The Christmas Story Is not yet Finished; not yet Told

Christmas Eve         December 24, 2013  

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

Titus 2:11-14        Luke 2:1-14  

Lectionary Link

   As a preacher, I can often be like the little boy who gets a new toy car.  It’s not good enough to just play with the car and enjoy it.   I have to take it apart and see how it works.  And when I do, I never sure whether I can get it back together again, or at least as the same working car it once was.  In reassembly, it may look like a chariot with lots of extra unused parts or it may be a space ship with lots of added parts.

  And as we have heard the Christmas Story again this year, you might tell me to just leave it alone preacher.  Let it function for us in its lovely primary naiveté so we can get home more quickly to the egg nog.

  But you know me; I cannot let this story stand without taking it apart and examining motive and provenance of its writing and reception in its own time.  I do so because I think that an ancient story can become violated by the temporal provincialism of us modern and post-modern people so thoroughly programmed by modern science.  We can be scornful of biblical writings even while we look for our truths in Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter.  We excuse ourselves because we say it is a different kind of truth than people found in biblical times.

   The Christmas Infancy narratives are actually quite diverse in their appeals to quite an eclectic audience.  They are rather sophisticated in their mode of composition even as the writers use the rhetorical devices of their time to deal with one of the plainest facts of human history, namely, who is this Jesus Christ, and why are we still talking about him and why did he not get discarded  in the dust bin of human history.

  The Christmas Story got written down in the eight or nine decades after Jesus lived because of the reality of his staying power in the lives of a growing community of people.  These people were baffled that a person had an ability to create a trans-historical presence.  But this was the occasion to continue to create new traditions about Jesus to new audiences. 

  Why did this Jesus happen?  Why won’t he go away?  Why does he continued to appear when his physical body was gone and affect the lives of people enough in compelling ways  to cause them to tell and retell his story again and again and in different ways?

  I would like for us to give credit to the Gospel writers for knowing their language methods and their audience.  They used Gospel narratives to tell the greatness of Jesus by trying to speak about his origin.  Where did this guy come from?

  In using the standard rabbinical methods of interpretation, known as midrash, the writers used the intermingling of plain fact, with allegorical or esoteric meanings and further they particularly used a method of comparative stories to wed the life of Jesus with the lives of others whose stories of greatness had been told.  What is also notable about the rhetoric of the infancy narratives is that the writers took the comparative stories method and used comparative themes from the Roman propaganda stories which accompanied the myths of the divinized Caesars.   In a community which had separated from the synagogue in a large part because of the success of the Jesus Movement among the Gentiles, the appeals of the rhetoric had to take into account the Roman Hellenistic audience. The Gospel writers were appealing to new audiences; they expanded rabbinical methods to extra-Judaic topics even as they made the Hebrew Scriptures more widely known and read in a Roman Empire audience.

  The plain fact of Christmas is that Jesus did not go away for lots of people after he died.  He stayed and his staying presence was accounted for under the reality of the Risen Christ.  Now how and why could Jesus stay around?  What is his origin?  How can we recount and tell his greatness?

  The earliest report tells us that Jesus was adopted as God’s Son at his baptism.  Mark is the earliest written Gospel; Mark does not have the Bethlehem birth story.  Jesus is adopted as God’s Son when a heavenly voice said, “This is my beloved Son; with him I am well pleased.” Christmas pageant directors certainly cannot get any scripts out of the Gospel of Mark.  The rabbinical method was not yet fully developed and applied in Mark.

  How can we find about the origin of Jesus and who is in his family tree?  We don’t have to go to the Salt Lake City data base of genealogy; we can go to Luke and Matthews.   The genealogy of Jesus begins with Abraham in Matthew.  And it begins with God, Adam and Eve in the Gospel of Luke.  The origin of Jesus is found in genealogy.  Genealogy is a rhetoric of origins.  The genealogies of Jesus expose fully his humanity but even as there were great people in his family tree, they were also very human in their imperfections.  The presence of the human imperfections meant that elaborating stories about Mary’s Immaculate Conception had to arise in the Catholic tradition to account for his surpassing greatness and perfection.

  The Gospel writers used comparative stories to align the birth of Jesus with miraculous birth stories tradition in the Hebrew Scripture such as the stories of the births of Isaac and Samuel. The Isaac birth story include angelic messengers.   The song of  a thankful Hannah, the once barren woman who became the mother of Samuel,  became the poetic model for the song of Zachariah and for Mary’s Magnificat.  

    The story of Jesus had to be told using the spiritual journey of Israel.  The people of Israel were trapped as slaves in Egypt and were led out by their hero Moses; the baby Jesus and his parents made a flight to Egypt and returned to the homeland as a symbolic story of the identity of Jesus with Jacob and Joseph and Moses.   Pharaoh was a baby killer of Hebrew boys in Egypt but the great Moses was spared when he was adopted by an Egyptian princess.    Herod was a baby killer but the baby Jesus survived as he was presented using the template of the baby Moses survival story.

  The Gospel writers also found in the poetry of the prophets the language to speak about Jesus. They borrowed freely the words of the prophets to speak about Jesus: Emmanuel, Counselor, Prince of Peace, Almighty God and many, many more.  The Psalmist wrote about kings of the earth coming to pay homage to a king in Judah.  The story of the magi fulfilled this alignment of Jesus with the poetic themes of the Psalms.

