The Tetragrammaton Is Not a New Video Game

12 Pentecost, Cycle A  Proper 17, August31, 2014

Exodus 3:1-15  Psalm 105:1-6, 23-26, 45c

Romans 12:9-21  Matthew 16:21-28

Lectionary Link

Priya: Are you familiar with the Tetragrammaton?

Chike: No, is that the latest video game?  Should I buy a copy today?

Priya: No, it is not a video game.  It is the unpronounceable name of God Almighty?

Arinze: But you just said God Almighty.  So you pronounced the name of God.

Priya: Well, yes I did but God Almighty are English words for God, but the ancient Hebrews did not pronounce a particular written form of the name of God.

Chike: Is that like the rock star Prince, who decided not to have a name any longer and so he became just a symbol?

Arinze: Well, people still had to talk about him; a symbol is only written and so people began to say "The artist formerly known as Prince."

Priya: Well, God's name came to be written in the Hebrew language.    And it is written with four Hebrew consonants.  Tetragrammaton means "four letters" which in English would be YHWH.  And if you added vowel sounds to the consonants, you might say, "Yahweh."  But of course, when we say Yahweh, we offend devout Jews because we are presuming to speak the holy and special name of God which cannot be pronounced.

Chike: But don't we still use the word Jehovah to refer to God in the English language?

Arinze: When they started to try to say Hebrew words and names in English they used to replace the Y sound with the hard J sound.  So, the old Jehovah is the new Yahweh.

Priya: So Yahweh is the pronounced name of the Holy God formerly pronounced as Jehovah.

Chike: How did it come that God's name should not be pronounced?

Arinze:  The story of the calling of Moses to lead Israel out of Egypt began with a fire which all firefighters would like?

Priya:  Why?

Arinze: Because it gave the special effects of a bush being on fire, but the bush did not burn and the fire did not spread.

Chike: Well, that some special effects!  Why do you think God appeared to Moses in such a spectacular way?

Priya: I think it was because God needed to get Moses attention.  Moses had run away from his people in Egypt.  He had gone to the land of Midian and got married and settled down.  He wanted to forget about his failure in his first attempt to lead his people.  But God would not let him forget about his responsibility to lead his people to freedom.

Arinze: Well, Moses was only human.  Sometimes it is very hard to deal with failure.

Chike: Sometimes when we fail, we just want to give up.  We just want to run away.  I think Moses gave up when he had a failure.  He doubted himself.  He did not believe that he had the ability to be the leader of the people of Israel.

Priya: I think that this story about Moses is important for us because we can get very disappointed when we experience failure.  Failure hurts even more when it involves the rejection by the people we are trying to help.

Arinze:  Yes, it was a real blow to the pride of Moses.  He wanted to help lead his people to freedom and in his first effort, he angered both the Egyptians and also his fellow Israelites.

Chike:  Moses was thinking, "What's a use?    I'll just run far away and start a new life somewhere else."  And that's what Moses did.

Priya:  This story tells us someone wonderful about God.

Arinze: What's that?

Priya: It tells us that God does not give up on anyone.  It tells us that we look at failure differently than God does.

Chike: How does God look at failure?

Priya: I think that God looks at failure as simply training and practice to live our lives better.

Arinze: Priya, do you think that you would believe God if you saw a burning bush and heard a voice from God speak to you.

Priya: Well, I don't always hear or listen when my brothers or parents are speaking to me, but I think if I saw these special effects, I would believe.

Chike: Even when Moses saw the burning bush and heard the voice, he asked God to tell him the Divine Name.

Arinze: And God said, "I am that I am or I shall be that I shall be."  The special Holy Name of God may be a form of the verb "to be." And so when God told Moses that the divine name was "I am that I am," it could be that Yahweh is a form of the verb "to be."

Priya: Since God is the greatest and best Being, it means that God always was, is now, and will always be in the future.  So the name of God could mean that God is more everlasting than anyone or anything else.

Chike: God is always going to be around.  Perhaps God was trying to tell Moses to keep trying because even our failure cannot make God go away or stop being God.

Priya: Well, I am glad that God doesn't have to speak through burning bushes and thundering voices.

Arinze: Why not?

Priya:  It seems a little scary and not very personal.

Chike: That is why Jesus Christ is important.

Arinze:  How so?

Chike: Jesus Christ is God in a human person.  Since God came to us in the form of a human person, we can know and feel treated by God in very personal ways.

Priya: Jesus was a teacher for his friends and students.  He needed to remind them about the true nature of the messiah.  He told that education and learning is like dying to an old state of ignorance so that one could learn new things.

Arinze: Taking up one's cross and following Jesus became an important phrase in the early church.  It did not mean that people wanted to be crucified like Jesus.  It meant that they were die to the things which are bad and be born to the things which are good.

Chike: Well I glad that we have learned some lessons today.

Priya: What have we learned?

Arinze: We learned that God does not give up on us when we think that we have failed.

Chike: Yes, failure is simply a teaching method to get better.

