Interior and Exterior Baptism

3 Lent     a           March 23, 2014

Ex.17:1-17           Ps.95:6-11     

Roman 5:1-11         John 4:5-42

Lectionary Link 

    In the history of the Christian church, one can find the manifestations of several kinds of fundamentalism.  Two forms of fundamentalism might be called ecclesiastical literalism and the other might be call biblical literalism.  Ecclesiastical fundamentalism is found in churches which tend to give too much power to the people who are a part of the hierarchy; such people have attained even the so-called “infallible” status in some matters of church order.  Other Christians have come to read the Bible in such a literal way that they believe the actual words of the Bible are causatively absolute of this world; as if because the words are in the Bible, it made the world to happen.   So to them the world is but a few thousand years old and the whole world order is going to climax in a battle at Armageddon.  Often in the history of the church, people with different fundamentalisms have been opposing each other to control the message for the peoples of their faith traditions.

  What’s the solution to fundamentalism?  Read carefully the Gospel of John.  The discourses of Jesus in the Gospel of John include satirical presentations of literal interpretation.  The literal Nicodemus said, “How can I get back into my mother’s womb to be born again.”  The woman at the well says, “Jesus, you don’t even have a bucket to draw this “living water.”  Jesus said that the “Pharisee who could see were blind, and the blind man was the one who truly saw.”  On the way to raising Lazarus from the dead, Jesus told his disciples that Lazarus was asleep.  The literal disciples said, “Well Jesus, isn’t sleep good for him?”  And Jesus said with my very uncharitable and misrepresenting paraphrase, “You dumb literalists, Lazarus is dead.”  In the living bread discourse the persons who interpreted literal cannibalism walked away from Jesus when they thought that Jesus meant literally eating his flesh and drinking his blood.  And yet there has been a history of transubstantiation literalism that has been founded upon this phrase of Jesus in John’s Gospel, the very one that was mocking such literalism.

  John’s Gospel is the last Gospel written and it is artfully written and it contains in it the layers of what has happened within the church for eight or nine decades and it interweaves the church practices of these decades within a narrative discourse of the life of Jesus.

  The church of John’s Gospel has become a Gentile church but the writer wants this Gentile church to know that the roots of Jesus are within the Judaic tradition and it is a church which wants to continue to include Jews.  The church of John’s Gospel is a church which baptizes for initiation and also practices the Eucharistic meal.  The writer of the Gospel of John tries to retrace the meanings of these liturgical practices within a presentation of a narrative of the life of Jesus and the writer creates “might have said” discourses of Jesus.

   The discourse which we have read today is called the living water discourse and in it is a baptismal discourse, with the spiritual meaning of baptism.  The setting at the Samaritan well tells us that the church of Gospel of John has overcome the enmity between the Jews and the Samaritans.  It indicates to us that Jesus as a man and a Jew is not practicing either ethnic nor gender nor sectarian segregation which would have characterized Jewish custom of his own time.  The woman at the well was a member of a hated group, the Samaritans, she was a woman and therefore unapproachable by a man and she belonged to the Samaritan religion based on Mount Gerizim and possessing their own versions and translations of the Hebrew writings.  So we could assume that the church of the writer of John’s Gospel had overcome in Christian practice these previous barriers to fellowship.

  Baptism was not invented by Jesus; it was not invented by John the Baptist.  Water purification rites were a part of the Jewish religion in its various forms of historical development.  Many water pools for Mikveh or baptismal pools have been excavated by archaeologists in the vicinity of the Temple complex in Jerusalem.  Such rites were even described by some rabbis as “new births” and so the teachings about water purification rites made figurative reference to the amniotic fluids which attend natural birth.  You understand why Jesus questioned Nicodemus’ lack of understanding about being born by water and the Spirit.  As a Jew, why did he not know the rabbis teaching about the new birth of water baptism?   There were also different kinds of water purification rites.  Women had to do monthly water purification rites so homes that could afford it kept tanks or large stone jars around for such practices in the home (so it makes it almost hilarious the event of Jesus turning 155 gallons of purification water into wine for a wedding feast).  “Mom, you want some wine for the wedding?  Poof.  How about 155 gallons of wine, will that be enough?”

  Jewish water purification rites also had requirements for the type of water which could be used.  The highest form of baptism had to have “living water.”  Living water meant there was motion involved; an ocean, a lake, a river or stream, or a fountain or the living river underground which was drawn from a well.  The Jordan River was living water for the baptisms of John the Baptist.

  In the metaphors of the Gospel of John, we are instructed that the Holy Spirit is a stream of living water or a fountain within.  This is a complementing metaphor to the understanding of water as an external bathing and cleansing.  The message is that we need to practice both external and internal cleansing.  John the Baptist said, “I baptize you with water; but Jesus will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”  In Christian symbols then, the Spirit is the cleansing of refining fire and the continuous fountain of interior cleansing of a rising and bubbling Holy Spirit within us.  This interior energy of cleansing is the essence of the living water discourse that we have read today.

