Honest Anachronism about the Holy Eucharist

11 Pentecost Cycle b  Proper 14 August12, 2012
1 Kings 19:4-8  Psalm 34:1-8

Ephesians 4:25-5:2  John 6:35, 41-51

 Lectionary Link

  Anachronism is the presentation of history with chronological inconsistencies where an artifact or idea is inserted out of its originating context.  In some ways the practice of anachronism is unavoidable.  How so?  If I were to present the Palm Sunday story of Jesus riding into Jerusalem in something like the so-called “Pope-mobile;” that would be a rather blatant anachronism:  Taking cultural practices and products from a later era and using our imagination to introduce them into a previous era.

  But why is anachronism unavoidable?  In some way we are always prisoners of the “present” because in actuality we can be nowhere else.  The past is but a present “reconstruction” and so the past reconstruction cannot be free of our present concern.  As “true” to the past as we think that we are or want to be, we were not there and so our reconstructions are but present imaginations.  And yet we have standards of judging what is regarded to be a “reputable” reconstruction of a previous era.  We also know that propagandists will present the past in a way to support what they want us to believe in the present.  Film makers sometimes seek authentic costuming and artifacts in their cinematic reconstructions of a particular period but sometimes they will also try to present, for example,  a “modern” version of Shakespeare as a deliberate attempt to find correspondences between Shakespeare in his time and Shakespearean meaning in our time.

  Fundamentalists read the Gospels as a mirror image reproduction of what happened during the life of Jesus.  And even if we assumed that were the case, how would we avoid being ourselves in our time in interpreting this “mirror” image?  Fundamentalists have a naivete about there being a self-evident meaning that would be obvious to you the reader, if you have the right spirit to know that self-evident and obvious meaning.  If it’s obvious to me and not to you, then you don’t have the Spirit. 

  The writer or writers of the Gospel of John wrote like all of us do about the past, “they wrote anachronistically.”  We write about the past from the present.  And yes, I am preaching about the writer of John’s Gospel from my present time and I do not deny that but I am trying to make the case as to why I think that what is written in John is relevant to our lives today.

  What was one thing that the writer of John’s Gospel was anachronistic about?  The community of John was a Eucharistic community; they practiced the community liturgy of the Holy Eucharist.  This Eucharist had its root in the Jewish religious meal practices but since the church became increasingly Gentile in congregational participants, the Eucharist attained a significance beyond the significance of the Passover Meal and other meal traditions of Judaism.  If the writer of John’s Gospel was teaching the catechism to the community, how did the writer teach the importance of the Holy Eucharist?  The writer of John used the bread of heaven tradition from the Hebrew Scriptures and the oral traditions about Jesus to present a teaching about how the Eucharist became regarded to be important to the practice of the Christian community.

  In Judaism the Torah or the inspired writings were regarded to be like the gift of manna from heaven.  Torah or Word of God was regarded to like bread from heaven.  In the Gospel of John, Christ is regarded to be the new Torah or Word of God but in actual human form.  And so Christ is the living bread that came down as a gift of God’s word from heaven.  Reading God’s word was the way to integrate the teaching about God into the depth of one’s life and practice.  So reading and eating are modes of consumption whereby one receives sustenance for one's life.  There is natural bread and spiritual bread; Manna was the gift of physical bread that the people of Israel collected and ate for their survival.  Torah was the spiritual bread that Moses gave them for their spiritual lives.  These teachings were expanded in the community of John.  Christ was presented in metaphor to be the eternal Word of God in human form.  And as we partake of Christ through his words then we partake of the life of God as our spiritual and everlasting life.  In this way the Church that produced John’s Gospel taught about Jesus as the living bread of heaven.  The Eucharistic bread and Christ as Word of God cannot be separated; if they are separated then we can be involved in making physical bread but an idol.  In Holy Eucharist we understand a real presence of Christ because we understand the fullness of Word of God that is associated with the receiving of the bread and wine of communion.

  The writer of John’s Gospel understood how important the Eucharistic gathering was in the experience of the church.  They believed deeply that Eucharistic practice was inspired and taught by Jesus who expanded a family Passover Meal or Jewish meal tradition to become the constitutive meal of a community of people that would invite people of all ethnicities throughout the world.

  Let us practice Holy Eucharist today as both constituting our social identity but also bearing an important aspiration of our lives.  Do we want to be fearful people eating alone behind closed doors?  Do we want to be exclusive in regulating who is worthy enough for our fellowship?  Or do we want to be a welcoming community?  Do we aspire for peace and reconciliation among all?   Did you ever think about how much the food of the world divides us?  Many people have but regional stomachs; they tolerate only the diets of their own familiar upbringing.  We in our global world have the delight of being exposed to so many different foods from many different cultures.  And fortunately we can be delivered from our very provincial tastes in what we like to eat.  Fortunately we've been introduced to new cuisine.  But even in our appreciation of variety, we know that we will never unite the world over one taste in food.