Priya:  And if God does not give up on us, we should not give up on ourselves and each other.

Arinze: We also learned that God does many things to get our attention, even dreams and visions and voices.

Chike:  But God has spoken to us best by sending Jesus Christ to this world.

Priya: And Jesus remains with us through the words of the Bible and through the presence of the Holy Spirit.

Arinze: The words of Jesus remind us that we never graduate from the school of life where God is always trying to teach us new lessons.  We die to old ignorance to take on new knowledge.  This is the educational process of life.

Chike: Moses learned it.

Priya: The disciples of Jesus finally learned the lessons of God in their lives.

Arinze: Let us remember that God is always trying to get our attention so that we might learn to become better people.

Chike:  Amen to that.

Priya:  And can everyone say "Amen?"

Amen.

Daily Quiz, August 2014

Daily Quiz, August 31, 2014

Moses had his burning bush experience with God on what mountain?

a. Sinai
b. Horeb
c. Tabor
d. Negev

Daily Quiz, August 30, 2014

Peter had a vision giving him divine permission to lift the religious dietary restrictions (kasher which became kosher following Ashkenazi pronunciation).  Which of the following was regarded to be ritually clean for eating?

a. shrimp
b. locusts
c. eagles
d. rabbit

Daily Quiz, August 29, 2014

Piety, Charity, Discretion, Prudence, Sagacity, Mercy and Hopeful are 

a. theological virtues
b. cardinal virtues
c. characters in John Bunyan's "The Pilgrim's Progress"
d. fruits of the Spirit


Daily Quiz, August 28,2014

What saint said, "The man who sings prays twice?"

a. St. Cecilia
b. St. Veronica
c. St. Augustine
d. St. Thomas Aquinas 

Daily Quiz, August 27, 2014

In the Hebrew Scriptures, if the body is said to go to the grave at death; where does the soul go?

a. Hades
b. Sheol
c. Gehenna
d. Tartarus
e. a and b

Daily Quiz, August 26, 2014

Tabitha, Phoebe and Lydia were leading women of the early church.  In what New Testament book can one find their stories?

a. 1 Corinthians
b. 2 Corinthians
c. Acts of the Apostles 
d. Luke


Daily Quiz, August 25, 2014

Bartholomew is listed in the names of the Twelve Disciples.  Some think he also was Philip's friend whose name was 

a. Lazarus
b. Nicodemus
c. Nathaniel
d. Mathias

Daily Quiz, August 24, 2104

Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar were 

a. grandsons of Noah
b. Israelite spies
c. friends of Job
d. musicians in Solomon's temple

Daily Quiz, August 23, 2014

When Saul was blinded in his encounter with Christ, who was the man who prayed for his healing and received this former persecutor of followers of Jesus?

a. Cornelius
b. Ananias
c. Rufus
d. Aquila


Daily Quiz, August 22, 2014

A "Damascus Road Conversion" is a metaphor which derived from the life of what person?

a. Saul
b. Paul
c. Peter
d. Barnabas
e. a and b


Daily Quiz, August 21, 2014

What person in the Bible said, "The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord?"

a. Abraham
b. Moses
c. Job
d. Solomon

Daily Quiz, August 20, 2014

The Psalmist wrote, "Seven times a day do I praise Thee."  What did this verse inspire?

a. a little known method of measure daily time
b. the monastic prayer hours
c. the numerological  significance of seven as God's number
d. the establishment of a seven day week

Daily Quiz, August 19, 2014

The Acts of the Apostles reports a magician convert who was fascinated with the power of the evangelist Philip and he wanted to purchase that power.  From this person what is the "selling" of church offices and privilege called?

a. Kickback
b. Simony
c. Felony
d. Chicanery 

Daily Quiz, August 18, 2014

Who is regarded to be the first martyr of the early Jesus Movement?

a. John the Baptist
b. Jesus
c. St. Stephen
d. James, son of Zebedee


Daily Quiz, August 17, 2014

How did Samson die?

a. of old age
b. He was beheaded by the Philistines
c. He toppled a building down on himself and 3000 others
d. in a battle against the Philistines


Daily Quiz, August 16, 2014

Samson was a miracle baby and his parent had to commit him to follow the vows of the Nazirite.  Which vow or vows did he violate?

a. uncut your hair
b. no wine 
c. no contact with dead bodies 
d. all of the above
e. a and c
f.  a and b

Daily Quiz, August 15, 2014

August 15 is the Feast of 

a. the Assumption
b. The Dormition of the Mother of God 
c. St. Mary the Virgin
d. all of the above


Daily Quiz, August 14, 2014

Samson was known for what kind of verbal play?

a. poetry
b. riddle
c. parable
d. debate


Daily Quiz, August 13, 2014

Delilah was a temptress who tricked a famous biblical strongman and judge to give up his "hairy" strength.  Who was this strong man?

