Law as Covenant Transforming Love

6 Epiphany       February 16, 2014          

Deuteronomy 30:15-20  Psalm 119:1-8

1 Corinthians 3:1-9  Matt.5:21-24,27-30,33-37

Lectionary Link

  What is the purpose for the speeding laws of the State of California?  Are they to encourage all of us to transform lives towards health and public safety or are these laws given for me to proclaim my moral superiority over my wife who has received many more speeding tickets than I have? If we understand this distinction, we perhaps can appreciate the issue in the Gospel riddles of the ironic words of Jesus.
  When law is reduced to legalism, then the law is used to build a moral resume for one’s own self-promotion and as a standard to compare oneself with others who do not attain the same moral resume.

  In the ministry of Jesus, he is often portrayed as confronting those who would reduce the great law to legalism.

  The great law was given to humanity as something like a marriage vow with humanity.  It was given to express a covenant relationship between God and humanity.

  The first commandment expresses the primary commandment; love God with all our hearts, soul and mind and strength.  And by the way, if are achieving this, it will affect your entire life.  You will have to spend some time with God so it will show in Sabbath time, prayer time.  And it will help and show in your family relationships with your parents and your spouse.  And it will help in your community relationships as in being truthful, respecting life and respecting the property of others.  And it will help you be contented with your life and not have to live in envy of other or wanting what others have.  If you work on your relationship with God these issues in your community life will improve.

  But  this great love and covenantal relationship with God can be reduced to some rules that the clergy and some of their groupies are able to keep and build their specialized moral resumes to prove to everyone how much better they are than the rest of those who are not a part of the legalistic cabal.

  Jesus came to countryside people who were being told that they were excluded because they did not have the same moral resumes as did the clergy and their groupies.  Jesus came to oppose the clergy who reduced the great covenant of a love relationship with God to very exclusive moral resumes for the religious legal experts.  So these clergy who were promoted as the official representatives of God could in fact misrepresent God and as a result they could make lots of people feel as though God did not care for them or that God was in no way relevant to their lives.  If God does not care for us and is not relevant to our lives, then what’s the use?

  Jesus came to oppose this misrepresentation of God.  If the ancient covenant of God was about a love relationship, then what was the purpose of the love relationship or covenant with God?  The purpose of this ancient love relationship or covenant with God was for the transformation of the lesser being to become more like the greater Being.

  If humanity was in covenant with God then the purpose of the covenant was to make us more God-like.  And what would it be like to be more God-like in the human situation?  The excitement of this ancient covenant with God is discovering what it is like in the human situation to be more like the God with whom we have this covenant of love?

  The specific rules and laws in the context of the people of the Hebrew Scriptures were simply the effort to try to chronicle what it means in specific situations to become more God-like.  But sometimes we can begin to assume righteousness by association rather than as a matter of practice.  There were those in  Israel who came to believe in their own automatic exceptionalism because they had discovered this great covenant relationship with God and because they had become specific in their rules and laws in how this covenant could make them exceptional and different within the world in which they lived.  We, Amercians, can and have done the same thing with our Declaration of Independence and Constitution; we often are very proud of our exceptionalism because of our association with these great documents but we often have not lived up to the great principles and spirit of these amazing documents.

  Jesus was confronting people who were reducing God to a legal resume.  I feel pretty good about myself.  I’ve never killed anyone.  Good job; I can put that on my resume.  I’ve never committed adultery; so I can put that on my moral resume.  I’ve had a divorce but when I divorced I followed the specific Moses instructions in how I carried it out.  Good job, ole boy, I’ve got that on my moral resume.  I’m a pretty jolly good fellow and look that all of those moral reprobates in the countryside; they’re a bunch of moral barbarians.  I’m certainly glad that I am not them.

  And this is when Jesus came at them with full blazing exaggerated rhetoric to blast them off of their pedestals of moral superiority.   Jesus was saying to them, “Instead of using the great covenant with God for the continuous transformation of your life to be more like God, you have used your definitions of moral attainment as justification for self-congratulation and for reasons to separate yourselves from people whom you will never welcome into your company.  And these are people that you exclude in the name of God.”

  If you are in a covenant love relationship with God, you know that God is so perfect that you will always be called to better living.  Long before Sigmund Freud told us that the unconscious interior life is polymorphously perverse, it was well known by the prophets that the human heart could entertain all sorts of perversity. 

  Jesus was saying to the religious people who were certain of their righteousness, “Yes you may think that with social pressure you can clean up your external behaviors, but what about your insides.  You may not kill anyone, but how many times have you wanted you?  You may not have acted out in adulterous acts, but how many times have you wanted to?  You may not have stolen anything, but how many times have you coveted?”

  Jesus was saying to everyone, “Do not reduce the law to a legalistic moral resume.  The law is to encourage the continuous transformation of one’s life towards being more like God.  And this is a continuous and great task.  And each person is in a different phase of this transformation.  And if we give exemplar behaviors, it is only for us to encourage a moral direction.  We are not to use exemplar behaviors as the final goal of this covenantal relationship with God.”

  Jesus reminded us that yes we can sometimes look like we clean up well for public presentation.  But then there is that interior cauldron that can have more counter tendencies flying around than the heevie jeevies of Pandora’s box.

  If we reduce the great covenantal law of transformation to the appearance of good public performance we make goodness into human work and the fortune of good social upbringing.  The greater work of God involves the engagement of our interior lives, our hearts and this is where we need to experience the work of God’s grace.

  Jesus was inviting everyone to this covenantal and transformational relationship with God.  This transformational relationship was the entire purpose of the Covenant expressed in the Mosaic Law.  It was not meant to be used as the basis to be a moral resume for people to use to establish their moral superiority.

