Sunday, February 17, 2013

Temptation: Acting on Misinterpretation


1 Lent C    February 17, 2013
Deut.26:1-11    Ps. 91
Rom.10:5-13     Luke 4:1-13


Text:
  We begin the season of Lent with the famous show down between Jesus and Satan.  One wonders how this private temptation of Jesus ever came to textual form but it has and it ties in with numerology of the Hebrew Scripture.  The number 40 is the symbolic number for test and ordeal and wandering before arriving at an appointed place.  40 years in the wilderness for the people of Israel.  It rained 40 days and night in the big Flood.   
  The wilderness is also a symbolic place of making the lonely vision quest to test one’s calling.  Are you really sure you’re supposed to do this?  A vision of vocation and ministry is tested.  “Maybe I shouldn’t have left the previous familiar place.  Maybe I did not have any choice as circumstances forced me in the liminal state of betwixt and between, a rite of passage.  Maybe I’ve launch out into the new vision and I’m getting nowhere so in disappointment, maybe I should quit.”  The showdown between Jesus and Satan in the wilderness happened after his baptism by John the Baptist, when Jesus was to begin his ministry.  In his vision quest in the wilderness one can find revisited the place of human defeat, namely the current state of the Garden of Eden..  First Adam failed in his temptation with the serpent-Satan, the trickster, and as a result the entire creation was plagued with weeds.  The Garden of Eden was locked off; Shangri-la now but an ancient myth.  Now the dis-harmony with the plant world was expressed in the weeds that want to grow in our garden of wheat and fruits and choke off our labor.  The Garden of Eden as a friendly menagerie of animals with Adam being like a Dr. Doolittle talking with animals and giving them their names, had become the wilderness where the beasts were predators and humanity is a prey unless human beings can outsmart the animals who were originally created for eco-harmony and friendship.
  “God, we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.” This was a visionary impulse long before Joni Mitchell wrote a song about the Woodstock hippie quest for a return to Eden.  The entrance of Israel into the Promised Land flowing with milk and honey was another attempt to get back to the Garden as are all human attempts at utopia for more perfect societies. 
   Adam and Christ stand as the totemic personalities for trying to understand human direction and in the story of Adam, we find a story that gives us insight about our moral failure.  First man and first woman, Adam and Eve are naively innocent creatures, who succumb to the superior stealthy cunning of the serpent, and the naïve pair went from being vegetarians to misbehaving fruitarians and as they say, the rest is history.  In the Biblical epic, there was one needed to progress beyond the state of naiveté and go again to a site of the original misdirection and that once Garden site has now become the wilderness haunted by wild beasts.  And a second Adam, a hero had to go in to confront the great trickster. 
  We in our biblical religion are so used to “externalizing” all things biblical as having happened out there in the external world.  The Greeks use a word, “Topos” to refer to both physical sites but also literary textual topics.  When we read the Bible we are reading about those “topoi,” those great human topics or literary topographical inner space sites of human angst and triumph.
   Perhaps the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness highlights most poignantly the notion of word, text and topic.  The temptation showdown was essentially an interior verbal sparring between Jesus and his interior trickster Accuser.  They exchanged words and so we had a debate or forensic discourse, verbal jousting.  And what were they jousting about?  They were essentially jousting about the great text of their known world, the words of their Bible, the words of the Hebrew Scripture.  The temptation of Christ shows us that Satan knew how to use the Bible.  The words of the Bible as written could be interpreted in a hundred ways and so Satan was using the words of the Hebrew Scripture to tempt Jesus to make the word flesh in coming to an actual deed.  The fullness of word being made flesh occurs when it animates an actual deed.  Just as the serpent trickster of old used flattering words to motivate Eve and Adam to the deed of eating the forbidden fruit, so too the trickster and eloquent devil tried to appeal to the good holy book to influence an action by Jesus.
