In What Way Is Christ a King at All?

Christ the King Cycle B  Proper 29 November 25, 2012

2 Samuel 23:1-7  Psalm 132:1-13, (14-19)

Revelation 1:4b-8  John 18:33-37

 Lectionary Link

    We enjoy watching children play; we are charmed by their imaginations.  They can be kings and princesses and super-heroes.  But even children know what is imaginary and what is not.  The little boy in his Superman costume knows that when he jumps off the bed to fly; he knows about gravity and so he knows not to be too literal about his flying.  Already the young guy knows that he is switching codes between science and the codes that govern the imagination of his Superhero imitation.  Even though he is child-like he still has learned the hard rules of gravity.  Is a boy in a Superman costume, Superman? Yes, he is as much Superman as the actual Superman, because the actual Superman is an invention of literary imagination. We encounter child-likeness and the brute facts of history on this feast of Christ the King.

  Today on the feast of Christ the King we ponder the question, how is Jesus of Nazareth a king by any actual earthly experience.  Saul, David and Solomon were actual kings of Israel.  They had actual earthly reigns.  There was an incredible long succession of Kings in the Roman Empire, the Caesars.  They sat on thrones, they had standing armies, and they were actual kings.

  But how are we Christians like the young boy who is pretending to be Superman when it comes to our confession of Jesus to be a king, and not just a king but the King of Kings?  This question challenged the writers of the Gospels.  They had to deal with those Jews who decided Jesus was not “their” kind of Messiah, because Jesus in fact was not kingly enough.  He did not have a standing army.  A king with a standing army would not let their leader get crucified upon a cross.

  Today, we have read from the interrogation scene between Pontius Pilate and Jesus.  This scene was being written by people who knew that the Romans were in control.  They knew that Jerusalem was destroyed.   They also knew that to confess another person to be a king in the time of the Caesar was a foolish political act and it was an act that could be interpreted as a rebellious act.  The Christians who wrote John’s Gospel knew that the Romans believed Jesus was dead and that he was not a literal threat to their power.

  Pontius Pilate is presented like the adult who is mocking a child for taking the Superman role too seriously. ‘ Seriously, young man, how are you Superman?  You jump off of the bed, you do not fly; you fall to the floor.”

  “Jesus, are you a king?  How in any way are you the King of Jews?”   “ Well, Pilate, my kingdom is not of this world; if it were my angels would have fought.  Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”

  What we don’t see in this dialogue is Pilate’s cynical reply, “What is truth?”

  For most people what was literally truthful was that a real earthly king has an army and wields incredible power.   That is the kind of king that the Roman citizenry understood.  It is the kind of king that David was and he was the model king for the messiah who the Jews were looking for.  And Jesus was not that kind of king.

  So how do we process the fact that Jesus did not look like a king?  Historically the church did this by saying Jesus does not yet look like a king but he will when he comes again in the future.  Then he will be a literal future king.  This deferred kingdom of Jesus on earth is embedded in the Bible in the apocalyptic literature.  This deferred kingdom is why so many fundamentalists and apocalyptic Christians pray and want the world as we know it to end.  There is less motivation to care for our planet if one is fervently praying for life as we know it to come to an end.  One might question the healthiness of this kind of “kingdom” attitude.  Jesus is not a literal king now in the world, but he soon will be and everyone will be forced to acknowledge it.

  I wonder if many have missed the truth of the kingdom of Jesus that is found in the Gospel of John.  In John’s Gospel, Jesus said that his words were Spirit and those words were life.  Jesus was the same one who was call the Word of God.  And the writer of John said that the Gospel was written so that the reader would know that Jesus is the messiah or God’s anointed king.

  And what is the Gospel?  They are the words and Spirit of Christ.  They are an army of metaphors and they fight such an interior battle that they persuade people to know the good news of how Jesus is kingly in our lives.  By the sheer number of people who have made the interior assent of the will in knowing Jesus as kingly in their lives, one could easily make the case that Jesus is the most kingly figure in all of human history.  The army of metaphors has brought the truth of Jesus to many people in more valid ways than what has come by the swords of earthly kings.  In fact, the Gospel coming to people by an earthly sword seems to be a violation of Jesus as the prince of peace.

  What is the truth that is being hinted at in the Gospel of John?  Poor Pilate is just a teaching tool for the Gospel writer.  He represents both the literalists and those who have such a limited understanding of the fullness of truth.  Literal Pilate is the one who knows that Jesus is not an earthly king.  Was there any other way to be a king other than with an army?  Pilate is the cynic who is treating Jesus in the same way that a myth busting adult would like to tell a child that Santa is not real and neither are all of those Disney characters in the Disney kingdom.

   The writer of John’s Gospel was saying that truth is about understanding word; how you use word and how it uses you.  There is a child-like way of imagination that opens us to the meaning of Jesus and his kingdom.  The cynic will try to pour cold water on that and say that isn’t true because it isn’t brute historical fact or scientific fact.  But truth isn’t just about fact; it is about the total way in which we live.  We live with different discursive practices when we do science or when we appreciate art or music or when we make love or when we play or observe play such as an athletic contest.  We have the discourses of dreams and hopes and wonder and imagination and the uncanny and the Sublime.  They are not all the same but they interweave in our lives to represent the fullness of Truth.  Pilate was cynical about the truth of Jesus because his own notion of truth was so literal.  As people of faith we need to drop literalism as the only way to appropriate Jesus as a king and as a savior.   The departure of people from communities of faith today has to do with the narrow practice of truth in many Christian communities.  Such narrow constrictions of truth go hand in hand with an obsessive need to control.

