Having a Word Transplant

1 Christmas  A     December 29, 2019

Is.61:10-62:3     Ps. 147:13-21

Gal. 3:23-25,4:4-7  John 1:1-18

Lectionary Link

In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God.  All thing came into being through Him.  In him was life and the life of the light of all people.

This revisit of the creation story has always made me think of Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan, the so called "Miracle Worker."

Helen was unable to see, to hear or speak.  She despite her impairments was a very capable person, but she was locked off from discovering her capacities.  She thrashed around being organized and domesticated by people who had their full language ability.  Her life was an interior chaos.  What could move over the deep of her chaos?

One day after repeated efforts of her teacher to sign into her hand; the association of water running over her hand and w-a-t-e-r being signed into her hand suddenly created her life.  She suddenly became a word fanatic; she wanted to know every word.  She wanted the full creation of her life.  In the word is life or John's Gospel says "zoe."  Helen Keller had life, she since birth had had "bios" or biological life; but she needed "zoe" life or abundant, creative, telling, spirit-life.  It is Word which create human life and makes us different among the other biological life.

I have come to believe that you and I are constituted by the words of our lives.  How we have taken on the words of our lives forms the character in that they have become the repetitive scripts of our lives that we live out.

We are at the end of our year and we might be pondering some New Year resolutions, in hopes of making some change.  How can we change some to the repetitive scripts that we have been living out?  The one's that we or others have come to call losing scripts, scripts which are not good for our physical, psychological, social or spiritual health.

Words are life.  Words are spirit.  Words are the driving scripts of our lives.  In John's Gospel, Jesus is quoted as saying, "My words are spirit and they are life."

So if we are going to be involved in changing our lives, we are going to have to have a "word transplant" in our lives.  We are going to have to dissolve existing word conditions which are losing scripts.  How do come into word transplants in our lives toward the positive change of repentance?  Through words.  We expose ourselves to new words.  We read, we look for new models and mentors who can give us new direction.  We practice new words in doing things different with our body language.  We change our dance choreography; we change the choreography of our body behavior toward health, love and justice.

Here we are; we are comprised of language, life scripts that we cannot help but live out.  And yet we still want something more; we want "zoe" creative, abundant life, beyond our biological existence.  We want to be explorative, even like Helen Keller who discovered that words were the creation of her life, and she really ended up having her life created very well by words.

Please make the year 2020 a Word year for yourselves.  Discover how your life and your behaviors are constituted by the ways in which you have taken on language even into the programming of your body behaviors.  Journal, write, speak, pray, read, learn, get in touch with the words that you have and how they use you for good and bad in your life.

How do you and I change our lives?  The best way is to have our socks knocked off by some new insights, new awareness when we come to say, "Wow, I'm never going to be the same."

This is what I hope for each of us in our Word life in 2020: That we will come to some very insightful "Wow!" experiences which will make life changes exciting and not drudgery.

In our beginning of significant human life has been the Word.  The Word was with God.  The Word was God.  The Word is our life.  The Word is our Light.  The Word is being made flesh in us.  The Word is trying to take over our body language toward love, kindness and mutual regard.

We see so much of dark human words and behaviors on display today in our media.  We truly need Christ as the Enlightened and Creative Spirit Word in our lives today.  Amen.

Hidden from the Wise; Revealed to Babes

Christmas Eve         December 24, 2019     

Is. 9:2-4,6-7          Ps.96:1-4,11-12        

Titus 2:11-14        Luke 2:1-14  

  Lectionary Link  

   Why has Christmas taken over the world in way in which Easter never has?  Why has Christmas had more influence in the secular world and in the non-Christian world than Easter?

    Christmas is about a baby.  It is about the  wisemen bringing gifts to a baby, and what is more universal than giving gifts to children?  And you are wise if you keep the children happy with gifts, right?

    But beyond the popularity of Christmas due to the birth of the Christ child it is also about having hope in this life as we are now in it.  Easter is much about hope for the afterlife and we can wait for the afterlife, we would like to ponder hope for life as it is now.

    I think that the value of Christmas is reinforced by the child motif that is presented in the Gospel words of Jesus.  Jesus said some rather enigmatic things about infants and children.  He said, "Let the children come to me; for to such as these belong the kingdom of heaven."  Sorry adults; those are the words of Jesus.   Jesus also said that unless one became like a child, one could not understand the kingdom of God.  Sorry adults.   Jesus also said that he thanked God that these things were hid from the wise but revealed to infants because such was God's will.  Sorry adults.

    There is an Arab riddle which is based upon the belief that there are 100 names of God but human beings can only know 99 of those names.  They can never now the hundredth name of God.  So the question: Why does the camel have this silly smirk on his face?  Well, he knows the 100th name of God and he's not telling.

    Why does the baby have the angelic grin on his or her face?  She knows and is living the reality of original joy and we adults can only look on as being perpetually locked out.

    If we understand the mystery of being locked out of original joy; we understand the appeal of Christmas and the celebration of the birth of the Christ-child.

     What is the conversion experience called?  It is called a new birth.  It is called being born-again.   How much closer to childhood can one get than the experience of a new birth.

      New Birth is what the early Christian mystics called spiritual awakening.  St. Paul said the mystery of the ages of revealed:  Christ in you the hope of glory.

