Youth Sermon: Yo, Yo, "In the Beginning was the WORD." Yo. Yo.

1 Christmas    C   December 30, 2012

Is.61:10-62:3     Ps. 147:13-21

Gal. 3:23-25,4:4-7  John 1:1-18

Youth Sermon

Lectionary Link

James: In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.  You may be seated.

James:  (Doing rap, adding voice mimic of turn table swishes)

Yo, yo...“In the beginning was the WORD!  (make the rap gesture..one that is not obscene)

“And the WORD (make the rap gesture) was with GOD. (make the rap gesture..)

“And the WORD (make the rap gesture..) was GOD.  (make the rap gesture..)

Rachel: So why do rappers always say the word WORD?  (make the rap gesture..)

James(using an affected British accent): Excuse me, did you say rappers?  In my circles we call it classical urban poetry.  After all it has been around as an art form since the 1970’s with roots much deeper perhaps even in the 1950’s.  And in classical urban poetry, WORD (make the rap gesture..)  is a very important word.

Kalum: Did you compose that classical urban poetry?

James:  No, of course not.  I borrowed it from the Bible.

Rachel: Where in the Bible?

James:  It comes from the first chapter of the Gospel of John.

Kalum:  Rappers use the expression “WORD”  (make the rap gesture..) as a sort of contraction, meaning, “That’s the word or I approve or I am in agreement.”

Rachel: But in the Gospel of John it is not used like the rapper’s use of the word, WORD.  (make the rap gesture..)

James: That’s right.  In the Gospel of John, Word is perhaps the most important insight in the entire book.

Kalum:  It’s like the writer tries to begin the Bible all over again.

Rachel:  Why do you say that?

Kalum:  The book of Genesis, the book of creation begins with these three words, “In the beginning.”  And what are the first three words of the Gospel of John?

James: “In the beginning.”  But how do you think the writer of John was trying to make a connection with the creation story?

Rachel:  How did the original creation story explain creation?

Kalum:  God spoke.  God said, “Let there be light.”  And there was light.

James: And how does that connect with In the beginning was the Word.

Rachel: Bingo!  God spoke.  What does God speak?  God speaks words.  So when creation happened, God spoke words, and then the Spirit moved and completed the creation.

James:  Wow, the writer of the Gospel was trying to show how God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit were present at creation.  If God the Father is the speaker then the Word that he spoke was Christ the Word.  And then the Spirit completes the act of creation.

Kalum:  I guess this means that the writer of the Gospel tried to explain the meaning of the life of Jesus using the only Bible that he had which was the Hebrew Bible.

James:  Yes, and in the Gospel of John, Word is very important.  Jesus said that his words were Spirit and that his words were life.  Jesus spoke lots of words and those words recreated the lives of his listeners.  And the writer of John said that if people would read the words of the Gospel they could come to believe in Jesus as the Messiah.

Rachel:  Having words is what makes us human beings different from animals.

Kalum: Before a baby can speak the adults organize the baby’s world with words and as the baby gets older a baby learns all of the names for everything in the world.

James:  So, it is the use of words that in some way creates or makes our world.  Before we have words our lives are more just instinctual.  As soon as we have words we do not have to cry as much because we can tell our parents where we hurt and what we need.  So, it is the word that creates or organizes all of our human experience.  Without words we can be lost in our own pain and in our tears.

Rachel:  But is the Gospel of John just about saying that human life is different because we have language?  Why didn’t the writer say, “In the beginning was the language and the language was with God and the language was God.”

James: I think that Christ exemplified Word life in a different way.  It is not just that human being have a language.  Language is a particular version of our basic Word ability.  A person has word ability but a person can speak more than one language.  Why do you think that WORD was a metaphor or name for Christ?

Rachel:  I think it could have to do with the phases of how people come to know God.

Kalum: How so?

Rachel:  Well, even if we don’t know about God, we can know that our lives are structured.  And so WORD is this invisible structure within everything.  We can appreciate this structure because we depend upon consistency and predictability in how things behave.

James: But the structure of the world does not seem like a personal way to know a creator who has done the structuring of the world.

Kalum: I’m reminded of the question of Albert Einstein, “Can we believe that the universe is a friendly place?”

James:  Now, I get it.  The writer of John wrote, “The Word was made flesh and dwelled among us.”

Rachel:  So this is the answer to Einstein’s question.  Yes, the universe is a friendly place; the one who created and structured the universe is the Word.  And this Word is revealed as the greatest person in our world, Jesus Christ.

James:  The best way to see and understand the structure of our created world is in the life of Jesus Christ.  So he is the Word made flesh.

Kalum:  And now Jesus of Nazareth is invisible to us.  We can no longer see him.  He has disappeared to be the Risen Christ and re-assume his role as WORD OF GOD.

Rachel:  So now we can know that the Word is present everywhere because the Word continues to structure and reveal created order everywhere.

James:  Yes and since Word became a person in Jesus Christ, we know that there is a loving, friendly, sacrificing, presence behind the order of all things.  That’s pretty exciting don’t you think?