  What is further fascinating is that the Gospel writers appealed to readers who were familiar with the Roman political rhetoric.  Caesars were declared as gods and sons of gods by the Roman Senate.  Caesars were praised for being saviors and bringing peace to the world.  Stories were told about the mother of Octavian conceiving in a temple through an encounter with a Apollo.   There were comets and astronomical signs which accompanied births of Emperors.  In the Christmas narrative the heavenly senate of angels declared the birth of a savior and prince of peace.  There was a Christmas star which accompanied and was a sign of the birth of a royal Christ child.

  The Gospels in their original contexts were exclusive for the people converted to their communities; they were not read in a wider community.  They served as liturgy and even secret teaching for their communities.  The writers were subtle enough to encode deeper meanings within the narratives.  The earliest New Testament writings are from St. Paul and he set the theology of the church which was the proclamation of the risen Christ in you by the power of the Holy Spirit.  The Christmas narrative presents Mary as a story example of everyone who has the life of the risen Christ born within them as they are over-shadowed by the power of the Holy Spirit.

  By the time John’s Gospel was written, Jesus the Christ came to be presented as the Eternal Word of God who was the word of God spoken to create the world from the very beginning.  In John’s Gospel, the origin of Jesus is as one who has no origin at all since he was from the beginning.

  And now after 2000 years the Christmas story has had so many collateral effects in so many times and cultures.  It has taken on evergreen trees and an obscure Bishop Nicholas of Myra has morphed into a Dutch Sinterclaus and a jolly grandfatherly Santa Claus of America commercial culture.

  Tonight we can say that what we learn about the Christmas Story is that it cannot be controlled, by limiting its meaning, its content appeals and its collateral cultural effects.  That may be disconcerting for people who want to be doctrinal police but it is also an affirmation that as long as there is time, there will more meanings for Christmas and more ways to tell and live the Christmas Story.

  The plain fact is Jesus was a historical person who has not gone away from the consciousness of the people of the world.  Dealing with this fact is how the Christmas story originated and why it still grows in its power to accrue new meanings today.

  The Christmas Story is large enough to encompass your life and my life and the kind of meanings which you and I need to surpass ourselves in excellence tonight.  You and I live with some of the harsh realities of our adult world.   Somewhere in our lives tonight we need rebirth and renewal.  Somewhere we need to re-capture the nascent and native state of being playfully joyful for no reason at all.   

  This Christmas Eve is as good a time as any to open ourselves up to renewal.  Being born again has become a mocking characterization of a type of Christianity but it should be seen as just good psychological practice of constant renewal into the original freshness of our births into this life.  Our memories of our original freshness are weak, obscure, even lost, which is why we need to be mystified by the Sublime Spirit to plumb our original blessed entrance into the world.  To aid our memories we have the magic of babies who have power over us because they live the state of being what we have forgotten.  We have babies and the Christ Child to bear our projections of the original blessing of our birth into this world.

  Tonight we let our projections go onto the great Child of History and the child in our history.  And this Child calls to us tonight to tend to him.  This child is found in the vulnerable in this world.  This Child is with us.  This Child is us.  And tonight we interpret the cooing of the Christ Child as a gentle whisper which says to us, “Merry Christmas.”  Amen.

God with Us; Can We Live up to That?

4 Advent         December 22, 2013

Isaiah 7:10-17 Psalm  24:1-7        

Romans 1:1-7     Matthew 1:18-25  

Lectionary Link

    

  Emmanuel is the name that was written about in the prophet Isaiah.    It comes from the Hebrew and means “God with us.”

  This name had literal meaning in the life of the prophet Isaiah.   He was referring to the birth of someone who in his day would be a sign of “God with us.”

  And the writers of the New Testament understood the Hebrew Scriptures to be sacred history and so it was a template, a pattern that was set to recur in history.

  Salvation history is like a spiral or a coil.  A spiral is not the same thing as a circle.  In a spiral the circles are open because they are connected to the previous circle but are not the same circle  and they connected to future circles but they are not the same.

One view of history is to note the return to the similar sites in the cycles of human experience.

  People in the time of the prophet Isaiah lived in some terrible times.  The north and south of Israel had been divided.  David’s kingdom and the glory of Israel had been very short lived.  The nation of Israel had divided in two kingdoms with competing kingship lines and the powerful Assyrian armies threatened the northern kingdom.

  Certainly everyone could believe that “God was with them” during the hey-day of King David.  But could people believe that “God was with them” when things were not so good?  Could they believe that God was with them, when the nation was divided and when the Assyrian army was invading?

  So the prophet Isaiah was inspired to preach a message of hope and to assure the people that there would be a sign in the form of a child, that “God is with us.”

  The writers of the New Testament set out to tell the story of Jesus.  The impact of his life was so profound, and yet it all occurred in apparent obscurity in the Roman Empire.  It is amazing that only the Jewish historian Josephus and the Roman writer Tacitus and perhaps one other made reference to Jesus of Nazareth.  Only obscure references to Jesus are found in non-Christian sources.

  And yet to the people who knew Jesus and who felt the impact of his presence, even after he was gone, to those people Jesus was again a sign for God’s people, that “God is with us.”

   It is probably true today that the time when we need to know that “God is with us” is when things don’t seem to be going very well in our lives.  That is time when we need the sign that God is with us.

  When things are all rosy and prosperous, we often take good fortune as an obvious sign that God is with us.

  But the sign came when God’s people were not feeling very successful.

  And Jesus came in a very obscure way in an obscure place to very ordinary people.

