A Phil-aphorism

Futility is when we hope for so much more than can become actual.  Futility is when we know that the aspirations of hope cannot be accomplished in the span of an action movie, or even in a span of one’s lifetime.  Futility is when our actual lives seem to tell us that our hope is not valid and we are to be pitied for being so delusional.

Is God a Good Farmer with Indiscriminate Planting of Seeds?

Lectionary Link

4 Pentecost, Cycle A Proper10, July 10, 2011

Isaiah 55:10-13Psalm 65: (1-8), 9-14
Romans 8:1-11  Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

Text:

    So here we are living close to some of the most productive farm enterprises in the world.  Agrabusiness is not really a hit and miss kind of business.  This is the age of Monsanto and Archer Daniel Midlands and genetically altered seeds, specially design to produce maximum yield for the conditions of the land.

  So how do we in the age of agribusiness return to the sort hit and miss farming of the parable of the sower as told by Jesus?  Well some us do some hit and miss amateur gardening at our homes and can get real proud of our tomatoes and squash, even while we don’t mention all of the other failures to produce fruit in our gardens.

  We have read the parable of the sower and its explanation.  I really think that the explanation was an effort by a later community to try to specify what the original parable meant.

  What was the purpose of the parable?  I could see Jesus being posed with a question like: Rabbi, why is it that some people are following you but not everyone?  Why are we attracted to become your disciples but why do you seem to be irrelevant to other people?  Why don’t they have the same excitement about your good news?

   And Jesus answered this question with the parable of the sower.  And his parable respects the mystery of why some people come to faith and why some do not.  Why do some people come to understand and accept the Gospel?  Well, the conditions for it to happen are just right.

  That seems to be the meaning of the parable of the sower.  People come to their faith expression because the conditions are right.  Why do fisherman catch fish some days and none on other days?  Well, the conditions have to be right.   How do you like such a vague answer?  Couldn’t one say that about anything that happens, “Well, the conditions have to be right?”

  I think the follow up explanation of the parable was given by people who wanted to make some precise applications as to what conditions are favorable or unfavorable as it pertains to accepting the good news of the Gospel.

  The conditions have to be right.  Is that too vague of an answer to be satisfying?  Certainly in today’s agribusiness, the goal is to make the preparation and the adjustments for the conditions to be right for every crop to be a bumper crop.  Modern science and modern farming is all about having the knowledge to be able to intervene to control the quality of the crop.

  What insights can we gain from this parable even in our age of wanting to have as much scientific control of outcomes?

  The parable of the sower can still give us some insights about God and about having faith.  The unwritten assumption of the parable is that the sower already owns the land on which the seed is planted.  In faith application, this means that God as creator already owns the world, but the world of people do not always know this or acknowledge this in the way in which they live.  Since people are oblivious to God’s kingdom and ownership of the world, and because people live with the presumption of a world without God, there needs to be intervention.  The sowing of the seed of good news, of God’s kingdom, of God’s love and forgiveness, has to be done for people unaware of the possibilities for their lives. 

  The sowing of God’s good news is “indiscriminate.”  What wise farmer would toss seeds onto the path and into rocky places?  The sun shines on the good and evil.  The good news is offered to every situation and circumstance, even when logic would tell us that the seed has no chance to grow.

  Before building a church building at a former parish in Texas, we rented a store-front building in the downtown area.  Outside at the back of the building in a corner to which the parking lot asphalt reached, there was a tree that just seemed to grow out of the side of the building.  I would cut it off, and in a few months, it would be growing again.  I often thought that if I tried to plant that tree in the middle of my yard it would not grow, but for some odd reason, it kept growing out of the side of the building.

  What nature reveals is that the uncanny happens in the mix of nature, nurture and the degree of freedom that each person has.  In the mix of human freedom, the social conditions and the individual nature, the possibility of coming to faith happens.  And with evangelism, we try our best to be “wise” farmers to promote the very best hearing for people to be able to come to faith, even while we must rely on the mystery of conversion to work to see people come to faith.

