Showing posts with label Sermon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sermon. Show all posts

Sunday, February 16, 2020

Pirate Making Portion of the Beatitudes

6 Epiphany   A    February 16, 2020   
Sirach 15:15-20  Psalm 119:1-8
1 Corinthians 3:1-9  Matt.5:21-24,27-30,33-37




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


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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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






Sunday, February 9, 2020

Be Salt and Light

5 Epiphany  A     February 9, 2020        
Isaiah 58:1-9a, (9b-12)  Psalm 112:1-9  
1 Corinthians 2:1-11  Matt.5:13-20

Lectionary Link

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Sunday, February 2, 2020

Jesus Was Ritual Participant and Innovator

The Presentation    February 2, 2014
Malachi 3:1-4   Ps.84:1-6
Heb. 2:14-18    Luke 2:22-40


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



Sunday, January 26, 2020

Divided by Having a Common Savior?


3 Epiphany A      January  26, 2020
Is. 9:1-4         Psalm 27:1, 5-13
1 Cor. 1:10-18    Matt. 4:12-23



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday, January 19, 2020

The Call of Christ and Evangelism Involves Translation

2 Epiphany A January 19, 2020
Isaiah 49:1-7 Psalm 40:1-12
1 Corinthians 1:1-9 John 1:29-42
Since we read the Gospel of John in its final textual and translated form, we often read it with primary naivete; that is, we read it as if it was an eye-witness account of a single reporter who was following Jesus around charting a contemporaneous account of his life.

We love to keep things in the delicious story mode; that is for child-like immediate enjoyment.  Why do you think Disney, and Novels and the Cinema is so popular.  We like to live in the "as if" mode.  We like to assume everything is "as if" it appears in its artistic form.

But lingering in primary naivete as the only way of reading the Bible is what created the interpretative school of what is called fundamentalism.  And when naïve reading clashes with science, common sense and the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system, people respond differently.  Fundamentalists think that they have to read most of the Bible as literal.  And scientists think that if being literal is what defines faith and religion; they say no thanks.  And as Episcopalians, we believe that we can be poets and scientist at the same time.  We can appreciate poetic, artistic, faith discourse and we can have our feet firmly on the ground with the brute facts of scientific discourse.

We can understand the Gospel of John as a collection of writings which had various editions before a final edition.  These writings reflect several decades of the mystical teachings of the church, their inquirers classes to teach new members being added to their community, the liturgical practices of the church including healing, Eucharist and baptism, and all of these practices were given a discourse to weave their original inspiration with the story of the life of Jesus.

One of the themes of the Epiphany Season is the calling of Christ.  Christ becomes manifest to people in a personal call.  Back in the days when telephones were fewer, it was always really special to get a call.  Back in the days of snail mail, it used to be really special to get a personal letter.  But today with the ubiquity of messages a call is not so special.  We end up blocking most calls and funneling messages to spam folders.

The notion of call is still important, because what is it that makes a call special?  It depends upon who is calling.  The call of Christ is important because he is unique and his call is personal and special because it is tailored to each individual's life experience.

Today, we can highlight the call of Simon Peter which came in a succession of referrals, starting with John the Baptist, then his disciples, which included Andrew, who then told his brother Peter.  This highlights that evangelism is most often based upon referrals.  "Hey, I've someone special; would you like to meet him too."  Evangelism is in many ways an attempt to do some match making between Jesus and other people.  "Hey, I'd like you to meet someone special; here's how I encountered the Risen Christ and it changed my life.  I'd like to present this accessible experience to you too."

One of the reasons we highlight call of Simon Peter today is because yesterday we began what is called the week of Christian Unity which stretches from January 18 until January 25th.  Yesterday, was the feast of the confession of Simon Peter, when he declared Jesus to be the Messiah, the Son of God.  On January 25th, we commemorate the Conversion of St. Paul, who was the chief apostle to the Gentiles.  Peter was a Pillar in the Jewish followers of Christ and Paul was a Pillar of the mission and manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles.

We might say that the purpose of the Gospel of John is to make the call of the Risen Christ accessible to the widest possible audience.

How does the church make the call of Jesus Christ accessible to the widest possible audience?  This brings us to what I find a very fascinating parenthesis in the Gospel of John.  The parenthetical phrase is, "which is translated."

