All Laws Are Not Equal

14  Pentecost Cycle B proper 17 September 2, 2012

Song of Solomon 2:8-13 Psalm 45:1-2, 7-10

James 1:17-27  Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

Lectionary Link

  The teaching  of the Gospel lesson for today is this:  All laws are not equal.  And while it is important to have laws, having too many laws actually might get in the way of freedom for living.  There are lots of laws that we would like to do without, certain tax laws,  deed restrictions, dress codes and rules that seem to deny some basic freedoms. 

  Human life consists of many laws; some of those laws are what we might call morally passive laws.  We would call scientific laws morally passive since they simply try to describe the behavior of natural phenomenon.  Water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit at sea level.  It is not good or bad that it does so, and we don’t place any moral value on such a law because human action and motive cannot make it so.

  The laws that pertain to human behavior are many; they are found in human societies ancient and in ours.   For any group of people who have tried to live together well, there is needed structure and order for preserving life and health and the well being of the common good.

   Thou shalt not kill.  That’s a pretty important rule for the health and safety of the human community.  Thou shalt pick up after your dog in the park.  An important rule but not the same level as “Thou shalt not kill.”  Though if it happens on your lawn and the dog owner doesn’t seem to care, it can cause bad thoughts to arise.

  There are also rules that pertain to ceremony and cultural protocol and if one does not know these rules one can truly offend without knowing it.  In a good portion of the world it is impolite to leave your shoes on when visiting someone’s home.  It is protocol to leave one’s shoes at the door.

  Some rules are secret and are meant only for insiders.  Lodges and clubs have secret rules and members take an oath not to disclose the rules.

  So the validity of a rule or law is affected by how widely it is known or promulgated.  The validity of a law is also supposed to be determined by its reasonableness and whether it is truly accessible for whom it is to apply.

  When Jesus walked in Palestine, he found within the Jewish religious community a Judean religious elite.  This elite group had elevated and magnified minutiae and lesser ceremonial rules to the level of the big ones, the Ten Commandments.  The laws of ritual purity were very important to those who believed themselves to be truly the official spokespersons for God and who believed themselves to be the official gatekeepers for those who were to be admitted to God’s favor.

  In Palestine, water was an issue.  Peasants did not always have the same access to water for ritual purity in the same ways that the Judean religious elite had.  The religious elite were wealthy enough to build a micro-society within the greater social order and they had rules for this micro-society that governed membership.  And Jesus found that the vast majority of the countryside peasants and the simple laborers and fisherfolk did not have access to that small micro-society.  And the message of the religious elite was this:  If you don’t and are not keeping the rules of our micro-society, that is a sure sign that you do not have God’s favor.  Because if you are not in our society, you are not in God’s society either.

  And that is what really ticked Jesus off.  The Gospels often portray Jesus as one who is violating these religious rules.  The Gospels have Jesus in sarcasm speaking against the elevation of minutiae to Olympian importance.  In another place Jesus said, “You strain to catch a gnat, but you let the camel go through.”  That is simply an ironic way of saying, “You’re missing the point of God and religion and you’ve got your priorities all wrong.”

  The words of Jesus were meant to indict and convict those who elevated minutiae to top priority while being totally blinded to some very big issue.

  The words of Jesus apply to us because sometimes we are so worried about gnats we do not recognize the camels and elephants that inhabit our world.  It seems as most faith communities fix rules and laws that are exclusionary.  You can’t receive communion unless….You have to be celibate to be a valid sacramental minister…You have to fast an hour before receiving holy communion…you have to believe this particular formula for the salvation of your souls…you have to believe exactly this about the Holy Scriptures…  There are hundreds upon hundreds of subtle little rules that govern who we accept into our company as being valid in God’s sight.  We can get so exorcised about all of the minutiae of church membership we are blind to our great failures to love God and our neighbor as our self.  Our tiny rules can make us blind to justice.

  If the great rule is to love God and our neighbor as our self, should we be more concerned about the correct view of the Holy Eucharist or about the fact that lots of people are starving in our world and in our country?  Should be more concerned about total immersion or sprinkling in baptism than the availability of clean drinking water to all in our world?