  The temptations of life most often are about interpretation and timing?  Is eating an apple from the tree bad?  Of course not, it is timing of when the apple can be eaten.  A parent does the same thing with one’s child.  Are cookies bad for children, yes and no, it depends upon the timing of eating for good nutrition.  Is bread bad for Jesus or us?  Of course not, it has to do with the timing of throwing Jesus off his schedule of how he understood his relationship with God his father.
   The idolatrous form of self-esteem is the megalomaniac quest for the kind of fame when a person is dominated to define their very worth as a person by the number of people who can express devotion or adoration towards them.  Our media society certainly feeds this distorted view of fame as famous people complain about invasive paparazzi even while they use all of the distorted fame to get wealthy.  Worship and adore me in exactly the way that I want you to.  And you see how fame and the events that lead to fame often get labeled as a Faustian bargain.  “Jesus, you are clever enough to use your wisdom and your charisma and your ability to manipulate people and become as powerful and as famous as the Caesar, so why don’t you use your ability to get this kind of fame.”  The plan of God had Jesus becoming famous in the path of counter-logic; by getting crucified and then returning to countless numbers of people in resurrection manifestations. 
  And then there is the temptation trick of trying to get Jesus to be a fundamentalist literalist.  “Throw yourself off the building Jesus because the Bible says the angels will catch you.”  There was a time and a place for Jesus to die but not by being led into acting because of a faulty reading of the Bible.  Lots of people are led to hurtful prejudice and acts of injustice because of the way in which they read the Bible.  Our world is full of incredible cruel actions done because of the way that religious people of all religions have been tempted to read their Holy Books in distorted ways.  The temptation of Christ is a witness to us to be careful in how we seek to understand our Holy Book in our time and if our interpretation of the Bible does not pass the non-exploitative, love and justice and common sense smell test, then we need to be careful in the kinds of interpretation of the Bible that we are acting upon.
  The greater point that I would like for us to understand is that you and I are word constituted in a sea of words.  By this I mean our world and self-knowledge is constructed by the way in which we see or perceive through the word structures of our life.  We use Holy Books and “higher education” to inform the language lenses through which we see all of life outside of us and all of who we are inside of us.  So we have taken on lots of word usage that already result in automatic body language acts in our life.  Our body language follows the code of how we have taken on word use in our lives.
  So this temptation event of Jesus as a clash of competing interpretations is crucial in understanding that you and I live on a sea of words in how we are interpreting the meaning of our lives in each word and deed.  The parts of our life deeds that are already on automatic in our body rituals sometimes are hard to interdict and change.
  The reason we try to educate and bring into our lives new word events and new possibility of new interpretations is that we hope to cure in progressive ways the ignorance that our speech and body habits have taken on through being informed by less than ideal sources of information.
  This is why we are always within a textual temptation, a word battle for excellence in future speech and action.  Jesus won the battle of words against the one who wanted him to misinterpret and take the wrong actions in his life.
  We live the drama of this temptation too, every moment of our lives.  That is why the “ I.T. phrase “garbage in, garbage out” is relevant to our life of temptation.  What we take in as we live on this sea of words in some ways become flesh in the actions of our lives and so we need to be ever mindful of what we are taking in so as to influence what we will be expressing in the words and deeds of our lives.
  Friends, we highlight the temptation of Jesus today as we have begun Lent, but trust me, you and I are living this dramatic temptation in our word lives all of the time.  Let us ponder today how we are interpreting and acting out the highest ideals of our lives today, and let us follow Jesus in finding strategies against the temptation to “mistime” the words and deeds of our lives.  Amen.