  If you and I are about legalism and about establishing how much better we than others, then Jesus offers us the same convicting words.  “Okay, you can look good on the outside, but what are you going to do about cleaning up the inside, the part that is secret and hidden?”

  So what is the point about the exaggerated words of Jesus?  The point of Jesus is that the Law can only show us what we are like inside in spite of everything that we do on the outside to clean up our behavior for proper presentation to the public for whom we care.

  And if we know the division between the interior thoughts, motivations and desire and the way in which we actually behave, we will understand our need for grace to be tolerated by God and by our honest selves.  And knowing this we will not ever over-estimate our moral resumes to criticize how badly others are failing.

  Jesus was simply telling people to be honest and know their own insides and then to find themselves in the same place as everyone, namely, in desperate need of God’s tolerating and saving grace and in need for a touch with the higher power of God to do things that we know we cannot do if we are left to ourselves alone.

  We often find ourselves in a continuous battle not to act out on interior tendencies and this common battle for each of us is what makes us always equal in the need for God’s grace.  We can receive the Law not as condemnation but as an invitation to a covenantal love relationship with God in a path of transformation.

  This is how Jesus promised that his way would fulfill the entirety of the Law.   How, in honesty about our interior lives, we can be desperate always to know God’s grace and the power of God’s Spirit for transformation of our lives.   Those who are in the path of transformation are too busy looking at the next goal to worry about the goals which others may or may not be achieving.

  Yes, there is juridical law for the governing of society and we need to follow those laws; but the covenantal law of God in Jesus Christ is given to us for the transformation of our lives through the continual awareness of the need for grace.  I’m here today, because I need God’s grace; will you join me in this need today?  Amen.

Salt and Light

5 Ephiphany    A   February 9, 2014          

Isaiah 58:1-9a, (9b-12)  Psalm 112:1-9  

1 Corinthians 2:1-11  Matt.5:13-20

Lectionary Link

  Listen God, let me make a deal with you.  How about if I promise to come to church every Sunday and if I say the Morning and Evening Offices of prayer each day; and also if I give some money to the church would you exempt me from having to help the poor?  Would you exempt me from having to love people who disagree with me?  You see, if I could assure myself that I am okay and that I can have eternal life if I have the correct theology and I am fully compliant on religious rituals, perhaps I could be exempt from all of that messy stuff about justice?

  Well, this is the kind of subtle religious contract that sometimes we may actually be living with God.  We adopt a religious practice and a religious community as a way to feel good and clean toward God, but at the same time we avoid issue of human justice and care of our fellow human beings.  We can be faithful and loyal to creeds and doctrinal positions because we may hope that being told by religious authorities that we are “orthodox” in our thinking means that we somehow have a good standing with God.

  The lessons which we have read from the Holy Scriptures are totally in opposition to this kind of subtle religious contract that we may have in our lives.

  The Hebrew Scripture tradition, the Gospel tradition, the tradition of St. Paul is about the transformation of our lives, our entire lives.  For transformation to be valid it has to affect our entire lives.

  The prophet Isaiah noted that lots of religious people had made this phony bargain with God.  They performed religious acts of piety, even fasting,  all they while they let their fellow human being live in deprivation and suffering.  And Isaiah warned them that they could not disconnect the meaning of their religious deeds and beliefs from the overall practice of justice and mercy in their lives.

  The Psalmist wrote that people who keep the commandments will be blessed by God even with wealth; and that sounds rather formulaic except the Psalmist goes on to state what it means to keep the commandments: it means being generous to the poor and lending freely.  You want blessing?  Keep the commandments.  But the commandments are not words inscribed on a tablet for public display as a symbol of our moral superiority; the commandments are in the messy details of living our lives as compassionate people in deeds of kindness.

   Again the Psalmist’s message:  You cannot separate the commandments and the blessing of the commandments from the actual practice of kindness and generosity.  This means our  lives exhibit evidence of  transformation by complying with practice of the commandments.

  St. Paul told the Corinthian Church that the significance of his life was not his wisdom or even having wisdom about the mystery of God; the significance of his life was that his life represented a transformation in how he lived his life.  The death and resurrection of Christ were not just historical events; they were not just wise doctrine of understanding God; they were a spiritual method which transformed his life with the power of change.  Paul had been changed from being a persecuting religious inquisitioner into one who invited everyone into a path of transforming their lives.  He became one who invited Jews and Gentiles to this powerful transformation of their lives that could be known when one experienced and accessed this higher power of God’s Spirit.  It was not a theory of wisdom about God; it was the transforming power in practice.

  The words of Jesus in the portion of the Sermon on the Mount that has been read today is also about showing the evidence of a transformed life.

  Jesus warned about breaking the commandments because breaking the commandments at the most profound level means that one separates the laws of what one professes to believe from the actual practice of one’s life.  It does no good to profess that one loves God and then fail to practice the love of our neighbor as ourselves.

  Breaking of the commandments means to fail to realize the power of transformation which enables to not only to profess our love of God, but also to live our love of God in how we treat our neighbor.

  Jesus used the metaphor of salt and light.  If we understand salt  we understand that it is the nature of salt to so interact with plain food in such a way as to complement and add an enhancement to the taste of plain food.  If salt did not do this for food, then we would not use it.  Jesus said that his friends were to be salt of the earth.  To live in our Christ-like natures is to live transformed lives when we unite both the ideals of our commandments with the actual practice of our lives.  Salt makes a difference with ordinary food.  Salt enhances and accompanies ordinary food.  So too, our transformed lives are to make a complementing difference in this world.  Yes, we are to be spicy people; we are to complement and bring out the exquisite sublime taste in this life.  We are here to help people know, "My life is much better because of way that you live.  Your living makes my taste of life enhanced.”  Living our lives as salty Christians means that we make this world, the ordinary world, a tasty world:  A world to be savored because of our presence.  Jesus said that our lives are to make a seemingly ordinary and bland world, a very wonderful and good world.  As spicy and salty people we are to help people to realize just how good their lives are.