a. Joshua
b. Jonathan
c.  Samuel
d.  Samson


Daily Quiz, August 12, 2014

Who was raised as an Episcopalian and came to spoof the Episcopal Church as "Catholic Lite, same religion, half the guilt?"


a. Johnny Carson
b. Jonathan Winters
c.  Robin Williams
d.  Steve Martin

Daily Quiz, August 11, 2014

The Poor Clares are members of a religious order founded by a woman who was influenced by what saint?

a. St. Basil
b. St. Francis of Assisi
c. St. Benedict
d. St. John of the Cross 


Daily Quiz, August 10, 2014

Jephthah made a vow to God if he was successful in warfare that he would offer to God the first person to come from the door of home on his return home.  Who did it turn out to be?

a. his father
b. his brother
c. his daughter
d. his son


Daily Quiz, August 9, 2014

In the crossword puzzles what is the one word definition of Ananias and Sapphira?

a. deacons
b. Cretans 
c. liars
d. generosity



Daily Quiz, August 8, 2014

What religious order has the abbreviation O.P. Order of Preachers, (Ordo Praedicatorium), are called Black Friars (from their cloaks), also Domini canes (Hounds of the Lord) and Jacobins, deriving from their Paris convent location?

a. Francisicans
b. Benedictine
c. Carmelite
d. Dominican


 Daily Quiz, August 7, 2014

"Transfiguration" comes a New Testament (koine) Greek word, a cognate for what English word?

a. Change
b.  Transition 
c.  Metamorphosis 
d.  Regeneration

Daily Quiz, August 6, 2014

August 6th is the Feast of the Transfiguration.  Which Sunday on the Church Calendar always uses the Gospel reading of the transfiguration?

a. Last Sunday after the Epiphany 
b. The Sunday before Ascension Day
c.  Second Sunday of Easter 
d.  First Sunday after Christmas

Daily Quiz, August 5, 2014

What was the recruitment criteria for Gideon's army?

a. those who drank water from cupped hands
b. those who drank water from a cup
c. those who lapped water in the stream like a dog
d. those who were accurate in shooting arrows


Daily Quiz, August 4, 2014

Gideon asked God for a sign using what criteria?

a. dew soaked fleece on dry ground in the morning
b. dry fleece on dew soaked ground in the morning
c. a lit lamp in a pitcher in the morning
d. cock crowing thrice in the morning
e. a and b



Daily Quiz, August 3, 2014

The Gideon Bible is a Bible 

a. found in a hotel room with a forward written by Hermann Gideon
b. distributed by a group named after the biblical Judge Gideon
c. from a group that started in Wisconsin
d. b and c 
d. all of the above

Daily Quiz, August 2, 2014

Barak and Deborah sang a song about the feat of the woman Jael.  What did she do?

a. gave birth to Samson
b. drove a tent peg into the head of Sisera
c. she was a famous seamstress
d. she fought the Philistines

Daily Quiz, August 1, 2014 

Who is the patron saint of funeral directors?

a. Nicodemus 
b. Joseph of Arimathea 
c. St. George 
d. St. Christopher

You Can Tell You Are in An Episcopal Church When..., September 2015

Holy Anachronism, St. Peter!

11 Pentecost, A p16, August 24, 2014

Exodus 1:8-2:10 Psalm 124

Romans 12:1-8  Matthew 16:13-20

Lectionary Link 

  There was a recent Downton Abbey promotional picture of cast members in costumes for the upcoming season.  This picture was published on the worldwide web with a big glaring “oops!”  Setting on the fireplace mantel behind these actors pretending to be folks from the 1920’s, one can see a plastic water bottle.

   This situation highlights an accidental instance of anachronism whereby an article from a later period is introduced into a presentation of events from an earlier period.  And this mistake makes for teasing comedy and whoever pushed the post button of the unedited picture is now saying, “My bad!”

   Today’s appointed Gospel lesson has something similar in it.  Did the church exist when Jesus walked with his disciples on earth?  Of course not.  The Greek word “eklesia” or church was a much later designation for the gatherings of the followers of Christ.   But we have these famous words which are very important for the identity of the Roman Catholic Church and what is called Petrine Primacy, the primacy of Peter.  “You are Peter and on this rock I will build my church and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.”  The confession of Peter about Jesus being the Messiah is found in Matthew, Mark and Luke, but this exchange of Jesus and Peter about him being the rock on which the church would be built is peculiar to the Gospel of Matthew.  It is even more ironic since after Peter confesses Jesus to be the messiah, he thinks that the Messiah is to be a conquering king and Jesus tells Peter and the disciples that  the messiah is going to be a suffering servant.  Peter openly disagrees with Jesus about the nature of the Messiah.  And next week we will read the words of Jesus to Peter, “Get behind me Satan.”  Do you see the irony of the insertion of this anachronistic reference to Peter and the church?  Jesus tells Peter that the gates of Hades will not prevail against the church and in the next line Jesus is saying to Peter, “Get behind me Satan.”  One would think that Hades and Satan go together?