Daily Quiz, February 17, 2013

Daily Quiz

Which Gospel does not mention the temptation of Jesus Christ in the wilderness?

a. Matthew
b. Mark
c. Luke
d. John

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Aphorisms for Ash Wednesdays


Ash Wednesday        February 13, 2013
Isaiah 58:1-12         Ps.103       
2 Cor. 5:20b-6:10    Matt. 6:1-6, 16-21
Preached at a Joint Ash Wednesday Service with Advent Lutheran of Morgan Hill


     What are we doing here tonight?  Right now you are put in the situation of listening to me preach unless you can let your minds wander to much more exciting places to be, and I’m sure that there are many. 
    After preaching these same Ash Wednesday Scriptural readings for 31 years, you’d think that I’d exhausted them by now or at least exhausted lots of listeners.  But now I come with fear and trembling into a house of Luther where the preaching is exceptional and I am used to Episcopal listeners who don’t expect me to say anything profound because it’s all been said better in the Book of Common Prayer, preferably in Tudor English.
     The Ash Wednesday liturgy provides us with a challenge; we have hundreds of years represented in the Scripture lessons and 2000 years of church history that bring us to this event tonight.  We have a room of people who have some shared community discourse in religious practice but also a room of people all of whom have individually taken on faith vocabulary in very personal ways within your own spiritual histories.
  So how can I expect to speak and control the meaning of anything that I say?  My knowledge is only my partial knowledge and my partial knowledge reaches out to your partial knowledge to see what kinds of meanings can arise.
    I feel like the best way to be honest to this meeting of people, all of whom have but partial knowledge is to respond with a discourse that admits the state of having partial knowledge.  And so I choose the discourse of offering to you a string of aphorisms. At first,  I thought that I should pay tribute to Lutheran numerology by offering a 95 point sermon, in honor of Luther’s famous 95 Theses nailed to the Wittenberg Castle Church Door, but 95 points would take too long and if I just taped it on your door, it would surely be recycled in the morning.  So, no outlined sermon with 95 points. So I offer you aphorisms in response to the question what are we doing here tonight?
  As Episcopalians are we here in violation of our number one rule:  Thou shalt not be seen in church more than once a week, unless there is a funeral or wedding…and if the wedding is on Saturday, that’s close enough to Sunday to not have to go to church on Sunday.
  We’re here to offer thanksgiving that Orchard Valley Youth Soccer does not offer games tonight to affect our attendance. (Although there are probably teams practicing).
  We here to show our sacrificial beginning to the Lenten Season by missing American Idol.
  We are here to paint our foreheads with the ashes that simulate our bodies’ future state, something like Native American braves putting on war paint to frighten our opponent death not to come too soon.
  We here to pay tribute to the church calendar that offers us 6 different seasons as an annual curriculum with Christian knowledge divided up into seasonal emphases so as to give us a full review of catechesis each year.  And Lent is our Spring training when we promise to simulate the tests and ordeals of life so as to build different kind of faith muscles so that we might understand better our calling to follow Christ.
  We are here to ponder the appointed reading from Scripture particularly the conjunction “as if” raised by the prophet Isaiah.  “Yet day after day they seek me and delight to know my ways, as if they were a nation that practiced righteousness.”  We confront ourselves with the possibility of our own hypocrisy:  Do we perform and practice our piety as if it could be a replacement for practicing righteousness?  Do we do this as a way of convincing ourselves that we are okay with God?   Do we suffer a major disconnect between our churchly life and our life outside of the church?
   We are here to ponder our religious piety.   Do we take on the voluntary fast for religious devotion; and ignore those who have the involuntary fast of hunger and starvation forced upon them by their conditions of living?
  We are here to fast.  Which fast would you rather choose?  Giving up food for a day?  Chocolate or wine for Lent?  Or the fast that the Prophet Isaiah says is preferred by God?  Getting rid of injustice.  Feeding the hungry.  Releasing the oppressed.  Clothing the naked.  Bringing the homeless into my house.  God, I’d much prefer my own religious rituals as a preferred fast to really dealing with these harsh realities of the world.
   Do we see prayer as public performance with great worry about our liturgical correctness and we cannot hear the authentic prayer of desperate people who are crying, “help me God, help me somebody?”
   Do we fuss over our public clothing, our Sunday-going-to-meeting clothes, and robes and albs and chasubles even while others do not have adequate clothing for their own warmth or dignity?
