John Rewrites Passion as Triumph

Good Friday    March 29, 2013

Isaiah 52:13-53:12 Ps 22

Heb.10:1-25        John 18:1-19:37

Lectionary Link

  The Passion Gospel of John is quite a different Passion Gospel.  It is so triumphant that it would seem to ignore or underplay the pain and devastation that the event of crucifixion would be.

  In the Passion Gospel of John, it is presented as though Jesus is calling the shots step by step.

  When the police of the chief priests arrive in the Garden of Gethsemane to arrest Jesus, in John’s Gospel, Judas is not needed to identify Jesus with a kiss.  Jesus steps forward and says,”Who are you looking for?”  When they say, “Jesus of Nazareth.”  Jesus says, “I am he.”  And when he does, the soldier all fall to the ground.  The phrase “I am” said by Jesus in the Gospel of John is to identify him with the God who approached Moses in the burning bush and called himself, “I am.”  In John’s Gospel, Jesus said, “I and the Father are One.”  And so when Jesus said “I am he,” he has the authority to knock the soldiers over like a bowling ball hitting pins.  At the arrest, who is in control?

  Peter drew his sword and cut off the ear of a soldier and Jesus told him to put away his sword because he was going to drink the cup of death given to him by his Father.

  The Jews did not use crucifixion as a method of death punishment; their preferred method according to the law was stoning.  In John’s Gospel the writer is writing towards a crucifixion goal.  “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up.”  Jesus also said in John’s Gospel, “If I be lifted up, I will draw all people to myself.”  The cross was the Roman method of the spectacle to discourage any insurrection.  And in John’s Gospel, the Cross is like an advertising billboard proclaiming the Kingship of Jesus.  What incredible irony that such literature should arise in the late first and early 2^nd century when there were still powerful emperors on the Roman throne.

   Jesus said to Pilate, “You have no power over me unless it was given to you.  Those who delivered me to you have a greater sin.”  So here we have a late writing and the Roman’s role in the crucifixion is being softened to be less than the role of the Jews.  This is written well after the separation of the synagogue and the church and when the majority of the followers of Christ are Gentile Roman citizens.

  What are we to make of this presentation of the Passion by the Gospel of John?  The Gospel of John is evidence of the strength of the Jesus Movement.  One does not look back at origins and interpret them in such triumphant way unless the Movement shows signs of great vitality and strength.

  There is something about completion that redeems and even brings about a reinterpretation and a complete re-writing of the past. 

  Can you imagine the mountain climber struggling to get to the top and having incredible doubts about being able to make it, but then from the top, the struggle looks different?

  Christianity is re-written from the top of the mountain of resurrection and John’s Passion account is proof of the future redeeming the past almost to the point of being unrecognizable as being true to the conditions of a Roman crucifixion.

  Good Friday is all about the method of rewriting our past lives from the perspective of resurrection.  This re-writing is the work of faith when we are able to declare the past as providence, even when it did not seem so at the time.  Without trivializing pain and suffering in the past, it is the work of hope to relativized suffering to make it serve a future.  And the work of faith is to be involved in anticipating a better future.

  Today, I invite you to look back at a very bad Friday in your life, and ask yourself if current outcomes have helped you to come to call your past, Good.  It could be that it may not ever happen because there may be some wounds that time does not seem to heal.  But are those wounds made beneficial to us as we attempt to use them to minister to others going through something similar?

  Let us offer up our bad Fridays to God today, in hopes that in time we can by faith call them Good.  Amen.

We Have Been Crucified with Christ

Palm Sunday and Passion Sunday        March 24, 2013

Is. 50: 4-9a        Ps. 31: 9-16         

Phil. 2:5-11       Luke 23:1-49  

Lectionary Link

   

  Palm Sunday and Passion Sunday are based upon two different events in the Gospel.  In one scene the crowds in the ticker tape parade of branches, cry, “Hosanna, blessed is the King.”  In the other scene Jesus is put on trial and another crowd yells, “Crucify him, we have no king but the Emperor.”

  How do we do two liturgies for this day?  Some parishes do not try to combine them; it is too much to juxtapose.

