely observant Jew, you were a defiled sinner.  John the Baptist and Jesus tried to straddle the border between observant Judaism and the Jews who were not observant; they appealed to both classes of people.

When John came to public attention, he was a wilderness preacher by the Jordan River and his great innovation was the baptism of repentance.  The Jews practiced a water baptism, a mikvah, for non-Jews who wanted to convert to Judaism.  John required baptism in the Jordan River for everyone who wanted to associate with his prophetic perspective; he required observant Jews and non-observant people to undergo the rite of baptism.  John challenged that the Jews could be automatically chosen people of God, just because of their birth.  Every person had to authenticate being chosen by God through repentance. Jesus, his younger relative identified with the message and ministry of John by undergoing the baptism of John in the Jordan.  By so doing, one could note that Jesus had the upmost respect for John and regard for this prophet and rabbi colleague.

John the Baptist had a reputation which rivaled the reputation of Jesus.  Some people speculated that he was the return of Elijah.  Even Jesus said that he had the "spirit" of Elijah, even being a kind of reincarnation of Elijah.  Others said that he was the Messiah.  Herod believed that Jesus was the resurrection of John the Baptist, so even the wicked Herod believed that John and Jesus were very close in their ministries.

John was a hermit and stood aloof from people.  Jesus ate and drank with sinners.  Jesus had many friends.  Jesus had women friends.  John as hermit did not try to please people; he was an unbribed soul.  He was like an uncensored "Tourette syndrome-like" speaker.  He said what came to his mind.  He called the Jewish religious leaders a brood of vipers who were hell bound.  When he criticized King Herod for marrying his brother's wife, John angered Herod and his wife.  He was thrown into jail.  In prison, he still had contact with his disciples and he had some doubts and sent word asking about Jesus and his ministry.  King Herod's wife did not think imprisonment was enough for John's meddling; she tricked her husband to kill John the Baptist, using her daughter Salome as the lure.  The young Salome danced for the party; Herod was pleased and told her to make a wish.  Herodias told Salome told her to ask for John's head.  And Herod was trapped.  He had John decapitated in prison.  John's life was made into a trivial party trick, exemplifying that in freedom, evil wins over and over again in the ascendency of tyrants.

Our eulogy for John should also contain the afterlife of John the Baptist.  The afterlife of John is the same as his former life.  Why?  The afterlife of John is the recorded testimony found in our Gospels.  The Gospels represent the writings of the early church to present the life of Jesus Christ.  They gave context for the life of Jesus and John the Baptist was very important in understanding the context for the life of Jesus.  John the Baptist was a mentor for Jesus who realized that his student had graduated and surpassed him.  So, John the Baptist, graduated his own students and sent them to the post-graduate school of Jesus.  He believed that Jesus could take them further.  John said, "I baptize with water; Jesus will baptize you with the Holy Spirit."  Jesus was a Trinitarian figure with the Father and the Holy Spirit; he was the one who gave orientation into God as Father and God as Holy Spirit.  About Jesus, John the Baptist said, "He must increase; I must decrease....I am not even worthy to tie the thongs of his sandals."  John was totally self-deprecating when he spoke about Jesus.  He was in total admiration and reverence of Jesus and he recommended all to be the same.  John the Baptist is presented as the ultimate set up person for Jesus Christ.  John's tragic and unfortunate death, became a milestone in the elevation of Jesus to be the sole leader of the former disciples of John the Baptist and the one who would surpass John in his life, death and resurrection.

Today, we honor John the Baptist with appreciation.  The Gospel witness of John the Baptist is the model for us too.  We need to be set up people for Jesus Christ.  We don't preach ourselves.  We preach Jesus Christ.  We embrace the reality that Christ has been born within us and we have the power to check our egos at the door and let the life of Christ come to the increase in our lives as we pursue lives of peace, love, justice and faith.  Let us mimic John the Baptist in being able to say about the Christ Nature within us: "He must increase; I must decrease."  Amen

Adjusting to Timing and Mistiming

7 Pentecost Cycle B Proper 9 July 8, 2018
Ez. 2:1-7 Ps.123
2 Cor.12:1-10 Mark 6:1-13
Lectionary Link
Often the life of faith involves how we deal with what can only be called timing and mistiming.  What do we do when the events in our lives seem to be plagued with the experience of mistiming?  Wrong thing at the wrong time?  When it comes to falling in love, we call such mistimings, unrequited love.  And this is painful mistiming.  "I love her and she don't love me."  Such mistiming is good for writing poetry and love songs for Country Western music.