  We are here to acknowledge all that is done in our names for which we take no personal responsibility.  Do we ponder the way we absolve our personal responsibility within our group identities?  It is the government that goes to war, not I; it is the government that denies health care, not I; it is our society that has the wrong priority about the general welfare of all people, not I.  I cannot be held personally responsible for that fact that my country is disproportionately the largest consumer of the earth’s resources.
  We are here to ponder utopia.  Isaiah suggests that if we ever start practicing righteousness and not just religious behaviors within our own religious communities, then it would result in the promise of God’s guidance in a restored world.
   We are here to think honestly about our sins?   Do we ponder the fact that the past is absolute; that it happened cannot be denied and that our absolute past includes our sins and short-comings? Do we come here to identify with the request of the Psalmist for God to cleanse us from our sins and to create new hearts within us?
  We are here to think about forgiveness.  Do we not feel challenged by our own remembrances of the hurt that others have done to us and the seemingly impossible task of forgiveness that we must seek as a gift from God?
  We are here to ponder the radical words of St. Paul about Christ.  Are we not in awe of the way that St. Paul states that Christ became our sin so that we might become the righteousness of God?  Christ represents God’s full identity with us in our human condition so that we can discover the godly and the spiritual within our human condition and not be defeated by our own imperfection.
  We are here to think about our role in being witnesses to Christ.  How many people allow them selves to be atheists because they have seen Christians acting badly?  Does the way in which we live our faith put obstacles in the way for others to believe in God and God’s goodness?
    Pastor Warner and I are probably happy that we don’t have to list on our ministerial resumes the list of suffering that St. Paul put on his list: great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger.  We should reflect upon our easy conditions in noting that suffering for the Gospel has been spread out unevenly throughout history and space.  We should put all of our problems in perspective:  Our problems are the problems of middle to upper middle class residents living in a Bay Area suburb.  How many people in the world would love to have our problems?
  We are here for corporate prayer and to ponder the meaning of such.  Public or corporate prayer is not to impress other people; it is to join in agreement with other people who share genuine concern for our world.  The reason that we do our religion in public is because there is more that can be done in sharing our gifts together than can be done if each of us tries to do our religion alone.  When we do our corporate prayer let us hope that the people who need mission and ministry will be the recipients of us doing public prayer together.  Collective effervescence can result in our worship attaining greater ministerial outcomes in our world.  Indeed let us be public in our prayer, but not to impress people but to be delivered from individualism and isolationism that says, “I don’t need you for my life of faith.”
  We are here tonight to consider our private lives.  Thankfully most of our lives and prayers are done in the closet and in secret.  God give us the grace to resist the publishing of all of our thoughts and deeds.  It is good to build our resumes in heaven and let God see both our secret sins and goodness.  It is good when we are hidden to ourselves and the secret effects of our own ministries.  I have many, many people and mentors in my past life that I never took time to thank (didn’t know how to thank them at the time)  but they were there for me and they have never known the value of their lives to mine.  I think that this is the kind of heavenly treasure that we build by just being faithful and not expecting visible reinforcement for being so.
  We are here tonight to ponder the witness that Jesus gave to his heavenly Father.  Have you ever thought that perhaps the most profound witness of Jesus is the example that he gave of knowing his heavenly parent?  As much as we like to build solid doctrine about how Jesus is the unique Son of God, I get the impression that Jesus wanted each person to know herself or himself as a unique daughter or son of God.  I get the impression that Jesus mostly wanted to share with us this secret place with God our heavenly parent and to know that this is the place where we can express our true honest authenticity.  And from the place of knowing a treasured relationship with God we go forth in our public lives, our religious lives trying to bring to them as much authenticity as we can.  And when we fail, we go back to the secret place of forgiveness and renewal and come out again ready to try to do God’s will of love and justice on earth.
  I do wish all of us a holy Lent; I wish us well in making strides in authenticity and I pray that each of us will know the esteem of being recognized as unique and valued by God our heavenly parent.  To know the secret of this recognition by God is indeed the greatest treasure of all. Amen.

