Confirmation for Teens # 2 Link
Sunday, March 30, 2014
Spiritual Seeing, Spiritual Blindness, a youth dialogue sermon
4 Lent a March 30, 2014
1 Sam. 16:1-13 Ps. 23
Eph. 5:1-14 John 9:1-38
Parker: In the Name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Please do not be seated. I want
us to be completely current in our church practices.
Kalum: How are you going to do that?
Parker: I want all of the
congregation to move to the center aisle and I am going to take a selfie of us.
James: I guess if the
president can do it; and Ellen can do it at the Oscar and his Holiness, Pope
Francis can do it, surely we can be St. Relevant’s Episcopal Church and do our
own selfie.
Parker: Okay everyone get ready for the selfie. Good I’m glad that we did this.
Kalum: Why are you glad?
Parker: Well, for one I have infallible photographic proof that I was
in church during Lent.
James: Are you saying that you need all of the proof that you can
get?
Parker: Well, maybe but it will
be proof for others too.
Kalum: So what else do you suggest that we do to be
relevant today?
James: I’ve got an idea. We
are at the height of March Madness. The
National championship will be decided a week from tomorrow. Today the Final Four will be decided.
Kalum: Well, I think that Parker
has been reading his holy bracket more than the Bible during last few weeks.
Parker: Well, bracketology is an official subject for school now, isn’t
it? How’s your bracket going James? I hope you didn’t bet the family farm on your
predictions.
James: My brackets are going fine but I’m also involved in Madness,
it’s called Lent Madness. They have their
own bracketology where the saints are pitted against each other and at the end
of Lent, one of the saints will win the Golden Halo award.
Kalum: Wow James, I didn’t
know that you were so “spiritual.”
James: It does not hurt to have “spiritual” on one’s resume. But seriously how’s your bracket going?
Kalum: Okay, but I had
Duke going further than they did. They
ran into a “giant killer” when they played Mercer. It was quite an upset.
Parker: It is kind of like the
biggest upset in the history of warfare.
James: What was that?
Parker: The most famous giant
killer and the most famous upset in history is the story of David and
Goliath. David was a scrawny, tough
little shepherd boy who fought with wolves and lions to protect his sheep. He went up against the great Philistine giant
Goliath and he won by using his sling shot to hit him with a stone right on his
forehead. Size isn’t everything; wit and
wisdom also counts for something.
David’s father Jesse had many sons who were older than David but David
ended up being chosen as the King of Israel.
Kalum: The famous Judge Samuel thought that all of
David’s brothers would be suitable to be anointed as King of Israel and David
was not the obvious choice but Samuel came to know that God sees differently than
humans see. God taught Samuel to see
David as the person to anoint as King, because David had something that others
could not see.
James: The Gospel story today
is all about seeing too. The religious
leaders were supposed to be people who could see the obvious. And the blind man was the one who didn’t see.
Parker: The Gospel presents this
irony of seeing and not seeing.
James: The disciples of Jesus were blind about cause and effects.
Kalum: What do you mean?
James: They asked Jesus if
the man was blind because of his sins or his parents’ sins.
Parker: How could anyone presume
to know such cause and effects?
Kalum: Well, I know why Duke lost to Mercer in the
NCAA tournament?
James: Why?
Kalum: I read that some loyal Duke fan had a lucky
unwashed Duke T-shirt that he wore and when he wore it to the games, Duke
always won. His mother inadvertently
washed the T-shirt and this Duke fan swears it caused his Duke team to be
upset.
Parker: Why are people so superstitious about cause and effect?
James: It probably gives
people a sense of power of being in control by presuming to know things which
really can’t be known.
Kalum: Some times
religious people believe that natural disasters are connected with the people
whom they think are sinful.
Parker: Such thinking can be
very prejudicial; it can make people into victims and religious people often do
play the blame game.
James: I think Jesus came to
show people how to see things differently.
He was not interested in presuming to know the reason why the man was
blind; he just wanted the blind man to know that God’s help was with him.
Kalum: In the Gospel of John the writer is trying to
get us to see things differently. The
writer wants us to see from the heart.
The Gospel of John shows us that presence of Christ is with us in all
situations even the trivial situations.
Parker: What do you mean?
Kalum: Jesus was present to help solve the wine
shortage problem at a wedding; that’s pretty trivial in the big scheme of
things.
James: But Christ was present
when the multitude needed food to eat; he was present with his disciples when
there was a storm on the sea. He was
present with a parent who had a sick child. He was present when a man was
unable to walk. He was present to the
blind man and his family. He was present
with the family of Lazarus after he died.
Parker: So the Gospel of John is
about the presence of Christ being with us in all of the times of our lives.
Kalum: And the faith and the new birth that is
promised by Jesus mean that we have the ability to see the presence of Christ
in the small events, the big events and the events of sadness and loss.
James: So in the story about the healing of the blind the man, the
blind man who was made to see is really all Disciples of Christ who are
learning to see the wonderful presence of Christ in all of the events of life
.
Parker: So, today we need to
learn not to think that we know the cause of why lots of bad things happen to
people. Because we may be wrongly
blaming people who are already hurting.
Kalum: And we need to know that our life of faith is
about learning how to see better; to see from the heart.
James: And we need to learn how to see the presence of Christ in all
of the events of our life.
Parker: Does that mean if I win
the bracketology contest for March Madness that I am a genius.
Kalum: No, it just means you’re lucky.
James: Sometimes it’s better
to be lucky than good.
Kalum: With God, it is
better to know God’s grace even as we are always trying to be as good as we can
and to see things as God’s Spirit teaches us to see things.
Parker: I see.
James: I see, too.
Kalum: Can everyone say:
God, open our eyes so that we can see!
Everyone: God, open our eyes so that we can see.
Kalum: Amen.
Saturday, March 29, 2014
Sunday, March 23, 2014
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
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.
Sunday, March 16, 2014
New Testament Writings as Transition to a New Religion
2 Lent A March 16, 2014
Gen 12:1-8
Ps.121
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.
Sunday, March 9, 2014
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
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.
Tuesday, March 4, 2014
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