Commencement in the School of Jesus

Youth Sunday Sermon, June 29, 2014

2 Pentecost, ap8, June 29, 2014 

Jeremiah 28:5-9 Psalm 89:1-4,15-18

Rom. 6:1b-11    Matt. 10:24-39

 Lectionary Link

(Connor begins by serving pouring cups of water and serving them to the people in the front.)

Kalum:  Connor, what are you doing?  And could it not wait until after the service?

James:  I know what Connor is doing.  I give him credit for reading today’s Gospel.  But will his shameless showboating really get him extra brownie points in heaven?

Connor: You talking head preachers can preach the Gospel; some of us actually do the Gospel.  Jesus said whoever gives a cup of water to these little ones will not lose their reward.

Kalum: Well, excuse me, Saint Connor; I did not know I lived so close to a holy one!

James: Saint Connor, please could I get your autograph before you become a relic? 

Connor: Are you being ironic or just plain mocking? 

Kalum: We are sincere……..in our mocking, that is.  But you have initiated a very worthy topic for discussion.

Connor: I have? Accidents do happen.  What worthy topic do we have to talk about?

James:  Well, you are right about the importance of doing the Gospel rather than just talking about it.

Kalum: Yes, actions do speak louder than words.

Connor: That’s a cliché which happens to be true.  But what else can we learn from the Gospel?

James: Well, we have just graduated from high school.  And we now have a diploma which is an official record of our achievement.  And it is a piece of paper which represents more than just being piece of paper.

Kalum: What do you mean?

Connor: I think that he means it stands for 12 years of blood, sweat and tears of all of the work and study that we had to do to get it.

James: When we present our diploma, grade average and test scores, we are able to gain admittance into colleges and universities.

Kalum: The Gospel lesson is about accreditation and the credibility of the disciples of Jesus.

Connor:  Once Jesus was gone, his disciples worried about their credibility.  They worried about whether people would accept their teaching.  They did not have seminary diplomas and official ordinations so how could they be sure that people would accept their teaching as valid?

James: What it shows us is that authority and respect comes from one’s wisdom, learning, character and the reputation that one gets from studying with good teachers.

Kalum:  I guess if you studied physics and you had Albert Einstein as one of your professor, you might get a little more attention for your resume than if you just studied with Joe Blow.

Connor: So if the disciples were worried about whether they would be accepted, Jesus reminded them that he had taught them well.  He had taught them not just to preach the Gospel but to live Gospel.  So if people did not accept the teaching of the disciples then they probably would not of Jesus either.

James: Did you know that the church had its own way of issuing graduation diplomas?

Kalum: What would that be?

James: It is called apostolic succession.  It is an unbroken record of church leadership which has lasted these two thousand years.

Connor: Is that why we have bishops?

Kalum:  Each bishop is ordained by three bishops who were ordained by three other bishops and so the Gospel has been passed down in an unbroken chain.

James:  I don’t think that this means only bishops can do valid ministry.   I think that a bishop represents that the basic message of Jesus Christ has been transmitted from one generation to the next over these many years.

Connor: Because we have this unbroken tradition from Jesus, it means that we can believe and trust that Christ is still present in the life and ministry of the church. 

Kalum: We have the example of Christ which has been preserved in the writings of the New Testament but we have 2000 years of people who have tried to follow the teaching of Jesus.

James: Even though we have bishops and priest and official ordinations, the proof of the authority of the Spirit of Christ is to be found in how we live.

Connor:  And how are we supposed to live?

Kalum: We are supposed to live without sin.

Connor: How can we do that?

James:  St. Paul wrote that living without sin is about learning impulse control.

Kalum: I have impulse control; I choose chocolate over strawberry all of the time.

Connor:  Bravo Kalum!    How did you manage to set the bar so high?

James:  I think that St. Paul was trying to teach his students about the goodness of our lives but also about the responsibility that we have because of freedom.

Kalum: It is like he’s saying that life and the energy and desire is good; but it still needs to be directed.

James:  If we get too fixated on idols or things which are not worthy we can become enslaved to bad habits.

