Monotheism or Henotheism?

4 Epiphany B  January 28, 2024
Deut. 18:15-20  Ps. 111
1 Corinthians 8:1-13   Mark 1:21-28

Lectionary Link

We are taught that Christianity and Judaism are monotheistic religions, and yet our Scriptures indicate writings which suggests that both are henotheistic religions, which means that they acknowledge a superior deity among other deities.

The unfolding of Hebrew Scriptures includes the ascendency of a supreme God over the other gods in the invisible realm even as the God of Israel was showing superiority over the gods of the people of the land of Canaan, but mostly when the people of Israel were being obedient to the One God.

The contexts of origin of both the Hebrew and Christian religion was polytheistic, meaning that people who did not embrace the Hebraic and Christian notions of a superior  God, were people who followed a variety of gods and and goddesses.  In the Roman Empire context, there was also the cult of the Emperor who was designated as a god.

Just as the Hebrew Scriptures is a record of how the God of Israel demonstrates a superiority over the other gods in the ancient world, so too the New Testament presents Jesus Christ as one who demonstrates a power over the interior hierarchies of principalities and powers of darkness.  In the New Testament, these lords of the interior life had their messenger agents, the demons, and the unclean spirits.

St. Paul wrote that life is first an interior battle before it becomes an exterior battle.  "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." In effect, the former gods were renamed as interior principalities, powers, and rulers of darkness.

In the Gospel rendering of this Pauline view of interior cosmology, Jesus is presented as the one who went interior to flesh and blood and was known to be the Higher Power against principalities, powers, and rulers of the darkness in this world.

Our interior world can be experience as an interior bundle of unnamed sensations, emotional instincts, and forces until a creative word can name, tame, and designate alternative acting out for such powers and energies.

St. Paul in giving practical advice for those who worried about food sacrificed to idols, asserted that the One God of all made false any other claim to the proper designation of the word God.   The Anselmian definition of God is that which none greater can be conceived.  St. Paul was recognizing the many divine pretenders which were part of the human experience of his time, but he was asserting the first commandment of not having any other god but the One God.  And Jesus was the human representation of the one God to be the one who could tame all the pretending forces of superiority.

In the cry of the Psalmist, was a request for a clean heart and a renewed right spirit within him.  O that I could know my interior life as a place of peace and calm and organized in such a way that I could act out with impulse control.

The words of Moses promised a prophet who would speak in the name of the interior one who could rule and tame the principalities, the powers, and the rulers of the darkness in this world.

The Psalmist proclaimed a superior Lord who if given the ultimate respect would provide wisdom for living, wisdom for impulse control, wisdom for peace, and wisdom for justice.

How is the Pauline battle of the interior presented in a narrative of Jesus?  Jesus is the ultimate interior whisperer.  He is the one who does interior repair.  He is the Eternal Christ, the Word of God, who moves again over the face of the interior deep and void of untamed forces, and he speaks and tames to peace and quietude to return people to their "right minds." 

In the religious purity code of his time, something which is designated as unclean was the ultimate in a cursed and condemned state of being.  Imagine having one's interior life designated as an "unclean spirit."  It was the extreme state of condemnation for his time.  And yet such a condemned designated person came into the synagogue to hear Jesus speak.  This person who was said to have an unclean spirit, a controlling impulse, co-existed with the volition of this person who was seeking an empowerment for his frail sense of impaired freedom.  He was the like the addict needing an experience of a Higher Power to restore his freedom to learn self control.

Jesus Christ is presented in the Gospel as the Higher Power to the release of our human freedom to give us power to repent and be on the path of becoming better each day.  Jesus is the One who can make real within each person a new monotheism out of the henotheistic past lives of having yielded control of our lives to many unworthy principalities, powers, and rulers.

May each of us be delivered from our apparent henotheistic devotions to other gods, idols, and controlling impulses, and may we see the One God of Jesus Christ rise in us as the one who whispers our lives to the freedom of self control which comes from the Holy Spirit being the clean heart within us.  Amen.

A New Family Business?

3 Epiphany B  January 21, 2024

Jonah 3:1-5, 10 Psalm 62:6-14

1 Corinthians 7:29-31 Mark 1:14-20

 Lectionary Link

Can you imagine being on the shore of the Sea of Galilee where the fishermen have their boats moored? Perhaps there were some shingles with the business names on them. One might say, "Jonah and Sons fishermen," and another might read, "Zebedee and Sons Trawlers." For a long time, businesses were mainly family businesses and if one was born into a family, the sons in the family knew what their future vocations and callings would be.

There was no luxury of going to a liberal arts college for six years with undeclared majors in order to wait for one to discover one's true interest or be loaded up with so much college debt that one is forced choose to do something to start to dig out from under the debt.

When businesses are generational and handed on, the next generation of the business are important. One can imagine that Jesus of Nazareth going along the Sea of Galilee and enticing sons from their fathers' fishing businesses might be quite controversial.

Jesus himself, perhaps had left his father's carpenter business to pursue desert seminary training with his cousin John the Baptist.

It is true that a son may not have the same aptitudes as his father. Did Jesus say to his father Joe, "Dad, I don't like to do woodwork, can I do something else?" Could Zebedee have thought, "James and John, never had their hearts and minds into the fishing business; it's no wonder they were coaxed away by a rabbi preacher." Did Jonah think that Peter was too impatient for fishing and he was a hot head, and his brother Andrew always had to steer him in toward doing something more compatible with his personality.

