Third Sunday of Advent

 

“Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for another?”—John the Baptist asking about Jesus.

  The most striking part of today’s gospel is John’s disillusionment with Jesus embodied in his question sent by messenger to Jesus: “Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for another?”  Jesus’ reply, however, is even more striking.  Instead of simply saying, “Yes, I am he,” he asks the messenger to report back to John what he has seen:

“…the blind regain their sight,
the lame walk,
lepers are cleansed,
the deaf hear,
the dead are raised,
and the poor have the good news proclaimed to them.”

            Notice Jesus isn’t saying, “I give the blind their sight, I heal the lame,” but is directing the attention to the acts themselves as evidence of God’s presence surrounding his ministry.  The messenger is asked to witness the Kingdom of God Jesus has begun. Jesus isn’t trying to prove his divinity; he is announcing God being in their midst, calling for practice before doctrine.

            Above all other things, the Kingdom of Heaven/God is built upon acts of healing and justice as signs of God’s presence.  To find the Messiah, you need to look where the Messiah hangs out: with those who are outcasts, sick, and poor.  God’s kingdom, as Jesus proclaimed to Pilate, “is not of this world,” but what he didn’t explain was that it can be found in this world. He knew that the hardness of Pilate’s heart would prevent him from seeing God’s grace in action because, like so many, Pilate would have looked for the Messiah as a group of devoted Jews looking to establish a new political order.
            Like many of us, John finds it difficult to believe that God’s justice does not involve some new political order, a new way of organizing society, yet another manifesto that, if we interpret it correctly and follow it faithfully, is guaranteed “heaven on earth”; that is not the kingdom of Heaven. The Kingdom is built around a way of being in this world but not being of this world. 
            It is telling the reaction of the crowd who encountered Jesus in John’s place.  In the next section of the gospel, after Jesus declares, “…blessed is the one who takes no offense at me,” we see the crowd leaving and Jesus calling out to them:

“What did you expect to see?  A reed swayed by the wind?  Then what did you expect to see?  Someone dressed in fine clothing?  Those who wear fine clothing are in royal palaces.  Then why did you go out? To see a prophet?”

            Jesus then affirms John’s role as the preparer of the way while proclaiming, “The least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.” It is time to begin our journey on the way rather than stay prepared.  It is time to follow God’s trail that leads to the poor, the diseased, and the discarded humanity, who are beacons for God’s presence in our world today. When we are in the presence of these people, away from power and influence, we find the Christ Child.

Second Sunday of Advent

 

Ready the Way of the Lord

"His winnowing fan is in his hand; he will clear his threshing floor"(John the Baptist)

Today, we shift from focusing on the “end times” to the other end of our journey, preparing for the coming of the Messiah!  It is a preparation that harkens back to when John the Baptist was preparing the way by preaching repentance in the wilderness. Still, the preparation we live in today anticipates the revelation of God’s kingdom more perfectly.

            We begin our story as Christians often do with our Jewish brothers and sisters who first heard and responded to God’s revelation.  Isaiah’s text celebrates the arrival of the perfect king with three sets of distinguishing virtues: deep wisdom and understanding, might and counsel, and knowledge and fear of God—virtues of intelligence, practical ability, and piety.  What more could one ask of a leader?  Alas, this hope faded over time. 

            With the birth of Jesus, King of King and Lord of Lords, Emmanuel—God-With-Us, the kingdom was not fully realized, but Jesus’ coming set in motion the building of the kingdom.  Just as John pointed the way of Messiah, Jesus pointed the way to God’s Kingdom, and the Holy Spirit continues to guide us and provide us with hope.  John’s “preparing the way” now is transformed into our mandate to “walk the way” made by Jesus for people who were originally known as “People of the Way.”

            John’s preparation of repentance for the coming of Jesus the first time is still valid today for us who set out on the way of Christ.  Before we plot a course, we have to know where we are in relationship to our destination; that is why repentance is part of Advent.  Repentance, as the word suggests, orients us a hundred and eighty degrees from our present course; it turns us around and gets us going in the right direction. John uses the image of the winnowing fan separating the valuable wheat from the waste of the chaff.  The chaff is the lighter and unusable part of the wheat and must be separated from the valuable kernel of the wheat itself.  Often this is preached as a metaphor for God punishing the unrighteous as “chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”  While this may be valid, it is also an opportunity to see a more personal dimension to repentance. The chaff is all those things that accumulate in our lives that obscure the true wheat of Christ; the Good News.  Through the ministration of the Holy Spirit, the Breath of God, we can let go of all that is not Good News for ourselves and others. Advent is a time for looking at what we cling to that keeps us from paying attention to our destination, dulling our sense of direction and the destination.

First Sunday of Advent

 

"Stay Awake!"

 Today begins Advent, a time of preparation to receive Christ at Christmas, but it is more than referencing the past. It also connects with our hope of Christ's return and the inauguration of God's reign. Jesus proclaims in Matthew: "Therefore, stay awake!" What are we watching for? Are our heads turned heavenward, searching the skies for Jesus returning in glory? Remember the angel's advice after Christ's ascension?

