Cloning the Insides of Christ to Be Everywhere

Easter Sunday        April 20, 2014     

Acts 10:34-43  Psalm118:1-2,14-24
Colossians 3:1-4 Matthew 28:1-10

Lectionary Link

  Children do you know what imagination is?  Do you ever use your imagination?  Do you think that imagination was used to make Disney movies?  And to write books?  And to invent things?

  So today, I am going to ask you to join me in using our imaginations.  With our imaginations we can do magical things.  Did our first president George Washington drive a Cadillac?  No, he didn’t, but with our imagination we can pretend that he did.  And wouldn’t it be kind of funny to thing about George Washington driving a car among all of the other horseback riders and people in carriages pulled by horses?  We can do this with our imagination.

   I would like for us to imagine Jesus living in a home in Jerusalem.  But his home has also become his office.  It is his office and the sign on the door says, “Welcome to Jesus Ministries.”

  And when go into the office of Jesus, we see him sitting at a desk and there are lots of desks and with phones on each desk.  Jesus is talking on the phone.  He finishes one phone call and he has to take another phone call.  And his disciples are also taking phone calls.  And there are so many calls, they have to bring in people to answer the phone in the evening and throughout the night because phone calls are coming in from people who live around the world.

  And the disciples are getting worried.  They go to Jesus when he has a break and they say, “Jesus, there are too many people calling.  People are asking for all kinds of things.  A little girl needs some medicine.  And  a family does not have enough food, but they live too far away.  We cannot get the food to them.  And there is a sick man who wants to be healed, but he lives so far away.”

  Jesus said, “Yes, we have thousands and thousands of requests for help, but I am located here in Jerusalem.  I can only be here in one place at one time.”  One of the disciples said to Jesus, “How can we clone you Jesus?  Can we make a million copies of you?  And then one of your clones could be in places all over the world.  If we could clone millions of copies of you, you could be everywhere and then lots more people could get the help which they need.  Jesus what are you going to do about all of the problems of people in this world when you only live in Jerusalem?”

  Jesus said, “Well, I’ve got a plan.”

 So you know what happened?  Jesus went out on the street and he began to heal and preach good news.  He told the Romans citizens and the Jews they had to love for one another.  He told them that God was near to them and God was coming to them.  And you know what happened?  Jesus made the Romans and the religious people angry.  “What do you mean Jesus, that God’s kingdom is coming?  This is the Caesar’s kingdom or this is the kingdom of King David where someone great like David will come back and be a powerful king.”  So the people got so angry at Jesus for preaching about God’s kingdom.  They were worried that God’s kingdom would be a threat to the kingdom of the Emperor Caesar.  They were worried that this kingdom of God would not be another great military king like King David.

  So do you know what they did to Jesus?  They did not like his message about the kingdom of God’s love, so they put him to death on the cross.  And they thought that this was the end of Jesus.  They thought that Jesus would be gone forever.

  But you know what?  When the friends of Jesus went to the grave and tomb of Jesus, they found it empty.  And you know suddenly people saw Jesus popping up all over.  People suddenly saw him in Jerusalem.  And some saw him on the Emmaus road and on the same day some saw him way up north in Galilee, quite a distance from Jerusalem.

  And the disciples got together and they said, “This Jesus is really clever and he has found the perfect solution to the problem of so many people needing the help of Jesus.  When Jesus died, he has come back and he has had the life that was inside of his body cloned to go into the lives of us and many people.

  And since the insides of Jesus have been cloned and put inside the lives of millions and millions of people, the work of Jesus can get done all around the world.  Jesus is no longer limited to being in just one body in Jerusalem; now Jesus can be the risen Christ in the lives of people everywhere.

  And you know what?  The insides of Jesus have been cloned and is inside us too.  I see it in you.  I look at Wes, and Jackson and Cole and I see Christ is risen and in them.  I look in your eyes and I can see the risen Christ in you and I know that your hands perform the works of kindness and love that allows Christ to do so much in this world now that he is not just limited to the one body of Jesus in his Jerusalem office.

  I look at you and I know that Christ is alive; I know that Christ has risen from the death and I know that the life that was inside of Jesus, his Spirit, has become cloned and is in you and me.

  Isn’t that wonderful?  To know that Jesus is not limited to just one time or place but that the risen Christ can now be everywhere.

  Let me hear you say, “Alleluia.”  Can’t hear you.  Christ is Risen!  Can you say that?  Now say, “Christ is risen, in me!”  Can you say, “Christ is risen in you!”  Now can you say?  I am a Christ-clone.  Because the Spirit of Christ is alive and well in me.  Amen.

A Very Rare Person; A Very Rare Event

Easter Sunday        April 20, 2014     

Acts 10:34-43  Psalm118:1-2,14-24
Colossians 3:1-4 Matthew 28:1-10

 Lectionary Link

   Did the words written in the Gospel of Matthew about the empty tomb account make the empty tomb happen?  Did the words written in Mark, Luke and John make the resurrection of Jesus happen?

