Do We Believe God Loves the World?

Lent B March 10, 2024
Numbers 21:4-9 Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22
Ephesians 2:1-10 John 3:14-21

Lectionary Link

It is said that Einstein's once opined that the most important question in life had to do with a belief in a friendly universe.

Indeed, what do we project upon everything, everywhere, all at once?  Do we project a God involved in the universe with a divine presence, diffusely immanent and omnipresent?  Is divine omnipresence a friendly presence?  How could we know?  

Is the universe but God throwing the dice resulting of an infinite play of probabilities and giving all probabilities a degree of freedom, such that communities of freedom can unite to do collective evil or collective good?

The biblical witness and the Christian witness perhaps frames the Einstein question in a different way with a bit different language.  The biblical witness like the articulation of everything is necessarily anthropocentric because as language users we are limited to human experience.   But we also believe to be human means to partake of the sublimely human and touch the horizon of a deeper connection of all things, the connection we name as the divine presence, which contains us and always engenders a future.

In the biblical witness we posit a divine presence which is the residing place and the cause of the presence of everything, including us.  And we believe that the great Presence responsible for our becoming, made us good, so that we might be on the path of becoming better.  The lure for us becoming better is the lure of the Presence of the One we have come to call Love.

We deal with Einstein's question of a friendly universe by the belief that God is love.  The one who is love is able to make other beings who have the free capacity to also love and be loved.  The act of creation is a love act, and the continuous renewal of everything in time is the labor of the sustaining love of someone who wants every being to become continuously better or part of comprising a better surpassing whole.

One of the most quoted words of the New Testament is from our appointed Gospel.  "God so loved the world...."  So, such an expression is a belief that an omnipresence God is loving everywhere, and what could be more friendly than that?

Einstein, in knowing the potential misuses of scientific discoveries, thought that a friendly universe issue was important as it pertained to the morals and ethics of how we use our science and technology to treat each other.  We know that we have not been enlightened in the practice of friendliness toward each other so as to give everyone an equality in the pursuit of happiness and well-being.  Believing that human beings are mostly unloving and not perfectible in love might make us act as though selfish behavior is the central motivation of life.

If we, like the writer of John's Gospel, believe that God is love, how is such to be known and experienced?  Why does it often seem like God is love is the unknown secret of the universe?

The biblical writers often write about the failure of people to be loving toward God and toward each other.  The people of Israel, who are presented as God's experiment in bringing love to the world, are shown to be people who continually failed to represent a God of love.  The proliferation of the failure to love can seem to be the prevailing trend of life itself.

How does the biblical witness deal with the continual failure of people to love God and each other?  The God who has and will out live all and yet include every other being, is seen to be the best of parent.  God is seen as one who has the duration to forgive and give endless chances for amendment of life to people.

The God of love gave exemplars within human community of how people are supposed to love and be loved.  "God so love the world," that God gave a specific divine child of love to show his brothers and sisters the life of loving and being loved.  Jesus is the example of God not giving up on us and showing us the tolerant loving forgiveness of our parent God who always believes we can get better because we are made in having a genuine freedom to chose in the direction of love.

The Gospel questions for each of us today include: Do we believe that God is a loving presence everywhere in this universe?  If so, how can we and others know?  We can only know by experiencing love from others and passing that love on to others.

And if we believe that God is love, how should we live?  Following Christ, we should always chose love and try to speak and live lovingly with our lives.  Amen.

The World as God's Temple

3 Lent B March 4, 2024
Exodus 20:1-17 Psalm 19
1 Corinthians 1:18-25 John 2:13-22

Lectionary Link

What is undeniable about the Bible is that it is a collection of texts, a collection words.  And it is evidence of the age when writing arose as technology of memory.  Text was a way of preserving the spoken words of people who had once been present.  A text is also an art form creating stories about people who never existed but were inventions of writers who believe that creation in writing was a way of forming community identity and passing that identity with certain values onto another generation.

The Bible like many of the classics, is revered because of the general paucity of writing in ancient times and the lack of general literacy of ancient people.  It is our task today to look at the words which convey the art of living for ancient people and who provide us not only with their words but with the example of being active language users to promote the very best of what language users should be doing.