And as they [his disciples] were gazing intently into the sky while He was going, behold, two men in white clothing stood beside them. They also said, "Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into the sky? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way you have watched Him go into heaven (Acts 1:11).

    

Our mission as watchers involves looking for the dwelling of Christ among us now by the power of the Holy Spirit. We need to be alert because it is often difficult to see Christ through the layers of sin that surround others that are unappealing. Perhaps we may have difficulty seeing Christ in others because we first must acknowledge Christ within ourselves as the lowly beggar, the control freak, or other undesirable.

     Let that be our beginning, then. Let us look for Christ where he is least likely to be found, both in others and in those places in our lives that need healing from sin. Let us not be afraid of venturing out into the dark or inwardly into the dark places in ourselves. Let Holy Scripture be a place to start, and let your prayer proclaim, "Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path" (Ps.110:105). On this path, we will encounter Christ in the most unexpected ways as we journey in Advent, for Christ's appearance over two thousand years ago was equally hidden and unlikely. Who would expect God among us in a backwater town, among farm animals, shepherds, and pagans, in the middle of the night?

Solemnity of Christ the King of the Universe

 

There is that famous line from Mel Brooks's movie History of the World: Part I, "It's good to be king!"  Being king brings up beautiful imagery of elaborate court ritual, absolute authority, and feasting; sounds a lot like the institutional church!   But Jesus' words to Pilate betray this image of opulence.  When asked about his kingdom, Jesus replies "My kingdom does not belong to this world" (New American Bible).  Another translation has it as "My kingdom is not of this world"(New International Version).  The sense of Jesus' reply is that his kingdom is neither the kingdom of Rome nor the kingdom envisioned by the religious authorities; both groups lose.

The Solemnity of Christ the King that embraces Jesus as king is relatively new.  It was established in 1925 to counter what the Church saw as an increasing tendency to worship human wisdom and power, which was loosely defined as modernism.  Later, positioning the solemnity at the end of the Church's liturgical year in 1969 further enhanced its standing as the summit of Christ's rule and, implicitly, the Church as Christ's kingdom.

However, the songs and imagery associated with this celebration often blunt the irony of Christ as king.  The common representation is a resurrected, non-bloody Jesus hovering (rather than being nailed) on the cross.  The image of Christ as king is ironic because he is the king with a crown of thorns a procession of humiliation, and a knightly court of cowards.  It seems as St. Paul writes in his letter to the Corinthians, "For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God."

The ironic image of Jesus as king nailed to the cross speaks of a different kind of power than the power of earthly kingdoms.  In a general audience at the Vatican, Pope Benedict XVI suggests

"The power of God's kingdom as embodied by Jesus' death isn't exclusively revealed by the resurrection, although the saving power of God is most apparent here. The magnitude of God's love for His creation in self-sacrifice shows Christ's real power as king. " 

The ultimate love is the love that sacrifices self for another. This is the real power that defines Christ's kingdom.  This is why evil can never ultimately triumph over good; evil avoids self-sacrifice.  Evil always seeks what is best for the self over and against the other.  It destroys the community and ultimately destroys itself.

On the other hand, self-sacrificing love is the ultimate Christian act where one falls into the opened arms of Christ on the cross, trusting in the power of God's ability to bring life from death.  Christ's kingdom is not of this world, but it is for this world.  Nothing is more important than conforming to this likeness of Christ as King.

Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost

     Meister Eckhart, one of the church's great mystics, famously wrote that if you only had a single prayer to pray, "Thank you" would suffice.

    This week, we continue with the general theme of prayer with the righteous Pharisee as an exemplar of how not to pray and the sinful "publican," or tax collector, as an exemplar of how to pray.  As usual, the unexpected is central to this parable.

      Jesus famously told his disciples what to pray for with the gift of the Our Father; however, he didn't answer the question directly as to how to pray.  Today’s gospel is all about how to pray.

     The Pharisee's prayer was more horizontal than vertical; his prayer was self-congratulatory for not being like his sinful neighbors. His prayer was from an island of self-righteousness. 

O God, I thank you that I am not like the rest of humanity --
greedy, dishonest, adulterous -- or even like this tax collector.
I fast twice a week, and I pay tithes on my whole income. 

    His gratitude springs from "not being like the rest of humanity," it begins in separation, focusing on his side-view of a sinner.  And the tax collector was a sinner.  Let's not make him into some noble hero.  Tax collectors were famous sellouts in Jesus' time.  They were Jews who profited from their association with the occupying Romans and were allowed to keep whatever they could collect above that required from their fellow Jews. They even had the power to have non-compliant Jews arrested.  As with most people invested with such power, the power was abused, and these folks were famously despised. 

    The Pharisees were a group of religious scholars trying to bring the average person hope by helping them live righteous lives by putting the Law into practice.  The Pharisee's pride grew from being socially, educationally, and religiously set apart from the people he was called to lead.  There is a lesson in it for me as a priest and anyone with temporal authority within the Church.  I can imagine such pride was incremental and crept in as he appropriated each compliment and praise received from the people he helped, growing like a wildfire until it consumed him in the deception that what they adored was him rather than God's gift to him.  The tax collector had no such delusions.