  I believe that God gives us a task of evangelism; God asks us to be a part of the sowing of the good news of God’s kingdom, God’s love and God’s forgiveness.  We need to learn how to be used by God to be creative lures to draw people to their better selves.  And they know their better selves when they can acknowledge God as the owner of life and when their lives can be motivated by love and forgiveness.  They become their better selves when they realize that the hybrid seed of God’s Spirit is a reality to be discovered within each of us.

  The parable of the sower invites us to ask ourselves the question:  How has the seed of the good news of God’s kingdom done in our lives?  This is a question that St. Paul struggled with in his life.  St. Paul discovered within himself the law of the Spirit of life.  He discovered that God had called creation good because the Spirit of God is the hybrid factor of excellence in our lives.  God’s Spirit within us is the guarantee that we can come to fruition in our lives.

  I believe the parable of the sower invites us to some questions of internal assessment today:  How is the good news of the Gospel doing in our lives?  Are we making the choices to enable  God’s love to be successful in us?  Are we discovering the winsomeness of God’s Spirit within us?  Further, are we making ourselves available to create the conditions that make it attractive and inviting for other people to know God’s love through us?

  Let us remember that our lives need to be witnesses of the success of God’s love.  And so our lives need to part of the right conditions for helping other people know the presence of God’s kingdom and the love and joy and the peace of Christ.  Amen.

What kind of elevator is the Ascension?

Lectionary Link

7 Easter Cycle  A      June 5, 2011    

Acts 1:6-14        Ps. 68  

1 Peter 4:12-14; 5:6-11   John 17:1-11               

   Last Thursday was a major feast day of our Lord and there were five people here to celebrate this major feast day.  It was the feast of the Ascension of our Lord, sometimes a forgotten feast between Easter and Pentecost because it occurs on a Thursday and therefore does not get the benefit of Sunday billing.

  It does let preachers off the hook to explain the phenomenon of someone rising into the clouds and going out of sight.  Most of us are not members of the flat earth society and we do not hold to the ancient cosmology of the netherworld, the flat earth, the dome sky and beyond the dome sky, heaven, the abode of God.  Up and down does not mean much for people who live on a globe in a vast universe, though it does mean something for us in simple perceptual relationships.

  As Christians, we are people who re-enact the drama of salvation each year in the cycles of the church seasons which are comprised of events in the lives of God’s people and more particularly, the life of Jesus Christ.  We have an annual teaching curriculum in the presentation of salvation history to focus upon different aspects of our lives of faith.

 We know that in our lives there is much that we do not see nor understand.  That mystery in itself is a continual lure for us to continue to try to know as much as we can.  Today, in our time of scientific knowledge, many have come to find a conflict between the ways in which we know scientifically, and the ways in which we know things through faith.

  People of faith may be looking forward to the day when scientists invent a microscope that can present a visualization of “spirit” as the most sub-microscopic particle smaller than neutrons, protons and quarks.  People of faith, may be waiting for a macro-scopic way to travel to the far edge of an expanding universe to provide the biggest picture of all.  It probably will not make much difference for our faith, because as humans we perhaps have to embrace that we know things differently and use language, symbols and expression differently in our different ways of knowing.

  Physicists attempt to give invisible answers for the visible world.  People of faith use more the language of art and love to speak about other parallel realms.

  Whether we live in the world of ancient cosmologies or our own age with a cosmology that will be regarded as primitive by people of the future, to be human is to be possessed with language and with the ability to formulate meaning and asking what is the worth of this world and my life in it.

  On this Ascension Sunday, we contemplate the movement something like an elevator between the parallel universes in the ways of knowing and in the language that we use to find meaning.