  Very ordinary people in some very hard time came to know that God was with them in the birth and life of Jesus Christ.

  And now for 2000 years God’s people still feel that Jesus Christ is the sign to us that God is with us.

  You and I need to take hope in that the sign came when time was the worst for God’s people.  That should be an indication to us that apparent success or apparent failure does not add nor diminish the fact of “God being with us.”

  God with us.  This does not mean that we can domesticate God and drop the divine name here and there in a trivial way as though we could control God.  Lots of people get so familiar with how they understand God and so frequent in their God words that one begins to think that they have a special corner on God, as though they somehow could control God’s blessing.

  But let us pray today that there will be signs from God that God is with us, especially to people in war, in distress, in need, in poverty, in sickness, in oppression and those who are victims of prejudice.

  Let us pray that they will know that God is with them; and let us pray that God will use us in an Emmanuel ministry.

  By that, I think we should pray that we could have our lives be used in such a way that people in need see our lives as signs that God has not forgotten them and that God is with them.

   So we pray that as Jesus was able to bear the ancient name Emmanuel, we too might share in the ministry of that name.  We pray, “O God, let our lives be lived so that those in our world will know that God is with them in their time of need and in all of the times of their lives.”

  And as we pray and sing O come Emmanuel, let us be willing to be the one through whom Emmanuel will bless the lives of people in our world.  Amen. 

Rejoice! In Spite of

3 Advent (a)      December 15, 2013

Is.35:1-10         Ps. 146: 4-9          

James 5:7-10      Matt. 11:2-11

Lectionary Link

   Last year on Gaudete Sunday, we were in the immediate aftermath of the terrible shootings which occurred at the elementary school in Newtown Connecticut.  And we had to remind ourselves about the creative purpose of the command to “Rejoice!”

  The Third Sunday of Advent is Gaudete Sunday or Rose Sunday and in our liturgy we are commanded to Rejoice!  "But preacher, I do not feel like rejoicing.  Go away!"

  But I am the preacher and it is Rejoice Sunday, so we’re going to rejoice whether we want to or not.  It is like a frustrated unrequited parent who says, “Children you will do this and you will have fun!”

  We need the command to rejoice in our lives not as a denial of what we are experiencing in terms of pain, hardship or suffering, but we need the authority of what joy and hope can create for any situation in our lives.

  Modern skeptics from Marx to Dawkins can criticize biblical faith for promoting unreality even as in our post-modern world, modern science has given us the ability to distract ourselves from the hardships of reality in countless number of ways.  The modern world has given us endless modes of distracting entertainment.

  When the people of Israel were in exile and in suffering, they could not go into their homes and watch the Jerusalem soccer team play on their cable TV.  They could not get at least some temporary distraction from their pain by watching a Jewish male hysteric comedian like Jerry Seinfeld make fun of his daily cosmic Angst.  What the ancient suffering people had were prophets who were the forerunners of Walt Disney.  The prophets spun in their literature an artistic entertainment of another kind of reality.  They told their people to rejoice because some day they would go home to their perfect home; it would be a magic kingdom all centered around Mount Zion.  I am offended by people who in our lives can have endless modes of entertainment and distractions from the suffering of our lives which exist on a continuum from the horrors of war, children with cancer, poverty, to mental depression, to ennui, or a boredom in the ability to experience an engaging pleasure and not allow people of the Bible to have their corresponding ways of dealing with suffering.   We today also have the medical results of modern science in providing us with a pharmacopoeia to block all sorts of pain.  We of all people should be sensitive and attentive to the fact the biblical people existed mainly in times of suffering and deprivation.  Since we are so specialized, we often can only see the Bible as a Holy Book of holy things.  We fail to understand the entertainment and the distraction function of some of the discourses of faith.  "Utopia?  It isn’t going to happen and it can’t happen.  So you people of faith are people living on illusion.  Okay, let pop another Disney movie in the DVD to entertain the children and let’s plan the trip to Disneyland for Spring Break."  Do you see how inconsistent we can be in allowing all sorts of entertainment to be parallel with loss and pain in our lives, but somehow we won’t let the prophets bolster the morale of their people with images which promote the primacy of goodness and health over the deprivations of evil and illness?

  Religious people have often taken the bait and fallen into the trap of defending the biblical writings in the wrong way.  Utopia, has not happen you say?  Well, not yet, but it will happen in the future?  Monkeys don’t fly?  Are you sure?  They might in the future and so you need to keep an open mind?  Defenders of the Bible have often defended utopian visions and apocalyptic endings as a literal future and when the utopia does not happen and when the world does not end, they always have the future to defer to well.  It has not happened yet but it still could.

  The time before life and the time after life is special time.  It is a functional time for us now even though we have no way to prove these "before life times" and "after life times."  They function as habits of the human mind because we cannot avoid asking and dealing with questions of origins and afterlife.

   In this life we know that there can be a seemingly random or uneven distribution of fortune and misfortune which happen to people as individuals, families and as nations.  Part of the art of living is adjusting our human response to live with the very best response to the particular conditions which face us at any time life.

  And when loss and evil and misfortune are upon us sometimes the equivalent of gallows humor is the creative response.  If we’re going to go down then we are not going to let our spirits be crushed.  We will not be defeated, we will not give in, we will go down rejoicing.  Some of the most poignant humor is known at a memorial service when the memory of a character who has passed on just makes one break down in laughter even while the tears of loss have not yet dried.