Translation is the key to making the call of Jesus Christ accessible to the widest possible audience.  The many people who were instructed within the community which wrote the Gospel of John came from different backgrounds.  Some were observant Jews, so they knew the jargon.  They knew what rabbi meant, they knew what Messiah meant.  They knew what Cephas meant.  But there were non-observant Jews and there were many Gentiles who had to have the connection of the Hebrew Scriptures with Jesus of Nazareth, translated to them.  They had to have the Judaic traditions translated to them.  The Gospel of John is a collection of writings about the efforts of the early church to translate the meaning the significance of Jesus Christ to people from diverse backgrounds.  The early church were trying to appeal to the followers of John the Baptist.  So they presented John the Baptist with the understanding that John recommended Jesus as his logical successor.  The early church which generated the Gospel of John were appealing to members of the synagogue by showing how Jews like Peter and Paul could merge their Judaism with the Spiritual innovations that became known through the teaching of Jesus Christ.  But also, John's Gospel translates actual language and religious notions into language accessible to the Gentiles who had no background in Judaism or the Hebrew Scriptures.  How would a Gentile know what "Lamb of God" meant unless there was a translation of Hebrew Scripture and tradition?

Translation expresses the essence of the Epiphany season.  How does Jesus Christ become manifest to the World?  He becomes translated into accessible teaching to as many people as possible.  Translation implies a bi-lingual experience.  It implies that there is a bridge of communication between diverse people.

If you and I have responded to the call of Christ, it is our further calling to become translators of the life Christ to other people.  We are called to interpret the meaning of the Risen Christ to other people in ways that are accessible to their life situations.  We celebrate this week of Christian Unity because translation requires lots of people to translate the meaning of the life of Jesus to all of the people of the world.  We as Episcopalians in this place have our own way of translating the call of Christ to the people we are inviting to know the Risen Christ.

Today, let us embrace the role of translating and interpretation with renewed commitment.  It means that we accept the very personal and unique ways in which Christ has gotten through to us and from there we honor the personal and unique ways that Christ will get through to people in their personal circumstances and situations.  Translation and interpretation means that we have to get to know and honor the life situations of others so that we can find the best way to refer them to know the call of Christ.

So on this day of remembering the call of Peter in this week of Christian unity, let us answer the following question with: "I will with God's help."

Will you translate the life of Christ to other people that you meet so that they can know the love of God in a very personal way?

"I will, with God's help."  Amen

Sunday, January 12, 2020

Baptism of Jesus, An Event in the Hominization of God

1 Epiphany A      January  12, 2020
Is.42:1-9         Ps. 89:20-29
Acts 10:34-38     Matt. 3:13-17
     Do you think that we communicate with animals?  Do you communicate with your pet dog or cat?  Do you have special communication skills with your pet dog?  Are you a dog whisperer?  How is it that we can presume that authentic and understandable communication happens between us and say our pet dog?  We can only observe a dog from the human point of view.  So how can we say that we understand a dog from a dog's point of view?    While we may be saying that a dog is our comfort, service and assistance animal, a dog may be saying this is my comfort, service and assistance person, in short, someone whom I've got wrapped around my little paws.  In short, I can get my assistance and service person do tricks for me, like get me food when I want it.

     Why do we assume the validity of such inter-specie communication?  Because we assume that we share something of a sentient nature with our pet friends, but still we cannot  have a complete identity with them because we remain different.

     Let now ponder the possibility of the inter-specie communication between God and humanity.  How is such possible?  How could it even happen?  And if it can happen what would be the nature and purpose of such communication?

     The witness of the Hebrew Scripture is that God is so special, so different, called the difference of holiness that God is humanly unapproachable. (No one has ever seen God).   If God is such a specie of a different order how is communication possible?

      We believe communication with God happens because of some basic assumptions.   We believe that God is enough like us and we enough like God in being personality that we have a meeting point for communication.  In the creation story, it is stated that human being are made in God's image, and so that likeness is the starting point for the possibility of communication.

     On the other hand, we are also faced with the reality that you and I are prisoners of human experience.  We have human experiences of trees and plants, we have human experiences of animals and pets, and we can only have human experiences of the life of God.  What does this mean then?  It means that there has to be some way to confer validity upon human experience as a way to know God.