The Bible includes stories of mistiming, and the prophets often felt like they were given a message which had no agreeing audience.  "God, why are you going to make me speak?  The people won't listen.  What I have to say is obviously total irrelevant to their lives.  They are going to reject me.  Why do you want me to preach?"  Ezekiel was such an unrequited prophet.  Elijah was the most famous pouting prophet; he ran in fear for his life and he complained to God about being the only faithful person left in Israel.

When the timing is good and connections happen and what we call "success" is experienced.  We're all optimistically triumphant.  "Woo Hoo.  High Fives all around.  Aren't we blessed!"  And from such experiences we sometimes are tricked into believing that is all life is about favorable timing.  And if the timing is not favorable we can feel not only rejected by other people but we can believe that God is not with us and that our calling is not valid.  Anyone who has survived in any calling, vocation, career or any human relationship or endeavor at all has had to deal with different seasons of apparent good timing and seasons of apparent mistiming.  How many people don't find their college majors until many attempts at something else?

The Gospel reading today is about how the early church understood Jesus dealing with the issue of timing and mistiming.

Jesus had good news.  He offered a message about a loving God.  He offered forgiveness.  He offered healing.  He did not practice religious segregation; he brought as many people with many different backgrounds together.  If you had been enemies, he said you had love each other.  What better message was there than the message of love as preached by Christ?

So Jesus, as anyone proud of his own hometown, wanted the neighbors of his childhood to get the full benefit of his special message and ministry.  And what happened?  His own family and hometown neighbors rejected his message and his ministry.  How did he respond?  "Oh well, prophetic mistiming, just like Ezekiel, just like Elijah."  At the same time mistiming is sad, especially when prejudice, envy and small-mindedness prevents life changing experiences from happening.  Some of the family of Jesus had to wait for better timing.  His brother James eventually became the head of the church in Jerusalem so better timing occurred for him after the resurrection of Christ.

Jesus also gave the 12 disciples some mission instructions about timing and mistiming in the message in their mission.  Go two by two, pack light, if they don't accept your message move on until the timing is right for people in realizing the benefit of your message and ministry.

St. Paul was an apostle who experienced lots of apparent good timing and mistimings in his ministry.  He had great success and he also experienced great rejections.  At Lystra, Paul was stoned and even taken for dead.  Some people speculated that during his "near death" experience is when he had his OBE.  What is an OBE?  For New Age religionists, it refers to Astral Projections or "out of body experiences."  St. Paul had an OBE during which he had such a profound divine encounter that he felt so confirmed in his relationship with God in Christ that he could endure anything.  He could face anything because he experienced God as the profound equalizer for any apparent experience of "mistiming" in life.

Where does that leave us today in Gospel wisdom?  All things considered, how many of us would like all events and connections to be experienced as pleasant and successful timing?  But freedom in life does not exempt any of us from "apparent" experiences of mistiming?  Life includes the experience of unrequited expectations.  We came, we offered our very best and we didn't get the return that we had hoped for?

What we do with mistiming in life is perhaps the more profound lesson in faith.  It is easy to have faith when successful timing happens but what about our faith when we do not receive the kind of affirmation, agreement and acceptance that we had hoped for?  Many people drop out.  Many people get misanthropic and down on people.  Many people blame others.  "They're idiots for not understanding me."  Other people go into self blame.  "It's my fault.  I guess I'm not the right person for the job.  I guess my calling to follow Christ was shallow and false."  Many people leave the church because of mistiming.  Many pastors leave their callings because of the experience of mistiming.

So how do we deal with both mistiming and good timing?  We need to accept that first of all our call is to an everlasting God who will survive all times.  So, we always have a future for better timing.

Second,  the way to survive is with, just being continuously faithful.  We take vows in our baptisms.  Those vows are supposed to be supported with a rule of life.  We get up in the morning.  We pray. We read the scriptures.  We ask what Jesus wants us to do today.  We gather to prayer and share Eucharist.  We love and we share love.  Sounds like a boring pattern?  No, it is just plain faithfulness. Faithfulness may seem as boring as keeping the trains running on time; but if the trains don't run on time everything falls apart.  Bad timing is made worse when faithfulness is not observed.