  Now I have an opinion about what is happening here.  Peter died a martyr’s death in Rome in the mid-60’s and scholars believe that the Gospel of Matthew was written after the year 70 after the death of Peter.  Peter was a church leader in Rome and he is associated more with Jewish followers of Jesus whereas Paul is associated more with the Gentile followers of Jesus.   

  I think that these words of Jesus to Peter are an insertion to rehabilitate the reputation of Peter in light of his heroic leadership and martyrdom in the Roman churches.  In other places in the Gospels Peter is made to look as an impetuous and immature disciple of Jesus.  The character of Peter is used to contrast the life of a disciple before and after the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus.  After the resurrection, the disciples became heroic in their witness to Christ, but while they are walking with Jesus they are presented as oft imperfect “works in progress.”  Peter denied Jesus before the crucifixion.  He did not understand the true nature of the messiah.  He is presented as one too proud to let Jesus wash his feet.  He was proud and self-confident, “I will never deny you Jesus, he exclaimed.”   He lost his faith in the walking on water event.

  You can see how the writers of Matthew knew what had become of Peter.  He had become a heroic martyred leader of the churches in Rome.  And the churches in Rome were being inspired and built upon this heroic witness.  And the Caesars who killed Peter represented the gates of Hades and the gates of Hades did not prevail against the church of Jesus Christ as it was led by St. Peter.  The death of Peter did not end the church, it only inspired the church.

  So this insertion in the Gospel of Matthew represents the truth of the witness of the life of Peter.  Indeed Peter’s life had been a rock on which the churches in Rome and elsewhere had been built and prevailed because of the heroic witness of faith.

   Let us learn an important lesson about Scripture and tradition.  Some people would argue that the New Testament writings are what formed the traditions of the church.  And I would assert that this is backward; the traditions within the Jesus Movement and the early churches are what caused the New Testament writings to be written.  Much later church traditions influenced which writings were included in the New Testament.  If one can appreciate this one need not get led astray by biblical fundamentalism.

  In the traditions of the church, we understand that Peter and Paul both died martyrs’ deaths in Rome.  They were willing to die for their faith, but Paul did not think martyrdom was the recommendable way to be a follower of Jesus.  St. Paul wrote that followers of Jesus should present their bodies to God as “living sacrifices” not dead ones.  By being living sacrifices it means that we live and we sacrifice the selfish ego to allow the gifts and graces of God to become known in our lives.  Paul listed some of those gifts: Prophecy or preaching, ministering, teaching, exhorting, giving with generosity, diligent leadership and cheerful compassion.  All of these gifts require from us to be “living sacrifices;” dying to selfishness so that we might let the grace of God’s Holy Spirit minister through us.

  St. Peter is presented in the Gospels as an all too human follower of Jesus but he is also presented as one who had a post-resurrection appearance of Christ which not only made him a “living sacrifice” in his ministry, but he ultimately paid with the price of his life.  This witness of the life Peter is the rock on which every church is built upon and the outward sign of a papacy is less important than the actual inspiring witness of the life of Peter.

  Martyrdom, hopefully will never be asked or required of us; but let us live self inflicted martyrdom lives of “checking our egos at the door” so as to let the ministering grace of the gifts of the Holy Spirit be expressed through us to bless each other and the world.  Amen.

Seeds of Gentile Christianity in the Gospel

10 Pentecost, ap15, August 17, 2014

Genesis 45:1-15  Psalm 67
Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32 Matthew 15: (10-20), 21-28

Lectionary Link

   Was Jesus of Nazareth a rabbi who believed that reforms were needed in the Judaism of his time?  Or was Jesus of Nazareth a self-conscious founder of a new faith community and religion, the one we’ve come to call Christianity?  Or was he a founder of a significant movement within Judaism as another rabbinical school, or a piety group like the Pharisees or Zealots or Sadducees or something like one of the other schools or traditions which have developed within Judaism?

  Sometimes there is a tug of war in the presentation of the significance of Jesus in the four Gospels.  Sometimes, Jesus was presented to be an apocalyptic prophet who proclaimed the end of the world in his generation.  At other times he was seen as a rabbi who was a Torah legalist, even saying that not one jot or tittle of the law shall go violated.  At other times he was regarded as one who reduced the dietary and purity codes and Sabbath rules to secondary status.

  From the Passion narratives which are included in all four Gospels, we assume that Jesus is presented as one who was excommunicated from the synagogue.  Being put on a cross is worse than merely being removed from the religious community and from humanity by death.  One scenario was that Judas betrayed Jesus to the Jews by giving them the clue to get the Roman authorities involved.  Judas perhaps told the religious authorities that the followers of Jesus were calling him a king; Caesar's representatives wouldn't like that so the Roman guards would respond to a any suggestion of insurrection.

   The Pauline churches were followers of Jesus often led by Jews who wanted all of the benefit of their Jewish traditions but who had observed the impact of the message of Jesus upon the lives of non-Jewish people.  They were baffled that so many Gentiles loved Jesus.  They were baffled that so few of their fellow Jews came to follow Jesus in a worshipful way.  Most Jews   continued within the other pieties and traditions of Judaism.