  Some times we get the words of explanation about an event and the cause of the event mixed up.  Words about an event do not make an event happen.  The scientific law  which states that water boils at 212 degree Fahrenheit does not cause water to boil.  The law is only the statistical approximation of many observed and tested occasions of water when it is brought to a boil.

  The Gospel words about the resurrection of Jesus did not make the resurrection happen.  In fact the Gospel words about the resurrection appearances of Jesus are not the first writings in the New Testament about the resurrection.

  The first New Testament writings about the resurrection of Christ were written by St. Paul and he never saw Jesus in his lifetime and he was not in Jerusalem on the reported Easter morning and he did not see Jesus before he left this earth.

 St. Paul had a resurrection manifestation of Christ on the road to Damascus when he had an intervention which changed his life.  St. Paul immediately became involved with the group of people who had formed themselves into new community because they were confessing that they too had  experiences of Christ still being alive in their lives.

  This experience of Christ being alive in their lives made them speak in a very poetic language.   St. Paul spoke and wrote about being raised with Christ in heavenly places.  Not only had Christ arose and was with them, but they themselves believed that they too had risen and were seated with Christ.

  This language of the poets can make scientists crazy.  How can you be raised with Christ in heaven?  Show me.  For people who have had experiences of the presence of Christ  cannot put such experiences into a scientific laboratory to test and replicate.  But enough people believe in the truth of such experiences to make them very meaningful and life changing.  Just as you cannot put "falling in love" into a scientific formula, so too the many experiences of the continuing presence of Christ are like the experience of falling in love.

  The people in the decades after Jesus left this earth knew about as much about the resurrection as we do today.  Why?  Rare events create great wonder.  Rare people create great wonder.  For rare events and a rare person of wonder there are many answers and explanations which arise as responses to what is impossible to explain.

  We have Christian people today who are very confident that they know precisely what happened at the resurrection of Christ.  Some people seem to treat their beliefs in the resurrection of Christ as being more valid, truer and better than ours.  They would say that their belief is better because they really believe what the Gospel writers wrote.  If you and I don't believe those words precisely in the same way then our belief is not valid.   And someone may say that you have to believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus.  But then one must ask what kind of body? One that goes through doors and one that can be in Jerusalem and in Galilee in mere moments in a way that would make a Star Trek transporter seem primitive.  How can a body which seems to behave like a ghost be bodily in the same way it was before it manifested ghostly behaviors?  How can one say that the resurrection of Jesus is a physical resurrection when many of the characteristics of the risen Christ are reported as ghostly or like the visions of angels?

  You see how one could argue endlessly about the resurrection and its meanings.

  Even without having precise certainty, belief statements and the spiritual poetry about the living Christ in the church are not mere poetry, there is a very rare person and a very rare event which they actually do refer to.

  Jesus was and is a very rare person.  The resurrection of Christ was and is a very rare occurrence.  And it is the rareness of both the person and the occurrence of the resurrection which make Easter such a wonderful ambiguous day which is completely chock full of many, many meanings, including a child's desire to get out of church quickly to get the Easter chocolate eggs in the Easter Egg hunt today.  Chocolate Easter eggs, one of the many collateral effects of Easter.

  What is not a rare event for humanity and for each of us and for each of our dear family members and friends is the event of death.

  We might wish that death could be a totally rare event!  But even as we think this we know with our commonsense minds that if death were completely rare, the world would have been over-populated long, long ago.

  Death is not a rare event in this world.  Death is an event which allows the entire world to accommodate the birth of new people.  Death is not rare but for human beings it is a very pronounced transition.  Death is the natural population control that makes room for others in this world..

  In the human sphere, the degree of our attachment to our lives and to each other means that we can cannot regard the human life cycle as being like the agricultural cycle of life.  Does the wheat field mourn when a plant dies at harvest?  Does the field rejoice at all of the seeds produced for new plant life in the future?  In the human sphere, death may not be rare, but it is special, it is holy, it is profoundly transitional for a person and for that person within a community.

  So how do we live with the fact that death as a sort of human population control is not rare and it happens and occurs in many different circumstances?  Do we live with fear?  Do we live with anxiety?  Do we live with resignation?  Do we live halfheartedly?  Do we live our lives as the proverbial ones who are but rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic as it is going down?

  Because death is not rare, to live we have to find a realistic, cautionary, actuarial, probabilistic relationship with death.  In short, we want to survive and live as long as we possibly can.  We have to find way to live without the thought of death paralyzing us from effective action. We need to find way to live inspired by the possibility and probability of our death and the death of those we love.  How can we live inspired by the probability of death?

  This is the ageless question of life?  How do we live with death without fear as though death   were the sword of Damocles hanging over us and able to fall at anytime?