The other possibility for both fathers, Zebedee and Jonah was that they were relieved to lose their sons to the calling of Jesus. It could be that there were other sons and the fishing business could only support so many, and so when Peter and Andrew, and James and John left, there was perhaps more to go around for the other brothers.

Whatever the circumstances, the call of Jesus upset the generational lines of the family business.

One might say that in the message of Jesus, we encounter a fatherization of God. Jesus called God his father, and he taught his followers to do the same.

So what does this mean as regard the main business of life? Jesus came to teach us that there was a new family business. It really was not a new business, but only a forgotten business or a neglected business or an undiscovered business. Adam and Eve in the creation story are proto-typical man and woman and son and daughter of God their maker. On them the divine image resided, the very spiritual DNA of God.

The phenomenon of sin is the habit of forgetting that we are supposed to realize our calling within the family business of God our Father.

Jesus left the carpenter shop, not because he did not love and respect his father and his trade; he left his carpenter vocation to promote the original but new family business, the family of God the Father.

The wonderful thing about the new family business of God the Father, is that you can be called and involved in all earthly business and still acknowledge the family business of God the Father-creator. But for a few, some had a particular vocation of going far and wide to proclaim the reality of this original but new family business of God the Father. This business was not about telling people that God was a human male figure in heaven; rather that God was divine originating personality of life who shared personal essence within each person by being the Word of God inhabiting the human community.

Peter, Andrew, James, and John were called from their fishing trade, in order to become involved in a persuasive trade of using words. They were to model and speak what it is like to be made in the image of God in the ways in which Jesus as God's unique Son showed them.

The stories, the history, and the legends regarding where their callings took them are many. But it's safe to say they went far beyond the Galilean Sea even to the capital city of the Empire and throughout the known world of their days.

They were called to go beyond their fathers' family businesses to the ends of the world to be people who reminded their listeners about God the Father's business, which is everyone's business to realize once one accepts oneself as a baptized son and daughter of God, with whom the Father is well-pleased.

The Gospel for you and I today is to embrace the Family Business of God our heavenly Originator and be energized to fulfill our family heritage which is stamped upon us as God's image.

So whether we're in ordained ministry or any vocation at all, let us realize that we are first in the family business of God, our heavenly parent, and Jesus is our CEO big brother on earth who has given us the business mission to proclaim membership in the family of God known through the practice of love and justice with each other. Amen.

Christ As Jacob's Ladder?

 2 Epiphany B  January 14, 2024
1 Samuel 3:1-10  Psalm 63:1-8
1 Corinthians 6:11b-20  John 1:43-51

Lectionary Link

 

The Gospel of John is full of metaphors for Jesus Christ. Who is Jesus? Son of God, Son of Man, Word, Word made flesh, The Way, the Truth, the Life, Light of the World, The Door/Gate, The Vine, The Good Shepherd, The Resurrection, and The Bread of Heaven. When the poetic Pauline declares Christ to be all and in all, this poetic exaggeration finds another Johannine expression in Christ being the eternal Word of God, from the beginning who gives being to everything.

There is another metaphor in John's Gospel which is often missed and not highlighted. The Gospel of John presents a dialogue between Jesus and the regionally biased Nathaniel who asked skeptically in hearing about the boyhood town of Jesus, "can any good thing come out of Nazareth?"

Jesus impressed this skeptic with perhaps a phrase for which it is impossible for us to know its specific meaning. "I saw you Nathaniel when you were under the fig tree." It could be that Jesus was such an observer that he could perceive the character of a person from afar, perhaps even in the deliberateness of some very seemingly ordinary behavior.

The metaphor that I would like to highlight from the dialogue of Jesus with Nathaniel is this: Are you impressed Nathaniel because I said I saw you under the fig tree? You will see the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.

We need contexts to understand this seeming cryptic saying. This is a not so cryptic reference to the famous Jacob's ladder. Jacob had his famous dream in Beth-el in his dream about a ladder from heaven on which angels were ascending and descending.

Now if the oracle Christ of the Johannine community is indicating that Jesus as the Son of Man is the connecting ladder between the invisible and the visible sphere on which the messengers of God travelled, what would be the meaning of such an inference?

The meaning of Christ as ladder from heaven evokes images of what Christ as the eternal Word would mean? Word is the invisible ladder of connection between the interior invisible world and the external visible world. And upon this Word ladder which is the entire linguistically possible universe, specific messengers travel to make general words specific applied words in the external contexts of people's lives. The meaning of the word angel is messenger; particular words are messengers or context specific words to provide value, meaning, and guidance for people in their external worlds.

But aren't angels actual beings which can be seen? Indeed they are in that they are the holographic appearances of words or messages for people who also experience words through projected image modes. What we see from dreams, dream-states and visionary states is real, holographic and pictographically constituted, and it is related to what we actually see while being significantly different. Seeing is actually a language or text in "pictures or images." They are picto-syntax and picto-grammar in nature because language co-exists with seeing. Scientists can dream and believe that images in dreams are actual without them having external concrescence.