  At St. John’s in our quest for topic overload, our Bishop is here for Visitation and so we have confirmation and people being received.  Since we are having confirmation and our bishop is here we added a Lenten discipline of reviewing our faith and then all of us together renewing our vows with those being confirmed and received.  Yes, it is a jumping of the gun on the Vigil and Easter, but we have the Vigil every year, we don’t always have our bishop with us for confirmations.

  So we have one grand multi-tasking liturgy and if that is too much, too bad.  The Plentitude of life experience does not divide itself up neatly into categories for our pieties.  And even if I seem to be doing something akin to a British no-no of mixing sweets and savories, I would like to make the case that life always everywhere juxtaposes multi-experiences of people.

  Agonies, ecstasies and everything in between are happening everywhere at all times.  Just because  I may be shielded in my joy does not mean that someone else is too.  Life is full to the hilt of differentiated experiences of people and differentiation in valuing things in the world.

  Take for example the Cross; what a terrible use of a beautiful tree!  Just because a cross was made out of one tree this does not nullify all of the trees that continued to grow in the landscape or the ones which were used for beautiful furniture.  The use-value of wood has a differentiation in human experience and we experience multi-use values all of the time.

  In the Palm Sunday parade, the children cried out their praise for Jesus the King.  This Jesus said that one had to become like a child to understand and perceive God’s Kingdom.  Pilate and others did not get this message; they got the message but used it as cruel joke.  Instead of riding a donkey, Pilate made Jesus ride the cruel cross of crucifixion.

  One has to say that strangely, Christians came to value the death of Jesus.  What could be the value of such a death?  How can a person like Paul who once tried to make people die like Jesus become one who gloried in the cross of Christ?

  How indeed could the very worst thing that could happen to a person in the first century become the very best for the early Christian communities?

  Each of the four Gospels has an account of the Passion.  One can assume that the Passion Gospel became the liturgical performance of a spiritual method.  This spiritual method is best known in the Pauline admission: “I have been crucified with Christ, yet I live, not I who lives but Christ lives within me.”

  If we understand this confession we can understand the purpose of the Passion liturgy.  Unfortunately, the practitioners of Christianity, including the hierarchy lost sight of the spiritual methodology and were left with just presenting the story of the Passion Gospel.  The literal recounting of the Passion includes some incorrect features.  The Gospels make it seem as though the Jews killed Jesus when the Jews really did not have such power or authority.  The Passion Narratives refer to the Jews which is strange because Jesus too is a Jew.   The Passion Gospels show the results of having been edited and redacted in times when more Roman Gentiles were followers of Christ and when the followers of Christ were separated from the synagogue and had become a separate religion.   The Roman dominate role in the crucifixion has been "softened."   By just looking at the literal Gospel, there were times in the history of the church that the reading of the Passion incited so called Christians to go out and persecute the Jews for their responsibility for the death of Jesus.

  This literal externalizing of the Gospel Passion misses the point.  And what is the point of the Passion?

  Jesus died out of this world and out of sight in order that Christ might be known as living in and through us in our thinking, seeing and doing.   If Christ is living through us we can no longer “see him;” rather we are involved in the continual task of checking our egos so that the Christ-nature can “be through us.”  This checking of our ego is how we are crucified with Christ and we live but don’t live, because the risen Christ lives in us.

  Let us be aware of the spiritual methodology of the early church: The Passion Gospel was to give a liturgical form to express the interior quest to always let Christ live through us.

  Today, as we begin Holy Week, let us remember the internal spiritual methodology of all that we do this week:  We have been crucified with Christ, we live, but we don’t because Christ lives in and through us.  Anything other than this can border on a crass literalism and sentimentalism.  Let us remember today, “We have been crucified with Christ.”  Amen.

A Theology of Excess

5 Lent     C        March 17, 2013       

Is.43:16-21        Ps.126              

Phil.3:8-14        Luke 20:9-19      

Lectionary Link

  In the Gospel story traditions there are multiple accounts of a woman or women who have approached Jesus in social settings and who have washed, anointed, kissed and wiped the feet of Jesus with their hair.