  The Holy Eucharist is an aspiration that beyond our local and individual taste there is something that can unify us as people of this world.  That we all need food, is “catholic” or universal to all humanity.  Heaven as the goal and aspiration is imagined as a great banquet.  Imagine all the people of the world sitting down at meal together in a feast of peace and love.  If one can grasp this image, one can understand why we put our bodies, minds and spirits through the ritual play of the Eucharist each Sunday in our gathering.  This is our aspiration for world peace.  This is what we want to be expressive of human relationship.  This is why the Eucharistic bread is living bread.  God in Christ tells us that humanity is valuable.  What is a greater statement of value than to say God became human in Christ?  And if humanity is raised to incredible value in Jesus Christ, we as human beings need to respect the dignity of value that God has placed upon and within all of us.  And we respect that human value by living in peace and in fellowship.  If the entire world lived Eucharistically, we would make sure that everyone had food, clothing, shelter and health care, whether through the public sector or the private sector.

  We gather for Eucharist because it is a confession that we need living bread from heaven, even Jesus Christ, to coax beyond our egotistical tendency to hoard regular bread to the exclusion of others having enough.  Let us live our Eucharistic aspirations and be as sure as the writer of John’s Gospel was, that the Eucharist was worthy of Christ’s Real Presence.  Amen.

Word and Sacrament; not Word or Sacrament

9 Pentecost Cycle B, Proper 13 August 5, 2012

Exodus 16:2-4, 9-15 Psalm 78:23-29

Ephesians 4:1-16 John 6:24-35

Lectionary Link

  If we over-literalize the Gospels as exact representations of actual situations in the life of Jesus, then we betray the fact that the Gospels are first of all literature and secondly, they are the teachings of the early Christian communities using the existing narrative traditions of Jesus of Nazareth.

  The method of “literal” interpretation by any Christian community has less to do with the facts of the Biblical text and more to do with the administrative control of particular Christian leaders over their communities.  Let us work to free ourselves from interpretation as “administrative truth” and let us seek to explore the insights which we can gain from the Gospel teachings themselves.  Literalists use a very circular argument as they use one part of the Bible to prove the divine inspiration of another part of the Bible when in logic circular arguments are declared to be fallacious.

  We as people of faith look to show how the insights of the Bible are divinely inspired and true in the way that the truth is practiced in the loving actions of our lives.  The church has argued for many years over the various interpretations of the text on the pages of the Bible.

  In the history of the church we might say that there has been a dynamic between word and sacrament.  Sometimes word and sacrament have been seen in an either/or way.  In over reaction to certain forms of Roman Catholic sacramentalism, some churches of the Protestant Reformation threw away the “sacramental” notion altogether.  Bible reading and preaching became primary in Protestant churches and sometimes Communion and the other sacraments have and are seen and practiced as almost minor afterthoughts.

  Anglicanism has been a community of faith that developed between sacramental extremism and Biblical extremism.  We have tried to hold in balance and complementarity word and sacrament.  Scripture is important but Sacrament too is important.  And we use our human reason in our historical settings to plumb the insights of Scripture and Sacraments for living well today.

  What is hidden and unspoken in the bread of life discourse of the Gospel of John is the regular practice of Holy Eucharist in the community from which John’s Gospel derived.  But how does one use the narrative of the life of Jesus who lived within a Passover Meal community to teach the importance of Holy Eucharist?  The author of John’s Gospel created a teaching using the Christ-narrative and presented as implicit what had become the explicit practice of the Christian Community where the writer of John lived and worshipped.  Again, if one is a literalist, one would find this suggestion scandalous; but if one understands the profound gift of the Eucharist in being the constitutive family meal of the Christian Community then one understands how profoundly wonderful this teaching is.

  To understand the writer of John one has to appreciate that examples from natural life are used as spiritual metaphors. But this method was not invented by the writer of John; this metaphorical use of language is common to all users of language.  We’ve read the story of the bread of heaven, manna, from the book Exodus, but already in later writings in Deuteronomy, bread from heaven and word of God are contrasted: “God humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna, with which neither you nor your ancestors were acquainted, in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.”  That one does not live by bread alone but by the word of God is repeated in the temptation of Jesus by Satan when Satan tempted the fasting Jesus to eat some bread.

  Creation happened by the word of God; God said, “Let there be…”  and in saying the word, creation happened.  In John’s Gospel, Christ is the eternal Word of God who is spoken in the act of creation.  Jesus is confessed to be the Word made flesh.  So Word is not separate from person or community. 

  As bread is consumed and becomes us, so too word is something envelops our entire lives with a matrix of values and those values become lived in the flesh and blood of our lives.  We partake of Christ, the word of God as the living bread of heaven and this word of God experience becomes evident in how we live the values of our lives in all that we do and say.

  There is a great mistake when Christian communities practice impoverished notions of word and sacrament.  Churches that practice the sacraments as superstitious rites where lay people have to jump through these hoops for the administrative control of the clergy: they miss the integrative function of the sacraments.  Churches that practice the words of the Bible and preaching as though they do not derive from the actual flesh and blood of life within human community miss the integrative function of the word.