The angels have different message formats and the theme of this week and one of the themes of the Epiphany season is the call of God in Christ. How does specific vocation, insight, purpose, arise from the morass of the everlasting Word? By messages and by messengers? It is not enough to say that every human has language as God's communication within us; we need specific occasions of meaningful message within the circumstances and contexts of our lives. The specific messengers of communication must arise from the field of possible messages to become particular for you and me within the specific circumstances of our lives.

We understand the words of the Bible to be for us angels or messengers of God in textual form and these words about the call of God to the famous Samuel, the calling of Christ to Philip and Nathaniel are given to us, not to limit the words of God to words of the Bible, but to let us know that Word of God and calling are normative and available to each person, in all times and places. Now some specifics of word and calling may seem more pronounced, dramatic, seemingly life changing, because of the role that they play as seeming milestones in our life story. However, the word and call of God is equally important when we are like Nathaniel, "simply under the fig trees of our lives." Are we willing to process and receive the words, the messages of the inner divine significance in our lives within the very ordinary.

The Gospel for us today is that Christ as the eternal word of God is also the connecting ladder of the inner life and the outer life. And the messages and messengers travel on this ladder to articulate the specific values, meanings, callings, and purposes in our lives from the perspective of what love and justice means in practice.

Let us be open to angels or messengers or messages of the call of God in Christ to us today in both the ordinary events and the milestone events of our lives. Amen.

Baptism, Just a Ritual?

1 Epiphany B January 7, 2024
Genesis 1:1-5 Ps. 29
Acts 9:1-7 Mark 1:4-11

Lectionary Link

Today is the feast of the baptism of our Lord, and one of the principle occasions for baptism within the church.

And it may be a day for cynics to say, "baptism is just a ritual, games which Christians play signifying nothing practical for the good of the world, so why do it?"

The same cynic might be one who faithfully wears the same unwashed sweat shirt when his favorite team plays so as not to jinx the possibility of victory.  This irrational repetition might seem disconnected logically from any actual effect upon the outcome of any athletic contest.

If one says that "baptism is just a ritual," one could also say that human beings are ritualistic by nature.  That is, human being engage in repetitions as grooved habits performing the energy of human desire.  And if human beings are ritualistic by nature, then the judgments about ritual behavior concern whether such rituals give orientation into human excellence.

Baptism is sacrament and it is a ritual of Christian initiation.  The lack of appreciation for baptismal meanings, might come from the rote social practice of baptism as but a requirement of family and church.  To baptize without articulating the anthropological soundness of baptism, leaves the ritual practice unconnected from human life cycle practices.

Today is a good day to ponder the meanings of our baptism and the meaning of baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist.

Baptism is an event of human solidarity.  Such solidarity might expressed in statements of reciprocity:  We want you to be with us.  And I want to be with you.

Such reciprocity might be expressed on another level when it comes to the meaning of the baptism of Jesus.  "God, we want you to be with us."  And God's Jesus says, "I want to be you, not as a general theory, but as specific person in time with a specific community, the community of John the Baptist."  And one of the names of Jesus which the New Testament writer borrowed from the prophet Isaiah was Emmanuel, or "God with us."

The event of the baptism is an event in the divine becoming one in solidarity with humanity, specific with Jesus, so as to signal that God's solidarity with each of us as children of God, is specific to the particular history and circumstances of our own life.  The general, "God is with us," becomes the specific "God is with you and me in the times and places of our lives."

Baptism is significant because human identity discovery and formation is a central feature of life.  Baptism is an event of value structuralization through language.  The chief feature of human solidarity is that we have language.  Language is structure in the values and judgments of our life.  In the event of baptism, the Christian community is declaring their values of how to be human in the very best possible way.  And how are those values expressed in the baptismal liturgy?  Humans originate from the greatness of God and reflect that greatness by bearing the divine image.  In the Risen Christ that divine image can be known within us as our chief identity.  As humans, we are loved by God, and forgiven perfectible, but not perfect beings.  We are gifted by God in discovering our creative purpose and our benefit for the good of the community.

Baptism then is the expression of our vision of what enlightened human solidarity means.  Baptism is an expression our our ideals as the lure for the energy of desire to target as our life vocation.

And if baptism is ignored or scorned, it must be said that other ritual behaviors will replace the profound meanings encoded in baptismal practice.  Such replacement to baptismal values will be governed by self-centered behaviors or solidarities of tribalism for exclusive group privilege.

Let us today not treat baptism as a cute little ceremony for a family gathering and baby pictures in passed down baptismal gowns.  Let us articulate in teaching and lifestyle with the expression of profound solidarity with the highest kinds of community values, namely, Christ is God with us and in us as the hope of glory.  Amen.

Word as First Principle of Humanity

1 Christmas B      December 31, 2023
Is.61:10-62:3     Ps. 147:13-21
Gal. 3:23-25,4:4-7  John 1:1-18

Lectionary Link

We can try to imagine a world without words and language, but we can only do so by using language.

We can observe babies and animals not conversing with us and try to imagine their "unlanguaged" states, but we have to use language to do so.

As adults we can try to remember what it was like to be in the womb or to be babies without language, but we only do so by retrospectively imposing a language upon our natal state and pretend to translate what we must have felt like or how we might have described our state of infancy when we did not have language ability.

We might even describe the state of not having language as as state of unformed seeming random void.

Imagine the frustrated void of the very young Helen Keller before she was initiated into the world of language.  Her caretakers could only observe her struggles and her frustrations and anger and they could only make her a passive person of their own linguistic projections, even with profound empathy.