Connor:  So sin is not about being bad or despising ourselves; it is about understanding that we can always be better.  Sin is like pain.  Pain sends us a message about doing something about what is causing us discomfort.  Sin is the awareness and we need to and can always do better than we have done before.

Kalum:  So, being a sinner is not such a bad thing.

James:  Well, we don’t have to be proud of our sin but always learning from the condition of feeling inadequate.  Being a sinner is good, if it means were always looking to amend and improve our lives.

Connor:  The character of Christ comes from learning the power and freedom of impulse control.

Kalum:  I don’t think that we will ever graduate from the School of Sinners.

James:  Well, you really don’t want a diploma for sin; not really the life achievement that one wants to be proud of.   But the goodness of Christ is like knowledge and learning.  In the field of learning we are ignorant of what we have not yet learned.

Connor:  So we are always sinners because there is always more goodness to achieve.

Kalum: Well, now we know how baptism is like commencement; we are always ending something in order to begin something else.

James: At baptism we all have received our diploma in the school of Jesus.  And it is an important diploma.

Connor:  But it also means that we have to choose each day to live up to the standards of love and kindness that we’ve learned from Jesus Christ.

Kalum: We sure have our work cut out for us.

James:  Just think of it in this way; we will never be unemployed Christians, because there will always be more Christian things to do.

Connor:  Let us thank God today for our baptismal diplomas today!

Kalum: We are now guaranteed a life time of much more Christian work!  Let’s get to work!  Amen.

Divine Providence Is Often Like Sausage Making

2 Pentecost, A p 7, June 22, 2014 

Genesis 21:8-21 Ps. 86:1-10, 16-17

Rom. 6:1b-11    Matt. 10:24-39

 Lectionary Link

    History is about how and what we remember what has happened.   History involves selection of what is to be remembered.  Selection of what is to be remembered is determined by the stand out value of any particular event or happening.  History is highly editorialized because events stand out because of their value in comparison with  ordinary mundane events.  You might remember the day of your graduation but not distinctly remember brushing your teeth on that day.  Some things stand out and some things don't.   In the community of faith, the twenty-twenty hindsight of history's highest designation of the editorial selection of an event is often called "divine providence."  Divine providence is such a confident "after the fact faith" that one believes a past event to be evidence of God's intervention.

  And so we ask what is it that makes ordinary history turn out to be divine providence?  In the events surrounding the crucifixion a person witnessing this event would be hard-pressed to call the dying of someone upon the cross an obvious event of God's providential intervention.  Such would be absurd.  But St. Paul years after the crucifixion,  writes about this crucifixion event being a remembered narrative providing the power of personal spiritual transformation.  Our old selves are crucified with Christ and so this terrible event becomes post-facto designated as God's providence, God's wonderful intervention and a source of continuous transformation.

  Providence that is known in advance is called prediction or clairvoyance or prophetic utterance.  And wouldn't every gambler playing the horses love to know providence in advance?  People who confess wonderful providence like to enhance that wonder by suggesting that there was prophecy or foreknowledge for such things.  It is like the recovery technique of the teenager who accidentally slips and falls in front of a large crowd and instead of being embarrassed by the laughter, he says, "I meant that to happen." Responding to an accident by claiming to be in control.

  The Bible is written from the point of view that these things "were meant to happen."  This is effort of people of faith to try to survive, cope with and find meaning for things that happened to them.  Word is spirit and word is life and word is creating.  We use word to re-shape the things in life that often are experienced immediately as chaos because they do not submit to the way in which we would control things.

  In hindsight we can find creation that arise out of chaos and we can find redemption which happened after severe hurt and loss.  And without trivializing the poignant pain of the events themselves we use the creative words of faith and the survival excellence of subsequent events to remake history into providence.

  One could say that the task of our lives of faith is to remake ordinary history into divine providence through the creative words of faith when we did not give up but kept going and we did not always know why we kept going.

  Our Scripture readings give us examples,  messy examples of finding the divine providence even in the earlier events of human weakness, pettiness and the crisis of major family and community disagreement which result in painful conflict and recriminations.

