Rise and Shine

Readings: Epiphany

"Rise and shine!" I can almost hear my late mother's voice as she woke us up for elementary school. Not for many years would I connect that phrase with our Old Testament reading for today. 

On this 6th day in January, we commemorate a time when God schooled us all about the little baby Mary had born under such humble circumstances. He is the God's Anointed King, the Redeemer of Israel, the Light of the People. Even the Magi (wise men of the East, who were probably Zoroastrians) had heard of him, and had traveled far to honor him and offer him rich gifts in tribute to his (invisibly) high status.

Herod, the King of the Jews (Judeans) as recognized by his Roman rulers, was displeased. He kept his throne by keeping order among his subjects, many of whom hated the Roman Empire and therefore hated him for collaborating with its occupation of Judea (also called Israel), which the Romans renamed Palestina. According to the story, he decided to eliminate this upstart, once the Magi found out where he was.

"Evil Herod," we're supposed to hiss. "Give the kid a chance." But how many of us welcome someone who has come to take our job or our place in society? How many of us welcome a new idea that has come to replace one that we have long thought true?

But, like Herod, most of the patriarchal honor/shame society that was Judea, would reject the claims of Jesus' followers after his death. Judaism would remain Judaism, while the Jesus Movement would eventually split from Judaism to become a Gentile religion. Which is where the Magi come in. They were Gentiles, a term for anybody other than Jews. According to the story in Matthew 2:1-12, Gentiles were a target of Jesus' ministry from the beginning. At least, according to the politics of the writer of Matthew's Gospel.

The Apostle Paul, on the other hand, took as his special mission to preach the Gospel (Good News) of Jesus the Messiah to the Gentiles of the wider Roman Empire. And so, whether or not Gentiles were part of Jesus earthly ministry (and much suggests he focused primarily on Jews and gathering in the twelve tribes of Israel), Gentiles were part of the development of the Church soon after Jesus' Resurrection. In fact, Paul's mission was to break down the distinction between Jew and Gentile by adopting Gentiles along with Jews into the spiritual Body of Christ.

So what we celebrate this day is the revelation (or Epiphany, or Theophany) of God in the baby Jesus as demonstrated by the arrival of outsiders. Arise, shine, for your Light has come!

 
 

Leia Mais…

Forgiven for Being Good

Readings: Third Sunday in Easter

Are you good?

If you're reading this, then you probably are a good person, or you have the potential to be one, or you at least want to be one. That's the human condition. That's what we all want to think about ourselves.

The Apostles in our first reading allowed their audience no such luxury. They had just cured a man of his longstanding lameness so that he could walk again. And they did it, they said, by calling on the name of the man, Jesus, whom the crowd had killed not long before.

Now wait a minute, you say. The crowd didn't kill anybody. The Romans killed Jesus. Well, yes, some Romans did the deed itself. But they couldn't have done if the crowd had tried to stop them. The crowd was guilty of what the legal profession would one day call "contributory causation." They helped cause the death of Jesus, because they had done nothing to stop it. Indeed, many of them had called out to have another man pardoned instead of Jesus.

Yet the Apostles go on to say that Jesus makes his name available to be called on freely, even to those who, by their inaction, enabled his executioners. To pardon them from paying the debt for their sins, including that one. (It is significant that many languages use the same word for guilt and debt.)

Ok. The crowd needed forgiveness, just like the lame man needed to be healed of his affliction. But you're good. For you forgiveness is optional, right?

Again, be honest. If you had been in the crowd when Jesus was executed, would you have done anything different? Would you have saved him? Would you have tried? Whether you admit it or not, the people in the crowd were like you, and you are like them. Good people.

How good are we?

How we rationalize our choices to maintain our self-talk about our own goodness! Some people might be pro-life, otherwise liberty-loving people who think that wanting to use government power to coerce others to have babies they don't want or can't support makes them good people. Others might be pro-choice, otherwise life-cherishing people who think that preserving a woman's license to kill the living human being in her own womb before it can become a legal person - her child - makes them good people. How we tell ourselves what we need to hear in order to think that we never have and never will compromise, contradict or violate our own core values! Or that our core values are consistent with each other!

Stephen Sondheim was right on point in his musical Into the Woods when one of his characters says to the crowd, "You're not good, you're not bad. You're just nice." And another character observes, "Nice is different than good."

Forgiveness is not an option. Forgiveness is a necessity. For all of us, all the time. It's just socially constructed to be more obvious in some people than in others.

And so our psalm and our second reading exhort us to turn away from our sin and toward our God for Forgiveness. How shall we receive that Forgiveness?

In that darkened room of our Gospel reading, so long ago, as his former followers sat in mourning, Jesus suddenly showed up. He spoke with them, touched them, and ate with them. Face to face.  That is how they received their Forgiveness. That is how we shall receive ours. Up close, in person. As it were, face to face. That is the Promise God makes to those who seek Him.

So, seek, and you shall be found. Even if you think yourself to be at the bottom of the heap of those who seek God, it's the best heap there is to be at the bottom of!

And God's Peace be with you always.

Leia Mais…

Laying Down the Law

Readings: 16th Sunday after Pentecost

As Christ's Resurrection is the defining event of the New Testament, so God's Theophany at Sinai is the defining event of the Old Testament. Our first reading takes us to the third day, when God speaks to all Israel assembled in fear and trembling at the foot of the mountain. God begins with the aseret hadevarim, Hebrew for the "ten words." We call them the Decalogue, or the Ten Commandments.

Truly, this was the beginning of God's Covenant with the Hebrews, also known as the people of Israel, or today, the Jews — from Judea (the land of Judah), the name of their longest surviving kingdom. From this day forward, the Jews agreed to keep God's commandments, and God promised to keep them as a distinctive people, a priestly people, in that they were to be the people who lived according to God's commandments.

It was also only the beginning. In the Old Testament (or Hebrew Bible) God gives a total of 613 mitzvoth, or commandments, and the Jews would be bound to uphold them all. During the period in which the Hebrew Bible was revealed, keeping the commandments proved difficult. The archaeological record indicates that many Jews kept figurines of gods belonging to religions other than their own until the Babylonian Exile. After that, they appear to have become strict monotheists.

Then the Romans occupied the Judea and re-named it Palestine, in order to break the identification of the Jews (Judeans) with their land. Not only did keeping the commandments become more difficult — after the destruction of the Second Temple and the subsequent Roman Exile, it became impossible to keep them literally. For the next several hundred years, Jewish scholars debated how to re-interpret the commandments under such circumstances, and wrote their opinions in the Talmud.

Thus, with some modifications, Jews are still liable for all 613 commandments. If you are Christian, then so are you. Jesus quoted the Hebrew Bible, and taught its commandments. To reject them is to reject Him.

I know the usual claptrap that passes for Christian Biblical interpretation claims that, because Jesus has "fulfilled" the commandments, you are excused from your obligation to obey most of them. But you are not excused. You are forgiven.

The difference is that to be excused means to be given a free pass. God gives a nod and a wink, and you are free to direct your attention elsewhere. Being forgiven means that you are the beneficiary of the Forgiveness that was planted in this world by Christ's blood and agony on the Cross. The commandments still stand, and you are still convicted when you neglect or disobey them, particularly those first Ten. But, thank God, you are forgiven.

And yet, our Psalm tells us that keeping the commandments is sweet. It is a form of worship to perform the daily and weekly rituals of Jewish life, and to study the Torah. The various actions and restraints, large and small, create a heightened awareness of the sacred in everyday experience, and thus a heightened spiritual consciousness. It is both a joy, and as both our readings from Isaiah and Psalm 80 remind us, a serious obligation.

How serious? There were a number of competing varieties of Judaism during Jesus' earthly lifetime. Of them, only two survived the Roman occupation: one became the Judaism we know today, and the other became Christianity. After nearly 2000 years of exile and near-extermination, the former has returned to the land of its origin, while the latter has conquered the occupiers so completely that their Latin is maintained as a living language only in rituals of the Catholic Church. These two vines have survived.

