Rejoice, Repentance and Newtown, CT

3 Advent C     December 16, 2012

Zeph 3:14-20  Canticle 9         

Phil.4:4-9    Luke 3:7-18

Lectionary Link

  There are events that happen that alter our lives; there are events that alter a formerly planned sermon.  And the terrible shootings in Newtown, CT have a way of altering our lives even from across the country.  The immediate communication in our lives makes us linked with people and draws from us our emotional and intellectual and spiritual participation in this faraway, but close event.

  Today is the Third Sunday of Advent, Rose Sunday, Refreshment Sunday and also called gaudete, the Latin for the command, “Rejoice!”  The Epistle lesson begins with this: “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice.”  The event in Newtown forces us to juxtapose the liturgical command “rejoice” with the downright horrifying and we may not feel like heeding any command to rejoice today.

  How can we rejoice today in the freshness of this assaulting event?  This event reveals to us the power of evil.  Evil has a parasitical power; it feeds off the normalcy of goodness.  It steals the energy of what is good and lovely and kind; it deprives goodness its place of normalcy.  Peace is deprived of peaceful effects as terror robs the calming energy of peace.  Evil creates ripple effects from one actual event and snowballs into our lives far away from the impact of the actual event and gets magnified into a lie that creates fear for us.  If it happened there; it will happen here too with us.  And that is wildfire lie of evil; it can spread seemingly endless collateral fear and make us alter our lives to prepare for what will not actually happen.  And we ask ourselves how can we resist the aftershock of an event that was a unique occurrence?

  The prophet Zephaniah wrote, “Rejoice and exalt in the Lord…you shall fear disaster no more.”  How can you write that you reality denying prophet?  The writing of the book of Zephaniah may have accumulated from the time of King Josiah until late in the post-monarchic period in Israel’s history, that is around four hundred years and they were some of the worst years for Israel.  The prophetic words are poetry; they may be a liturgy.  Like a mother rocking a very sick baby and who does not know when the baby will be alright, the mom lullabies “There, there my sweet baby, all is going to be well.”  We accept mother’s words of comfort in hard times even though she cannot guarantee a particular outcome.  I believe that this is how the words of the prophets often ministered to a suffering and oppressed people.  “There, there, things will be well, things will be better, things will be glorious and wonderful.  Believe in the good, the better and the wonderful.  Do not give up believing in the normalcy of the wonderful, even when the actual circumstances seem to contradict it.”

  Today we receive the command, Rejoice and we receive it even when we don’t feel like it.  Do we resist obeying the command or do we let it work its corrective purpose?

  What would I mean by the corrective purpose of the command to rejoice?  In a Dickensian sense, all times in some ways are the “best of times and the worst of times.”  The question involves who is experiencing the fuller impact of the worst of times at any given time.  Best and worst of times are distributed in a random and unequal manner over the population at any given time.  Yes, we’re all in this life together but simply by saying we’re all together does not immediately result in sharing evenly the impact of events of the best and worst of times.

  But the evil of the worst of times has a macabre power as we have seen in this horrifying school shooting.  This evil event in our day of immediate communication has the ability to suck the oxygen from our attending to the everyday goodness of life.  An evil event can demand our attention; it exaggerates its place of importance in our lives even though we are thousands of miles away.  It can make us think that an actual event can reproduce itself in our environment and it cajoles us to respond in fear, anxiety and pessimism.  Crimes that occur because of mental affliction cause us even more distress because we are tempted to minimize mental illnesses as being somehow less valid than physical illnesses, even when we know that brain chemistry is a physical phenomenon.  We are tempted to look for failure of nurturing in the immediate environment of the one who committed the crime; or we look for the general enemy and we find it in some sense to be the collective “us” with such permissive freedoms in our society.

  The macabre power of evil requires the corrective purpose of the liturgy of “rejoice.”  Rejoice in the Lord always and again I say rejoice!  The command to rejoice is a creative command.  God said let there be light and there was light.  Let there be joy and there was joy.  Why?  Because joy is normal and natural.  To see a smiling baby tells us that joy is the natural state of life; for joy to be taken away is a situation of deprivation, but deprivation cannot define what is normal about life.  That is why we need the corrective purpose of the command to “rejoice.”  This command is a reminder of what is normal even while we mourn a devastating event of life.

 On this day when we are commanded to rejoice, we are also commanded to repent.  Repent is a command to educate ourselves in a way that means we are always taking remedial action.  It means that we learn to perform better today than we did yesterday. 