In Christian faith, we have inherited the annual drama.  God off stage and unknown, but revealed in Laws, and inspiring prophets and wisdom teachers.  God, occasionally as sending messengers, angels, who make visual, the invisible to indicate the communication between inner world and outer world.  God entering the human stage in the person of Jesus Christ, thus validating the human way of knowing things that are more than human, God exposing human nature as being threatened by the very notion that God could be known in human form,  God in Christ constituting holy friendships on earth to create a community, God in Christ leaving the visible realm to prove that God has never left this visible realm but only needed to awaken people to the closeness of God’s Spirit who could be known intimately to those who could be made aware.

  And so we are a part of this annual presentation of Salvation history and we must each year re-write its compatibility with our own age and with our own lives.

  On this Ascension Sunday, you and I are asked to advance in the art of living in parallel universes.  Up and down are not necessarily just perceptual visual phenomena; up and down are  parallel phenomena of inner realm and outer realm and the ways in which we use words and in the ways that we come to meaning in our lives.  And our lives have many, many meanings.  And what makes them exciting is that we always have more meanings to discover.

  The prominent image that is presented to us of Jesus Christ today is that he prayed to God his Father for his friends.  Here we have Jesus Christ as the chief symbol of one who lived best in both realms; he was a fully divinized human being and so even in his human life, he already lived an ascended life.  His communication between the realms of experience was complete.  And he revealed to us that at the heart of living, life is intensely personal because God is like the best human parent who we can experience as a wonderful friend and mentor for our lives.  That is what Jesus revealed about God.  We, Christians, have wanted to make Jesus so special that we want Jesus to be an only child.  But that is not what Jesus wanted; Jesus revealed God as his mentor Father, so that you and I could know that God is mentoring parent for us and that friendship and relationship and communication is what is at the heart of finding meaning in our lives.

  If we believe that friendship and communication are the highest values of life, perhaps we can survive situations where friendships and communication seem not to be present in this world.  Jesus praying to his Father and wanting his friends to discover this same relationship reveals to us what we regard as most important in our Christian faith.

  Today you and I are invited to pray.  Pray in all of the ways that we can.  Prayer is the art of communication; it can be done alone or in community; with word, song, liturgy, ritual, silence, and our acted deeds in the course of everyday life.   Prayer is the attempt to find our voice in language to work at communication between the various realms of our being; to communicate between our inner lives and our outer world.

  Today on this Ascension Sunday, you and I are ascending and descending with Christ as we try to weave inter-relationship between the realms of our lives.  We are trying to bring concord between our inner realms of desire, hope, and quest for what is ideal, beautiful, perfect and complete and our outer worlds where everything is in some state of becoming, of being developed, of going through rites of passages and phases of abrupt discontinuities.

   Jesus prayed and showed us that we live not in just physical and visual up and down worlds, we live in inner space and outer space and we have words to bring the two together.  And from the realm of where words come, we realize that we are born to seek meaning for our lives.  And the meaning of our life is known as we pray, as we find our voice before God and with each other as we hope for the best meanings of all for ourselves and for each other.  Let us Ascend with Christ today in our prayer; let us find our voice before God so that we can live and speak the Good News, the Gospel of God in Christ.  Amen. 

Phil-laugh-orism for the Day

Favorite Rabbi and Priest Joke

Rabbi: Father you Christians have stolen some of your best stuff from Judaism.
Priest: Rabbi, what you you mean?
Rabbi: Take for example the 10 Commandments.  You've stolen them from us.
Priest: You're right Rabbi, we have stolen the 10 Commandments from you, but we haven't kept them!

Parodies of Popular Tunes

On youth Sundays when our youth lead our liturgies, their band often plays.  For one Sunday, they did parodies of popular tunes in what was called a Beatles' Mass  (click to zoom)

Easter and Utopia

Lectionary Link

Easter Sunday        April 24, 2011

Acts 10:34-43      Ps. 118:14-17,22-24

Col. 3:1-4             Matthew 28:1-10

   The longer that I have lived, the more I believe that no matter what our religious or philosophical beliefs are, we live by the imaginations of the utopian.  We live through the imaginations of what seems to be mostly impossible.  We live for future events that would falsify some of the current events of human life.