  Jesus also called his followers to be lights in this world.  He said just as we don’t violate the nature of a lighted candle by immediately putting it under a basket to be extinguished, so we are to live our lives as wicks that are ablaze with a light.  We are to live our lives to help others see more clearly things that help give them better orientation to their life situations.

  In the season of Epiphany which will end on the Mount of the Transfiguration where the face of Jesus is like the filament of a light bulb fully aglow,  Jesus is declared to be the Light of the World. But Jesus did not keep all of the light to himself; he also lit up the lives of his disciples.  He gave them the light of the Spirit as an inner depth to help them unite what they practice with what they believed.  Jesus provided his friends with a path of transformation.

  You and I are invited to be in this path of transformation today.  In this time and place we are to be salt and light.  We are to make this world a more tasty place because of the way in which we live our lives.  We are to make this world a brighter place because we have known an inner light.  This light has given us direction in the transformation of our lives so that we too can be an aid for others to transform their lives towards the love, wisdom and justice of Christ.  Amen.

Nunc Dimittis: Origin Rhetoric for Gentile Christianity

The Presentation    February 2, 2014

Malachi 3:1-4   Ps.84:1-6

Heb. 2:14-18    Luke 2:22-40

Lectionary Link

  Today is a day which has many calendar designations.  In the regular church year, this would be the 4^th Sunday after the Epiphany, but it is also the 40^th day after Christmas on which falls a major feast of our Lord and when a major feast of our Lord falls on a Sunday, it takes precedence over the regular propers for the Sunday.

  On the folk ethnic calendars February 2^nd is known as Groundhog Day.  On this day we believe that an over-grown rodent can become an accidental weather prognosticator for predicting the duration of the cold of winter.  I guess the liturgical counter part of Paxsutawney Phil would be that if Preacher Phil comes into the pulpit and sees his shadow then Lent is going to last 14 weeks instead of 7 weeks this year.  And I do see my shadow since the house lights are on.  Sorry.

  But on the perhaps the most revered calendar of the American culture, the Super Bowl falls on this day this year.  And unfortunately for many, the Super Bowl is the feast of feasts and takes precedents over everything else on this day, which is why a priest once told me that he always prayed that his home team did not make it to the Super Bowl because he desired to have at least some church attendance on Sunday.

  With all of the calendar conflicts of this day, we can return to some reflection upon the feast of the Presentation.  The events of this day have brought about some interesting practices as well as historical adjustments.   But beyond the liturgical minutiae there is perhaps a profound message embedded in the song of Simeon which proves to be a rhetoric of origin for the greatest early paradigm shift in the practice of the Christian church.

  On the fortieth day after Christmas, the birth of Jesus, Mary, the mother of Jesus reached her days of required segregation from the Temple due to the ritual impurity that was believed to be incurred by women during child birth.  This notion of Mary’s ritual impurity was unthinkable for those who later came to hold that Mary was perfect and without sin, that she was immaculately conceived and that she was perpetually a virgin, in that there is a branch of the church who do not believe that Jesus had biological brothers and sisters.  So why would perfect Mary have to re-enter the community in fulfilling a purification rite?  Well, she didn’t have to, but just like Jesus was circumcised and was baptized by John and didn’t need to repent of any sins, so Mary fulfilled the liturgical rites as an expression of her full solidarity with humanity.

  For a long time, churches had their parallel rite for the re-entry of the mothers into the church after child birth.  For those of you old enough to remember the former Books of Common Prayer, you perhaps remember the pastoral rite entitled, The Thanksgiving of Women after Childbirth commonly called The Churching of Women.  The rubrics actually specified that women were to present offerings for the occasion for the priests and wardens to be used for distressed women.  While the Jewish rite implying the impurity of women during child birth is rather repugnant to us today as well as even the hint that women had to be “churched” again after child birth, we perhaps need to exercise some interpretation charity in appreciating the high infant mortality in the not so distant past as well as the high rate of mortality of women in child birth.  Such a birth event with high negative probability could account for corporate liturgies with non-scientific and liturgical superstitious connections being honored as a way  for communities to deal with this major rite of passage for child and mother.  Modern non-religious folk do far crazier things to guarantee that their favorite team will win.  We could also regard this as a societal recognition of a 40 day maternal leave for mothers to bond with their babies.

  This feast is called the feast of Presentation because of another ancient rite with a history.  The Passover Lamb was the ritual decree that God gave through Moses when there was an indiscriminate killing of all first born sons who lived in Egypt during the time of Moses.  Moses gave the people of Israel inside information; “If you will sacrifice a spotless male lamb in place of your son and sprinkle the blood on the door, then your son will be spared death but you will also know that your first born son will belong to the Lord and so you must ritually present him to the Lord.”  And this of course was the basis for the church at various times in history requiring that first born sons be given to the church for the priesthood.  It also meant that if first born sons belonged to the church, so did their inheritance because all of the “worldly” possession of the priest belonged to the church under the rubric of the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.

  This day is also called Candlemas and has been a liturgical event for churches to bless candles.  The Song of Simeon, states that the infant Jesus would be a “light to lighten the nations.”  So Christ as the Light of the world makes the feast of the Presentation consistent with the basic theme of the season of the Epiphany.

  I apologize for all of the secular and ecclesiastical liturgical minutiae; presented for context if not just a chuckle.  However, I think that this feast is significant in reinforcing the main theme of the Epiphany, which is the Manifestation of the light of Christ to the world.

  And so I would like for us to turn to the significance of Simeon and the famous Song of Simeon, which is included in Daily Office of Evening prayer known under it famous Latin designation the  Nunc dimittis.