In our appointed lessons for today, the famous ten commandments are presented to us.  These words are evidence that people in community were seeking best practices for how they could live together in the very best possible way.  In their wisdom story, they present Moses as a wise medium between the greatness of God and how that greatness could be funneled into human living.  The ten commandments assert that love and justice are the best ways to live in life.  The ten commandments are based upon loving one who perpetually greater than us so that we might then practice love as justice with each other, with parents, spouses, families, property, knowledge, truth, life.  This is accomplished by learning of impulse control, stated as "thou shall not covet."  Namely, if only God is worthy of the profundity of our desire, then from worship we learn to direct our desire to mere enjoyment rather than be driven to harmful addiction.

The appointed Psalm today is in part a poem of praise about the great insight of living in love and justice because of the discovery of the great insight of a law which was founded upon respecting first the one who is greater than us and then living with such loving respect for those who are most like us.

The words of the Bible include a narrative of judgments about the behavior of people when they failed to live up to their highest insight or for when they misused the very notion of being lawful.  If the commandments of loving God and neighbor are great, then so is the precise specification of what laws could mean in all of the specific circumstances of life, in how to wash dishes in the temple, or how to eat, or what is appropriate offerings to present to God.  Certainly every society knows about the proliferation of rules and law, even to micro-manage the cleaning up after our pets in the park.  All kinds of law are good, useful, and functional for community order, but when minor laws are treated with the same respect as the great laws of love and justice, then the priorities of the community can get skewed.  When legalism becomes the only valid use of language, the fullness of human experience is missed.

One might say that philosophy, the love of wisdom, is the great gift of the ancient Greeks to our world.  But what if such wisdom get reduced to saying that something is only meaningfully true if and only if it can be presented in a logical proposition?

When St. Paul had his life completely renovated by a mystical experience, he had to confront some contradiction regarding what was meaningfully true.  Jesus is God's Son, who is the Messiah, who died, reappeared, and is mystically known after he can no longer be seen.  What kind of heroic Messiah is this?  Compared with a Messiah like David, Jesus dying on the cross is a scandal.  Paul's experience also seemed to be logically inconsistent with the wisdom of the Greek as it came to the Roman era. This foolishness is presented in the skepticism of Pilate about to crucify Jesus: "So, Jesus, you are a King?"   St. Paul could have easily pointed to fact that the Greeks and Romans held to their law and logic even while believing in stories of gods and goddesses with quite fickled behaviors and violating all norms of empirical verification.

What St. Paul was showing is that in the mystical experience of love, law and logic must give way to other kinds of meaningful events within the life of people.  He, and others had this mystical experience which changed their lives and it contradicted preconceptions of people who were Jews and Gentiles.

St. Paul and the Gospel writers were trying to persuade regarding meaningful presence of God everywhere, which was made known through the appearance of Jesus Christ.  In the past one could intensively locate the divine in stories of the gods and goddesses, or in meeting places such as temples and shrines, or in revealed writings such as the law.  In St. Paul and in the Gospel, Jesus became known as the unique temple for the dwelling of God in human experience, so that each person could come to know oneself as a dwelling place of God as well.

This is the meaningful and mystical truth of Paul and the Gospel writers who knew themselves to be temples of the God Holy Spirit who proclaimed this as a meaningful experience for everyone.

The Gospel for us today is that if the heavens declare the glory of God, so God's glory can be declared everywhere, and especially within each human being.

This is the witness of Jesus as God's Temple in history, who became the Risen Christ who is able to make everyone today a temple of God's Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Living in the Universality of God

2 Lent B      February 25, 2024
Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16 Psalm 22:22-30
Romans 4:13-25  Mark 8:31-38

Lectionary Link

It is easy to confess universalism but quite difficult to practice such within our specific circumstances.  The famous cartoon quote of Charlie Brown is insightful about the great tension between good theory and experimental practice of that theory.  Charlie Brown said, "I love mankind; it's people I can't stand."

Great love is inclusive, but our narrow-minded affinities are often very exclusive and limited.  We know that God is love, and God calls us to love all but does that include the people who are thorns in my side?  Does it include our enemies?

One of the goals of St. Paul was to write the Gentiles into salvation history in continuity with the salvation history as found in the Hebrew Scriptures.  The Hebrew Scriptures highlight the tension between the universal nature of God and God's availability to everyone and the conflict of the people of Israel with all of Israel's neighbors, including those who had been pushed from land so that Israel could claim it as their Promised Land.