  This cleansing was available to non-Jews, to Samaritans, Greek and Romans.  This baptismal practice was also consistent with a requirement for non-Jews who wished to convert to Judaism.  In addition to circumcision required of males, baptism was required for a person to be cleansed from their old “pagan” ways and be born through the amniotic waters of baptism into their new family of faith.  Early Christian baptism, obviously integrated this notion of proselyte baptism in the formation of the Christian rite of initiation.

  John’s Gospel is no refuge for the literalist.  It begins by suggesting that Jesus is the Word of God from the beginning.  The very Gospel is based upon the creativity of “Words.”  John’s Gospel teaches us that we cannot get to anything; we can only interact with words.  When we posit that there is a Holy Spirit, we ask, “what’s that?”   It’s God like breath or wind?  How is God’s Spirit literally breath or wind?   It’s like a Presence we feel with us.  What is feeling and Presence?  It’s like something close.  What does something close mean?  So you see how John says word is what creates our human experience.  And words create other words to explain former words in an endless referential pattern.  And yet we feel there be to a Greatness beyond all referential words and it is so great we can only believe we know that it is there without controlling it with words that we must use to recognize the Greatness beyond words.

  But let us embrace the words about the Holy Spirit being living water within us.  This Lenten Season we are invited to the practice of mediation.  Let us use this Living Water or Interior Fountain metaphor as visualization for our meditation.  Let us visualize our deepest life energy or desire as this Living Water of God’s Holy Spirit which is always able to arise in us and cleanse and forgive and wipe the slate clean for us to take on another day in bubbling and flowing delight.

   We have been baptized with the external water of baptism; let us forever be baptized and re-baptized and re-purified by the Living Water, the Spirit of God whom we can discover within ourselves.  Amen.

New Testament Writings as Transition to a New Religion

2 Lent        A      March 16, 2014

Gen 12:1-8          Ps.121

Rom. 4:1-5, (6-12)13-17  Jn.3:1-17

Lectionary Links

   According to recent population totals, there are 3.1 billion Christians in our world and 14 million Jews.  What does this mean for Christian and Jewish Holy Books?  It means that more people read the Jewish Holy Book than do read the Christian Holy Book, by at least 14 million people.  For Christians, the Hebrew Scriptures are required reading but for Jews, the New Testament is not required reading.

  We know that Christianity and Judaism are two different religions today.  It was not always so.  Jesus was a Jew who practiced the pieties and liturgical forms of Judaism of his time.  But in Judaism, the tradition is regarded to be a living tradition.  Rabbis would write, preach and teach on the meaning of the Hebrew Scriptures and new understandings would arise to add to the body of the tradition.  Jesus of Nazareth was a rabbi with disciples and he was adding to the growth and the development of the Hebrew/Judaic tradition.

  Before Christianity and Judaism became different religions there were phases of transitions in time of several decades between the life of Jesus and the more complete separation of the communities of faith signaled by the practice of “excommunication” of the followers of Rabbi Jesus from the synagogues and a similar shunning of so called “Judaizers” within the Christian communities.

  The New Testament writings, including the Gospel are written in some phase of this transition of the birth of the Christian religion out of and separate from Judaism.  When people believe things strongly, they cannot avoid being a bit excessive in their persuasive attempts.  If one has good news, one wants to validate the good news by seeing its positive effect upon others.  And one can be disappointed or even critical of those who persist in finding the “old good news” as their continuing good news.  So many Jews after Jesus still found that their good news did not include following Jesus as their Messiah.

   What made the Jesus Movement a significant threat to the very structure of Judaism was the success of the message of Jesus within the Gentile community.  And when St. Paul and others decided that the Spirit of God could be present and work without the practice of all of the legal requirements of Judaism, the separation between Jews and Christians became sealed.  This upstart movement, the Jesus movement was claiming to be a valid successor and re-interpretation of Judaism and the Hebrew Scriptures.  The New Testament writings are essentially writings of re-interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures.

  So how can faith be valid for the Gentiles who did not have the benefit of growing up being taught the Torah, the prophets and other teachings of the Hebrew Scriptures?  Well, you know that pre-Jewish patriarch named Abram, who became Abraham?  He left his homeland in Ur of the Chaldees, and his obedience ushered in a new religious paradigm.  His obedience to God was an act of faith and he was a righteous man and he did not have the benefit of the Law of Moses because he lived before Moses.  So he was like the Gentiles, he was a person of faith, without the benefit of the Mosaic Law.  Abraham was appropriated by Paul and others as the paradigm of having faith without the Judaic law.  But what Paul also did was to spiritualize the promise of God to Abraham to make of him a great nation.  The great nation for Paul was no longer the land and people of Israel; the great nation for Paul was the nation of faith which derived from believing in Jesus as the Messiah.  By removing, the “land based” notion for the people of faith, the universal potential of the Christian faith was unleashed and one could say that this partly accounts for the evangelizing success of Christianity in our world in comparison with Judaism.