  I would classify most of the Biblical literature as utopian.  It is written by people who aspired always for more; always for the not yet.  And these aspirations are consistent with a belief that the world is not yet complete; there is more creative evolution that needs yet to occur in the universe, on our globe, in our nations and communities and in our personal lives.  And even as my life seems to be devolving through the aging process,(surely you don’t need time lapsed photography to have noticed)  I still hang on to an even more hopeful future.  And perhaps the cynics think that I should be pitied for my wishful thinking.  I think that we should pity the cynics because the cynics often pin their hope and future on a dsytopia, a world of disorder and demise.  Just because there are cynics, it does not mean that they don’t have a future.  It’s just that they might imagine a different future.  In a real sense life is all about choosing the imaginations of our future to motivate our current lives.

  Easter is a day that we celebrate because we believe that Hope found a narrative in the events in the life of Jesus Christ.  Are we to be pitied for embracing this long-standing tradition of Hope?  Are we to be pitied for embracing the accounts of those backward people who lived long ago without the benefit of our modern science that seems to be based upon not believing anything that cannot be replicated by subsequent experiment? 

  As much as I believe in utopian imaginations that inspire us in the parallel existence in the inner realm of hope and faith; I believe that utopian imaginations are inspired from actual life experience.

  The Isaian prophet had a vision of wolf and lamb co-existing in peace and over-coming of the predator-prey antagonism.  And yet there is known in actual experience the uncanny events where actual harmony occurs in situations deemed impossible.  We are amazed and humored by occasions when natural enemies express harmonious interaction.  Siegfried and Roy of Las Vegas seem to co-exist with white tigers; St. Francis, apparently was so friendly with birds that birds would fly and rest on his shoulders.  We are amazed at people who seem to have a way with animals, dog whisperers or horse whisperers.  What is the science regarding this uncanny interspecies communication?

  The uncanny happens within the human community; how do we explain child prodigies or the savant syndrome?  How is it that Mozart composed at such an early age?  There is enough of the uncanny happening within the human community and within human experience for us to imagine one such as Jesus Christ.

  Just as every person is like a one of a kind snowflake, Jesus was a one of a kind person.  But his snowflake uniqueness stands as an avalanche compared to our uniqueness.  Jesus was bound to be remembered.  Jesus was bound to make an impression.  Jesus was bound to be known because of his uncanny uniqueness.  We can either disbelieve about Jesus regarding his uniqueness or we can embrace that uniqueness and find meaning in what the Uniqueness of Jesus can do for us.

  What the church confesses about the Uniqueness of Jesus Christ is the Incarnation of God in human experience.  What that means for us is that Jesus Christ had a way with human life.  Jesus Christ was a “people whisperer” and because of the profound level of his divinity, he has been able to communicate with the seeming lost aspect of our human divinity that we have because of our being made in the image of God.  Jesus was the ultimate people whisperer…he was a child prodigy in learning; he was a healer; he was a wonder worker; he was an avid communicator; he was a story teller; he was a provoker; he was one who attracted close and devoted friends;  he had a way with nature;  he had a way to reconcile the outcast and the “sinners” by his inclusive welcome.  The full extent of the incarnation of Jesus was seen on Good Friday, as Jesus embraced the human experience of death, the gate to the place of no return.  And why are we here today?  Because Jesus Christ also had a way with the afterlife.  Humanity has always wondered about the afterlife.  Many cultures have devised many imaginations about the afterlife.  And what did the resurrection of Jesus do for the utopian imaginations of the afterlife?  The resurrection appearances of Jesus resulted in the writing of the accounts of actual interactions between a man who was formerly dead and who lived again in a marvelous way.