The beginning or birth of her life in a poignant way was when her tutor, Anne Sullivan, initiated her into the world of language.  When her naming ability was released, she became a language user and she became the co-creator of her world to be known by her in only the way in which she could know it.  Ms. Sullivan has been called the "miracle worker" for her midwifery of the young Helen into words, language, and achieving naming ability.

If we can appreciate the event of Helen Keller being initiated into her native language ability, then we can understand perhaps some of the most profound words in the Bible: "In the beginning was the Word...."  The book of beginning, the book of Genesis, assumes that everything began with words authored by a Supreme Language User.  And God said, "Let there be light.....and there was light."  So the creation story is told about God as a speaker, and the Spirit who makes flesh the words of the Creator, makes externally existent the vast order of creation.  And between Creating God as Word Speaker and the Spirit as the Ultimate 3-D printer of the world, the Word was the source of all words, and this Word was confessed by the early Christians as Christ the eternal Word from the Beginning.

Rather than reducing sublime poetry about Christ to a crassly linear history of a world with a vastness that will ever leave us mystified, even as we think that we know more and better our little patch of that world, we can appreciate the poetry of the Christ-nature of all things.  In Pauline poetry, Christ is confessed as all and in all.  That is a poetically possibility if Christ is understood to be the Word from the beginning.

The Greek word for beginning is "arche."  This word can also refer to in Greek philosophy as the first principle.  Modern science in the effort to find a unified answer for everything, always, all at once, posits a big bang beginning as a way of articulating a basement starting point, but even then rhetorically we must confess that it is still "turtles all the way down," even under the basement of a theoretical big bang.

As people of faith, we are more interested in the art of living and such an art involves integrating the wonderful insights of science, while maintaining our side of wonder based upon the experience of sheer Plenitude which mixes the simple and the complex in an infinite number of ways.

As people of faith, we can appreciate the First Principle of humanity is that we have language; that we are constituted by the language of our lives.  We are language users in a way that makes us different among the other creatures and entities of life.  Other creatures and entities have their own modes of interrelation and communication which we can observe and speculate about from our own language perspective; but we know that we have being and knowable relationship by virtue of being people with language.  Language creates human life as we know it and knowing this should help us appreciate the insight of The Great Word being equivalent with God.  Or as the Gospel of John declares in John's Christmas Story: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

In this great insight, we can appreciate That Word or Language is co-extensive with what is none greater than can be conceived, as in the ontological definition of God expounded by St. Anselm.

Word is how the Everything, Always, All at Once, gets parsed into the limitations placed upon us by Time.  An reservoir of infinite words is worthless unless those words can have instantiations within the times of actual language users.

And so we have the poetic and philosophical Bethlehem in the Gospel of John:  And the Word, (that is the Word that is God), was made, became manifest, was funneled into a fleshly person, and lived dwelled with us.   This is another expression of the emptying of the Plenitude into parseable human portions and simultaneously human experience is elevated as a valid way to come to know the horizon event of humanity whom we can come to confess God to be.

The Word was made flesh....Word constitutes our inward life because we name the geography of what is happening within us;  Word also constitute the world of our landscape and our interactions with it.  Through Him (the Word), everything was created and has being.  This is profound first principle, to have the insight that our life as being human is founded in a unique way by virtue of us having language.

And if we are constituted by language, the art of living has to do with each person finding the very best voice of their lives, the voice to love God, to love one's neighbor and to love oneself.

The very best of Word, is still attempting to lure us to use and be guided by the very best words of our lives.   We are hindered in this because we have learned some losing scripts which keep us trapped into acting out in less than ideal ways.  

We believe in Spirit because we believe that the invisible world of words within us needs to be re-ordered and constituted or constantly relearned to be made better flesh in us in the body language deeds of our lives, even the deeds of love and justice.

On this last day of the year, let us commit ourselves to the process of the Word being made flesh again within our speech acts, our writing, and within the body language of our lives.  When we as a group of people commit ourselves to finding the Voice of the words of love and justice inundating our lives, we will arise to be co-creators in the tremendous work of love and justice which needs to be done in our world.

Let us commit ourselves in the new year to the best words of our lives, following Jesus who was exemplary word made flesh.  Amen.

Empire Christianity and the Birth of Christ

Christmas Eve B  December 24, 2023                                           

Isaiah 9:2-7 Psalm 96                                                                   

Titus 2:11-14  Luke 2:1-14

Lectionary Link

If we are warm, well-fed, clothed, sheltered, money a plenty, safe, protected, and able to indulge in all kinds of Christmas season excesses tonight, how are we going to appropriate an identity with the Christmas story tonight?

Perhaps we are more honestly identified with the privileged members of the Roman Empire who enjoyed the benefits provided by their being members of the Emperor's wide sprawling entourage.

No one of any status was on the look out for a lowly couple in journey who could not find proper shelter for a woman in the late stages of her pregnancy.  The Emperor-identified people were on the side of the tax collectors, who according to the story caused the journey back home to Bethlehem for the census to verify the number of potential tax payers.