  What we practice within a sacramental community is that the Eucharist is living bread; it is word of God as a creating and spiritual presence within our lives.  If the sacraments seem to be rituals and community ceremony they are such to be a sort of“holy play” (what does prelude mean?  before the play or game or event).   We perform this “holy play” in a careful way to remind ourselves that every action in our life is to be with performed as a holy offering to God for the benefit of the community.  Communion bread that is just holy bread that we take to feel pious in our religious behavior is a very limited notion of the living bread that came down from heaven.  Communion bread that is understood to be connected with people who do not have enough to eat because the Eucharistic communion has not yet been successful in getting food to all is truly the living and creating bread of heaven.

  As we read this living bread of heaven discourse today, let us remember to keep word and sacrament together.  The Eucharistic Community is to be proof that God’s word is alive, active and well within the life of the church.  But the Eucharistic community is not separated from the world by the church doors; the Eucharistic, Bread-of-life church is the salt of the earth   continually to add the flavor and season of God’s love to this entire world.

  The writer of John’s Gospel understood Word and Sacrament in complimentary relationship and so should we.  Amen.

Signs of Christ, a Youth Dialogue Sermon

Youth Dialogue Sermon for July 29, 2012   

Lectionary Link

Katie’s cell phone rings…

Katie sheepishly looks at Fr. Phil and says:  Oops.  Sorry, I forgot to turn my cell phone off.  I’ll do it now.

Fr. Phil:  You might as well answer it and see who is calling.

Katie: Hello, yes, that’s my order.  How much is it?  You need a credit card number…Just a second…

Katie: Fr. Phil, can you give your credit card number over the phone?

Fr. Phil:  Why?

Katie:  For this sermon today, I wanted to prove that you could feed 5000 people, so I ordered pizza for 5000 from Domino’s and they would like to have your credit card number.

Fr. Phil:  Sorry, I can’t afford that kind of miracle.  You’ll have to cancel the order.

Katie to caller:  Sorry, I’ll have to cancel the order.  Bye. Bye.

Connor: So, Katie, I guess now you want to check in at facebook or do you have time to deliver this sermon?

Katie: I was just doing a set up for feeding of the 5000.  That was quite some miracle.  It does raise all sorts of modern questions.

Connor:  Well if the bread and the fish were multiplied, I wondered how it was served.  Do you think the entire crowd ate sushi?  That a lot of sashimi to serve in the hot sun.

Katie: I doubt if it was raw fish; if the bread was served in its baked form and not as raw wheat, I expect that the fish was cooked or perhaps it had been dried and cured in salt.

Connor:  Do you really think that Gospel is about a miraculous generation of food for 5000 from five loaves and two fish?

Katie:  Probably not; in the Gospel of John the word for miracle is “sign.”  A sign is something that points to something else.  What do you think the “signs” were pointing to?

Connor:  Well, signs can point but they sometimes fail if they are not understood or heeded.

Katie:  What do you mean?

Connor:  The most famous sign in America is the eight-sided stop sign and your driving instructor has tried to teach you that this sign is not just a recommendation nor is it street decoration.   You are actually supposed to come to a full stop.

Katie:  Don’t make fun of my driving.  If the Gospel stories about the feeding of the 5000 and the calming of the storm are signs, what do these signs mean?

Connor:  I don’t know but I might take a guess.  I think the little boy who donated his lunch is important to the story.

Katie:  Why is he important to the story?

Connor:  As a young boy, he probably did not care or feel restricted by dietary laws.  So, when he saw the need for food, he simply offered his food for a group picnic. 

Katie:  And Jesus blessed his gift and suddenly everyone was fed.

Connor:  So it could be that lots of people carried picnic lunches with them but were afraid to share because of rigid dietary laws about food preparation.  This little boy shamed them into sharing their food without being afraid of dietary laws.

Katie:  That is certainly a reasonable meaning.  But the fact that the writer places the event near Passover may also be significant.

Connor:  Why do you say that?

Katie:  The early followers of Jesus understood a change in the meaning and practice of the Passover Meal.  They understood that Jesus changed the Passover Meal into the Eucharist.  The Eucharist became the Christian family meal.  It became a meal of Christian family identity.  And the feeding of the 5000 was a sign that the Passover was no longer a “closed” or exclusive meal, it was a meal that was open to Jews and Gentiles.  That was quite a miraculous change in religious practice.

Connor:  We need to be careful about seeing the Eucharist as a “closed” or exclusive meal when in fact it expresses our wish that all people can join in God’s meal of love, thanksgiving and friendship.

Katie:  We need to remember too that the Gospel writers compared Jesus other great prophets and they told his life story using the pattern of the story of the famous Moses.

Connor:  Yes and Moses was the one who led the people into the desert where there was not food.  He prayed to God and God sent the people of Israel the special bread from heaven called “manna.”  So the Gospel writer is trying to say that just a Moses was a sign from God, so too Jesus is a special Sign from God.

Katie:  So the feeding of 5000 turns out to be quite a Sign of how Jesus Christ changed the religious life in Palestine and in the life of the world.

But what about the Signs of walking on the water and calming the sea?   I guess today that sounds too much like Harry Potter.

Connor:  If this means that we wish that Jesus would intervene in every hurricane, typhoon or tsunami then we might wonder about God’s selective intervention.