  I am not saying we should be over-whelmed by world hunger and poverty; I’m just saying that in the big scheme of things, we should not let the petty church political stuff cause us to lose perspective about the big principle of life, “loving God and our neighbor as our selves.”

  I think if Jesus were here today visiting every church that existed, he would continually challenge all of us about our priorities.  He wouldn't single us out or the Baptists or the Lutherans or the Roman Catholics, because his words are what one might call, “equal opportunity convicting.”  Liberal or conservative, it doesn’t matter, his words will always convict us about our priorities.  His words will convict us about making the petty into the dominant motivation of our lives.

  How is the ritual washing of our hands going to help us love God with all of our hearts and loving our neighbor as ourselves?  But how about getting clean drinking water to all of the people of this world?  How about getting water for irrigation to starving people?  This would really be a way of making the world ritually pure through the use of water.

  If the ritual use of water in our faith ceremonies does not inspire us to get water to those who need it, then our ritual behavior is the equivalence of malpractice.  And Jesus was hitting very hard at the malpractice of religion.

  The words of Jesus will always confront us with our potential malpractice of religion where we are content with micro-rules of ritual and doctrine, but let the big issues that pertain to loving God and our neighbors go unattended.

  Let us live under the conviction of Jesus today, knowing that we are failing in some very major ways.  It is a good place to live because it makes it easy to ask God for mercy, forgiveness, and grace for the amendment of our lives.  And if we have the audacity to ask God for mercy, forgiveness and grace, then perhaps we too will offer the same to the people in our world and life.  Amen.

      

Quiz of the Day, August 2012

August 1, 2012

Summertime Quiz

August 1^st is the feast of Joseph of Arimathea.  In the Gospel narrative he,

a.       Provided the thirty pieces of silver to give to Judas

b.      Provided the tomb for the body of Jesus after the crucifixion

c.       Arranged for his friend Nicodemus to meet with Jesus at night

d.      Provided the room for the Last Supper

August 2, 2012

Summertime Quiz

In the New Testament, the word Greek word for “priest”  hiereus is mainly used to refer to:

a.  the person who said the prayers at the Eucharist

b.  the cultic officials of Roman temples

c.  the priests in Judaism who offered the sacrifices in temple in Jerusalem before it was destroyed

d. the apostles and disciples

August 3, 2012

Summertime Quiz

August 6^th is the Feast of the Transfiguration.  What Sunday every year do we read the Transfiguration account from the Gospels?

a.  First Sunday of Lent

b. Last Sunday of Epiphany

c. First Sunday in Advent

d. First Sunday after the Epiphany

August 4, 2012

Summertime Quiz

Do you not know that in a race the runners all compete, but only one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may win it. Athletes exercise self-control in all things; they do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable one.  So I do not run aimlessly, nor do I box as though beating the air;

This Olympic metaphor is found in the New Testament.  Where is it found?

a. The Epistle to the Hebrews

b. 2^nd Timothy

c. The Book of Revelation

d. St. Paul’s  First Epistle to the Corinthians

August 5, 2012

Summertime Quiz

Manna is

a. the mysterious substance that fed the Israelites in their wilderness journey

b. a word that comes from the Hebrew meaning, "What is it?"

c. called the bread of angels

d. used by a Gospel writer to teach a lesson about Jesus as living bread

e. all of the above

August 6, 2012

Summertime Quiz 

Who was present at the Transfiguration event?

a.Jesus, James, John, Peter

b.Jesus, Moses, Elijah,  Peter and John

c.Jesus, Moses, Elijah, Peter and James

d.Jesus, Moses, Elijah, Peter, James and John

e.Jesus, Moses, Elijah, Peter, James, John and God the Father

August 7, 2012

Summertime quiz

The Sadducees, a sect of Judaism in the time of Jesus, did not believe in the resurrection from the dead because:

a. It could not be supported from the writings of the Prophets

b. They were pessimists

c. It was not support from the writings of the Torah

d. Immortality was a Greek notion

August 8, 2012

Summertime Quiz

What English word does the new Roman Catholic Liturgy use to translate "of one being with" in the Nicene Creed?