Kalum: Amen.

Rachel:  Well, I think that a synonym for Amen would be the favorite expression of classical urban poetry.

James:  And what would that be?

Rachel: WORD!  (makes the rap gesture)

Kalum: Do you think that we could get this mature group of people to say, WORD! (makes the rap gesture) rather than Amen?

Rachel: It’s worth a try.

James:  Here we go.

    “In the beginning was the Word. (rap gesture)

Kalum, Rachel and everyone:  Word! (rap gesture)

James:  And the word (rap gesture) was with God. (rap gesture)

Kalum, Rachel and everyone: Word!  (rap gesture)

James:  And the word (rap gesture) was God.  (rap gesture)

Kalum, Rachel and everyone:  Word!  (rap gesture)

James: All things were created through the WORD.  (rap gesture)

Kalum, Rachel, and everyone:  WORD! (rap gesture)

James: And the Word (rap gesture) was made flesh.  (rap gesture)

Kalum, Rachel and everyone: WORD! (rap gesture)

James: And the Word (rap gesture) dwelled among us.  (rap gesture)

Kalum, Rachel and everyone:  Word!  (rap gesture)

James:  And believing in the Word (rap gesture) we become children of God.  (rap gesture)

Kalum, Rachel, and everyone: Word! (rap gesture)

Kalum, Rachel, and everyone: Word! (rap gesture)

Kalum, Rachel, and everyone: Word! (rap gesture)

James(once again in his best British accent): I say, I think we’ve taught this mature group classical urban poetry!  Bravo. (James politely claps)

Constituted by the Word; A Postmodern Insight? Really?

1 Christmas   C    December 30,2012

Is.61:10-62:3     Ps. 147:13-21

Gal. 3:23-25,4:4-7  John 1:1-18

Lectionary Link 

  We know that the Gospels of Mark and John do not have the Christmas story in them.

  Mark’s Gospel begins at the baptism of Jesus and in this Gospel, Jesus appears to be adopted as God’s Son at his baptism when the heavenly voice says, “You are my beloved Son.”

  The Gospel of John, the last Gospel written of the four, does not seem to care that Jesus was born in Bethlehem.  The writer of John is much more philosophical. The writer understands that Jesus had an existence pre-existing his earthly life.  For the writer of John, he was the eternal Word of God who was with God from the Beginning.  When God spoke a creative word and said, “Let there be light,” the writer of John’s Gospel believes that Jesus as the Word was present at the time of creation.  And in the same paragraph the Word is called the light of humanity.   And that is a long time before Bethlehem.  Such a Word needed no star because the Word was Light.

  How does the Gospel of John summarize the Bethlehem event?  And the Word became Flesh and dwelt among us.  This is where we get the notion of Incarnation.  Word becoming flesh.

  I am fascinated with this ancient notion and how it expresses an insight that is just a relevant and mysterious today as it was then.

  The human ability to use words is what creates and organizes our world.  Word ability is what separates humanity from the other animals and from plants.  To achieve word ability is to leave infancy and childhood and come into the fullness of person hood.

  We take on our word ability without knowing it.  We use the words that we are given in our cultural settings.  Our world is in a certain way created by the words that we are taught to use.

  We speak words and we learn to write words.  When we see our world, we see it through invisible grids that names and categorizes everything that we are looking at.  Our bodies move with a body language because they express the purposes that are directed by word.

  Everything that we do is someway mediated and flavored by our use of language.  Even if we say we have pre-linguistic or non-language events, we use language to say it, and that disproves any pretense to having a life without word and language.  As babies we do not have active language but we are passive recipients of all of the active coding of our existence by our parents and their society.

  I think that the biggest elephant in the room for anything that we do is Word and Language.  We assume it in everything that we do, while we ignore its presence and significance.

  Today, I would like us to consider how our Word has been made flesh in our lives?

  What are the languages or words that our bodies are speaking?  What are our moral and our ethics?  Our behavior is the language that our bodies speak…our behavior is the result of our Word having been made flesh.  And it behooves us to ask ourselves what the scripts are that are directing the behavior of our lives?

   Are any of these scripts losing scripts for us?  Do we find our selves in patterns of repetition that represent bad habits or addictive behaviors?

  If we can get at the Word of our lives, we can begin to do some serious interdiction into the behaviors of our lives that we want to change, that we want to recreate.

  The reason we recommend education and reading of uplifting books and literature is so that we can saturate the language field of our lives so that we can orient ourselves to be able to act and behave in ways that show that we have faith, and love God and our neighbors as ourselves.

  We are and we become how we have been taught to use words.  And if we have some bad patterns, then we have to re-train ourselves at the very deep level of how our word is made flesh in our lives.

  One of things that I would encourage each person to do is to get in touch with one’s own language.  What are the passive habits of mind, body and speech that you have taken on because your particular experience in your family and culture?  Since we have not be raised in completely perfect environments;  since we have not been disciplined enough to expose ourselves to the highest forms of the use of words, we have taken on some habits that are in need of reform.  We are in need of some re-creation in our lives.