  The fact of history is that the Jews and the Arabs are two dominant branches of the sons of Shem, otherwise known as Semites.  The Jews and the Arabs became great peoples of tribes who came to have the mutual respect of great rivalry.  What was the providence of these two great nations?  These two people came to know the success that the ancient people believed to be God's blessing.  But what was the source stories of the blessing of these two people?  The writers of Genesis cite incidents of sheer human doubt, fickleness and petty rivalry.  Sarah, the wife of Abraham laughed when God's angelic messengers told Abraham that the elderly couple would have a son.  And so her first son was named accordingly, Isaac, which means laughter.  But before Isaac was conceived Sarah began to doubt whether she would conceive.  And in the good old family values of the Old Testament, Sarah ordered Abraham to try to conceive with their slave woman Hagar.  So, Ishmael was born before Isaac was born.  Later when Sarah conceived and bore Isaac, the boys grew up together as half-brothers until Sarah became petty in her jealousy.  She was worried that Ishmael might share in some of the affection and prosperity that came with being raised with Isaac in the presence of their father Abraham.  So she demanded that Abraham send Hagar and Ishmael away into the desert.  And it was there that Hagar and Ishmael received the promise of God's blessings.  So the human pettiness is made to seem as though it was God's providential acts. Past acts that seemed doomed and motivated by human folly and pettiness are re-shaped and re-designated as providence, by a trumping subsequent blessing.

  The Gospel writings derived during a period of transitions between families and community caught in the aftermath of the success of the Jesus Movement.   The Jesus Movement grew as a prominent interpretation of the Judaic tradition.  A chief part of the success of the Jesus Movement is that many Jewish followers of Jesus allowed their Jewish customs to be dispensed with so that the success of the message of Jesus could be fostered and promoted for the non-Jewish believers.  This promotion of a Christo-centric Judaism to non-Jews and allowing them to forgo circumcision and many ritual practices caused great division within Judaism and particularly within families.

  If Jesus within his own time was a significant challenge to the existing religious authorities in Palestine, the challenge of the Jesus Movement to Judaism became more pronounced as Gentiles began to fill the gatherings of the Christian communities.

  The phrases of the Gospel of Matthew that we've read today are evidence of the incredible community and family pain of this major paradigm shift in the religious communities because of Jesus of Nazareth and the aftermath of his life on earth.

  Many people have been in families where people are passionately divided by having a common God and a common religion.  Christian, Jew, Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, Mormon, Jehovah Witness.....the division among people who claim be devoted to the same Christ has been known.  How can Jesus as the prince of peace bring peace to an individual soul even while that soul comes to anger and strife with members of his or her own family?  People change faith persepctive; that new faith perspective which is meaningful is suddenly designated as a sectarian cult and people are shunned, excommunicated and persecuted as the outcome of the new faith experience.

  How many people today embrace the notion of atheism because of the extreme conflict and hateful behaviors of people who claim to have faith in a loving God?

  Let us not believe so naively that the Gospel communities resolved issues of faithful living in such a final way.  What we find in the Gospel communities are people who are seeking to find the narrative and oracle of Jesus as inspiration for words of wisdom which try to give context for the conflict which was evident in their communities.  If people can believe that creative advance does not always occur with peaceful transition, then they can decide to keep following the path of creative advance.  We know that the American experience came about with great conflict and there were many who would have wanted to return to the security of being but a colony of Great Britain.  We have come to regard the conflict as providential for the incredible experiment in government that we know America to be.

  We can look back at the Gospel communities as communities which survived some very conflicting times of their birth and separation which were providential in forming this Christo-centric Judaism which traveled around the world.  The Gospel words are words of trying to make sense of the chaos of conflict that was occurring as this new universal Christo-centric Judaism was being formed.   Let us be thankful that they endured lots of discomfort and conflict to survive to be links in a great and wonderful movement.

  Let us pray that we can have the faith to come to providence for our religious history both on the personal level and on the parish and community level.  Conflict is a fact of life.  But let justice and love be the final judgment about the divine providence of conflict:  Are more people invited to know God's love and justice because of the conflict?  If this is so, we can embrace the conflict as the divine providence of God's Spirit helping us to make creative advance in love and justice.  And this, loving and just outcomes are the good and providential news of conflict for us today.  Amen.