  One cannot get any lower on the human body than the feet and so if one adores the feet of another it is an act of excessive devotion or honor.  In some cultures it was not a voluntary act.  Ancient monarchs had protocols of bowing and prostrating oneself before royalty as the only prescribed way of being in the presence of the great one.  There are all sorts of protocol for showing respect.  Have you ever been to an ordination?  Often the ordination begins with the candidate lying face down in front of the altar as the litany for ordination is recited.  You can been sure that lots of brother cardinals were genuflecting and kissing the hand of the prelate they elected to be their new Father in God, as their Pope even though he doesn't seem to be one so inclined to such stuff.   The irony of a church that became an Empire is that the princes of the church ended up taking over protocols of respect that were practiced in secular culture where the Emperor had been reverenced as a deity.  It perhaps offends our democratic sensibilities even as it inspires our sense of attraction to ancient customs.  Some cultures still observe the practice of touching the feet of someone who is respected.  Gurus and Sufi sheikhs often receive bowings and kisses and touching of their feet.    It is a cultural way of acknowledging what a community regards to be a particular personal oracle of the sublime.

   Comedians often satirize such behaviors: The comedy team of Wayne and Garth used to mock such customs of adoration by doing fake bows and saying, “We are not worthy, we are not worthy.”

   There are lots of feet jokes too: there was the woman who said to her husband with a foot fetish, “I will only let you honor my feet by buying a $1000 pair of Italian-made high heels.”

   I doubt if any of us is too socially comfortable with this scenario of Mary of Bethany pouring perfume on the feet of Jesus and then drying his feet with her hair.  How uncomfortable would this be for us?  In our speechlessness we might be thinking, “Get a room!”  The only context for us to understand such excessive and unusual display of devotion would be in the privacy of the silliness of things done under the influence of the pathological state of romantic love.  Book her with a DUIL, done under the influence of Love.

  There is something quite transgressive in going public with such stories of devotion.  We know from first century culture and from many traditional Middle Eastern cultures today, the practice of the public segregation of men and women.  So, the event of a woman touching Jesus in the presence of other people was a violation of social custom.  Mary was unwomanly for doing so; Jesus was unmanly for allowing it to happen.

  I think to understand this story is to move beyond the fact of any original event and understand how the writer of John was writing for his community with the sense of the anticipatory present tense, meaning how can stories in the life of Jesus be told to represent our own experience with the risen Christ?

  And this preacher preaches with the same anticipatory present tense:  How can I relate to us the meaning of this wildly, exotic and foreign story the relevance of it in our understanding of the risen Christ in our lives today?

  Obviously, the act of Mary could be understood as her profound gratitude for Jesus bringing her brother Lazarus back to life. (A story found in the chapter before).   The book of Signs is a document incorporated into John’s Gospel, and the bringing of Lazarus back to life was the last Sign.  The early church writers were trying to teach their members how to live their lives knowing that Jesus was the Resurrection and Life.

  Their conclusion: The life of the Risen Christ invited the expression of excess.  This act of Mary was an act of excess that defied social custom and the logic of the priority in the use of assets.  Acts of excess co-exists with lots of poverty and human need.  One sees examples of this everywhere:  Why do Cathedrals and Temples get built with the beauty of architecture and gold, silver and ornamentation in the midst of people of poverty.   Doesn’t it seem ludicrous that Cathedrals and Temples exists in place of such poverty and yet people will shuffle on bloody knees as an act of thankful devotion, penance or act of anticipation for something good to happen to them?

  Like the infamous Judas Iscariot in the story we might point out the contradiction of excess and poverty in this life.

  And the words of Jesus tell us to leave her alone in her excess.  The event of excess has to be permitted.  In fact, one of the secrets of life might be finding where we can commit events of excess.