  Can we admit with the people of biblical faith that we are very complex emotional multi- tasking sorts of people who cannot be limited by misinterpreting things through a false literalism which is not honest to human emotional complexity?

  We may not relate to the specifics of the entertainment or comfort function of Isaiah's utopia or promise of a better life.  We may not relate to the belief in an imminent ending of the world like the writer of the letter of James did when he said the “Day of the Lord” is at hand.  When suffering is so intense and widespread, then you want the end of it to happen so much that you have to believe that it will happen soon.  This is a true fact of human nature, even if you understand that not everyone in the world is suffering in the same way at the same time.

  The biblical literature of utopian and apocalyptic end respond to our child aspect of personality in that we want pleasure and relief now, not five minutes from now and not next year.  This primary naiveté which we have is a natural response to the greatest warning sign in life, namely, pain.  Pain declares the necessity of a response to end it.  The manifold mobilization against the causes of pain includes a whole range of whatever can come to language.  And we have a whole range of biblical literature to deal with the reality of human pain, even as we continue to build our arsenal of human responses to pain.  And one response is to rouse the human capacity of hope with the command to “Rejoice.”  Help is on the way.  There will be another day.  Let us hold on together for another day.  Let us assert the primacy of goodness and health over the deprivation of evil and illness.

  The Gospel provides us with an event in the Passion of John the Baptist.  Before his death, John was put in prison.  In the Gospel of Matthew, both John the Baptist and Jesus are presented as people who expressed doubt in the moments of their suffering.  Jesus on the cross, is quoted by the Matthean writer as using the famous cry of Psalm 22, “My God, why have you forsaken me?”  And John the Baptist from prison is not seen to be the confident confronting prophet;  he has doubts about his ministry and about Jesus.  John sent his messenger to Jesus from prison.  Perhaps John wanted Jesus to be the conquering King Messiah.  “Jesus, are you the great one who is going to intervene and end all of this?  Are you going to rescue me from prison?  Have I preached in vain?  What’s happening Jesus, when are you going to bring in the heavy artillery?”

  Jesus said, “Go tell John that the blind see, the deaf hear, the lame walk.”  I am one who promotes health and healing and life in a world where death seems to win out.

  And what is the Gospel for us?  The Gospel for us is to rejoice because we need to be on the side of health and healing.  Illness and death get their definition and reality from health and life and not the reverse.  The Gospel for us is to rejoice because we are here to proclaim the primacy of health and life.  There are some who live as though evil, greed, and illness are the main facts of human nature and so the quest is to be the best at evil and greed and promoting the dis-ease of others for one’s own benefit.

  We as stewards of the Gospel need to remain faithful to the morale booster of “Rejoice!”  Rejoice, because no matter what happens, goodness, love, health and justice are the norm.  And so today, let us never forget to rejoice.  Amen.

Apocalyptic, Utopian Unreality or Realized, Mandela-like Messianism

2 Advent    A     December 8, 2013

Is. 11:1-10         Ps.72        

Rom. 15:4-13    Matt. 3:1-12

Lectionary Link

  This week the world lost a great man and not because he thought so, in fact, Nelson Mandela was one to point out his own imperfection and he was one quick to credit lots of other people who suffered and sacrifice to end apartheid in South Africa.  One can hardly imagine the strength of spirit to endure twenty seven years in prison and to use that time for discipline and study.  He became famous when his captors tried to make people forget him. Upon his release from prison he was elected to be president of South Africa, and he governed through forgiveness and reconciliation.  His life represents the achievement of what was thought to be impossible.

  I sometimes wonder if we read and perhaps misuse the utopian visions of the Isaian prophet?  Sometimes life seems so cruel and unjust; it is a life of the predator and strong exploiting the weak.  We often use the Genesis account of a causatively absolute fall of humanity into such depravity that rather than being realistic about the true freedom that is in our world, we are ready to throw in the towel and say this creation is just a failed experiment of the Creator and so we challenge the Creator to intervene and remake creation to be a totally innocent universe where there is no longer freedom and the consequences of freedom.  Wouldn’t it be nice if wolves and lambs played together? Wouldn’t it be nice if babies would play with vipers?  Wouldn’t it be nice if this knowledge of the Lord were some robotic orientation towards goodness and harmony such that we could not be anything other than innocent?  Is this utopian world, a world without genuine freedom, one that we really want?   It sounds nice but such views also can encourage a passivism.  If Nelson Mandela was sitting in prison wishing for the end of the world or a magical re-making of human nature to be receptive to a multi-racial society, one could understand such a vision for temporary comfort but it would be unrealistic to the actual conditions of the world.

  So we need to be careful not to read utopian worlds or an apocalyptic interventionist end of the world as presenting  literal futures; such a literalism is a giving up on this world and it also is an offense to freedom.  Even if we want God to come and end the world right away how can anyone  be so sure that we are worthy for God to intervene for us and our view of life?  Does suffering and oppression automatically make people holy or better than others or are they people who don’t abuse power because they don’t have power to abuse?  We really need to be aware of the logical consequences of the apocalyptic views if we hold them in literal ways.

  The Isaian prophet also longed for one who was from the line of Jesse.  David as the youngest son of Jesse was the improbable king of Israel.  His greatness could not be predicted but it happened and David gave Israel its only golden period, even though it got idealized as much better than it was because the literature about it was written in the periods of later suffering.