a. transubstantial

b. unified

c. substantial

d. consubstantial

August 9, 2012

Summertime Quiz

Intercessory prayer is

a. asking God for things for ourself

b. praying in a special time

c. praying done with fasting

d. identifying with the needs of other and asking for God's help on their behalf

August 10, 2012

Summertime Quiz

Love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control are called by St. Paul:

a. theological virtues

b. cardinal virtues

c. gifts of the Spirit

d. fruit of the Spirit

  

August  11, 2012

Summertime Quiz

Why is the day of worship different for Jews and Christians?

a.  Sunday, the first day of the week is the day of the resurrection of Christ

b. Judaism has maintained its ancient Sabbath tradition

c. The Acts of the Apostles states that the disciples gathered on the first day of the week to break bread and say the prayers.

d. All of the above

August 12, 2012

Summertime Quiz

Why do scholars call the Old Testament the Hebrew Scriptures?

a. It was written in Hebrew

b. Out of respects for the Jews

c. If a person does not recognize a New Testament, their Testament is not old, it's their only Testament

d. all of the above

August 13, 2012

Summertime Quiz

Who succeeded David on the throne of Israel and was regarded to be the wisest person of ancient Israel?

a. Absalom

b. Jonathan

c. Saul

d. Ahab

e. Joash

f. Solomon

August 14, 2012

Summertime Quiz

August 15 is the Feast of the Virgin Mary. On November 1, 1950, Pope Pius XII infallibly defined that,

a. the Virgin Mary was a saint

b. the apparitions of the Virgin Mary were authentic

c. the Virgin Mary was Assumed or bodily taken into heaven at the end of her earthly life

d. all of the above

 August 15, 2012

The Virgin Mary is:

a. referred to as "Theotokos" or God-Bearer in the Eastern Orthodox traditions.

b. referred to as Mother of God in the Western Church Tradition.

c. has a cousin names Elizabeth according to the Gospel of Luke

d. mother to the siblings of Jesus

e. all of the above

August 16, 2012

Long before UFO and Extra-terrestials, the Bible has presented extra-human figures known and called angelic (messenger) beings.  Visionaries actually divided angelic being into choirs.  Which is not in one  of the choirs?

a.  Seraphim

b.  Cherubim

c. Thrones or Ophanim

d. terraphim

e.  Dominions

f.  Virtues

g.  Powers or Authorities

h.  Principalities or Rulers

i.  Archangels

J. Angels

August 17, 2012

Summertime Quiz

The Four Gospels do not have internal evidence that reveals their actual authors.  The names were attached in the traditions of the church.  Which Gospel would seem to have some evidence of the author?

a. Mark, since he is probably the young boy in the Gethsemane arrest event

b. Matthew, since he was probably Levi

c. John, since he was the beloved disciple

d. Luke, since Luke goes with Acts and he was a physician and companion of Paul

August 18, 2012

Summertime Quiz

The Restoration in English History refers to:

a. The day and period of the restored monarchy in England in 1660

b. The end of the rule of Oliver Cromwell’s son

c.  The ascent to the throne of Charles II

d.  the time when a significant revision of the Book of Common Prayer occurred

e.  all of the above

August 19, 2012

The Prayer for the Sick is a sacrament. It has also been called,

a. the prayer for healing

b. Extreme Unction

c. last rites

d. holy unction

August 20, 2012

Summertime Quiz

In religious terminology, apocalypse means,

a.  literally, an unveiling

b. catastrophic ending of the world as we know it

c. if capitalized another name for the last book of the Bible, Revelations

d. all of the above

August 21, 2012

Summertime Quiz

Before, during and after the time of Jesus when the communities where biblical writings occurred often were suffering and oppressed communities, a pronounced fervor about the end of the world as we know it was common. Portions of the Bible are called Apocalyptic literature. The theological sub-discipline for the study of end times is called:

a. Apocalyptology

b. Parousiology

c. Cosmology

d. Eschatology

August 22, 2012

To what disciple did Jesus, "on this rock I will build my church?"