How can Abraham be the ancestor of a multitude of nations, while the love of God was to be only for God's favorite Israel?  How could the Psalmist implore for all the nations to praise God without specifically inviting them to do so?  How could the Temple be a house of prayer for all people, and yet entrance there not be allowed to all?

The history of salvation is the history of people who believe themselves to be favored by God, not being able to grant that favor with the true largesse of the loving heart of God.

Indeed no group of people has the same largesse of heart of God; and we have to be humble at accepting our limitation and our limited ministry to the people in our lives.

However, the universality of God always invites us to the continual expansion of learning to be more universal and inclusive of more people, even people who are outside our familiar comfort zones.

The writings of St. Paul and the Gospels are about bringing the message of God's love to more people than those who had been adherent Jews of the Temple and synagogue.  The movement of presenting God as being accessible to people who were more than adherent Jews of the synagogue and Temple was controversial.

St. Paul saw the Hebrew Scriptures as a witness to the universality of God for everyone, and for him, it meant that he understood the Gentiles as being pre-figured in the story of Abraham and in the universality of God written about in various parts of the Hebrew Scriptures.

Although the Gospels were written as though they are in the time of Jesus, they really are written from the perspective of people who knew the experience of the Risen Christ 25 to 55 years after Jesus had left the earth.  This is clearly in the Gentile age of the Jesus Movement.

What made the Jesus Movement more universal than the synagogue experience, was the mysticism of the early Jesus Movement.  This movement was based upon the experience of the Risen Christ being a spiritual experience of many people.  The teachings of Paul and the Gospels included a spiritual methodology for taking on an identity with Christ through a visualization of events in the life of Jesus.  One could be "crucified and raised" with Christ as an interior power of identification in the overall program of education, called repentance, meaning literally continual renewal of the mind.

One of the catch phrases of the early Jesus Movement was to take up one's cross and follow Jesus, a dying to one's soul life of former mind to receive a renewed mind, an after mind.  Repentance or metanoia literally means "after mind."  Instead of being a David-like external military messiah, Jesus, as Risen Christ,  was an interior power for the transformation of lives one at a time in the secret place of people's soul.

Taking up the cross of Christ was like the phrase of identity in Pauline spirituality, "I have been crucified with Christ."  St. Paul and the Gospel writers believed in the universal accessibility of knowing identity with the Risen Christ who was the sublime presence of a person knowing oneself as a child of God.

Let us today, as we are shackled with the limitations of our life experiences and fearful unwillingness to recognize God's relevance to everyone, let us acknowledge that the sublime experience of God can come to all and let us acknowledge such God-dignity upon the lives of all today.  Amen.

Lent and Living with Probabilities

1 Lent B      February 18, 2024
Gen. 9:8-17           Ps    25:1-9  
1 Peter 3:18-22         Mark 1:9-13

Lectionary Link
 

Holy Scripture sometimes places together in proximity the notion of temptation, trial, and ordeal.

In the Our Father, we pray, "lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil."  Or the contemporary translation, "save us from the time of trial and deliver us from evil."

Temptation, trial, ordeal, and evil have to do with probabilities in life, which for many are unavoidable.

The lessons from Scripture for today, might pertain to some insights about the covenant that we live in with God, each other and with life itself.  The covenant that we live is our baptismal covenant.  And what is this covenant?  It is a strategy within community to live best with the probabilities of life.

The probabilities of life include everything that may happen to us and how does one prepare for such a great task?  What does one desire when faced with many weals and woes of what may happen to us?

We cannot be unrealistic about freedom; freedom is.  Things happen.  And we have only varying degrees of control over what happens to us in life.  So to have a baptismal strategy is prepare ourselves to live with the probabilities in life.

And what do we desire in living with the probabilities in life?

We want good timing.  We want to be doing the right things, at the right time, and in the right way.  This means that we need training, wisdom, and insights about avoiding what is harmful and unworthy.  We also need to be taught about what is good and beneficial to us and those in our life.  And we also need training to know how to bear up when the things over which we have no control confront and afflict us.

Good timing in life is a desirable goal to have, but to find good timing and to have optimal responses to trouble we need to have training and practice.  And this is part of the reason we have the season of Lent.  Because we know that things can go wrong, how do we purposeful deny ourselves so as to be better prepared to face the conditions of unchosen exigent threats.