  I would like to make the case for a theology of excess.  I think that deep within each human being is life force and this life force comes to have many names depending upon how we experience it or categorize it.  This life force is so profound that it represents the capacity for excess that is at the center of all of us.  This life force is known as it radiates through us and focuses upon all of the objects in our outer world.  All of the objects and the people of our outer world provide for our excessive life force the occasions of attraction and repulsion.  If our life force can be spread out in in even ways on general objects it is sublimated or diluted in its intensity and it can provide the general pleasure and enjoyment that is necessary for sustaining hopeful lives.  The truth of the excess of our life force is that some of it gets fixated or more intensely focused upon some items or people or activities more than other.  Why do people fall in love with one person and not another?  Why do people like baseball but not cricket?  Why do some people like knitting but not football?  The rhyme and reason of how our life force gets focused is not always known.

  When our life force gets too fixated it leaves us in the state of addiction.  Some addictions are more acceptable than others; some addictions allow us to remain more functional in our overall life.  I would say that lots of the problems in life have to do with not understanding the profundity of our life force, not knowing how our live force is meant to be expressed as the energy of our charismatic personalities and gifts to interact with others, not knowing what to do when depression does not allow us to enjoy the flow of our life energy, and  not knowing that the purpose of our life energy is not to create an environment that adores us as our narcissistic reflection.

  The theology of excess is what I believe that Jesus allowed from Mary and what the writer of John’s Gospel was encouraging of the people who came to worship together.  It is known in the famous phrase of the once very worldly and passionate St. Augustine, when he wrote, “The heart is endlessly restless until it finds its rest in God.”

  The profundity of our life force is that it seeks more than life can visibly give us.  It seeks Christ beyond his life and death and in his resurrection.  And when our hearts know that they cannot be satisfied completely with anything that we can know in this life but can have this beyond life touch of the sublime, then we can find the occasion of excess, the excess of worship.  This is the ecstasy of the prophet Isaiah hearing the Holy, Holy, Holy, in his heavenly vision.  It is the joy of finding love of love and love in love.  It makes one profoundly grateful and when one is profoundly grateful excess happens; Cathedrals get built, people get fed, ministry gets done.  Excess is the natural response of gratitude.  Neither spiritual gratitude nor spiritual excess is found where people live thinking God has been stingy, inaccessible and parsimonious with them.

  The Gospel is read today with the message of hope that people will have the occasions of excess and gratitude from having the experience of knowing that God has done something special for them.  And I pray for the serendipity of such excess and gratitude today.    Amen.

Alligator Gives up Meat for Lent?

Gospel Puppet Show

March 17, 2013

Characters:

Ally, the Alligator

William

William:  Hi boys and girls.  Do you know what church season it is?  Is it Christmas?  Is it Epiphany?  Is it Pentecost?  Is it Easter?  Is it Advent?  There is only one more to guess.  What is it?   It is the season of Lent.  And during the season of Lent we like to do special things.  We like to show God how we are thankful.  I told my parents not to buy any pizza for me during Lent and give some food to the food bank to help feed hungry.  And I do this because I am thankful for having enough to eat.

(Ally the Alligator suddenly pops up with his mouth wide open and frightens William)

William:  Help! An alligator is attacking.  I’ve got to get away.

Ally:  Stop, don’t run away.  I’m not going to hurt you or bite you.  Please come back.  I need your help.

William:  But alligators are dangerous meat eating creatures.  And I do not want to be your breakfast, lunch or dinner.

Ally:  Do be afraid of me.  I heard you talking about Lent.  And I am doing something special for Lent.

William:  What are you doing?

Ally: I have given up eating meat for Lent.  I’ve become a vegetarian.  I only eat sea weed now and algae.

William: Well, that must be really hard to do.

Ally:  It was for a few days but now I like it.  I feel better and so even after Lent is over, I am still going to be a vegetarian.  I found out that I have more friends to play with if I don’t eat them.

William: Well, that’s a good point.  You can be very lonely if you eat everyone in your neighborhood.

Ally:  But I have a problem.  Now that I’m a vegetarian, my teeth get very, very green and I can’t get them shining white.  And sea weed gets stuck between the teeth.  So I need your help.

William:  Today, is a good day for green teeth; it’s St. Patrick’s Day.  But why do you need my help.

Ally:  I need you to brush and floss my teeth.

William:  I can’t do that.  I am afraid to put my hand in the mouth of an alligator.  Do you think that I’m crazy?