It remains the Covenant obligation of Jews to uphold the commandments, to study Torah and Talmud. It remains the New Covenant obligation of Christians to go beyond the commandments. At first glance, we Christians seem to have the easier path — fewer details to learn, fewer rituals to remember. Until we remember that Jesus said (Matt 16:24, Mark 8:34, Luke 9:23), "Whoever will come after me, let him take up his cross, and follow me."

We console ourselves that our righteousness is not earned by obeying the commandments (aka the Law), because in truth, we cannot obey them perfectly. Instead, we claim a righteousness that has been given to us by God through Christ himself. All He asks is that we follow, wherever He may lead, through whatever hardship, even through death. And to go joyfully, passionately, straining forward toward the goal, as the Apostle Paul wrote in his letter to the Phillipians.

Leia Mais…

Make the Most of your Model

Readings: Holy Trinity Sunday

In 1674, Thomas Ken wrote a hymn called Awake, My Soul, and with the Sun, which ends with the following verse, now sung as the Doxology in many of our Christian services:

Praise God, from Whom all blessings flow;
Praise Him, all creatures here below;
Praise Him above, ye heavenly host;
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. On this first Sunday after the Pentecost we celebrate and meditate on God's revelation to us that we may think of God as a Trinity of three Persons.

Indeed we may. But must we? Must we believe that the Absolute Reality of God really is this unity/trinity of three distinct Persons emanating from one Godhead?

I don't think so. For one reason, whenever you begin to think about God instead of being in relationship with God, you are thinking about your own idea of God, which is at best a toy model of God, and at worst an idol. All theology is thus tinged with idolatry, which means that we can only take theology as a guide, a pointer to the One who is beyond all theology. And so, the Trinity is a theological construct. Because it fits so well with the New Testament, it qualifies as a model rather than an idol. And it's a model with many virtues. But as for it's being the Absolute Reality of God, well, as Paul says, "Now we see through a glass darkly."

Yet another reason leads me to assert that the Trinity is a model. The historical Jesus and his companions during his public ministry would have rejected such a notion. Yet, neither he nor his followers could be critiqued as "un-Christian." Instead, the notion of the Trinity reflects the opinion of the early Church following Jesus' Resurrection. Indeed, it may even reflect some secret teaching of the post-Resurrection, pre-Ascension Jesus that was kept circulating in oral tradition and not written (not explicitly, anyway) into the New Testament.

Now, although the Trinity is a model, it isn't "just" a model. It's a great model, fitting nicely through all the wickets in the New Testament, and with the experience of God reported by Christian mystics through the ages. We have Jesus, who declares "All that Abba (the Father, or 'Daddy') has is mine," Jesus' emphasis that we are to relate to God as "Daddy," and the Spirit of Truth which came over the assembled worshippers at Pentecost. Indeed they go together, three faces of an inseparable Unity.

It's not so complicated, really. Certainly not so complicated as imagining God to be the ten Sefirot of Kabbalistic Judaism. And indeed, among the Sefirot one finds the Shekhinah, the Spirit (or in Hebrew the "Ruach" or breath of God) who is feminine, and corresponds well to the Holy Spirit recognized by Christians. She is the Sefirah who spends so much time the world of humans.

But let us not fight over whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father (Eastern Church) or from the Father and the Son (Western Church). That's just arguing over how the Tinker Toy sticks of your model are joined together. If prayer can be compared to making love, then too much concern with this kind of theology can be compared to, shall we say, "going it alone."

So step outside. Consider that the skyscape is brought to you by God, that your breath is breathed for you by the Spirit of God, and that next to you is the Son of God, admiring it all through your eyes.

Leia Mais…

Up, Up and Away

Readings: Seventh Sunday in Easter, Year C

Jesus, whom his disciples loved, had been killed by crucifixion, a form of execution well-known for its pain and humiliation. After this horrific shame, he appeared to his disciples in a hyper-physical living form, able to enter rooms without passing through doors or walls, yet still able to eat food with them, and to touch them and be touched by them. These meetings and instructions went on for some time, the traditional "forty days," as it is written. And now, on this Sunday, we commemorate his leaving them.

And what an exit he made! Rising up from among them and into the clouds where they could see him no more. It was an exit that did not leave them sad, but rather triumphant. Their teacher who had lost his life, had won the sky!

And someday, when it was their turn, they would win it, too. This death thing, is just a phase. They would get through it. They would get over it. And what happens next, well, that would be too glorious to describe.

The promise of Christianity, and the hope of Christians, is that even though you are some 30 generations removed from those who witnessed Christ's ascension, your ultimate destiny is the same as the destiny of those witnesses. Because, despite all appearances to the contrary, ultimately God is in control. The entire Universe, and all the good and bad in it, is on loan to you for a time, in order for you to become yourself and then return to the One who made you.

Sounds too good to be true, doesn't it? Sounds like some nutty magical thinking. Those who witnessed the event, would answer, "Yes, but I was there. I saw it. I felt it. It's really true!"

Two thousand years later, we have some scant record of their testimony. Yet we live in the world they changed, because of what they experienced. In this age of skepticism, maybe it's time to be a little skeptical of skepticism itself. Maybe it's time to be more open-minded to the proposition that things are actually a good deal better than you think.

Leia Mais…

O Brightest Hope

Readings: Easter Sunday, Year B

Sometimes there is a cloud over our lives, so vast, so dark that it is impossible to hope that it will pass over us. So overwhelming that it is impossible to hope at all. All one can experience is helplessness, despair. And the gnawing dread that things are getting worse. That we or our loved ones are going down into the pit from which there is no return. It is only a matter of when, and how hard the shock will hit us.

Cowering and ashamed after they had abandoned him to suffering and death, Jesus' inner circle of followers waited for things to get worse for them. Soon, the Romans would come for them. They, too, would be crucified. Theirs was a shrinking circle of grief and dread.

But then something extraordinary happened. All a scientific historian can know is that suddenly, the followers didn't care that they might be crucified. They took up places in public squares and declared that they had seen, felt, conversed with, and even dined with Jesus after his crucifixion and burial. Jesus, they claimed, was God's Anointed who had conquered death itself. Jesus would lead anyone and everyone who asked him by name out of death and into life everlasting.

What has become of their claim? Two thousand years later, one third of all the world's people say they believe it. The Roman Empire that crucified Jesus and later, many of his followers, is sixteen centuries gone. The claim of his Apostles and the witness of more unusual events since then still stand. In blood and agony a message of hope was planted in the world, and large parts of the world are still guided by it.

Their claim has become our brightest hope. The hope that we do not surrender our loved ones and ourselves to the abyss. Rather, we give them and ourselves back into the loving embrace of the infinitely generous God.

Against this hope, the secularists advance unaided reason. But without a defiant and irrational Stoicism, unaided reason leads inevitably to despair. It gives us the what and the how, but not the why. The crisis of pure rationalism is a bottomless abyss of meaninglessness that can be resisted only by irrational means. Stoicism provides only resignation. There is no meaning, there is no hope. But there is a kind of pointless honor in going on.

But pointless honor provides no basis for anything other than societal suicide. It may be that one must go on, but must one at great cost to oneself bring someone else into the world, just to carry on the pointless struggle, fraught with suffering and anxiety? A hopeless society is a below-replacement-birth-rate society, an aging society, a dying society.

Is it really so reasonable to stand reason against hope? Is is really so reasonable to deny our brightest hope, that this one man, God's Anointed, has triumphed over suffering and death, and that he did so in order to share his his triumph with us?

You are free, of course to deny anything not proved to you by unaided reason, or Divinely revealed to you. But if the Risen Christ makes himself known to you, then you will be stuck. You cannot then help but bear witness of him. People will think you are a little bit crazy.