  People in other times and places, in times of war and occupation, in times of slavery, in times of famine and plague, had worse life expectancy situations to live with than we do in our country with our relative higher standard of living and freedom from day to day terror.  But even for us in good conditions, living with death is one of the main issues of life itself.

  The followers of Jesus spontaneously and with many different kinds of experiential events discovered that this rare person Jesus of Nazareth, provided to them rare experiences of knowing his afterlife.  There were many people who had these truly significant experiences of the various forms of the afterlife of Christ made known to them.  Many people were joined together in having a sense of unity about the continuance of the life of Christ.  The continuance of the afterlife spread like wildfire and people who were far from Palestine in location and time from  the year 33 of the Common Era needed to account for the reality and strength of a vast variety of these experiences of the afterlife of Christ.  And so they wrote down in the poetry of Paul and the Apostles and in the Gospel account many different ways of how and why they felt that Christ was risen and alive in the church.  In their accounts they traced stories of the transition of Jesus of Nazareth walking in Galilee and Jerusalem to his death but they also wrote about his reappearances, first in places close to Jerusalem and Galilee but then as appearing to many in the people who lived in many places in the Roman world who gathered in local gatherings because they shared this common experience that Christ was still alive and with them.

  Today we are gathered because we in some way have discovered that Christ is alive in our lives.  We have discovered it when we can live by and for something beyond death and execute faithful and hopeful and creative action in our world.  We have discovered that Christ is still alive when we experience love and when we experience justice, when we experience the heroic examples of people who sacrifice for the common good in dying to slavishly selfish egotism.  We discover that Christ is alive and well in us when we have the ability to lay down our lives for the good of each other.

  I have had the holy privilege of being with people as they approach death.  I have had people who did not want the last rites of “Prayers said at the time of Death” because to the very end they did not think that they would die.  They merely believe that there would be a continuation of that consciousness of eternity which they were already sensing in themselves.  It is almost like some people think, “Death? Not I, that’s for other people.”

  We who have been raised with Christ in his resurrection can affirm this sense of eternity which we know now and we can live knowing that this state of eternity will continue through the gate of death.

  At each burial requiem, the celebrant says, “For to your faithful people, O Lord, life is changed, not ended; when our mortal body lies in death, there is prepared for a dwelling place eternal in the heavens.”

  The early followers of Jesus traced the eternal hope of the risen Christ within them back to a mysteriously rare event in the afterlife of a very mysterious rare person Jesus Christ.  They wrote and confessed the post-resurrection narratives as the reason for the reality of the presence of Christ living in them and who would be in them and with them for ever.

  And so again today, we confess this mysterious, unique and rare person, Jesus Christ and the rare circumstances of his reappearances after his death.   And we exclaim this about the reality of the hope of Christ in our lives:  “Alleluia, Christ is risen!  The Lord is Risen, indeed!  Alleluia!.  Amen.

Baptismal Sermon at the Great Vigil: God loves you! Deal with it!

Easter Vigil         April 19, 2014

Ex.14:10 Canticle 8, Ez  36:24-28 Psalm 42:1-7

Rom.6:3-11         Luke 24:1-12

 Lectionary link

  Tonight we are gathered to celebrate something wonderful about grace.  The most wonderful thing about grace is that you and I don’t have any choice about it being offered to us.  Grace is given to us whether we want it or not. 

  And so Peter and Payton are here tonight to be initiated into God’s wonderful grace.  They like us do not have any choice about Grace being offered and given to them.

  Peter and Payton do not have any choice tonight about being loved.  Their parents, grandparents and family and friends have and will continue to love them.  They have no choice about that.  They may grow up and try to resist this love and grace but they can never take it away nor can they deny that it has been given to them.

  Tonight baptism at the Easter Vigil expresses the grace of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.  This grace has been known by all of us. This grace that has already come to Payton and Peter in the love of their parents, grandparents, family and friends.  The grace of the resurrection of Christ   is expressed in the lives of the people who are letting themselves be the hearts, the hands, the feet of the risen Christ tonight.

  Jesus did not remain in a tomb; Christ rose and entered and energized the countless numbers of people.  Christ has taken us over to the point of we cannot help but be expressions of the love and grace of Christ toward Payton and Peter and towards each other and towards even our enemies.

  This is the living Gospel of the resurrection of Christ.  We are to be the living proof of the resurrection of Christ in how we offer active grace and love to Peter and Payton and to everyone tonight.

  We, church are gathered tonight, to confess to Peter and Payton and to the entire world:   People, you have no choice; you are loved, by God and by us, even in our fumbling and feeble efforts to do so.  No, we are not perfect in our love but we are perfect in having the heart of the risen Jesus Christ within us to inspire us always to be at the work of loving better.

  A major reason why we baptize babies and children and people of any age is this: People you do not have any choice about these fact.  God loves you.  God cares for you.  God forgives you.  God gives you many wonderful gifts to develop.  And when you finish your life in your body, God is going to give you eternal life.  Folks, just accept it.  You don’t have any choice about whether God loves you.  Deal with it.