    This is what underpins our confession of Jesus as Son of God and son of humanity.  We confess Jesus as the divine life becoming fully bi-lingual with human experience so that the divine life could be interpreted into adequate human terms to make a difference in elevating human life to its highest excellence.

    The Gospel story of Jesus is a story of God learning completely the human language and using the language of human experience to show what God is like and how God wants us to live best.

    In Pauline mysticism, this emptying of the divine life into human experience is called "kenosis."  This is the humility of God implying that humanity is like deeply loved and cherished pets, so cherish that God is willing to embrace a complete coincidence with human experience.

    And one such emptying experience of God into human experience was the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist.  In the baptism of Jesus by John, Jesus is expressing a complete solidarity with human community, a specific human community, the community of John the Baptist.  In the mysticism of St. Paul's poetry about Christ, he wrote that in Jesus equality with God was not something to be grasped; but he emptied himself taking the form of a human person.  The baptism of Jesus is an event of divine solidarity with human experience, within a human initiation event.  The baptism of Jesus another event of God in Christ proclaiming, "I am Emmanuel,"  I am with you and I am for you with the purpose of elevating you to be persons of best excellence.

     What does the baptism of Jesus tell us about God?  It tells us that all theology is anthropology.  It tells that all known experience is but human experience, and it is the undeniable affirmation that we cannot help but be anthropomorphic because we are prisoners of human experience.  Even our experience of God is but a human experience, but it is elevated and exalted human experience, particularly if its spiritual identity which propels us to fulfill the practice of love and justice.

    In the baptism of Jesus, we are told it is okay to be human because the best human thing that we can do is to come to know our identity with God.  The Orthodox Church has long called this dynamic process, "theosis" or the divinization of humanity.  God become hominized in Jesus so that humanity might become divinized in Christ.   The life of God became emptied or devolved into human experience so that human life might become evolved into our spiritual or divine natures.  The baptism of Jesus was symbolic of his initiation into human community so that we in our baptism by water and the Holy Spirit might be initiated into the divine community of Father, Son and Holy Spirit and with fellow saints as children of God.

     Let us today be thankful of the identity that God takes with humanity and how it was expressed in the baptism of Jesus.  God learned the language of humanity in Christ so that the language of God might be taught to humanity.  And what is God's language?  It is mysteriously never finished and always needed to be learned.  It is the language of love, joy, justice, peace, patience, gentleness, goodness and kindness.  Jesus came to teach us these special language features of what the divine language means for human experience.

    At the baptism of Jesus, the heavenly voice declared Jesus to be God's beloved Son.  But what is true about Jesus is that he did not want to be an only child.  An only child might ask mom and dad for a brother and sister.   Jesus asked his parent for many brothers and sisters.  Jesus also gave power to men and women to also become children of God and hear God's voice say, "You are my beloved son.  You are my beloved daughter.  Welcome to the family."

    If Jesus Christ is God emptying the divine self into human experience, then we owe to ourselves to embrace the invitation to ride the elevator of God's Spirit to know and express our higher selves.

    Let us be thankful today that God embraces your experience and my experience as valid ways to come to know how the divine life is a part of our lives and how we are given spiritual energy and grace to live out our heritage as children of God.  Amen.