  The Gospel of Luke is the first half of a larger work sometimes referred to as Luke-Acts.  And while it would seem that the events of the life of Jesus occurred chronologically before the birth of the church, the writing of Luke’s Gospel actually occurs after the church was already an established reality.  Why?  Because history is always written in hindsight.  We only are interested in what came before after something significant has happened.

  Why do we have countless millions of people who have made the pilgrimage to Bethlehem and nobody making a pilgrimage to Swedish Covenant Hospital, in Chicago.  Why, because I was born at Swedish Covenant Hospital, and nobody rightly gives a rip about my birth place.

  The Acts of the Apostles was penned by Luke.  It is a chronicle about the success of the church through mission of the apostles, Peter and mostly St. Paul.

  St. Paul is responsible for presiding over the most significant paradigm shift in the history of the church.  Although, Paul visited the synagogues in the Jewish Diaspora in various cities of the Roman Empire, he found that the success of the message of the Gospel was embraced by more non-Jewish persons.  So there was an incredible dilemma; here these non-Jewish persons wanted the message of the Gospel.  They received it and they changed their lives.  They devoted themselves to these new Christ communities.  Paul had a dilemma; how do you tell someone who has embraced the message of Jesus Christ that he had to become circumcised, he had to quit eating pork, and he had to observe all of the feast days on the Jewish liturgical calendar?  The Jewish ritual practices were impractical and inaccessible to so many who were having their lives transformed by the Gospel and who were forming these early churches.

  St. Paul saw the evidence of the message of Jesus Christ; he also recognized that the Jewish rituals were inaccessible to the people who were receiving the message.  He made a theological decision; he became the theological architect and ecclesiastical Pope for the “seamless” inclusion of the Gentiles into the greater River of Salvation history which had Judaism as a major tributary after the age of Abraham.

  Jesus himself was not the conscious architect of the church or its separation from Judaism.  So Luke had a writing goal which needed to be achieved.  How could the true Jewish roots of Jesus of Nazareth be upheld but be presented with subtle hints toward the reality of what eventually happened within the Pauline churches and in Christianity?

  And so we have the infancy narratives, the Christmas Stories, in Matthew and Luke.  Some scholars believe these narratives were the last to come to textual form in how the Gospels were comprised. 

  How was the Gentile mission of the Gospel foretold in the life of Jesus?  Well, magi, foreigners or Gentiles visited the Christ Child and paid him homage.  And Simeon, this very old man, symbolizing the antiquity of the Jewish tradition sees the baby Jesus at his presentation and what does he say, “ I have waited my whole life to see this.  I have waited to see how our tradition is connected with the lives of the rest of the people in our world.  Because I now see with my own eyes the Savior.  And the whole world is now prepared to see the Savior.  His time is ripe.  This baby will be the light to enlighten the Gentiles or the nations.  But it will not be a diminishing of Israel; it will in fact be Israel’s glory because this baby will universalize Israel to the entire world.”

  And so you see how Luke uses the Song of Simeon as a rhetoric of origin for why the Pauline churches happened; it happened because it grew out of and was predicted by the salvation history which began in creation, flowed in a definitive way through the people of Israel, but now has come to the entire world.

  This is why Paul wrote that in Christ there is no Jew or Greek, no male or female, no slave or free but a new creation.

  The Song of Simeon was Luke’s literary pilgrimage to the origin of the success of the message of Christ to the entire world.

   You and I can embrace the light of Christ as a light to the world.  Christ can still be light to this world of non-Christian people because his message of love and hope is universal to all.  We do not have to think that the Christian churches of the world exhaust the relevance and the message of Christ as light to this world.  We can be completely committed to this light even as we don’t need to be chauvinistic about our church or Christianity.  We can be humble about the relevance of the Light of Christ to all and know that where people practice love, justice and forgiveness they are in fact, joined with the light of Christ.  Amen.

Origin of the Church? Christian Befriending

3 Epiphany A      January  26, 2014

Is. 9:1-4         Psalm 27:1, 5-13

1 Cor. 1:10-18    Matt. 4:12-23

Lectionary Link 

  When something is successful, there ensues this curiosity about the causes for that success.  We want to do a forensic analysis of success so that we might understand the ingredients of why things come to happen.  We cannot help but be curious about success.  This past week we had the 30^th anniversary of the Macintosh computer and so now historians and biographers look back at the circumstances which brought about its development.

  I think that sometimes we project back upon the history of the church this sense that the persecuted church was not very strong and was struggling for its very existence.  I have come to think differently; I think the early church leaders were very excited and they realized that the message was very successful in forging community in an unstoppable way.   The Gospel program was becoming a sweeping social force in the cities of the Roman Empire but it was a stealthy force.  The churches built upon this social force of the Gospel began to be built in the private spaces of houses in the cities of the Roman Empire.  It was so successful and it morphed in so many ways that the leaders could disagree passionately about the forms of expression which the Christian message took.  The fact that there is so much early disagreement among Christians is a sign that it had become a social force to contend with in the society-at-large.

  I would contend that it is the success of the message which made all of the institutionalization of Christianity necessary.  When movements are successful they have to be institutionalized for standardization and organization in order to function within different settings and to give some sense of comprehensive unity.  They have to be institutionalized in order for their franchises to become operative in many locations.  In the first century after Jesus of Nazareth one was able to find the great increase in number of many home churches throughout Roman Empire.

  When success happens one needs to account for that success through tracing the origins.  But in trying to trace the story of origin, one uses those stories as the method to further spread the influence of the social movement.  You should embrace the Gospel because look what it has done for so many people in so many place.  And this is why it happen.

  The season of the Epiphany is a season dedicated to mark the historical fact that Christ and the Gospel became known across the Roman world.  How did this happen?  It is as though a great light shown in the world and began to change the world because new things were now being able to be seen.