You will have been cured of your bad spiritual infection (existential despair and angst, or worse) by acquiring a good spiritual infection (the spirit of God). In material terms, it is like treating bowel disease by eating yogurt. Instead of the noxious but familiar fumes of nihilism, you will emit the stink of salvation. Eventually, you will get used to your reconstructed self, and tone it down to where your brothers and sisters on this earth can stand you. And then you will get down to the business of your calling.

So now imagine that you are one of the Apostles two thousand years ago. The person you have come to love more than anyone else in the world, who for the last three years has given your life all its meaning, has been humiliated, tortured, and killed. And then he comes back from the dead, in radiance and power, and takes your hand. Don't worry, he says. Everything is going to be fine. Everything is going to turn our very well indeed. Much better than you can imagine. Much better than even he imagined. Go, tell it on the mountain.

Ultimately, you are in the best of hands. Count on it. Rise up in hope. The brightest hope ever proclaimed in this world.

Leia Mais…

Substitutionary Sacrifice isn't what it used to be

Readings: Second Sunday in Lent, Year B

God, for no particular reason that we can fathom, singles out Abraham and promises him that he and his wife will have a son whose descendants will become many nations. Our Psalm sings of the great Day of the LORD, when the LORD shall rule over all the nations. The New Testament Reading covers many topics in one short passage: Faith, Law and Gospel, and substitutionary sacrifice. Finally, in our Gospel reading Jesus foretells his Crucifixion, and is Transfigured in front of some of his disciples. Hours worth of material here. But relax, we're going to take a shortcut.

For the Day of the LORD is obviously not yet, Abraham has given rise to three great world religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, in that historical order, and substitutionary sacrifice has been called into question. And this is our sticking point. There is no denying that all the authors of the New Testament believed that Jesus Christ was offered as a sacrifice for our sins, going all the way back to Adam, the first man, who disobeyed God, and caused the entire Universe to fall into its present state.

Well, we know that's not true in the physical sense. Our physical selves evolved from the primordial slime into our present form as populations of living things responded over many generations to suffering and death. That is to say, human beings did not bring suffering and death into the world. Human beings were brought into the world by suffering and death. Suffering and death are prior to human beings. Regardless of what the New Testament writers and their communities believed, it is no longer reasonable to believe that Jesus had to atone for the Sin of Adam and Eve.

So, in the words of the old radio show, The Lone Ranger, who was that masked man? Why did Jesus endure death by Crucifixion, and then rise from death in a new, perfected form? If not for the Sin of Adam, how about your own sin? Oh, surely, you can't be all that bad. Surely you don't need such an outrageous act on the part of God!

On the other hand, even if the Fall of Man is not true as a physical history, it isn't bad at all as a primitive psychology. The Hell of it is that we behave pretty much as Genesis says we do. We all live our lives pretty much without reference or deference to God. And the Universe is constructed to let us do it. The rain falls on the just and the unjust.

And we wouldn't have it any other way. We like our freedom from God. No, we love it. We are like addicts with respect to it. We need to be our own selves, running our own lives, our own world. Except for those who are like spiritual suicides, who want nothing more than to escape the selves that God gave them by giving those selves back to God as damaged goods, as a hand of cards they don't want to play out. If the relationship with God is Buber's I-Thou, then some of us want to abandon I, and others want to escape from Thou.

In other words, the Sin of Adam did not take place in history. It takes place in the way we live our lives every day. The results have been spectacular, particularly in what we have done to each other: the Inquisition, the Salem witch trials, the Holocaust, centuries of persecution of Jews before the Holocaust, the wars of religion before Europeans decided to fight over politics and Lebensraum, just to mention a few of the atrocities committed by Christians. Non-Christians can be as bad or worse, but this is church, so let's just stick to our own business for the present.

But even when we are not being spectacularly bad, there is this, if I may quote Scooper:

In response to hardship and Death, we often disregard others and look out only for ourselves. But, since we are evolved to be a social species, we know that it is wrong for us to do so. We know that we must do good for ourselves and our society, and that sometimes, we must sacrifice our personal desires and interests for some higher good. We know that this is what God's Justice has written on our hearts, yet we disobey, and we lie to ourselves about it. And we attack those who threaten to expose our lies — like Socrates, the Prophets, and Jesus. (Or anyone who challenges our way of seeing the world and ourselves.)

We don't want to be confronted with our lies. Which means we can't accept our true selves, and we don't believe anyone else can, either, unless we pay the price, unless we earn acceptablity by self-sacrifice to a higher cause. Yet we need to accept our true selves, in order to be able to tolerate God, in whose presence we confront the truth about everything. The price is beyond our ability to pay, for in the presence of God, we have nothing to offer but tainted goods — the selves that even we cannot accept. So God pays the price for us. God came into the world as one of us, to endure abandonment by God, and to be killed by us.

That is the price of admission for people like us into God's Presence — Paradise. It is a shock, a horror, and a scandal. And since we don't want to be confronted by the inference that we are that bad, we deny it, and attack (at least verbally) those who proclaim it.

Substitutionary sacrifice isn't for Adam. It's for you.

Leia Mais…

Give it Up this Season

Readings: First Sunday in Lent

In our readings we go from God's covenant to Noah and all living creatures that survived the Great Flood, to the Jesus being baptized by John. The images are of a purification by water: first as a punishment/trial and then as a cleansing immersion. The first letter of Peter comments on both. There is much to talk about in these short texts, but I want to focus on the tradition of Lent itself.

Lent commemorates the 40 days that Jesus spent in the wilderness fasting and being tempted by Satan. Not coincidentally, the Hebrew Bible tells of the Great Flood occurring some thousand year earlier, during which it rained 40 days and 40 nights while Noah rescued his family and various creatures by taking them into the ark he had built at the LORD's bidding. Lent has become a 40 day period to commemorate Jesus' ordeal, and as a way of preparing to honor the sorrowful mysteries of Holy Week, which includes remembering Jesus' death by crucifixion on Good Friday.

Lent is a period of "pre-mourning." It used to be a period of actual fasting, at least by forgoing red meat. Now many Christians "fast" by abstaining from something, or giving something up, for Lent. A person might give up eating chocolate during Lent, or driving, for examples. We could abstain from things we like to eat, or to drink, or to do.

But those are essentially our amusements or innocent enjoyments. What about our Sins? What about identifying some way you habitually sin, and refraining from that for the 40 days of Lent?

In case you need a reminder, the four basic Sins are that we are estranged from God, the world, each other, and ourselves. We exhibit these estrangements in Capital Sins like Pride, Avarice, Envy, Anger, Lust, Gluttony and Sloth. We can oppose these Capital Sins in ourselves by practicing Capital Virtues like Humility, Liberality, Fraternity, Meekness, Chastity, Temperance, and Diligence.

If these words are too big for you, then look them up. If you're too lazy to do that, then just think about the ways in which you're an asshole. Then, try not to be such an asshole until Easter.

May God forgive you for the times you fail, may God bless you for those times you realize that you failed, and may God make his face to particularly shine on you for those times when you succeed. Amen.

Leia Mais…

Transfiguration, Anyone?

Readings: Transfiguration Sunday

In our Gospel reading we are treated to a remarkable incident reported by Mark. Mark has fewer lines of dialog for Jesus than any other Gospel. Mark is about action. Jesus did this, Jesus did that. Prophetic action that both foretold and made real the imminent coming of God's Kingdom.

This time it's the Transfiguration. Jesus' clothing becomes dazzling white, perhaps luminous, and he talks with Elijah and Moses. Then a cloud overshadows them and a voice says that Jesus is God's Son, the Beloved, listen to him. All of which serves to establish Jesus' bona fides as someone so special as to be unique.