  What sort of re-creation do you and I need in our lives now?  And how can we undertake such re-creation?

  First, possess your words.  Most people are merely passive users of language, they are spectators of language.  Take up journaling and learn to possess the language that you have as an active user.  When you struggle for complete expression, you will begin to discover the kinds of words that already control your mind and your behavior.  And if you can get them into text or expression, you can begin understand in a conscious way the script that is guiding your lives.

  If Christ is the eternal Word, then it is suggested that the way in which we can change the scripts and word patterns that dictate the behaviors of our lives is by choosing the very best model for our word life.  Certainly Jesus Christ as the Word of God is the highest model that we can choose and in adopting Christ as our model, we can begin to change the deep infrastructure of our word life so that it begins to show up in how we actually behave.

  If Jesus is the Word of God, we can look to him and to God’s Spirit to begin to influence the words that organize and shape our lives.   Let us be hopeful about the Word of God and how it can influence and recreate our lives.    Let us not be lazy in our devotion to the Word of God and let us not be just passive users of words; let us begin to activate our life of word and expose ourselves to ourselves so that with honesty, we can seek the areas of re-creation that we need to pursue in the quest for excellence.

  Remember the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.  And the task of our life is to let the Word of God be made flesh in our flesh and direct the behavior of our lives in the path of faith.  May the Word of God dwell richly in our lives today.  Amen. 

Being Drawn to Innocence

Christmas Eve     C    December 24, 2012

Is. 9:2-4,6-7          Ps.96:1-4,11-12        

Titus 2:11-14        Luke 2:1-14  

Lectonary Link

   Good Christian friends rejoice!  Christ is born today!  Christ is born today!  In our language of hymns and poetry and in the language of the liturgy we attempt to remember important events.  On Christmas we proclaim that this world has become something completely different after the birth of Jesus into this world.  We may argue endlessly about how and why it is different and we may argue about details but it is fairly obvious that our world is different because Jesus was born. We accept the fact that our world has been completely changed because of this one person Jesus Christ and if we think about it very long we can be baffled at the impact of one person upon the entirety of human history.  How is it that such a person can be remembered and for such a long time in human history?  Most people are lost to the general corporate memory within a generation unless they make it into the history books but even great historical figures do not have the type of “staying power” like that of Jesus of Nazareth.  How many people today claim to have a personal relationship with the risen Caesar Augustus?  Not any that we know.  How many people even claim now to have a continuing personal relationship with Elvis Presley, a different sort of king?  Elvis had a few sightings in the years after his death and even though his songs live in recordings, he does not have the staying power of Jesus of Nazareth.

  Christ is born today!  How is the birth of Christ both a past and present reality?  How is it that Christ has become an omnipresent trans-historical personal presence to so many people?  One of the greatest mysteries of history is how the historical body of Jesus of Nazareth became mystified into the corporate body of Christ in such a significant and profound and expansive way.  How is it that we can say every day that “Christ is born today?”

  Christ is born today!  How do we know?  We have no specific calendar time evidence in the infancy narratives about Jesus from the Gospel.  We are given the information that it occurred during the reign of Caesar Augustus and when Quirinius was Governor of Syria but we are not given an exact date in the Gospel stories of Christmas.  The date gets assigned as part of the teaching and evangelistic liturgy that developed within the church.  The early followers of Jesus were very baffled and mystified about the continuing presence of Christ in their lives even after he apparently had taken leave of this world in his physical body?

  How could Jesus be gone from sight and touch and yet still be ready to be a potential “birthing event” within the lives of all who had the receptive attitude of the Virgin Mary.  The life of Christ is conceived in me?  Really?  Let it be to me according to your word.

  If we understand the metaphors of the New Testament we can understand the liturgy of the Christmas narrative.  The early followers of Jesus believed that Christ had risen but had returned as a mystical experience within the lives of all who had the serendipity of a new birth.  Baptismal waters were like the amniotic fluid of this new birth event.  In the liturgy of the church, a person was born by water and the Spirit.  The liturgy was a public accompaniment of this serendipitous experience of someone who felt like they had been born again.  And one was born again into a new way of seeing this world.  And the early church proclaimed that Christ was within each person as the hope of glory.  If you want fame and glory, you get it by recognition from God; what more fame does one need?

  The Christmas narrative is part of the spiritual liturgy of the early church as they celebrated the liturgy of the birth of Jesus as co-extensive with reality of the birth of Christ into the heart of those who were receptive to this new way of seeing the world.

  Why does Christmas have more public expressive power than the liturgies of Good Friday and Easter?  Christmas has profound expressive power because of the power and the mystery of the infant and child.  The liturgy of the church presents a year round cycle of learning; it is a very inter-generational cycle of learning.  If you have your choice, which would you rather choose, dealing with the joy of birth or dealing with the reality of death and the afterlife?  Good Friday and Easter deal with the reality of death and the afterlife and all things being equal, we are drawn to the birth and childhood liturgy.  We find it more universally appealing and obviously Christmas is very child friendly.