  Modern cynics can see religious people as childish people in Superman costumes ready to jump off the building and assume that they are going to fly and the cynic says, “Not me…that’s just childish and a little crazy.”

  The Gospel more than anything is the “spirit of words.”  It is about an army of metaphors taking over our lives and reorganizing our lives towards the values of love espoused by Jesus.  Indeed Jesus is a king of hearts; he entrances and inspires the imagination.  He motivates us and is available as an experience of life-changing grace that is so unique and serendipitous to our life experience, it cannot be replicated.  Other people have graceful experiences but not my graceful experience.  The Gospel of John has Jesus speak to the truth of the different graceful experiences of life and how they come to words in the stories of the people who have these experiences.

  And trust me, people have graceful experiences but often will not tell them because the cynical Pilate is out there to crush them with the boot of cynicism the truth value of graceful experiences.

  The kingliness of Jesus has to do with how Christ becomes the visionary directing person in our lives to organize us toward love and justice in speech and deed.  And so let us today not be cynical or too literally limiting of the ways in which God and Jesus have, are and will get through to us.

  Let the angelic army of peaceful and loving metaphors enter us and rearrange our interior lives and let us know that Christ is our king and we live in his kingdom.  Amen.

Theology as the Art of Coping

25 Pentecost B    November 18, 2012  

1 Samuel 1:4-20 Psalm 16

Hebrews 10:11-14 (15-18) 19-25   Mark 13:1-8

Lectionary Link

   Have you ever heard of “Chicken Little Theology?”  You remember the famous Chicken Little in the famous tale.  She had an acorn fall on her head and in hysteria she made an incredible misinterpretation.  She did not actually see the acorn hit her so in alarm what did she scream?  “The sky is falling, the sky is falling, the sky hit me on the head.”   And she shared her alarm with Henny Penny and all of her other friends and ultimately the wily Foxy Loxy took advantage of her ignorance and he had her has very rare bird for his dinner.

  What might “alarmism” look like on the level of family, religious groups or society?  The Bible has within it alarmist theology.  We call it apocalyptic literature.  How do we interpret an alarming event that happens to us, to our family, to our parish, to our country, to our world?  Alarmist theology produced visualizations of the end of world; after all, if God’s people were suffering does that not signal an end of the world as we know it?

  Alarming events, interpretation and misinterpretation of the same are part of what we might call the efforts to cope with crisis and loss in life.  In many ways the Bible presents us with the efforts of people of faith to be involved in the continuous effort to cope with the events of life.  We celebrate blessing and success but what do we do in the time of crisis?  It is during a crisis when we need the psychological and spiritual wherewithal to “cope.”  And much more of biblical literature is about a theology of coping rather than a theology of success.   This gives some indications of the conditions that were faced by the people who generated the biblical literature.

  What did our country feel like when the twin towers came crashing down on 9/11?  We felt violated?  We felt baffled; why did this happen and why would anyone do this to us?  We felt angry.  We felt the need for revenge.  We felt like justice should be exacted upon those responsible even though those who perpetrated the act died in their act.  One of the planes targeted the Pentagon and another had targeted the White House.  How would we feel if the White House and Capitol Building were destroyed in an attack?  The symbolic importance of those building and feeling safe in our lives would be threatened.  How do we make sense of alarming events?

  Chicken Little’s first mistake was to misinterpret the cause of the event and so she ended up over-reacting to something that did not take place at all.  Events of alarm can bring out some unhealthy coping responses.  One response is denial.  Another response is self-blame; “It’s all my fault and I deserved this.”  Another response is to scapegoat and blame others.  “It’s all their fault.”  And when that is done on the social level entire groups of people can be blamed for misfortunes in society.  Another response is to propose conspiracy theories about why things happened.  Even factual incidents can inspire lots of “wacky” speculations.  Another response is the rationalization response and that can be part of denial as well.  If the levees had been better constructed we would not have had such a disaster.  Good thinking; but after the fact denial and blame.  But there is also the Calvinist deterministic response, “God is in control and God knew it was going to happen.”  There is some comfort in believing in a super-Cosmic Entity who is a puppeteer for all earthly happenings.  After all, at least somebody is in control.

  By now, I have probably offended all of our favorite methods of coping and for what purpose?  Today, we have read an account from the community which generated the Gospel of Mark.  This community belonged to the sect of Judaism who believed that Jesus was the Messiah.  They were opposed by other Jews who did not believe Jesus was the Messiah.  The community of the Gospel of Mark lived after the year 70 when the most important city and building for the Jews had been destroyed.  The Temple and the City of Jerusalem were leveled to the ground and so there were definitely issues of coping involved.  Many people lost their homes and had to flee the environment of Jerusalem.  Many people who believed Jerusalem to be the holiest site on earth had to contemplate the fact that God’s protective shield had not been in place.  Many people had to make sense and meaning of this event.   There were major shifts occurring within communities and we, as Christians today,  are the result of those shifts.  Today the Jewish community survived the destruction of the Temple and they have survived not believing that Jesus was the Messiah.  And Christianity is no longer a sect of Judaism; it is a separate religious faith community.