  A great light has shown.  What is the source of this light?   And how has this light kept shining with a continuous brightness?  And so we have origin stories about the source of this light, Jesus Christ.  And we also have origin stories about the source of the continuing transmission of this light in the calling of Christ to his disciples and in the birth of the church.

  The Gospels provide us with the infancy narratives and the record of the ministry of Jesus to give an explanation account of the source of this great Christian social movement.  The light did not just get limited to Jesus of Nazareth; he was able to transfer this light to his disciples.  They were able to transfer this light to subsequent disciples and the movement grew in an exponentially profound way.

  We are often taught that the birth of the church occurred on Pentecost when the message of Jesus was seen to be universally accessible in all of the languages of humanity.  But one can trace the history and the origin of the church to something very basic, namely, befriending which took place between Jesus and his friends and students.  As their teacher, he was more than a teacher; he was an intimate mentor and friend and in the befriending dynamic which took place between Jesus and his disciple the transmission of the social and spiritual energy of the church occurred.  And it has been occurring forever.

  This befriending dynamic is the origin of the church and it accounts for the success of the church and it will be present in the future success of the church.  Where befriending occurs in our life orientation toward God, there we will find the essence of Christ;  there we will find the essence of the church.

  The church has institutionalized this befriending in the person and office of a bishop.  A bishop stands as a symbolic person of the fellowship and befriending behaviors of Christians with each other in our world today.  But a bishop also stands as a symbol of the fact that Christ-like befriending has been passed from one generation of Christians to another.  A bishop does not exhaust the essence of Christian befriending; a bishop’s symbolic personage reminds us that befriending with Christ is the birth of the church; it is the secret of the transmission of the Gospel from the past to the present; it is the symbol of our befriending fellowship with one another now and in the office of the bishop laying hands on future bishops, we have symbolized our obligation to pass on to future friends the wonderful gift of Christian befriending.

  The Church happened very successfully because of this universally adaptable Christian befriending.  The church happened because the befriending nature of Jesus of Nazareth caught on and spread and it spread like a wildfire because it was adopted to all times and cultures.

  The befriending nature of Christ continues today.  Churches fight about it. Some churches put limitations upon how they think the Christ befriending behaviors should manifest themselves.  But the Christ befriending winsomeness just keeps rolling on; the befriending Christ befriends many people for whom you and I may not have an affinity; it befriends many people who may have completely different life experiences than the experiences which we have.

  But I would ask us this:  Should we be offended and limiting about the scope and nature of the winsomeness of this wonderful befriending that happens because of Christ?  In our acceptance of our own Christian befriending should we deny the validity and sincerity how it has happened to others?

  At some point every bishop and church leader need to have the humility to admit: Wow! I do not control this Christ-befriending dynamic that is present in this world.  I do not control it even as  I and many others have been swept away by its awesome winsomeness, by it awesome good news.  And God forbid that we get in the way of someone's good news with our petty censoring ways of how we think that good news should be received.

  The birth of the church took place in the call of Christ to his disciple students and friends.  This is the heart of the transmission of the light and good news of Christ in the world.  This befriending turned out to be a wildfire in the Roman Empire and ultimately the entire world had to deal with this befriending dynamic.

  Let us be thankful for the befriending behaviors which we have had particularly those which have given us good news about being loved, being forgiven, being perfectible and being given hope for all of the possibilities of the future, enough to inspire actual choices of faithful behaviors in our lives now.

  Christ is the Light of the world.  We have received this light of Christian befriending and cannot help but let this good news go forth into the future to everyone in our lives with the release of our befriending gift of Christ to all for whom it is intended.  Amen. 

Curiosity and the Call of Christ

2 Epiphany A      January  19, 2014

Is.49:1-7          Ps. 40:1-10

1 Cor. 1:1-9      John 1:29-41

 Lectionary Link

  One of the themes of the season of the Epiphany, the season of the manifestation of Christ as the light of the world, is the theme of the encounter of Christ, or the call of Christ.  Christ called the disciples and they followed.  As stories it seems rather simple but now we have institutionalized the call of God in Christ to be something that happens to those who end up in the specialized roles of leadership in the church in the ordained ministry or religious life.

  A simple encounter with Jesus cannot get you into ordained ministry anymore, in fact, if one thinks that one has too many actual encounters with Jesus, it often means referral for psychological evaluation.

  The truth of the history of church would indicate to us that the success of the church has many explanations, different explanations because the teachings of Christ have been universal enough to be adopted to many different cultural settings.

  I have recently come to think that the success of the church had to do with the message of Jesus getting out of rural Galilee and into the cities as a social club format for providing the people going through urbanization, identity clubs and socialization advocacy networks within the city.

  If we look at Christianity today, where is it growing the most?  In the Southern Hemisphere.  Some people like to give simple explanations; it is because the people of the Northern Hemisphere have rejected Christ and it is because the peoples of Africa and South America are really the faithful ones to the real truths of primitive and pure Christianity.  At the same time, sociologists would say that the people of Africa are ripe for Christianity and Islam because of the rapid urbanization which is taking place.  People uprooted from tribe and village need identity clubs in the city to introduce them to modernization which has not fully spread its effects to the countryside.

  We should not be offended by the many scenarios for the call of Christ throughout the world or even within Morgan Hill. The call of Christ has been adaptable to many situations and it will continue to be adaptable.  Part of what we are trying to do here at St. John the Divine is to understand more clearly how the call of Christ can be adopted to our situation here.