  Today is a day of these two commands, Rejoice and Repent.  We obey the command to rejoice so that we do not let evil establish itself in the place of what is normal.  We obey the command to rejoice because in the sum total of things that happen to us in this life we believe that most of them are good and beneficial and so we rejoice to count our blessings.  We work to limit the boundaries and the duration of the effect of the act of evil.  So in our prayer we submit to the command to rejoice as part of the corrective purpose of joy in the re-establishing the goodness of creation.

  But there is also from John the Baptist the command to repent.  And we need to heed this command too, in our personal lives, our parish lives and in our society?  Do we have too much virtual violence in our society that desensitizes minds to actual pain?  Life is not a video game that can be restarted after all of the targeted people are killed.  Do we have too much freedom of accessibility to weapons of war which allows persons a choice of action that should not even be offered?    And can we turn back the clock on our culture of virtual violence and our culture of the freedom of the second amendment for profit for those who will sell almost any weapon that can be sold?  Because certain weapons have a potential market, should all weapons be sold?  We live in a society that has made peace with ticketing and fining us for driving without a seat belt. We live in a society where we can be ticketed for using our mobile phones while driving and be required to wear motorcycle helmets; surely we can find some collective legislative wisdom regarding the probability of events of violence and the general accessibility of certain kinds of weapons.  And without getting emotional, we can let the people of actuarial science guide in probability and prevention.  We let insurance companies do this with their rates all of the time.

  I do not have easy answers except to say life is precious and worth the efforts of repentance in all manner of personal and social behavior that will promote quality and duration of life.

  Rejoice and repent, the two can co-exist for us as we endeavor to celebrate the primacy of goodness, hope, love, health, life and kindness and as we work to resist and prevent everything that challenges the primacy of goodness, life, health, safety and love.  And may we find a way forward in repentance; insights on how we can be better and some action to make it so.

  Let us Rejoice and Repent, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Repentance, a Scary Word, or Just Education?

2 Advent  Cycle C     December 9, 2012

Malachi.  3:1-4      Song of Zecariah  

Philippians 1:1-11     Luke 3:1-6

Lectionary Link

   The words of the prophet Malachi were used for a baritone aria in the oratorio by George Fredrick Handel, The Messiah.  “But who may abide the day of his coming.  Who shall stand when he appeareth.  For he is like a refiner’s fire.”  And Handel’s Messiah did not include the phrase, “he is like fuller’s soap.”

  In broad terms one could say that the ministry of the ancient prophets was one of education.  The prophets were teachers who tried to motivate people to live well.  They believed that living well had to do with knowing how to reach beyond what people already knew and to seek further horizon in human experience.  And beyond the horizon was the realm where God beckoned people to continually surpass themselves in excellent behavior.  The prophet often went to the edge of society to avoid distractions and hear the calling from the far horizon of human experience.

  How did God function in the experience of the prophet?  The prophet used the metaphors common to metallurgy and to the production of cloth.  The work of God is like the production of a pure metal; it requires heat to burn off the impurities until the silver or gold attains their purist forms.  The work of God is like “industrial strength Woolite.”  Fuller’s soap was combination of ash and alkali used on newly woven wool to soften it up to be used to make clothing.

  So the process of education is like the process of making pure metal.  It is like the process of softening harsh wool to be useable for making clothes.  There seems to be an emphasis in the prophets about the painful process of education.  The assumption for the prophets was that the teaching process of history for God’s people both on the personal and corporate level involved a painful process.  There is a phase of nurture that is painful.  Growing up involves painful experiences.  Education involves the painful unlearning of some habits in order to take on new habits of mind and practice.

  The church uses the liturgical calendar to present two distinct seasons of learning, Advent and Lent.  And the church has often emphasized the painful side of education and learning.  It is painful to give up old habits and take on new ones.

  We have in our religious tradition a tradition of educators who are like military drill sergeants.  Many of the prophets often seemed like drill instructors.  And in the season of Advent we have the ultimate drill sergeant arrive on the scene, the one and only John the Baptist.  John arrives on the scene and immediately we feel like he is saying to us, “Okay maggots, drop and give me 100 pushups now!”  We probably do not like the boot camp style of John the Baptist.  We aren’t boot camp people, we think.  That’s for people who are in prison or for the proverbial problem kid who is sent off to military academy for disciplinary training.  Instead of John the Baptist, I’d rather have my Advent teacher be Mister Rogers who would simply tell me that it’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood and that I’m special.  I think that I would learn more with Mister Rogers’ style than with boot camp sergeant, John the Baptist.

  Perhaps what you and I can ponder during this season of Advent is what further education means for each of us.  Why are drill sergeants needed in life?  They are needed to prepare us for things that we don’t just naturally want to prepare ourselves for.  Probably, it is not natural to be prepared for the conditions of war; that’s why marines and soldiers go to boot camp to be forced to harden themselves for the conditions of war.  And they need to be forced to do some things that they wouldn’t just do on their own.  Why does a coach want the team to practice in a strenuous way?  The coach wants the team to be prepared for the game.