  This Gospel of Mark reveals the coping actions of the early Jesus Movement.  The community understood that the risen Christ as a living oracle in their community revealed that time means nothing is permanent and not even the holy Temple of Jerusalem.  What also did the oracle Christ reveal to them?  The oracle Christ used perhaps one of the most poignant metaphors of all, a metaphor of extremely unique pain but a sign of a most propitious event.  What is that metaphor?  Something I will never know anything about.  Birth pangs, labor pains.  Women who have delivered babies into this world have variously described birth pangs.  Birth pangs are painful but they mark the glory of a new beginning. The presence of the baby makes the pangs worthwhile, even while we might question the harsh reality of physiology that juxtaposes such pain and new life.   And the oracle of Jesus in the literature and liturgy of the community of Mark used the metaphor of birth pangs to describe the historic events of their time.

  Perhaps we might adopt birth pangs as a metaphor for life.  New moments are being born out of previous moments.  Painful transitions are always occurring and we continually have to let go of the old in order to embrace the new.  The birth of the community of Jesus Christ was a painful beginning and the community of the Gospel of Mark was trying to find meaning for the living out of their belief in Jesus as the Messiah.

  I believe that words of the Bible are consistent with the most common forms of coping in human experience.  We translate events of pain and pleasure into words; words are experienced in our physical existence but they also seem to have a parallel existence in the thought realm.  We use words to try to give meaning to all of the events in our lives.  The great philosopher Plato is known for his division of life into the realm of the ideal world and the actual world.  This platonic thinking is evident in the writer of the book of Hebrews.  This writer recreated a Temple and a priesthood of Jesus in the heavenly realm or the realm of the ideal.  So the earthly Temple and earthly Jesus had a parallel in the heavens and this realm in heaven was what completed the actual historical reality.  The early church understood and coped with their situation by their interpretation of life with a spiritual meaning.

  The question for us today involves how we use the Gospel of language to cope with the issues of faith in our life today, and they are many.  Our lives of faith involve rigorous efforts to interpret and assign meaning to events, not because we can discover any infallible meaning, but so that we can continue to live and act toward hopeful outcomes for ourselves and for our vision of what would make this world better.  What is infallible about the Bible is that people of biblical times grappled with the issues of faith and wrote their words of how they tried to find meaning.  Our words will be different than theirs based upon the fact that we have accumulated and are influenced by 2000 more years of world experience.

  As much as we think that we have progressed, we have progressed to know how small we are midst the vast quantity of what we know the universe to be.  We can be easily humbled by immensity.  We also know that we encounter freedom and that freedom renders for us a range of probabilities in our human experiences.  Important buildings can be destroyed, war and terrorism do happen in this world.  Disease occurs.  Hurricane occurs.  I think that mature coping in life does not involve scapegoating or pretending to know God’s will about why everything has happened.  Mature coping involves the faith of knowing that life is going to survive us, no matter what happens to us.  So what do we do?  We rejoice with each other in the joys and goodness of life.  We mourn with each other and support each other in the events of loss and crisis.

  And in the pain of our lives we hope that we can with the continuing oracle of Jesus Christ in the church, in faith, confess that life includes birth pangs, the terrible pain of delivering something new and joyful into our world.  Let us believe that the Gospel of Jesus and our lives of faith are a part of this birthing process and what we are giving birth to is the future after us.  Amen.

The Widow's Two Coins: Judgment on an Institution

24 Pentecost 27 B     November 11, 2012

 1 Kings 17:8-16  Psalm 146  

Hebrews 9:24-28    Mark 12:38-44

Lectionary Link

  You and I have survived another presidential election; when did it begin?  4 years ago and already someone is headed to Iowa getting ready for 2016.  And we’ve read and watched lots of coverage about the election.  And whatever news service or disservice we’ve given our attention to, we are well aware that phrases and sayings are “loaded with meanings.”  The writers and commentators believe that they know their audience and so they “load” their messages and reporting with meaning.  And we know that since we share with them some common assumptions.

  When the Gospels were written, you can be sure that the writers and editors intended their writings to be “loaded with meanings” and the readers and listeners shared some common assumptions with the Gospel writers.  The ways in which we use a particular Gospel is loaded with meaning that perhaps was not a part of the original meaning intended.

  It is November and Every Member Canvass time and conveniently, we have the story of this desperately poor widow giving her last two coins into the Temple Coffers and Jesus is saying to the disciples that she has given more than all.  And the stewardship message is that giving should be proportionate giving.  Giving should be determined by how much we have left over that enables us to live.  And of course, down-sizing and simplifying life is always a challenge or at least using our resources in the most creative way is another way of expressing excellence in our relationship with all of the resources of our lives.

  But we also might find that Gospel read for today is like the obituary for a form of religious life that ended and passed away.