Faithfulness expresses our relationship to God, to Christ, to each other and to our world.  And if faithfulness to Christ comes before success or failure, we will be able to have the strength to survive apparent success and failure.  Why?  Because the most important success is our relationship with Christ.  Amen.

Creatively Abhoring Sin, Sickness and Death

6 Pentecost cycle b proper 8  July 1, 2018

Wisdom of Solomon 1:13-15; 2:23-24 Psalm 30

2 Corinthians 8:7-15 Mark 5:21-43

Lectionary Link

I've just come from the burial of my youngest brother and just a couple years ago, we buried another younger sister, proving that order of leaving this world does not follow the order of entering this world.  And it is hard to understand purpose and meaning in the timing of how and when people leave this world.  But it is experienced by us as great loss and even more impactful, if a person doesn't seem to reach the average death age.  When one does not reach one's probable age of death, we cannot help but think that it is probably unfair.  We struggle with death because we cherish our lives and the lives of other.  It has always been so even to point of declaring that death cannot be God's will.  We've read the startling words from the Book of the Wisdom of Solomon: God did not make death, and he does not delight in the death of the living.  For he created all things so that they might exist; 

Forever it seems as though death is so wrong, but it has become so common that in our lives we have had to learn to adjust to the fact that death happens to all, it happens to friends, foes, family and it will happen to us.  If God did not make death, how did it become so normal to human experience?

In the story of the Garden of Eden, there existed a Tree of Life in the middle of the garden, meaning that God wanted to eventually train Adam and Eve to be able to eat of the tree of life and live forever, but instead, they ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and we are told that sin, sickness, disharmony and death entered the world.

Obviously, this living forever is rather fantastical since if everyone lived for ever on this earth, there would be a greater population problem.  When the biblical texts were being generated people were not concerned about over population; just survival for as many people as long as they could.

The Bible is a book about healing sin, healing sickness and healing death.  It is about salvation from sin, sickness and death.

What does the Hebrew Scripture portion of the biblical tradition provide us for salvation from sin?  We are given the law to correct and learn right behaviors for living.  If we have learned how to sin, we can repent, we can change our future behaviors and learn how to do right things.  We can correct human behaviors.  This is how we realize salvation in our lives.  The Law is given to us to show us right behaviors and to teach us a disciplined way of living.

What does the biblical tradition provide for in terms of salvation from sickness?  We know every sickness does not end up cured.  We know that the very aging process of life presents us with seeming states of sickness when compared with earlier states of more youthful health.  I do not think the Bible gives any final answers as so why some people get sick and others do not.  The Bible is full of discussion about people who have to deal with sickness, just as we have to deal with sickness and aging in our own lives.

The Bible is a book about healing death.  How is death healed in the Bible?  In much of the Hebrew Scripture portion of the Bible, it appears death is not seen as being healed.  Death is seen as healing of the aging process by ending it.  Death is seen as healed by what each person leaves as their legacy within the world.  Your death is healed by the seeds of the fruit of your life which contribute to the future good of the world in your children and in the legacy of your mentoring influential deeds given to other people.

And now I would like to turn to Jesus and sin, sickness and death.  What did Jesus add to this world regarding sin, sickness and death?

Consider the social context of sin, sickness and death in the time of Jesus.  The practitioners of the Religious law had become practiced in a purity code based upon the abhorrence of sin, sickness and death.

In the time of Jesus, a sinner was one who did not observe the laws as overseen by the religious leaders of the community.  So Jesus found that there were more sinners than religiously observant people.  Jesus hung out with sinners.  According to religious leaders, He was not supposed to.  Throngs of people followed him and most of them had the designation of being "unclean" sinners and you were supposed to shun such sinners.  Sinners were supposed to be quarantined from those who kept the precepts of the law.  Jesus welcomed, ate with, drank with, interacted with the designated sinners of his time.  Their lives were sick, and he was a physician of souls who showed how they could be healed.  But they were first healed because they were welcomed by Jesus.  Jesus declared to them: Your sins are forgiven; therefore, you are made clean and acceptable by God.  God loves you.  You can be better, relative only to yourself, not according to what the official religious people tell you.  My being better today than yesterday is different from what being better today than yesterday means for you.  Jesus fully accepted this individual approach to repentance and holiness and he said, "I do not condemn, I forgive, now follow me."