The reason athletic teams have pre-season extended training periods is so they can simulate actual game conditions in preparation for the possible game events.

What did Jesus actually have to experience in his life?  Rejection by his family, criticism and persecution by religious leaders, being called crazy or mad, being called one who had a demon, being threatened, being called a drunkard, being called a sinner, being called blasphemous, mocked, betrayed by a disciple, denied by his disciple, abandoned by his disciples, tried for false charges, being  flogged, and being crucified.  How could Jesus be prepared for these?

Those who knew Jesus best believed that he was prepared in an ordeal of an extended temptation.  In his interior life, Jesus had to be prepared for everything that was going to happen to him.  The synoptic Gospels give us accounts of the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness, a time like a Vision Quest which would tempt his role in controlling the timing of his life.

Jesus understood that he had to live in God's will, God's timing.  The temptations of Jesus in the wilderness are presented as efforts of that inward accuser to get Jesus to do things in the wrong way, at the wrong time, for the wrong motive.  The result of the temptation was Jesus being true to the timing of God for his life.  He was to eat, he was to attain glory and fame, and he was to die, in God's time and way and not in the timing of the evil one.

Where you and I have freedom, means that mistiming is the chief temptation of our lives.  Lent is a season for you and I to ponder continuously good timing for what we do and say.  If probability is the rule of the freedom of life, then you and I need to have insight and wisdom about where we exercise our freedom in what we do and say.

Lent is a good season of probability training for us.  We can use this time to simulate what might happen to us and prepare for how we can maintain ideal timing in our potential responses.  Prayer, Study, discerning from Scripture strategies of ideal timing, seeking community support, and doing the good preventive work of giving alms; these are ways that we can prepare in constructive ways for living with the vast probabilities of life.

So much of this, like the temptation of Jesus, is interior work, because we have to be inwardly prepared before we take on the details of our mission and work in our lives.

Today, let us continue to pray, "lead us not into temptation, save us from the time of trial, and deliver us from evil,"  but let us also work during this season of Lent to learn good timing in our lives, doing and saying the right things, at the right times, for the right motives, and so progress in our desire to be more Christ-like.  Amen.

Ash Wednesday: How Will We Be Recycled?

Ash Wednesday   February 14, 2024
Isaiah 58:1-12 Ps.103
1 Cor. 5:20b-6:10 Matt. 6:1-6, 16-21

Lectionary Link

Did you ever think that before we came to know about atoms and other sub-atomic particles, that a fragment of dust or ashes might have been regarded to be the smallest entity in life?

Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return. The mere observation of the body put on fast forward either through fire or through long decaying in an ossuary, rendered the conclusion that when the bodies breaks into its smallest fragments, it is but a collection of dust. As dust and ashes the body is eventually recycled into the environment over time depending upon the environment into which bodies are disposed.

How should we think about dust and ashes now that we have come to believe in the existence of atoms and sub-atomic particles? What does our delving into the hyper-microscopic world do to our dust and ashes metaphors? And how does our knowledge of atoms and the sub-atomic world affect our understanding of our Ash Wednesday Scripture readings?

The ancient people, like us, knew of the mystery of the unseeable microscopic and the sub-microscopic worlds. They used metaphorical words like heart and spirit to speak about the inner mystery of life within our bodily flesh. The ancient people, like us knew that the flesh has a shelf life, and the flesh has a event of separation of the inside sub-microscopic life of heart, spirit, and soul from the body.

Even though humanity in many ways has believed in the inward life of soul and spirit, it does not diminish the preferred connection of our inward life with our bodily lives. For all intents and purposes, we rather be living, so much so that we cherish living, and we mourn when we lose people from the realm of the living, and we hope that they continue to live in some way. We hope that they have some substantial continued being, one even as substantial as they were in their bodies which become ashes.

St. Paul wrote about having treasure in our earthen vessel. The words of Jesus exhort us to build up treasures in heaven, in such a way that they cannot be degraded like our bodies which break down back to dust.

Ash Wednesday is about contrasting how our bodies will eventually be recycled with how the mystery and worth of our personhood will be recycled.

Most of us will not make the history books, even while we might be retained for a generation or two in memories within our family and friendship circles. So how will the mystery of our lives be recycled and retained? This is the building of treasure part of our future.