  Lots of religions over-emphasize the human choice in choosing baptism or faith or religion.  If someone offers me a million bucks, am I to be profusely congratulated for graciously deciding to take the million bucks?  “O, Phil you are so wonderful for graciously deciding to take the million bucks.”  Absurd right?  What is marvelous is the generosity of the giver and not the minor event of my decision to take the money.

  That is the nature of God’s love and grace for Peter and Payton tonight and for you and me and for all of the people of this world.

  We have the privilege of receiving this generous grace and love and we as the church have the responsibility not to make this grace and love look bad because of the way in which we live.  We are called tonight to be the very proof and evidence of the resurrection of Christ.

  Can you say, “Alleluia, Christ is Risen?”  And now say, “He’s risen in Me!”  Can we also be fully committed to let this resurrection life of Christ in us be grace and love to Payton and Peter and to all whom God would bring into our lives?

  Alleluia!  Christ is Risen in You!  And in Peter.  And in Payton.  Let us rejoice that we have no choice about whether this resurrection power and grace and love is given to us.  But let us humbly accept it and be conduits for the grace, the love and the power of Christ tonight.  Happy Easter to you!  I can see Easter shining in your eyes tonight.  Amen. 

Bad Friday Rewritten as Good Friday from the Hindsight of Resurrection Grace

Good Friday    April 18, 2014

Isaiah 52:13-53:12 Ps 22

Heb.10:1-25        John 18:1-19:37

Lectionary Link

  The Cross of Jesus has developed many meanings since it first occurred.  We can only start with a very secular history of the Roman method of capital punishment, the method of crucifixion.  It was a horrendous event that could be coupled with floggings, humiliations and other techniques of torture.  One could imagine it a part of interrogation as a way for the Roman authorities to find out co-conspirators in anything that could have the appearance of an insurrection.  The Cross of Jesus lost its brutal secular historical interpretation when the followers of Jesus could not believe that the death of such an amazingly perfect person could be but the seed planted for a more perfect and complete outcome.

  The greatest outcome of the Cross of Jesus was the birth of a large number of people who saw the Cross of Jesus as an event of Glory.  St. Paul said that he would know nothing among his people, except Christ and Him Crucified.  St. Paul said that he would glory in the Cross of Christ, through whom he was crucified to the world and the world to him.

  The earliest New Testament writings are the writing of St. Paul and the cross had become for him a profound metaphor of personal transformation.  It had become the profound metaphor for the Eucharist which Paul presided at.  Paul wrote, “Christ our Passover has been sacrificed for us; therefore let us keep the feast.”  With St. Paul we have a Lamb of God theology which in turn becomes a part of how Christ is presented in the Gospel of John.

  The Passion Gospel of John, which is read on Good Friday, is the most developed presentation of the Passion Narrative.  In this Passion we can see evidence that “Glorying in the Cross” of Jesus has now become the way in which the very Passion Narrative is presented.

  In the Gospel of John, Pilate as the executioner is treated as though he is a minor pawn in God’s purposes for the world.  “Pilate, you could not do anything unless it was allowed and ordained by God.”

  Some people might think that an event can only have one meaning or several official meanings.  Some people would be ready to excommunicate you if you believed or thought lots of different things about the cross.

  I think that the Cross of Jesus, like any event, does not ever finish having meanings, even new meanings because in our isolation from the events of 2000 years, new meanings, other meaning can occur to us.  One meaning can even contradict another meaning and yet still not be censored by doctrinal police who presume to know the “real meaning.”

  For many years, the  prophets and sages to criticized the business of priestly religion.  The economy of priestly religion was for people to provide animal offerings for the priests of the temple.    The priests of the Jewish Temples wanted sacrifices of lambs, heifers, sheep, goats and birds.  Such offerings were good for the Temple economy; the animal offerings were “stand in” victims to pay with life for the sins of the people who gave the animal offering.  People could get “indulgences” for their otherwise bad behavior by offering sacrifices.

  The ancient sages had enough of the “bloody mess” when they cried, “God does not desire bloody sacrifice.  God does not desire the blood of animals.”  What God desires is the living sacrifice of loving mercy and justice and walking humbly before God.

  If this living sacrifice theology really caught on, then religious institutions would surely not be needed.

  The holy Man, Jesus was a living sacrifice with his life; he loved mercy, he did justice, he advocated radical love and he walk humbly as Son of God before God.

  The justice, love and mercy of Jesus caused a stir.  He gained a following and some of his own felt threatened.  Jesus was in the tradition of the prophets who wanted religion not to be a diversionary game from how one lived one’s life.  His radical love, justice and mercy were also a threat to the Romans.  The Roman authorities ended up being like unknowing secular priests who offered the life of Jesus, not on an altar, but upon the cross.