For the most part, we as American Christians have been in comfortable lifestyles, like those in who were identified with the  Emperor and having influence, safety, power, and privilege.  In the history of our American Christians ancestors we know that  they forced the Christian message upon people who lived more closely with the oppressed circumstances of Mary and Joseph and baby Jesus.  Early American Christians brought the message of the love of Jesus to the people who were already in our land, and to the slaves who were forcefully brought to our land.  To these people, we brought the love of Jesus rather ironically with the hypocritical "do as Jesus did, but not as we are doing to you."  

Why would this preacher be so negative about our hypocrisy on this Christmas eve, of all nights?

To remind us about the total irony of the Christmas Story.

God's unique Son is born into a family of nobodies who were so less than ordinary that they would be unnoticed.

But what does the Christmas Story do?  It promotes a realm of understanding about this seeming ordinary birth with magical realism.  The Roman Senate does not confer upon Jesus the title god or son of a god, rather a heavenly choral senate of angels register their affirmation of the divine child through songs and a massive light show, and for whom, for a senate or court of influential people?  No, but lowly shepherds get the first scoop and first invitation to birth site.  Lowly shepherds are the nobility of heaven's kingdom.

But can people of means, power, knowledge, and privilege also have access to this special birth?  Enter the foreign magi, persons of wisdom and means; they too are included in the invitation to the site of the special birth.

But this birth of one who is called God's special child has its opposition.  Herod must uphold the Emperor's exclusive right of being humanly divine, and opponents must be eliminated.  There is open opposition to the meaning of this special birth.  Ironically, when everyone is God's child by virtue of God's image upon us, it becomes silly for people to compete over such designation.

Friends, how can we appropriate this Christmas story tonight in our time and in our lives, indeed a time when the current dangers of war has shut down Bethlehem for Christmas?  The good news of the Christmas story tonight is to receive the birth of the Christ again and again as the continuous opportunity for conversion to our better selves, yes even the selves who would see that no poor couple would be left in the cold but would be taken care of with the best possible health care.

The opportunity awaits us tonight for the birth of Christ to convert people in all kinds of situations, rich, poor, of different ethnicities, religious, social, economic, and educational conditions.  And how shall our conversion of Christ be known tonight?  By the harmonious reciprocity between ourselves.  Rather than the birth of Christ be but a reminder of our own past failures and hypocrisy in being Christ-like, we should see this Christmas Eve as opportunity to more fuller conversion in being more Christ-like with each other.  And being more Christ-like might mean some social and economic leveling where the rich find the poor as the fulfillment of their destiny to be more perfect sharers of the gifts of their lives.

Let us celebrate the birth of Christ tonight in us through the evidence of Christ-like behaviors in us that bring love, peace, and justice to fruition in our world.

Merry Birth of Christ in you tonight.  Amen.

The Annunciation as Mystagogy

4 Advent B December 24, 2023
2 Samuel 7:4,8-16 Ps.89
Romans 16:25-27 Luke 1:26-38

Lectionary Link

The Annunciation is the account of the angel Gabriel addressing Mary with the "Hail, Mary."  "Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you."  And in this account we can find the entire mystagogy of the church encapsulated.

Mystagogy is the instruction into the mysteries of Christ.  The Jesus Movement was built upon the continual happening of the sublime experiences which were occurring within many persons who were having them following the preaching and teaching of the followers of Jesus Christ.

St. Paul, who wrote long before the Annunciation story came to its mystagogic form, wrote "Christ in you, the hope of glory."  Christ in you, the experience of the interior sublime identity whereby one realizes that one is a child of God.

Paul wrote mystical theology for these interior events which were spontaneously occurring in many people, even as he himself who never saw Jesus had a profound interior event with the Risen Christ.  The Jesus Movement was founded upon the mysticism of these profound interior experiences and the interpretations given for these experiences was the experience of the Risen Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit.

By the time the Gospels were written, there were gathering communities of people who had had this sublime experience of interior identity and they understood this as knowing themselves following Jesus, as beloved children of God.

The presence of the Gospels, written in an accessible language to many people in the Roman Empire, represents the institutionalization of the message because of the recurrence of these experiences of being identified with Christ.

How could this spiritual experience be promulgated and taught?  How could it be hidden within a narrative, a story about exterior events which encoded the interior event of "Christ in you, the hope of glory?"  How did they believe that these recurring interior Christ events were happening?  They believed that they occurred because of a heavenly word and message.  They believe it happened because of what they called a baptism, an immersion, in the Holy Spirit.  They believed that each person could be overshadowed by the Holy Spirit and have the life of Christ conceived within their interior beings.

The mystagogues of the early Jesus Movement were Gospel writers.  They encoded the very mystery of Christ in you, within a narrative of Jesus of Nazareth.  The origin of Jesus is also the origin of each person who is conceived or born by the power of the Spirit, who becomes like a reiteration of the Spirit combining with mere dust creating the human being as God's child.

The word angel means messenger, and Gabriel is the personified messenger, signifying that each person is given a unique initiation into their identity event with God.  One is hailed by God's messenger into the reality of our realization as children of God.  Mary, is paradigmatic of the Christ in you experience.  Christ became in Mary, conceived by the over-shadowing of the Holy Spirit; it was not physical event involving the male seed.  One's spiritual birth is not one's physical birth, but it is a birth which happens because we are physically born with the potential of realizing our spiritual deep down God identity.

The Annunciation account is spiritual word art of the Jesus Movement encoding the reality of mystical union with God in Christ as the Christ nature arises within those who are willing to let that identity become the chief identity of their lives.