a. Andrew

b. The Beloved Disciple

c. Peter

d. Simon bar Jonah

e. Cephas

f. two of the above

g. c, d, and e

August 23, 2012

Summertime Quiz

Pneumatology is the sub-discipline of theology and involves the study of,

a. angels

b. breathing techniques in prayer and meditation

c. respiratory illnesses and the prayer for the sick

d. the Holy Spirit

August 24, 2012

Ecclesiology is,

a. the study of the book of Ecclesiastes

b. the study of liturgical practices

c. the study of church architecture

d. the theological study of the church

August 25, 2012

The Gospels often refer to Jesus as the Son of Man; why so?

a. to indicate that he was truly human

b. to use a phrase that refers to humanity in general

c. to translate a phrase in Hebrew that literally means son of Adam

d. to indicate the identity of Jesus with an apocalyptic figure written about in the book of Daniel associated with the end of the world

  

August 26, 2012

According to the Book of Acts, Rabbi Gamaliel was,

a. a leading Rabbi who violently opposed the followers of Jesus

b. a Rabbi who converted when he heard Paul preach

c. a Rabbi who favored the execution of Peter

d. a Rabbi who said if the Jesus movement is of God then no one can overthrow it

August 27, 2012

In the Acts of the Apostles, who was the man who replaced Judas Iscariot and how was he chosen?

a. Joseph Barsabbas elected by the remaining eleven

b. Justus, who was revealed in a dream to Peter

c. Matthias, who was elected by a two-thirds concurrent majority of both disciples and non-inner circle disciples of Jesus

d. Matthias, elected by drawing lots

August 28, 2012

What famous Saint from Africa wrote two of the best known books in Christian history, entitled, "Confessions" and "City of God?"

a. Augustine of Canterbury

b. Augustine of Hippo

c. Origen

d. Eusebius

August 29, 2012

John Bunyan wrote which Christian classic?

a. Great Expectations

b. Paradise Lost

c. Holy Living, Holy Dying

d. The Pilgrim's Progress

August 30, 2012

The Synod at Whitby in 663 was significant in English Church history because,

a.   the native Celtic Christians of the British agreed to give up their local customs for Roman Church practices

b.  it included an early version of football

c.  the Celtic Church separated from the Roman Church

d.  the Celtic Church told the Roman Church to leave the British Isles

August 31, 2012

The phrase having "the patience of Job" comes from,

a. the book of Job in the Bible

b. the story of a man named Job who is the most famous example of suffering

c. a writer who wanted to show that bad things happen to good people

d. all of the above

Divided by a Common Religion

With apologies to George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde who made comments about Americans and the British being separated/divided by a common language.

Within the Gospel of John one can find the roots for most of the Eucharistic conflicts that have divided the church, so much so that we could say that Baptists, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Roman Catholics, Orthodox and Methodists are people who are divided by having a common religion.

Winning the Interior Battles with the Presence of Christ

13 Pentecost  Cycle B proper 16  August 26, 2012

Joshua 24:1-2a, 14-18  Psalm 34:15-22

Ephesians 6:10-20  John 6:56-69

Lectionary Link

  Does faith and the military mix?  Religions have an uneven history with military warfare.  In the Old Testament there was a practice of holy wars, in the sense that Israel as God’s chosen people often thought and believed that God wanted them to wipe out all opposition to their possession of their “promised” territory.  But by the time of Jesus of Nazareth, Israel had been overrun by several empires and with the exception of some short lived victories by the Maccabees, they essentially had been an occupied country since just after the time of King David.  Human nature tells us something about just war theory and war; if one is on the winning side of an empire, it is easier to believe in war than if one is on the losing side of the empire.  Jesus came to an oppressed and occupied people; and there is evidence that he was crucified because he challenged the emperor of Rome, because some believed him to be the King of the Jews.  But in his words, Jesus said to love our enemies; he told his followers to turn their other cheek after being slapped.  As a result of the teachings of Jesus and in the early centuries of Christians living as a persecuted minority, Christians in the first three centuries were pacifists; they would not take up arms.  In fact, for almost four centuries Christians were not allowed in the Roman army.  After Constantine adopted Christianity as the religion of his empire, Christian apologists (particularly St. Augustine) revived the just-war theory of the ancient Greeks to give a theological reason for taking up arms.  And at the end of the 4^th century, when Christianity was the official religion of the empire, only Christians could be in the army.  I guess the moral of history is that it is easier to be a pacifist when one has no power.

