What Is the Wisdom of the Kingdom of Heaven?

Lectionary Link

6 Pentecost, Cycle A Proper 12, July 24, 2011

1 Kings 3:5-12 Psalm 119:129-136
Romans 8:26-39   Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

  In the biblical tradition, who is regarded to be the wisest person in the Hebrew tradition?  It is King David’s son, King Solomon.  We have read the prayer request of Solomon before he ascended the throne to succeed his father David.  What did he ask for?  He asked for wisdom and God answered him by saying to him, “I will give you a wise and discerning mind; no one like you has been before you and no one like you shall arise after you.”  Solomon became the inspiration for the wisdom school in the Hebrew religion and the wisdom teacher was to ancient Israel what the philosopher was to ancient Greece.  Some people have questioned Solomon’s wisdom though, because he is said to have had 700 wives and 300 concubines.  (How’s that for biblical family values?)   What is the wisdom in that?  Well, one woman once said that Solomon had a source for wisdom because he had 1000 counselors who gave him free advice.  How could he not be wise?

  Some Gospel scholars believe that the wisdom teacher was a model for the ministry of Jesus.  The words that seem to be most original to Jesus were teaching stories call parables.  A parable is a story that teaches through the attempt to get the listener to identify with a scenario.  It is an attempt to teach through appreciative participation.  But the parables of Jesus were also riddles; in them he required the listener to confront his counter logic.  How do the parables of Jesus that we’ve read today, represent counter logic?  And how does the counter logic of Jesus trick our literal minds into seeing things in a new way?

  Most people believe that civilizations are great because of the people who are heroes.  Kings and Warriors, philosophers, are normally thought to be the pillars of civilization.  Most of us understand history as the public record of why things have occurred because of the great people who attained fame in their public deeds.  These people are like the great oak trees of the forest.

"Not so", says wisdom teacher Jesus.  The kingdom of God, or the most embracing realm of life itself is known because of the little mustard seed deeds.  Heroes and heroic acts do not make a great society; rather it is the collection of all of the small deeds of kindness and caring that result in the success of any society.  If all of the deeds of kindness and caring ceased; society would come to a halt.  If moms did not care for their babies, and people did not do the millions of menial chores required to sustain communal life, societies would break down and fail.  When great disasters hit, the immediate goal is to return life to it normal sequence of the many rituals of care and mutual accountability.  These are the scaffold and telling reality of the kingdom that Jesus spoke about.  The kings and leaders get to prance on the stage held up by scaffolding of all the tiny mustard seed acts of care and kindness and mutual accountability that makes a society work.  No matter what the president or congress or governors or legislatures or captains of industry do; the people in this network of small acts of kindness and mutual care and accountability will still have to keep on, keeping on.  Parents will still have to do all the things they do for their children; dishes and clothes will have to be washed, traffic laws obeyed, shops opened, groceries sold, produce delivered.  We in the course of all of our little mustard seed deeds don’t have the luxury of worrying about whether we are doing big and important things.  But in the logic of the kingdom of Jesus Christ, it is in these every day micro-events of kindness, care and mutual accountability where the reality of God’s kingdom is found and known, and in fact this reality rules the world because we only survive because this micro-network magnified is the very infrastructure of human community.  We will still be a part of the scaffolding of the kingdom of heaven no matter what they decide or don’t decide in Washington.  How do you like the logic of Jesus?

  The parable of the leaven or yeast is like the parable of the mustard seed.  The kingdom of heaven is like a small portion sourdough culture.  You put it in the dough and this tiny substance infiltrates the dough and gives bread its very “breadiness.”  Jesus was saying, “You hero worshippers think that important people are really making life important and that is wrong.  It is each person exercising the moment by moment small deeds of kindness and mutual care and accountability that gives us abundant life.  Don’t be fooled by all those who tempt you to believe that the spot light of fame, power, and fortune are the key to survival in life.”