  The Gospel of Mark was written and edited around and after the year 70; this was the year that Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed.  It obviously was not written in Jerusalem and part of the theological message of the Gospel might be a reflection upon the end of Temple-based religion in Jerusalem.

  One thing that the writers could do is blatantly state the obvious; the obvious was that the Romans were brutal in crushing any resistance movement.  The Gospel writers knew that the Roman Empire was there to stay; with Jerusalem destroyed another earthly kingdom was not going to happen soon.

  The writer of Mark’s Gospel is hinting at something else.  There is that suggestion that the mainline religions of the Scribes and Pharisees were responsible for what had happened.  What was wrong with the religion of Scribes and Pharisees?  According to the Gospel writer, the scribes were devouring the houses of widows.  That sounds like a rather harsh judgment upon some religious leaders.  The irony of the Gospel reading is this:  The scribes in their interpretation of the laws and in writing so many regulations were such imposing religious authorities that they had convinced this poor widow to give her last coins to the Temple as part of her religious obligation.  How is it that she could not see that she was free to spend the little money that she had for her own needs?  How is it that her own religion had turned herself against herself?  What kind of religion is this?

  You and I did not get to read the verses of Mark that come after what we read today.  In the next verses, Jesus is saying that the temple will be destroyed and not one stone will be standing upon another.

  The widow’s giving her last coins in obedience to her religious leader’s ability to turn herself against herself represents perhaps the corrupt blindness that can come to any kind of institution.  We are put together to be a benefit to people and we end up becoming institutions that need 100 % of our time, talent and treasure going to the institution.

  We read over and over again in the Bible that the “Lord cares for the widow and orphan.”  The Lord cares for the poor and the broken-hearted but the reality of the world does not always seem to support that claim.  Religious institutions do not always seem to make it clear in their practices that the Lord cares for the widow and the orphan.

  The prophet Elijah intruded upon a widow in Zarephath.  She had no provisions but Elijah told her if she would fix his meals for him then God would never let her run out of oil and meal for her daily bread. Here again this poor widow was asked to support the “prophetic institution” but in the case of Elijah, it turned out that she always had plenty to eat in her support of the Prophet Elijah.

  So we have stories of two widows and their relationship with religious institutions; one received helped by her participation and the other had her resources drained.

  And what was the judgment upon the institution that took from the widow and did not support the widow?  The very end of Temple based worship was predicted.

  The widow threw her two coins for the Temple tax while Jesus predicted the very end of the Temple. The poor widow was in an unknowing way undoing the Temple as an institution because her very faithfulness to a policy that had her turned against herself showed how religious, wealthy and intelligent people can convince the poor and ignorant to engage in practices against their own best interests.  Often when one looks at public lotteries, we have to admit that they are fatal taxes affecting most poignantly the poor and ignorant.  Intelligent people do not waste lots of money on the lottery; poor and ignorant do and so it becomes a practice against themselves.

  In another Gospel Jesus is quoted as saying, “To whom much is given; much is required.”  If one is given intelligence, then one can certainly use that intelligence to mislead and trick and fool those who don’t have the same intelligence.  If one has intelligence and religious authority and the public office to require certain behaviors of people, then much is required.  And if that authority and ability is used to trick people to do things that are not in their best interest, then it is better that the stones of the institution that maintain such a behavior be dismantled.

  The story of the widow is a story about judgment upon the institution.  It is also a story about us.

  Where in our lives have we been duped into practices that are not healthy for us lives?  We are paying the equivalent of Temple taxes to authorities that have not always given us good healthy practices for our own lives.  Where are we living unhealthy lives because of the authorities that we have submitted to in our lives?   And where are we a part of the authority structure that unwittingly misleads about or takes advantage of those whom the Bible says that the Lord cares for?

  The widow and her two coins today are message to us about institutional integrity and credibility today.  The quest for institutional integrity and credibility should include some questions for us today?  Is it important to pray?  Is it important to gather to pray?  Is music important?  Is it important in worship?  Is it important to have someone visit the hospital and skilled nursing centers on our behalf?  Is it important to mentor children in their faith?  Is it important to bless children?  To get them started right in life?  Is it important to welcome all people to our house of prayer?  Is it important to give counsel to people in crisis?  Is faith education important?  Is it important to have celebration and recognition of rite of passages in peoples’ lives, baptisms, marriages, memorials?  Is St. John’s important to us?  Does it have institutional credibility and integrity?  Are Morgan Hill and our lives better off for St. John's being here?  You notice, I did not ask, does it have a perfect or even adequate rector?  You know you can get the perfect religion of you being alone contemplating God on the mountain without the messiness and imperfections of others being present.  You know you can get perfect good religion and theology through virtual means.  There are better sermons online than you’ll ever get from me.  You can get TV and virtual religion without coming to church.  But is virtual and religion of individualism honest to our birth into communal life?

  The widow who gave her all in the Temple was willing to give to a very imperfect institution that was passing away, because that was the only institution which she had.  In our lives in our quest to find the perfect, we can sometimes forget to “love the one we’re with” because that one seems too messy and imperfect as we are always looking for the next one that is better.