An act of kindness, mentoring a person, and myriads of deeds of love and justice will remain recycled as the fuel of hope forever. Building up the secret treasures of heaven means that we will be bricks in the wall of time forever, unable to be removed and forever contributing with what has been, is, and will happen.

The liturgy of Ash Wednesday is about cherishing our mortal lives so much that we "make hay while the sun shines." That is, we develop our inward lives of language to code our body deeds, our speech, and our writing with the mystery of the treasures of heaven, even the mystery of love and justice played forward forever through our interaction with the people of our lives.

When we think about it, words are mysterious in what they are and how they come to be within us. They are sub-atomic, even sub-microscopic but they are poignantly effective in manifesting the values of our lives through deeds, saying, and writing.

We are given this life in our bodies so that we can develop the treasures within, about which the words of Jesus and Paul refer to. Let us cherish our lives in our bodies so much by developing our words in action lives which determine the legacies that we have with the people in our lives now, but also become the future chain of becoming for the people whom we influence who live beyond us and influence people for their futures.

May God help us cherish our lives in our declining bodies, so that we are mindful to build the basis to influence the enhancement of goodness for people now and in the future. Let the treasures of love and justice from us be how the best part of us is recycled forever. Amen.

Transfiguration: Mystagogy, Language and Light

Last Epiphany B February 11, 2024
1 Kg 19:9-18 Psalm 50:1-6
2 Corinthians 4:3-6 Mark 9:2-9

Lectionary Link

People who often are referred to as "fundamentalists," are people who prefer a particular form of interpretation of the texts of Scriptures.  But such fundamentalists are selective in applying their method of interpretation, and they would say that they are not totally locked into one form of interpretation.  For example, when the words attributed to Jesus indicate that he is light, life, resurrection, shepherd, door, gate, way, vine, bread of heaven, or the words about him such as lamb of God, fundamentalist interpreters would says that such uses of words are metaphorical and figurative, but not literal.  By not being literal, it would mean that Jesus could not be empirically verified to be actual light, life, shepherd, lamb of God, door, gate, vine or bread from heaven.  Fundamentalists, then are not people who interpret everything in the Bible as though they are events that have to be able to be empirically verified to be meaningfully true.  But they will then regard events presented by biblical writers which truly defy natural law and the laws of science as being empirically verified.    Such things like biological actual virgin birth, chariots carrying people into heaven, walking on water, and other impossible natural events which are done by Jesus and the biblical heroes, are not seen as figurative, teaching, visionary events, but as events which were empirically verified.

What is lost in such inconsistencies in biblical interpretation is the nature and purpose of the biblical writers and how the nature and purpose of the writers chose to present their sublime message within the style of their preaching and writing.

What governed the writings of the writers of the New Testament?  It was the mystical experience of the Risen Christ.  Jesus who was dead and gone, was being experienced in a different way by many people, and the people who had these experiences joined together and invited others to be facilitated into this experience of the Risen Christ.  Experiences of the Risen Christ were different for different people, and so they could not be related in the way which science replicates the experiments of natural science.

The biblical writers were pushed into the moving language of aesthetics to try to express the sublime experiences of their lives.  Sharing these experience were less like boiling water in beakers in a laboratory with fellow lab mates, but more like being with a group of concert goers in being moved by the sublime presentation in a work of art.  Literal language of science is too drab to express the sublime experiences which happen because of art, the experience of being loved, the experiences of seeing justice realized, and the mystical experiences of a human superlative which gets confessed poetically as God and Son of God.

The very practical, didactic and very poetic tradition of St. Paul, and the Pauline traditions, pre-date the writings of the Gospel.  The mystagogy or instructions in the spiritual mysteries of the Risen Christ came to different presentation in the Gospel form of writing which came to promulgation after the writings of St. Paul.

The Gospels are a different kind of mystagogy than the writings of St. Paul.  They re-present the experience of the Risen Christ within a narrative of Jesus as parable, a figurative writing encoding the mystical practices of the church.

By taking the narratives of Jesus and reading them as empirically verified, historical eye-witness accounts, reader miss the important spiritual practice of the early communities of people who confessed and shared this experience of identity with the Risen Christ.  This identity was stated by Paul, as "Christ in you, the hope of glory."

The transfiguration, which literally, means metamorphosis, is part of the presentation of a spiritual parable of Jesus, as the Risen Christ who is given a visualized Jesus narrative as a way of inspiring the imagination of how Christ is in us.