  The Cross to end the life of a political figure got reinterpreted and it became an altar on which an offering was made to God to consummate or celebrate the relationship between humanity and God in a new Covenant.

  And here’s the meaning now.   Please understand that God does not want death or blood or sacrifices.  In the story of the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham, we have a paradigm shift for ancient pre-history.  God did not want human sacrifice so Abraham understood that God would allow animal substitute sacrifices.  But then later we are told by the prophets that God does not desire the sacrifice of animals.   

  You and I could imagine a different life for Jesus of Nazareth.  How about, Jesus living to a ripe age of 90 and then dying a natural death and coming back to life after 90 years of life.  We could have found equal inspiration from those events.  Did God really need Jesus to die a violent death on the cross as the only way in which God could love and forgive people?

   Or is this the way in which humanity gets the real message about freedom.  If even the divine life is and can be offered up to death  for a temporary victory for the forces of evil; is that not the most profound sign of how the very nature of God is Creative Freedom?   Jesus was subject to the conditions of freedom which allowed forces of tyrants to rid the world of people whom they deemed to be a threat to their power.  But isn’t the main point of life to resist and overcome the freedom of evil with the freedom for good?  The death of Jesus on the cross and the frequent defeat of all good things in life is but proof that freedom is a fact of life, it is a fact of God, because even God honors freedom.

  The Cross of Jesus is the story that we’ve been given.  His death on the cross is the death from which we must look for meaning.  The followers of Jesus had the freedom to know and present the cross in a completely different way than it was intended by the Roman authorities.  They had the freedom to reinterpret a very bad Friday and re-create it to be a very Good Friday.  And with this creative interpretive goodness we have the ultimate irony: In but a century and a half this man who died on the cross took over the Roman Empire.

  The Passion Narrative which we have read today is not so much the truth of the details of what happened when Jesus died on the cross; it is the truth of the faith of the people who took the Cross as a rallying symbol of glory.  The people who wrote the passion narrative had already had the evil freedom which resulted in the cross, overcome by the freedom of resurrection goodness.  By knowing the freedom of resurrection goodness, they could re-visit the cross and present it not as harsh history but as the divine providence known from the hindsight of resurrection grace.

  Today, Good Friday, invites us again to have faith in this incredible ironic alchemy of transformation.  We see in our lives and in our world the results of the freedom of evil and badness, of greed, pride, hatred, bias and bigotry.  We find the attitudes and the results of the freedom of evil in our world. 

  And we seek to live with hope for the future and with faith in the present.  We look to our present goodness to reinterpret our past experience of badness; we hope that any Bad Fridays in our world now will be overcome and re-interpreted with future and free resurrection goodness.

   Let us be inspired by the faith of the writers of the Passion Gospel, who knew powerful freedom of such resurrection Goodness that they could write for us a Good Friday.   Amen.

Maundy Thursday; Reflections upon Eucharist and Passover

Maundy Thursday  April 12,2012     

Ex. 12:1-14a       Ps. 78:14-20, 23-25

1 Cor 11:23-32      John 13:1-15

 Lectionary Link

   I begin with a really bad joke which I’ve told over and over again but there is an obvious point about it.

The rabbi and the priest are talking together and the rabbi says, “Father, you Christians have stolen your religious beliefs and practices from Judaism.”  And the priest replied, “Rabbi, what do you mean?”  And the Rabbi said, “Well, take for example the 10 commandments; you’ve stolen them from us.”  And the priest relied, “Yes, rabbi, we did steal the 10 commandments, but we didn’t keep them.”

  The truth of our Christian origin is that we borrowed much from Judaism, but the punchline truth is that we haven’t kept what we borrowed from Judaism in the same ways in which Jews have kept to their ancient traditions and in the ways in which their own traditions have developed.

  This evening is Maundy Thursday and we commemorate the institution of the Holy Eucharist.  And we must know that the Holy Eucharist as it appears in the New Testament writing is not presented as a complete Seder or Passover meal.  The first reference to Holy Eucharist is in St. Paul’s writings in his writing about the Lord’s Table.  He found that the church in Corinth had so removed the lines between a meal with holy implications from an actual eating of a meal that the spiritual meaning of the meal was being lost or diminished or trivialized.  St. Paul told the people of the Corinthian church to eat at home before they came to the practice of Eucharist in the gathering so that they would discern the presence of Christ in partaking of the bread and wine.  St. Paul said that he received this tradition from the Lord himself, even though St. Paul never walked with Jesus.  We are told that the early Christian gathered on the first day of the week for the breaking of the bread and the prayers.