  We need also to remember that the Gospels were written during this transition phase of the separation of the Jewish and Christian religions.   So one of the motives behind the Gospel writings is to make a persuasive appeal to Jews who had not yet come to embrace Jesus as their Messiah.  Another motive of the Gospel writings is to instruct the Gentile Christians about the deep Jewish roots of the Christian faith.

  Of the four Gospels, the Gospel of John is perhaps the most Gentile Gospel.   It was written later than the three synoptic Gospels and it has a more developed Christian teaching presented in long discourses of Jesus, one of which we read in part today.  Nicodemus, is a person who does not appear in the earlier written Gospels, which is interesting since he is presented as having such a prominent role in the requesting from Pilate of the body of Jesus after his death.

  We have read today the favorite discourse which defines evangelical Christianity.  We find in this text the origin of the phrase, “born again” and the location of the most famous Christian graffiti of sporting events, John 3:16, “For God so loved the world…..”

  The Gospels are literature and as such they are art.  The first goal of art is to trick us into a moment of an “as if” belief.  So we read this Gospel “as if” we are eyewitness to an actual encounter between Jesus and Nicodemus.  We are caught in the wonder of the “primary naivete” like the wonder of a child.  But in adult study, our suspicions correct us with a literary analysis to remind us that this is literary art written in a specific time for specific persuasive purposes.  Being adult literary critics might seem to ruin the literal story for us, kind of like telling children that Disney characters are not real. We do have adult commonsense minds to understand the function of a writing in a context for certain purposes.  In two moments of the experience of art, we have the wonder of primary naivete; in another moment we have a balancing commonsense mind.  Fundamentalist literalists are people who make both of these events the same, in that they are afraid of their adult mind.  And they would deny us who do have adult minds, the genuine wonder of devotional experience which we know in the event of primary naivete.

  One of the purposes of the dialogue between Jesus and Nicodemus is for the persuasion of Jews to follow Jesus.  Nicodemus is a Greek name meaning “victory of the people.”  Interesting for a Jewish member of the Sanhedrin to have a Greek name.  But in some other Hebrew tradition, Nicodemus means, “innocent of blood.”

  So you see there is an invitation to Jews to be like Nicodemus and be innocent of the blood of Jesus.  There is also an invitation to convert to this new paradigm of how God is to be understood.  Be born again; be born from above.  Be converted to this new paradigm for the universalizing of the message of God to all people.  Be born by water and the Spirit.  This is a sure indication of the practice of water baptism that was prevalent within the Christian community.  This Gospel about God is a teaching about becoming initiated into the community of Christ.  This Gospel ties the work of Moses in raising the healing serpent upon a pole to the raising of Christ on the cross, not as a symbol of death but as a symbol of health and salvation.

  And then we find the favorite Bible verse of many, because it expresses the universal love of God that we believe to characterize the life of Jesus:  For God so loved the world that he gave God’s unique child so anyone who believes in Him would not see their lives as ending with death but would activate within themselves the life of God’s presence, the Spirit of God, who is immortal and eternal life.

  We, today need to understand the antagonism that is evident in the New Testament writings as they are zealous attempts to try to convince all Jews at the time of their writing that Jesus was the  Messiah referred to in the Judaic tradition. Today we can believe in Jesus as the Messiah without denying the validity of the faith of our Jewish brothers and sisters.   Let us accept our Jewish brothers and sisters as equals with their own wonderful tradition of devotion to God.

  We can embrace our devotion of Christ without diminishing the sincere faith of other people, even as we are committed to proclaim: God loves the world so much that the fullness of the divine life is shared with us completely by the omnipresence of God’s Holy Spirit, but most particularly in the life of Jesus of Nazareth.

  What we can learn the most from Christ is this proclamation: For God so loved the world. This is the very best of the Gospel.  Amen.

Jesus Versus the Trickster

1 Lent        A      March 9, 2014

Gen 2:4b-9,15-17,25-3:7  Ps.51:1-13

Rom. 5:12-21         Matt. 4:1-11

Lectionary Link

   It is hard in our lives not to take things  personal.  As human persons, we cannot help but filter everything through our personhood.   And even when we try to do some non-personal imaginations of not being a person like trying to do dog whispering, we still do it as a human person.

  You would think that non-human and non-personal or extra-human or extra-personal things would escape being personalized for us but it is hard to avoid experiencing anything without projecting some personal presence engaging us in many ways.