It also foreshadows Jesus' transfiguration into a resurrected being after his crucifixion. Remember that people had trouble recognizing him after his Resurrection. Perhaps we are all to be so transfigured after our resurrections that, as perfected beings, rather than as the masses of contradiction that we now are, we would hardly know ourselves.

Something to look forward to, something to put these troubled times into perspective. Ultimately, our destinies are good. Ultimately it will all work out. There may be some bumps along the way, but ultimately it will all be very fine indeed.

Leia Mais…

On Embodiment

Readings: Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany

So Naaman is healed by Elisha, who doesn't even do him the customary honor of coming out to see him. From within his house, Elisha sends his servant to tell Naaman to wash in the Jordan seven times and he will be cleansed of his leprosy. Not an encounter, just a message of good news: do this simple thing and you will be fine.

Elisha and Naaman are two prominent personages. Elisha is the protege of Elijah who by this time had departed the world in chariots of fire, and Naaman serves a king of a neighboring land. Who goes to see whom and how they are treated are matters of political posturing. Naaman, the LORD is so much greater than you that his messenger will not meet you. He will only send you a message, and that will suffice. Naaman is healed, but he has also been put in his place by the ultimate power-play.

Jesus, on the other hand, has no social status, and neither does the leper who begs him for healing. There is no room for political posturing. Indeed, politics is excluded from this encounter. Jesus does not send him a message. He touches him and says, "Be made clean." It is at once a command, and the power to accomplish the command. By himself, the leper cannot make himself clean. But the touch and the word cleanse him. He is not passive - he is given power to become clean, told to be clean, and he becomes clean in response to the command.

The body is central to both narratives. What is healed is a visible bodily infirmity, and how it is healed involves what people do with their bodies - sending a message, or having a personal encounter involving sight, voice, and touch. Which brings us to the Apostle Paul's letter to the church in Corinth. Paul knows that embodiment is central to the human condition. He knows that God has made us, body and soul, and given us to ourselves. Seeking after the necessities and pleasures of the body, we give ourselves over to Evil.

But God has re-purchased us through the price paid by Jesus in his death and resurrection. So the converts in Corinth believe, as Paul reminds them. And that purchase involves both soul and body. Thus Paul admonishes the Corinthians, as he admonishes us to exercise self-control in what we do with our bodies. That neither we nor others exist solely for our own pleasure, but for the pleasure of God.

Through the ages this passage has often been considered in the light of sexual morality, which has undergone changes from place to place and time to time. I would like to enlarge it to all of our behavior, everywhere, all the time. I will restate it as this: Live your life so that more good things happen around you than bad.

That may sound easy, but it isn't. It takes more discernment of the difference between good and evil than we actually have. I don't know what you may want to do about that, but for myself, I pray for guidance and wisdom, and a bit of help now and then.

Leia Mais…

Haven't You Heard?

Readings: Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany

Have you not heard? The LORD brings princes to naught.

Let's count a few of the recent ones, shall we? Number 1, Hitler. Oh, wait, he shot himself after millions of soldiers and thousands of pilots and seamen kicked the asses of his army, navy, air force, and civilian population, and leveled most of the buildings in most of the cities of his country. Number two, Stalin. Well, he seemed to die of something like old age after killing millions of Soviet citizens and initiating the Cold War by bringing the Iron Curtain down on Eastern Europe. Mao Zedong? Old age again. Pol Pot? Old age. Robert Mugabe? Getting older, still pending.

There are many forms of prayer, and one of them is lament. My lament is that we can take 20th and 21st century history as license to be skeptical about Isaiah 40:21-31. But I also notice that the Soviet Union, the old "Evil Empire," is no more, and that Communism as a secular religion no longer holds many hearts in thrall. Maybe the LORD lays the princes low after all.

Laurence Gonzales notes in his book, Deep Survival that most people who survive catastrophes pray, even the ones who are agnostic or atheists. The form of prayer called supplication, asking for help with our real needs, helps us face and focus on them, which helps us to survive.

So is it real or all in our heads? Does prayer work, or does it just help us work?

There is a story about the man sitting on his roof in a flood who prays to the LORD. Eventually, a boat comes by to rescue him. "No thanks," he says. I trust in the LORD to save me. Another boat motors by, and he again declines their offer, saying, "I trust in the LORD." A helicopter hovers over him, and again he refuses rescue, declaring his faith in the LORD. Eventually the flood waters cover his house and he drowns. When he gets to Heaven, he complains to the LORD that the LORD ignored his prayers and let him die. "No I didn't," says the LORD. I sent you two boats and a helicopter."

Maybe it's a matter of failing to see what is, because we are too focussed on what we want to be. We expect to be saved in some spectacular, supernatural way, rather than noticing that we are being saved in a ordinary, natural way. Maybe it's a matter of looking beyond our immediate rescue to see the bigger picture.

In Mark 1:29-39 Jesus heals people. The next day, there are still more people to be healed, but he moves on to the next town, because he is not about healing people. He is about getting his message out. Healing people establishes credibility and gets attention for the message. But the message is the main thing, and healing is a side issue. What matters is the message.

The message is the Good News that the Apostle Paul proclaims in 1 Corinthians 9:16-23. To proclaim it, he does whatever is necessary, becoming one with all to whom he preaches. To the Jews he is a Jew, to the Gentiles he is a Gentile. He acts like he is rich or poor, as needed.

And what is the message? That the LORD takes pleasure in those who attend to him, who hope in his steadfast love. That those who have done evil will repay. That would be Justice, but then we would all be in trouble, because we have all done evil things, large and small. Someone else - Jesus - has stepped in and paid the price we would otherwise have had to pay ourselves. We are forgiven, but forgiveness did not come cheap.

Now Paul thought that you had to believe in Jesus as your Lord and Savior in order to be raised to Eternal Life. As if there are lots of doors in the afterlife, and that you have to go through the right one - the one that Jesus is hiding behind - in order to get to Heaven. On the other hand, it could be that Jesus is behind all the doors, and that Hell is refusing or fearing to go through any door at all. Or it could be that Jesus doesn't hide behind the doors - he comes out to you and guides you through.

I don't know. I do know that the early Christians, like Paul and the other Apostles would not have willingly committed themselves to martyrdom for any but the first alternative. But were they right, or is some other alternative right? Or is the question itself beside the point? One fine day, usually before we are ready, we each of us will find out.

Leia Mais…

Prophets, Priests, Kings and Law

Readings: Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany

Islam has the audacity to claim all the Jewish prophets as Muslim prophets, from Moses to Jesus. So in the interest of inter-faith clarity, I would like to use today's readings to consider how prophethood was and is viewed in Judaism and Christianity.

To begin, note that the archetypal prophet, Moses, was not a priest. His brother Aaron was the priest of the Exodus. This means many things, of which we can immediately extract one. A prophet is not beholden to any religious institution. No institution has the ability to appoint, select, approve or disapprove prophets. The prophet him or herself had better get that straight:

But any prophet who speaks in the name of other gods, or who presumes to speak in my name a word that I have not commanded the prophet to speak--that prophet shall die.

Moreover, the religious institutions and the people in them are also warned:

Anyone who does not heed the words that the prophet shall speak in my name, I myself will hold accountable.

The prophet has only one job: to speak or to do what the LORD commands - to be the LORD's messenger. And nothing else. In Judaism and Christianity, the prophet is not a general, not a head of state, not a priest, not any culturally sanctioned authority figure. The prophet is independent of culture and cultural institutions. In ancient Israel, the prophet came from among the people, and criticized the King, the Priests, and the people themselves.

These institutions were kept separate from the beginning, as commanded by the LORD. Kings were not Priests, and Priests were not Kings. The wielders of temporal power were kept separate and distinct from the wielders of religious authority. And both were kept in check by the prophets, who were kept separate from both.