Katie:  A storm represents the power of nature.  And the worst power in nature for humanity is the experience of death.  Human experience requires that we know about danger in life and that we know about death.  We might even think that people are different from other animals because of they way in which people reflect upon death.

Connor:  Jesus walking on the water and Jesus calming of the storm were Sign stories in the early church.  They were Sign stories which were not written until the disciples experienced the Risen Christ.  The risen Christ was a Sign that death was to be but a doorway into another way of life.  And if people could know this, they would be able to live with faith instead of fear.

Katie:  We are tempted to live with fear if we think that everything can be lost in the event of death.  Jesus, when he was known as the Risen Christ gave people a way to live with faith even with the knowledge of danger and death as probabilities in life.

Connor:  So the Gospels were written as Cue Cards or Signs to us.

Katie:  And what do the Signs say?

Connor:  Have faith, not fear.

Katie:  That is a good slogan for living: Have faith, not fear.  Amen.

Multiplication of Loaves Is Not Just "Bread and Circuses"

9 Pentecost cycle b proper 12     July 29, 2012

2 Kings 4:42-44  Psalm 145: 10-19
Ephesians 3:14-21 John 6:1-21

Lectionary Link 

  In this church calendar year, we are reading predominately from the Gospel of Mark; however today and for the next four weeks we are given reading assignments from John’s Gospel, the sixth chapter.  We begin with the multiplication of loaves from John’s particular edition of this event.  And this event is expanded into a long discourse of Jesus that is called the bread of heaven discourse.  John’s Gospel has long discourses from the mouth of Jesus in the first person and these are not included in the other three Gospels. Scholars variously contend that these discourses were taken from the secret instruction that Jesus gave to the 12 disciples or they in fact may be the development of teaching and preaching within the community of the beloved disciple in the late part of the first century.  Words that are attributed to Jesus may have come from the disciples who believed that they had permission from Jesus to speak in his name in the power of the Holy Spirit.  So the apostles believed that were inspired enough to speak as an oracle of Christ.  Only modern people who speak about authorship, intellectual property and plagiarism would call such attribution dishonest.  The words of Jesus and the Spirit come from God belong to God and nobody can take exclusive credit for them.  Of course, if I prefaced something like this to you:  “The Lord told me to tell you to give the church, a million dollars”…you naturally would be quite skeptical, even though I preface each sermon with the presumption of speaking in the name of God, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Each person has their own way of determining what might be a genuine word of God for him self or her self.

  The writer of John’s Gospels uses templates from the Hebrew Scriptures to retell the life of Jesus and its significance.  Jesus was someone new and profound in terms of a revelation but Jesus was also in continuity with the Hebraic tradition.  He was presented as a fulfillment and update of the Hebraic traditions. 

  The Hebraic tradition included celebration of certain feasts and the Gospel of John and the discourses of Jesus present his teaching about replacements of those feasts.  It is most likely that when the final edition of John was written that the church and the synagogue were separated.  There was a significant population of non-Jews in the Christian communities; there were non-Palestinian Jews and many Jews who lived in the Diaspora migration of Jews into the Roman cities of the Palestine and Asia Minor region.  The Gospel of John has many descriptions of Jewish terms and customs and such descriptions would have been totally unnecessary in the time of Jesus because they would have been commonly assumed knowledge of Jewish customs. 

  Today’s appointed Gospel is a retelling of the multiplication of loaves stories.  And it is followed by story of the calming of the storm and Jesus walking upon the water.  This is also a part of the section called the Book of Signs; there are seven signs that are presented in John’s Gospel.  Feeding of the multitude and the calming of the sea are two of the signs.  These two signs revisit the setting of the feast of Passover.  The Gospel writer states that the time of the signs was the approaching feast of Passover.  Passover was a family feast that was originally held by the Hebrew families who were preparing for their exodus from Egypt into the vast wilderness, lead by the great Moses.  And after the Passover feast, what great water miracle happened?  God controlled the Red Sea through the intervention of Moses, so that the Hebrew people could escape from the army of the Pharaoh.   And once the Hebrew people crossed the Red Sea, they were stuck in the wilderness.  And how were they fed in the wilderness?  They were given miraculous bread from heaven called Manna.

  Do you see how the Gospel writer was retelling the story of Jesus using the Hebrew Scripture themes as the template?  But this multiplication of loaves event will be expanded in the discourse to be evidence of the practice of the early Christian community of making Christ present as heavenly food and drink in the Eucharistic feast of bread and wine.  So the Passover and the manna in the wilderness event are used to teach about the practice of breaking of bread in the early Christian community.

  If the original setting for this Gospel writing is far from us both in time and culture, how do you I find something in this to edify our own minds, souls, spirit and community today?

  First, of all we should not assume that the ancient writers were literalists.  They were adept at using figurative language.  They did not fall into the modern trap of thinking that something that could be verified by the eyes of a witnessing journalist was the only thing that was true.  The truth occurs when signs of God bring us to have faith and to believe that our lives are worthwhile.