Sunday, February 10, 2013

Transfiguration as Process of Life


Last Epiphany c          February 10, 2013
Exodus 34:29-35     Ps. 99
2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2    Luke 9:28-36    

   

   How did many of our favorite fairy tales end?  They ended with these words, “And they all lived happily ever after.”  We know it isn’t exactly true even though we like to promote optimism with our children.  Even though we know it really would be “they all lived happily until they finally died.”
  Living happily ever after is suggestion about a state of bliss in a world where bliss is not the only experience.  One of the functions of art, music and religion is to “transport” us to access a place within our own experience where we touch the sublime, the eternal and the blissful.  It really is not escapism unless it hinders the realistic dealing with all of the other experiences in our lives.
  The Bible and the Gospels are literature; they are art, they are stories.  They are transporting stories.  They are not exact representations of reality.  When we read about Jesus bringing Lazarus back to life that is where the story ends; we don’t read about Lazarus getting old and dying a slow painful death.  Today, on Transfiguration Sunday, you noticed that we read the aftermath of coming down from the mountain top experience; Jesus whispers the inner life of a child and that child is freed from a terrible inner torment.  But that’s all we know about the child; did he have a relapse?  Did he become a disciple?  Or did he get arrested for stealing chariot wheels in Jerusalem?  Gospel stories give us such time lapsed scenarios and the phenomenon of time lapsing tricks us to another better place within ourselves.
  The Gospel is a spiritual literary art that transports us to another place, a parallel existence that we can access in our lives.  And this other place is perhaps an ongoing process of life; this on-going process of life can also be called the life of the Holy Spirit.  And another name for this life process is transfiguration. A pessimistic materialist might say that the main process of life is called entropy or a running out of energy in life but does not energy just change form and shape and what ends or dies is transformed into another shape or form or manifestation of energy?  Transfiguration is the English word for translating the Greek word from which we get metamorphosis. 
   Our encounter with metamorphosis came in our elementary school science classes.  We studied the phases of life of frogs and butterflies and moths.   We watched little fuzzy-wuzzy caterpillars appear to go lifeless in the pupa or cocoon phase, and if we were lucky we would see the butterfly break out of the cocoon and take to flight.  And this entire process of change is called metamorphosis.  We don’t so much know why it happens; we can but record and witness that it does happen and try to name this marvelous process.
  Metamorphosis is incognito in many costumes; the tiny egg, the larva, the pupa and finally the butterfly that in turn lays the eggs.  Metamorphosis or transfiguration is the energy of life, the life force that pulsates through all of life and this force is impartial to all of it guises.  We on the other hand are human and all too human and we in community become very attached to certain appearances and manifestations of the process of metamorphosis.  If we took a survey, probably most people would prefer to look at butterflies rather than tiny eggs, caterpillar or cocoons.   In human vestiges we perhaps all have favorite states of appearance; we want to have the wisdom of Methuselah and the physical prowess of Adonis and the beauty of Venus.  It is very human to be attached to certain states of our manifest appearances.  But metamorphosis does not discriminate; it gives us no choice.  Metamorphosis is equal in the egg, in the larva, in the cocoon and in the butterfly even though it does not seem to be equal in the experience of each phase.
  The process of this life force of Transfiguration provides us with encounters of an enchanted kind.  Such an enchanted kind is chronicled in the mountain trek of Jesus, Peter, James and John.   In the state of enchantment the interior life of people become like incredible projectors putting in their environment things, people and events not normally seen:  Clouds and lights and space travelers of two saints of old who did not have natural deaths, Moses and Elijah.  If a Jewish person were influenced and formed by the Sadduceean tradition, they would honor Moses as the final authority.  Pharisees and other Judaic sects allowed that the writings and acts of the prophets were authoritative. So Moses and Elijah were seen in the visionary event as endorsing Jesus to be the Successor within the line of salvation history. But beyond Moses and Elijah came the testimony of the direct heavenly voice of the Speaker who declared Jesus to be the beloved Son.  
  This enchanting experience was like a dream that one does not want to wake up from.  Peter was so nervous with enchantment, he suggested that they build temporary dwellings in honor of the three so they could camp out and stay awhile.  And why would anyone want to leave the event when enchantment awakens us to the appearance of discovering a person with whom one experiences love and friendship and guidance and comfort and warmth and light.  The transfiguration process of life became apparent in a most poignant way in the way in which Peter, James and John encountered Jesus.
  But they could not remain on the mountain top in the preferred state of ecstatic encounter; they had to go down into the “demon possessed” valley.  The reality of transfiguration on the mountain top had to accomplish some creative reclamation within the valley of chaos.  And we sure do not like the ugly states of chaos in the phases of transformation.  But transfiguration does not avoid the valley of chaos and the demon possessed.  The power of transfiguration is evident in the life of Jesus to do some serious people whispering in the valley of the demon possessed.  Transfiguration does not keep Jesus or us in the state of spiritual ecstasy; it brings us into the world where apparently chaos reigns.  We who have been transfigured need to activate our transfiguring energy; we need to activate our life force as personal charisma or graceful creativity and do some people whispering ourselves to help each other and the people to whom we are called to come into new states of mental and spiritual peace.
  We need to find the rhythm of transfiguration within our lives; learning to be recharged in the ecstatic of the sublime, but then called to release and advance transfiguring energy for people who need their lives whispered to the next creative and peaceful state of existence.
  You and I are called to the transfigured life.  It is a process of God’s Holy Spirit that impels us through many apparent states; sometimes we’re breathless with awe and wonder and sometimes we’re holding on in intense waiting for what seems an interminably delay of transformation into the next phase.  Transfiguring life is equal and same in all phases, even though we naturally prefer certain phases over others.
  Let us embrace Transfiguration as the Creative process of God’s Spirit within us now and within the life of our world.  And let us make ourselves available to the power of transfiguration to be people who are willing to whisper the lives of other people to a greater sense of peace, love, care and kindness.  Let the transfiguring Spirit of God within us be a heavenly voice that says to each person:  You are God’s beloved and unique and special son and daughter.  And God is pleased with you.  Amen.