Mary is hailed by the messenger, she is favored by God because of the event which is going to happen within her, and this event which replicated in the souls forever will bespeak the blessedness of this event for all generations.

The Annunciation is the proclamation par excellence of "Christ in you, the hope of Glory!"  The Gospel for you and I today is to humbly embrace this sublime event within us and say with Mary, "Let it be according to your word."  Amen.

Rejoice, Anyway

3 Advent b December 17, 2023, 3 Advent
Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11 Psalm 126
1 Thessalonians 5:16-24 John 1:6-8,19-28

Lectionary Link


The cauldron of the probabilities of what has happened, is happening, might have happened, did not happen, will happen, will have happened, is very full, yes teemingly full.  And some happenings are so horrifying that they can monopolize our thinking and energy into neglecting the reality of them being but mere happenings within the totality of everything happening.

What is happening to me right now can easily be generalized to characterize what is happening to all, and everything.

How do we live without generalizing our selfish interpretations of what is happening to me or us, and projecting our small interpretations as being the significant truth of everything?

The third Sunday in Advent is Gaudete Sunday, Rejoice Sunday.  It is an invitation to access the deep experience of joy as a way to live in relationship to everything that has and is happening.

But how can I have joy with the senseless war in Ukraine with many dying and a tyrant wanting to overrun a country because megalomanical disease?  How can I rejoice with the horrendous events in Israel, Gaza, Syria, and the complete impossibility of exacting precise justice to offending parties in real time resulting in bombing not being very smart but very indiscriminate among innocent people who end up being in harms way?

How can I rejoice in a country of relative plenty where people with a lot get much more and people with a little get much less?  How can I rejoice facing my own guilt of having plenty while accepting general helplessness of getting enough to those who need it?

The life conditions of the truly free play of probabilities means that life is always ambiguous in what might actually happen to us and to other people in our world.  How do we live best with the actual probable conditions?

Well, practically we adopt the best wisdom of probability living, namely, statistically approximation, which simply means we apply good actuarial thinking of what has happen onto what might happen in the future.  But we know that even good wise planning and good scientific thinking cannot guarantee future specific outcomes in our personal, social, and national lives.

What is required is to tap into the two inwardly known virtues of faith and joy to accompany us in our living with the probable conditions of what is and what may happen.

Jesus came to people who were oppressed people, people who were often trying to perform religious duties like the proverbial arranging of deck chairs on the sinking Titanic.  How can we live when it seems like the entire world is going down, sinking for me and my people who are living in the distressed conditions?

How can the people of Pauline churches live as tiny majorities within the cities which were dominated by the cult of Emperor?   Paul had the audacity to write, "Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances..."   Paul are you crazy, how can we do this?

Most of the biblical literature was written by and for oppressed people.  Most of white European Christianity has known the legacy of Christendom and Empire Christianity who have been more on the side of the oppressor than the oppressed.  And people on the winning sides of Empire Christianity need to be careful in how they appropriate a literature written during time of oppression and for people who were oppressed.

Our American founding documents invite everyone to the life goal of a pursuit of happiness.  Happiness is a valid quest if we regard freedom from all manner of pain to be what is normal for us psychologically and socially.  But on the pursuit of happiness we know that happiness often depends upon what happens, and so we and many are often unhappy in life.  We can hope that the experience of unhappiness builds within us grooves of empathy to help us aid others in their pursuit of happiness, especially when events of unhappiness occur.

John the Baptist, baptized, and so built a community of baptized people who practiced together the pursuit living lives of excellence.  John the Baptist predicted that Jesus would baptize with a Spirit and this Spirit would create a community.

How do we reconcile joy and happiness since joy is an underneath condition which can be experienced even when happiness is not our current experience?  Joy is the embracing of everything, all at once experience which totally relativizes the power and the effect of any specific thing which might be happening to us.  Joy is the experience of ultimate togetherness, and it is poignantly known in the mutual support of being in community together.  John the Baptist could baptize people into a community of mutual support during hard times.  Paul could tell his flock to rejoice, because of their covenant with each other to be together, no matter what happen to them while they tried to fly under the radar of the cult of the Emperor.

The Gospel, the good news for us, is to rejoice, which means learning to tap into the very native joy of having been born and having consciousness, but also of living in the Spirit with a community of people who share with us the conditions of the free probabilities what might happen to any of us at anytime.

Let us in our spiritual practice today discover how to access the All, of everything, all at once, impinging upon us deeply as the experience of joy.  And from this joy, let us go forth to live together with what may happen, and be thankful for the many occasions of happiness which have and will come our way.  The Risen Christ within us as the All in all, is our source of Joy.  Amen.

The Gospel of John the Baptist

2 Advent b December 10, 2023
Is. 40:1-11 Psalm 85:1-2,8-13
2 Peter 3:8-15a,18 Mark 1:1-8

Lectionary Link

The sheer amount of ink given to John the Baptist in the Gospels should be a marker of how important he was for the those in the early Jesus Movement who were responsible for generating the Gospel writings.

We can assume that John the Baptist originated a community of people, one which has persisted even to modern times.  And why would the community of John the Baptist be important to the Gospel writers?