Ally:  Well, I won’t bite you.  But maybe you can trick Fr. Phil into to doing it.

William:  Father Phil, could you do something special for Lent.  Could you help my friend Ally the Alligator.

Fr. Phil:  I guess but I don’t have much experience with alligators.  What does your friend want?

William:  He wants you to brush and floss his teeth.

Fr. Phil:  Are you kidding.  You want me to put my fingers in a alligators mouth?  Children, should I do it?  

William:  But Ally is friendly and he even gave up meat for Lent and now he’s become a full time vegetarian.  And that is a problem; it made his teeth very green and he has sea weed stuck between his teeth.

Fr. Phil:  Okay, Ally, I am going to trust you.  Open your mouth wide while I brush and floss your teeth.

(Fr. Phil brushes and flosses Ally’s teeth)

Ally: Oh that feel good and now my girl friend will not tease me about having green lipstick on my teeth.

Fr. Phil:  Okay, I’m all done.  Your teeth are all shining white again.  Congratulation on giving up meat for Lent.  I know everyone is feeling safer in your neighborhood now.

Ally:  Sometimes when we’re thankful we just feel like doing some wonderful things.  And I am thankful and so I gave up eating meat.  And William gave up eating pizza for Lent and is giving some money to the food bank instead of buying pizza.

William:  Lent is a good time to be thankful and if we are thankful we can do things to help others.

Fr. Phil:  Ally and William, I am proud of you for your special acts of thanksgiving.  God promises us abundant life and God promises life beyond death so we don’t have to live in fear.  So we can be very thankful.   Let’s give Ally and William a big hand.  Thank you for teaching us a lesson in thanksgiving. 

Tough Love, Dumb Love, God's Love

4 Lent    C         March 10, 2013     

Joshua 5:9-12          Ps.32           

2 Cor. 5:17-21     Luke 15:11-32     

Lectionary Link

  

  What if I were to say or assume that I have been so good and upright in my behavior that I am living proof that God loves me more than God loves others.  If I said this, you might say to me, “Phil, have you even tried just the appearance of humility?”

  What if I said, “I have done the worst things in my life so that I can prove that God does not or will not love me because my deplorable nature can change the nature of God and make God not love me.   "Look what I’m going to do God.  I dare you to keep loving me."   You then might say to me, “Phil, you are not changing God’s loving attitude toward you with your behavior; you are only hurting yourself, and so stop the foolishness.”

  The parable of the Prodigal Son highlights another habit of the Gospel tradition, namely a preference for reclaimed lives.  Sometimes the Gospel makes it rather boring never to have ever rebelled and experienced a dramatic repentance.  Is God better because God can change the lives of really bad behaving people?

  Sometimes in the born again circles of Christianity, it is almost a badge of pride to wear to testify about how bad you were before you got saved.  In one of our favorite story lines we like to hear about notorious bad guys who become heroic saints.  The story of reconciliation and healed relationship is a chief tear jerker in our genres of life.

  St. Paul referred to himself as the chief of sinners because he was complicit in the murder of early followers of Christ.  And he was very profuse in his praise of God’s mercy in his life.  But he is also the one who wrote, “Should we sin so that grace might increase?”  His answer was no.  

  If all of the notorious sinners are getting all of this attention because they trashed their lives and the lives of other to come to the end of themselves and they get a hero’s welcome for turning their lives around, what is the purpose of just being good and faithful without such fanfare?

  And what about all of our wonderful heroes in our modern 12-step program culture?  The success of 12-step program has been wonderful in changing lives, but I bet if you ask anyone in a 12-step program, they would prefer not to have been addicted in the first place and never have had to enter a 12-step program.

  So let me get to the point: the insight that I saw in my most recent reading of the parable of the Prodigal Son is this:  Nothing can change the loving nature of the forgiving Father, meaning, nothing can change the loving nature of God.

  In human terms or psycho-babble analysis of the Prodigal Son parable, we might want to sit down with Dad and say, “Dad, let me tell you about this notion of tough love.  Your son wants to take all of his inheritance as a teenager.  And you’re going to let him do it?  Dad, don’t do it, practice tough love, set some boundaries or the next time you come and see me I might upbraid you for dumb love, not tough love.”