Sunday, February 3, 2013

Awesome Love Makes Us Humble Relativists


4 Epiphany  C   February 3, 2013
Jer. 1:4-10     Ps.71:1-6
1 Cor. 13:1-13   Luke 4:21-32

 
  Super Bowl Sunday and we actually have some people in church or perhaps you are here to pray for the home team and not “jinx” them?  There is more superstition in sports than has probably ever been religion.
  I have been trying to build some hype for the church service today by doing some Tweeting on Twitter; kind of like the Old Burma Shave Signs.  (And I know some of you are old enough to remember them on the road side).
  Tweets: The Love Chapter will be in your local parish on Sunday.   The Love Chapter:  Is it a Rock Band?  The Love Chapter:  Is it a new online dating service?  The Love Chapter:  Is it a club for lonely hearts? 
  And what is the Love Chapter?  The 13th Chapter of 1 Corinthians.  How many of you had this read at your marriage?  Can you believe that this was written by a man who was not married, so he decided to write an impossible standard because he knew that he’d never have anyone to ask him to take out the trash or fix the faucet?
  All kidding aside, I really do think it is St. Paul’s very best writing.  If love is a cliché then sometimes it is the truest cliché that needs to be used.  Do you ever use the word love?  The Greek language has at least four words for love and in English we have to supplement the word love with lots of qualifying nuances.  It is easy to decry love as a trivial cliché especially if you are not the one who is fortunate enough to be “in love.”  We get a life time education in love because what we mean by love at 16 may be completely different when we are 82.
  So how do we use the word love?  Let us count the ways?  Well, today is anyone saying, “I love football?”  I love the 49’ers?  And what kind of love is this?  Do you love your spouse, your partner or your friend?  Do you love pizza or haggis or quiche?  Do you love to ski?  To play golf?  To jog?  Do you love a particular hobby?  Do you love your enemy?  Or is that an oxymoron?  Do you love a particular television show?  Do you love music?  Do you love your country?  Do you love your job?  Do you love money?  Do you love your political affiliations?
  Do we over use the word love such that it becomes trivialized and loses precision of meaning?  Should we decry love and speak against its trivial use?  Is love only about the passion and desire known as one's preference?  Is being in love actually a pathological state because it makes us “lose” control?  Is the passion of love not to be trusted?  Have people done things because of love that they've come to regret?  Should we always choose the calm, restrained, and passionless voice of reason over the whims of love?
  What is the way of love?  How does it work?  In a general sense is it a kind of magnetic force that exists between everything that in rather fickle fashion draws together beings with desire in a more or less predictable but often serendipitous ways?
  The writer of the Song of Solomon called love strong as death.  Emily Dickenson wrote, “That love is all there is, is all we know of love.”
  Love rides on the border of always being a trivialized cliché and being the most profoundly definitive word of how we truly feel at any time.
  Love is a word like God, a single word for a highly awesome and complex inclusive conception.  We have to use the word even though we always feel a bit hypocritical and a bit unworthy to use the word love, because it is always strangely more wonderful and more awesome than we can say.
  St. Paul was writing to a congregation of people who had ministerial gifts and the great qualities of and for religious devotion.  Some had the faith to become martyrs; some had the ecstatic states and utterances of the angelic sort with incredible experiential highs that made them feel very touched by God.   Some had faith to do great works, and in the face of all of this St. Paul writes about Love.  The way in which he writes about love is awesome and even terrifying because his view of love is a view of God.  It is a vision of what is possible.  And what is possible overwhelms what is actual.  What is possible inspires hope because the possible is the future that inspire our actual efforts now.
  The awesome and terrifying nuances of the Love that Paul writes about are revealed in these phrases:  Love endures all things.  Love believes all things.  Love hopes all things.
  Well do you believe in UFO’s and unicorns and gnomes and fairies?  In my own understanding, I’ve come to believe in everything that can come to language, since not to believe in what comes to language is to deny the way in which a person characterizes their own experience.  Yes, I would always qualify about how I believe many things that have occurred in the imaginations of people.  But this hymn of Paul to Love is a confession of the all-inclusiveness of love.  That is terrifying because there is much included in the total body of human experience that I would like to censor and remove because it is not to my liking.  But love believes all things and hopes all things.  This is a witness to the expansive nature of the freedom that exists with the full play of possibility.  The awesome and creative can arise in this Plenitude of love but also some very dark and evil things can occur as well.  But love is not in the business of exclusion it is all about inclusion because with inclusion comes maximum aesthetic clarity.
  What would I mean by aesthetic clarity?  It is like the young boy who was hit repeatedly by the bully at school.  His mom ask him if he were hurt.  And the boy stumbled upon a sort Yoga Berra explanation: “Mom, after he stopped hitting me, not being hit felt much better.”  The boy had aesthetic clarity about what health was in a different way.  The Plenitude of the Love about which St. Paul wrote is the very condition for meaning that occurs because of the tolerance and belief in vast differences.
  Love has the inclusive plenitude of contradiction, as in love your enemies.  Jesus also said that even after one has the paper of divorce love still maintains that the two are still preserved in the reality of Love.  Love preserves in that it means that what has happened can never be that it did not happen.  Love preserves to make the past absolute.  That is awesome and terrifying at the same time.
  Love can also be unrecognized and incognito.  Jesus the prophet did not have the honor of love in his own hometown.  Familiarity can make it seem as though love is not there and love sometimes does not become apparent again until a person has died or is gone from the scene.  And suddenly love is known as having been “taken for granted.”
  Love can be known in the experience of “wow, this is what I was put in the world to do.”  The prophet in his call felt like he had been called from the womb.  This is the poetry of love being known as the proverbial “déjà vu.”  Wow, this just seems so awesomely right.
  The final thing that I want to say about Paul’s hymn to love is this: “To know love is to know that humility is not a choice, it is the true condition of being overwhelmed in the plenitude of love.”
  In most philosophy, the supreme insult is to call someone a “relativist.”  St. Paul makes it clear that in the face of love we have no choice but to know ourselves as relativists.  Why?  St. Paul, wrote, “Now, I know in part.”  That is the most any of us can say, “I know in part.”  My knowledge is very limited and partial, even while I hope that my knowledge is growing.  What do we do in having only partial knowledge in the face of such plenitude?  We have all of the real conditions of humility that enables us to worship the one who has much more than our partial knowledge. Where our knowledge ends we submit in our hearts to the loving relationship with the God of Love.   And we say, “Take me Oh God of love!”  Since I cannot comprehend the divine plenitude, I take comfort that the ocean of God knows me and loves through me, even in ways I cannot see.  In the end, St. Paul is telling us that God is calling to be lovers and that we can receive in moment by moment doses the inclusive love of God.  It is our calling to let God’s love be transmitted through us in the words and deeds of our life.  This is the mystical experience of Love to which all of us are ever invited.  Amen,