  The next parables of Jesus also have the counter logic of this wisdom teacher.  It’s is dishonesty to have discovered the abundance of minerals on a piece of property, and then buy the property without disclosing to its owner that the minerals are there.  What Jesus was indicating by this is that most people do not know the value of their own lives and therefore do not tap the native wealth that is accessible in human experience.  Why is it that two people can look like they are doing the same thing, but one person will express the experience of wonder and the sublime, while the other will be bored?  The kingdom of heaven is the experience of knowing another level of value in this “seemingly” ordinary life.

  The parable about the pearl of great price, is really about another stock market “no-no.”  We call it “insider trading.”  It is about having privileged information that others don’t have.  It’s like going to a rummage sale and offering a couple of dollars for old baseball cards that you know are worth thousands of dollars.  What Jesus is saying is that people can live this life in such a way to understand another level of value.  Within life, Jesus said that we can find abundant life.  And Jesus is inviting us to find that abundant life.  This parable is also about the purpose of human life. We are ever to be re-educating ourselves towards the discovery of higher values.  When we look at our lives, things that once were regarded as important now seem to be trivial.  How is it that our values change?  How is it that we discover new values?  We do so in the event of finding what is great and then we organize our lives around what we regard to be the highest inspiration in life.  The kingdom of heaven is the process of coming to higher values; that’s a problem since values are experienced as being relative to our own moral and spiritual progress.

  How do I tolerate myself for the higher values that I do not yet have nor have discovered?

Well, Jesus said the kingdom heaven is about patience, with ourselves, with each other and with our world.  The net is cast to catch all sorts of values in the mix of our life experience, and we need patience with the mix both in our own life and in our world.  We need to have the patience to wait for a more complete sorting out of the values in our lives and of the values in all human experience.  The kingdom of heaven is about having that kind of patience, but also having that kind of hope that justice amongst all values will someday attain.  The kingdom of heaven is about having patience with hope.

  St. Paul believed that we could have that kind of patience and hope in the midst of the extreme mixture of human experience, because we have God’s Spirit within us and because nothing can separate us from the love of God.

  Let us hear the Gospel today: We live in the kingdom of God’s love, a patient and hopeful love.  And this God of love is educating our values as we grow in wisdom in the art of living.  And may the Gospel also be this:  In the middle of the seeming ordinary, God has for us events of the sublime, events of such wonder that we feel a bit guilty about “having inside” information.  These events guide us upward in the values of our lives.  May God grant to each of us events of the extraordinary within our ordinary lives.  Amen. 

Futility and God's Patience

Lectionary Link

5 Pentecost, Cycle A Proper 11, July 17, 2011

Genesis 28:10-19a ,Psalm 139: 1-11, 22-23

Romans 8:12-25 Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

  What if I were to let you get on your soap box with the following unfinished conditional clause: If I were God, I would  (fill in the blank).  If I were God, I would have eliminated that large pit in the avocado.  Think of how much more guacamole you could get from each avocado without that big pit.  If I were God, I would have finished creating the human foot by making every pinkie toe beautiful.  If I were God, I think I would have left the cockroach on the R & D table.  If I were God I would not have allowed the coming into life experience people such as Hitler or Stalin.  How would you finish this conditional clause if you were given a soap box?

  When we have finished speaking and begin to look at our statements, we might find that we express an intolerance or impatience for many things in this life.  Such intolerance or impatience might be proof that at heart, we are all utopians in wanting a better life and a better world.

  What our intolerance and impatience would also express is that if to truly be God is to allow freedom in the world, then we could not be such a God.  If to be God means to be the most patient of all beings, then we would fail at the task of being God, because as we look at things that are evil or occasions of innocent suffering, we do not think that we can have such patience.  In our temporal pain and suffering we are too willing to sacrifice “freedom” for automatic or robotic good outcomes.  Would good be good, if it were automatic or robotic?