How did Jesus regard sickness in his time?  In the time of Jesus, sickness marked a person's life and made a person dangerous to the community.  Sickness had to be classified and when a person was classified as sick, he or she was shunned or quarantined from the community.  What did Jesus do?  He violated the quarantine rules regarding the sick.  He went to the sick and the sick came to him.  He interacted, he touched, and he brought the people into the community.  He taught his disciples to be those who did not shun the sick but bring them into the community.  The woman with the "issue" or hemorrhaging of blood would have been a shunned woman.  She knew it but she had the faith to believe that her pre-existing condition should not hinder an encounter with Jesus the Physician who was a walking clinician.  Jesus of Nazareth told the people of his time that sickness was not a punishment of God and it should not be punished by the practice of quarantine with no access to caring people.  We should not allow ourselves to victimize people who have the tragedy of illness.  The church is called to be a community of prayer and care for those who experience the kinds of maladies that can come to any of us at any time.

Finally, what about death and Jesus?  Death in the time of Jesus was also a profoundly shunned state of being?  What do I mean?  A corpse or a carcass was considered to be so "ritually impure" that one had to avoid contact with a dead body.  Yes, people did have to have obligatory contact with the dead; but then they had to undergo ritual purification to re-enter the community after their defilement in their contact with the dead.  The shunning of the dead meant that death had great power over all who lived.

What did Jesus do?  He ran to the dead.  He called death a mere sleep.  He touched the dead.  He raised the dead.  The significance of Jesus for death, is that he cured death.  He made it acceptable as an event in one's life in God's plan for one's life.  Jesus made death but a gateway to the assurance of a future personal continuity beyond a lifeless body.

The Gospel writers gave us the witness of Jesus as healing our sin and making us into those who are getting healthy.  They gave us the witness of Jesus overcoming the quarantine of the sick and establishing his followers as those who would not shun the sick, rather they would pray for the sick and care for them.  They would touch the sick.  Why?  When we are sick, we do not want to be shunned for our unchosen condition.

Finally, Jesus healed death by relativizing it.  He limited it to a single event in the string of one's life.  He declared that death is not the end of one's life.  It is a gateway to a different life.  He exemplified the resurrection life by reappearing and in so doing he showed this world that death is and will be healed.  He gave us the life of the Holy Spirit as a foretaste of the meaning of eternal life.  Even as we mourn the profound loss of concurrent accessibility to the life of our loved ones; we can have a profound hope in the personal continuity of our loved ones and of our own eventual personal continuity. 

And so about sin, sickness and death, please confess with me, "Jesus is my salvation."  Amen

Jesus, Why Are you Sleeping in My Storm?