  The Isaian prophet wished for greatness in a similar way that we wish for a Nelson Mandela kind of greatness to happen again.  In the Hebrew religion, the notion of greatness was found in messianism.  This was a belief that God energized, divinized, anointed human beings to accomplish great things.  Many kings of Israel were anointed with oil but most were not great in the way that they actually performed.

  As Christians we are similar to the Isaian prophet who hoped for greatness to be the evidence of God’s Spirit anointing human beings.  This is not a violation of freedom; this is not wanting God to be a powerful judge at the end of human history; this is not wanting us magically to become a world full of automatic innocence; this is looking for God to help us human beings toward excellence in incremental steps of improvement through education, or the religious term for education, repentance.

  In the Christian liturgy of baptism we pray for the seven fold gifts of the Spirit.  The seven-fold gifts were inspired by this Isaian passage.  We anoint with Chrism, the oil of baptism, because we hope that God’s Spirit will anoint us with a Spirit of excellence to do what is right for ourselves and for our world.  In the baptismal liturgy, we pray that each one of us can partake of the Spirit of greatness of the Messiah.  Baptism is a practice of group messianism; we pray to be a collective messiah in the world because God’s Spirit is invoked upon our lives.

  Biblical literature of apocalyptic intervention or magical realism is wonderful literature of comfort for people who need visualizations in their pain management, but to honor the actual conditions of freedom in our world, we need to promote the value of education.

  The word which John the Baptist used for education is the word repentance.  Repentance means a renewal of our minds.  It means taking on transforming information which helps us to act better today than we did yesterday.  We know that institutions can take good knowledge and make it so rote and routine that it becomes unable to inspire actual change.  This is the argument which John the Baptist had with the religious establishment of his time; the way in which the religion was practice did not educate people to change their lives towards understanding what obvious creative love and justice meant.  The great Law of Moses was about love and justice; how come so many people in Palestine missed out upon law and justice under the regime of the religious authorities.  John and Jesus were educational reformers; there were too many people left behind by the prevailing religious establishment.

  I think the season of Advent is a messianic season; not because we hope that the world will end soon, but because we hope that the messianic grace which we all prayed for in our baptism would rise to greater effect in our lives and in our world.  Our religious view is not functional, if we simply want to wish away the actual world of freedom and feed our minds upon utopian visions and apocalyptic endings of the world.

    We need greatness in our world; we have greatness in our world but it is most often wrongly directed.  We have highly paid geniuses to develop financial schemes of hedge funds, Ponzi schemes, bundling of bad loans and sold fraudulently, future and derivatives schemes for increasing the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few.  What would happen if the total human genius of the world was directed toward solving hunger, social, political and economic injustice?  It is easy to wish away the world in utopian vision, to wish for a great Messiah to zap us to be angelic people; but how about the messiah of our baptismal anointing?  How about messianic greatness as the direction of human genius towards the approximation of love and justice?  We need messianic greatness as something like a portion of the Spirit of Mandela to work creatively with free conditions of our world to persuade us towards more hope, love and justice for more people in our world.

  The harshness of the message of John the Baptist is needed in our world today, not because greatness does not exist but because greatness and creativity is directed toward greedy goals.

  Let us be messianic people today.  Let us heed the message of John the Baptist to repent?  Let us baptize any human greatness toward the direction of love and justice for all.  And let persuade others to do the same.

   John the Baptist was telling people that their creativity was being used for the wrong end.  Repent, renew the mind, and let us be creative, great and excellent as we have the vision of what is loving and just in our world.  Let us wish for the greatness of Mandela to be present in our world; let us wish for the repentance of John the Baptist to be our education and let the Spirit of the Messiah give us proper direction for the great energy of freedom in our lives.  Amen.

You and I As Continuous Advents of Christ

1 Advent A      December 1, 2013

Is. 2:1-5      Psalms 122

Rom. 13:8-14   Matt. 24:37-44

Lectionary Link

    Scientia, is the Latin for science and the Greek equivalent is episteme.  They both simply mean knowledge but for us science, since the days of the Enlightenment, has come to mean a more systematic way of knowing and studying.  What we have come to refer to as modern science has changed the way people know things.

  Old science did not separate the cosmic causality of the divine from the causal connection between all things that we are able to observe.

  Modern science has brought about an incredible specialization in all fields of study as well as in all human life.  Modern science has changed how we regard our faith experience; it has changed how we read our holy books.  It has made us reassess how they are relevant to our lives today. 

  We have arrived once again to the season of Advent and we are presented with the main theme of Advent.  Advent or adventus is the translation of the Greek word parousia and this refers to what is called the Second Coming of Christ.  We who have observed satellites and space shuttles go into space and return to earth are required to process information about the Second Coming of Christ in a different way.  We can do it in a way that makes it relevant to our lives and in a way that does not diminish the presentation of it in the Bible.

  One of the outcomes of modern science is that if one has maintained a faith experience within the biblical tradition one has had to force the Bible into a very special role, it is a religious book.  Costco recently offended some, by mistakenly labeling the Bibles in the fiction category.

  The Bible in its times of composition and for most of its time of use for public recitation was a book without competitors.  The Bible for most of its history of use has not had other comparative literature.  It had exclusive use.  It was used to be a book of all knowledge and all human experience.  The Bible was ancient history, science, ritual guide, religious teaching, social studies, political science, sex education and it was something that we probably will not let it be because we have it labeled exclusively in a sacred category.  The Bible was also the main source of community entertainment.  Today we have Hollywood and many genres of literature to fine tune our entertainment sensibilities; the Bible used to be an all-purpose book.  It does not function that way anymore and so it either gets literalized as actual modern science presented in a very ridiculous ways or it gets completely shoved aside as irrelevant or obsolete or without any function except regarded to be like a weird old uncle who is kept locked in the basement most of the time and occasionally brought out for family gatherings.