  When seemingly random or coincidental things happen to us in nature or in happenstance events, even then we still personalize the events.  We lose someone or something, we take it very personal.  We get in an accident and we take it personal.  So we take negative events in a very personal way.  It like we impute a motive of some personal force against us in making our lives bad or inconvenient.  On the other hand, we also personalize the positive occurrences as well.  No parking places at all and suddenly we drive up and someone pulls out and we can park.  We take it as a personal blessing or personal providence.  We see a rainbow and think that it happened just for and because of me as a personal sign of the forces of climate and weather wearing the face of God’s blessing for me.

  Children personalize all sorts of forces; boogie men and monsters and angels are found in the shadow and light of their bedrooms.

  Adulthood and modern science provide us with practices of critical thinking to distinguish between the personal and non-personal.  We learn about non-personal and impartial forces of nature which happen and occur towards us at all time.  Science teaches us to discipline our simplistic childhood personalizing response to all that happens to us.  “Silly you, it is not God or the devil, it is the play of freedom in a string of impartial events.  Bah humbug.”

  As impersonal as science makes causality, all of the events of our lives still get filtered through our personality and so we cannot escape the mode of personalizing in how we assign meaning to the events of our lives.  The most poignant events of causality are when another person hurts us or blesses us.  It is poignant because we can see or feel the effect directly.

  It is hard for us to escape our personalizing tendencies for the larger cosmic issues of the world, like morality itself.

  How does the moral make up of humanity get framed in the creation story of Adam and Eve?  In part, the moral moment involves a form of “the devil made me do it.”  Why did you eat the forbidden fruit Eve?  Well, the serpent tricked me.

  A good portion of the experience of evil and badness in life comes from taking bad things very personally.  And if the devil didn’t make me do it or make it happen to me, there is the mystery of events that are experienced as personal failure or personal misfortune and they happen because there is some great foe or trickster who is tripping me up or who is evident in the arrangement of the events which happen in my life.

  The serpent, the devil, Lucifer, Beelzebub and Satan are the various names for the personification of the superior Trickster who seems at many times in our lives to be in the ascendant.  You perhaps remember the words of the Rolling Stones’ song, “Sympathy for the Devil?”  “Pleased to meet you.  Hope you guessed my name, But what's puzzling you, Is the nature of my game.”  It is almost like in all religious cosmology there is a shadow person and shadow force to deal with.  Persons in this cosmic drama are caught in the great drama between the two great personal forces as they become evident in the whether we perceive events and actions as good and beneficial or as evil and malevolent.

  The great drama as recorded in the Bible characterizes our human and personal situations as having lost to the Serpent or that extra-human personality who has tricked us and the events of this world to result in bad performance in human behavior and as the clash of the systems of nature which cause human and personal conveniences.

  Harmony is but the ancient and forgotten time of the garden of Eden.  Harmony is the forgotten time of the nine months of gestation of the proto-child within the womb of mother.

  We’ve been tricked out of paradise by forces greater than us and as persons we cannot help at times as interpreting those forces as being seeming personal assaults upon our progress if not upon the convenience of our life.

  Who will confront the great shadow figure of the world?  Who will confront the great trickster and not get tricked?  And how will the hero who does this fare in the world of the great trickster?

  We arrive at the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness during the event of his solitude, isolation and fast.  Jesus confronts the great trickster.  The wiles of the trickster involve getting Jesus to do some good things in ways that make them bad because of mistiming.  All things in life are good; they are bad because of mistiming and the clashes which occur because of the mistiming.  Food, fame and literal interpretations are good in themselves but they can be mistimed and from the mistiming caused by wrong motives good things can be experienced as evil and bad.

  Food stands for our physical needs; how bad is the mistiming in the provision of the physical needs for all of the people in our world?  Hunger, lack of housing, lack of health care, lack of employment comes from the incredible disaster in the timing of provision and there are plenty of roadblocks in the natural world but some very big human willfulness issues which do not provide an adequate meeting of the needs of people in our world.  "Okay, Jesus, be a divine magician turn stones into bread and into housing and health care for all.  Make it happen."  We do not live by divine magic; we live by the words of God which orders our lives in acts of love and charity and done in freedom with everything else.  We cannot magically just wish for ideal conditions; we have to learn how to time good things to happen toward the well-being of as many people as possible.

  Fame and glory, that is what we need for esteem.  Megalomanical narcissism is the great temptation.  I will sell my soul to the devil for great fame and power.  Give me fame and lots of it and I will feel good about myself through that external affirmation coming towards me.  But Jesus said to the devil “You are not God and esteem and enjoyment come through the perpetual worship of God, the great One and in all of that worship energy going towards God there are wonderful collateral experiences of personal esteem and the enjoyment of the many good things that God has given to us.