  Stewardship at St. John’s as we close this year and begin the next involves simply, “loving the one you’re with.”  We’re all in this place together as we seek to have our institutional life perform with integrity and credibility towards our ideals of loving God with all our hearts and loving our neighbor as ourselves.  Let us accept the widow’s two coins as a commitment charge to “be here, now” with an undivided attentive presence.  Whether the walls will be standing tomorrow, let us commit to be here now.  Amen.

Wearing the Law; Living the Law

23 Pentecost 26B     November 04, 2012

Deuteronomy 6:1-9 Psalm 119:1-8

Hebrews 9:11-14 Mark 12:28-34

 Lectionary Link

  Today is All Saints Sunday and in our lessons from Holy Scripture we have read about the law.  We read the charge that Moses gave to the children of Israel.  He told them that when they went into the Promised Land, that the Law was to be the crucial identity of their lives.  Today, we believe with the advent of the T-shirt, clothes became the billboard for textual messages of all sorts.  In our day, a T-shirt allows a person to literally wear their language.  But what is our relationship to the text that we wear.  What textual message could I wear that I could live up to?  My T-shirt could read, “I am a gray and balding older man.”  Well, that would be true.

  Long before textual T-shirts, the people of the Hebrew and Jewish faith have worn their texts.  Part of the prayer costume for Jews includes phylacteries.  These are leather boxes with the text of the Torah written within them.  They are strapped around the head and on the wrist.  They literally are the worn text of the Torah and they fulfilled this command of Moses:   “Bind the words of the commandments as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead.”  In a very symbolic way the writing of the commandments worn on the hand and the forehead state the principle that the commandment can not remain a dead letter upon the page; the commandments has to take control of one’s thought life and the commandments have to be internalized into one hands, into ones actions and body language.

  What can happen instead of the Torah living in our minds and in our actions?  We can replace justice and fairness by devising a series of religious ritual behaviors to stand in place of actually doing justice.  So, it became a practice to make the religious sacrifices of the prescribed animals and that kind of religious behavior was done, while the orphans and the widows went without food.  So prescribed religious ritual behavior became a substitute for living a life of justice, compassion and care.  Ritual behavior is easier than justice.  It is very messy business to try to bring justice to everyone.  Clergy are happy with ritual behavior; the ancient priests of Israel could get some of the best cuts of meat for their own tables with the prescribed animal sacrifices.  Clergy can fund the church and their jobs with prescribe obligatory religious and ritual behavior; okay so you’re not perfect and justice is not realized in society, but just come, give your tithe, make your confession, receive your absolution and go to Mass, and you get a clean slate.

  On All Saints Day, we confess Jesus to be the Saint of Saints.  Jesus is the Law of all Laws.  When one speaks in generalizations about faith communities, one would say that the Torah or the Law is central to Judaism.  But what is central to Christianity is Jesus Christ.  In Jesus Christ, the message of God does not come on stone tablets as written laws; in Jesus Christ, God comes as embracing the entire personhood.  What is greater?  Writing or Personhood?  Even though language and writing are what make human beings the unique creature, the appearance of God in a human being bespeaks a belief that human beings can only access that which is greater than human life, through human life.  Our belief in Jesus Christ is a belief that God does not just communicate through writing on stone tablets; God embraces the entire human experience as a way for us to know and celebrate the fact that being human, also means recognizing that life involves a recognition of life that is more than human.  It is the more than human life of God that comes to us in the Jesus Christ.

And what it reveals to us is that in a world of time, we are always invited to be More than we are right now.  We are always invited to surpass ourselves in excellence.  Believing in God means that we believe in the immensity of the quantity of future occasions of existence and those future occasions invite us to further invention, further creativity, further excellence.

  The future will likely change the details of human law of the past.  Why?  Because love always requires the details and strategies of love to be worked out in new situations.  We write laws and will continue to write laws in new situations because love and justice are not fixed states of what can ever be permanently attained.  Practicing love and justice is never completed; we have to keep at it again and again.  As much as the founders of our country believed in their laws that “all people were created equal” they were blinded to achieve that in their actions as long as they accepted tacitly the practice of slavery and the subjugation of women.  Our founders preached a beautiful law and justice but at the same time, they did not fully realize law as a full completion of the work of justice.

  This never finished work of love and justice is perhaps the chief reason that Jesus settled for the summary of all of the law into just two laws; love God and love your neighbor as yourself.  St. Paul did a similar reduction when he said that love fulfills the law.

  Does this mean that love and law are opposed to each other?  Of course not.  Law is the strategy that love and justice needs to be actually practiced.  We write laws as approximations of what good and just living means in actual practice.  And how do we know?  Well, you ask people; and people will tell you when they think something is fair or just in how they are treated. 

  All of the written laws can be reduced to love because love is not just having the law written as text on a T-shirt.  Love is not placing little boxes of Torah on your forehead and hand.  Love is when my hands perform deeds of kinds; love is when my mind think thoughts of kindness.  When our body language performs and acts deeds of love and kindness, then we become living law.  We become the law of love and justice.

  And who is it who was the perfect example in life of law and justice?  It was Jesus Christ.  He was the living law.  He was God’s law in Person.  He was love and justice personified.  And on All Saints Sunday, who do we call saints?  We call saints those who embodied love and justice in their very deeds.  These were not people who gave us legal texts on how we should live; they were people who showed how to live by the example of their lives.  They were “living laws.”