  In the Gospels we find some insights about the call of Christ.  The call is social in nature, that is, people get referred to Jesus Christ by people they respect.  John the Baptist was respected enough to have his own community of followers.  But the historical record proves that John the Baptist and his community were too parochial, too locally based on the Jordan River.  John’s message could not become an effective message in the cities of the Roman Empire.  So the disciples of John made the transition to Jesus.  Jesus was baptized by John, perhaps his first curate or assistant but John did not let his ego get in the way when he observed the excellence of Jesus.  He referred and recommended his own disciples to Jesus.  They came, they saw and they told their brothers and friends who also came and saw Jesus for themselves.

  You see how origin stories about the call of Christ simplify the subject matter for the purpose of the teaching occasions in the places where the Gospel words were preached and written down.   The location of  John the Baptist and Jesus in the story would have been geographically distant from the people who heard these words in a city in the Roman Empire and the actual geography of the Gospel story would not have had much meaning for the people in cities throughout the Roman Empire..  They weren’t written to be geography, they were written to explain the dynamics of the call to Christ which was engaging people who were drawn to these new Christian clubs called churches.

  The call for you and me here today is still both an individual and social thing.  Many Christians in America and in Europe have experienced the material abundance of our cultures and so we do not have socialization crisis in our lives.  We can be more independent units and pick from an entire array of clubs and groups to find the kind of fellowship that we want to advocate our values in our society.  But in other places and in other times the church has been the dominant social force for people who are trying improve their life in a new place.

  In the Roman Catholic Church today, you have one sector of the church who find significant identity because of the Catholic educational institutions stretching from elementary through very fine universities.  They find identity in such “catholic” cultural expression of higher education and Notre Dame Football and Jesuit Universities' basketball.  The attendance of the Catholic church would be down in the United States except for immigrant peoples who arrive and struggle for a new start but who find attending Mass to be a significant factor in the process of setting down roots and getting established and finding friends and advocates in a new place.  The church is a place to meet "expats" who speak the native language and the church provides the meeting space to foster the identity of immigrants in the United States as their new location.  People who have been here from birth do not need the parish church to function in the same way for them.

  The call of Christ involves for you and me the significant self-love of curiosity.  Curiosity is being drawn to a vision of who I am and what I can do and become in the future.  People like Jesus had such mentoring charisma that people said, “I don’t know what I really want to be, but I do know that I want to be more like that man Jesus in the art of living.”  The call is the same today.  It is successful dealing with our curiosity about who we can become in the future as we are informed by examples of excellence.

  At St. John’s today you and I are in this process of being called but also being the voices of Christ as ones who are doing the calling.  We are possessed with curious self-love to want to surpass ourselves in a future state by seeking out mentoring examples, but at the same time we are to be the voice of Christ and the helping hands of Christ that are used to call others because ironically, we are to be examples to others and each other to improve our art of excellent living.

  Let us continue to be curious about the next phase of our call towards excellence.  But let us also make ourselves available to be watched by others so that something of Christ can reflect from us to others in their own unique phase of responding to Christ.

 Today, let us re-commit ourselves to making our parish a place where this dynamic of the call of Christ to us and through us happens in only the way it can happen through us.  May we all continue in the call of Christ today.  Amen.

Jesus, Superman, Baptism and Christian Clubs

1 Epiphany A      January  12, 2014

Is.42:1-9         Ps. 89:20-29

Acts 10:34-38     Matt. 3:13-17

Lectionary Link

  Long before the digital world took over, some of us grew up in the high literary culture of comic books.  The hero of heroes of the comic book culture was Superman.  The author of this story obviously borrowed from the biblical story.  Kal-El is sent hurling through space in an escape capsule by his father Jor-El from the planet Krypton and he lands in Kansas and is adopted and though he is from Krypton, he is Earthly enough to become known as the mild mannered Clark Kent.  He progressively becomes aware of his other-worldly powers even as he hides them in the earthly human Clark Kent.  As the mild-manner newspaper reporter he is situated to be aware of the circumstances where heroic interventions are required.

  The comic book literary experience of the hero genre was engaging to us.  We, the readers, were the privileged insiders as to the full identity of Clark Kent, while those in the story, Perry White, Jimmy Olson and Lois Lane and all of Metropolis were kept in the dark.  The authors let the readers know what the characters in the story do not know.  The hidden incognito hero story-line is a story line that has been repeated in successful comics and cinematic presentations many times over.

  A story reader knows that the ignorance of people in the story is much more profound than any current ignorance in our lives now.  What is the story line of admitting what I don’t know now?  What I don’t know about other people now has no context for me to even talk about.  What I don’t know now will only have engaging meaning in hindsight when I find out what was truly was happening when I was ignorant.

  This is the genius of narrative and story.  The reader gets to read about the past with knowledge that the original characters are portrayed as not having.  This illusion of art is what makes it so embracing.

  Narrative is how the Gospel was told because the Gospel writings were forging the identity of a club of people who were gathering to survive their lives lived within the Roman Empire.  Urbanization was a fact of the Roman Empire.  Nomadic people and people who were forced into exile were people who needed to have smaller group identity to negotiate their identity within the cities of the Roman Empire.

   The baptism of Jesus is a story about his initiatory rite into humanity.  The encompassing of   humanity by the divine is the story of Jesus.  Kal-El appeared earthly enough to pass as Clark Kent.

  Jesus is the hero whose identity is known and revealed and told in progression by the Gospel writers.  These writers were providing something like we, young boys felt when we received a crisp new Superman comic book, that we secreted away in our secret club or secret fort and we felt special in that club in the midst of the outside world of parents and teachers and all other authorities.

  The Christian Clubs in the Roman Empire gave people an identity.  The Christian Clubs had an initiatory ritual known as baptism.  With baptism you began that progressive incorporation into the Christian Club and this would give you an extended family to help you negotiate your existence within the Roman Empire.  The Roman Authorities were visible enough through soldiers and authorities to be threatening to those who did not have authority; the Roman authorities were not omnipresent enough to completely take over private lives and in those private lives one had to learn to practice lodging behavior to survive.  Old family, tribal and clan systems often broke down in the cities and so the function of the Christian Clubs within the city became formidable in the lives of the members of these Clubs, these churches.