  The Pauline churches consisted of Gentile membership but they held fast to Hebraic/Jewish roots of their faith.  Paul was proud of his Jewishness even as he said the faith of Gentile Christians was consistent with the faith of Abraham who lived before the people of Israel, Moses and the Torah.  The writings of Paul came before the Gospel writings and there was a dilemma.  How did an increasingly Gentile church tell the story of Jesus when the churches were no longer a part of the synagogues?

  The Gospels are presentations of life events and sayings of Jesus as parables for the origin of many things that had come be practiced within the churches.  Paul did not require of Gentile Christians the practice of circumcision, dietary rules of Judaism or ritual purity practices of Judaism or the observation of the Jewish religious calendar.  How could Paul dispense with such practices and fully claim his own Jewish heritage?

  The advent of a Christo-centric Judaism within the Gentile people of the Roman Empire was so significant it had to be noted when presenting the accounts of the life and ministry of Jesus.

  Jesus came from the tradition of the prophet Jonah who was commanded by God to preach repentance to the foreign Ninevites.  Jonah did not want the foreigners of Ninevah to hear the message of the covenant and was upset when they came to repentance. The prophet Elijah healed the Aramaen General Naaman of his leprosy as an indication that the healing of the God of Israel was not limited to the people of Israel.  Jesus came from the prophetic tradition of Isaiah who called the house of God a house of prayer for all people.  It was a place to gather foreigners and outcasts.   Jesus was seen to be a representative of this specific prophetic tradition of reaching beyond the Jewish ethnic community to the foreign communities.

   When the Gospels were written they included the presentation of the life of Jesus as one who was reaching beyond Judaism to other communities of people.

  The Canaanite woman, unnamed with an unnamed daughter in the Gospel text, came to Jesus seeking healing from a disordered inner life; so disordered that they simply called it an unclean spirit or demon.  For the Canaanite woman, health or salvation was to have her daughter receive a “clean interior” life, an interior life rightly ordered.

  The ancient cry of the Psalmist was “Create in me a clean heart O God.  God I don’t want to feel dirty inside anymore.  I want to feel new and fresh and clean.”  Such a hope, expresses the hope of salvation.

  Jesus, probably disappoints our mothers, Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister, by giving every young child the authority of his word not to wash their hands before a meal.  But Jesus was teaching a lesson:  Salvation cleanliness comes from within.  The opposite of not feeling clean is to feel dirty, unclean, unworthy and worthless.  The expressions of feeling unclean mean that the actions we perform are unclean and defiled, harmful to ourselves and others.  Jesus was saying that physical dirt is not that same thing as the defilement of moral and spiritual dirt, or the defilement of being addicted to idols.   Washing one’s hands was not going to clean the heart, even though it was good physical hygienic practice.  Jesus was saying, “Don’t equate the ritual practice of washing one’s hand with the clean heart that comes from the act of Jesus baptizing us with the higher power of the Holy Spirit.”

   This Canaanite woman, an unclean foreigner who had a daughter who had an unclean spirit wanted the salvation of a clean heart for her daughter.

  The Gospel writer presented Jesus engaging in a hyperbolic or exaggerate debate.  This debate provided an example of the dialog that happened and was occurring within the early Christian communities regarding a strain of Judaism which was reaching beyond their ethnic community.  The dialog between Jesus and the Canaanite woman also was an origin parable for what had already happened in Gentile Christianity.  The Gospel writers were trying to show that the roots of Gentile Christianity could be found in the ministry of Jesus, but the dialog also showed that the mission to the Gentiles was very controversial.

  A paraphrase of the words of Jesus might be: “Woman, you are a foreigner.  Don’t you know the common opinion about Jews?  We keep to ourselves.  We are made special by the Torah.  And as a teacher, don’t you see that I’m here to make sure that the lost sheep of Israel are fully brought into the fold of practicing Judaism?   In this role, should I throw the saving food of the Torah, the healing word to one who is as foreign to us as a dog might be at the table of his master?”  And the woman responded, “But Jesus the message is so good that even if we get your left-overs it still would be salvation and healing for us.”

  And the parable is this: The foreigner had faith without pride.  It indicated the controversy of the Gentile mission but it indicated how desperate the Gentiles wanted the message of salvation.  The foreign woman simply wanted to go where she could find that clean and healed heart for her daughter.  The old generation of separation between Jew and Gentile was not be in the next generation of the church, as signified by the healing of the daughter.  So Jesus was saying: the act of faith is its own salvation heritage.  The act of faith is its own Jewishness.  The act of faith is what includes us in the line of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David and the Prophets.

  Having faith in the one who can bring us the experience of a heart made clean by God's mercy and forgiveness: This is what makes us worthy of the biblical tradition.