 5 Pentecost Cycle B Proper 7    June 24, 2018
Job 38:1-11  Psalm 9:9-20

2 Corinthians 6:1-13 Mark 4:35-41    

Lectionary Link

  There is a false sense of triumphalism in some religious people who can be tempted to think that being religious means that one's life will always express the signs of God's blessing, like wealth, health and all signs of success and fortune.  People who have more than their "share" of luck can build their formulaic systems for others about "attaining the signs of God's blessing."
  In the biblical witness there were phases when it seemed as though people had become very formulaic about blessing and success.  "If you obey God and the keep the commandments, then God will bless you with health, wealth, success and good luck."  Implied in this formula, is that if one has any signs of illness, poverty, failure and misfortune, then it is a sign that perhaps one has some known or unknown sin that has drawn the karmic disfavor of God.
  To counter this simply formula of blessing, the Bible has the witness of Job, Jesus and Paul and many other people who were called to "fill up" what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ.  And bearing afflictions with Christ is surely not inferior faith even if the state of affliction does not look like blessing or success.
  I believe that the "Jesus, sleeping in the boat," story in the Gospel is an instructive parable about misconceptions about what following Jesus means?
  Apparently some disciples believed that following Jesus meant being the chief leaders in the administration of Jesus that would take over this world by force.  Apparently, the disciple fishermen, who had surely been on many a stormy Sea of Galilee in their fishing careers, suddenly decided that "hanging" with Jesus meant that they would be exempt from the conditions of freedom of events that can happen to anyone in life.
  How many times do people who are committed to lives of faith, seem to ask, "Jesus, why are you sleeping through all of this?  Don't you see what is happening to me?  Look what is happening to my health and the health of family members and friends?  Look what is happening to our country?   Look what is happening in relationships that have soured?  Look what is happening in my job?  
  "Jesus, why are you sleeping in my storm?"  Implied in the question is that I should be exempt from the conditions of freedom of what might happen to any person in life.  One also might challenge, "What's the use of following the commandments if they don't guarantee the obvious visual conditions of favor and blessing in my life?"
  In the witness of Job, Jesus and Paul who are people on the  favor of God, we find that each of these was not spared from the conditions of freedom of some very bad things happening to them.  Job lost everything but his life.  His best friends had really easy answers about his sinful cause of his obvious punishments of misfortune.  They were sure about the laws of karma: "Job, because these terrible things happened to you, you must have offended God to cause them."  Jesus was not spared derision; He was called mad, demonic and a drunkard.  He was mocked, he was flogged and he was wrongly charged and he was killed in a criminal's death on the cross.  St. Paul often felt the poignant pain of his own sin, but he also felt called as an apostles.  But did his high calling as an apostle exempt him from the worst conditions of freedom?  He wrote: "we have commended ourselves in every way: through great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger; ...We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see-- we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything."  Was God sleeping in the storms of Job?  Was God the Father sleeping in the storms in the life of Jesus?  Was Jesus sleeping in the storms that came to St. Paul."
  When Jesus woke up and calmed the storm, it was like: "Okay, kids, I'm glad that you regard me to be a hero interventionist whenever you get in a fix, but come on, you've got to grow up and have adult faith."  True faith means living with the conditions of freedom without having any special exemptions.  One can be persuaded about the blessing of knowing God and Christ in the midst of everything that can happen and that is honest to God and honest to life.
  So one might ask?  What's the use of the law or the program of discipleship faith in Christ if one is not guaranteed success?  Following laws and embracing a discipleship program is what I would call good actuarial wisdom.  Wisdom involves the discipline of following good probability thinking: it doesn't mean that you don't take creative risks of faith, but that you know when you are doing it.  Good actuarial wisdom is not rocket science.  If you don't smoke you decrease your chance of getting lung cancer and so you will have the blessing and favor of having healthy lungs.  But even following good actuarial wisdom does not exempt one from anything that might happen.  Freedom, law and actuarial wisdom can and do co-exist.
  So how are we to live with both freedom and with actuarial wisdom?  We live with faith because we act now inspired by the hope of what Christ offers us in this life and in the life to come.  We have the resurrection card in our pocket and we know it's there and we don't want to play it until our time comes.  But knowing that we've got this final winning card, we can live with faith within the storms of life whether we experience great deliverance or whether we survive with wounds or unscathed.
  The Gospel for you and me today is that faith is the ability to live both with actuarial wisdom and within the conditions of freedom in life.  And this faith is real and it is honest to life conditions.  If Jesus appears to be sleeping in the storms of our lives, it is because he trusts that we will continue to have faith in his presence which can complement everything that can happen to us.  Jesus can say, "I've been there with you.  I am there with you now."  Amen.
  

   

St. Paul As Blind Ninja Faithman?

4 Pentecost  proper 6  June 17, 2018
Ezekiel 17:22-24  Psalm 92:1-4, 11-14
2 Corinthians 5:6-10,  14-17  Mark 4:26-34
Lectionary Link
St. Paul wrote: "We walk by faith and not by sight."  And in walking by faith he believed that he perceived life in a superhuman way.  He saw things that other people could not see.  Was St. Paul like one of those proverbial blind ninja warriors?  You know the ones who can beat everyone in martial arts and sword fighting even when they are blind because they have perfected the art of seeing from within.

No, I don't think that St. Paul was like a blind ninja warrior.  I think what St. Paul implied was this: "We walk by faith and not by physical sight alone."  St. Paul believed that this inner disposition of faith gave him another way of seeing.

We use the word "faith" so often that we don't stop to think about what it means.  Faith can be the disposition of trust in God.  It can be a synonym for belief.  Faith can be the general reference to a particular community of belief, like the Episcopal Faith, the Catholic Faith, the Christian Faith, the Jewish Faith.