         I believe that the Christmas Story encodes the new birth theology of the early church.  They believed from their experience, that a person could have as an adult, a renewal into the essence of the original joy of our birth into this world.  The smiling baby can be alive and well within us.   We can have the experience of original joy within us.  We can access this original joy even as we live within all the harsh realities of our adult worlds.  This is not an escape from our adult worlds; this is the great complement to our adult worlds.  This experience of new birth, of our child-likeness, is not a childish denial, it is not the childish and inappropriate emotions of an inebriated state, it is a spiritual birth of renewal that is available to us.  And we should not cease in our quest for life experience until we have found it and its effects.

     Why do we love Christmas?  Not because all of the family pressure to please everyone by finding the perfect presents to give.  We love Christmas because we want to recover wonder and joy in our lives.  We want to know that Christ has been born in us and for us and with us.  We want to know that the divine affirms the validity of our lives.

    Tonight, the celebration of the birth of Christ invites us to joy, wonder and renewal.  And with God's gift of the Spirit, we can all find this tonight.  Let us hear the whisper of God say to us tonight, Merry Christmas, my children, Merry Christmas.  Amen.

     

Multi-Genre Beings

4 Advent A, December 18, 2016

Isaiah 7:10-16 Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18

Romans 1:1-7 Matthew 1:18-25

 Lectionary Link

       Just so you won't think my sermon is pointless, here are four points.  1-We use the past to explain the present. 2- Translation of the Bible can affect our theology.  3-As language users people have always employed genres.  4-The Gospels were spiritual manuals which encoded the mysticism of the early churches.

       We often are left with the impression that the ancient prophets who are in the Hebrew Scriptures specifically predicted Jesus of Nazareth.  To use the Bible to predict the future may be comforting for people who want to assert their sense of God being in control of the world but such predictions have not and cannot be proven with the exactness that some fundamentalists often imply.  What is true is that history is a spiral; similar patterns of human behavior recur and so the past is used to explain what is happening now.  Did Babe Ruth predict the appearance of Roger Maris, Hank Aaron or Barry Bonds?  No.  But do we speak of Roger Maris and Barry Bonds using Babe Ruth as the one who exemplified hitting home runs?  Yes, and so the past anticipates the future and we use the past to explain the present.  The early Christians preachers who read the book of Isaiah certainly understood that Jesus Christ exemplified meaning of the Isaian child who was called Immanuel.  Jesus Christ was understood as God with us or God being on our side.  Or God becoming completely bilingual of both divine and human life.  The past anticipates the future without being explicitly predictive; such belief in exact prediction would be a violation of the conditions of freedom.

     Second point.   The translation of the Bible can affect how we understand theology.  We have read from seventh chapter of Isaiah today which refers to a young woman bearing a child.  The Hebrew word for young woman is "alma."  The famous Greek translation of the Hebrew Scripture is called the Septuagint.  The Septuagint translators translated the Hebrew word "alma" as "parthenos," which is the Greek word for virgin.  The New Testament Greek uses "parthenos" indicating their Septuagint reading of the Hebrew Scriptures.  In the history of the church's translation of the Bible the Virgin Birth theology has been reflected.  The famous King James Version of the Bible translate the Hebrew word as virgin and not as "young woman."  What this reveals is that sometimes the theological perspectives of the church are highlighted by the way in which a translation of language is done.  But I will later show how we have sometimes diminished the mysticism of the church for literal meanings of words.  Sometimes we use the literal almost like idols and we end up avoiding the mystical experience.

    Third point.  As language users we employ genres.  As babies we are passively coded with all of the language meanings of the caretakers of our lives.  As we activate our language ability, we take on language use with its glorious multivalent meaningful practices.  We employ genres of language use.  We know literal, common sense, empirically verifiable meanings.  We know figurative, allegorical, moral, metaphorical, aesthetic and spiritual meanings.  We are amazing language users, but we can make mistakes in how we think that genres are being employed.

     Imagine the young boy in his Superman pajamas with a lovely cape.  He has just been watching a Superman movie.  So what does he do?  He takes a flying leap off his upper bunk bed dressed as Superman and he discovers that gravity crashes him to injury on the floor below.  The boy has confused his genres.  But from this experience the boy does not have to give up his genre of magical realism nor does he have to give up the genre of scientific natural laws.  The key is to learn to transact appropriately with the various language genres of life.   The biblical writers were not stupid, primitive language users.  And even though they existed long before modern science, they still understood naive realism and commonsense perceptual reality.  They understood mystical and allegorical genre of writing.  The Gospel writers wrote at a time when the Roman propaganda said that a comet attended the birth of the Caesar and that his mother had a miraculous conception in a Temple and that he was the Savior of the World who brought peace to the earth and he was called divi filius, son of god.  The great fault of modern fundamentalists is to deny Bible writers the intelligence of knowing how they were writing in their own time fully cognizant of the writing genre which they deployed in their context.    We need to appreciate how fluid all language users can be with genres.  We need to beware of reading a genre in the wrong way.  

    Finally, the fourth point.  The Christmas story encodes the mystagogy of the early church.  What is mystagogy?  It is instruction of teaching in the mystery of Christ.  According to St. Paul, the mystery of the ages was this:  Christ in us the hope of Glory?  How is Christ born within us?   We are overshadowed by power of the Holy Spirit.  We are baptized by the Holy Spirit and the life of Christ is conceived and grows within us.   In being overshadowed by the Holy Spirit, one's heart is made clean and virginal to bear the presence of Christ.  This was the chief reality of the early church.  This is the reality which the mystics of the early church encoded in the story of the Virgin Mary.  Blessed Mary is the paradigm of every Christian who has had the life of Christ born in them when they have been overshadowed by the Holy Spirit.  Can we appreciate how the Gospel writers were writing in the mystical genre and how it could only be pierced by the early initiates into the mystical transformation program promulgated in the early churches?  Do you see how often the church throughout the ages have externalized all of this and literalized it and missed the mystical significance?  Let us learn how to deploy our genres appropriately.