  Today, we invite everyone into the tradition of Jesus.  It is a tradition of learning to have faith and this is not automatic simply because we are baptized into the Episcopal Church;  it comes with the freedom to learn to turn toward Christ and ask him to create in us clean hearts.  Today we pray: “Create in us, clean hearts and renew a right spirit within us.”  The message to each of us is that we will always be invited to the faith of, by,in, and for God, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Having Faith While in the Storms of Life

9  Pentecost, A p14, August 10, 2014

1 Kings 19:9-18 Psalm 85:8-13

Romans 10:5-15,  Matthew 14:22-33

Lectionary Link

Have you ever seen anyone walk on water?  I have seen people walk on water and I've done it myself.  I did it as a child and also when I was at seminary in Wisconsin.  I must confess though the water that I walked on was the hardened variety found on the frozen lakes of the north.  That sort of diminishes the miracle doesn't it?  I have also seen people walk on water before in one of my water dreams.  But dream state, altered state seeing does not have the same status it once had in the ancient world.

   All of the miracles in the Bible are believable if we accept "altered states" kind of seeing.  It was common for dream states to be a significant mode of communication from the non-conscious side of life often characterized as the abode of God or the Spirit.  Dream states have a naivete about them, a purity about them because we as human being do not control such states.  Since we as humans cannot make dreams happen and since we cannot control their content, they have a fascinating feature to them.  They can have the sense of the divine because they seem to be communication to us in a fashion which we are not used to.  They also are mysterious to us since they have cryptic communication.  They do not seem to have obvious meanings.  They engage us and make us ponder their meanings.  And they do not have literal meaning.  And they do not have scientific meaning because one cannot replicate or repeat exactly what the dream experience was.  When anthropologists have gone to study other cultures which have not had contact with the cultures affected by the Enlightenment and modern science, they have found that people in their wakened state and conscious lives can still see in way that is more of what we call "dream-like" seeing.   They do not yet fully distinguish between what's inside and what's outside in the way in which we have been taught to do so from having been raised in the cultures of science where the subject and object split is so pronounced.

  Much of the Bible includes accounts where it is obvious to us today that people saw things differently and experienced differently and used a different kind of language reporting to relate to them the important things about their values, their beliefs and their faith.  Dreams and visions were shared and became a part of the community lore and written down as a part of the community’s literature.

  After reading the Gospel language of the storm, Jesus walking on the water and Peter's attempt to do the same, I think we could honestly say that we could dream something like this ourselves.  And in dreaming something like this we might be able with some reflection to come to some various insights.

  First, our conscious minds cannot collect everything that is happening to us and around us.  Our conscious minds have the limitation of remembered frames of focus but our unconscious peripheral awareness is always taking in more than what we do with intentional focus.  And in our dreams and in other moments of altered awareness we can have access to all of what we have taken in and it is presented to us in sort of collage images.  And we have to reflect upon these collage images to come to some insights about our lives and about how we can live with hope and faith in our lives today.

  The Gospel story today is the equivalent of a very serious water dream.  And a water and storm dream is definitely an indication of an anxiety dream.  Anxiety is a major truth of everyone's life because we love our lives enough to cherish and value them and to know the threat of the loss of life and the things and people we have come to enjoy.

  We enjoy loving friendship, freedom and ability to be free agents, health and safety.  We experience or we observe the loss or the threat of loss of everything.   A water dream reveals to us the experience of anxiety, a form of fear.  This is a universal human experience.  The water and the storm would indicate to us the state of chaos which everyone can know when systems come into conflict and when the competing goals of people cause pain, hurt and injury.

  The chaos of Anxiety and fear come to us on many different levels.  We can be incredibly galactic in our anxiety and worry about solar flares or a comet hitting our planet or we can resort to conspiracy theories involving UFO's and aliens.  When people were limited to but a radius of but a few miles and relied upon the stories of travelers, then it was much easier to subscribe to the great cosmic stories to provide cause and effect answers for local situations even when one had no way of verifying cosmic effects.  Astrology is very entertaining even while it is hard to verify as valid one to one connections between stars and human personality tendencies.

  Today with rapid communication it is easy for us to have world and global anxiety.  The water and storms of our own world threaten us to think about the spread of chaos.  Genocide in various places in the world.  ISIS forces killing Christians and other religious minorities.  Boka Haram extremists slaughtering innocent people.  Troops amassing on the border of the Ukraine, cyber thieves threatening economic interchange, perpetual hostilities between Israel and Palestine, Syria is in an incredible warring mess as well as Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt and Pakistan.  Drug cartels having violent control and we oppose them while being one of the largest drug using countries in the world. Kleptocrats making condition so unlivable in their own countries forcing even children to make dangerous journeys for the hope of a safer place.  Truly, there is occasion for us to have storm and water dreams of anxiety for the global threats in our world.

  But water dreams of anxiety are also relevant to our own pockets of chaos.  We face economic changes, job changes, change of location, addictions, relationship stress, family crisis, health crises and so we like Peter and the disciples can be in our small boats caught in the midst of great waves of water in very windy storms.

