Monday, March 28, 2022
Jesus Deals with Sibling Rivalry
4 Lent March 27, 2022
Wednesday, March 23, 2022
Sunday School, March 27, 2022 4 Lent C
Sunday School, March 27, 2022 4 Lent C
Sunday, March 20, 2022
Becoming Good Compost for a better future
Ex.3:1-17 Ps. 103:1-11
1 Cor. 10:1-13 Luke 13:1-9
We cannot help but think about innocent suffering today as we watch the news of bombs being purposely dropped on civilians, on hospitals, school, and theatres in Ukraine.
We can’t help but inwardly or outwardly asking be why? Why Putin? Why Russia? Or Why God? You are all powerful, you are all loving; that is how we define you. If you are all powerful you can prevent innocent suffering. If you are all-loving then you certainly have the heart to prevent innocent suffering. Innocent suffering persists; does that mean that you and I have to give up one of the definitions of God as being all loving and all powerful?
The people in the time of Jesus were speculating about the cause of some untimely deaths, even deaths which had the desecration of the victims remains. Their blood was mixed with some of the sacrifices for Pontius Pilate. Other people had died when a tower fell upon them.
Jesus brought these up, but they obviously caused moral outrage and questions about how and why such deaths could happen in God’s world. Most of the time, in order to save our understanding of God so as not to offend God, people often say, “We don’t know why, but they must be happening to punish people for their misdeeds.” In order to save our definitions of God as all loving and all powerful, we switch the blame to fallen angels, serpents and people in the created order. So, there has to be some causal blame built into the system.
How was the all-powerful God doing for Moses and Israel? Do you remember all those promises to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob about being a great nation? What happened to the promise? Jacob’s sons and their families had come to be made slaves in Egypt. And Moses had fled Egypt and got married to a Midianite and settled in for domestic life, and when he had given up any aspiration of leadership or calling, God appeared to him in the burning bush and called the doubting Moses, by revealing to him his Name, his holy name, the name that Jews refuse to pronounce.
His name is translated as I am that I am. Why say “I am” twice? Because God is a God of Time and in Time. God was then, God is now and God will in the future. And that means everything else that was and is, will be kept and remembered for ever. In short, God is a perpetually becoming, creating God. Each moment of time a new ring is added to totality and God always encompasses the outer ring, because as St. Paul wrote, “We live and move and have our being in God.”
God as creating God and always becoming means that God is pure freedom in Time. And it turns out that this God of pure freedom, shows the greatest divine weakness. And what is the divine weakness? God sharing true and proportionate freedom with everyone and everything in creation, and then not interfering with that freedom. To interfere would be to make moral significance null and void. You might think that this compromises God’s greatness and perfection. And yes, it does because God always has a better competitor, but just one. And who is the better competitor of God? It is the Divine Self in a future state. Yes, in the world of time, creativity and freedom, everyone and everything surpasses itself in a future state, even the Divine Self. When God continually surpasses the Divine Self in becoming, it means our freedom makes a real and genuine contribution to outcomes. It means our freedom is real and not predestined.
So that means there is genuine freedom for lots of marvelous things to happen, lots of horrifying things, and everything in between.
The conditions of freedom create probable conditions of what Paul called testing, temptations, and even ordeals. To live in time, is to live the conditions of temptation/mistimings of events, motives, systems so as to create conflicts and even harm. Paul said that with and in temptation there is a way of escape. And what is the way of escape? It is more time, more chances. Time is always its own escape from the past to be different.
And this is what Jesus was asking, a continuous better and different future of each of us surpassing ourselves in excellence in our future.
Jesus was saying, you can speculate about the causes of the deaths of others and about bad luck that happens but the effective response to anything is repentance. Surpass yourself in excellence in each moment.
What does repentance have to do with the cause of death? Well, no one is going to die perfect; but the perfect way to die is in the state of repentance. Repentance is having the wisdom to know what we can change and what we can’t.