First, the Gospels tells us that some early church leaders had previously been followers of John the Baptist.  There is also a succession event that is recorded in the Gospels:  The Baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist in the Jordan River.  Was Jesus a part of the movement of John the Baptist?  Did Jesus have a similar wilderness training like John the Baptist in his formative period, the first thirty years of his life of which we have very little in records, except a birth narrative and one boyhood event in the Temple?

John the Baptist is given some comparative analysis with the life of Jesus by the Gospel writers.  He has a birth narrative.  He has accounts of his ministry and his message.  He has a passion, a record of his imprisonment and death.  

According to the Gospel words of Jesus, who was he?  He was something of a reincarnation of the prophet Elijah, you know, the one who did not die but was spirited to heaven in a chariot of fire, perhaps so his spirit could return and be visualized at the Mount of the Transfiguration and be present in the ministry of John the Baptist.

The Gospel record that crowds went out to the Jordan River to hear him and to be baptized by him.

So, John the Baptist and his community were important to Jesus, and to the followers of Jesus.

We might even conclude that the community of John the Baptist was like the proto-church, a model for a new kind of separate community.  The followers of John the Baptist formed into what might be called a counter-cultural movement, borrowing and innovating water baptism as a new rite of initiation into a group that was not specifically attached to the synagogue or the Temple; it was indeed a counter-religious community, but one which seem to draw a following from diverse sectors of people in Palestine.  And this indeed would be a precursor of the identity and composition of the Jesus Movement which became churches in various locales throughout the Roman Empire.

The Gospel writings have functions and purposes.  One of the most prominent purposes of the Gospel writings was an appeal to the members of the community of John the Baptist to make a transition to become members of the Jesus Movement.  This motive would account for the special importance which the community of John the Baptist had for the leaders of the Jesus Movement.  The community of John the Baptist was a specific target for the communication efforts of the leaders of the Jesus Movement.

So, John is presented as the set up man for Jesus.  He is presented as the transitional figure for embracing the surpassing figure of Jesus of Nazareth.  John is the water baptizer and repentance teacher; Jesus is the Holy Spirit baptizer and the Resurrection life giver.

John the Baptism represents the liminal phase between Temple and synagogue and the Jesus Movement which became gathered churches.

We highlight John the Baptist during the season of Advent because we understand this as a season of preparation for both the celebration of the first coming of Jesus in his birth, but also for the subsequent comings of Jesus in his Risen Christ future.

The life of John the Baptist might be characterized by the word "fast."  Advent is a fasting season.  Fasting is the discipline of simplifying our priorities toward what is most important in personal and community values.  While in our secular culture, the Christmas parties of excess have already begun, we need to keep in mind the spirit of Advent fasting.  In our end of year fasting, we reorganize our resources, giving to charities and non-profits who are committed to get resources to those who need them direly.  We fast from gross excess to reallocate our resources for those who need them and we are reminded that the Son of Man is to be recognized in the giving to those who bear the presence of Christ poignantly in their very situation of need.

Let us embrace the fasting and rebuking of John the Baptist today as a reminder that we need consistent and intermittent fasting for our own physical and spiritual health, but also for the constant reorganizational redistribution of the resources of plenty to be shared with those have been bearing the involuntary fasts of being in need.

May God help us embrace the grace of the Advent season of fasting to benefit our physical and spiritual health, and move our world toward the gigantic redistribution of resources which is needed for us to affirm our belief and practice of love and justice.  Amen.

Having Genres of the Future

1 Advent Cycle b December 3, 2023
Is. 64:1-9 Psalm 80:1-7
1 Cor.1:1-9 Mark 13:24-37

Lectionary Link

To be human is to be a futurist.  We live toward the future.  We live toward the events which will be after now.

How we regard the future is highly conditioned by how we understand our current conditions and how we have integrated our past experiences.  We project what the future might be in not-yet scenarios.  We extrapolate from the past and present what a future might look like.

Our futurisms take many forms which are consistent with the discursive varieties in our lives.  Scientific futurism is different from aesthetic and artistic futurism which share more discursive habits with religious futurism.

In science the concerns is not really about ethics or spirituality or entertainment; in science the rule of statistical approximation prevails.  From observing and charting the behavior of "things," laws of consistency are derived and the guiding assumption is that the conditions will be so similar in the future that accuracy of prediction is guaranteed.  We should all be thankful for this kind of reliable futurism since it provides us with the most practical method of planning in our lives.

But there is also a futurism which inspires differently than science.  Not all human events are as reliable and predictable as the rising of the sun or the boiling of water; the events of how human beings treat each other manifest a wide range of fickleness.  We can treat each other with kindness or love or we can be extremely cruel on the personal level or on the level of social units of family, tribes, and nations.

Much of the biblical literature was generated in times of distress for biblical writers and their communities.  The leaders of these distressed people could not rely upon a predication of a better tomorrow because no relief from oppression seemed imminent.

They had to live on the fumes of hope, the kind of hope which could inspire a program of visualization in words of what love and justice could mean for them.  These prophets of the visualization of hope used utopian language, magic realism, super-heroes, and what we call the apocalyptic genre.

Jesus arrived within a community of people whose identity was significantly formed by the apocalyptic mode of thinking.  Why?  Jesus and his friends knew that life could be significantly better than what they experienced.  Their literature revealed to them about a time during the reign of King David, when they had much better conditions, and they longed for future conditions to be like or better than they were during the reign of King David.  There were other writings besides the Hebrew Scriptures which expounded this apocalyptic futurism for an oppressed and suffering people.