    Advent or the Second Coming of Christ is something which modern scientists do not find to be good material for their study.  Modern scientists however are interested in the end of life as we know it.  The melting ice caps and rising waters, global warming, the big earthquake, a colliding comet or meteorite, the massive  volcano which will cover the sunlight for a long enough time to begin another ice age, nuclear destruction and the lack of the sustainability for the growing population of the earth; these are the endings and the transformations which interest the modern scientist.

  The science of the Bible had more to do with the human science of living together; it had more to do with what we call the art of living.  And I would say that one of the results of modern science is that it has redefined the relevance of the language of faith as a language of aesthetics, a language about the beauty, the horror, the fear, the delight, the love, the curiosity, the wonder, the doubt and the faith of living.

  It is a human truth that we are interested in origins and endings.  It is a human truth that we are interested in the past and in the future.  In the growing repository of human experience, we have many cosmologies about the ancient, ancient past and the future, near and far.  The past and the future are of great interest to us because through experience we can find out certain things.  If things are not very pleasurable, time teaches us that suffering can end and pass.  And if our experiences are really very good, time also teaches us that if we’re “riding high in April, we can be shot down in May, that’s life!”  Time teaches to be prepared for the bad times.  The experiences in time teach us to receive the best possible functional response to what we are experiencing.

  I believe that for us as Americans, the Bible provides us with a distorted view.  The biblical view is distorted for us because the biblical view is most often told from the point of view of people who are suffering.  The Bible story is not told from the point of view of people who are in control of a world Empire; it is told from the point of view of people who are suffering because the Empire has struck them again and again and kept them occupied or in exile but certainly not with majority status.

  Biblical people wanted and desired a new world order.  They desired more favorable situations so much that their published prophets were poets who wrote literature much like John Lennon’s song, Imagine.    Imagine a completely different world, one which is more favorable to our well-being. This kind of imaginary thinking is thinking which helps suffering people to maintain within their condition but not to give in to believe that pain and suffering are natural.  Imaginary thinking and utopian thinking is true thinking because it establishes peace and freedom from pain as what is truly normal.

  Biblical people struck by the Empires could not help but be political people; it is hard not to be politically angry when the Empire has a boot upon one’s throat.  The politics of the end of the old order was also the talk among those who carried the lore and traditions of their society.  We, who have modern science and many genres of entertainment and who live as free people, we have comic book superheroes of Hollywood to fuel our need for interventionist strategies against injustice and against those who make our lives fearful and threatened.  Biblical suffering people had a tradition of the apocalyptic as their politics and as their hope for a future instant interventionist to establish justice in this world.  We have the luxury to be entertained by comic book heroes; biblical people needed the Apocalyptic Son of Man and theories of being whisk away as a way to continue to believe in justice and God’s favor towards them.

  You and I live in a world Empire, the American Empire.  We cannot identify with the experience which generated most of the biblical literature.  So what can we do, we who have inherited modern science and who live relatively comfortable lives?

  During this Advent, let us make it our calling to be the many comings of Christ to this world.  Let us be the Christ working to beat swords to ploughshares.  Let us be the Christ of peace to the world. Let us be those who come and whisk away people from their poverty and their human need.

  Let us not limit Christ to a first or second coming.  Let us celebrate that in the giving of the Holy Spirit the risen Christ has come to live within the church.  And each of us who know the presence of Christ is to take the presence of Christ into our world.  Each of us is to be another Advent of Christ.   Each one of us is to be another coming of Christ to make his love and justice actual to the people of our lives.  Amen.

Absolute Power That Is Not Corrupt

Last Sunday after  Pentecost, Cp29, November 24, 2013  Christ the King

Jeremiah 23:1-6  Ps. 46           

Col. 1:11-20    Luke 23:23-33   

Lectionary Link

  On the playground one can find children playing all sorts of imaginative roles.  Castles, kings, princesses and dragons and monsters, and it is a delight to see them have so much fun with unreality.  Perhaps it is necessary part of learning abstract thinking; perhaps in play acting heroic roles against monsters and dragons, they are internalizing coping patterns with real life situations.  Perhaps in being a monster or a dragon it is a way of believing that one can optimistically negotiate the situations of one’s life.

  All fine and good for children, but what about the followers of Jesus confessing and hoping that Jesus would be a king both when he lived and in the decades after Jesus left this world?  When adults project their imaginations of a king upon someone who really does not look like a king what are we to think about them?  What are we to think about the founders of our faith community?  How are people to think about us as we project kingship upon a person who is not kingly in the earthly ways of thinking about monarchies and political power?

   From the appointed Gospel of the day: “The soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine, and saying, "If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!" There was also an inscription over him, "This is the King of the Jews."  One of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding him and saying, "Are you not the Messiah?”

  The Passion Gospel includes the mocking scorn of the kingship of Christ by the Roman soldiers and one of the criminals crucified with Jesus.

  Why would the early Christians retain in their recited story this incident of scorn?  The Passion liturgy includes an honesty about scorn for what happens often in life.  Things of value, people of value, justice values often get defeated.  Good people get snuffed out before their time.