If this same separation were observed in Islam, the Caliph or Sultan (political ruler), the Imams (leader of prayer), and the prophets would always be separate people. The combination of any two of them in one person would not occur, much less the combination of all three. But this is the innovation of Islam: all three were combined in the Prophet Muhammad. A careless reading of the Qur'an will retroject this combination onto the Jewish prophets. This is an error.

Prophets could innovate, because they taught with authority from the LORD. But they could do more than that. In our Gospel reading, Jesus commands an unclean spirits to leave an unnamed man. In our day, we might say he was a faith healer, who could cure psychosomatic disorders. Or we might say a lot more. While it is impossible to independently authenticate any particular miracle attributed to Jesus, it is quite clear that Jesus, his followers, his competitors, and even his enemies all agreed that he was a worker of astonishing deeds that included healing.

This was an innovation of Jesus: before him, it was common to associate the gift of healing with prophets, but it didn't seem to be such a large part of their activities.

Following Jesus, the Apostle Paul extends Jesus' innovation regarding the relaxation of purity laws about food. Yet, he does not force his innovation regarding food sacrificed to idols on those for whom it would become an obstacle to their faith.

And so, over our readings God goes from severe to lenient. It all depends on the context. There are 613 rules commanded by God in the Old Testament, many of which are now impossible to obey in modern times. It must be that many are set aside or modified, and many are simply forgiven us. Because we are not the same polytheistic rabble that Moses led out of Egypt. We are followers of Jesus, who summed up what it means to obey the LORD's commandments as:

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. - Matthew 22:37-40

We might add, as did Micah, "And what does the LORD require of the but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with thy God?"

The Law is the Good Guide, a compass pointing in the direction of true faith. It is not to be used as a straitjacket, or as blinders, or as a cross upon which to crucify those who interpret it differently from ourselves.

Leia Mais…

Refusing the Call

Readings: Third Sunday after the Epiphany, Year B

To really understand the context of our Old Testament reading, you have to read the first four short chapters of the Book of Jonah. Jonah is the comic prophet. The LORD tells him to give a dire warning to Nineveh, a large Assyrian city that was a worship center for the goddess Ishtar.

At first, Jonah was having none of it. He knew what fate awaited prophets who told large populations what they didn't want to hear. A holy martyrdom was not one of his desires. So he took off in another direction, buying passage on a ship to Tarshish.

The LORD, however, calls up a storm that frightens the sailors until they figure out that Jonah is a prophet refusing his mission and throw him overboard. This is when "ol' Jonah got et by a whale." This threatens to be the end of Jonah, but it turns out he dies only metaphorically.

When Jonah gives in and sings to the LORD, the whale pukes him onto the shore, a metaphorical, if smelly, rebirth. I should point out that whale puke, also called ambergris, is so good at holding onto a smell that it is refined and used as a base for expensive perfumes. The Bible is silent on whether Jonah takes time to bathe on the way to Nineveh. When he arrives there with his warning, the people, much to his surprise, actually repent and call on the LORD.

Jonah is upset. That was too easy. He wanted to see some fireworks come down on the place. The LORD disabuses him of that notion, too.

In contrast to Jonah, Simon (later called Peter, which means "The Rock"), Andrew, and James all respond to Jesus's call "immediately," which seems to be the favorite word of the Gospel attributed to Mark. If they had thought about it, like Jonah, they might have talked themselves out of it. Following Jesus would be a rough road for them, forsaking family and tribe - the two things by which you live in honor/shame societies, to follow this itinerant preacher and faith-healer.

On the other hand, could they really have refused the call? Sometimes the LORD gives you no choice. Tag, you're it. It's the corollary to Isaac Bashevis Singer's statement that, "We have to believe in Free Will, we have no choice."

So what else is there to do but sing the LORD's praises like today's Psalm and go for it with gusto. After all, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians, the time may be shorter than we think. It's always a good time to get our priorities straight.

Leia Mais…

The Call of the LORD

Readings: Second Sunday after the Epiphany, Year B

"Hey, you!"

"Here I am."

The call of the LORD and the response of the whole person, simple and immediate. "Here I am," was the way you declared that you were not only present, but accountable and responsible. You declared that you were ready to do your superior's bidding.

But in the case of the young Samuel, "Here I am," was not enough. Samuel thought that Eli had called him. Eli instructed him to be more specific. The next time Samuel hears the still, small voice of the Lord, he answers, "Speak, for your servant is listening."

Then the channel of communication opens, and the Word of God changes his life, and the lives of the people around him. The LORD calls Samuel to his calling, the mission in life he was always supposed to have, the mission that will truly make him all he is meant to be and to become. He is not called to be a reasonably respectable temple priest who never appears on the stage of history. No, he is called to be Samuel, the bearer of the LORD's news, both good and bad, the king-maker, the anointer of King Saul.

Sometimes being called out of your present life and into your new life is a fantastic experience for you and all those around you. Consider the case of Paul Potts, the shy, fat, young mobile phone sales clerk, who has the gall to appear on a tryout for a television talent show and declare that he is about to sing opera. The three judges look at each other as if to say, "Oh, God, I hope this won't be unbearably bad. And then the guy gives this performance:



By the time he's done, some members of the audience are giving him a standing ovation, some are in tears, and the judges are in slack-jawed wonder. His life and ours are changed from this day forward. He wasn't meant to be a sales clerk after all. He was meant to be an opera singer.

Sometimes being called out of your present life can lead through the doorway of death. Pat Tillman felt called to leave his career as a professional football player and become a Corporal with the United States Army Rangers. It was his way of responding to the challenge of Islamofascism to Civilization after the 9/11 attacks. He was killed by "friendly fire" in an ambush on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pastor who dared to criticize the Nazis after they had taken control of Germany. Although he had escaped Germany, he felt called to return, to put his body on the line against genuine moral evil in his native land. He was eventually sent to a concentration camp, and when the camp was about to be liberated by the Allied invasion of Europe, he was executed. Some years before that, Bonhoeffer had written a book called The Cost of Discipleship, in which he said that when Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.

Sometimes physical death is the risk we are called to take, sometimes not. But we are always called to die to our previous way of life, to our previous notions of what is important, to our previous values. For all people of all cultures in all times and places one universal truth is that our values are not God's values.

The call to be all that we can be is the call to step outside ourselves, to enlarge our values, to risk who we are so that through us God may affirm who God is.

So Jesus says to Philip, "Follow me."

Into what adventure, into what peril? Into what glory? Philip has no idea, but he has a strong feeling that whatever the cost, this is the man, and this is the moment. He gets his body up and follows Jesus.

Simple, in a way, for Philip. All he has to do is get up and go. For us, following Jesus is not so obvious and so immediate. The nature of our call can sometimes be obscure.

But there are things we are called to avoid. Since we take God with us in whatever we do, we are called to avoid doing things we prefer not to drag God into. We are to avoid obsession with minor points of religious law and observance, to the exclusion of our awareness of God's presence. It was that obsession that got Christ crucified.

We are also to avoid the abuse of our own and other people's bodies, including the abuse of our sexuality. As the Apostle Paul says in his first (surviving) letter to the Corinthians, we are not our own. We were bought with a price - the price Jesus paid on the cross. And he paid that price because, God has known you better than you know yourself from before the foundation of the world.

This is effectively a commandment to be caring and respectful toward ourselves and each other. For that is how we are to be recognized by the world, that we have love one toward another.

Now you are called to follow your God. Where the adventure leads, I can't tell, except that ultimately we are promised Heaven. But the point is that if we shrink from the call, we will shrink spiritually, we will be less than we were meant to be. We will die inside. If we say, "Yes, here I am," and follow our call, we will have abundant life, even if it is in the midst of outward deprivation and suffering. For we will all surely die. The only question is whether we will truly live before we do so.

Leia Mais…

The LORD's Baptism, the Church's Touch

Readings: First Sunday after the Epiphany, Year B

Water. God's breath moving over the primordial water. John baptizing in the Jordan. Paul at Ephesus.