If the future were to be better for the oppress people of the community of Jesus, there needed to be super heroes who were greater than the Caesars and the military surrogates of the Caesar.  The earthly power of the Caesars seemed to be so formidable that interventions of super non-earthly powers were needed to put things right, or more selfishly, to deliver the oppressed people.  The names of the super heroes in the time of Jesus were Messiah and the Son of Man.  These super God blessed heroes were visions of how thing could be put right.

The writer of Mark's Gospel understood that Jesus identified with this figure referred to as the Son of Man.  This super hero was a visualization of a God appointed and God powered person to establish judgment and justice for the oppressed people of the world.

Our nay saying sides could say, "it didn't happen, it hasn't happened, and it probably won't happen in such a way."  The skeptics might say that such people are to be pitied for believing such stuff, especially if they are taking it literally.

But as one who argues for the functional purpose of every discursive practice, I would say that such discourse is not meant to be taken literally, but literarily.  It is a discourse of visualization of the end of pain and distress even as a pain counselor at a cancer clinic might devise visualizations techniques for people of different ages to deal with the pain and reality of their terminal disease.  The discourse is true to human hope even while the images do not comport to the empirical verification standards of science.

While we moderns might feel superior to these poor purveyors of the apocalyptic, we should confront ourselves with the reality that we in our situation are far more futuristic and apocalyptic than the biblical writers ever were.  Super heroes of Marvel Comics dominate our lives, science fiction, and action adventure in the cinema draw big audiences.  The "art" of the future in its many genres are part of our lives.  We regard it to be artistic entertainment, even while as skeptics we don't allow the biblical apocalyptic to be a part of the analgesic and entertaining aspect of their lives in their experience of oppression.  Many people wrongly think that "entertainment and the aesethetic" were not valid modes of being for biblical peoples.  Shame on us for allowing ourselves such pervasive genres of futurism, while denying it to biblical people because of the biblical literalists who misappropriate the functional purpose of the apocalyptic genre of futurism.

The Gospel for us during Advent is to let hope visualize a better world, with better realized justice, and with persons of surpassing virtue to call us to our future surpassing selves.

Let us appreciate the genres of futurism which are in the Bible, in the Gospel, in the words of Jesus, and in that appreciation let us be honest about the genres of futurism which work in our lives to give us hope that love and justice have actual futures.  Amen.

Do We Regard the Omni of Omnipresence?

Last Sunday after  Pentecost: Christ the King Cycle A  proper 29 November 26, 2023
Ezek. 34:11-16, 20-24     Ps.100   
Eph. 1:15-23      Matt. 25:31-46
 
Lectionary Link

We Christians are good at theological theory, but are often not so good at actual practice of Christ-like behaviors.

In our theology, we say God is omnipresent, God is everywhere.  And in our Christology, we say, like St. Paul, Christ is all and in all.  But in our practice, we tend to be more like the proverbial Charlie Brown when he said, "I love mankind; it's people I can't stand."

We have favorite places where we like to find God and Christ.  Many of those places are safe places, which don't demand much from us, and we treat those places as places with seemingly are so privileged that in our practice they seem to exhaust the presence of God and Christ.

And what would those favorite safe places be?  The Bible, the Sacraments, and all things churchy.

We gladly proclaim, "the Word of the Lord," after reading all manner of Scripture readings.  We gladly find the presence of Christ in bread and wine and the sacramental rites.  And if we keep our participation in Word and Sacrament isolated from expanded meanings of Word and Sacrament, we can safely convince ourselves that we are doing God's will and we can feel justified in and by our religious ritual behaviors.

But we cannot selectively limit how and where we want to know the divine presence, the Christly presence.

The parable of Jesus read for today, is also in the Bible and is regarded to be God's word.  This parable is given to us to incentivize us to look beyond our favorite places for knowing, seeing and reverencing the divine.  And where does the parable of Jesus tell us where to find and serve the great Son of Man?

In the thirsty, the hungry, the ones without adequate clothing, and the strangers.  My, my, is this not some communist plot to redistribute the resources to people who did not really earn them?  Should we not build higher walls so that strangers cannot get to us?  The homeless on our streets: do they not represent an embarrassment?  Are they not people with such failed life practice that they can't take care of themselves?  Strangers, hungry people, thirsty people, homeless people seem to threaten us and in our false sense of American individualism, we often blame them for their failure at individual efforts to get their lives together and take care of themselves and their families.

The parable of Jesus does not tell us why people are thirsty, hungry, unclothed, or strangers; the parable simply tells us that they were in these conditions.  We often want to spend time blaming people for being in the conditions that they are as a reason for us to say they don't deserve food, drink, clothing, housing, and a welcome.

Do we want to be the "goats" in the parable of Jesus who go into eternal punishment?  Sounds rather severe.  The language is very strong language but it is the language to incentivize us not to limit the presence of Christ within our favorite biblical passages or within our liturgies.

Today, the Risen Christ is saying to us, "if you are coming for my presence in the preaching of the word and in the bread and the wine, then you also must go forth and find my real presence in the stranger, the hungry, the thirsty, the homeless, and those without adequate clothing."

Let us be rebuked and incentivized today by this parable of Jesus to see Christ as All and in all, especially within the poor, the needy, the strangers and the neglected.  Amen.