  In the last temptation, Satan encourages Jesus to be very literal.  “Throw yourself off the temple because the Psalmist wrote in your Bible that the angels will catch you.”  The obeying of God means we know when to be literal and when not to be literal.  We are called to learn how to read and interpret the events of our lives and the words of influences which have been given to us in our various human traditions.  So we need to know the difference between language that would end up in personal injury and language that is figurative in encouraging us to trust God in the emergency of falling from the high places or crises of life.  If life is often a seeming “free fall” we need to know those metaphorical angels who will break our fall.

  We begin Lent with our hero Jesus going against the Trickster and winning.  And the winning of Jesus gives us great wisdom about the goodness of life but more importantly about how we time the words and deeds of our lives and how we read correctly the events of our lives so that we offer good motives and well-time responses to what befalls us.

  Yes, we do take the weal and woes of our lives as very personal, since the events are filtered through personhood, which we regard to be the highest designation of humanity.

  And if we regard our own humanity as personal, we cannot avoid allowing that which is greater than us at the very least does include a superior personhood.

  Today, let us be aware of the great Trickster personality whom we often confront in the bafflement of our life events; but let us look to one greater than the Trickster who can give us the wisdom of a more perfect timing in how we read and interact with the people and events of our lives.

  I wish all of us holy and propitious timing in our lives this Lenten Season.  And may Jesus give us wisdom to deal successfully with the Trickster more than just a few times.  Amen. 

Special Face Painting: Ash Wednesday Explanation for Children

Transfiguration:Bring Light to our Surfaces in Word and Deeds

Last Epiphany A      March 2, 2014

Ex.24:12,15-18,      Ps.99        

2 Peter 1:16-21  Matt. 17:1-9

Lectionary Link

  Did you ever wonder how values in life are formed?  What is it that makes gold a valuable substance?  Is it due to the artificiality that arose in cultures to form the social and psychological value of gold?  If an infant has the choice between gold and bottle of milk; which is more valuable to the infant?  But you say, the infant is not educated to know or appreciate the value of gold.  So value is very contextual and the context also includes the intelligence levels of the participants.

  When we read the words of Holy Scripture we are reading traditions of how people and events came to have value.  Reading the Bible in a serious way involves understanding some of the symbolic order found therein.

  If a man goes up on a mountain called Sinai and receives laws written by the hand of God and if he returns from the mountain and his face is shiny bright from being in the presence of the divine, then you have a story of how and why Moses and Law were important to the people who received and practiced these laws.

  The law within the literary tradition which derived from the people of Israel was so important to them that the people have to believe these profound laws had come from some source of inspiration beyond this earth.  And so there is the tradition of Moses on Sinai receiving the law from God and getting very close to divinity. Sometimes values arise in discovery of something new and useful and those who experience such values develop a program to try to explain to themselves and to others why things are valuable.

  The practice of the Law was so marvelous for the Hebrew people that they needed a story for its genius and the Mount Sinai story is the story about where heaven meets earth and something of heaven is given to a mediating agent Moses who then is popular, heroic and remembered because he is a special contact person with the divine to help deliver the genius of the law.

  The people who had their lives affected by Jesus of Nazareth did not plan for that to happen.  It just did; and the effect of his live upon them did not stop.  He and his life and his message were so significant that the life of Jesus had a domino effect.  The successful impact of Jesus upon the lives of his followers was being passed on and promulgated.  The reason for this success had to be explained.

  And so the writers used the symbolic ordering system that was present to them from the Hebrew Scripture.  And how could the early followers of Jesus account for the success of Jesus?  Why did Jesus have the impact that he did?  Why did he become the most supremely valued person in the lives of so many people?

  Well, Jesus went up on the Mount one day and his face shone.  And the members of the church was there represented by the presence of Peter, James and John.  And the representatives of two strains in the Hebrew/Judaic traditions were also present in this mountain top vision.  Moses represented the Hebrew tradition of the Torah, the only tradition accepted by the Sadducees.  Elijah represented the tradition found in the other Hebrew writings and the Pharisees accepted the Prophetic writings and the other writings in the Hebrew Scriptures.

  This great visionary meeting on the Mount of Transfiguration is story about why Jesus had become valued by so many people.  He was a great person; he was a genius; he was in the company of Moses and Elijah and even in the company of Moses and Elijah, the heavenly voice of God the Father said about Jesus, “This is my Son, the beloved; listen to him.”

  This story of the Transfiguration event is a legitimization story for explaining why Jesus had become so important to the lives of so many.  If Peter, James and John were to actually meet Elijah the Prophet and Moses the Law giver, would they not be expected to listen to them?  But here they are with Jesus, Moses and Elijah and the voice of God the Father is telling them to listen to Jesus.

  The transfiguration event is a story to indicate that Jesus is definitely within the traditions of Moses and Elijah but Jesus is given a higher affirmation than Moses or Elijah by the heavenly voice of God the Father.