  The powers that be often mock the values of love and justice.  People who believe and practice very good things often are crushed.  But in the Passion of Jesus we find the agents of the true king of Palestine, the Caesar, crushing to death one who bore the local myth of being a king.

  What this Passion narrative reveals in an entirely counter-logic to the earthly notion of kingship.  Lord Acton once wrote, “"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”  By this definition, if one believes that God has absolute power, then God would be corrupt.  But the teaching of the kingship of Christ was a teaching about thinking about power in a different way.

  Absolute power corrupts mainly because it must rely upon the limitation of the freedom of others.   To dominate one must shut down the freedom of others.  Limit what they can do and what they can think not as a program of temperance or self-control but so that the will of the one or the few can make the energy of freedom into the energy of oppression and suppression.

  The death of Jesus on the cross literally meant that his freedom to live was taken from him.  His freedom to teach and to heal was taken from him.

  What kind of king was Jesus?  And why did his early followers persist in the belief of his kingship?  Why did they continue to perform the mockery of his kingship each time they performed a reading of the Passion narrative?

  The absolute power of God is not like the absolute power of human government.  The absolute power of God is completely permissive of the freedoms within the limits of each creature and entity.  People have freedom within their limitations.  Animals have freedoms within their limitations.  Wind and weather, flowers and rock and molecules and atoms have freedoms within their limitations.  And the absolute power of God is permissive of all the kinds of freedom which exist.

  The way in which this absolute power of God became known and manifested in the life of Jesus was through winsome, persuasive, charismatic love.  The followers of Jesus believed that Jesus had the power of a king; he had the power of clemency.  “Father forgive them.”  Pardon them, commute their sentences; they do not know what they are doing. 

  They believed that Jesus had the ability to usher a repentant criminal into a kingdom life called Paradise.  Today you shall be with me in Paradise.

  Whenever the church and Christians have tried to become a kingdom of this world in a direct way, the church and Christians have partaken of the corruption of power.  Whenever the church has respected power as propelling the energy of service, the church has best expressed the kingship of Christ.

  Today we are invited to the irony of Christ the King.  Indeed our liturgy is like children playing on the playground because we must become child-like to perceive the kingship of Christ in this world where we see so much of the corrupting effects of people who have too much power.

  What kind of king says, “Blessed are the poor.”  “Love your enemy.”  “If someone needs your coat, give it to him.”  “If someone hits you on one cheek, turn the other.”  The kingdom of Christ is a totally ironic kingdom and it forces us to see our lives differently.

  I believe that the impact of the resurrection appearances upon the lives of the disciples was so pronounced that they believed they had evidence of a strength and a power over death itself.  Their experience of the resurrection appearances of Jesus made the disciple confident in presenting the narrative of the death of Jesus because they believed that kingship would be defined by the one who triumphed over death.

  The resurrection of Christ means that it is possible for us to perceive another kind of kingdom and another kind of living and lifestyle even as we live within the corrupting and corruptible kingdoms of this world.  As we perceive the kingdom of Christ in our world we don’t live in naiveté about the kingdoms of this world but we are able to receive a Spirit of peace and innocence as a counter balance to our lives in an often harsh world of the conflict of power.

  Today, you and I are invited to the kingship of Christ and to his kingdom.  We are invited to God’s forgiveness and to the Paradise of knowing that we are ever invited to new excellence in our lives.  Let us celebrate Christ as our king today but let us not make Christ as king in the images of typical earthly power, let us understand the reality of the kingdom of Christ as a new creation, as a new and peaceful way to live and serve.  We are here today to celebrate Christ as King and believe that the Absolute Power which is not corrupt is the power of winsome, persuasive, charismatic and never-ending love offered to people who are free to be convinced  to know that compassion, care, justice, love and service is the perfect expression of our freedom and power in life.  Today we are invited again to the irony of knowing Christ as our King. Amen.

The Comfort and Analgesic Function of Salvation Language

26  Pentecost, Cp28, November 17, 2013

Isaiah 65:17-25 Ps. 98:

2 Thes. 3:6-13     Luke 21:5-19   

Lectionary Link

    As one who you know to be very hung up on words and language, I am often disappointed by the misuse of language or the ignorance of language or the rather lack of lyricism in how we use language in our lives and more specifically how biblical language is misinterpreted in mode and context and application.

  One of my goals in life is to get people understand the broad and deeply rich spectrum of language and word use.  Language is perhaps the greatest truth of human experience.

  The Bible is a book of language; it is a book of words that have derived from the experiences of people who struggled with the common questions of humanity that pertain to life between cradle and the grave, and the possible life beyond the grave.

  I would ask that we understand genre and use of language and not misapply in inappropriate ways the various applications of language which function for our orientation in the great stories of humanity.

  A mother who may comfort a fevered baby with words like, “there, there little one; all will be better in the morning” could be confronted by literalist, “Mom how can you speak such untruthful things; you have no proof that all will be well in the morning.”  And what would you say to such a literalist before you smacked him in the mouth?   You would probably say, “You unfeeling idiot, do you not know a discourse of comfort does not need to be infallible predictive scientific discourse?”

   This lack of language finesse accounts for most biblical disputes by those who defend the Bible wrongly and by those who attack Bible language wrongly as being something that is does not purport to be in its use and function.

  If the Bible can be called salvation history, we could understand the word salvation to mean “health.”  The function of the Bible in its origin and now in its use is to be words of health for the community.