     I would leave you with a quote from one of the most profound mystics of the Christian Church, Meister Eckhart.  He wrote:  What a shame it would be if Jesus was only born to the Virgin Mary in the first century and not be born in our lives today.
   
     My prayer for us today is that we would experience the current reality of the birth of Christ.  Amen.

Rose Sunday

3 Advent A     December 15, 2019

Is.35:1-10         Ps. 146: 4-9          

James 5:7-10      Matt. 11:2-11

Lectionary Link

      Why did we like a pink or rose candle today on the Advent wreath?  Today is the third Sunday of Advent and it is called Rose Sunday.  Christian calendar days have traditions which have histories.  Advent in times past began as a forty day fast before the celebration of the birth of Christ, kind of like a second Lent.  It was regarded to be penitential season and began in the 4th century, after the feast of St. Martin in early November.  In later tradition the season became shorten from 40 days to four weeks.  Advent retained like Lent, a refreshment Sunday, a day of temporary indulgence within a penitential season.  In liturgical color, rose replaced the seasonal purple to use color to express the change in penitential relief for the day.

     The Lenten Sunday of refreshment is called, Laetare and the Advent Rose Sunday is called Gaudete.  Both words in Latin mean, "Rejoice,"  and they come from the introits that were used on these days, in Advent from the Epistle of Paul in some years, "Rejoice in the Lord, always and again I say rejoice."

       Let us consider some lessons from the Scripture readings for this Rose Sunday in Advent.

First, we need to learn how to access joy in our lives.   Happiness is not the same thing as joy.  Happiness depends upon what happens.  And in the free conditions of our lives, we are not always happy about what is happening to us and to others in the world.  But happiness is a temporary surface release of something deeper and more profound.   In the season of Advent we are encouraged to "Rejoice in the Lord always."  How do we do this?  Joy is a fruit of the Spirit.  This means we have to tap this interior source of fulfillment in the midst of some very challenging situations in our world.  To live by joy is not to deny all of the unhappy conditions in the world; to live by joy is to believe that whatever is happening now has to be put in context with everything that happened in the past and everything that will happen in the future.  And joy is based upon the faith that God is winning even while the challenging conditions of freedom are being lived out.  If God's Spirit is the sign of immortal endurance, then to the know God's Spirit is to know joy.  What did C.S. Lewis call the biography of his conversion?  "Surprised by Joy."  One of things that never ceases to amaze me is to see young children in refugee camps and in hospitals and see them smile for no apparent reason at all.  They live closer to the original joy of their births.  That joy gets covered up in our adult worlds.  The conversion to Jesus, is to be able to access once again the original joy of life itself.  And having this access to joy, enables us to function better within the conditions of freedom in our lives.  So, let us learn to obey this command, "Rejoice in the Lord always."
      Another Advent lesson for us today is to let ideal worlds and utopia function for us a continuous call to a better world.  Let us not be too smug about what we've attained.  Let us be horrified by the worst of evil.  Let the ideal worlds inform the direction of our moral progress.  Let the poetry of the ideal inspire us: the desert will bloom, justice and recompense will happen,  people will recover from their blindness, people will learn how to walk on a direct way,  the exiled shall be able to return with gladness and joy.  The Psalmist proclaims God as the greatest of ideals?  Why?  God cares for the widow and orphan, God gives justice to the oppressed, God gives sight to the blind,  God cares for the stranger and those bowed down, God gives food to the hungry, God sets the prisoner free.   The ideals which we proclaim in the Advent readings remind us that anyone who is not for these ideals is not on the side of God.  During Advent we have to judge ourselves harshly in light of the great ideals in life.  Why?  We cannot drop perfection as our standard.
      What other Advent lesson is given to us today?  Be patient beloved.  The day of perfection, the day of Lord is not yet here.  There is still a big gap between what is ideal and what is actually happening in our world.  How do we survive being taunted by our ideals in the midst of some abject failures?  Be patient.  Joy is a fruit of the Spirit; so is patience.  Patience is the power to wait in the conditions of freedom and not give in to rage and wrath to think that we can force our notion of perfection in a sudden fit of rage.  Patience is the ability to honor the importance of freedom while not giving up our ideals.  To refuse patience is to give into rage or a Murphy's Law fatalism; if something bad can happen, it will happen.
     Another final lesson that I would cite from our readings today is this:  We need to be ready for paradigm switches or conversions to what is better.  We need to be ready to convert to that is which is a more adequate answer to our life situation.   The Gospel lesson is the story form of a paradigm switch.  Which Palestinian religious community had members who were most likely to become followers of Jesus of Nazareth?  The Pharisees? No.  The Sadducees?  No.  The Zealots?  No.  The Essenes.  No.  The followers of John the Baptist?  Yes.  They were the most obvious target audience to embrace the new religious paradigm of the Jesus Movement.  John the Baptist in prison is the example of all of his followers who wanted to maintain his memory and his community after he was killed.  When a movement loses a leader like John the Baptist how do they survive?   There was no successor like John to take his place.  Some important leaders in the Jesus Movement had been followers of John the Baptist.  They wanted all of the members of John's community to follow Jesus too.  They wanted the members of John the Baptist to understand why they had come to follow Jesus.  Jesus had a special ministry that fulfilled the ideals of the prophet Isaiah.  John the Baptist was a water man.  Jesus was a Spirit man.  John baptized with water; Jesus baptized with the Holy Spirit.   We are not certain whether the baptism of John was done just once; it might have been like a frequent purification ritual to symbolize the continuous need to be cleansed from sins.  The baptism of the Spirit was like an interior spring of water always bubbling within.  John the Baptist proclaimed an end of the world with immediate judgment; the Jesus Movement became the kingdom of heaven as the kingdom of God's Spirit who resided within the lives of those who came to know him as their Messiah.
     The message of Advent reminds us that we need to be ready for the paradigm changes in our lives.  We need to be ready to convert towards thinking and practice that are in the direction of fulfilling our ideals.
      Today, let us Rejoice, in the midst of both unhappy and happy conditions.  Let us not compromise the great ideals of life.  Let us be patience on the path of perfectability.   And finally, let us be willing to make conversions and paradigm switches towards the excellences of Jesus the Messiah as they become known to us.  Amen.