  One can understand this story of the Transfiguration vision to be like so much of the Gospels as the early Christians establishing Jesus as the person of supreme value in their lives.  Was Jesus great because of the story of the transfiguration or did the story of the transfiguration happen because people were experiencing Jesus as a truly great person?  We can understand how the transfiguration story functions in the Judaic tradition of proclaiming and establishing the surpassing greatness of Jesus.

  On another level the story of the transfiguration is the figurative story of all of us who embrace our lives as a journey with metaphorical events of going up and down mountains, travelling on flat ground and crossing rivers and seas.  Like Peter on the mount of the transfiguration, we would prefer to build dwellings and do impossible of living only in the times of mountain top experiences.  

  The word transfigure refers to transformation and metamorphosis.  The goal of all of salvation history within the Bible is personal metamorphosis, personal transformation.  We are given creative original life force energy of our lives and we are to work this energy to the surfaces of our lives so that we shine with glory.

   The goal of life is to let the eternal Spirit of life rise in us and re-create and reorganize and reconstitute our lives with an art of living to bring us into progressive excellence.

  One of the misuses of the Bible and the Gospel stories is to make them so legendary and fantastic to the point of irrelevance for our lives.  We make ancient times special and legendary and in this special religious literary genre we allow that the laws of science did not prevail back in ancient times like they do now.  People embrace the stories of the Bible today almost as a category of what we would call entertainment.  If we do not understand the connection of the Bible stories for the transformation of our lives, we can limit the Bible to being simply fantastic entertainment, not unlike the fantastic entertainment of science fiction or mytho-poetic discourse. 

  If we miss the Gospels as literature which invites us to the continual transformation of our lives, we have missed the purpose of the Gospel and the Bible.

  Moses, Elijah, Peter, James, John and Jesus did not have life experience for us; we have to embrace and accept our own experience.  We have to be writing in our own lives personal Gospels of transformation.  We have to discover how the values which constitute our lives have occurred to make us who we are.

  Today, I would invite us to open our eyes to see how transfiguring events have occurred in our lives to lure us to excellence.  They are happening everywhere at all times because we live our lives in a completely worded environment so there is significant communication opportunities impinging our existence at all time.

  Today, let us read the transforming and transfiguring events of our lives because the Spirit of God is the life force within us who will arise within us to the surface of our lives to shine in our words and deeds.  May God help us to find ways for the arising of God Spirit to make our lives shine with creative advance towards excellence.  Amen.

Daily Quiz-February 2014

Daily Quiz, February 28, 2014

Which of the following is not true of Philemon?

a. He was a friend of St. Paul
b. He had a run away slave named Onesimus
c. He was the brother of Timothy
d. He convened a church in his house

Daily Quiz, February 27, 2014

Who was the rector of Fugglestone St. Peter with Bemerton near Salisbury who was a poet, devotional writer, lived in the time of King James I,  and has been the model for the quintessential parish priest?

a. John Donne
b. George Herbert
c. Nicholas Ferrar
d. Thomas Bray

Daily Quiz, February 26, 2014

The account of the Transfiguration of Jesus does not occur in which canonical Gospel?

a. Matthew
b. Mark
c. Luke
d. John

Daily Quiz, February 25, 2014

The book of Proverbs treats what quality of life as an incarnation of the divine?

a. Love
b. Fear of the God
c. Wisdom
d. Angelic beings

Daily Quiz, February 24, 2014 

In elections the "losers" rarely get remembered; when Matthias won the apostolic casting of lots to replace Judas Iscariot as the twelfth apostle, who was the man who did not win the "lottery?"

a. Justus
b. Joseph
c. Barsabbas 
d. all of the above


Daily Quiz, February 23, 2014

Which of the following was not from the village of Bethany?

a. Lazarus
b. Mary
c. Martha
d. Simon the Leper
e. Thomas the Apostle

Daily Quiz, February 22, 2014

Eric Liddell on the calendar saints made famous in the movie "Chariots of Fire" 

a. was a Scottish missionary to China
b. won two Olympic sprint medals
c. refused to run an Olympic race on a Sunday
d. won the 100-meter dash at the Olympics, his best event
e. all of the above
f.  a,b,c
g. a,b, d

Daily Quiz, February 21, 2014

When did Jacob get his name changed to Israel, the name of the nation of people?

a. when he married Rachel and Leah to bear the sons to be heads of the tribes of Israel
b. he received it before he was born through his grandfather Abraham
c. he received when he wrestled with an angel of God
d. he received it posthumously when Joseph carried his bones back to his home

Daily Quiz, February 20, 2014

What former slave and African American abolitionist, conferred with presidents Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson, attended the first women's rights convention at Seneca Falls, NY and was an ordained minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church?

a. Richard Allen
b. Absalom Jones
c. Frederick Douglass
d. Booker T. Washington

Daily Quiz, February 19, 2014

When Jacob and Rachel fled Rachel's father Laban, what did she steal from her father's household?