  Christmas is so powerful because it is the power of the infant.  One only has to be present to a sleeping infant or to see the smile of a baby or child to know the power of the child.  We know that there no higher blessings in life than receiving the blessing of a child.  An infant or child is not yet programmed into having ulterior motives for everything; they are not smart enough to have such motives yet and they retain what we call “innocence.”  We love the blessing of the one who is innocent and if we can make the world safe so that the innocent ones will continue to give us their blessing we feel as though this is an important adult vocation.  We can feel this brush with innocence also with our pets; we impute no ulterior motive to our pets and so when they show us their favor we feel blessed.  Dear friends, tonight is a feast of Innocence and we desperately want to have a brush with Innocence tonight and every night.

  Tonight is a liturgy of Innocence.  We want to be born again.  We want to become like the infant and babes for whom Jesus said the wisdom of the kingdom of God would be revealed.  We want to access the childlike so that we might access the original blessing of Innocence that would let us know that we live in God’s kingdom of love, hope, joy, faith and creativity.  Tonight we want to embrace Innocence and we want to be innocent without being naïve.  We want to be innocent and freed from all self-serving adult motives for doing anything in life.  We want the power of innocence to co-exist with and to permeate our fully adult lives.

  An artist or musician does not like to starve; as adults they have to earn a living but they still hope to retain the sheer joy of creativity in their calling.  A preacher has to earn a living too but in preaching, I want to access the art of inviting everyone to the sheer experience of God’s lovingly wondrous, joyful innocence.  In all of our adult vocations and relationships we live in webs of multi-faceted motivations about which we cannot be naïve; but in the midst of all our adult vocations and relationships we still want to access the holy experience of innocence.  We want to live the experience of having been brought into this world for no reason at all except for joy.  We want to re-access the smile that we had as an infant for no reason at all.  We want to re-access the native joy of innocence and we want this experience to permeate and influence our having to live with all of the adult protocols that seemingly dominate our lives.

  This original experience of innocence is still available to us tonight and it is the reality that is proclaimed in the Christmas liturgy.  Let us now take a deep breath and just breathe in the original innocence of our births that is retained in our memories forever.  And I want you to know tonight this original innocence is always, already available to us in our fully adult lives.

  This Christmas feast invites to be innocent without being naïve; we have lots of naïve religion in our world that ends in cruel judgments and actions.  The feast of Christmas is a feast of the new spiritual rebirth of the risen Christ within us.  And we can know the pure freshness of innocence in the midst of the world of tyrants like Herod and the other violent ones of our world.

  Tonight let us invite the Innocent into our lives and let us allow the power of innocence to be present in all of our adult relationships and callings in life.  And in our acceptance of the Innocent tonight, let us vow always to make this world safe for those who are vulnerable and innocent tonight.

  Merry Christmas dear friends.  Let innocence arise tonight in your hearts.  Let Christ be born in us.  Amen.

Birth Narratives and the Risen Christ in Us

4 Advent C     December 23, 2012

Micah 5:2-4   Song of Mary     

Heb.10:5-10   Luke 1:39-56

Lectionary Link

   The Old Testament presents us with the birthing and childhood traditions of the great servants of God.  Moses, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Samuel, David, and the prophets were memorable from birth or from their early childhood.  The biblical reason given for why some persons come to have eventful lives as leaders is that God chose them from the womb.  Before I was in the womb, God knew me…that is what the prophets and the psalmist said.

  John the Baptist and Jesus both became well-known; so they too had miraculous birth stories.  The founding personalities of the Christian tradition had their stories told using the miraculous birth template present in Hebrew Scriptures.  Elizabeth like Sarah of old was barren but conceived the baby John.  And of course, Jesus had the birth of births.  Before I was in womb God knew me….that is how the prophetic destiny was expressed in biblical terms.

  Mary and the aged and pregnant Elizabeth got together and John the Baptist became a gymnast in his mother’s womb when Mary shared the news of her conception with Elizabeth.

  So when did John the Baptist recognize the superiority of Jesus?  Even in the womb.  Certainly this story was an indication to all of the followers of John the Baptist, that John meant for all of his followers to follow Jesus.  After all, John the Baptist recognized Jesus when he was still in the womb.  And the Spirit of God inspired Elizabeth in the words that have become forever memorialized in the famous prayer:  Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you.  Blessed are you among women, and blessed be the fruit of your womb Jesus.

  It is interesting to note that in the Bible, the miracle birth stories end with John the Baptist and Jesus.  Yes, the miracle birth stories are found elsewhere.  The Roman Emperors had miracle birth stories where  the mother of the Caesar conceived in a temple through the action of a deity.

  But the reason the miraculous birth stories end with John the Baptist and Jesus in the Biblical tradition was that in the Christian community, the birth of every Christian was regarded to be miraculous.

  How so?  The Christian life was called a new birth, a being born again. How was a follower of Christ born again?  The Christian was born again when his or her life was overshadowed by the power of the Holy Spirit and the life of the risen Christ was conceived within the life of the Christian.