Mystagogy is language used in a way so that it can bear witness to experience of the sublime.  The Gospel writer of Mark knew the body of symbolism found in the Hebrew Scripture.  The Gospel preacher believed/knew that Jesus was in succession with the great heroes of the past, with Moses and Elijah.  Their reputation was such that in the literature of time of Jesus, they were regarded to be time-space travelers.  They could and would be apparitional figures who would reappear to mark new paradigms of spiritual advance.

So, we have the parable of the transfigured Jesus.  Jesus takes his disciples up a mountain alone, into the clouds and he becomes the filament for an event of light.  And the apparitional Moses and Elijah appear with him to affirm him as the logical succession of their mission, and such event happens on behalf of the disciples in this event of Mystery and Light, in knowing Jesus in a very special way.

In two events in the Gospel of Mark, God the Father, declares with an audible voice to Jesus in the presence of others, "You are my beloved Son."  There is another declaration of Jesus as Son of God in the Gospel of Mark, and that is at the death of Jesus on the cross, when the Roman centurion declares, "Truly this is God's Son."

Mystagogy is teaching about the interior event when Christ in us is the hope of glory, the hope of having esteem and worth in our lives. We can appreciate the figurative audience positions of the identity of Christ as Son of God.   One is at the Jordan with John and the crowds there, the other is with James, John, and Peter in the encounter with Jesus, Elijah and Moses, and the other is the outsider, the Roman Centurion, who was able to recognize the sublime even being such an outsider.  We have our own "audience" position in knowing the Risen Christ, within us as Son of God, helping us to realize ourselves as child of God.

The Gospel of Mark encodes in a parable of Jesus the mystical experience of the people who know that the Risen Christ in within themselves and as he is glorified in being manifest as God's unique Son, so too we are invited to know ourselves as sons and daughters of God.

And in this path of mystagogy, we are invited to the being made Christ-like metamorphoses of spiritual growth.  Yes, we may prefer the mountain top and butterfly events, but they accentuate sublime points in the continuous metamorphosis that we are called to in ever become more Christ-like.

Let us embrace the metamorphosis in becoming more Christ-like, which the event of the transfiguration invites us to.  Amen.

Historical Medical Anthropology and Gospel Healing

 5 Epiphany B  February 4, 2024
Isaiah 40:21-31 Psalm 147:1-12, 21c
1 Corinthians 9:16-23 Mark 1:29-39

Lectionary Link

Salvation might be considered holistic healing.  It is so embracing, it also pertains even to how people regard  the afterlives of their loved ones and their own afterlives before they die.  To live, in part is always to be thinking about life and death issues.  This is why salvation is a relevant issue.

Salvation or holistic health might be seen as viewing health upon a continuum of what we can know about being healthy and the negligible factors, or unknown factors in being healthy.  Probability number crunchers say today that 25 percent of longevity is determined by genetic factors.  Other factors might be the risk of one's environments and lifestyles, as well as nurture and personal habits of health.

What did physicians in the time of Jesus know?  Did they know about viruses, bacteria, and germs?  About mental health, did they know about how early trauma could create dissociative disorders when a person can manifest a legion of personalities?

We might look with some skepticism on medical practices of the past, even as we might look with skepticism upon some medical practices of the present.  Not everyone subscribes to the healing powers of crystals, except the one who confess that they have had positive results. 

The notion of the healing reality of the placebo effect highlights the connection between the mind and the body.  In medical anthropology, and historical medical anthropologies, we discover that specific practices of healing exist within the communities which promote and accept those practices.  Medicine men, shamans, witch doctors, and others fall within the class of what might be called "folk medicine," and such practitioners of "folk medicine" might regard this designation to be the pejorative designation given by those of modern scientific medicine with a superiority complex.  As our world has gotten smaller, we know that ancient medical practices of the East, such as acupuncture, have been brought within an expanding umbrella of what is regarded to be acceptable and valid medical practice.

And still we regard with duck sounds, those who we regard to be practicing medicine for profit and rely upon the ignorance of their client base.  We refer to them as "quacks."  But with the placebo effect, a patient might say, "I may have been treated by a quack, but it still made me better."

As we approach the "folk medical" practice of Jesus which is listed in the Gospel, we can find a variety of healing practices, and different modes of treatment.  The "folk medicine" of Jesus indicates that the physical body was like a building which is inhabited.  The living people within a building or a home, are those who maintain the outer structure which is always already dealing with the effects of age and time.