  In the midst of our storms when we react with fear and all of fear's fingers of anxieties, we seek one who is with us enough to know our anxiety but beyond us enough to see beyond the particulars of our chaos.  Peter in the midst of his storm saw the vision of Jesus walking on the water.  Jesus did not allow himself to be possessed by Peter's fear; he was the vision of one who could survive and live within the storm.  The vision of Jesus was so comforting to Peter that it actually made Peter confident.  Peter decided that he too did not want to put his life completely on hold during the storm, he wanted to walk in the storm.  He wanted to express his faith even within the storm.  So Peter walked toward Jesus but the conditions of the storm distracted his faith.  It was so much easier to believe in the reality of the storm than in the reality of Jesus, who lived beyond the storm.  And when Peter used his good reason not to believe, he did not believe and he sank.  But even in his sinking he found that Jesus rescued him.

  Can we not see in this story portrayal an altered state way of seeing our lives?  Can we not see the literal truth, the literary and artistic truth of this story to our lives?

  You and I are always already in stormy states of life by virtue of the conditions of freedom in our world and because of the reality of time which means there are many different changes that are always occurring.  And we have to live with, adjust to, respond to and assert ourselves within the conditions of change.

  So what are the Gospel insights for us today?

  One Gospel insight might be the admission of the actual conditions of life.  Folks, it can be stormy out there and it can be stormy in here.  It can be stormy in the heavens, it can be stormy in the galaxy, it can be stormy in other countries, it can be stormy in our country, state, city, neighborhoods, homes and family.  We cannot avoid the reality of the storms of life.  Human storms are as inevitable as the changing weather.

  Another Gospel insight is this: Storms are not the only weather condition.  There can be many other weather conditions which are more supportive of human safety.  So, do not let the storms define the totality of all weather conditions.  In the human sphere, do not let loss, pain, failure or threat, define the totality of life.  The total good outweighs the total bad; it is just that the bad is such a deprivation of the good that it yells out and gains attention beyond its actual strength.

  Another Gospel insight for us:  Let hope give us the vision for survival in the midst of our life storm.  The greatest storm of life is death and the threat of death.  The resurrected Christ stands before us as the trump card to death.  We begin there to deal with the big Anxiety.  But we let the hope of seeing Christ inspire us to take steps in the direction of what is hopeful.  The details of the hopeful are many: another job, a good health report, a successful surgery, a child growing up, a relationship improved, an addiction interdicted in an encounter with a higher power grace experience, a new friendship, the ministry of a piece of music, reading some telling piece of wisdom in a book, an artistic image, a sublime encounter with stories of cinema and television, a report of heroism, courage, rescue and healing.

  Another Gospel insight for us:  Even if we falter in our efforts of faith, we can still be rescued and given more chances.  Christ picks us up and Christ forgives us and he does not accuse us.  He simply challenges us to keep on being faithful and taking those small steps of faith in the direction of Hope signified by Christ who is the one who gives us a vision of surpassing our current stormy situation.

  My friends, this Gospels is true because it invites us to an altered way of seeing within the very real storms of life.  Look up and see Christ as the one who surpasses our stormy situation to inspire hope for us to take the next step of faith.  Amen.