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The Trinity: A Mere Footnote on Plato and Aristotle?

Trinity Sunday A   June 15, 2014   

Gen. 1:1-2:3       Ps.33

2 Cor. 13:5-10,11-14  Matt. 28:16-20     

Lectionary Link

 Today is Trinity Sunday and a day to remember that the Trinity is our community’s formulation of what we believe about God.  The formulation of the Trinity has a history but such is a cliché that could be used about everything.  Every use of language has a history and so history itself is about how words of meaning come into being and how they get changed in their meanings and values.

  If the Trinity has a history in the history of words, it still has what is not yet history, namely the future.  The Trinity has a past, a present and the Trinity will have a future in human usage.

  Historians would like to proclaim the Council of Nicaea as a high water mark in the formulation of God as a Trinity of Persons.  By the time of the Council of Nicaea in 325 of the Common Era, the Hellenization of Christian thinking had become quite advanced.  Alfred North Whitehead said that European philosophical tradition  is but a series of footnotes to Plato.  And Plato and Aristotle might as well have been at the Council of Nicaea, because the influence in thinking  evident at the Council of Nicaea made its documents seem like some of those repeating foot notes.  The foot note to Nicaea might have said, “See Plato and Aristotle.”   It is interesting that Pope Benedict XVI tried to reassert the significance of such a Hellenistic footnote by requiring his flock now to use “consubstantial” in the Nicene Creed. 

  Do you think it is demeaning to the importance of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit to make such a reference to Plato and Aristotle or Greek philosophical categories?  The New Testament Writers inherited both the Hebraic and the Hellenistic traditions.  If one wanted to say that someone new and marvelous had arrived upon the scene one could only use the illustrious past to speak about the surpassing greatness of what is newly revealed.

  We are living in a long tradition about God.  This tradition about God has many tributaries in the cultures of people within the world.  We as Christians believe that the tradition about God arrived at a new distinction in the life of Jesus Christ.

  But we know that more has happened regarding the tradition of God after Jesus Christ than what happened during the life and ministry of Jesus.

  Humanity was given this surpassing great person who manifested such a rareness of existence that he has been remembered more than any person in history.

  The life of Jesus is proof that there is a mystery in how human values get determined.  After Jesus we have had to readjust human values.  We have had to change what we thought and believed about ourselves, the afterlife and about the life of God.

  The Holy Trinity is an expression about how we have come to value God and how we have come to express the meaning of God in our lives.  The Holy Trinity is an expression of relationship values.  And while we may want to reduce relationships to the precision of mathematical formula and philosophical logical statements; relationships do not allow such precision or such reductions.

  The Nicene confession about the Trinity is an effort to make philosophical statements about our relationship with God.  And it fails to do the relationship justice even as it succeeds in stating our most important way of speaking about God.

  We can decry the use of the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle to speak about the Trinitarian relationship but we cannot dismiss the human motive to attempt always to find the best possible explanations for the best in things in our life.  If Jesus and God the Father and the Holy Spirit are the best things in life, then we cannot cease to find our best possible ways to speak about the best and highest relationship of our lives.

  And so some may say we are Trinitarian because of Greek philosophy; I would beg to differ.  I would say that we are Trinitarian because of Jesus Christ.  You cannot artificially invent a person like Jesus.  You can’t just develop such a person with an advertisement or propaganda campaign.  Jesus happened and the people of his time had to deal with him.  They dealt with him as honestly as they could.  They tried to keep the traditions of his life and words alive in the ways in which they could.

  Jesus came and he re-valued how we have come to know, relate and speak about God.  So we need not blame the Trinity on Plato or Aristotle; we should credit the life of Jesus as he lived it before his friends as the inspiration for the arriving at the value of the Holy Trinity.