  The truth of our Eucharistic faith is this; we are a people on pilgrimage and in our earthly pilgrimage we need the company of people and the help and presence of God.  The Passover became the Eucharist because unlike the Passover, the Eucharist is eaten with more than just flesh and blood relatives.  The Eucharist is a family meal of those who have come to know themselves as sons and daughters of God.  Jews in the time of Jesus would not have shared their food in such a large gathering.  They would have hidden their picnic lunches; they would not have eaten the food of someone else, since they could not have been certain of whether it was prepared according to their dietary rules.  The little boy who shared his picnic lunch did so out of the pure heart of a child and Jesus took that gift from the boy’s heart and offered “eucharist”  that is Greek verb for thanksgiving.  Offering something to God means that it is blessed and purified for sharing.  And suddenly there was food for many.  We need to get over our fears to share; often we minimize our gifts as being too small or inappropriate, but gathered and combined with the gifts of others they provide the eucharist that could feed the world, if we really, really were serious about Eucharist.  And so there is a lesson in sharing about the eucharist; we should not separate the multiplication of bread on the altar from the need of many people in our world to have bread.  If we are ever really successful as a Eucharistic people worldwide, then hunger will be eradicated.  And so there is that hope for us to aspire for in this story of the multiplication of loaves.

  But we need also to remember that it is not just about our hunger or world hunger.  Jesus would have been king of the world if he just did tricks to feed everyone.  The ministry of Jesus was not to be a bread-making machine.  As we know from the society of those with excess having plenty or too much bread does not make us any more adept at understanding the word of God or God’s purposes for us.  So there is a spiritual purpose for us to learn about bread of another sort.  That bread is food for the mind and spirit.

  I think that there is something for us to learn about the logic of the signs or miracles of Christ.  Did you ever wonder about the multiplication of loaves?  If this was a miracle, why did not God and Christ do a prior and greater miracle of eradicating hunger in the first place?  If Jesus could calm the sea and walk on the water for the disciples, why did he not do a prior miracle of keeping the storm away in the first place?  And if God and Jesus accomplished the resurrection from the dead, why did they not abolish and prevent death in the first place?  Do you see how fuzzy our thinking can get when we are so certain about the specifics of the miracles?

  We have hunger, storms and death in life because that is reality of the human experience.  That reality is accepted by God and Jesus since they obviously tolerate lots of hunger, storms and death in human life.

  So what is the point?  The point is that the Gospel message is not God and Jesus being unrealistic about hunger or storms or death; the point of the Gospel is that Jesus is the event of a sign of knowing God’s presence in some telling way in the midst of hunger, storms and finally in death itself.

  The Gospel is not escape from life as it is; it is finding the presence of Christ as a sustaining presence in the midst of life as it is.  And we really don’t need religious escapism.  We need religious realism or faith that is honest to God, honest to human experience of life.

  In our hunger for what we need today let us look for the sign of Christ, not in mere material reality but in the extraordinary that comes in the midst of the ordinary.  In the storms of our life, let us find the presence of Christ who is God with us, not in life as we wish it might be, but in life as it is.

  Jesus in our hunger.  Jesus in our storms.  Jesus in our life.  Jesus in our death. Jesus as true to the full extent of human experience.  Amen.

What Is Reconciliation If We Segregate People Who Are Different

8 Pentecost  B,P.11     July 22, 2012

2 Samuel 7:1-14a Psalm 89:20-37

Ephesians 2:11-22   Mark 6:30-34, 53-56

Lectionary Link

  "Christ is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us."  The writer in the tradition of St. Paul saw multicultural difficulties in the Ephesus Christian community.  What did the Jewish followers of Christ think about the Gentile followers of Christ?  And what did the Gentile followers of Christ think about the Jewish followers of Christ?

  The Ephesian writer in the tradition of St. Paul uses some political terms to speak about relationship with God and the relationship within the Ephesus community.  Words like citizen, alien and commonwealth.    America’s very identity is based upon our immigrant identity that has been renewed with each wave of immigration.  Our identity is also like the identity of Israel in Palestine; we are conquering immigrants who have made native peoples strangers and aliens in their own lands.  King David wanted to solidify his consolidation of the lands of Israel and he was inspired to build a Temple as a sort of statement that his God was to have a sort Capitol Building Temple in the Land of Israel.  It happens that is what the Phoenician religions in the region also had.  Religious Buildings and Belief systems can be associated with political power and in subtle ways those who are not part of the “official” or “majority” religion are made to feel like strangers and aliens.

  In the time of Jesus there were many people who were made to be religious and socio-economic aliens to the people who had power.  Jesus found many people who were strangers in their own land.  Most did not have the privilege of Roman citizenship, but further they did not have significant status within the various communities of Judaism which negotiated the conditions of the occupied peoples of Palestine with the Roman occupiers.  Obviously many people suffered as part of the underclass of Roman occupation, but Jesus was very popular with that group of people who were doubly oppressed.  Jesus was trying to bring a sense of belonging to people who felt neglected and left out.  

  You can notice how the lectionary is set up by the clergy so one might be suspicious about how today’s Gospel got selected in the middle of the summer.  Today is a day when the rector is supposed to be on vacation and the substitute preacher is in the pulpit saying, “Father Phil is just obeying the words of our Lord when he said to his disciples, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.””  But as the Gospel records, there was no such rest or solitude available.  The truth is that no one can take a vacation from the Gospel.  No one can take a break from the conditions of human need whether they be spiritual or physical needs.