  The Eucharist on Maundy Thursday traces the normal practice of Sunday Eucharist back to a Passover time event.   One can find significant ways in which the Eucharist has departed from the Passover tradition.  Of the Passover meal, there are only two elements which remained; the bread and a single cup of wine.  The Eucharist is a weekly celebration on the first day of the week; the Passover was a once a year celebration and most often done with family and invited guests.  When there was a temple it there was a gathering at the Temple because Passover was an important pilgrimage time.   In the Passover meal there were and are prayers and recitations and the four questions which were part of the liturgy of the meal.  Yes, the Eucharist retains words of our salvation history and Jesus is regarded to be understood under the symbol of the Paschal Lamb, but the Eucharist is significantly removed in its identity from the Passover.  I think it best today to allow the Passover Seder to be observed by our Jewish brothers and sisters within the settings of their community.  We can note how our Christian origins involved a significant re-interpretation, re-editing and reduction of what we inherited from Judaism in our formation.   The best way to observe a Passover meal is to be privileged to accept an invitation from our Jewish brothers and sister and learn to understand and appreciate how the Passover tradition still remains for them a crucial root event for their identity as a community of people.

  At the same time we cannot deny that our founding apostles and early teachers understood the life of Jesus from the Hebraic roots of the Christian Gospel.  We “stolen” from the Hebraic roots in the development of Christian theology and practice, but we haven’t kept the theology and practices of Judaism in the ways in which the continuing Jewish communities have kept to their roots.

  I do not think that we want to return to a literalism about a Paschal Lamb.  The Paschal Lamb as the main course of a meal which celebrates a covenant relationship is based upon understanding that God is a God who would kill all oldest sons except for the families with inside information about how to avoid it.  The Israelites had insider instructions to eat the substitutionary Passover lamb, whose blood was on the door post of the homes, because presumably the angels of death would avoid those homes.  The same Hebrew people who had this Passover story also had prophets who proclaimed that God did not want the blood of animals; God wanted the living sacrifice of lives willing to love mercy, practice justice and walk humbly before God.

   The life of Jesus was a living sacrifice, a gift of God’s most intimate presence to us.  His love of mercy, justice and his humble walk brought him to be killed on the cross.

  And so the early Christians believed that the living sacrificial life of Jesus could continue to be in each person and the profound remembrance of this sacrificial presence was known in the bread and the wine, in the feast of the renewal of the remembrance of Christ’s sacrificial presence.

  When Jesus took the role of a servant in washing feet he was exemplifying how the Paschal lamb was to be known in living a life of loving service.  Loving service is how we express being living sacrifices.

   Let us be thankful for the Passover tradition tonight.  Let us be thankful for the integrity of this tradition which is still observed by our Jewish brothers and sisters.

  Let us freely acknowledge how our Christian identity has grown out of the Hebrew-Judaic traditions and let us share with them the notion of dynamic remembrance.  In the Passover meal, the Jews believe that the power of salvation which was present in the Passover deliverance is a power that can be known as they are renewed by the very same saving power today.

  We as Christian believe that the power of the life, death, resurrection of Christ and the Holy Spirit of God are celebrated and dynamically remembered in the Eucharist which we believe is a gift to us by Christ as being the most intimate expression of the social reality of the gathered church.

  Tonight we gather to give thanks, for Thanksgiving, because Eucharist is an act of thanksgiving for the saving power of Christ which is able to inhabit each of us and help us to be living sacrifices for God and each other.  Amen.

Passion Narrative as Revisionary History

Palm Sunday/Passion Sunday Cycle A   April 13, 2014

Is.45:21-25     Ps. 22:1-11

Phil. 2:5-11    Matthew 26:36-27:66

Lectionary Link

   I can’t imagine what it would be like if my best friend and the greatest person I’d ever known were to be condemned to die a death of capital punishment.

  The death of capital punishment is a declaration that someone is a menace to the social order.  To watch a really good person die a criminal’s death would really be hard to fathom.  One could only think, “It has to be that the bad guys are winning.”  It has to be that people with money and power can use power to call bad anyone who seems to threaten their money and their authority.

  The death of Jesus was a political decision by the Roman authorities.  It was a way of getting rid of someone who had been perceived as a trouble maker.  A trouble maker would be anyone who could draw a significant crowd of people.  The Romans did not want crowds of people gathering that were not gathered for them and for their own purposes.

  The death of Jesus could only be a terrible event.

  But this most terrible event underwent many make overs.  The cross of Jesus became the very opposite of terrible.  The cross of Jesus became viewed as an expression of the glorious power of God.  God is so powerful that God can willingly empty the life completely out of Jesus in his death.  The earliest New Testament writer, St. Paul made the cross of Jesus a central theological focus.  The power of being emptied of life itself represented the power to end all things that needed to be ended.  The cross of Jesus became the metaphor for spiritual transformation in the theology of St. Paul.