  St. Paul wrote, “Christ in you, is the only hope of glory.”  He also wrote, “I have been crucified with Christ, yet I live, but not I for Christ lives within me.”

  So Mary became very important; she not only was the mother of Jesus, but she was also the paradigm of every Christian who has the life of Christ reproduced within their lives by the presence of God’s Holy Spirit.  The stories reflect and teach a reality that has been lived by Christians for more than 2000 years.

  So as Jesus was born in Mary and was known to be such a unique person, his mother Mary and his origin could only be related in a way that befitted his unique life and ministry in our world.

  The great 13^th century mystic Meister Eckhart said, “What good is it that Christ was born many years ago if he is not born now in your heart?”

  If the birth of Christ could not be replicated as a spiritual reality throughout history, no one would ever hearken to even care about a man named Jesus of Nazareth in the first century.

  It was the spiritual reality of the risen Christ, who returned to be born in the hearts of his disciples that caused the life of Jesus to be remembered.

  The life of Jesus is remembered in a narrative way so that people would come to know the birth of the risen Christ in their hearts.

  The story of is Jesus is not something we should be arguing about because it is related in different ways in the Gospels: The significance of the Gospels are that they communicate in story form the reality that Christians lived because of their spiritual experience of the risen Christ.

  As we come again to Bethlehem on Christmas let us remember again those words of Meister Eckhart when he said, “What good is it that Christ was born many years ago if he is not born now in your and my heart?”  Amen.

Rejoice, Repentance and Newtown, CT

3 Advent C     December 16, 2012

Zeph 3:14-20  Canticle 9         

Phil.4:4-9    Luke 3:7-18

Lectionary Link

  There are events that happen that alter our lives; there are events that alter a formerly planned sermon.  And the terrible shootings in Newtown, CT have a way of altering our lives even from across the country.  The immediate communication in our lives makes us linked with people and draws from us our emotional and intellectual and spiritual participation in this faraway, but close event.

  Today is the Third Sunday of Advent, Rose Sunday, Refreshment Sunday and also called gaudete, the Latin for the command, “Rejoice!”  The Epistle lesson begins with this: “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice.”  The event in Newtown forces us to juxtapose the liturgical command “rejoice” with the downright horrifying and we may not feel like heeding any command to rejoice today.

  How can we rejoice today in the freshness of this assaulting event?  This event reveals to us the power of evil.  Evil has a parasitical power; it feeds off the normalcy of goodness.  It steals the energy of what is good and lovely and kind; it deprives goodness its place of normalcy.  Peace is deprived of peaceful effects as terror robs the calming energy of peace.  Evil creates ripple effects from one actual event and snowballs into our lives far away from the impact of the actual event and gets magnified into a lie that creates fear for us.  If it happened there; it will happen here too with us.  And that is wildfire lie of evil; it can spread seemingly endless collateral fear and make us alter our lives to prepare for what will not actually happen.  And we ask ourselves how can we resist the aftershock of an event that was a unique occurrence?

  The prophet Zephaniah wrote, “Rejoice and exalt in the Lord…you shall fear disaster no more.”  How can you write that you reality denying prophet?  The writing of the book of Zephaniah may have accumulated from the time of King Josiah until late in the post-monarchic period in Israel’s history, that is around four hundred years and they were some of the worst years for Israel.  The prophetic words are poetry; they may be a liturgy.  Like a mother rocking a very sick baby and who does not know when the baby will be alright, the mom lullabies “There, there my sweet baby, all is going to be well.”  We accept mother’s words of comfort in hard times even though she cannot guarantee a particular outcome.  I believe that this is how the words of the prophets often ministered to a suffering and oppressed people.  “There, there, things will be well, things will be better, things will be glorious and wonderful.  Believe in the good, the better and the wonderful.  Do not give up believing in the normalcy of the wonderful, even when the actual circumstances seem to contradict it.”

  Today we receive the command, Rejoice and we receive it even when we don’t feel like it.  Do we resist obeying the command or do we let it work its corrective purpose?

  What would I mean by the corrective purpose of the command to rejoice?  In a Dickensian sense, all times in some ways are the “best of times and the worst of times.”  The question involves who is experiencing the fuller impact of the worst of times at any given time.  Best and worst of times are distributed in a random and unequal manner over the population at any given time.  Yes, we’re all in this life together but simply by saying we’re all together does not immediately result in sharing evenly the impact of events of the best and worst of times.

  But the evil of the worst of times has a macabre power as we have seen in this horrifying school shooting.  This evil event in our day of immediate communication has the ability to suck the oxygen from our attending to the everyday goodness of life.  An evil event can demand our attention; it exaggerates its place of importance in our lives even though we are thousands of miles away.  It can make us think that an actual event can reproduce itself in our environment and it cajoles us to respond in fear, anxiety and pessimism.  Crimes that occur because of mental affliction cause us even more distress because we are tempted to minimize mental illnesses as being somehow less valid than physical illnesses, even when we know that brain chemistry is a physical phenomenon.  We are tempted to look for failure of nurturing in the immediate environment of the one who committed the crime; or we look for the general enemy and we find it in some sense to be the collective “us” with such permissive freedoms in our society.