I have come to appreciate a fuller meaning of faith by returning to the classical meaning of the Greek word for faith.  In the New Testament Greek, the Greek word, "pistos" is used for faith or belief.  New Testament Greek was the "low standard" Greek left over in the world as a result of Alexander the Great conquering the world and bringing Greek to commerce, politics and learning throughout the world.  The Hebrew Scriptures was translated into Greek as an outcome of the pervasiveness of the Greek language.  People in various locales had their own native language but for business and government, a very low standard of Greek was used.  The New Testament was written in this koine Greek even as Latin in the Roman Empire was vying to become a new lingua franca.

In the classical Greek of Aristotle and Plato the Greek word "pistos" was important for the discipline of rhetoric.  Public Speaking was important for the ancient Greeks; they studied and developed the art of public speaking and they had hired speech writers called rhetoricians.   The goal of rhetoric according to Aristotle was "pistos" or persuasion.  Why did one make a speech?  To persuade.  Rhetoric was the study of how to persuade through the use of language.  Why does one want to persuade?  One wants to convert another person to one's proposed values.  Pistos or persuasion is important in life.  Every salesperson wants to be good at "pistos" or persuasion.  Every politician wants to be good at "pistos" or persuasion.

This notion of persuasion adds a greater fullness to how faith or belief is presented by St. Paul and by Jesus in his parables.  What is faith?  Faith is that internal constitution of one's life expressing what one is persuaded about?  And what is one persuaded about?  One is persuaded about one's highest values, the ones which draw our interest, our devotion and our allegiance.   One's life is all about being persuaded by our values.

St. Paul had a great event when his values changed significantly.  He was a Pharisee well-versed in his religion and yet he used his religion as a justification for persecuting the followers of Jesus.  In Paul's famous conversion, he was confronted in a vision of Christ and he had a change of heart; he had a conversion.  He became persuaded about the value of Jesus Christ in his life.  And because of this new persuasion, he saw things completely different.  If St. Paul walked only by sight what would he see?  In his world, Jesus was not King; the Caesar was.  In his world, the "main" religions were the religion of the synagogue and the Roman Mystery religions with their gods and goddesses and their temples.  In his world, people were devoted to the Caesar as a god and son of a god.  The Caesars had propaganda about their being saviors and peacemakers through military might.  If St. Paul walked only by sight, he would see small house churches of diverse people beginning to gather because they too had this inward conversion experience to Jesus Christ as the new value in their lives.

St. Paul did not live to see these little house churches take over the Roman Empire and move into the basilicas; but he was so convinced about the profoundness of Jesus Christ that he saw things differently.

This seeing by faith is also found in the parables of Jesus.  What did Jesus see with eyes in his time?  Caesar was the king of the world and the Roman Empire was the main kingdom visible everywhere.  But Jesus taught his disciple to walk by faith and not by the sight of the obvious.  He taught using parables to teach a different kind of seeing from the heart.  He taught about being able to see or perceive the kingdom of God.

Jesus taught that the kingdom of God was so obvious that it was easy to miss.  Coming to faith is like the harvest of life.  One is in the cycle of life to achieve the harvest of coming to faith to be able to see the obvious presence of God everywhere even when it looks like the kings of the world are prancing as those who presume to be in control.  People with faith know that God will outlive all kings and us.  People of faith know that we have inherited a Plentitude of life which we did not make or create.

Jesus said the kingdom of God was like the small mustard seed, tiniest of seeds and yet suddenly it takes over and one can suddenly discover a yellow meadow of paradise, one variety which became large shrub trees.  Jesus valorized the individual deeds of faith, love and kindness because when they are collected they become impressive character.  When the small deeds of love and kindness are really seen, then one realizes that they are the hidden scaffold which preserve and sustain the world even while the television and the media tells us it is the  kings, politician and the publicly famous who sustain the world.  Mustard seed thinking works in our personal lives and in the world at large.  We only attain character by the repetition of deeds of faith, love and justice.  People may dream for things to be better and when the reward is not easily seen or instant, they give up in disappointment and discouragement.  People give up on churches and parishes because they stop seeing their own small deeds of faith as valuable to build the character of the whole.

St. Paul and Jesus invite us not to live by sight alone; they invite us to this interior seeing, the seeing of faith, because we have been converted and persuaded by the surpassing love and greatness of Jesus Christ.  Today, you and I are invited to this seeing with eyes of faith and we can have this kind of seeing because we have been converted by surpassing love of God in Christ.  Amen.