  The church cannot take a vacation from the conditions of human need or the conditions of difference that threaten to divide us.  What physician who has taken the Hippocratic Oath would not stop and assist someone who showed the signs of a heart attack while playing golf?   The human condition cries out at all times for peace and reconciliation.  Peace and reconciliation define the health and salvation that is needed in the human community.

  Peace and reconciliation is what was needed in the Ephesus Church.  People with significant religious, ethnic and cultural differences came into an agreement about Jesus Christ.  And their differences were hindering them from living together within the community.  Their differences were bringing about division and when differences bring about division what gets lost is the good news we have to share.  Outsiders who see the church fighting often say, “Well I don’t want to be a part of that group.  They don’t practice the good news.”  Apparently the situation in Ephesus was not like the America religious scene at all; apparently there were not enough people who were called Christians and since they were such a minority, there was good reason for them to try to stay together.  In America, we tend to believe if you start fighting in the church because of different views, just go down the street and attend another church that is agreement with your specific point of view.  In American Christian religion we tend to believe in peace through religious Smorgasbord, pick and choose your own menu.  If you don’t like McDonalds, go to Burger King or In-N- Out Burger.  In American Christian religion we tend to believe that high fences make for good neighbors. One wonders if the diversity of Christian practice and Christian groups today could be called peace or reconciliation at all.

  The church in Ephesus was a church that aspired to live a message of peace and reconciliation.  And that is good aspiration for us to have in our parish too.  There are people who can only live with people who agree with them completely on all manner of details of life, political, philosophical, cultural and socio-economic perspectives.  Some people believe that peace and reconciliation is achieved by being with only one’s kind, however one defines one’s own kind.

  I am an Episcopalian because I believe that peace and reconciliation can be a reality in the midst of diversity.  Reconciliation in the midst of diversity means that my life is stretched and enlarged as I am brought out of the ignorance and fear that keeps me from befriending people who are in some way different than I am.  Peace and reconciliation efforts may know great failures but the effort of reconciliation is never a failure.

  Let us remember the famous Sunday School song, “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world; red and yellow, black and white, all are precious in his sight, Jesus loves the children of the world.”  This is the reconciliation aspiration and in the practice of reconciliation we all get our hearts enlarged if we make the effort.  Let us be thankful for the diversity of people who are united together in the Eucharist who come to receive the body and blood of Christ, people of every race, gay, straight, single, married, old, young, conservative, liberal, carnivores, vegan, tall, short, and all shapes, jazz lovers, classic music lovers, junk food lovers, Giants fans, A’s fans……on and on we can define the qualifications that could be used to separate us from each other. 

  Let us be on the path of reconciliation and there are differences that will arise of which we have not yet even imagined to challenge our practice of the grace and the peace of the reconciliation of Christ.  Rather than escape and become yes-people in some group that excludes differences, let us prove the reconciliation of Christ in our parish life experience.

  Let us remember again the words of the Ephesian writer when we feel threatened by our differences with others: "Christ is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us."   Amen.

John the Baptist, Best Supporting Role?

7 Pentecost Cycle b proper 10     July 15, 2012

Amos 7:7-15   Psalm 85:8-13

Ephesians 1:3-14  Mark 6:14-29

Lectionary Link

  In the Academy Awards, which award is best, Best Actor or Best Supporting Actor?  Lots of the hype surrounds the winner of the Best Actor but being nominated for any acting award is determined by the role that an actor is given in the screen play.  Since so few acting awards are given out, getting a Best Supporting Actor Oscar is not considered too shabby in the film industry.

  We could agree that Jesus would be in the Gospels, the Oscar equivalent of Best Actor, but who would be the equivalent of Best Actor in a Supporting Role?

  Would it be Simon Peter?  Would it be Mary, mother of Jesus?  Probably not, since she became better known many years later when popular sentiment demanded recognition of the feminine in church matters.  Would it be Mary Magdalene?  She had to wait many, many years for a popular novel, The Da Vinci Code to be elevated as playing the best supporting role for Jesus.

  If we just look at the amount of text that various people get in the Gospels, I think that we’d have to say that John the Baptist, hands down, is the Gospel equivalent of the Best Supporting Actor.

  Why would John the Baptist be regarded to be in a supporting role to Jesus of Nazareth?  That is his role in the scripts of the Gospel writers.  But why did John the Baptist attain so much coverage in the Gospel?   It seems from the internal evidence of the Gospels themselves that for many John was in the chief role.  Some thought that he was the Messiah and others thought that he was the reincarnation of Elijah (even Jesus said as much as the same).  So John the Baptist was quite high in the pantheon of prophets who inhabited first century Palestine. It is also highly likely that John the Baptist had quite a community of followers.  What did those followers do after he had gone?  John the Baptist had obviously some new theological and liturgical adjustments to the practices Judaism of his time as did Jesus of Nazareth.  John the Baptist had his own community of the baptized; those baptized in the Jordan River underwent this rite as a sign that they were intentionally committed to the spiritual renewal of their lives.  The message of John the Baptist was effective and engaging enough to comprise a community and some of the most famous disciples were those who switched from following John the Baptist and began to follow Jesus of Nazareth.  The switch from John to Jesus was presented as graduating from John the Baptist’s school of baptism for the remission of sins to the school of Jesus as baptism into the indwelling of God’s Holy Spirit.  John the Baptist gets lots of Gospel ink, because the writers, whom once perhaps followed John the Baptist, were appealing to the continuing members of their former community that had gathered around John the Baptist.  The writers of the Gospels wanted the remaining followers of John the Baptist to graduate to follow Jesus of Nazareth.