  But do you see how from our notion of love where we might question the wisdom of the kind of love that the Father has.

  Indeed from our human and controlling perspective we might want to call God’s love, dumb love.  And what is the nature of this “dumb love?”  It is a profound permissive freedom and so profound that it is both awesome and terrible at the same.  The freedom that is abroad in the world is evidence of God’s love and because of the terrible outcomes where saving intervention does not occur.  In our view this might be a dumb love.

 What kind of love is God’s love?  Does the sun shine upon the righteous and the unrighteous without partiality?  Indeed we often think the sun shines more favorably upon some pretty rotten people in our world.  Why would it ever be permitted for the sun to shine upon the likes of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein and many others?  Why can’t God be like an omni-present smart bomb preventing with precision any misdeed in the world and any misdeed in my life?  Wouldn't God be a better parent if God did immediate and specific interdiction all of the time?  Oh, I forgot God is too busy assisting winners of football games and beauty pageants.

  We can go into the shade or the clouds may come out but we cannot change how and when and on whom the sun is going to shine in a general sense.  The history of humanity coming to faith is a history of accepting the very essence of God to be profoundly permissive creative freedom.  And how do we discover this?  We discover it as we experience that everything in this universe shares a degree of freedom to exert an effect upon everything else.  We really do not have big enough computers to generate the probability scenarios for everything that is affecting everything else that is.   And so we have a total environment of freedom.  And in our lives of faith, we are learning how to know this great permissive freedom as a blessing of a loving and friendly God.  God does not then intervene as an alien force; God arises from within creation to inspire acts of faith and love and kindness in the lives of men and women who in their lives are capable of imaging the highest order of freedom in creation.

  So let us not call the generous permissive loving freedom of God, a dumb love.  We in our lives have a very limited freedom, but it is a significant freedom.  In our limited freedom we do not have the capacity to permit the kind of freedom that God permits.  In our limited freedom we set goals for how we should use our freedom.  Do no harm.  Don’t be wasteful.  Don’t be exploitive in relationships.  Practice care and kindness. Embrace the fact that human freedom is one of the most powerful gifts that God has given us.

   So what about the Prodigal Son parable?

  No matter how we use or misuse our freedom, we are not going to change the loving nature of God.  If I am the stay at home son who is dutifully helping Dad run the ranch, I am not going to change Dad’s love for me. And I have the freedom to continue to be faithful and receive this love.   And if I am the spoiled, impulsive, get away with everything younger son who knows that I can do better than Dad and my brother with my inheritance, then Dad in his love allows me to do so because Dad allows me the freedom to deny him and his significance to my life. 

  Whether the dutiful older son or the impulsive rebellious, what does not change is the loving freedom of God who is always already to reward the choice to turn towards repentance.  The reparations of repentance may be difficult so there is no reason to glorify rebellion over remaining dutiful and faithful. 

  The story highlights how unfair grace is to the notion of human exact justice.   Salvation is unfair just like health management in our society.  A person who practice good health behavior and yet pays the full medical premiums subsidizes the person who does not practice good health behavior and who needs a disproportionate amount of medical services as a result.  Such health management does not seem fair.  Salvation in God’s grace is unfair too.

  What privilege is given to presidents, governors and monarchs?  The privilege of their power give them the privilege of clemency.  They have the freedom to pardon and that is unfair, but it is a practice of human society.

  God who is greater than all practices clemency and pardon to all who apply for it.  The issue of the parable of the prodigal son is this: one party believes that the other party needs pardon while assuming he did not need it himself.  What the Gospel teaches us is not to compare our relative needs of pardon.  The older brother needed a different kind of pardon on his own path of surpassing himself in excellence than did his younger brother.  God’s grace is available and needed by all; it just has different application in your case and in my case.

  The season of Lent is about turning toward God love and grace where we are and receiving a very specific measure of God’s grace appropriate to our path of excellence.  So God’s love is not a dumb love, it is always available and we can’t change the nature of God by choosing or denying God’s love; we can however be changed ourselves depending on how we choose to respond to God’s love.  Amen.