Pure, living water (flowing from a stream or a spring) was used by the Israelites to make a mikvah, to take a ritual bath to cleanse yourself after experiences that made you ritually unclean. The two innovative things about John's baptism were that it cleansed you from your inner impurity (Sin) rather than an external impurity (say an unusual discharge of bodily fluid or an unusual skin condition) and that you did not administer it to yourself. John administered it to you.

Much to the embarrassment of the early Church, John administered baptism to his disciple, Jesus. When the Spirit descended and the Voice spoke, it appears that only Jesus saw and heard, and not John. In both Matthew and Luke, the imprisoned John sends messengers to ask Jesus if he is the one of whom John himself had said, "The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals."

Given that Jesus continued the practice of baptism, it is reasonable to conclude that he learned it from John. As Fr. John P. Meier argues in Mentor, Message and Miracles, the second volume of his series A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, John the Baptist was Jesus' mentor prior to the beginning of Jesus' public ministry.

The early Church's embarrassment was that Jesus, the Son of God, of one being with the Father, truly God and truly man, had to learn anything religious from anybody, or worse, that Jesus would need to be cleansed of any sin. But we have just come through the Christmas season, in which we celebrate God's kenosis — God's emptying himself of his power, knowledge, and glory, and becoming a helpless baby. As Jesus, God had to learn almost everything from other people, including language. So why not learn baptism, this new twist on the mikvah, from John?

As for Sin, it's the down side of being human. Would Jesus be truly human if he didn't share in this aspect of the human condition as well? I'm not suggesting that Jesus ever said, thought, or did anything bad. But I notice that he often went off by himself to pray. The only reason we need to pray is that we are estranged from God. If we were at one with God, if God's presence suffused our consciousness, we wouldn't need to pray. We would have an always-on, DSL or high-speed internet cable connection from our souls to God. By comparison, prayer is a dial-up connection. Prayer is not always-on. You have to actually do it, and then you have to stop, to rest, sleep, eat, go to the bathroom, whatever. What I'm getting at is that one aspect (or is it a penalty?) of Sin is not being always-on with God. It appears that Jesus did participate in this aspect.

On this Sunday, we remember that Jesus himself was baptized by John for the forgiveness of Sin. It was an embarrassment for the early Church. But they couldn't cover it up, because it was too widely known. The disciples of John who had not gone over to the Jesus movement, who were still around after the Resurrection, made sure that it was. The early Church has Jesus submitting to baptism in order to set an example for all Christians to follow, but not because he himself actually needed it. So what?

Jesus answers his former mentor's question: Tell John that, "the blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them." Six signs of the Messiah, the Anointed One, or as we call him, the Christ. Not, it appears, the military genius who would throw off the domination of the Roman Empire. Just the Galilean Jewish peasant who, through his death and resurrection, would overcome the world.

But wait, as they say in those TV ads, there's more! When Paul baptizes the Ephesians in the Name of Jesus, the Holy Spirit (the breath of God that created the universe) came upon them. They spoke in languages they had not known, and they said prophetic things. Maybe they talked of future events, or maybe they spoke God's truth about what was happening around them. Whatever it was, baptism in the Name of Jesus accompanied by Paul's laying on of hands, had powerful after effects. It's almost as if Christianity were a spiritual contagion — a good contagion — spreading from person to person.

That points up another aspect of Church. Church is person to person, hand to hand. Church is touch, not just words, not just thought, not just reading, not just prayer. Your computer cannot baptize you and lay hands on you. Only another believer can do that. And that places you in the network of believers.

How connected is that network?

Say a human lifetime is the traditional "threescore and ten" or seventy years. Then Jesus was baptized about 28 lifetimes ago. Imagine yourself in the Cosmic Church, holding the hand of the person on either side of you, who holds the hand of the next person, and so on. On either side, you are only 28 people away from the hand that baptized Jesus, or from the hand of Jesus himself. Maybe only 27 people away from the hand of Paul. Overhead, the breath of God is moving, touching a person here and there. May it touch you as God wills.

Let the Gospel contagion spread from your heart, your words, your hands.

Leia Mais…

Wisdom, Folly, and the Word Made Flesh

Readings: Second Sunday in Christmas, Year B

It's difficult to date Jeremiah's writings with precision, but it appears that he wrote our Old Testament reading shortly before, or perhaps during the exile of Israel's elites into captivity in Babylon. "Hear the word of the LORD, O nations... He who scattered Israel will gather him, and keep him as a shepherd a flock." Israel was not being gathered in, it was being scattered. Those living at the time might have said that Israel was more likely to be "taken in" by Jeremiah than gathered in by the LORD.

We now know that Israel was gathered in, twice. Once from Babylon, and again after the Holocaust. Our Catholic readings speak of Wisdom. Would it seem like wisdom to keep the LORD's commandments? That path has brought destruction. On the other hand, that path has also brought survival. Without the LORD's commandments, the Jews would have assimilated and ceased to be Jews long ago. If survival is the goal, then keeping the commandments is not just wisdom, but the only wisdom that counts. Only if ease, not survival, is the goal does keeping the commandments seem like folly.

Yet, as Christians, we proclaim what cannot seem like wisdom to the world. We proclaim the birth of Jesus as the birth of Almighty God into human form. Don't look to your army for rescue, don't look to wealth for ransom, look to this baby.

We know the stories of the nativity — the humble birth in a manger known only to the Magi and to the shepherds startled by a Heavenly chorus of angels. We sing of them in Christmas carols, and recite them in our traditional Christmas readings. They are similar to the infancy stories of the heroes of many cultures. The early Church celebrated Easter, not Christmas, which was a later invention by more than a hundred years.

Nevertheless, we celebrate these twelve days and justly so! But let us remember that without Easter's Good News — the resurrection of Christ, and in him, of us all — the Good News of Christmas is just another birthday.

And what a birthday! God goes completely underground, becoming one of us. And not by materializing full grown out of nowhere, but by being born dumb and helpless, just like the rest of us. God would experience what it is like to be in only one place at one time, with only the finite store of knowledge gained by growing up, and no greater power than that of heart, hand, and voice. God would never have been able to reach us by that path, if someone hadn't loved him, fed him, and changed his diapers.

Imagine the magnitude and terror, not of the Crucifixion, but of the Incarnation. One second God is Omnipotent and Omniscient, and the next God is a baby, who will never amount to anything if someone doesn't teach him his manners. That God did not abandon the Universe for 33 years do this, that God could still be God and also be Jesus, and that there could be the same separation between Jesus and God that we feel between ourselves and God — remember that Jesus often needed to go off by himself to pray — is expressed in the terminology "Son of God," which non-Christians find so unfortunate. But there it is, God going from the Power behind the Universe to having a short, rough life, with no special treatment or advantages, and having to communicate with his larger self the same way we do — through prayer. A fearsome thing to face, when you consider how hard life is. A sacrifice on our behalf, just to live, let alone to die.

All because God wants to be with us, not as a stranger, but as one of us. Which means that God puts on a human face, a persona, a personality. In particular, the personality of Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh. And the Word was made Flesh in secret. The writers of Mark and John didn't know the infancy stories surrounding Jesus — their accounts start with his baptism by John the Baptiser.

John, however, delays his narrative to meditate on the Logos, the Word, as if that concept meant something to his Greek-speaking Gentile audience. Today, that concept might be more familiar to a Muslim than to a Christian. In Islam, God says to a thing, "Be!" and it is. It springs into existence out of love for its Creator. The power of God's Word is such that it creates things out of nothing.

And that is John's obscure point. When God said, "Let there be light," that creative speech (or thought) was the core identity of the person Jesus. Just as spirit and breath are the same word in Biblical Hebrew, so the Divine speech is breath/spirit. In ancient thinking the spirit/breath was the essence of the speaker/breather. When a person breathed out his last breath, his breath/spirit/essence was gone.