  Today’s Gospel might be call the Passion of John the Baptist and compared to the Passion of Jesus Christ in the Gospels, the Passion of John the Baptist is but a mini-Passion, but a significant one.  The Passion of Christ and the Passion of John the Baptist were significant for their early followers who themselves were in the circumstances that could force them into the decision of the martyr.

  In the Passion of John the Baptist, the stage has three other actors, Herod, Herodias and Salome.  The Herod in question, has to be designated as Antipas since Herod the Great, was so proud of his name, he gave several of his sons the first name of Herod.  Herod the Great, an Idumean or Edomite had supposedly converted to Judaism and had risen to be the Caesar’s petty monarch in Judea.  He divided his realm between his sons and Antipas was over the Galilean area where Jesus and John the Baptist lived and preached.  Now if Herod Antipas was playing political lip service to his constituents by appearing to be Jewish, then John the Baptist, a firebrand prophet was going to hold him to Jewish marriage and divorce laws.  John the Baptist rebuked Herod Antipas for taking the wife of his brother as his own wife.  Her name was Herodias and she came with her daughter Salome to the palace of Herod Antipas.  Herod Antipas is presented as being rather intimidated by John the Baptist, but Herodias was downright enraged by this meddling preacher, John the Baptist.  She regarded him as a moralist paparazzi who needed to be gotten rid of.  Herod Antipas was reluctant to do so because of Jewish political affairs, so the scheming Herodias had to trick him.  Herodias was also, a child abuser since it is doubly despicable to involve one’s child in a murder plot, and a gory one at that.  The Passion of John the Baptist is not a death on the cross; it is decapitation with his head being served on a platter as a party favor for the dancing Salome.

  My, my, how engaging are the stories in the Gospel!  They are so fascinating it is almost too easy to miss their liturgical purpose in the early communities of Jesus Christ.  It is easy to miss their relevance in our own personal liturgies of life in being renewed by the power of the Holy Spirit.

  So how can we understand the Gospel as a narrative of insights for our own personal liturgies of renewal?  How can we let the words intermingle with the word structuration of our own lives so as to present us now with a kaleidoscopic arrangement of words that gives us a glimpsing vision of new insight?

  May I suggest to you that like John the Baptist we are but in supporting roles for the risen Christ?  And being in supporting roles, it means that we have learned to “check our egos” at the door, especially when we are faced with a more excellent model in the art of living well.  The Gospel stories present a Star and Supporting Actors.  This personality theme functions for us as a basic structure in our lives as we want to be on the road of manifold invention, creativity and excellence.  We too have our John the Baptist aspect of personality and Jesus Christ aspect of personality.  In a very attainable psychological insight, it is quite easy for me to be humble, when I contemplate all that I yet need to be.   I am but a supporting actor for the Phil who is a self-surpassing Phil in a future state.

  The Risen Christ represents always in very personal ways, you and I in beckoning and surpassing future states of excellence.  In our current states, we are but supporting actors for the future star that we are always called to be.   So the John the Baptist and Jesus dynamic of the Gospel becomes the narrative of the dynamic growth in excellence for our lives.

  The perfect and the excellent Risen Christ is always an elusive structure of our future as we always have the opportunity for humility in the vision of what is surpassing excellence.  We like John the Baptist are always in a supporting role for this excellence.  And unlike John the Baptist and the martyrs who lost their heads and lives for their witness to their principles, we don’t have to be so literal about dying to ourselves.  We can be coaxed out of old states of mind for better ones like a snake leaving its old skin for a new one.  We can contemplate the Risen Christ as always a vision of ourselves in a more perfect state and so our moral and spiritual target is always before us in a future state.  And we now can always be in a significant but support role for that future state because we have the witness of the star of our lives, the risen Christ. Amen.

Hometown Conservatism or Mission Readiness

6 Pentecost Cycle B  Proper 9     July 8, 2012

Ez. 2:1-7           Ps.123

2 Cor.12:1-10     Mark 6:1-13

Lectionary Link

  You have heard me repeat the old joke over and over again about why the Episcopalians were so late to arrive on the frontier in the United States.  Answer:  They had to wait for the invention of the Pullman Coach because they wanted to travel to the frontier in style and with lots of baggage.

  Today’s appointed Gospel is about evangelism and strategies of evangelism.  Sending the early evangelists out in two's and prescribing evangelical poverty for them was a “sales” strategy.  Traveling light without lots of baggage would enable them to cover lots of territory quickly.  And they would offer  their evangelical product only where people showed an interest in responding.  They were not to wait around trying to convince those who rejected them.