  Modern society has changed the church.  Church has come to have a more compartmentalized specialty.  We have made the church into such a holy and special gathering of people, it has become somewhere we don’t want to go very often, maybe but an hour occasionally, but then we want to retreat to our man-caves or women salons and do the really clubbish things which excite us, like watching the 49ers or all of the other exciting things that we apparently don’t find in church.

  I would submit to you that these early churches were very engaging entertaining clubs which provided significant social function for the people drawn to join them.  Churches used to command a larger role in the socialization process of belonging.  Christians were a bit secretive in the Roman Empire because one did not want to be too open or visible to raise any question about any possible political opposition to the Emperor and his surrogates.

  Gospel stories and literature were the art of the community; it was entertaining art; it was initiatory art.  In the Gospel literature a member of a Christian Club was a privileged reader who had special knowledge about the resurrection appearances of this hero Jesus.  But in knowing end of the story, the reader could relive in engaging excitement all of the human limitations which this hero took upon himself.

  The Gospel writings and other letters and writings were passed around and received with excitement in these “club” churches.  Christians met and had this incredible social identity club into which they were initiated by baptism.  Why baptism?  Because Jesus himself was baptized.  And because Jesus had surpassed John the Baptist and because many of the followers of Jesus had come from the community of John the Baptist, it was important to hear it said that John recognized the excellence of Christ.  But at the same time, the risen hero Christ, accepted his complete solidarity with humanity in locating himself within a specific community led by John the Baptist. 

  The risen Christ, the super-human being, was also Jesus of Nazareth in all of his limitations. 

  There is always a logical problem in hero stories.  If Superman is great enough to catch criminals and people who are falling from buildings, shouldn't he also have been great enough to prevent the necessity of the rescue in the first place?  That is the same problem which the Gospel writers had to deal with….yes Christ is really great and super and wonderful but at the same time God and God’s super One did not exercise the preventive efforts to make salvation and rescue and healing unnecessary.  It is the difference between asking God to prevent illness and asking God to heal us when illness has happened.  So the super hero cannot be so super as to avoid most of the consequences of freedom in this world.  The super hero has to be great enough to surf the waves of true freedom in this world and even the freedom that brings the phenomenon of death.

  The Gospel writings within the early church clubs gave their members an initiatory inculcation into the group values.  The Gospel clubs recount the story and the meaning of the story of Jesus their hero.  Jesus was God becoming initiated into full humanity within a ritual such as baptism so that men and women might be baptized or initiated into the realization of the divinity, the eternal spirit nature that has to be released or energized in order to experience the Higher Power of God’s Spirit to change one’s life.

  You and I today want to be initiated into the divine; you and I want to be initiated into the Sublime.  You and I want to know that our lives are touched by a Higher Power of delicious purpose.  Since we have the freedom to worship, we don’t have to do it in secret clubs with just a few writings to read like the monthly comic books in my young boys club or like the few early writings which were passed around in the early Christian communities.  Because of the acceptance of the church in our society, we have relegated the church to a compartmentalized spiritual category and we say it is holy and special; but then we go elsewhere for the other fun and social identity of our lives.

  I am trying to make the point of the relevance of the Risen Christ and the Gospel and the Church to our entire lives.  It is not a special compartment; the risen Christ can be in the places where we are finding our secret sublime fun, if we will simply allow Christ to be connected with all of the sublime and wonderful experiences of our lives.

  Baptism is not being initiated into church life; it is a celebration of birth into abundant life itself, God’s life, because we live and move and have our being in God.   Baptism is the invitation to  hear the Great Within cry to you and me, “You are my beloved son and daughter.  With you I am pleased.”  To hear these words within us is the experience of profound affirmation to be, to love, to search, to discover, to wonder, to find goodness, to express as much of the possibilities of hope through faithful acts and deeds.

  Can we see how excited people must have been in these early Christian clubs within the cities of the Roman Empire?  Can we appreciate the identity that they received from initiation into the Risen Christ?

  Can we be honest about how our parish functions in our own lives now?  The parish may not have the same impact in our lives as those early Christian clubs but can we liberate the message from being but a sacred compartment on Sunday, and understand the reality of baptism being our initiation into the life of God, who has said to each of us in the loudest silence of our souls, “You are my son and daughter, with you I am well pleased.”  Amen. 

The Magi, Christocentric Judaism and the Pizza Effect

2 Christmas A January 5, 2014

Jeremiah 31:7-14   Ps 84:1-8

Eph. 1:3-6,15-19a Matthew 2:1-12

Lectionary Link

   Today is the last day of Christmas and tomorrow is the Feast of the Epiphany.  And on the twelfth day, according to the song, your true love gave to you twelve Lords a leapin’.  If you’ve ever watched the House of Lords in session on the telly, you would find that hard to believe.  It’s more like twelve Lords a sleepin’.

  What the lectionary gives us on the twelfth day of Christmas and the Second Sunday after Christmas is the story of the magi who came from the East to visit the Christ Child.

  To understand the literary function of the magi story, it might help us to understand something about the Jesus Movement and the Christ communities of the first ten decades after Jesus lived on this earth.