Sunday, January 27, 2013

Gospel Puppet Show on the Meaning of Good News


Gospel Puppet Show
January 27, 2013
3 Epiphany 


Puppet Character: Jesus of Nazareth


Fr. Phil: I want to introduce to you today, Jesus of Nazareth.  Let’s give a big hand to Jesus of Nazareth.  Welcome Jesus.

Jesus:  Welcome to you and to all of these children.

Fr. Phil: Why did you welcome us, Jesus?

Jesus: Well, this is a church and so it is my house, is it not?  So can’t I welcome you to my house?

Fr. Phil:  You sure can Jesus, I’m sorry sometimes I forget.  Yes, this is your house and you do make us feel very welcome.  Thank you.  Jesus, if I were to ask you what you preached about what would you say?

Jesus:  I would say that I told people the Gospel.

Fr. Phil: I know that the Gospels are books in the Bible, but what is the Gospel?

Jesus:  Gospel means “good news.”  And I came to tell people the good news.  Do you know what good news is?

Fr. Phil: I think so.

Jesus: Do you think these children know what good news is?

Fr. Phil:  I think so.

Jesus:  Well, I am going to find out.

Fr. Phil:  How are you going to do that?

Jesus: Well, I’m going to give them a quiz to see if they know what good news is?

Fr. Phil:  Oh, oh…I hope you don’t ask hard questions.  How are you going to test us?

Jesus:  I am going to tell you about something and I want you to say good news or bad news.  That should be easy enough.

Fr. Phil:  Okay, are you ready children?

Jesus:  Okay, you get sick and don’t feel well.  Good news or bad news?

Children:  Bad news.

Jesus: That is correct.  After you are sick, you get better.  Good news or bad news?

Children:  Good news.

Jesus:  Correct.  It rains and the water helps the plants grow.  Good news or bad news?

Children:  Good news.

Jesus:  You get angry at your friend and push him.  Good news or bad news?

Children:  Bad news.

Jesus:  Correct. You tell your friend that you are sorry and he forgives you.  Good news or bad news?

Children:  Good news.

Jesus:  Some people have plenty of good food.  Good news or bad news?

Children:  Good news.

Jesus: Correct again.  Some people do not have enough to eat.  Good news or bad news?

Children:  Bad news.

Jesus: Correct.  God loves you very much and so do your parents.  Good news or bad news?

Children:  Good news.

Jesus: Correct.  And now I’m going to give you a very difficult problem.  The 49ers win the Super Bowl.  Good news or bad news.

Children:  Good News.

Jesus:  Wrong.  This is both good news and bad news.  It is good news for the people who like the 49ers; but it is bad news for the people who like the Baltimore Ravens.  So some things can be good for one person and sad for another person.  But you children are very smart and you have past my test.

Fr. Phil:  So what do we do now that we passed the test?

Jesus:  I want you to be teachers now in my Gospel school.  I want you to be teachers in my “Good News School.”  Can you go and tell everybody the Good news about God’s love?  You passed my test and so I want you to be good news boys and girls.  Can you do that?  Can you say, “Yes, we can?”

Children:  Yes, we can?

Fr. Phil:  Thank you Jesus.  We want to be good news people.  Bye, Bye, we hope to see you again.  Children, can we be good news people?  Yes we can.

Children: Yes we can. 

Universal Society of Music Lovers: Bagpipers not welcome!?