Utopian Ideals Need an Advent Police

2 Advent    A     December 8, 2019

Is. 11:1-10         Ps.72        

Rom. 15:4-13    Matt. 3:1-12

Lectionary Link

            Joni Mitchell wrote a very idealistic song about Woodstock, when she missed being able to go to Yasgar's farm, the location of Woodstock.  "We are star dust, we are golden and we've got to get ourselves back to the Garden."  Certainly the peace movement, love and over-optimism about new found pharmacology was part of the hippie attempt to get back to the Garden of Eden.  The prophet Isaiah wanted to get back to the Garden of Eden too.  He wanted to turn the clock back to the mythological time before the Fall and having to live under the consequences of knowing good and evil.  Would that the entire world could be the utopian impossible world of no predator-prey relationships.  This is the universal aspiration of everyone, which is more poignantly felt when the world is so weary with pain and loss and injustice.  But it is a world that still is actually experienced by a certain group of our population.  There are people who live in the perfect Garden?  Who and why?  Babies and infants and those in the stage of innocence live in the Garden of Eden because they don't know any different.  Being clueless can be the bliss of Eden and infants and children live there, until they encounter the main word of moral awakening, "NO!"  When infants experience intervention because adults know that all instant gratification of desire is not good, they get kicked out of the Garden of Innocence forever.  As adults, we still use the vision of a perfect innocent state to try to comfort us as we live under the free conditions of the world, which surely include the experiences in various degrees of good and evil.  And no matter what one's situation in life is, one has to live under moral conditions of good and evil, however they come to be defined.
         Why do people inside of religious communities and outside of religious community often resort to the nostalgia and regression of idyllic states of perfect innocence and perfect harmonies where no creatures harm another?  We live under the condition of freedom which permits the experiences of good and evil to occur in unintended random events of systems in conflict and in the intentional acts of free agents.  In the battle of good and evil in the conditions of freedom, things can seem to be so bad, that we might imagine dystopia to be the eventual outcome?  We need the counter visions of utopia to inform the possibilities of goodness prevailing in our future.  St. Paul was worried about strength and power of sin and evil and so he wrote that we have to overcome evil with good.   The vision of utopia and innocence informs our hope that goodness can prevail in the perpetual battle with evil, hatred and injustice.  But goodness is not automatic; goodness needs the training of free agents to make the goodness of heaven actual in our lives on earth.   What do we often need to become successful agents of goodness?
      Let us imagine ourselves being typical Americans; we begin to celebrate Christmas very early in Advent with parties and decorations.  And so we are at a neighborhood Christmas party with a big Christmas tree, lots of lights, party sweets and spiked egg nog.  And suddenly there is a loud knock at the door.  And I answer the door and there is a very strange looking man at the door; he looks homeless.   So, I greet him and ask him what he wants, noting that he does not look like the UPS and Amazon delivery persons.  He growls that he is the Advent Police and he has come to issue our residence a ticket for violating Advent rules.  So, I ask him who he is and by what authority he is issuing the ticket.  And he replied, "I am John the Baptist, and I am the original Advent Police."  And then it all makes sense, the scruffy hair and beard, the camel hair tunic and the big stick.  "Ok, John, you caught us in the act, but times have changed.  Christmas is so big, it needs more days and it really needs an entire quarter of the year to celebrate."  But John said, " You guys have it wrong.  Advent is about the coming end of the world.  You need to be prepared.  Advent is penitential boot camp for the end of the world.  You should not have your tree up.  It should go up on Christmas Eve, and go down on 12th night.  You should not have all of the lights on.  You should be giving up the rich foods and the booze.  "But John, what should we eat in Advent to satisfy you?"  And what does John say, "I'm glad you ask; I have brought a sack of kosher grasshoppers for you to munch on and my own Jordan Valley honey to go with those kosher grasshoppers."    "Well, John you are an Advent Scripture tradition and we have to read about you, but we don't really want a speed bump on our festive race toward Christmas.  Why don't you go visit the Amish; they'll buy your message all year long."
       John the Baptist stands as a figure of interdiction for evil in our world.  If Santa Claus says, "Ho, ho, ho," then John the Baptist says "No, no, no."
       Why does utopia need John the Baptist?   Utopia doesn't need John, but the threat of dystopia needs him badly.  "You guys are going wrong.  The direction of your lives is leading toward disaster.  You guys need major interdiction.  You need a road block.  You need to turn around because you're headed to dystopia chaos.  The Garden of Eden and innocence is the other direction.  Now turn around with some serious impulse control which allows you to share and care for each other and your world."
      You and I, during Advent, need to access our John the Baptist aspect of personality to interdict wrong directions in our lives and in the lives of our society.  Where we are destroying ourselves and our world we need to stop.  Stopping the inertia of bad behaviors is the first step.  What is the chief feature of 12 step programs?  Perpetual fasting.  Perpetual sobriety.  Stop doing what is bad for you and the world.
      Let us channel Advent John the Baptist today as a witness that we need to overcome evil with goodness.  We need to interdict and stop all evil tendency and habits.  We need to turn our directions, we need to renew our minds, we need to repent.  Repentance means turning the direction of our lives towards the utopia of overcoming evil with good in our actual lives today.
       Let us heed the advice of John the Advent Police today, even if we don't want to invite him over for supper.  John the Baptist as a fixture in the season of Advent is a reminder that we need to be at the continuous work of overcoming evil with good.  With the utopia vision of Isaiah we can be inspired in the right direction; and with John the Baptist as our boot camp sergeant, we can receive perhaps the motivation that we need to welcome Jesus at Christmas, and in all of the days of our life.  Amen.