  So the resurrection of Jesus Christ gives utopian visions of the afterlife an actual instance that life after death can and does happen.  And so we are here today to proclaim that our utopian and impossible vision of hope does actually have a story and narrative that gives us a solid basis for our hope.

  Now we will not resurrect like Jesus did.  We will not be able to convince people after our deaths of our continued physical existence with them for fifty days after our departure, because our lives are not unique in the same way that the life of Jesus was unique.

  Let us embrace the Easter story as our belief that God has embraced our lives completely from cradle to the grave, and Beyond. Let us look to God as the only one who can ultimately preserve our lives in the most significant way.

  Today, we need not argue about precise understandings about the nature of the resurrection of Christ; today we simply confess the fact that it happened.

  Today for us the resurrection of Jesus Christ is part of our baptismal metaphor: When we go under the waters of baptism, we are buried with Christ in his death.  When we come out of the waters of baptism, we are raised with Christ in his resurrection.  And that resurrection for us now means that we in this life now partake of the eternal life of the Spirit of Christ.  The Spirit of Christ now makes us feel our resurrection eternal life, even as the rest of our mortal lives experience decline.

  Today, what are we going to believe more? That our mortal lives that are slipping away, or that our inward Spirit, resurrection, and abundant  life cannot be killed?  I tell you today that eternal life is within us and it is evidence of a utopian future; but this future is grounded in an actual event.  And this event inspired the cry of this day:  Alleluia! Christ is Risen.  The Lord is Risen, Indeed.  Alleluia!  Amen. 

The Power of the Death of Christ

Lectionary Link

Palm Sunday/Passion Sunday Cycle A   April 17, 2011

Is.45:21-25     Ps. 22:1-11

Phil. 2:5-11    Matthew 26:36-27:66

  In the Nicene Creed, we confess one holy and apostolic church.  And yet we know that historically in actual on the ground circumstances the church has never been catholic because there has never been universal acceptance of the Gospel.  So catholic, which means, “on the whole” or universal has more to do with aspiration rather than actual attainment.  Historically, "catholic" can simply mean the agreement of the Church Councils.  Surely we aspire for the persuasiveness and winsomeness of the Good New of Christ beyond our Church Councils. 

  So what is actually “catholic” about the church?  (I am glad I asked; so I can attempt an answer; nothing better than a press conference when one can ask and answer the questions desired). What is catholic about the church involves the topics of the church that have universal relevance.  And what would be those universal topics?  May I suggest a few?  Birth? (Christian Baptism as being born again) That’s pretty universal.  Eating? That’s pretty universal. (Holy Eucharist as the presence of Christ known to be as close to us as the food we eat)     Family/Community?  That's pretty universal.(The Church as a welcoming community to everyone)   Water?  That’s quite universal.  (The element of baptism)  Thoughts about the afterlife?  I imagine that’s universal. (God’s preserving power of resurrection)   And Death?  And what is more universal than death?

 On Passion Sunday and on Good Friday, the topic is death, and in particular, the topic is the death of Christ.  Death as a universal is a valid theory but the experience of particular death can be quite unpleasant since we regard the mode of physical presence to be the chief element of life.  And death can inspire fear.  Though Woody Allen once stated: “I’m not afraid of death; I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”

  We must admit that the topic of the death of Jesus has become highly romanticized in Christian theology.  Talk about making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.  How is it that the death of Jesus has become a most glorious accessory in the church’s theological wardrobe?  How is it that a cruel instrument of torture came to become the preferred jewelry of young and old alike and rendered in gold and silver and wood and jewels?

  The most significant theological architect of the cross of Jesus was St. Paul.  St. Paul as Rabbi Saul, was not present at the actual crucifixion.  He did not walk with Jesus of Nazareth.  In fact, he was interested in making the followers of Jesus imitate Jesus since he participated in the killing of the followers of Jesus.  Rabbi Saul snapped on his way to Damascus on his way to kill some more followers of Jesus.  The Romans thought it valid to kill people who were deemed a threat to the state; but Rabbi Saul had the sixth commandment to deal with: Thou shalt not kill.  And when it occurred to him that his jihad against the followers of Jesus was not exempt from the sixth commandment, he realized that he could not use killing as a way to get rid of people with whom he disagreed.  In a vision he encountered the risen Christ; he realized that he had been acting exactly like the Romans: using death as a way to getting rid of people deemed inconvenient to them.