  In our lives we often have to assess the amount of baggage that we’ve accrued or sold in a garage sale when we left our last residency. Sometimes we have lots of emotional baggage that was formed in our hometowns or the places of our first eighteen years of life.  Nothing requires us to reflect upon our emotional baggage more than the “class reunion.”  How many of you have attended high school class reunions? The days leading up to high school have created interesting scripts in our lives;  it is amazing how much influence that our days of not having fully discovered ourselves still exerts an influence over our current lives.  There is a cliché about attempts at attending reunions: “You can never go home.”  However if you never left home, then you might have a different opinion about those who attempt to come home only at the high school reunions or at  family funerals.  People who have left home and stayed away for a long time have become like foreigners to the hometown.  They have looked for insights and adventures beyond their hometowns.         

  The ministry of Jesus was an itinerant ministry; he was always on the road.  And after he had been on the road, he worked an appearance into his schedule for his hometown of Nazareth.  The traveling evangelist and healer who had gained a reputation in other places was coming home and this was an occasion for the expression of lots of mixed feelings.  "Why did you leave in the first place Jesus?  Why didn’t you stay and help your dad with the carpentry business?  And what is wrong with our religious expressions?  What can you teach us that our local religious leaders can’t?  You come  home with all of these new ideas and then you will leave.  We will have to live with the aftermath of you spreading your new ideas."

  When I lived in Iran in the 1970’s there was an attempt to bring sanitary conditions to the villages.  A student came to the university from a village that had experienced lots of illness because of poor drainage of human waste.  In the water system, the ancient underground aqueduct system that brought water from the mountain was used for irrigation, bathing, washing of clothes and dishes but it also was the sewage system.  The village was not familiar with the microscopic beasties which cause all manner of sickness.  This student returned to his village and tried to teach the village new sanitary patterns.  And even when sickness lessened, after he left, the villagers returned to their old patterns and the diseases returned.  And so the new knowledge became worthless when it was not practiced; when it was not institutionalized.  Creating sanitary conditions was too much of an innovation for the village to change their ancient practices.

  The practice of modern science has had to confront lots of human ignorance regarding all manner of things.  People of faith have sometimes held out the longest on issues because it would seem that sacred texts often have made the “cultural details” of ancient cultures an unchangeable standard of practice.

  Over and over again, people who have attained new learning do not seem to be able to go home to their reunion with their “hometown” faith communities.  People come into new insights and join new movements and then preach and live a different expression of faith than what they grew up with.  And families are divided over religion.  Certainly the life of Jesus, his ministry and the life of his followers represent Galilee and Palestine coming to grips with what was perceived as innovation in the first century.

  Hometown thinking is institutional thinking; it conserves.  Hometown thinking has all of the comfort and the infrastructure of the Pullman Car.  Everything has been thought out and patterns have been set.

  I believe the Gospel narrative today presents us with the narrative of our lives.  How do we both conserve and practice innovation in our personal and community lives?   Sometimes what is very familiar to us, keeps us from entertaining new thinking that might offer to us significant insights and give us new vision.  Such insights and new vision can in turn bring about changes in our practice and such changes in our practice can also bring with it attempts to change our institutions.

  You remember the steam engines on the train used to have firemen.  Firemen would shovel coal into the boilers but their jobs became obsolete when diesel engines replaced the coal burning engines.  But the railroad unions continued to have firemen because that was the institutional pattern.  For a while the term “feather-bedding” was used to designate the unnecessary hiring of people whose  jobs were obsolete.  Institutions conserve even when change is called for.

  We are not going to change the conserving nature of institutions nor are we going to suddenly stop the dynamics of change that comes to our personal or community lives.  The collision between change and institutional fixity is a fact of life.  And sometimes we find ourselves as institutional fuddy duddies and at other times we find ourselves as the revolutionary guard.  It often is simply a matter of what phase of our personal or institutional lives we are in at any given time.

  We need both institutional stability and innovation in life; lots of the countries in our world have not found the right balance between these two dynamics of life.  Change needs to be consolidated by institutional stability but the stability needs to be upset when new problems require new answers.

  The Gospel reflects both our personal and community lives of faith.  The Episcopal Church is meeting in Convention this month.  The institutional stability and innovation dynamics are issues for our continuing life as a faith community.  How can we streamline to do a better job of getting our message of hope, faith and community building out to a post-modern world?  I would suspect that the average age of those who are attending the General Convention is close to the age of 60.  What do people my age have to offer to the generations that are coming?  Are we hometown scoffers of anything new?  The new generations are not fighting our old battles; they are not embroiled in our biases and prejudices, they are not seeking answers to questions that they are not even asking.

  I believe that even though Jesus on one occasion was not able to convince his hometown crowd about some new insights, it did not mean that his hometown refused to change.  In the advancement of the innovation of new ideas the dynamics of conservation and change will test what will come to have the best functional use for us and our community.  And we hope that love and kindness and care will be the final criteria for the functional practice of ideas.

  Today, you and I are invited both to conserve and to change in the advancement of excellent practice in both our personal lives and in our community lives.  I believe that the Gospel of Jesus is realistic about both conservation and innovation.  Amen.