Moses and the Burning Bush

March 3, 2013

Characters:

Shepherd boy. Asa

Moses

Voice of God

Sheep

Moses and Asa are watching the sheep in Midian

Asa:  Moses, why are you a shepherd?  I know that you are very smart.  I have seen you read Egyptian writing.

Moses: Well, believe it or not, I used to be a Prince in Egypt.  When I was a born, to save my life my mom put me in a floating basket.  And an Egyptian princess found me and adopted me.  And so I was raised in a palace in Egypt.

Asa:  Then what are you doing here?

Moses:  I saw that the Egyptians were harming my people and so I tried to help but my own people thought that I was too much like an Egyptian.  So, I had to run away to save my life and I ran a long, long ways away.  I came here to Midian.

Asa:  You have lived here for a long time; I know your children.

Moses:  Yes, I got married to Zipporah and we have children.  My father-in-law is a Midian priest but he also has lots of sheep so I work with him and my children get to see their grandparents.  I can’t complain.  I have a wife and family and a job.

Asa:  Moses I have to go.  I will come back tomorrow to help watch the sheep.  Bye.

Moses:  Bye Asa, thanks for the help.

(A lighted bush appears when Moses is alone with the sheep)

Moses:  O no, there is a fire in that bush over there.  I better go put out the fire.  I don’t want a fire to spread and burn up all of the good grass for my sheep.

Voice of God:  Moses, stop!  This is not a fire you can put out.  I am God and I need to get your attention.

Moses:  Well, you sure have my attention.  Wow!  Are you sure this fire won’t burn all of the grass and tree?

Voice of God: Moses, I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  You know that all of the family of Jacob got stuck in Egypt after Joseph went to Egypt.

Moses:  Yes, I know.

Voice of God:  Moses, I want you to go back to Egypt and lead the children of Israel back to this place where I will give them a special law.  And I want you to lead them back into their land.

Moses:  I can’t do it God, because I already tried and the Egyptians want to kill me and my own people don’t accept me as a leader.  How can I go back?  How do I know that you are not a mirage?

Voice of God:  Well, look at this bush it seems to be burning but it does not cause a destructive fire.  This is special fire from God.  This is proof that I am God.  And you need to tell them that I have a special name.

Moses:  What is your special name?

Voice of God(profoundly):  My name is “I am that I am.”  I am that I am.  I am that am.”

Moses (bowing and cowering to the ground):  Wow, now I know that you are God and that you will help me go back to Egypt and bring my people out of slavery.  But I will need your help.

Voice of God:  Moses, go and I will help you and I will do lots of great works to convince your people Israel and the Egyptians to let them go.

(the burning bush goes away)

Moses: Wow, did I just dream?  I better go and tell my family.  I have to obey God.

Asking Why and Causal Connection Precision

3 Lent      Cycle C       March 3, 2013      

Ex.3:1-17          Ps. 103:1-11           

1 Cor. 10:1-13     Luke 13:1-9       

 Lectionary Link

   One of the most common questions in the world is “Why?”    An adult can be driven to distraction when a curious child is following and always asking the question “why?”   And the question “why” is a good question. In our naïve realism and commonsense lives it is very important to discern visual and obvious cause and effects relationships.  Young drivers need to know that cars can’t be the same place at the same time.   There is nothing wrong with the question “why?”  And there is nothing wrong with studying the observable relationship between cause and effect.

  There is observable cause and effect and speculative and even prejudicial explanation given for  cause and effect.  How many televangelists have blamed hurricanes and other natural disasters on certain groups of people?   Religious leaders for a long time built their reputations on presuming to know precise causal connection between weather events and other natural disasters and the behaviors of their target groups of disgust.  They literally proclaim them to be acts of God to punish some people, failing to realize that such disasters are not really precise “smart bombs” and they do general collateral damage to everyone.  To presume such precise cause and effect knowledge about the unknowable gives them a sense of religious insight to the suckers who are willing to believe them.   