So the Word of God is the breath/spirit/essence of God, breathed into God's creative command. Breathed into Jesus at the moment of creation, breathed through Jesus into all creation. "All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being."

In the entire Bible, this is the most radical, over-the-top statement about Jesus. In his earthly lifetime, during his public ministry, he probably wouldn't have believed it himself. Only the second most radical, over-the-top thing about Jesus would have made this statement clear to him and his disciples — his Resurrection.

Now you look around the world and you don't see much Resurrection going on. People who die stay dead. What you see is a whole lot of Crucifixion. Not in the literal sense (except that Hamas has made it legal again in parts of the Holy Land for the first time since the days of the Roman Emperor Constantine), but in the figurative sense that people do a lot of awful things to each other. The Christmas story, the birth of Jesus, the Word made Flesh, looks like we are being "taken in," (deceived, fooled) rather than gathered in, for the Day of the Lord.

We can go on, attempting to explain ourselves to the world with fancy theology, but talk is cheap. That's why so much of the Bible, and especially Mark's Gospel, consists of actions. I suppose that we had better get out there and act like Christians, if we can figure out what that would be like. History shows us to have been a mixed bag so far in that regard. But we have at least one example.

So take these days and celebrate with family and friends. Or even with strangers. And then, be what you are called to be.

What is that, you might ask, and when were you so called? The writer of Ephesians (who may have been the Apostle Paul, or one of his followers) claims that you were called "from before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love." That's probably the most radical, over-the-top thing the Bible says about you. Well, you're not holy, and you're not blameless. But you can love and be loved. That's a start. Our Lord Jesus Christ came to do the rest.

Merry Christmas!

Leia Mais…

All Hail the Power of Jesus' Name

Readings: The Holy Name, Year B

In the ancient Middle East, one's name had special significance. Pharoahs of Egypt had their names carved everywhere, because the preservation of their name was part of insuring their immortality. Putting your name on something was a way of making it your own. Giving someone your true name was the equivalent of giving them your special confidence or trust.

The God of the Hebrew Bible was not promiscuous with His Name. After using several aliases, like El Shaddai, God reveals His Name to Moses, speaking out of a "burning" bush near a place called YHU (probably pronounced "Yahoo," later re-named Midian). The Name, of which we have only the consonants YHWH may have been pronounced "Yahweh." No one knows. The ancient Israelites did not pronounce the Name out of reverence for it. They did not "take the Name in vain."

But it probably was pronounced on the occasion narrated in Numbers 6:22-27, in which YHWH (which we render as the Lord) puts his name upon Israel in the form of the now familiar Aaronic Blessing. They are indeed His people, and he will be their God.

A majestic name, indeed, as our Psalmist proclaims, especially in its power to preserve God's people. In spite of two thousand years of diaspora, including more than one attempt to annihilate the Jews, Judaism is the oldest continuously practiced living ethical monotheistic religion. Apparently, it is God's will that his Law be kept as an unbroken, living tradition until He comes.

And now, for us Christians, God takes on another name, Yehoshua. It means "YHWH helps." The Latinized form of the Greek rendering of the name is Jesus. Another rendering, closer to the Aramaic, Y'shua, is Joshua. The Christ-child was named after Joshua, the general who commanded the Israelites' conquest of the Promised Land after the death of Moses. Clearly a name with great expectations attached to it.

The names of his earthly father, mother, and four brothers (James, Joses, Jude and Simon) all "hark back to the glorious days of the patriarchs, the exodus, and the conquest of the Promised Land," according to Fr. John P. Meier, in the first volume of his opus on the historical Jesus, A Marginal Jew. Meier concludes that these names indicate that Jesus' family may have been involved in the first century reawakening of Jewish national and religious identity, and the growing popular sentiment to re-establish the Kingdom of Israel free of Roman domination. And so they named their first-born son after Joshua, as commanded by the angel. A name with great expectations, the name of a conqueror.

Yet this conquering name is bestowed upon a tiny, vulnerable baby. A baby who cried, as all male Jewish babies cry, at his circumcision, when he was officially given his name. As the writer of Philippians states, God "emptied himself" of his Glory, taking human form, humbling himself even to public humiliation, scourging, and crucifixion. Theologians call it kenosis.

To honor/shame cultures, like those of the Middle East both then and now, kenosis is a scandal. A god who would do such a thing just can't be God - it's too dishonorable! There is nothing like it in any other religion on earth. There are traditions of gods becoming incarnated as humans. But all of them were high-born, nobles, kings, somebodies. No other religion claims its god was born a peasant, grew up as a laborer, and was executed as a criminal. A seditious, peasant, laborer named, in seeming irony, after a conquering hero.

Now the Roman Empire is dead and gone. Ironically, its language, Latin, is only remembered because it was preserved by the Christian Church, the church founded by the followers of this peasant who was executed by the Roman Empire. After all, Christianity eventually became the official state religion of the Roman Empire, with a liturgy in the language of the common people, Latin. In that way Jesus, the crucified one, did indeed conquer the world of his day.

But Christianity as a state religion is a contradiction in terms. The LORD's kenosis in becoming this peasant child, living the life he lived, dying the death he died, and being resurrected - all this turns all notions of status, honor, power, glory on their heads. It does more than just set Christianity apart. It sets Christianity against - against culture, all cultures of all peoples of all times and places. The Church may build culture, but the Church also critiques culture.

This separation of Divine from earthly power is very old in the Judeo-Christian tradition. It started with Moses the leader, and Aaron the high priest. It continued when God granted Israel a line of kings: beginning with David, there was always a king, a separate priesthood, and often one or more prophets who were separate from both. The king led, the priests kept the temple rituals, but the prophets spoke for God, often criticizing both priest and king.

Now the Church has become an institution, or a set of institutions, valuable institutions that in many cases have stood as counterweights to the governmental powers of nations and states. Institutions that have given help to the oppressed. And sometimes institutions that have done the oppressing. But Christianity itself is not an institution. It is a spiritual insurgency, constantly injecting itself into the world, like God injecting himself into the world almost clandestinely as the baby Jesus. The baby named, "God Helps."

And the Church is in institutional crisis. Roman Catholicism is beset with a dearth of priests, and scandals among the priests that it has. Mainline Protestant churches are losing members. In too many places, the Church is even persecuted, as in the Christmas attack on a church in Congo. Maybe the Church as an institution needs to team up with Christianity as a spiritual insurgency, and sponsor networks of home churches. To get small to become great, as did our LORD Jesus. To "have love one for another as I have loved you," if I may quote our Savior.

But then, that would risk the Church being taken over by its own spiritual insurgency. It risks the high being overtaken by the low. It risks having multiple centers and sources of power within the church. The upside is revival, the downside is dissension. And there are so many fires of internal church conflict burning in our day already. What can we do?

We can call on that lowly, ironic name that is above every name, the name that promises, "God Helps," the name of Yehoshua the Anointed One, Y'shua the Messiah, Jesus the Christ. The name of the one who conquers our sin and sets us free from it. The name that we value above every name because it raises us up on the Last Day to be with Him. And we can return to the world, like the shepherds, as ambassadors for what we experience.

Now may the LORD bless you and keep you,
May the LORD make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you,
May the LORD look upon you with favor, and give you peace.
In the name of Jesus Christ, who lifts high the lowly in spirit, amen.

Leia Mais…

A New Year, A Time for Justice

Readings: New Year's Day, Year B



I will be brief, because I have a life, and as our Old Testament reading concludes: "I know that there is nothing better for them than to be happy and to enjoy themselves as long as they live; moreover it is God's gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in all their toil." I will shortly go and take pleasure in mine, go thou and do likewise.