Sunday, January 5, 2020

Magi, Symbolic of Accessible Salvation

2 Christmas A January 5, 2020
Jeremiah 31:7-14   Ps 84:1-8
Eph. 1:3-6,15-19a Matthew 2:1-12


     Today is the last day of Christmas and tomorrow is the Feast of the Epiphany.  And on the twelfth day, according to the song, your true love gave to you twelve Lords a leapin’.  If you’ve ever watched the House of Lords in session on the telly, you would find that hard to believe.  It’s more like twelve Lords a sleepin’.
      Do you think that the entire world has the right of access to chocolate?  Well, no, it should belong to us; it should be our secret so that we don't have to share it.  Spoken like a true hoarder of chocolate.
     Do you think all of the people of the world have the right of access to water?  Well, yes because it is necessity of life.
     Do you think that everyone in the world has the right of access to good health care?  Well, yes and the question remains how to make that happen everywhere.
     Do you think all people in our world should have access to spiritual health?  The biblical word for spiritual health is salvation.  The Hebrew word is "yeshua."  It means deliverance, which would imply the rescue from the threats to personal well-being.  When "yeshua" is translated into English, how do we say it?  Jesus.
      One could call the Bible a record of salvation history.  The creation story would imply that God desired health and salvation for everyone.  The history of humanity is how we have gone from innocence to ignorance about our own spiritual well-being and so we needed divine events to help us find salvation or spiritual health.  The Hebrew Scriptures is the story about how salvation could come to a specific group of people so that its effects could be shared with the rest of the world.  It's like Israel had to be the sugar cube of sweetness in the tea cup to bring sweetness to the entire drink.  But like chocolate hoarders, many people in Israel treated salvation as evidence of their own superiority and so why should their secret be shared.  The entire book of Jonah is message to those who did not think foreigners deserved the message of salvation.
     When Jesus came into his ministry, the Judaism of his day believed that salvation was an exclusive purity program to keep the Jews free from as much Gentile influence in their religion as possible.  They rightly were fearful about being swallowed up by the Romans who surrounded them and controlled the politics.  They were consumed with salvation meaning the saving of themselves as a distinct people in a very threatening world.
     The early church believe that Jesus was spiritual health and salvation offered to all the people in the world.  The early church believed like the author of the book of Jonah, that Jesus was a theological correction to the short-sighted and exclusive practice of Judaism.  How did the early church come to believe this?  They observed the Jesus-effect happening within the lives of Gentiles who experienced the Risen Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit.   They regarded these Gentiles to be wise people.  They made a journey from deity religion of the Emperor, and from the Mystery religion practices in the Temples to the place of the birth of Christ within themselves.  They did so at great sacrifice and great social and religious change.  They attended to the birth of Christ within their lives with the very best gifts of their lives.
     The wise Gentile followers of Christ gave up much, and some visionary early Jewish Christian leaders did not make them comply to the ritual purity practices of Judaism.  They did not have to observe Jewish feasts, they did not have to keep the dietary requirements of Judaism, the men did not have to undergo the practice of circumcision.  Jesus was offered as salvation to the Gentiles who were wise enough to embrace it and make a significant cultural journey to embrace Christian practice, but they did not have to become those who observed the ritual purity rituals of Judaism.
     The early church believed salvation was available to all.  They believed that this was the original intention.  They believed that Abraham had valid faith before he was circumcised.  They believed valid faith existed before Moses and Judaism was even born.
    So wise Gentiles were faithful people like Abraham.  They could travel to the place of experiencing the birth of Christ.  This reality of the manifestation of Christ to the Gentile is encoded in the story of the Magi, which is the theme of the season of the Epiphany which begins tomorrow.
    For the Jews who remained in the synagogue and excommunicated the followers of Jesus, they had significant non-negotiables which would not allow them to make the ritual compromises to the Gentiles which the members of the Jewish Movement allowed.
    The Jesus Movement was a Christ-centered Judaism which compromised the ritual purity requirements to allow the wise and willing Gentiles full membership into the fellowship of Christ.
     The church still lives in the spirit of the Epiphany; the belief that the birth of Christ is available and accessible to all wise persons who want to make the journey and bring the best gifts of their lives to witness it in their own lives.
     If we understand the theological meaning of the Epiphany, then we understand the function of the story of the Magi within the early churches which had become populated by wise Gentiles who had made the journey to realize the birth of Christ within their lives.
    The Epiphany is still a reality for us today.  Our empty churches might make us ponder whether we a truly offering the universal message of salvation in accessible ways to everyone today?   It is true that not any one parish or denomination can be omni-competent to the faith and salvation needs all people.  But we in our situation still have the responsibility to make the appeal to the people we can in accessible ways. 
    We have to ask ourselves if we have too many non-negotiables for people to feel at home in our midst.  Are we too focused on our own comfortable practices such that an "outsider" might not feel they could feel at home here?   We always need to be assessing the welcome to Jesus as our salvation which we are offering in the witness of our parish.  Do we have some precious exclusive practices that in some ways make us a closed group?
    The magi story reminds us that there are always wise foreigners who are willing to make the trip and sacrifice to experience the salvation of Jesus who is born in us and who can be known to be born in any honest seeker.  
    May God's Holy Spirit help us to live up to the Spirit of the Epiphany as we seek to make Christ manifest to as many who want to know salvation of the birth of Christ in their lives.  Amen. 
  

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