  In the parable of the weeds and the wheat, Jesus presents the message of a tolerant and patient God.  In the biblical writings, God was not always been presented with such patience.  In the story of the great flood, God is presented as seeing the human community to be so depraved that he has to use a great flood to rid the earth of its evil population and save only eight people.  And what does his saved hero Noah do after he comes out of the ark?  He gets drunk and curses his son.

  By the time Jesus comes, God is seen to be much more patient and God’s patience has to do with the fact that good and evil have true meaning because of freedom.  To limit human experience to the sole ascendency of good or evil would be to remove freedom and also the definition of good or evil.

  The parable of wheat and the weed gives us an insight about God’s tolerance and patience.  But it does not suggest that we should just wait until a final day of judgment before we do anything about improving our world.

  What it suggests is that catastrophic intervention would mean destroying the potential good crop of the future because of the presence of some inconvenient inter-mingling pesty weeds.  Some of the legal penalties of the Old Testament law were catastrophic in nature, sometimes called the law of the claw, an eye for an eye, a tooth or a tooth, and a life for a life.  There was a law that said an insolent child should be stoned to death.  What sort of future redemption is present in such catastrophic reactions?

  Catastrophic intervention is the chief mythology of Hollywood.  In action adventures, catastrophic intervention by a hero doing super human martial and military acts wins the day in less than two hours.  This virtual cinematic myth is rotten with the rage of a perfect one who knows that good and evil are so clear cut that good can be forced with the rage of catastrophic intervention.  Such cinematic myths do not have the patience necessary for the way life really is.  Nor do they represent the patience of God.

  How can we come to grow in the patience of God?  How did Jacob come to have patience?  Jacob came to have patience by believing that he had a future and for him to have a future, he had to escape from the wrath of his twin brother Esau, whose birth right he had tricked from him.  Jacob escaped to an unknown future and in his night of sleep he had the dream about the angels ascending and descending upon the ladder from heaven.  In this dream, Jacob was reassured that there was and would be messengers from another realm who could bring messages to his own realm of comprehension to enable him to be patience with the unfolding events of his life.

  St. Paul was aware of the tolerance and patience that he needed to have with himself and he also preached of a cosmic patience that we need to have with this world.  If Paul did not come to have patience with himself, he would have said, eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth.  He participated in the stoning of Stephen; therefore he too deserved to be stoned.  But if Paul had died of a stoning, the entire mission of the Gospel to the Gentile world would not have happened in the way that it did.  Being complicit in murder is perhaps a great weed in one’s life that would challenge one’s right to live and go on.  How could Paul forgive himself and accept the forgiveness of Christ?  The severity of his murdering ways cried out for a great redemptive mission in his life. 

  What did St. Paul call the conditions of weed and wheat of this life?  He called it the condition of futility.  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.

  But the Gospel of Jesus and Paul would tell us today that the experience of the Spirit in our flesh is in fact proof that the wheat of hope will someday be ascendant for us.  The experience of God’s Spirit even in our actual weakened conditions of our flesh is the proof itself.

  Let us today accept our limitation as beings who are much less than God.  In our limitations, we do not have the capacity for catastrophic intervention in this world, nor do we have the ability to know that we have the best vision of what is truly good.  What we do have is the presence of the Spirit of God in our lives to inspire us to begin to do a little weeding in our own patches.  O, Spirit of God, what kind of weeding do I need to do to rid my life through personal choices of the things that hinder more excellent human fruitfulness?

  I often worry about apocalyptic fatalism of some people who wish for a catastrophic end of the world as we know it.  They assume a position of God in thinking they truly know from their precise and certain Bible knowledge who is good and who is bad.  Let us not be so certain that we know how the situation of futility in our world, country, community, family or personal lives can be resolved in a final way.

  But let us be certain about the Spirit of God in our futility to be energy and power of hope and patience with us and with each other.  And let us get busy by the Spirit of God to do a little weeding in the patches of our lives.  Amen. 

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)