  The macabre power of evil requires the corrective purpose of the liturgy of “rejoice.”  Rejoice in the Lord always and again I say rejoice!  The command to rejoice is a creative command.  God said let there be light and there was light.  Let there be joy and there was joy.  Why?  Because joy is normal and natural.  To see a smiling baby tells us that joy is the natural state of life; for joy to be taken away is a situation of deprivation, but deprivation cannot define what is normal about life.  That is why we need the corrective purpose of the command to “rejoice.”  This command is a reminder of what is normal even while we mourn a devastating event of life.

 On this day when we are commanded to rejoice, we are also commanded to repent.  Repent is a command to educate ourselves in a way that means we are always taking remedial action.  It means that we learn to perform better today than we did yesterday. 

  Today is a day of these two commands, Rejoice and Repent.  We obey the command to rejoice so that we do not let evil establish itself in the place of what is normal.  We obey the command to rejoice because in the sum total of things that happen to us in this life we believe that most of them are good and beneficial and so we rejoice to count our blessings.  We work to limit the boundaries and the duration of the effect of the act of evil.  So in our prayer we submit to the command to rejoice as part of the corrective purpose of joy in the re-establishing the goodness of creation.

  But there is also from John the Baptist the command to repent.  And we need to heed this command too, in our personal lives, our parish lives and in our society?  Do we have too much virtual violence in our society that desensitizes minds to actual pain?  Life is not a video game that can be restarted after all of the targeted people are killed.  Do we have too much freedom of accessibility to weapons of war which allows persons a choice of action that should not even be offered?    And can we turn back the clock on our culture of virtual violence and our culture of the freedom of the second amendment for profit for those who will sell almost any weapon that can be sold?  Because certain weapons have a potential market, should all weapons be sold?  We live in a society that has made peace with ticketing and fining us for driving without a seat belt. We live in a society where we can be ticketed for using our mobile phones while driving and be required to wear motorcycle helmets; surely we can find some collective legislative wisdom regarding the probability of events of violence and the general accessibility of certain kinds of weapons.  And without getting emotional, we can let the people of actuarial science guide in probability and prevention.  We let insurance companies do this with their rates all of the time.

  I do not have easy answers except to say life is precious and worth the efforts of repentance in all manner of personal and social behavior that will promote quality and duration of life.

  Rejoice and repent, the two can co-exist for us as we endeavor to celebrate the primacy of goodness, hope, love, health, life and kindness and as we work to resist and prevent everything that challenges the primacy of goodness, life, health, safety and love.  And may we find a way forward in repentance; insights on how we can be better and some action to make it so.

  Let us Rejoice and Repent, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Repentance, a Scary Word, or Just Education?

2 Advent  Cycle C     December 9, 2012

Malachi.  3:1-4      Song of Zecariah  

Philippians 1:1-11     Luke 3:1-6

Lectionary Link

   The words of the prophet Malachi were used for a baritone aria in the oratorio by George Fredrick Handel, The Messiah.  “But who may abide the day of his coming.  Who shall stand when he appeareth.  For he is like a refiner’s fire.”  And Handel’s Messiah did not include the phrase, “he is like fuller’s soap.”

  In broad terms one could say that the ministry of the ancient prophets was one of education.  The prophets were teachers who tried to motivate people to live well.  They believed that living well had to do with knowing how to reach beyond what people already knew and to seek further horizon in human experience.  And beyond the horizon was the realm where God beckoned people to continually surpass themselves in excellent behavior.  The prophet often went to the edge of society to avoid distractions and hear the calling from the far horizon of human experience.

  How did God function in the experience of the prophet?  The prophet used the metaphors common to metallurgy and to the production of cloth.  The work of God is like the production of a pure metal; it requires heat to burn off the impurities until the silver or gold attains their purist forms.  The work of God is like “industrial strength Woolite.”  Fuller’s soap was combination of ash and alkali used on newly woven wool to soften it up to be used to make clothing.

  So the process of education is like the process of making pure metal.  It is like the process of softening harsh wool to be useable for making clothes.  There seems to be an emphasis in the prophets about the painful process of education.  The assumption for the prophets was that the teaching process of history for God’s people both on the personal and corporate level involved a painful process.  There is a phase of nurture that is painful.  Growing up involves painful experiences.  Education involves the painful unlearning of some habits in order to take on new habits of mind and practice.

  The church uses the liturgical calendar to present two distinct seasons of learning, Advent and Lent.  And the church has often emphasized the painful side of education and learning.  It is painful to give up old habits and take on new ones.