  So on All Saints Sunday, we are invited to personify the law and the justice of Christ.  We can be articulate and brilliant in legal reasoning but law is most effective when we see it in practice.  Children are perhaps the most impressionable when they cannot speak and when they cannot read.  So in the first three years of their lives they are formed mostly by the people who model what it is to be human for them.  Parents and mentors are the living law for impressionable children.

  But we never lose our childlike impressionability; we forever have this need to be impressed.  And what are we most impressed by?  By the living practice of love and kindness.  We are impressed when we experience justice and fairness.

  All Saints Sunday is a time to celebrate those who lived love and justice with their lives.  It is a time for us to embrace what is saintly in life.  It is time for us to internalize love and justice and let love and justice be lived through every word and deed of our lives.

  Today, we sing the song of the saints of God, and we pray, “God help me to be one too.  God help me to be love and kindness in what I do and say.”  Amen.

  

Suffering and Entrance into the Priestly

21 Pentecost Cycle B Proper 25     October 28, 2012

Job 42:1-6, 10-17  Psalm 34:1-8, (19-22)
Hebrews 7:23-28  Mark 10:46-52

Lectionary Link

  Unfortunately it is hurricane season and Sandy is in the Atlantic this week.  She has already caused damage and loss of life in the Caribbean especially in Haiti and now she’s headed toward the New Jersey Coast.  Our prayers ascend and also let’s hope that every two bit prophet out there will just keep their mouths shut about knowing God’s will regarding suffering.  It is bad enough that terrible things happen; it is made worse when someone thinks they can know precisely why it happened and in accordance with God’s will.  The politicians who have opined about God’s will have not done a truly worshipful God any favors.  Really bad theology can keep people away from the God of love whom many of us believe that Jesus came to reveal.

  The Book of Job was written precisely for the people who thought they knew God’s will and why bad things happened.  It could have been written against some of the simplistic, cause and effect writings of the prophets who preached that Israel was suffering because of her sins.  Now this may be true in a general sense because we might say that if a person has a bad character that person is going to get into some trouble at some time; it is not true always in the specific sense of knowing how the conditions of freedom manifest prosperity and suffering in specific cases.

  And so we have the ironic writing of the book of Job.  The writer writes a story that goes against the common “popular theology.”  What was that theology?  God blesses good people.  So success means that you must be good otherwise God would not let you succeed.  And if you suffer, it means you must have done something wrong, even if you don’t know what you did.  Or you just might suffer collateral damage because of something done by someone else.

  The plot of Job tells us that Job is a righteous man but also a fortunate man.   You know the saying, “I’d rather be lucky than good,” well, Job was both good and lucky.  So in the heavenly council Satan says, “Of course Job is good, he’s good because he’s been lucky.  But if you take away his good luck, he will curse God.”  What does God say, “The bet is on; have at it with Job but just spare his life.”  And so a hurricane of woes hits Job’s life.  He loses everything and everyone and even his own health; but he did not lose his theological friends who were present to tell him the meaning of his suffering.

  If you and I actually thought that God and Satan were in some heavenly place putting wagers on whether we would have faith, I doubt if anyone of us would believe in such a God.  But the point of the story is a satire on people who believed that events in people’s lives were precisely coupled with specific knowable actions and knowledge of God's personal disapproval. The writer of Job used a satire of this theology to put this theology into question. The writer used an exaggerated simple cause and effect theology to challenge how such theology was not honest to compassion in the suffering situation.  I also wonder if the writer was not a woman?  Did you notice how the writer made a special point of mentioning the inheritance of Job’s daughters?  Could be that the story was also taking a swipe at inheritance practices of the time as well.

  The punchline of the story of Job for me is this;  “The Lord restored Job’s fortune when he prayed for his friends.”  And I think that fuller notion of prayer is not just religious acts that we do in church;  prayer is how our entire life is offered to God on behalf of others.

  When someone is suffering what is needed?  Does a person need friends who come to be completely awkward at giving care and comfort?  Suffering brings a crisis to a person and their family and community and those who are not immediately affected stand outside of the suffering.  And in their uncomfortable “rubbernecking” on the suffering of another, they often offer awkward and unhelpful advice.  We've all been in situations where we don’t know how to react or what to say and so we just open our mouths and say something that ends up being really inappropriate, stupid or not very helpful.  Friends who offer easy answers to suffering are not very helpful.  But Job survived his suffering and he did it in part for his friends.

  The Lord restored Job’s fortune when he prayed for his friends.  Did we ever view our lives as life experience that prepares us to be with the people whom we are called to help?  This is the wise theory and practice behind specialized “support groups.”  Support groups are most often closed groups; you can’t be a survivor of cancer if you have not had it yet.  And what is the message of most support groups?  We will not let our suffering make us victims.  We will let our entire life inform the meaning of our lives, not just the event of suffering that we experienced.  Support groups are based upon what I call oblationary prayer; it is when your life experience becomes shared with others.  
  People suffer because of the incredible freedom that is abroad in this world that results in all sorts of things happening.  One can say that God is pure creativity.  Another way to say that is that God is pure freedom and God shares a degree of that freedom with everyone and everything in this world.  And in a world of such freedom we can observe laws of consistent patterns in behaviors but we can also see human suffering when systems come into conflict.  An Oncologist can be fascinated with the performance of cancer cells even while such cells are monstrous in the human body.  Freedom results in the conflict of systems; freedom results in suffering.