a. some of her father's flock of sheep
b. household gods
c. dowry gold
d. some cloth

Daily Quiz, February 18, 2014

Why is Martin Luther's feast day February 18th on the church calendar?

a. it was the day he was born
b. it was day that he nailed the 95 Theses on the Wittenberg Castle Church door
c. it was the day that he died
d. it was the day he took on the Diet of Worms

Daily Quiz, February 17, 2014

Which infamous African dictator was responsible for the martyrdom of Archbishop Janani Luwum?

a. Robert Mugabe
b. Charles Taylor
c. Paul Biya
d. Idi Amin
e. Sekou Toure

Daily Quiz, February 16, 2014

Which of the sons of Jacob were not born from his first wife Leah?

a. Reuben
b. Simeon
c. Joseph
d. Levi
e. Judah

Daily Quiz, February 15, 2014

SPCK and SPG are acronyms for two Anglican societies founded by 

a. George Herbert
b. John Donne
c. Thomas Bray
d. William Wilberforce

Daily Quiz, February 14, 2014

St. Valentine is not a patron saint of

a. engaged couples
b. love
c. against fainting
d. epilepsy 
e. bee keepers 
f.  plague
g. happy marriages
h. chocolate 

Daily Quiz, February 13, 2013

Who was the first African American priest ordained in the United States?

a. Richard Allen
b. Absalom Jones 
c. Booker T. Washington 
d. David Walker
e. James Forten

Daily Quiz, February 12, 2014 

"Be Lord over your brothers, and may your mother's sons bow down to you."  What is the context for this?

a. Jacob's blessing of Joseph
b.  David's blessing of Absalom 
c.  Isaac's blessing of Jacob thinking he was Esau
d.  Abraham's blessing of Isaac

Daily Quiz, February 11, 2014

Fanny Crosby, blind from the age of six weeks, wrote more than 8,000 hymns.  Which of the following is not one of hers?

a. Humbly I Adore Thee
b. Jesus, Keep Me Near the Cross
c. Blessed Assurance
d. I Am Thine O Lord
e. Praise Him, Praise Him

 Daily Quiz, February 10, 2014 

Which man in the Hebrew Scriptures was the older of two twins, had the name "Red" because of his hair, and sold his birthright reserved for the eldest son to his "younger" twin brother for a bowl of lentil stew?

a. Isaac
b. Jacob
c. Esau
d. Boaz

Daily Quiz, February 9, 2014

What is something Jesus did not say about children?

a. the kingdom of God belongs to them
b. one had to be like a child to receive the kingdom of God 
c. one had to be a baptized child to receive communion 
d. being born again was necessary to understand God's kingdom

Daily Quiz, February 8, 2014

Which biblical matriarch had a brother named Laban?

a. Sarah
b. Rebekah
c. Leah
d. Rachel

Daily Quiz, February 7, 2014

The Centurion Cornelius is associated with what Apostle who had a dream about God's permission to eat the meat of animals he believed to be unclean and forbidden?

a. Paul 
b. Saul
c. Barnabas
d. Peter 

Daily Quiz, February 6, 2014

Alpha and Omega, a biblical metaphor meaning beginning and end,  are the letters from the alphabet of what language?

a. Hebrew 
b. Latin 
c. Aramaic
d. Greek 

Daily Quiz, February 5, 2014

Anne Hutchinson was not 

a. called the most famous English woman of the American colonial history for exercising her freedom and gift of ministry
b. part of the Antinomian Controversy 
c. exiled from Massachusetts by John Winthrop
d. killed by the Siwanoy Indians in The Bronx NY region
e. the wife of Roger Williams

Daily Quiz, February 4, 2014

Who is known as the missionary to Scandinavia?

a. Wilfrid
b. Boniface 
c. Anskar
d. Wulfstan 

Daily Quiz, February 3, 2014

Nunc dimittis, Magnificat, and  Benedictus are 

a. first word Latin titles of canticles used in the Daily Offices 
b. titles of Latin musical setting for the Mass
c. first word Latin titles for Psalms
d. songs attributed to Simeon, Mary and Zecariah
e. a and d


c. Daily Quiz, February 2, 2014

Mary and Joseph offered turtle doves and pigeons for an offering at the Presentation.  Why would they have not given a lamb?

a. the law allowed a substitute for people who could not afford a lamb
b. Mary and Joseph wanted to make the least expensive offering
c. Mary and Joseph were not from Jerusalem and so the logistics for lamb procurement was the issue
d. The Temple priests could only handle a certain amount of lamb offerings

Daily Quiz, February 1, 2014

St. Brigid, a sixth century abbess is associated with what Irish city?

a. Dublin
b. Armagh
c. Kildare
d. Kilbride

Love Your Enemies; Sermon on the Mount as an Oracle of the Early Church

7 Epiphany A, February 23,2014

Leviticus 19:1-2,9-18 Psalm 119:33-40

1 Corinthians 3:10-11,16-23 Matthew 5:38-48

Lectionary Link 

   “Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.”  How’s that for setting the standard rather high?  And what is the point of confronting us with an impossible goal of perfection?  We have been reading from the Sermon on the Mount which in a way in how Jesus is revisiting the entire purpose of the Law and how it is fulfilled.