  How were the words of the Bible readings, words of health for people in their times of composition and how can they be words of health for us today?

  Words of health might include the functions of education, comfort and pain management.  Words of comfort and pain management might not necessarily be literally true, probable or even possible.  The mom who sings to a restless baby, “Hush little baby don’t say a word, momma’s goin’ to buy you a mockingbird.”  Well, no momma’s not going to buy a mockingbird; a mockingbird can be a teasing mischievous noise maker.   Momma’s trying to create a rhyme to comfort a restless baby.

  The Isaian prophet had some major comfort to achieve within the community.  The comfort also included some major pain management and so the words of comfort had to be downright analgesic.  They had to be escapism; they had to be fantastic.  And what were the conditions like that required analgesic words?  Not just simply Tylenol words but they had to provide the most effective pain-killers of all.

  What conditions could call for such escapism?  The Isaian writer was implying that the world was so bad that God needed to start all over with a new creation.  Jerusalem was so bad that a new Jerusalem had to be built.  The Isaian writer was doing what we all do when we’re in pain; we generalize to the entire universe.  Well, if life is so dreadful for me, it must also be for the entire universe.  When life is really bad, we can want to be somewhere else with a complete new discontinuity from the way things are.  Denial is a form of pain management.  These Isaian words are similar to John Lennon’s song, Imagine:  Denying words, utopian word, analgesic words.

  What else was happening?  The beasts had taken over the world.  The lambs were getting eaten up by the wolves; “O wouldn’t it be nice if wolves and lambs were friendly playmates?”  In a predator and prey world, the predators were winning.  Only the extremely fit were surviving.   Wouldn’t it be nice if people could enjoy the labor of their own hands, their own homes and gardens?  Infant mortality was staggeringly high.  “O, wouldn’t it be nice if young people lived to the very minimal age of one hundred.”  There is an incredible amount of wishful thinking in such analgesic discourse.  Such discourse may only be relevant when it is needed.  (Take as directed). We should not criticize its use in the situations when it is needed.  On the other hand, we have modern day literalists in America who live in a comparative lap of luxury trying to literalize these Isaian words as an escapism future for themselves.  I would submit to you that they misuse and misapply such language.

   The writer of the Gospel of Luke was also using words of health for comforting people in beleaguered times.  By the time that the Gospel of Luke had come to its final textual edition, what had happened in the world and in the lives of some of the followers of Jesus?

  The Temple had been destroyed and all Jewish sects, including the rabbinical sect of Jesus, had fled Jerusalem for safer places.  When you've been scattered and your homes destroyed and Chernobylesque conditions prevail, you have to start up elsewhere and you need to maintain community and identity.   In a time of crisis the conditions of vulnerability prevail.  There is a power and leadership vacuum and there are those to step up to try to give explanation for why things happen and what should be done because of the crisis.  After the destruction of Jerusalem there was a leadership vacuum and pretenders arose to fill that vacuum.  People who want to be leaders during a crisis try to give answers as to why the crisis happened and how to get out of the crisis.  Some people will try to predict catastrophic outcomes.  While others will say  catastrophic and cataclysmic events will continue to happen until the big one, the final one occurs.

   The writer of Luke knew about conflict in various communities; such conflict led to suffering.  Obviously the Roman authorities had power to persecute.  On more local levels, members of various Jewish sects and their synagogues had power to excommunicate and to let their theological disagreements break out into actual community disciplinary actions and physical punishment.   When members of different Jewish sects disagreed with each other, families could be divided.  Former Sadducees, Pharisees, Zealots and members of the community of John the Baptist who were persuaded about the interpretation of Jesus as the messiah experienced the wrath of the members of their former communities.  The writer of the Gospel of Luke knew about the inter-Judaic conflicts between the different sects of Judaism.  This writer knew how passionately people could disagree with each other.

  A particular discourse of comfort would involve the risen Christ to be presented as an oracle of comfort for the community.  The risen Christ would have known about the destruction of Jerusalem; he would have known about splintering of Judaism into various communities.  The risen Christ as one who would have predicted all of this would be an oracle of comfort to those who had to live through the devastations.  We do not have to be literal about the words of the Gospel of Luke to understand the truth function of words of comfort.  Words of comfort arise in the form that is needed to sustain the community during difficult times and that is the greater truth.

  Words still function that way for us today.  I hope that you and I do not need the powerful analgesic words for our lives today.  I hope we can be generally pain free.  What I would pray for us to become today are words of comfort in our actions.  The United States Constitution is a document of comfort for disagreeing religious people in that it does not permit people of different religious persuasion to burn each other at the stake.  It is a more ideal language of comfort for our language to be the body language of love and justice.  What kind of language of comfort is needed today in the Philippines?  In Viet Nam?  The body language of people delivering rescue teams and supplies from concerned people all over the world.  On the ground in the areas of devastation,  the people might need the language of escape from their exigent distress even while the world tries to mobilize the corporate body language of a world organizing to bring relief.

  Whether the time of Isaiah or the time of Luke, the language of comfort and analgesia is often needed.  Such words are discourses of hope and we should not despise such language, even as we should complement such language with the body language of active justice, love and compassion.

  This is the language of comfort that the risen Christ inspires in us today.  Let us be people who receive comfort in all the ways that we can but let us generate in all of the ways we can, a full language of hope, care, love, justice, comfort and salvation today.  Amen.