  So the question is not why suffering happens; the question is when it does occur, what do we do?  And what is the biblical answer?  Well, there are many biblical answers.  The reason that we have so many prophets today making simplistic pronouncements is because they existed in biblical times too.  We know that because the Book of Job had to be written to counter the simplistic formula of suffering and blessing.

  My preferred biblical answer to the problem of suffering is this: God restored the fortune of Job when he prayed for his friends.  "Job, your suffering gave you experience that you have that is so unique but it will make you available to other people in ways that you have not been available to them before.  Your suffering has now made you a priest to people."

  Jesus was not a priest in the Temple during his life, but the writer to the Hebrews believed that Jesus was the very essence of what defines a priest.  His life, death and suffering were viewed as his life offered on behalf of humanity and that is what made him a priest.  We, the church are too hung up with the priestly office, when we should emphasize that the entire nature of the church is priestly.  Your experience as it is offered to the people to whom you are called is what makes you priestly.

  I would like for everyone of one us to embrace our experience and come to understand that we are valuable to the rest of the community because of our experience.  The question for each of us is this:  Can I embrace and accept my experience in all of its breadth?  Can I accept that I am not an island in this world?  Can I accept that my experience can be a gift to others as I offer it as a prayer to God and to the community?

  If you and I can offer our lives, with its suffering and joy to God and to our community, we have entered the priesthood of Job and the priesthood of Christ.  Can we do that today?   If so, in a very, very unofficial way, I, with no authority at all, now so ordain into the priesthood of Christ, every person here who is willing to offer their lives as prayers for the community.  Amen.

Puppet Show on the Meaning of Halloween

A lesson about Halloween

Puppet Show starring Roary the Lion

Roary:  Roar…Good morning boys and girls.  My name is Roary the Lion.  How are you today?

Do you know what holiday is coming up?

What is it called?

It is called Halloween.

Can you say Halloween?

Do you know what Halloween means?

Does it mean we get dressed in costumes?

Does it mean that we go Trick or Treating?

Yes, it does mean that but I want to tell about how we came to have Halloween.

Are you ready?

Okay….

Can you say, “All Hallow’s Eve”

All Hallow’s Eve.

When people began to say, “All Hallow’s Eve” real fast it began to sound like Halloween.

If you say All Hallow’s Eve real fast…it can sound like Halloween.

All Hallow’s Eve, All Hallow’s Eve, All Hallow’s Eve,   Halloween!

Do you know what All Hallow’s means?

How many of you know what a super hero is?

Is Batman a superhero?

Is Superman a superhero?

Are Ninja Turtles superheroes?

Are Power Rangers superheroes?

Also we have other kinds of heroes like princesses.

Snow White.  Belle.  Oriel.  Cinderella.

And at Halloween we wear costumes of superheroes and princesses.

We also have other heroes like baseball players.  The San Francisco Giants?

And football players?

And we have famous Olympic gymnastic heroes?

But do you know what All Hallow’s means?

It means All Saints.  Can you say All Saints?

Have you heard the word Saint?

What church are we at today?  We're at Saint John's church today.

Who was Saint John?  St. John was a famous hero.  He loved God and he helped other people to love God.

Have you heard about St. Mary?  St. Mary was a hero too.  She was the mother of the baby Jesus.

So saints are heroes.  They are God’s heroes.  They are heroes of our church.  And there are many heroes who did some very nice and kind things.

All Saint’s Day or All Hallow’s Day is the day when we celebrate all of the heroes who loved God in a very special way.

And so the evening before All Saint’s Day is called All Hallow’s Eve or Halloween.

It is the Day before the celebration of God’s famous heroes.

So as you put on your superhero costumes and your princess costumes remember God’s heroes.  And they are called saints.

And you are called to be a hero too.  You are a hero when you are kind and good.

Can you say, Thank you God for Halloween?

Can you say, Thank you God for heroes?

Suffering Is Honest to the Conditions of Freedom

21  Pentecost b P.24  October 21, 2012

Job 38:1-7, (34-41) Psalm 91:9-16

Hebrews 5:1-10 Mark 10:35-45

 Lectionary Link

   It might be interesting to be able to know the future in precise details unless; the predictions for the future were always for misfortune and bad luck.  Would we want to know the future if we knew for sure that it would be bad luck?  I don’t think that we would; so it is enough for us to use wisdom to understand probabilities and try to take the necessary precautions. 

  The disciples of Jesus wanted for Jesus to guarantee them the knowledge and promise of a future success for them.   They wanted to be promised specific success and specific promotion:  “Jesus, could we sit next you in the best seats of your kingdom?”  And Jesus could not claim access to such future knowledge.  Only his Father could know that and if we understand the plentitude of God to be the one who Jesus called Father, Jesus was simply saying that the future can only be possible, it is not yet actual.