Advent: A Time to Uphold the Normalcy of Justice

1 Advent A      December 1, 2019
Is. 2:1-5      Psalms 122
Rom. 13:8-14   Matt. 24:37-44


 Lectionary Link 

  Today is the First Sunday of Advent and that means it is first day of the New Year, the Christian New Year, so Happy New Year!  Did you party hearty last night to bring in the New Year?  Or did you forget about the Christian New Year, again?    So, why do we have a church calendar?  Why do we have calendars and watches and all measures and qualifications of time?  One of the tasks of life is to influence our orientation to time.  We are born to organize time.  So, we have clocks and calendars.  Today, the church calendar has many competing calendars.  We have many orientations for the times of our lives.  We have fiscal calendars, we have school calendars, entertainment calendars, concert calendars, we have agricultural calendars, we have commercial calendars, (the know, the one where Christmas begins the day after Halloween), we have personal family calendars built around the birthdays and anniversaries of family members, political calendars, work and job calendars, we have sports calendars galore for every sport on every level.  Every calendar that we follow provides specific orientation toward directing our activities in time.

        The church calendar did not always have so many competing calendars.  The modern era has created so many social occasions in life requiring many calendars to organize alternative participation to church life.

        So, what is the church calendar and its purpose?  And what is the meaning of the season of Advent?  When we try to study history, we can't study it all at once.  We break it up into time periods and location of people.  We establish curricula to study the entire body of knowledge in bits and pieces.

         The church calendar is an annual cycle of the presentation of the full body of Christian knowledge.  In short, the church calendar is a curriculum of Christian knowledge.  It is a method of progressive learning and repetitive review of themes in our faith based upon the events in the life of Jesus and the theology of that these events came to have in the early church and church history.

          So, what are the themes of Advent?  Advent means coming.  Advent is a season of two comings.  If the Messiah came first as a babe in Bethlehem but then died as the Suffering Servant Messiah, there had to be a second coming to be a theological corrective to fulfill the definition of the Messiah by many Jews.  For the followers of Jesus, there were other comings of Christ between the first coming and a future great coming.  Jesus came again from the dead in his post-resurrection appearances.  In the theology of the early church Jesus left in the Ascension, only to return in the experience of Pentecost in the Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit is also the Spirt of Christ.  Still Jewish Messianic theology required a conquering kingly Messiah, and so there arose the theology of the big Second Coming of Christ as a future figure of corrective justice for a suffering world.  The big second coming and return of Christ was what the early church needed as way to answer the Jewish belief that Jesus of Nazareth did not qualify for the full definition of a Davidic, kingly Messiah.  The Second Coming theology fulfilled the fuller definition of what the Messiah should be.

     Advent is a season about anticipating a big second coming of Christ.  Why do we need such a discourse of the second coming?  We need the Second Coming, because we need to continue to believe in the normalcy of justice.  We need to believe in fairness.  We need to believe that eventually in some ways, all accounts will be settled.  We need to believe in the normalcy of agricultural complex for feeding the people of the world, over the industrial military complexes of the world which have been the lifestyle of humanity at war.  (We wish the resources of the world could be used to feed and care for people, rather than be dominated by swords and the weapons of warfare). 

         The oracle words of Risen Christ given in the Gospel words were to prepare the Christians for the uneven events of what can arise in the free conditions of the world.  Like in the days of Noah a flood can arise and wipe out lots of people.  In the time of the early church, Jerusalem would be destroyed; there would be uneven persecutions and martyrdoms.  Like in the days of Noah, some were taken away in the death,  while others are left behind to survive and keep the church alive and well.