  The followers of Jesus believed that he taught us to call God our Father.  The followers of Jesus in the community of the writer of John’s Gospel believed that Jesus stated his Oneness with God his Father.  So how does one use the Greek language or any language to deal with this expression: Jesus said, “The Father and I are One.”  The early church believed that Jesus told his followers to pronounce the initiatory words at baptism: In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.  So the literature which derived from apostolic times required that church deal with this Equality of Persons in understanding the dynamic Unity of God.  If we speak about the Trinity today, we can blame it on Jesus and the traditions which derived from him.

  It behooves us to understand the relationship nature of the Trinity in our lives today.  You and I are not limited to the words of the creed or to the philosophy of Aristotle or Plato to speak about God in our lives.  We make a commitment to use the very best that we can to tell this world about how worshipful God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit are in our lives.

  For me the meaning of Jesus as the Son of God is both the incredible presumption of humanity and the humility of God.  It means that no one can have a non-human experience of God; so any experience of God is funneled through human experience, otherwise it could not be humanly understood.  We are hopelessly anthropomorphic; indeed it would seem that God seems to orbit around and within human experience as we force upon God a humility to be reduced to our level to be understood by us.  We confess God to be Jesus the Son because we might be able to imagine other kinds of beings but in our experience we have to assume human existence as a valid way to come to know God.  Human experience forces upon God a humility by reducing God to human understanding and language.

  But that does not mean we cannot appreciate greatness; we confess that we came from a pre-existing plenitude and a plentitude will exist after we are gone.  We believe that plenitude will retain the memory of us having been here.  We believe that God's memory of us will be our resurrection and continuing life.  We confess God as Father because Jesus did and because as sons and daughter we believe we came from someone and if a Father has known and loved us that Father will also continue to know, love and remember us.

   We also believe that when Jesus confessed his Oneness with God as his Father, that there was a transacting Spirit which was present in their relationship.  We confess a Spirit who is like copper wire for electricity.  Copper wire allows electricity to be carried and conducted between points.  The Holy Spirit is the very condition of mutual conductivity between beings with different levels of consciousness.  You and I do not live isolated and unaware of our environment or the people and things of our environment.  The Holy Spirit is the omnipresence of God which is the very condition for mutual consciousness of each other.

  I believe that we can embrace the Trinity as a meaningful way for us to understand our relationship to the One defined by St. Anselm as the One that which none greater can be conceived.  And if one can conceive of such greatness, the property of existence is but a basic requirement of the Greatest of All.

  But we can move on in faith from awareness of sheer existence of God to experience God as one who is intimately friendly with us, even as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Pentecost: Ab uno in plures, E pluribus Unum

Feast of Pentecost A June 8, 2014   

Acts 2:1-11        Psalm 104:25-35, 37b

1 Corinthians 12:4-13      John 20:19-23           

 Lectionary Link

  What is the official motto of the United States?  Is it: E pluribus Unum?  Or, In God we Trust?

E pluribus Unum was the de facto but not the legal motto until 1956.  The American Congress got really religious in the 1950’s:  They codified “In God we Trust” as the official motto of The United States.  And in 1954 on Flag Day, the Congress added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, which had survived without that addition since its composition in 1892 and official adoption in 1942.

  The Day of Pentecost is a very “E pluribus Unum” day.  From the many One.  The foundation of any mystical body whether it be a country or organization or the church has to deal with the basic complex dynamic of life itself.  The one and the many.  One could turn the phrase around.  Ab uno, in plures.  From the one, the many.

  The Gospel of John begins with, “In the beginning was the Word…and everything was created by the Word.  So from the Word came many languages, many textual creations which are the very basis for people understanding themselves and their own life stories within their culture settings The culture setting makes it profound imprint as people take on their languages within their own families.

  Word is what unifies all but Word is able to be reflected into endless diversity.  Word is perhaps the only thing which cannot be falsified.  One can say or think, “Word does not exist,” but one has to use word to say or think such a thing and so a denial of word cannot be true.  Word is undeniable in human experience.  It is the unity of human experience.

  But it is not enough to confess the simplicity of the Singularity of Word; we speak many words.  Our bodies articulate many kinds of body language words of action.  Word is the very condition for the many tongues of the Day of Pentecost.  Many from the One; One from the many.  We live in the tension of these two meaningful truths each and every day of our lives.