  We have in our religious tradition a tradition of educators who are like military drill sergeants.  Many of the prophets often seemed like drill instructors.  And in the season of Advent we have the ultimate drill sergeant arrive on the scene, the one and only John the Baptist.  John arrives on the scene and immediately we feel like he is saying to us, “Okay maggots, drop and give me 100 pushups now!”  We probably do not like the boot camp style of John the Baptist.  We aren’t boot camp people, we think.  That’s for people who are in prison or for the proverbial problem kid who is sent off to military academy for disciplinary training.  Instead of John the Baptist, I’d rather have my Advent teacher be Mister Rogers who would simply tell me that it’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood and that I’m special.  I think that I would learn more with Mister Rogers’ style than with boot camp sergeant, John the Baptist.

  Perhaps what you and I can ponder during this season of Advent is what further education means for each of us.  Why are drill sergeants needed in life?  They are needed to prepare us for things that we don’t just naturally want to prepare ourselves for.  Probably, it is not natural to be prepared for the conditions of war; that’s why marines and soldiers go to boot camp to be forced to harden themselves for the conditions of war.  And they need to be forced to do some things that they wouldn’t just do on their own.  Why does a coach want the team to practice in a strenuous way?  The coach wants the team to be prepared for the game.

  Discipline for excellent performance in extenuating circumstances requires a departure from our normal patterns.  In some way discipline implies an out of the ordinary learning process.  What do we call persons who embraces a discipline?  We call them disciples.  Often we are happy to celebrate that Jesus had twelve disciples and so he didn’t need to have any more disciples and that term “disciple of Jesus” would be too austere and too pretentious for any of us to aspire to.

  Are we to be congratulated for our modesty today for not aspiring to be disciples of Jesus?  “Oh, I would not want to be a disciple of Jesus, that would be much too pretentious and the 11 of the 12 did it so well. “  

  Advent is a season to remind us to embrace education as a metaphor for what is happening to us in life.  We can say events in our lives are but happening to us in some random way without any purpose or we can read all of the events of our lives to have a purpose.  And even when the purpose that we assign or discover might seem a bit individual or arbitrary, assigning or finding purpose in the events of our lives happens because we have faith.  Faith is the attitude of accepting that from the horizon of human experience from the God-world we are loved and called to surpass our own horizons with future excellence.  We are to accept life and history as our teacher.  Being a disciple of Jesus means that we view ourselves as being mainly in life as those who are willing to be taught, those willing to be educated.  Life is sometimes a hard instructor and sometimes harsh and painful and sometimes life is a seductive teacher and sometimes joyful and sometimes fun and sometimes humorous and sometimes musical and sometimes artistic and beautiful and sometimes awesome and breath taking.

   During the season of Advent we need to remind ourselves that we are ever the students of life.  And as students we need to also be willing to be mentors and teachers to each other.  We need sometimes to be drill sergeants ourselves.  We need to be those who intervene, particularly on behalf of children and the vulnerable.  There are children in this world who are being given inappropriate and untimely learning experiences in their lives, like for example the children refugees in Sudan.  This world is full of situations where God’s lesson plan of love has not been learned.

  John the Baptist is the one who became a hermit; the word hermit comes from the same Greek for wilderness.  John went to the horizon of human civilization to hear another voice and another word.  And because he went there, he found that others became interested in what he had heard in the far fringes of human society in the God-world.  And when John saw people’s interest in the God-world he warned them.  He in effect said to them, “Don’t play with religion.  I am not the latest guru circus bear to entertain you.  If you are curious and interested in what I have found in the God-world, then make a serious commitment to education.”

  Repentance is but a fancy religious word for education.  Advent is about repentance; it is about education.  Education is a more accessible word for us in our lives and we need to embrace the broad implication of education for our lives.  How can I read the signs in the events of my life giving me indication of some different choices that I need to make now to achieve the next insight and the next plan of action?

  Advent is also a time of education for our parish?  What is God trying to teach us as a parish as we finish this year and as we begin 2013?  What do we need to do differently?  What changes do we need to make?  How can we respond with greater faith to the educational experiences that are upon our parish right now?

  Let us not be threatened by the word education.  Let us not be threatened by the vision of the  self-surpassing people that God calls us to be.  Let us not be frightened by the possibility of a newer parish life that beckons us to commitment and excellence.  And let us not be modest about our primary educational vocation, namely,  being disciples of Christ in the school of life.  Amen.

An Advent One Sermon That Will Not Be Preached

1 Advent C      December 2, 2012

Jeremiah 33: 14-16     Psalm 25: 1-9

1 Thessalonians  3:9-13   Luke 21:25-31

Lectionary Link

  Did you ever ponder the diversity of areas of interest that a person of modest income and education can have in our time and place?  We can be substantial cluttered multi-taskers.  About four PIP…picture in picture venues on the screen.   Ballgame, googling, reading a book, updating two blogs, three facebook pages, writing a sermon, and listening to music, and a news commentator on the TV in the next room, checking text message on a smart phone, doing research in multiple areas of interest at one time and writing stuff for children, teenagers, for spiritual direction, for counseling sessions, lyrics for songs, involved in political discussions, and following Curiosity on Mars and much, much more.  And as a news and information junkie who is disillusioned with anyone who thinks that they have found a final answer, I think this is a pretty exciting time to live in.  And you might think this is a cluttered shame.