     In the modern era, many have let themselves be dismissive of Advent and the Second Coming of Christ discourse.  Why?  The fundamentalists have literalized them as exactly predicative of specific futures, and 1000's of apocalyptic preachers have tried to predict the exact dates of the end of the world, even though they were told by Jesus that no one knows the end, but only the eternal father.  And if only the Father knows, who is everlasting, it means there is no end day, there is only the latest day.  Time means that there will only always be the latest day.  Life is continuous, but we live by the unit of the story with beginnings and endings; we need book ends for stories even while we know that arbitrary beginning and endings of stories cannot limit the continuity of time.  Our entertainment life is full of stories of endings and the exacting of justice by the good guys over the bad guys.  If people have left the church and the stories of Advent justice, they still embrace the Advent themes in their novels, science fiction and cinema.

      During this season of Advent, let us be comfortable with the normalcy of justice and when we know poignantly, that we don't live in a fair and just world, we still do not give up the ideals of justice.  We continue to make an Advent station at the story of the second coming of Christ as our belief in eternal justice and our hope that a God-human being can persuade all this cosmos into a harmonic unity.

       We will keep forever, the Advent second coming tradition, because in the worst of times, our entire being recoils against injustice.  And in Advent, we profess that we live toward justice as what we believe should finally win in this world.

        Let us not be uncomfortable with the language of the Second Coming of Christ; if we deny it in our faith, we will find it in the secular culture where many people have gone to find the story forms for belief in justice.  But let us not be so proud in our rightness, that we think God will and should intervene to prove that our particular view and lifestyle is better than anyone else's.  The fundamentalists essentially believe in the Second Coming of Christ as way to say that God is going to come and prove them right.  Let us not use the stories of the second coming of Christ to trivialize God in such way; but let us seek solace in the stories which proclaim the justice of a loving, winsome, Christ, forever.  Amen.

Holy Irony! Jesus is King?

Last Sunday after  Pentecost, Cp29, November 24, 2019  Christ the King

Jeremiah 23:1-6  Ps. 46           

Col. 1:11-20    Luke 23:23-33   

Lectionary Link

We might think that billboards were a modern invention for mass advertising, but we find from the Gospels that the cross of Jesus Christ was also a billboard.  On the cross of Jesus, it was written, "The King of the Jews."

This inscription would be interesting to ponder during the actual time of Jesus.  Why would writing be placed upon a cross?  Who would see it?  How many people who would be in the audience for the event that lasted just a few hours would actually be literate?  Would it be an internal joke among the Roman soldiers who could read?  Crucifixions were public spectacles to discourage others about even thinking about rebellion and insurrections.

It is hard for me to understand who the actual viewers would have been to see the words written on the cross.

What is easier for me to understand is the literary function of this billboard within the early Christian community.  "The King of Jews," being written on the cross in the account of the crucifixion is a proclamation of the profound irony which was involved in the cross of Jesus.

Today is the feast of Christ the King and this is perhaps the original irony which instigated the split between the church and the synagogue.

The feast of Christ the King, became a feast because a pope observed the success of the Bolshevik revolution and secular and atheistic political movements in Europe.  How could Christians celebrate an event of Christian politics?  So, we have the arising of the feast of Christ the King.

We know that for us that not only was Christ as king, an ironic notion; the very notion of monarchical governance is a big problem for us as Americans.  We formed our country because we did not believe that monarchy was  true to the nature of free independent people who could determine their own governance.

Americans love the romance of European tourism monarchies and gossip about the Royal family.  We enjoy the Disney fantasies about royalty, even while we are very skeptical about the notion of kings and monarchies.

In the Hebrew Scripture, the notion of kingship was originally problematic.  The tribes of Israel were a loose federation governed by prophets, seers and judges.  The tribes of Israel begged the last famous Judge Samuel to give them a king who would lead an army to protect because all of their enemies had kings with armies.  Samuel, warned them that it was not God's will.  He warned them that a king would be a "socialism of one; a king is a very demanding central government."  The king would take your young men for his army and he would take a disproportionate amount of the goods and services of the country to support his life style.  Reluctantly, God and Samuel, agreed to have a God chosen king, who would be invested in the act of pouring oil on the head.  This anointing is where the word and notion of Messiah derives.  The oil is symbolic of God's spirit selecting and initiating God's chosen leader.  This is also perhaps a variation of the ancient notion of the "divine right" of kings that is found in many ancient societies.  It is also the highest religious political propaganda because, "if God has chosen the leader, then how can mere people oppose such a leader?"  It becomes blasphemy to oppose the divine king."

Let us ponder how the designation of "The King of the Jews" is a highly ironic notion for first century Palestine.  In the time of Jesus, who was the actual King of the Jews?  It was the Caesar and his local representative, King Herod.  So, the Roman soldiers who knew that Caesar was King, mocked the small town prophet king as being but a joke.  In the Passion story, the notion of Jesus as a King was presented as a threat to the Caesar.  Jesus as King was seen as disclosed to the Roman authorities by the Jewish religious leaders who paid Judas 30 pieces of silver for this secret knowledge held by the followers of Jesus.  They confessed Jesus as being the chief candidate for this mythical successor of King David, the Messiah.  The Passion crowd cried, "We have no king but Caesar," which meant that Jesus was presented to Pilate and Herod as a competing pretender to the throne.