  What did moderate Muslims do after 9-11 when their extremists were exclaiming “jihad” or holy war?  Most of the Muslim pointed out that “jihad” was not about swords and spears, in fact jihad was an interior battle against one’s carnal nature; a fight on behalf of what is good and right.

  The writer of the Ephesian letter used the body armor of a warrior as a metaphor for weapons of righteousness against all of the enemies of the soul.  This teaching for the Ephesian church asserted that the real battle was against principalities in unseen places and so the spiritual warfare was the primary battle.  You and I know that negative possibilities; things that actually have not happened, things unseen, have a force and a power to keep us from doing good things.  Fearing fear itself has probably hindered more good things from happening than any other actual physical force.

  We have a long history of wars being fought for good religious or Christian reasons.  We have seen tanks and fighter planes and shields decorated with crosses.

  The history of the world is a history of conflict and fighting and war have often come to horrendous expressions, and whose side one is on has often determined one’s view towards war.

  I am not naïve enough to believe that the world will soon be free of war, but I do believe as much as we can we need to embrace the interior conflict of the Spirit against the many forms of selfishness and the forces of fear and anxiety.  I believe that we have battles and wars in our world because the interior battle against all forms of selfishness and anxiety has often been lost.  The battle against greed and selfishness is lost first in the lives of tyrants and when tyranny and oppression occurs tyrants use fear as a force against those whom they oppress.  Against tyrants, the use of war to protect the oppressed may be just, though not easy.

  The bread of heaven discourse in the Gospel of reveals evidence of totally different sort of conflict within the early Christian community; ironically it was a battle of words and understanding about the Eucharist.  Within the Gospel of John one can find the roots for most of the Eucharistic conflicts that have divided the church, so much so that we could say that Baptists, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Roman Catholics, Orthodox and Methodists are people who are divided by having a common religion.

  The words of Jesus in the written text show the words of the early preachers who spoke in the name of Jesus and who observed the controversies in those early circumstances.  Many people could not believe that the risen Christ was still present in the community.  And some people could not believe in the Holy Eucharist as a way in which Jesus really promised to be present.  They chose to interpret the words of Jesus as a literal “cannibalism” of actually eating flesh and drinking blood.  The disciples represent those who understood the inner meaning of the words. The interpretation that is given by the oracle of Jesus is this:    It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.  Now if you think this settled the issue, the history of the Eucharistic controversies fills the pages of Church history.  So we have different ways of speaking about how Jesus is present in the bread and the wine:  transubstantiation, consubstantiation, a memorial presence, receptionism, a symbolic presence, a spiritual presence,  a real presence and typically Episcopalians hold all of these positions which is another reason why we are always in disagreement within our own family of faith.

  We might clarify the issue by refusing to divide the human person into entities of body, soul and spirit.  Even though we do this for speaking purposes, in actuality the human person is an indivisible entity.  At death it may seem as though the body is separated from what is inside of a person. The belief in the resurrection means that the living spirit and soul through God’s work has the ability to recreate a new body. So the spirit is not separated from the body because the spirit has as it were the potential to clone a new body.  When someone says that there is only a spiritual presence of Christ in the Eucharist, they seem to mean an incomplete or diminished presence.

  The early Church believed in a very substantial continuing presence of Christ in the church and they believed that his words and command in the Eucharist was a way of actualizing in history a particular and special presence of the risen Christ.  And yes it is a spiritual presence, but it is a presence that involves a substantial presence that can be known “as if” the person of Jesus was present.