  To give us a sense of the situation, I would like for us to consider a culinary phenomenon which also could be viewed as a metaphor for sociological process.  I would call it the pizza effect.  Though Italy gets credit for the name, flat bread or open pie with spices and various sauces on top can be found almost everywhere and in many places in antiquity.  Pizza probably derived as a food of the masses; it was a quick way to bake flavored flat bread.  It was vendor portable and so could be hawked on the streets quite easily.  It was so basic that one could put on it whatever happened to be in the larder on the day.  It was so basic and so good it traveled with the nomadic communities wherever they went.  Pizza underwent a major paradigm switch because of those Americans; tomatoes and tomato sauce and paste derived from the Americas and were taken back to Europe and tomatoes have become so much a part of the pizza tradition that it is hard for Americans to even think about pizza without tomato sauce, even though pizza has lots of varieties without tomato sauce.  Today, each American city brags about having the best and most authentic pizza.  And Chicago hails deep dish pizza and New York retorts, “Fuhgeddaboudit. Pizza has to be flat and skinny.”  I don’t think that there are any American pizza chains in Italy but there are some pizza makers there who cater to American deviant pizza taste.  It is rather presumptuous for Americans to make authentic pizza claims in Italy.

  The Jesus Movement experienced its own dynamic something like the pizza effect.   Jesus was a populist rabbi within the Judaic tradition; an apocalyptic rabbi who had a sense that great changes were going to come to his world.

    He was not around for those changes.  Jesus of Nazareth was not around after about the mid-thirties.  And the first New Testament writings did not occur until the mid-fifties with the writings of the man who was associated with perhaps the greatest paradigm shift in the history of the Jesus Movement.  St. Paul was involved in this paradigm shift.  It was a shift that was more profound than the effect of tomato sauce in the history of pizza.  St. Paul, a rabbi, noticed that Gentiles became infused with the Spirit of Christ and that they manifested obvious moral and spiritual changes in their lives; and they did not even have the benefit of circumcision and they did not keep the Jewish calendar nor did they observe the dietary rules.  They had the evidence of spirituality without the identity markings of Judaism.  So Paul had to rethink what the community of Jesus Christ would be like in the cities of the Roman Empire where a variety of people were brought into contact with each other comprising churches or sort of egalitarian social clubs for fellowship within large cities.    Could Jews and Gentiles live together within a community of faith that derived from Jesus of Nazareth?  Could slaves and slave owners actually be friends?  Could men and women have places to meet with social protection and dignity?  What would Jewish followers of Jesus have to give up or to tolerate to receive Gentiles into the community and live together?  Would Jewish followers of Jesus have to sacrifice too many of their religious practices to be able to tolerate living in a community with non-Jewish members?  How can you cook kosher in a kitchen that has already had pork prepared in it with all of the cooking utensils?  It is hard to purify a kitchen with “mixed” use.

  St. Paul represented the universalization of a Christocentric Judaism, a Christ-centered Judaism, within the cities of the Roman Empire.  This Christocentric Judaism which involved accepting Gentile members was political and social in nature; the social reality of the Roman world is that it placed the nomadic populations in proximity with the local residence of the cities.  There was a need for a community; a sort of “home away from home” kind of extended family to help mediate a person’s existence within a city of the Roman Empire.  The Christocentric or Christ-centered Judaism of St. Paul was successful enough to comprise a variety of these home churches to give people social identity centered around a devotion to Christ.  It resulted in helping Jews and Gentiles to live side by side in successful fellowship with one another and it was so successful that this pluralistic community began to pass judgments upon communities that wanted to remain separated..  The synagogues that wanted to retain their Jewish purity of practice began by the year 80 or so to excommunicate followers of Christ.

  We can further note the “pizza” effect in the sociology of early Christianity.  St. Paul’s writings were written before the Gospel writings.   That is not to say that authentic oral traditions of the Gospel did not pre-exist the writings of Paul, but it meant that the oral traditions of the Gospel were edited and written to take into account the coming of the message of Jesus Christ to great success within the Gentile communities.  Just as tomato sauce changed the pizza, Gentile acceptance of Christ changed the appearance and the presentation of the Gospel writings.

  How could the Gospel writers who were Christ-centered Jews, account for the acceptance of Christ by the Gentile community?  Since Gentile Christianity had become as common as tomato sauce on pizza, the Gospel writers had to have origin stories to incorporate the validity of Gentile Christianity.  Where was the origin of Gentile Christianity in Scriptures?  Well it was there from the beginning.  It was there in the Torah and it was in the other writings of the Hebrew Scriptures.

  For St. Paul, the Gentile people of faith were children of Abraham, the father of pre-Hebrew faith.  With Christ, the non-Jewish line of Abraham was let back into the lineage of authentic faith in God.  The Temple was supposed to be a house of prayer for all people.  The Psalmist and the prophet Isaiah wrote that kings of the earth would come and pay homage with gifts for the promised one.  So the magi came to receive kingly identity in Christian tradition.    In telling of the universalization of a Christ-centered Judaism, the story of the magi became an origin story about the drawing of the Gentiles into the community of faith.   The Gentiles traveled long and far from their socio-ethnic background to come under the influence of the Jewish populist rabbi Jesus.  The Gentiles gave their best and their all for the birth of the life of Christ into their lives.  They gave the gold of their life earning; they gave the frankincense of their rising prayers to God and they brought the medicinal myrrh as symbols of health and salvation.

  So the magi story was used by the Gospel writer to explain why the Christ-centered Judaism had come to many people in the cities of the Roman Empire.  They were magi; they were wise because in their wisdom they would not compromise with those like Herod who wanted to limit their faith and their worship to exclusive communities.  The magi refused to participate with the extinction of the message of the Christ Child.

  The Gospel,  much like pizza has in our day, has become a universal phenomenon.  It has morphed and habituated itself to many new countries and situations.  The magi story tell us that there is something so good about the birth of Christ into the world and into us that we are compelled to change our lives toward excellence and share for the cause of this excellence the very best of lives.

  So people, enjoy your pizza today, of any variety but Christ is one greater than pizza and who is offered to us again today under the species of Eucharistic bread and wine.  This perhaps is the greatest culinary spirituality of all.  Come today and partake of the Christ; and bring your best gifts to Christ today.  Amen.