   The growing number of the followers of Jesus meant that the message of Jesus was successful.  Success meant the message was the basis for establishing small social gatherings in the cities of the Roman Empire.  The church had to deal with the success of the message about Jesus; they had to teach it and put it in forms accessible to more people.  How did the death of a person result in a growing and popular new social movement within the cities of the Roman Empire?   The death of Jesus did not end the Jesus Movement; it only amplified it.  And so the Passion Narratives in the Gospels came as the Christian communities reinterpreted the meaning of the death of Christ in liturgical and narrative forms.  By the time the death of Jesus was used as a liturgy within the Christian gatherings it had already become the focus of spiritual transformation.  Because the life and death and the after life of Jesus had become so successful in the lives of people, the death of Jesus could only be as an event which was interpreted as ordained, scripted and triumphant.  The success of the message of Jesus in the Jesus Movement required that the death of Jesus be presented in the way in which it was experienced as an interior method of spiritual transformation by the followers of Jesus.

  As we have read today’s Passion account from Matthew's Gosepl, we can note that Jesus is both the main actor and the director of the event.  Jesus is following the script.  The references in the Hebrew Scriptures about a suffering apocalyptic or messianic hero had been found to provide the template for story.  There had to be a betrayer, deniers and deserting friends.  Somebody had to fulfill the pre-ordained roles in the script of the Hebrew Scripture.  The Christians who read the Hebrew Scriptures believed that the dynamics of events in the past repeated themselves in the events of the life of Jesus.  The church of the years 60-100 had become so successful in the Roman Empire, they could only look back at the life of Jesus as the evidence of the fully scripted plan of God in history to make the church reach the outcome that it had already attained.  On the day of the crucifixion, it was a horrible event.  When the Passion narratives were written, the death on the cross had become the glorious providence of God.

  The Passion Gospel is a literary truth of the death of Jesus; it is not the literal truth of what truly happened in Roman crucifixion.  The Passion Gospel is the literary and liturgical truth of the Church of people who had undergone the truth of a spiritual process of knowing their lives completely transformed because of this post-resurrection spiritual presence of Christ in their lives.  The reality of Christ within the lives of Christian writers could only inspire them to present the narrative of Jesus on the cross as the Victor.

  As we read the Passion Narrative, we are insulated by the alchemy of spiritual process which has turned the power of the death of a good and perfect Jesus into the power to end what is wrong within a human heart and bring to birth a new kind of resurrection life.  The power to die to everything that is unworthy and the power to let come to birth what is good, was given the passion – resurrection narrative to teach and renew the growing and successful Christian communities.

  We cannot blame the church for writing it in such a way.  The churches of the Gospel writers wrote it fully influenced by the transformation of their personal and social lives.

  We cannot blame ourselves either for continuing in this tradition.  Not because we cannot still shudder at the literal thoughts of such a death, but because we too know the transformation in our lives in having the power to bring to an end unworthy motives and habits and bringing to birth patterns of love, peace and justice.  If we were to decry the Passion Gospel writers for taking too much literary license, we too would have to deny the reality of transformation within us because of our baptismal lives.

  The Passion narratives are also preceded by Eucharistic Narratives.  This is where Jesus takes the food and drink of a meal and identifies himself with this food and drink and then feeds his friends.  This is the promise that he made to be very close with them forever in the transformation of their lives.

  So whether, in the Eucharist or in the highly literary Passion Narrative, you and I identify again with a power that can end what is evil and unworthy in our live.  We also can know a power to give birth to actions which will bring peace, love and justice to our lives.

  People can be cynical and dismissive about our Eucharistic liturgies and Passion narratives, but what matters to you and me is that we know power of the transformation of our lives which surely is anchored in the very same life power which was in Jesus in his death and resurrection.  Amen.

Death Is Encompassed by Another Kind of Life

5 Lent a        April 6, 2014

Ez. 37:1-14     Ps. 130 

Rom. 6:16-23    John 11:1-44     

Lectionary Link

  One of the teaching tools of Jesus that are found in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke is the parable.  In the Gospel of John, we no longer find the use of parables; we find long discourses of Jesus.  A parable is a story that is used to teach something in an indirect way.  One could say that the Gospels are parables too since they use stories about Jesus and dialogues and discourses of Jesus to teach lessons which are less about the actual time of Jesus and more about the issues of the early churches in the time after Jesus has gone.

  The writing context for John’s Gospel is significantly different than the contexts that are evident from Matthew, Mark and Luke.  In John’s Gospel, casting out of demon is no longer a method of folk medicine.  In John’s Gospels the miracles have become presented as signs in stories for discourses which teach the basic theology of the church of John’s Gospel.

  Today, we’ve read the story of the last sign, the story of the raising of Lazarus from the dead.  And so here we are at the 5^th Sunday in Lent and we get to preview Easter in the Lazarus story of John’s Gospel.  John’s Gospel presents some elevated roles for women.  According to the Gospel of John Mary Magdalene has the most profound and first encounter with the risen Jesus.  According to the Gospel of John, Martha of Bethany, who gets some bad press as a non-contemplative busy body in another Gospel, Martha of Bethany is the one who hears first the most profound declarative statement of Jesus about the resurrection.  Jesus said to Martha, “I am resurrection and I am life.”  In the same story the disciples are presented as dull literalists thinking that when Jesus used the word “sleep” he meant sleep instead of “death.”  It is interesting to note that women are presented as those who understand the inner meanings of the heart, while the male disciples are often presented as the literalist clowns.