  One from the many is the great faith adventure of life?  Why?  Because once the great egg Humpty Dumpty has shattered from his fall, it is harder to put him back together again.  All the king’s men and his horses have tried forever to use the glue of power and government to force the shattered outer shell of the diversity of life back into one situation of unity.

  As we ponder the unity in difference which is celebrated on Pentecost, the day of many languages confessing a common message, we are required to ask of ourselves what this unity means.

  Unity cannot mean the extreme simplicity of monochromatic experience.  White and black are colors but if we only had one color in life to experience we would live in boredom if there was no differentiation in color.

  I have some very ambiguous feelings about some modern optical art.  When I went to a gallery in Washington D.C. and saw the Rothko panels covering the wall, an entire wall of large canvasses all monochromatic and worth millions of dollars.  I couldn’t help but think the joke is on us, this whole system of how artistic value is made in our culture.  Yes, I understand the philosophy and the revolts within schools of art and such canvasses are not just canvasses but also expressive of paradigm shifts within our culture.  And I like many of Rothko’s paintings.  His monochrome canvasses are not just valued art because they are single colored canvasses, they stand in the tradition of aesthetic value being the contrast between the one and the many.  One could say that Rothko’s monochromes have value because he did so many other polychromatic works.

  It was given to the followers of Jesus to find a way, to put unity back together from the many.  This is the great faith adventure of life itself if we want to preserve life for the future.  Our tradition is a worthy tradition to persist within because of this adventure to put unity together from the many.

  It is easier to separate and contemplate as a single agent meditating on one’s breath and navel on the mountainside.  Living and working and praying among the many is often messy.  It is very messy to go among the many languages which people speak in words and in their life styles and experiences.  The day of Pentecost calls for us to look for the One within the many.  The Day of Pentecost is not over; we are still in the hunt for the One within the many.

  But the one is not having everyone fold into the background of a single white color and becoming invisible.  The oneness which we seek is an experience of the total play of difference towards some higher purposes.  And what would those higher purposes be?  What would unity be known as if it is to be true to the many?

  We have words for the higher unity from the many.  One word might be harmony.  Harmony is a word which expresses the honoring of differences in a unity expressed as beauty.  Harmony can co-exist with solos and with melody.  In actual life practice another name for harmony is justice and love.   Love and justice express the freedom of the differences of gifts to be expressed and the result is not a competition which destroys the individual but of a harmony which creates something beautiful.

  Do you know why people like to sing in choirs?  They like to work on the individual parts over and over again and add them to the other voices because in the performance there is the beauty of getting truly lost as an individual voice in the greater work.  The harmony of the piece of music both elevates the many and the one in a singular event.

  If we can grasp this experience we can grasp the mission of Pentecost.  The mission of Pentecost is to bring back the events and expression of unity from the experiences of the many.  This mission is greater than the church; it is the American experiment which has known successes and failures.  Today, it would seem that E pluribus Unum has been reduced by greed to the power struggle between groups.  It’s almost like the basses in the choir getting so strong they decide that they don’t need the other sections or they only want the other voices for occasional contrast in service of the superiority of the basses.

  The work of Pentecost is not over; we in the church need to live this tradition of the One from the many so that the collateral effects of our success will be known in family, business, education and politics.  We owe it to God, to Christ, to the Church and to our world to devote ourselves to the One from the many.

  The Spirit is One who speaks in many tongues and languages of the diverse experiences of all people.  It is a daunting task to find harmonic unity among so much diversity.  The task is even more daunting today because instant communication allows us to know such manifold diversity in a deluge of information.  It seems almost too difficult to process such complex diversity into workable harmonic unity.

  But the Spirit is One; the Spirit inspires us to new harmonies where differences are acknowledged and celebrated even as the Spirit inspires the egos behind the differences to be checked at the door for the purpose of those higher harmonies.  Let us on this Pentecost Day re-commit ourselves to these higher harmonies of Jesus Christ as they are known in justice, love, service, sacrifice, joy and peace.  Amen.