  But ponder the amount of world knowledge accessible to the ordinary person in biblical times with the amount of world knowledge and variety of experience available to us today.  You see where it might be difficult for us to be impressed with the details of the Bible because it has to compete with so many more kinds of text and cyber textual experiences.  We as the church have forced ourselves to read this book in public even while for the stuff of our modern life we resort to the entire panoply of “self-help” gurus to fine-tune our life performance.  And what do the Bible and Jesus have to do with us?

  The people in biblical times had a comparatively minute body of world knowledge compared to what we have today.  With so little world information their lives could be more easily unified and entertained.  And their religious life was also their political life and their entertainment.  They could network by sitting with their wise people who could spin tales from their reading, travels, and knowledge acquired beyond the border of the village or neighborhood.  They could in hushed tones speculate about their political affairs, that is, their state of oppression by the Empire, the one that struck back again and again and took out the Temple and Jerusalem.

  There was a political figure in their time known as the Son of Man.  In the prophet Daniel such a Son of Man was to be one who was to come in the clouds.  That expression was vague enough to be able to bear the projections of many who speculated about the fate of God’s people since their actual conditions did not always seem to be what could be called providential favor and blessing.  So, writers in apocalyptic books such as the book of Enoch speculated about such a Son of Man.  This writing did not make it into official Bibles but it was influential enough to show up in the street conversations with populist rabbis in Palestine.

  Biblical Scholars are not really sure about this figure in the Gospel called the Son of the Man.  They are not sure as whether Jesus at times is referring to this Son of Man as someone who is not himself or to a future role that he himself would assume.  The Gospels are first of all, literature; they are written and as writing their teaching function prevails over their being mirrors of historical events.   This is most evident when Jesus often speaks of the Son of Man or Messiah in the third person and that kind of speech betrays the fact that the Gospels are in fact teaching literature and liturgy.  The Gospels also integrated the actual street language, the political speech that Jesus and his counter-culture gang used as they traveled.

  The Son of Man was important just as the resurrection was important because the world of God’s people woefully lacked justice.  The Empire and Empires had stuck again and again and God’s people were often those who bore the brunt of those strikes by the Empires: Persian, Assyrian, Greek and Roman.

  Religious talk in the alley on the hush hush was also political but it was also partly their entertainment since politics has a largely theatrical aspect about it in how it comes to the people.  Religious talk was also entertainment; Son of Man and resurrection talk was very entertaining.  Such talk was imaginative and engaged the imaginations.  We today have so many compartments that derive from genres and specializations as compared to the time of Jesus when world knowledge was so minimal that the religion, politics and entertainment all came together.  And I am not trivializing or diminishing it by making such a suggestion.  They in their time, like we are in ours, need to deal with the issue of justice.  Theodicy?  How can God be believed to be just in the face of innocent suffering in this world?

   In their day and in ours when we sense the severe impoverishment of justice, our stomachs are sickened.  We need catharsis.  In our day of Hollywood, we have the visualizations of vigilante saviors who in the duration of a two hour movie bring the “bad guys” to justice and rescue the good guys and the weak and the poor.  But vigilantism is not justice because once vigilantism becomes codified into the law of the land, it becomes the law of those who “have” oppressing those who “do not have.”

  And so in the time of Jesus, the Son of Man was an ultimate figure of the future representing the projection from the hearts crying the eternal need for justice.  The Son of Man was a future judge and the severity of the oppression intensified expectancy for the imminent arrival of that judge.

  Why do you need resurrection and a judge as a narrative for future life?  What if the oppressors die and leave this world in the lap of luxury?  What if the oppressed who believed that the Lord loves the poor, the widow and the orphans, die and leave this world in the state of oppression?  How can a just God be proclaimed to anyone now?  Resurrection is an imagination on how retroactive justice can be exacted.  If everyone has to face a future judge then accounts and scores can be settled and in the end we can hold out that our faith and hope in a just God has been validated.

  So do not disparage the Son of Man language or the eternal return of the desire for the realization of justice.  Let us be thankful if our laws in some significant way approximate justice and dignity and spread this fairness to as many as we can in our life time.

  We will seek catharsis from our anger at injustice in “quick fix” wars and vigilantism and perhaps achieve temporary fixes in ridding the world of the violence and terror.  And some of our anger for justice will be merely the catharsis of an Action film but even that  cinematic vigilante justice is a faint artistic liturgy of repugnance in the face of injustice.

  The resurrection, the Son of Man, the judge and Jesus as a future judge are very profound and inspired narrative bearing our quest for justice and more importantly, expressing our own need to be just.

  The season of Advent is about what is coming.  The future is what is coming.  And what is coming?  A judge and justice and if we are living in fear about it we should simply switch our focus and see the Son of Man as the judge who invites us to be Just now and to practice mercy and kindness.  Advent is about being invited to Justice.  And justice is a lifelong quest and Jesus invites us to the Son of Man who is our judge and who offers us the Gospel of justice.  Amen.