And what can repentance make us in our future after we have died? Forgive me for using the Gospel metaphor, but repentance can make our afterlives in this world good compost for a better world after we are gone. If we have left this world with the witness of repentance, then we will be good compost for the world which survives to be fertilized to fruitfulness.
So, the Gospel for us is that God’s power is seen in the freedom which is shared with all in time. This means that we are living the conditions of temptation, tests, and ordeals; it also means more time is always the escape. And the escape is to repent. And repentance is the life recommended by Jesus, and it is the perfect state to die in. And if we live the repentant life, we will be good compost to give the future a better chance to survive in better ways. Amen
Saturday, March 19, 2022
Will We Be Good Compost for the Future?
3 Lent Cycle C March 20, 2022
Ex.3:1-17 Ps. 103:1-11
1 Cor. 10:1-13 Luke 13:1-9
The Bible is a book about Time, telling us how an Everlasting, Timeless God is involved in our history.
In the Burning Bush theophany to Moses, the name of God is revealed: "I am what I am. I am continuous Being within all beings in time. I am always total becoming what I am becoming."
God as pure becoming, omni-becoming, comprehending everything as time moves on and as every change makes the God environment larger and larger, and about the environment God provides, St. Paul wrote, "In God, we live and move and have our being." We live and move means change and becoming, and so we are a moving and changing total number of occasions of existing.
The nature of God's becoming is pure, continuous creative freedom. And God’s great gamble in creation is that creative freedom is shared in degrees with all lesser beings that live in God's creation.
This freedom means that all the events of the past are absolute events which happened and contributed to the causing of all future events.
And because there are so many creative beings, human and non-humans, we cannot know with precision exact causation. What does science try to do? Scientists observe behaviors to establish significant causal connections which allow us to understand better how we should live to promote best probable outcomes for our future.
It is easier for scientist to establish causal connections in the physical world; but in the realm of human behavior, the ability to be exact in our understanding of cause and effect is more difficult.
We as human beings are engrossed with causes of human behavior or understanding why good and bad things happen to people in apparently some rather random ways. And because we are insecure about the mystery of causality, we whistle in the dark by speculation, we find speculations of all sorts.
Why did those poor folk from Galilee end up dead and their blood used in Pilate's sacrifices? What did they do to cause this? And what about those poor people on whom fell the tower of Siloam? And what about all those innocent people and children who are being bombed in Ukraine? What did they do to deserve this? Surely Putin's bombs were not so smart as to single out individual men, women, children, and buildings.
We think that we can know specific causation sometimes, but in very important areas of our lives it is a mystery; the mystery of an entire chain of indispensable former things which all contributed to what is happening now. And we can’t know the precise connection of everything, and so we speculate as our coping mechanism.
In the face of speculation about the causes of tragic deaths, what did Jesus say? He was less concerned about the cause of death, and more concerned about how one entered the portal of death.
And what does Jesus recommend as the ideal way to enter the portal of death? In the state of repentance. Repentance is the best way to respond to Freedom and Time. Repentance is learning and working at trying to be better today than yesterday being drawn by the magnetic lure of God's perfection. No one enters the portal death perfect; but the perfect way to enter death is in the state of repentance.
If you and I are living in the state of repentance, then you and I can be the very best compost, after we are gone, for a more fruitful world after we are gone. Compost and manure does not seem like a very romantic mode of our afterlife, but think about it: the past is dead and gone but the residue traces of how we have lived and left our influences can be rich compost for the future, or it can be waste that needs to be forgotten.
I believe that Jesus is asking us to live repentant lives so that we can be deep, rich, fertile, holy compost for a better future world. By being holy compost is the way in which we remain literally in this world after we are gone.
Today let us worry less about past causality and let us embrace repentance causality to pay the goodness of our lives forward into the future. Our lives as God's compost can be used to give the future world another chance at surviving and bearing fruit. Amen
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