Reflections on the Transition to Postmodern Possibilities of Faith

  Post-modernism has many different definitions but one of the consistent definitions of post-modernism is the perpetual criticism of Modernism.  Modernism dates from the Enlightenment when theology began to be de-throned as the the queen of the sciences and chief arbitrator of truth and Reason was enthroned as the final method for establishing truth, meaning and value.
  As a result theology was delegated to a very narrow field of morals and ethics or a practice of nostalgia for a different era when we did not know so much.
  The crowning jewel of modernism is what we call modern science.  The methods of modern science with its requirement of empirical verification and/or falsification of statements of meaning called scientific laws or theories have been very successful in creating all of the technological products to make our lives better and easier.
  But has the modern era only been better and easier?  Post-modernism has arisen as intellectual and social movements to challenge the supremacy of the outcomes of the so-called progress of modern science.  Post-modernism is not the denial of modernism; it is critique of modern progress being seen as only positive, salutary and recommendable.  Post-modernism represents a disillusionment with some of the results of progress.  Modernism has been so progressive that one of our chief achievements now includes the ability to destroy, quickly or progressively, human life as we know it at our own hands.  One of the chief achievement of modernism is the military industrial complex which has given us the bombs to destroy the planet.  A slower death of the planet has become obvious because of our poor stewardship of the environment.
  In American culture, the beat cultures and the hippie cultures of the fifties and the sixties were early protest movements of post-modernism against modernism.  The sixties highlighted wrong-headed achievement of science resulting in controversial wars; technology had brought us to the place of being able to go to war because we "could" and not because we needed to defend ourselves for some life threatening enemy and many began to note that we could be very inconsistent for the reasons of our military intervention in other parts of the world.  "Our interest in the region" became a rather convenient and pliable interpretive principle for foreign policy.
  We did have a seeming idealistic bubble in the 1950's when because of television we believed or aspired to believe that everyone was or could be a "Ward and June Cleaver" middle class family living in the nice home with the white picket fence.  Such a world had an undercurrent which we did not care to highlight because it was too much a part of the "goes without saying" tacit background of the racial and socio-economic situation in our country.  The bubble of our "naive" sense of being good or better than people of other countries had not yet been popped and we naively assumed that we were a Christian country and that we really knew what being a Christian country meant.
  Ironically, there were a variety of Christian responses to the impressive truths of science. Various brands of fundamentalism expressed in various Christian confessional groups subtly embraced the truths of science by virtue of accepting the products of a thoroughly scientific industrial culture and life style and they regarded  it necessary to begin to explicate all things biblical as scientifically truthful. So the virgin birth of church tradition also had to be understood as a modern biological understanding of child conception and birth.  Embracing the the truth of radioactive dating the creation story had to be the understood as the creation of old rocks because Adam was created as an adult male and not a baby .  Truly adult rocks were created and managed to fool the radioactive dating methods and appear to be very ancient while having been created but some 6000 years ago.  This is the ultimate irony; fundamentalism was a product of modernism impressed by its truth and therefore fundamentalists had to conform biblical story to modern scientific truth criteria as a way to defend the ancient faith.  After all, an omniscience God would have known about Cadillacs before they existed.
  This truly anachronistic phenomena of fundamentalism was a modern phenomena but very poorly constructing unbelievable apologies for having faith in the modern era.   One can truly feel sorry for those who suffered from nostalgia and so they attempted to wed details of ancient cultures with an incompatible modern scientific methodology.
  Even while fundamentalism tried to present myth as actual history, the modern study of history resulted in a historical presentation of biblical peoples whose stories needed to be de-mythologized for modern people who held to causality based upon the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system.
  What was lost because of "historicism" and "fundamentalism" was the kind of seeing which comes from having one's constituted state of seeing "altered."  So in revolt many people in this post-modern revolt against the effects of modernism sought for the ways of seeing and experiencing through "altered" states.  People went East and gurus came West to teach "altered" ways of seeing the world so that negative effects of progress could be resisted, interdicted or given new direction.  Both historicism and fundamentalism had locked off a kind of seeing which was present in the lives of those who wrote the Scriptures.  Some people found refuge in even more visionary literature of Eastern Religions.   Some found a way to alter their states of being, living and seeing through the discipline of meditation and other  yogic practices.  Others found a way to alter their seeing through hallucinogenic drugs.  Some found that to challenge their sound and rhythm environments with new hybrids of music deriving from Blues and Rhythm of African-American culture gave them a music of reaction, protest and resistance.  But the new sound environment also became a significant new way to alter the state of seeing life; social, cultural, political and religious lives.   This also included a reaction against fundamentalism's puritanical controlled holier-than-thou restrictions upon the libido.  The altered states of the sixties and seventies included an orgiastic revolt against the previous order for the libido whose main "punishment" of pregnancy was beginning to be dealt with because of modern medical science.
  Hopefully we have arrived at a place of a more sanguine appraisal of the kinds of religious modernism, fundamentalism and de-mythologizing historicism.  Perhaps the greatest opportunity we have in our Post-modern age is the honesty we can have about acknowledging language as the undeniable human absolute.  We may refer to pre-lingual, a-lingual or extra-lingual, or post-lingual but we are always using language to do so.
  With an appreciation of the supremacy and the fluidity and omni-reflexivity of language in human experience we can begin to understand that language performances arise in response to a variety of human experience and as language is produced it differentiates itself into discursive practices which are appropriate to providing meaning in different "language-games" or human scenarios of life.  With an appreciation of language we can understand that the restrictions put on language products of the scientific method are not the same which pertain to the aesthetic appreciation of Shakespeare or a poetic work or Holy Scripture.  There are works of writing which were produced from dream-like states of interior seeing and when such seeing is brought to text, it cannot be read or interpreted for the same meaning that we get from reading a reported event of current news.  It cannot be read or interpreted in the same way in which a scientific experiment is being observed and recorded.  We are variegated enough in our discursive practices so we need to be committed to surpassing ourselves into the fullness of manifold meanings.  This means inner seeing can contradict scientific seeing even while co-existing in each person as a language practitioner.  By nature we cannot avoid language craft and to accept the full vision of this marvelous language craft we need to avoid creating battles which we artificially create as being "out there...outside of language" because there is no such place.  We need to let language honestly bear the contradictions and ambiguities involved in being fully true and honest to continual surpassing human meanings.  We in communities of faith can embrace our variety of "altered state" seeing as handed on to us by our wisdom traditions and we do not blindly copy the details of applied wisdom in past cultures; we embrace the wisdom of "altered seeing" today which helps us with faith apply wisdom in the details of our lives today and do so with hopeful approximations of justice and love.