  What happens in the understanding of the death of people who are good people and who are killed unjustly?  Their lives and the power of their deaths become inspiring; inspiring to the point of extreme poetic license in language.  In the study of the births of religious movements, it is often noted that when people are martyred, the success of the movement flourishes.

  Rabbi Saul became Paul the Apostle and he who did not encounter Jesus of Nazareth became the architect of the theology of the Cross of Jesus Christ.  Paul wrote his theology of cross before the actual Gospel Passion Narratives were written.  That is confusing for us because we often think chronologically.  Jesus did die before St. Paul wrote about it, but when the writers began to write down the Passion narratives; they did so with a theology of the cross that they inherited in part from St. Paul.  One obvious result of writing the Passion narratives from Paul’s perspective and after the split of synagogue and the Jesus Movement, is that the Jews in the narratives get more of the blame for the crucifixion than do the Romans.  Blaming the Jews for the crucifixion has shamefully involved the church in anti-Semitic inquisitions in the long history of Christianity.

  What did the death of Jesus become for St. Paul?  It was an event of communal identity.  Paul wrote: Christ died for us, while we were sinners.  When we are immersed in the waters of baptism, we are dying with Christ.  Paul wrote that our old selves are crucified with Christ, so just as death ends all physical suffering, the death of Christ has an interior power to interdict our selfish natures.  The death Christ died, he died to sin, once and for all.  Paul said that our death is to the Lord, because we in our deaths belong to Christ.  Paul said that he proclaimed the death of Christ as a stumbling block to the Jews (their messiah never would be put to death on the cross) and the cross was proclaimed as foolishness to the Gentiles (is it reasonable to think that death could have a positive power?)  St. Paul wrote that when we eat bread and drink the wine, we are proclaiming the death of Christ.  Paul, who once tried to killed followers of Jesus went on to say, that he had been crucified with Christ…and now Christ lived within him.  And those who belong to Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.  He said that both Jews and Gentiles could be reconciled to each other through the cross.  Paul said that Jesus emptied himself completely of divinity in subjecting himself to the cross.  Paul said that we all had guilty records and those guilty records and the deserved punishment was nailed on the cross of Jesus.  Paul wrote that Jesus gave himself, a ransom for all.

  On Passion Sunday and on Good Friday, we perform the Passion Gospels as though they are reported as eye witnessed events; but we really are reading the participatory liturgy of the early church.  We are encountering more the theology of the cross rather than the actual historical event of the cross.

  And so we are a part of this long tradition of the theology of the cross.  In the theology of the cross, the power of the death of Jesus is to be contemplated as a spiritual methodology in the way of personal transformation.  In the theology of the cross we are to accomplish the most incredible alchemy of all; to experience the power of killing the holy Jesus as the power to bring to an end all that is unworthy within us. 

  Now of course, in our liturgies we are performing a chronological order and we perform this act of the play, even while we know the earlier acts and the subsequent ending of the play.  Act One: Jesus was born, lived and ministered.  Act Two: Jesus is put to death.  Act Three: The risen Christ appears:  Act Four: The risen and ascended Christ is with us in the Holy Spirit.

  The meaning of Act Two….the power of the death of Jesus, is only known because of Acts Three and Four.  You are invited to return next week for the performance of act Three. I apologize if I’ve ruined the story for you by giving you the title of Act Three.

  Let the Gospel for us today be: We are crucified with Christ and we receive the power of his death to be the power that can eradicate all that is unworthy in our lives and in the life of this world.  Amen.