That Jesus died a death on the cross was proof that he was not a military king Messiah like David who would be so great as to deliver Israel from the domination of Caesar.  And because Jesus was not a military Messiah, at the death of Jesus, his followers scattered.  How could Jesus on the cross be the Messiah?  And so we understand the chief reason that the synagogue separated from the Jesus Movement.  It was the irony about how Jesus was the king; it was the irony of not being able to believe one's eyes.  For most of the members of the synagogue, Jesus could not be a true Davidic Messiah king because he did not deliver Israel.  In fact, Israel was destroyed by the Roman armies with Jerusalem and the Temple being razed to the ground in the year 70.  How could Jesus be the Davidic Messiah with such devastation of the homeland?

The irony of Jesus as a king and as a Messiah was fulfilled in the early church, through what I would call the mysticism of Jesus Movement.  What is the mysticism of the early church which would bring a person to confess Jesus as the Messiah?  The followers of Jesus had the privilege of the mystical encounters with Risen Christ which was so real, they were convinced that he was still living.  If Jesus of Nazareth, transcended death and appeared as the Risen Christ, this powerful post-death transformation was more than enough proof of Jesus being God's chosen and anointed Messiah-King.

But you see the problem.  If you did not have the mystical experience of the Risen Christ, you could only believe your eyes and think that Messiah would be a powerful military king.  One can sympathize with people who did not have the mystical experience of the Risen Christ; one can sympathize with those who did not have this baptism of the Holy Spirit to be able to experience this interior and vital King of Hearts.

Jesus as the Messiah became evident to those who had this experience of the Risen Christ and understood this parallel kingdom of God that transcended the visible world which was still in control of the tyrants of the world.

Now do you understand the irony of the billboard on the cross of Jesus, "This is the King of the Jews?"

It was an irony because the Risen Christ had become known and revealed as the Messiah to the Jews who had this mystical experience of the Risen Christ, but also to the Gentiles who had the same mystical experience available to them as well.

The history of the church throughout the ages is the history of the irony of Christ as king.  Even when Christianity converted kings and rulers and when so-called Christian Emperors and Kings tried to pretend they were the kingdom of the Messiah, it has not been evident that they could make it heaven on earth.  It has more often been the case that Christian leaders and popes with absolute power also found the all too human way to be absolutely corrupt.  And yet in the continuous failure to make heaven on earth, the irony of Christ as King and Messiah continues.

How does it continue?  It continues as an inside job.  Christ is the Messiah the King is known in the continuing availability of the mystical experience of the Risen Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit to transforms the inner lives of the person.

Sometimes the political situations in our world seem so corrupt and bereft of genuine care for the common good, we can get discouraged about the kingdom of the Messiah ever being actually within our grasp.

I believe that many religious people think that if we can convince the kings and the leaders of the world to support us, we can make our heaven on earth. But to ally ourselves with corrupt leaders for our own power is to compromise the values of Christ.

And we can easily betray the irony of Christ the Messiah.  The Gospels of the early churches are the mystical spiritual manuals of the early churches; they present the inner mysticism within the narrative of the life of Jesus.

For those who have had the experience of the Risen Christ, they have entered into the path of identity with Jesus and with Paul, they could say, "I have been crucified with Christ, yet I live, yet not I for Christ lives within me."

The narrative of the life of Jesus in the Gospel is the narrative of the mystical identity with Christ.  This includes the mystical irony of Jesus on the cross as the king of the Jews and as the king of anyone who wants to know the power of the death of Jesus become the mystical power within each of us to die to that which is unworthy.

On this feast of Christ the King, let us be true to the mystical experience of the Risen Christ becoming the King of our hearts who has initiated us into a parallel kingdom of God.  And the wonderful thing about this mystical experience is that many, many times in our lives we find experiences in this visible world which partakes of the delicious presence of the Risen Christ, who is our King and Messiah.  Amen.

  

Utopian and Apocalyptic: Analgesic Discourse

23  Pentecost, Cp28, November 17, 2019

Isaiah 65:17-25 Ps. 98:

2 Thes. 3:6-13     Luke 21:5-19   

Lectionary Link

    You and I are aware of the word utopia and for us it refers to ideal conditions or best conditions.  We sometimes might think that the literal meaning of utopia means "good place" which would be eu-topia, but the actual word utopia was constructed from a negative Greek word, not meaning "good place," but "not a place," or "no such place," perhaps even meaning an impossible place.
    When you go to the health spa which is called "Utopia," remember it really means "no such body, and no such good looks," but you should try anyway.
    Utopia is not mentioned in the Bible; it became a word coined by the "Man for All Season," Thomas More, the critic of Henry the Eighth, who wrote a book of the same title. Utopia was a fictional island and he did this when there was chaos in the political world of England and Europe.  O that there would be an impossible place, a "no such" place to escape to in our imaginations for but a moment of satirical relief from our current chaos.
    I find it interesting that the utopian words of the prophet Isaiah are put in contrast with the dystopian world referred to in the words of Jesus as written in the Gospel of Luke.
    The Gospel of Luke was written after the destruction of Jerusalem.  The Jesus Movement and the early Christ-communities went through periods of flying under the radar from harm  and times of severe persecution.  The words of Jesus in the Gospels are layered to be appeals of the oracle of Christ depending upon what a particular group of Christians were facing in terms of persecution. 
     How does the Bible deal with the conditions of dystopia when the bad guys are winning and when those who believe they know God's spiritual favor are not favored in the actual circumstances of their lives?  How do we continue to believe in God and in justice when God is not an apparent intervening protector of God's people?  How can one believe in truth and justice when lying and persecution abound?
    In the Bible, there is literature which is called apocalyptic.  It was a language of comfort for suffering people.  Language of comfort can be both utopian and apocalyptic.  When one is in pain or distress, what does one want?  One wants the freedom from pain and the end of the circumstances which causes the pain.  We use aesthetic, poetic, artistic and musical language to ease the pain of the body and soul.  Oncology and pain management regimes involve visualizations of states of bliss and freedom from pain.  Children in oncology units are encouraged to draw pictures of what fighting means to end the cancer that attacks their body.  They draw pictures of angels and superheroes and tanks and bombs fighting against their disease and pain.  They try to envision the apocalyptic end of their cancer and pain.  Is the language of the apocalyptic and utopian true and meaningful?  It is indeed meaningfully true to fight pain in suffering with every kind of linguistic assault that can provide an analgesic.  Fundamentalists say that utopian and apocalyptic language is predictive about an actual empirically verifiable future, and the scientists make fun of them.  To make such language literal is to violate the analgesic and true meaning of utopian and the apocalyptic language.  The true meaning of such language is found in a large portion of our literature and cinema of futurism which is seen everywhere in our entertainment culture.   Just because we have separated apocalyptic and utopian from religion does not mean that the people who comprised the biblical books did.  Remember the Bible as the first of its kind in being unique published use of language, presented many of the genres which modern society has stolen from in the many derived correspondences.
    Utopian and apocalyptic language was true and meaningful analgesic language of comfort to the people of the Bible at different times of their lives.  If we understand the function of such language, we understand it as meaningfully true.  Persons who literalize such language try to literalize poetry and it only makes their religion look silly.
     We use apocalyptic and utopian language and modes of thinking all of the time in common speech, even though we don't label it as such.
        When a mother comforts her sick baby, with "There, there, all will be well.  You'll be just fine."  She does not know what she is saying can or will be verified but the major truth of her words is the truth of comfort, real comfort, godly comfort.  And it would be silly for anyone to criticize her speech as being scientifically unverifiable, and therefore not true.  The language of comfort is the language of hope for time to pass and better conditions to arise.
      The apocalyptic is also the delayed impulse of rage and anger.  We often are so enraged by the sheer injustice of something, we could wish ourselves to be all powerful enough to intervene and correct with force the immediate situation.  Our better selves are more restrained; oppressed people who want to strike at their captors have to choose servile survival instead of enraged reactions that might get themselves and others harmed.  What do such people do to delay their rage?  They leave vengeance to God in a delayed future reckoning.  The discourse of delayed future reckoning is the discourse of the apocalyptic.
      Today in our cinematic art we use the action adventure film to channel the rage for immediate intervening justice.  The action adventure hero in less than two hours can right all wrong and bring the bad guys to order, something that really is impossible in actual life.
        The art of the apocalyptic functioned for people of biblical cultures; we just use the art of the apocalyptic in a different way today and people who are oppressed still need the art of the apocalyptic to retain a belief in the normalcy of a final justice for everyone.
   The discourses of the utopian and the apocalyptic are words of confession about a hope that life can be better, and greater harmonies can be achieved.  They are confessions of our belief in justice and no matter what the current conditions are. We still confess the normalcy of justice for all.
   You and I live on the continuum of the freedom of all difference agents and actors in this life; some human and some not.  In the free condition of different agents, we can hope for a harmony which acknowledges difference but also celebrates a perfect reciprocity among everyone and all things.  Given our knowledge of our less than angelic natures, we doubt the fulfillment of perfect harmonies in our world, even though we need to have the utopian visions of harmonies, or the apocalyptic intervention of an almighty force eventually persuading the outcome of justice.  In our lives based upon evolutionary theory, we can observe the fittest survive by over-powering in various ways the weak.  And in our lives of faith and love, we believe that the weak have the right to play their part in the big orchestra of life, without being eliminated by the strong.  The utopian and the apocalyptic genres are the poetic language of justice in a greater Power to persuade into a full harmony of all things.
  Today, you and I need not worry about the apocalyptic words of Jesus as being foreign to human experience.  We need not be cynical about the utopian vision of Isaiah or even the poetic license of John Lennon's song, "Imagine."
    Today, I finish with the example of the conductor of the new Junior High symphony.  The first day of class results in a total cacophony of bad sounds.  "Everyone thinks.....this is really terrible."  But then the conductor plays the recordings of a major symphony to show the kids what they could eventually sound like.  The conductor gives them a utopian, seemingly unattainable model.  But the conductor also begins to lower the apocalyptic boom on them in demanding practice and hours of private lessons.  The conductor intervenes in a severe way to transform the skills of the instrumentalist toward the ideal.
   Today, you and I need both the utopian and the apocalyptic.  We need the vision of the perfect us, a utopian people, no such people yet, as a vision to which we are called.  The biblical utopian Person is the Messiah, the Christ.  He is the one who calls towards our utopian selves.  He calls us a parish and society toward the harmony of being non-competitors, causing no harm.  He assures us of a final apocalyptic power to ultimate persuade us and everyone toward our better angels.
  Remember that if people today mock the utopian and the apocalyptic language of the Bible, they still are getting their utopian and apocalyptic discourse in other ways in the discourses of the culture within which we live.  Most of these discourses derived from the great themes that are laid down in the Bible.
   We need not feel inferior about the biblical discourse, because you and I have found the utopian person, Jesus Christ to be a life transformer, and we have found the Holy Spirit to be an apocalyptic intervener in our lives to advance us on the path of love and justice today.  Amen.