  Discipline for excellent performance in extenuating circumstances requires a departure from our normal patterns.  In some way discipline implies an out of the ordinary learning process.  What do we call persons who embraces a discipline?  We call them disciples.  Often we are happy to celebrate that Jesus had twelve disciples and so he didn’t need to have any more disciples and that term “disciple of Jesus” would be too austere and too pretentious for any of us to aspire to.

  Are we to be congratulated for our modesty today for not aspiring to be disciples of Jesus?  “Oh, I would not want to be a disciple of Jesus, that would be much too pretentious and the 11 of the 12 did it so well. “  

  Advent is a season to remind us to embrace education as a metaphor for what is happening to us in life.  We can say events in our lives are but happening to us in some random way without any purpose or we can read all of the events of our lives to have a purpose.  And even when the purpose that we assign or discover might seem a bit individual or arbitrary, assigning or finding purpose in the events of our lives happens because we have faith.  Faith is the attitude of accepting that from the horizon of human experience from the God-world we are loved and called to surpass our own horizons with future excellence.  We are to accept life and history as our teacher.  Being a disciple of Jesus means that we view ourselves as being mainly in life as those who are willing to be taught, those willing to be educated.  Life is sometimes a hard instructor and sometimes harsh and painful and sometimes life is a seductive teacher and sometimes joyful and sometimes fun and sometimes humorous and sometimes musical and sometimes artistic and beautiful and sometimes awesome and breath taking.

   During the season of Advent we need to remind ourselves that we are ever the students of life.  And as students we need to also be willing to be mentors and teachers to each other.  We need sometimes to be drill sergeants ourselves.  We need to be those who intervene, particularly on behalf of children and the vulnerable.  There are children in this world who are being given inappropriate and untimely learning experiences in their lives, like for example the children refugees in Sudan.  This world is full of situations where God’s lesson plan of love has not been learned.

  John the Baptist is the one who became a hermit; the word hermit comes from the same Greek for wilderness.  John went to the horizon of human civilization to hear another voice and another word.  And because he went there, he found that others became interested in what he had heard in the far fringes of human society in the God-world.  And when John saw people’s interest in the God-world he warned them.  He in effect said to them, “Don’t play with religion.  I am not the latest guru circus bear to entertain you.  If you are curious and interested in what I have found in the God-world, then make a serious commitment to education.”

  Repentance is but a fancy religious word for education.  Advent is about repentance; it is about education.  Education is a more accessible word for us in our lives and we need to embrace the broad implication of education for our lives.  How can I read the signs in the events of my life giving me indication of some different choices that I need to make now to achieve the next insight and the next plan of action?

  Advent is also a time of education for our parish?  What is God trying to teach us as a parish as we finish this year and as we begin 2013?  What do we need to do differently?  What changes do we need to make?  How can we respond with greater faith to the educational experiences that are upon our parish right now?

  Let us not be threatened by the word education.  Let us not be threatened by the vision of the  self-surpassing people that God calls us to be.  Let us not be frightened by the possibility of a newer parish life that beckons us to commitment and excellence.  And let us not be modest about our primary educational vocation, namely,  being disciples of Christ in the school of life.  Amen.

An Advent One Sermon That Will Not Be Preached

1 Advent C      December 2, 2012

Jeremiah 33: 14-16     Psalm 25: 1-9

1 Thessalonians  3:9-13   Luke 21:25-31

Lectionary Link

  Did you ever ponder the diversity of areas of interest that a person of modest income and education can have in our time and place?  We can be substantial cluttered multi-taskers.  About four PIP…picture in picture venues on the screen.   Ballgame, googling, reading a book, updating two blogs, three facebook pages, writing a sermon, and listening to music, and a news commentator on the TV in the next room, checking text message on a smart phone, doing research in multiple areas of interest at one time and writing stuff for children, teenagers, for spiritual direction, for counseling sessions, lyrics for songs, involved in political discussions, and following Curiosity on Mars and much, much more.  And as a news and information junkie who is disillusioned with anyone who thinks that they have found a final answer, I think this is a pretty exciting time to live in.  And you might think this is a cluttered shame.

  But ponder the amount of world knowledge accessible to the ordinary person in biblical times with the amount of world knowledge and variety of experience available to us today.  You see where it might be difficult for us to be impressed with the details of the Bible because it has to compete with so many more kinds of text and cyber textual experiences.  We as the church have forced ourselves to read this book in public even while for the stuff of our modern life we resort to the entire panoply of “self-help” gurus to fine-tune our life performance.  And what do the Bible and Jesus have to do with us?