  I am not sure that I can precisely tell you how Christ is present.  I used to be able to when fresh out seminary, I knew most everything, or so I thought.  With each day of my life, I become more comfortable with living with mystery and do not feel like I have to explain mystery.  Just as I cannot explain why I find the experience of the sublime in a work of art, a piece of music, a haunting sunset, in love and friendship, I cannot tell you about the science of the sublime presence of Christ in Eucharist.  I believe the Christian life is not really about verifying mystery in reductive ways; it is about the art of living and that art includes finding the sublime presence of Christ in many, many ways.

  I think that we as Christians have the freedom to get ourselves clear of ancient conflicts; conflicts as old as the biblical communities.  We really don’t have to be like biblical communities who came to open disagreement over things that essentially are mysterious.  What we can affirm is that there are many ways of appropriating the great mysteries of life and the great mystery of the sublime presence of Christ in our lives.

  The mystery of the presence of Christ to us today in the Eucharist is there for us to accept and embrace; we need not argue about the forensics of this mystery.  By the way, sacramentum is a Latin word; what is the Greek word for sacramentum?  Mysterion.  Sound familiar?  Since God is greater than we are, the divine presences will always be a mystery to our minds that are smaller than God’s greatness.  Let us embrace the reality of the presence of Christ, while never presuming that we can control it through our own understanding.   Mysteries are a genre of literature, “who dun it” books, crime and detective books.  The mystery of how the risen Christ is known to us is not one to solve.  Christians who think that they can solve it as a mystery with the correct language of description are more interested in controlling meaning.  The Mystery is the presence of Christ is of such a magnitude to keep us humble and to live in hope that this risen Christ will be an interior presence for us to wage a never ending battle against all forms of selfishness and fears and anxiety.   Amen.

Christ as Living Bread and Wisdom of God and All in All

12 Pentecost proper 15  August 19, 2012

Proverbs 9:1-6  Psalm 34:9-14

Ephesians 5:15-20  John 6:51-58

Lectionary Link

  Which do you prefer as a name?  Chokmowth?  Sapientia?  Or Sophia?  These are the words for Wisdom in Hebrew, Latin and Greek.  I suspect that many of us prefer Sophia; it sounds more romantic to our ears and many of us grew up watching a popular Italian actress with that name.  Chokmowth? For us, the guttural sounds that we associate with clearing phlegm from our throats do not sound very romantic, though in other languages they can incite poetic trance.

  From our Hebrew Scripture lesson we have read about Chokmowth or Sophia, we have read about Wisdom.  Wisdom in both Hebrew and Greek are feminine.  And this is interesting since more masculine and patriarchal notions of the divine seem to be more prominent in the Judeo-Christian traditions.  The Hebrew Scripture at times seem to present parallel battles in heaven as on earth.  As Israel asserted a covenant with the Sky God El and the unpronounceable and unspeakable Yahweh became the preferred name of God, Israel was also encountering the Canaanite peoples who had a pantheon of gods and goddesses.  The earth and fertility goddesses were seen as competitors with the one God El, Yahweh, Elohim, Adonai.   So as a radical monotheism came to the people Israel, it would seem that what also came was a notion of a sky or transcendent God who was addressed using masculine pronouns.  Was there to be no place for the use feminine metaphor in referring to God in the Hebrew religion? 

  Chokmowth or Sophia or Wisdom came to be articulated as a fitting metaphor for God.  If God is purely transcendent or above all or completely different from human experience, then God could not be even known in such inferior human experience.  So the only way we can even confess a transcendent God is to also admit that God is an Immanent Being or a God who is accessible in some way to human experience.  And this is where the notion of Sophia or Wisdom comes in.  God’s omnipresence in the world was called Sophia or Wisdom.   The Hebrew Scriptures have an entire genre of literature called Wisdom Literature.  Books like Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon and the Book of Job are examples of Wisdom Literature.  And there are more developed examples of Wisdom literature in the books of the Apocrypha. 