  John’s Gospel story of Lazarus presents a response to the parable of the rich man and Lazarus in the Gospel of Luke.  When the leper Lazarus is in paradise with Abraham and the rich man is in Hades separated by an unbridgeable chasm, the rich man asks Abraham to send someone from the dead to warn his family.  Abraham said, “If they don’t believe the Moses and the prophets, neither will they believe even if someone comes back from the dead.”

  Do you see the obvious meanings of the Lazarus story in John?  It is evidence that not everyone was convinced or saw the resurrection as a valid reason for belief.  After the Lazarus story, we are told that some Jews believed in Jesus, but we are also told that other Jews saw this raising of Lazarus as something that was too much of an attention-getter and that it would bring the Romans down upon the Jews in a harsh way.  The resuscitation of Lazarus from the dead was reason for the Jewish authorities to plot the demise of Jesus.

  The Lazarus story in John’s Gospel has multiple functions including harmonizing it with the parable of Lazarus and the rich man.

  Miracles have been a major problem for our scientific age.  We live in an age where we have been taught to believe in a uniformity of natural causes in a closed system.  This closed system has allowed us to discover and develop scientific laws to describe consistent and repeatable occurrences in nature.  So, the alchemical changing water to wine, the suddenly healing a lame person and blind person, the walking on top of the water, the change of weather at personal command, the making of enough food for 5000 people out of five loaves and two fish, and the opening of a grave to bring a dead man back to life; these accounts to say the least, blow our scientific minds.

  They also blow our moral minds too.  Why do the needy conditions occur in the first place? If a miracle happens, why couldn’t a previous miraculous prevention of the need in first place have occurred?   Why did so few people have access to the few miracles?  Why did not the miracles become the obvious gift to give to the church to use them to completely heal all of the hurt, the disharmony and all of the death in life?  If food could magnificently be multiplied then why keep it to happening in just one event?  What makes the starving people with Jesus in the wilderness that day any more important that starving people who exists in our world today and who have existed throughout history?  How many of us do not have graves that we want to be robbed of some important people whom we have lost? What is the purpose of tantalizing us with the resuscitation of one dead man?  What is the purpose of tantalizing us with such miracles if they are only to accompany the ministry of Jesus and a very few chosen disciples?  It almost seems like a cruel use of the very notion of “miracles” if we truly think about the logical consequences.

  The writer of John’s Gospel already understood this dilemma and so the word Sign was used and the Sign is the marvelous event which signified the presence of Jesus Christ as triumphant for us in surviving all of the great dilemmas of life.

  When is Christ with us and how can we experience Christ being with us?  We can know Christ as the uncanny in the trivial bothersome events of life, such as running out of wine at a wedding.  We can know Christ in the various conditions of sickness.  Jesus is the Way.  Jesus is the one who heals our lameness so that we can walk in the way.  Jesus is the Light and Truth.  Jesus is the one who heals our blindness so that we can see with wise and honest perspective.  Jesus is living bread; Christ as Eucharistic bread is the unifying and constituting liturgy of the church. Jesus is the Life.  With Jesus Christ, we have found the healing of death.  The story of Lazarus is a sign of Christ’s presence with us even when his comfort seems delayed.  The way in which death is healed is that it is truthfully presented as a one-time event. Death is redefined and made different by understanding that it is only one event which is minimized by everything that happens before and after the event.

  The scientific closed system of the natural world is opened up by a new birth into the parallel world of the Spirit.  The natural cause and effect is totally turned on its head, not in a literal way but in the truly uncanny world of art, faith and the experience of the sublime.

  If we can find a way to coexist, with minor frustration, disease, natural disasters, blindness and infirmity, hunger and thirst, and to co-exist with death, then we have found an abundant life, we have found an encompassing way to live.

  This is the encompassing life of faith to which the writer of John’s Gospel invites us.  This Gospel invites us to not pout in literalism and wonder why we don’t get miracles that defy science.  This Gospel of John invites us to the experience of the Risen Christ, who accompanies and encompasses all of life in such a way that the only way to show this wonder is to tell us “great sign” stories.  Because people who live by faith can come to live by this “jaw dropping” “O my God” wonder of the Holy Spirit encompassing all of our life.

  The Gospel of John reminds us that the Gospel is about a new birth, a new seeing, a new way of living which encompasses and ultimately heals everything, including death.  We can be in the place of Martha today to hear again these ultimate words of health and salvation:  “I am the Resurrection and the life.”  May God help us to access and live within this life today.  Amen.