And why not? We are an insignificant speck in the great expanse of the universe, and but an eyeblink in the eons of cosmic time. In spite of all that, our Creator has made us special, for his own good pleasure. He pays attention to us. In the end, in the universe to come, he will do away with death, suffering and sadness. It is already done. We just haven't run into it yet.

So how long will it be? What time is it now? What is this season? Our Gospel reading, Matthew 25:31-46, tells us that from now until the Apocalypse it is always the same time. It is time for justice.

What we do to each other, including the least, we do to the Most High. We should live and act like we will be called to account for the justice and injustice we have done and enabled to be done, passively or actively.

A happy, prosperous, and just New Year to us all!

Leia Mais…

Robes of Righteousness

Readings: First Sunday after Christmas, Year B

I know what you do. You step out of the shower, face the mirror, and check your flaws. You cover them with clothes. Maybe you color your hair, or wear makeup. If you're young, you try to cover the acne, if you're older, the lines. That's human nature. That's biology.

But your inner flaws you can't see as easily, because they aren't reflected in mirrors. They're reflected in the lives and faces of the people you hurt. You cover them with denial. If you're young, you want sex, if you're older, money or power. You attend to the people who can give them to you, and, at best, you ignore the people who can't. But mostly, you just want to believe that you're a good person. So you steal the certainty of your goodness from whatever source you need to, even from God. That's human nature, too. That's psychology. Or, in church-talk, sin.

And yet, as Isaiah says, "You shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the LORD, and a royal diadem in the hand of your God."

Isaiah, of course, was talking about the shame and humiliation the people Israel had suffered by being conquered and exiled as powerless captives. They regarded their recent captivity as shameful, like having their nakedness exposed for all to mock. Now the LORD has clothed them with garments of salvation, like bridegrooms and brides. In captivity they were naked, ugly, and dirty. Now they are clean and beautiful, to be admired by all the nations, not for themselves, but to show the redeeming power of the LORD. Isaiah just can't keep silent about this good news.

Psalm 148 raises the level of praise to include all creation, from inanimate things to all people of the earth, even their kings, to the host of heaven. Everyone and everything everywhere dancing and singing together.

This is serious "feel-good" fellowship, here, and there seem to be no phrases of exclusion. Hey, celebrate! "You shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the LORD, and a royal diadem in the hand of your God."

Inside and out, you shall feel good, you shall look good, you shall be good. Clothed in robes of righteousness.

And not second-hand righteousness, as if there were such a thing. As the apostle Paul writes to the Galatians, you shall receive adoption as children of God, sisters and brothers of Christ. The Spirit of Christ is sent into our hearts crying, "Abba!" Writing for a Greek-speaking audience, Paul translates this as "Father," but it was probably more like a nickname that a very young child would use like, "Daddy."

Now Paul is writing about whether the new Christian community, consisting of both Jews and Gentiles, should observe the whole of Jewish law and tradition, starting with the 613 laws in the Hebrew Bible. He is silent on whether Jewish Christians should continue observing the law, but he claims that forcing the Law on Gentile converts to Christianity just adds impediments to their new faith. He argues that we as Christians are not slaves but free with regard to the Law. That we are not God's slaves, but God's children. We may observe the halacha, Jewish ritual Law, if we feel called to do so, but we may not force it on new converts.

This is, mind you, a distinction between Christianity and and Islam in regard to the relationship of the believer to God. In Islam, a believer is God's "willing slave," whereas in Christianity, a person is God's child by adoption as Paul says. We are God's children to be clothed in robes of righteousness.

But the Law is not void. Jesus' earthly parents bring him to the temple, and offer sacrifice, according to the Law. Luke's text is a little vague on this, but he isn't fooling anyone who knows about Judaism. Jesus is there for his briss, his circumcision. While they are getting ready for it, his parents receive two prophecies, one from an old man, Simeon, and another from an old woman, Anna.

Jesus, they say, is God's salvation, the light for revelation to the nations and the glory of Israel. Jesus is like what Isaiah was talking about, only more so. Or maybe, since prophets speak more meaning than they can know, Jesus is indeed what Isaiah was talking about.

The light that will rescue you from yourself, that will clothe you in radiance, that will make glory shine from you.

Have you ever watched the television programs "What not to Wear" or "Tim Gunn's Guide to Style?" Have you noticed how the women become so much more alive, let so much more of their spirit shine, after they have their fashion makeover? How just looking good makes them so much happier?

Who would have thought? Change the outside, and it changes the inside. Look good, feel good. Well, we are all going to get a fashion makeover. We shall be clothed in robes of righteousness, which shall change us into who we were always meant to me, inside and out. "You shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the LORD, and a royal diadem in the hand of your God."

And just as the outside is connected to the inside - change one, you change the other - the future is connected to the present. One fine day you will be clothed in righteousness. But who's to stop you from letting a little bit of your glorious future shine from you now? The most it could possibly do is to change the world.

Merry Christmas! It goes for twelve days, all the way to Epiphany! Jump, shout, dance! And let your light so shine...

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Let Heaven and Nature Sing

Readings: Christmas Day, Proper III, Year B
Hymn: " Joy to the World"



"How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, who brings good news, who announces salvation, who says to Zion, "Your God reigns."

The writer of our Old Testament reading gave expression to the gratitude of his people for a national liberation. The exultation that his people had returned from captivity in Babylon, and that they could now rebuild their ruined capital. Who had made this possible? The Lord! The Lord had returned with his people to Zion, most likely the Temple Mount in Jerusalem where the Lord's Sanctuary had stood. This was the salvation of God. Now God's people could live in peace.

Twenty-eight centuries later, we know it was not to be. The Second Temple was built, and then destroyed by the Romans. Now the Third and Fourth Temples are a pair of mosques, the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa.

But a prophet speaks more than a prophet knows. A prophet speaks to a particular people at a particular time and place, but also to all people of all times and places. Isaiah's words thunder from age to age to us here and now, on Christmas Day. Isaiah speaks not only of salvation from captivity in Babylon, but of the great and glorious Day of the Lord, when, as our Psalmist says, the Lord is coming to judge the earth with righteousness. Not vengeance, mind you. Not "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," but all peoples before the equitable and righteous God. The God who proves his faithfulness to us and his love for us.

The God who becomes born to us as one of us. Who becomes a Son of Man. Who becomes a son to us, a brother, a friend.

As the writer of Hebrews explains, he is the reflection of God's glory and the exact imprint of God's being. And yet he is one of us. Maybe that's what it means when the Book of Genesis says we are made in the image of God. We are such beings that any one of us can bear God's imprint. Yet we are also such beings that we can become captives to our own desires, to our own errors, to our own pride, to our own sin. God has become this child to set us free from our sin. All of us who have lived or will ever live in all the world.

This morning, over two thousand years ago. Let the seas roar, let the floods clap their hands. Joy to the World! Joy as long as the world lasts, and into the world to come!

The little baby Jesus is the creating and sustaining Word of God made flesh, claims John in his gospel - the light that lights everyone who comes into the world. The light that looks back from behind your eyes. Though you may deny it, though you may doubt it, though you are in some ways a stranger even to yourself, the miracle of God's Incarnation in the infant Jesus is part of the miracle of you.

So you are a miracle, praising and giving thanks for the miracle of the Incarnation of God in Jesus, our Messiah. So what?

Twenty-three years ago, I got my car stuck in mud while trying to find a shortcut to work one cold, wet winter morning. A big, red-haired guy stopped, roped his car to mine, and pulled it onto solid ground. He told me that only a few weeks earlier, he would have passed me by, but since then, he had a "Born Again" experience. He had to stop and help me now, because he was a Christian. I was a little offended, I guess, because I was an atheist at the time. But his help was physical sign of hope in a dark time in my life.

It would take another year before I went to church, but I still think about that guy. He did Gospel.

Merry Christmas! Happy birthday, Jesus!

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