   We also ask the question “why” about positive or benign events, events of good fortune.  And we can be silly sometimes in our giddy success.  The same God that helped my team win a football game is the same God who let my opponent lose and they were praying to win too.  So why do we get excited and make it seem as though God was picking sides?  To be consistent with this view, one has to make God into Fate and whatever is then, is God’s will.

    Moses ran away from Egypt for 40 years, got married and was working as a shepherd for his father-in-law, a Midian priest.  He encountered a burning bushing that would not be consumed by this strange fire.  And so he must have been seeing things.   And he heard this strange voice speaking to him and asking him to return to the people of Israel whom he had run from 40 years ago.  And Moses was perhaps thinking "Why me?”  And why would anyone believe me and the words of “God?”  How could I convince people that God had spoken to me?

    So Moses was thinking about this unusual call from God, “Why me, God?”

  Some people were speculating to Jesus about some disastrous occurrences.   Some Galileans had been killed by Pilate and he used their blood in the very sacrifice that they themselves had offered.  Also a tower had fallen on some people and they had died.  And so the fatalistic speculation arose: Why did these misfortunes happen to them?  And the common wisdom on the street was that, bad things happen to people because they must have been bad or they had done something wrong.  And Jesus rebuked them for pretending to suggest such a thing.  He suggested that to say that things happen to such people because they were bad, may be simply another away of making twice victims out of people who had suffered the loss of their lives.

   Lent is a good of time as any to look at the state of our lives in how we are asking and answering the question “why?”  Why did this happen to me in this way at this time?  Why am I not meeting the right people, the right friends?  Why did this happen on my job, or in my family or to my health?  But not only the bad stuff;   the good stuff too.  Why did I receive this new insight, this new sense of direction, the discovery of this new friendship or relationship, or why did I get some good news in the very same area where someone else received bad news?

   And what is the wrong answer to the question of why?  The wrong answer is to assume that God is more or less God at anytime in our lives…to assume that God is not constant and ebbs and flows in the divine relationship with us like the whims of a fickle lover.  God remains the same all of the time. 

  God’s creation and people are like the fig tree of the parable.  We as people don’t always achieve the level of performance that is expected of us.  We may be like my tomato plants that get over watered, lots of beautiful green plant but not many tomatoes. The good nature, the hybrid was not enough; the fig tree needs some nurture too…a whole lot of fertilizer or manure was needed to provide the conditions to produce good fruit.

  God is the cosmic gardener who is patient always to give us more time and more nurture so that our natures may come to bear fruit.  The nurture of human experience can some time be as smelly as manure; but it does not mean that God is any more or less present to us.  Our nurturing events are many; sometimes as fascinating as a burning bushes that totally baffle and surprise us; at other times smelly and partaking of some things we’d rather avoid.  And we cannot really know the “answer” to the why a smelly test or why a wonderful surprise or both.

  But the wrong conclusion is to doubt God’s presence and involvement and care in our lives.  And if we can uphold our belief in God’s presence, involvement and care in our lives, we too will become God’s presence and involvement and care in the lives of people who surely need some reassurance.  If we can affirm the constancy of God in the midst of all of the “whys” of life, then we will be less likely to victimize people when bad things happen to them and more willing to help them to know God’s love and care.

  Why did the tower fall on those people?  Why did Pilate use the blood of those Galileans in their sacrifices?  Wrong questions.  These terrible things happened; what can we do to help the families of the victims?  If the question of “why” delays charity in our actions, then it is the wrong question.  Asking and answering the question “why” can help us prevent future mishaps, but we cannot change the past; we can only live and minister in the present.

  I think that the call of God tells us what God told Moses: that God is who God Is and the Divine Being remains no matter what happens in this world in the fullness of real freedom of events.

   And what we need to learn during this Lenten season is that no matter what happens to us, the divine presence and call and care is still towards us, even now and at the hour of our death and in the time of our afterlife.  God  is the Holy Being who Moses was called to obey; this is the Holy Being who promises to be with us.  This is the God of Jesus Christ who does not change amid the ebb and flow of the circumstances of our lives.  Amen.