   In the various communities of those who wrote the Bible, there was different reflection upon how can one be guaranteed success and how one could ward off suffering and failure.  There are certain writers who thought they had discovered some success formula.  If you are righteous and obey God, then God will give you success.  However, if suddenly one does not have success and one suffers loss, using that same success formula, one must admit that bad things happen because one is really bad and thus deserves bad luck, even if one’s badness does not seem particularly evident to the one who has to suffer.  How can a suffering baby understand his own sins for such suffering?  And why would a baby be singled out for punishment because of a parent’s sin?  So the success formula really does not work when the punishment of suffering does not seem to fit precisely with any obvious crime.  Other writers in the Bible challenged the formula for guaranteeing blessing simply because it seemed as though in so much of the history of Israel, God’s chosen people suffered a lot.  And it is not always easy to find a one to one correspondence between the suffering and the particular crime that caused the suffering.  And so we have the book of Job as a testament to the fact that some bad things can happen to good people.  In this morality play, in the final scene, God speaks directly out of the whirlwind.  And what does God say?  God essentially said, “the plentitude of God and life is much bigger and older than you Job; you are but a tiny particle on the plentitude of life and so you cannot possibly know why everything happens in the way in which it happens.  Job, you are not fullness of life, you are not God, and so you don’t really have to know everything.  And you certainly don’t have to even pretend to know everything.  And Job, all of those people who pretended to know why you suffered, they were very presumptuous and they owe you an apology and I want you to pray for them in their narrow “know it all” views.”

  People who want future guarantees are people who want to exert a sense of control where they have no control.  The control that we have is acting in wisdom on probabilities; not in any precise knowledge of a future event, good or bad.

  This very same debate governed how various groups wanted to discuss a future messiah.  In some people’s mind Jesus could not be the messiah precisely because he suffered.  A triumphant hero would not be subjected to Roman crucifixion; a triumphant hero would rout the Romans out of Palestine and reestablish a kingdom in Israel like King David did. 

  The group of Jews who later became the Christian community believed the messiah to be a suffering servant.  A God who intervenes in history and knocks some heads is not how Jesus the messiah came to be understood.  Granted, many Christians who proclaimed Jesus as a suffering messiah, decided to delay the triumphant messiah until a future end of history when the one who suffered would be the one who judges.  We need not believe in a precise future narrative but it is quite normal to believe in the victory of justice, even when we cannot fully understand how it will actually happen.  People in every age will spin stories of future justice, future freedom from suffering from pain, simply because we believe that justice and freedom from pain is normal and desirable.  If injustice and suffering seems to prevail, there is still no reason to submit to suffering and injustice as what defines a good life.

  The writer of the letter of Hebrews said that Jesus learned obedience through what he suffered.  And what does suffering teach us?  It teaches us submission to the greater order of all that is.  We must submit in our minds because the infinite number of things in mutual relationships is too vast to understand.  This is not fatalistic thinking; it is the sheer fact of quantity.  The quantity of events in my life and life experience is much less than the plentitude of all of life and of God’s life.  After we do everything in our might and power to work for freedom from pain and suffering and injustice, we find that we have to obey or submit to what is, or what actually happens to us.  This kind of submission is how we avoid denial.

  The Christian life is not a life of denial; it is not a system of giving us easy answers about how we can secure future exact and precise blessing and success, such as the disciples of Jesus wanted.  The Christian worldview does not tell us why suffering occurs except for allowing that true freedom is happening in our world.  What Christians understand is that God in Jesus suffers with us.  God understands the full implications of true freedom in this world and God suffers with us to acknowledge the reality of freedom.

  Yes we are tempted to want a method and theology to guarantee a future of success and exemption from suffering and injustice.  But that is not realistic and it is not honest to God or honest to Jesus.

  Jesus asked his disciples if they could drink of the same cup that he did and be baptized with the same baptism that he had.  They said yes and Jesus agreed.  Indeed, Jesus’ identification with the suffering was very complete and so will ours be.  In all of the occasions of life, the freedom in this world results in various amounts of suffering but also the blessing of success and fortune.  To be human is to be submitted to freedom and freedom’s mysterious consequences in actual occasions.  This is honest to life; this is not some religious huckster message promising you specific blessing or freedom from suffering.

  In faith, like Job and Jesus we submit; we obey the dictates of the permissive freedom of all that has happened.  And we are baffled because we are smaller than towering plentitude of events within which we live.

  In faith we believe that God, who is all, registers and knows our present condition and lets us know from within and from without that we are cared for with a personal care.  And in faith we know that we need to be servants to each other; our hands need to be the hands of God to help each other.  In faith, we know that if God really honors freedom, then we need to use our freedom to serve as much as we can to counter the freedom that permits injustice and suffering.

  Jesus learned obedience and submission in his suffering.  And from this we can know that God suffers with us and lets us know that it is our calling to use our freedom to serve those who suffer and to promote justice in a world where injustice can truly occur.

  Let us today, not be humiliated by the great mystery of God and by the great fullness of life; let us be humbled by knowing our limitations but let us also know that God permits us in our human limitations to know some wonderful events of grace, love, faith and hope.  And if our human limitations are expressed in life occasions that can only be called grace, love, faith and hope, then we can be thankful indeed.  And in our thanksgiving let us be generous in service.  Amen.