  The religious leaders in the time of Jesus were rather proud of the defining documents of their religious and national identity, namely the Torah or the Law of Moses.   “We are an exceptional people because we have been given the Torah.”  An obvious rejoinder to this would be, “Well, you are so exceptional that your land has been controlled by outsiders for many years.”    But we can understand how an oppressed but proud people would not want to be assimilated to the values of the foreign occupiers.  This resistance to the occupier was a daunting task since the people of Judaism could not help but interact with the Roman authorities.  This would mean that within the areas where freedom was allowed by the Romans, the Jewish religious leaders would want to work overtime for their people to retain their unique and exceptional identity.

   To remain distinct in the face of occupation would be to learn how to live with fear of loss. We've lost the control of the borders of our country; we don’t want to lose the very identity of our nation by assimilating to the values and habits of all of the Roman foreigners who have come to our country.

  We might have some pity upon the Pharisees and Sadducees who were trying to retain exclusive identity under the threat of being assimilated into the culture of the outsiders.

This meant that the religious authority understood the great Mosaic Law more for cultural identity and less for transformation of their lives in loving God  It also meant that they were perhaps intolerant with those who could not maintain the details of the laws in the same way that they did.

  Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.  How could this have an intuitive literal significance?

  Imagine an older sibling in any family who lords his experience over the experience of a younger brother.  Imagine being the younger brother who is ostracized or left out because he cannot perform at the same level as the older and more experienced brother.  Imagine an intervening father in such a dispute and the father might say to the older son, “Okay you are harassing your younger brother for not being up to your level of performance; well, now I’m going to require that you be up to the level of my performance.  Since you are requiring an impossible standard for your younger brother, I will require an impossible standard for you.”  And the older son would say, “That’s not fair because you are older than I am.”  And the father would say, “Exactly so do not wrongly judge your younger brother based on the difference in your life experience.”

  Jesus was saying even if someone is advanced in understanding and practicing of the law, they had no right to judge without mercy, someone who did not have the same understanding or the same practice.  Rather, they should set the moral direction of their vision upon the perfect Father in heaven and know that they always have to accept grace, mercy and forgiveness when they compare themselves with perfection.

  So, the words of Jesus teach a crucial lesson about where we should look for moral direction.  We should always look towards becoming better ourselves rather than being overly proud about how we think that we are better than others.

  I think that there is another level of understanding these Gospel words of Jesus based upon the unavoidable habit of writing history anachronistically.  This means that history writers include their own lives and subsequent events in how they recounts events and words of the past.  How were the seeds of what has already happened found in the original words and events of Jesus

  If the Jews in the time of Jesus were encouraged to love their enemies, who were the real enemies of the Jews and what would it mean to love them?  The real enemies of the Jews were the Samaritans and the various persons who represented the Roman oppression in their country.  How would you truly love these foreigners and enemies? Well, you would give them a message of love so profound that you would convert them and persuade them to begin to transform their lives.

  By the time this Gospel was read in the churches in the cities throughout the Roman Empires, the enemy Gentiles had become equal heirs and friends in the faith.  How could this great gap between Jew and Gentile be overcome?  By the message of the Gospel or the good news about Jesus Christ and how this good news could transform lives.

  And so now the Sermon on the Mount with its radical fulfillment of the law was actually realized in the churches which read and taught the Gospel.  The message of Jesus brought enemies to love one another because the former enemies had their lives transformed by the message of the love of God in Christ.

  The Father in Heaven who is perfect is Father of both the Jews and the Gentiles.  Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father has broken down the enmity between Jews and Gentiles and enabled them to live in love and fellowship because they had their lives taken over by the Spirit of God who was the evidence that Christ was still alive and with them.

  We might believe that the Sermon on the Mount is a radical teaching;  but it had already been fulfilled in the reality of the union between Jews and Gentiles in this new community of Christ.

  It is impossible to write the narrative of the life of Jesus without knowing exactly what happened because of the life of Jesus.  The Sermon on the Mount is a case in point.  The oracle of Christ within the church where Jews and Gentiles lived as friends and not as enemies proclaimed the reality of how enemies could be made to become friends.

    Our world needs this powerful transforming reality to happen in profound ways in our world today.  Enemies need to be loved into friendship.  This is the result of the Gospel; this is the power of the love of Christ.  Let us always look to the power of this love in our lives.  Amen.