  The people in biblical times had a comparatively minute body of world knowledge compared to what we have today.  With so little world information their lives could be more easily unified and entertained.  And their religious life was also their political life and their entertainment.  They could network by sitting with their wise people who could spin tales from their reading, travels, and knowledge acquired beyond the border of the village or neighborhood.  They could in hushed tones speculate about their political affairs, that is, their state of oppression by the Empire, the one that struck back again and again and took out the Temple and Jerusalem.

  There was a political figure in their time known as the Son of Man.  In the prophet Daniel such a Son of Man was to be one who was to come in the clouds.  That expression was vague enough to be able to bear the projections of many who speculated about the fate of God’s people since their actual conditions did not always seem to be what could be called providential favor and blessing.  So, writers in apocalyptic books such as the book of Enoch speculated about such a Son of Man.  This writing did not make it into official Bibles but it was influential enough to show up in the street conversations with populist rabbis in Palestine.

  Biblical Scholars are not really sure about this figure in the Gospel called the Son of the Man.  They are not sure as whether Jesus at times is referring to this Son of Man as someone who is not himself or to a future role that he himself would assume.  The Gospels are first of all, literature; they are written and as writing their teaching function prevails over their being mirrors of historical events.   This is most evident when Jesus often speaks of the Son of Man or Messiah in the third person and that kind of speech betrays the fact that the Gospels are in fact teaching literature and liturgy.  The Gospels also integrated the actual street language, the political speech that Jesus and his counter-culture gang used as they traveled.

  The Son of Man was important just as the resurrection was important because the world of God’s people woefully lacked justice.  The Empire and Empires had stuck again and again and God’s people were often those who bore the brunt of those strikes by the Empires: Persian, Assyrian, Greek and Roman.

  Religious talk in the alley on the hush hush was also political but it was also partly their entertainment since politics has a largely theatrical aspect about it in how it comes to the people.  Religious talk was also entertainment; Son of Man and resurrection talk was very entertaining.  Such talk was imaginative and engaged the imaginations.  We today have so many compartments that derive from genres and specializations as compared to the time of Jesus when world knowledge was so minimal that the religion, politics and entertainment all came together.  And I am not trivializing or diminishing it by making such a suggestion.  They in their time, like we are in ours, need to deal with the issue of justice.  Theodicy?  How can God be believed to be just in the face of innocent suffering in this world?

   In their day and in ours when we sense the severe impoverishment of justice, our stomachs are sickened.  We need catharsis.  In our day of Hollywood, we have the visualizations of vigilante saviors who in the duration of a two hour movie bring the “bad guys” to justice and rescue the good guys and the weak and the poor.  But vigilantism is not justice because once vigilantism becomes codified into the law of the land, it becomes the law of those who “have” oppressing those who “do not have.”

  And so in the time of Jesus, the Son of Man was an ultimate figure of the future representing the projection from the hearts crying the eternal need for justice.  The Son of Man was a future judge and the severity of the oppression intensified expectancy for the imminent arrival of that judge.

  Why do you need resurrection and a judge as a narrative for future life?  What if the oppressors die and leave this world in the lap of luxury?  What if the oppressed who believed that the Lord loves the poor, the widow and the orphans, die and leave this world in the state of oppression?  How can a just God be proclaimed to anyone now?  Resurrection is an imagination on how retroactive justice can be exacted.  If everyone has to face a future judge then accounts and scores can be settled and in the end we can hold out that our faith and hope in a just God has been validated.

  So do not disparage the Son of Man language or the eternal return of the desire for the realization of justice.  Let us be thankful if our laws in some significant way approximate justice and dignity and spread this fairness to as many as we can in our life time.

  We will seek catharsis from our anger at injustice in “quick fix” wars and vigilantism and perhaps achieve temporary fixes in ridding the world of the violence and terror.  And some of our anger for justice will be merely the catharsis of an Action film but even that  cinematic vigilante justice is a faint artistic liturgy of repugnance in the face of injustice.

  The resurrection, the Son of Man, the judge and Jesus as a future judge are very profound and inspired narrative bearing our quest for justice and more importantly, expressing our own need to be just.

  The season of Advent is about what is coming.  The future is what is coming.  And what is coming?  A judge and justice and if we are living in fear about it we should simply switch our focus and see the Son of Man as the judge who invites us to be Just now and to practice mercy and kindness.  Advent is about being invited to Justice.  And justice is a lifelong quest and Jesus invites us to the Son of Man who is our judge and who offers us the Gospel of justice.  Amen.

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.