3 Epiphany C          January 27, 2013   
Neh. 8:2-10           Ps. 19      
1 Cor. 12:12-27       Luke 4:14-21    

   We are familiar with the word Gospel, but what is the etiology of this word?  Gospel comes from the middle English word, god-spell, meaning “good tidings or good news.”  It is a translation of the Greek word “euangellion” meaning the same thing “good news.”  Gospel is the title that we use for the first four book of the canonical New Testament.  These literary accounts used narrative presentations of the life of Jesus to teach and guide the liturgies of the communities from which they were written.
  So, we might think that the Gospel originated from Jesus Christ, but today’s portion of our Gospel lesson reveals a more ancient origin for the notion of Gospel.  Jesus is the lector and preacher at a synagogue in Nazareth and he read from the scrolls of the prophet Isaiah.  He read the portion of Isaiah 61:1: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.”  The Hebrew word for “good news” is basar, and in the Greek translation of basar the same root word for euangellion is used.  So Gospel comes from the ancient prophetic tradition of Israel.  God sent  messengers to proclaim good news to the poor.  Jesus of Nazareth locates himself within this ancient “good news” tradition.  From euangellion we have the word evangelism and this word sometimes has gotten a bad name in our society.  “Evangelical Christians” are regarded to be a voting bloc in our county and sometimes identified with what is called the Christian Right and they are people who seem to be motivated by only two social issues of our time.
  We are in dire need of rehabilitating the word evangelical, because if we are to be like Christ we are to be evangelical.  To be evangelical is to be in this ancient Good News tradition.  The Good News tradition is a more than a Christian tradition because it pre-dated Christianity.  And we should look for the Good News tradition everywhere in life even if it comes without Christian sub-titles.
  When Jesus read from the ancient prophet Isaiah he read, “"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.  He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."   After Jesus read these words, he in effect declared, “My life resembles these words.  My calling is to live this life of the good news.  My life is Evangelical.”
  When one reads these words, we cannot avoid the fact that they have material, physical, social, economic and political meanings as well as spiritual meaning.  What is good news to the poor?  Good news for them would be to have enough to live. What would it mean to release the oppressed?  It would mean the justice of freedom coming to those who were held back by an oppressive authority.  What would sight for the blind mean?  Certainly anyone who has been temporarily blind would know the recovery when it came.  Good news would mean having access to health care.  What would proclaiming the year of the Lord’s favor mean?  It would mean that we experience our life circumstances as being fortunate or lucky.  The freedom to pursue life, liberty and happiness.
  Jesus lived in an era of lots of bad news in the conditions of the people with whom he lived.  Jesus did not literally release any political prisoners in his time.  Jesus is known to have brought sight to the eyes of blind people.  And if Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet, was he proclaiming the favor of God’s imminent intervention to bring a final cosmic justice to Palestine?
  What happens when words do not seem to have any literal reference?  We are forced into their spiritual meanings to maintain their credibility for our lives.  The kingdom of God did not have an earthly manifestation in the form of an actual perfect government with righteous armies and judges.  Jesus did not bring about a New Deal or Great Society or Social Welfare for the poor of Palestine in his time.  When the Christian movement became the Christendom of the Holy Roman Empire, we find that absolute power corrupted absolutely both empire and church.
   The Good News tradition may indeed always be a parallel inner spiritual tradition that we have access to in order to bring manifestations of good news into actual physical order of our lives.  Justice may never be fully realized but it is always there to be the model for our laws and our social, political and economic behaviors.
  So what would good news be like in the community?  St. Paul believed that good news in his community had to do with the finding and the mutual support and tolerance for the gifts of everyone in the community.
  Can you imagine this oxymoronic sign: Universal Society of Music Lovers: Bagpipers not welcome!  Our kilt wearing friends from Scotland would be highly offended.  How could you proclaim yourself to be universal and exclude bagpipers?
  St. Paul encouraged his community to live up to the universality of God’s love and the good news of God in Christ.  If a person in the community is excluded because of the way in which he or she knows her gift to be available as a valid expression of the good news of their life and the benefit of the community, how can that be good news?  How can the community pretend universal love and good news with exclusionary practices of the gifts of people who want to be contributing members of the community?
  St. Paul was saying, “Live up to the universality of love and good news and this cannot be done by exclusionary practice of those who are gifted for the benefit of the community.”
  My friends, the good news tradition is still an invitation to us.  We are invited to be truly Evangelical as Jesus was in seeking to embody in his life practice what good news is for all people.  Let us not be afraid of the word evangelical today.  Let us renew our commitment to this ancient tradition of the prophets and that was given the ultimate stamp of approval in the life, death and resurrection of Christ.  And now in the resurrection of Christ, the Christ life is within us to keep us firmly in this Good News tradition.  Amen.

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