The Judaism of the time of Jesus included a system of public health, because health is social in how it is practiced within community.  There was a diagnostic or classification system for optimal and negative states of being, as they related to a person within their community.  There was a binary system of designation of things and states of being as clean or unclean, pure and impure.  There were rules for how one could make the transition from being unclean and impure into an accepted state.  There were recommended states of public quarantine or removal from community contact;  there were public validation rites performed by the priests, with rites of ritual purification to allow a person re-entry into a community.

The Gospels narrates bodily conditions of people with physical ailments: blindness, fever, leprosy, lameness, deafness, muteness, and unknown conditions causing death.  The Gospels also present people with what might be better called psychological and spiritual conditions, or people with the resulting behaviors due to  childhood and life traumas.  If we know of PTSD, dissociative disorders, and many other traumatic mental health disorders today which have their root in earlier traumas in the lives of people, we can be sure that people in the time of Jesus, as in all times, had their psychological and spiritual health problems.

As an external condition like the disease with visible skin phenomenon of leprosy was designated as being a state of uncleanness requiring segregation from "clean or healthy" society, so too persons with manifestations of chaotic internal and emotional disorders which left them with uncontrolled behaviors, such persons were said to have "unclean spirits."  Having one's internal being declared as impure or unclean would be quite a severe diagnosis to have.  People of every era have feared persons with mental health disorders.  Their unpredictable behaviors create a public fear which governs the ways in which they have come to be treated.   Our history includes the history of prison, asylums, and bedlams to quarantined those designated with "unclean spirits."

How might we attain some insights for ourselves in our reading of this Gospel healing story today?

First, we might regard it to be something like a psychiatric practice of the time of Jesus.  The rabbinical literature indicates the practice of exorcism as the religious public health treatment of people who were so troubled by invisible causes, that it had the designation of being an "impure and unclean" state.  In the history of health and illness, and even today, there is still a negative perception of persons with the seeming invisible effects of mental health disorders.  The Gospels chronicles the negative designations for "sick" people, but also the personal and social treatment technique of Jesus.  Rather than shunning contact with such people, he offered both personal and social acceptance to give comfort for such persons and their families who suffered.

The Gospels portrayed Jesus as one who prevailed in his own psychological being.  His temptation to face the interior principalities and powers centering around a great inward Accuser is recorded in three Gospels.  The Gospel writers understood Jesus to be such a person of internal fortitude that he had a resulting charisma to be a people whisperer.  He could heal the inner selves of others because he had prevailed within himself against the internal forces of accusation.

The exorcism stories also highlight a chief vocation of life, namely, the reconstituting our inward lives so that we are acting out in the behaviors of kindness and love.  The Psalmist requested of God, "Create within me a new heart, and renew a right spirit within me."  Also the prophet wrote, "the heart above all thing is deceitful."  Salvation of holistic health is about the recreation, the reconstituting of our inward lives so that the springs of our motives and action can be pure, clean, and righteous.  To this regard, John the Baptist, stated that beyond baptism with water, Jesus baptized with the Holy Spirit and with fire.  The stories of exorcisms exemplify Jesus as the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit, who can be the cleanness of heart and renewed spirit within us.  The Holy Spirit is the one who makes the Risen Christ present within us as our new internal identity.

The Gospel narratives also present a spiritual cosmology.  The Risen Christ is the one who is above the principalities and powers of darkness in heavenly places.  The exorcism stories within the Gospel indicate salvation as the overcoming of evil with good which results in people being about to express the fruits of the Spirit, being self control, with love, joy, peace, hope, patience, gentleness, and goodness.

Today, we still seek interior health, renewed internal state of being.  We seek a comprehensive body, soul, and spiritual health, and we come to Jesus as the one who models this health for us, as he is now known to us as the presence of the Risen Christ.

We also know that the health of Jesus was restoring people to community.  We as the church are to be a community of health by welcoming and including people.  Health is communal in dimension and all can be in some state of unhealthiness as any given times.  This means we need the health of a loving, inclusive, welcoming community to express the full meaning of health as community completeness.

Following Jesus today, let us aspire to be a healthy community, within which we can practice the healing power of the love of Christ.  Amen.

 

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.