  There is something of God in every bit of the world and that something is someone, even the friendly Sophia.  In fact, Sophia, is so friendly one might say, she is downright seductive.  The metaphor from the book of Proverbs states that God is to be known as a seductive real personal force in everyone and everything.  This wisdom or seductive immanent Sophia is particularly successful in drawing the people who are perpetually curious.  Curiosity can be seen as the native quest for wisdom in one’s future.  Curiosity is living perpetually with one’s mouth open and saying “Wow,” what’s next?

  The ancient Greeks gave an invitation for everyone to be in love with Sophia.  They called this love relationship, philo-sophia or as we call it philosophy….the art of being in love with wisdom.

  I believe that this ancient name for God, Wisdom, expresses our belief that the world can be experienced as created and not as chaotic.  Yes, our world can be experienced as a void and as seemingly chaotic, but since there is a word for chaos, that would suggest that even chaos has the order of some definition. Word gives boundary and limitation to chaos and so word is evidence of superior creativity.

  To know God as wisdom is to know that creation is the process that we are forever a part of.  To know Wisdom is to know a continually ordering and structuring of our world for our understanding and for the use of the benefits of what we discover in the world.

  Wisdom as a dominant metaphor for God incarnate invites us to many types of discourses to creatively order our worlds.  Some other metaphors for the divine might be Justice, Law, Reason, Word, Spirit, Hope, Faith and  Love; on and on we can fill this world with various discourses or forms of language usage.

  With the metaphor of Wisdom the ancient writer tried to establish a natural theology; they attempted to show that God can be known in and through what is in the world without the aid of what we have come to call revelation.

  It is unfortunate that we have often been limited to the notion of a masculine sky God who intervenes from outside of the human sphere.  This is often how the presentation of revelation is perceived; God as an alien who packages the divinely different self in human form so that humans can be drawn to seek this transcendent alien.

  The writer of the Gospel of John took the notion of God as wisdom and explicated it using another common Greek word, namely, Logos, or the word for Word.  We know this Greek word in every science:  Theology is Words about God, zoology is words about animal life, biology is words about living organisms…

  In John’s Gospel, the Christ is the eternal Logos who is the creating process of life itself.  And the Gospel of John said this creating process of life itself attained a personality in the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ; and though Word became flesh in Jesus, Word was not limited to physical body of Jesus in the 33 or so years that he lived.  The Word like Wisdom continues to be a creating presence that can be experienced as a Personal Being who is interested in us in our lives and who can seduce us to be curious forever about discovery and the integration of our discoveries for the benefit of our lives.

  For the church of John’s Gospel, Jesus as Word could be expansively known everywhere; Jesus could be known as living bread from heaven.  No, Jesus was not a literal loaf of bread dropped out of the sky.  To be drawn to Jesus was to take in Word and Wisdom and have Word and Wisdom become us in the subsequent words and deeds of our life.  And this is not some carnal literal cannibalism that offended those literalists who rejected the teachings of the community of John; the living bread of heaven was the Word of God as personal presence that cannot be trapped within or exhausted by any one human experience.  Living Bread from heaven is not about the literal sky;  it is about the elevated values of life into which we are initiated through our encounter with the Risen Christ as the Word of God who can also be Eucharistic Bread and Eucharistic Wine.

  If Christ can be known in the church gathered as the Eucharistic Bread and Eucharistic Wine, Christ can also be known in life experience itself as the Wisdom who beckons us to further curiosity with the occasions of the sublime presence of God.

  In the writings that have come to be associated with the churches of the Apostle Paul, Christ is called the Wisdom of God and Christ is called All and in All.  Can you and I admit that most of the New Testament literature is waxing poetic about Christ as encounters with the Sublime and it is not stodgy historical reporting about days in the life of Jesus?

  If we understand the writer of John’s Gospel we see that there is a rebuke to those who want to make the Eucharistic words into a literal cannibalism.  If we understand the Risen Christ to be in continuity with the Wisdom tradition, we understand that God arises within our world to encounter us in very personal ways.  We are not here to establish precise details of historical events in the life of Jesus in first century Palestine; we are here to encounter Christ as the living Word of God, the Wisdom of God and the one who is All and in All, and so it is quite appropriate for me to administer communion to you today with these words," The Body of Christ, the Bread of Heaven. " Amen.

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.