     The tax collector's prayer was vertical; off at a distance and prostrated, he couldn't even see or hear the Pharisee.  The tax collector's sins were too painful for him to list.  He simply prays, "Have mercy on me, a sinner!" Scripture says he went away justified; God forgave his sins not because he was righteous but because he prayed from his poverty of spirit.  The Pharisee prayed from what he considered his great possessions: his righteousness. Like the widow only putting in a mite for the Temple collection, she gives all she has.  She isn't donating a small portion of her wealth; Jesus observes in that parable that "she gave from her poverty."  We must pray from our poverty because this is our state in relation to God.  We have nothing to stand on but clay feet, but it is the same clay God formed; it is human clay, and it is the source of true humility and genuine gratitude because God has redeemed it in Christ.  

     When we pray from our poverty, we tap into the riches that God has given us.  Time and time again, God's grace seeks out the humble, the lowly, and the dispossessed.  Throughout salvation history, God visits the least regarded and comes to visit and give great comfort.  There is something in the nature of God that desires such intimacy as that of a mother caring for her sick child. We don't need to be great and notorious sinners to attract God's love; it is there before we ask. God is in love with humanity, and the less we stand human before God, the more distorted our understanding of the image of God within us.

          The Oscar Wilde quotation, "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars," comes to mind. Our prayer is always a cry for mercy when we begin with being grateful for having the vision of the stars from the gutter.

Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost

 

Ten had Faith; One had Gratitude.

            Today's reading from The Book of Kings and the Gospel of Luke highlights healing and the outsider.  In Kings, Naaman, a Syrian, is healed by Elisha as a sign of God's blessing to those outside Israel.  In Luke, of the ten healed of leprosy, it is only the Samaritan that returns to give thanks.  The Samaritan and Syrian have the dubious distinction of being least-favored, not part of the "Chosen Ones," yet God's blessing rests on them.

            In the gospel story, the ten lepers are outside the city and cry to Jesus not directly for healing but for mercy.  Such a cry reveals the connection between illness and a loss of favor with God; if you were sick, you had lost favor with God.  Jesus doesn't pray for them but simply commands them to journey to a priest to be certified as being healed.  They had to begin the journey still uncured.  It was on their way that they were healed; it was their faith that got them moving.

            Faith requires us to act as if what we proclaim has already been brought about.  This is why there is always an element of the absurd in living a life of faith.  St. Paul speaks of this in 1 Corinthians, chapter 1:

 Jews demand signs, and Greeks look for wisdom, ²³ but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.

What, then, is the point of returning to give thanks if everyone was healed?  The other nine didn’t return to a leprous state because gratitude can only be a gift, not a requirement.  The gratitude of the Samaritan was rewarded by a relationship with Christ, a personal encounter one-on-one the other nine did not establish.  The Samaritan’s gift was relationship---the ongoing and direct connection to God.

            This story also serves to highlight another reality of the Christian life.  While a Christian may have faith, faith enough even to heal, that doesn’t mean she or he has that intimacy and closeness that those whose faith is sustained by gratitude enjoy.  Gratitude is what sustains us when we are not healed, for whatever reason, when our prayers seem to go unanswered.  Gratitude is what allows us to pass the blessings of our faith to others.  The other nine were healed, but how many lived that restoration and “returned Glorifying God in a loud voice”? One.

            We are called to “Glorify God in a loud voice” by displaying our gratitude, living our life as a gift from God that we can share with the world, with the “foreigners,” the outsiders who cannot lay claim to any blessing other than the one we can give that comes from God.

Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost

 

Creating a Home for the Poor

            From Psalm 68 we get the refrain “God, in your goodness, you have made a home for the poor”.  In this simple verse, we have the profound truth of a connection between divine goodness, home and poverty converging; what is the relationship?

            In the reading from Sirach, a wisdom book, we get the admonition to conduct our affairs with humility “and you will find favor with God”.  Humility is the essential disposition of the seeker in the spiritual life, yet it can become more elusive as we regard our progress in this journey with greater satisfaction.  It is ironic that the consciousness of development is inimical to advances in the life of the spirit.  The great verse from Philippians (2:6-11)

 though he was in the form of God,

He [Jesus]did not regard equality with God something to be grasped.

Rather, he emptied himself,

taking the form of a slave,

coming in human likeness;

and found human in appearance,

he humbled himself,

becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross.

            Humility is realized through emptying, the kenosis of Philippians (κένωσις), that implies leaving room for God to act, of being in a relationship of profound trust with God.  We empty ourselves of our delusions on claims to grandeur, on entitlement to be other than who we are: creations in the likeness of God.  We become more “God-like” the more we accept ourselves as imaging God rather than imagining ourselves to be God.  Jesus’ enjoining would-be banquet guests to prefer the lowest and least seat at the table leaves open the possibility of being invited, “so that when the host comes up to you he may say, ‘My friend, move up to a higher position.’” Only the lowly may be exalted; the exalted have no place to go. Our right relationship with God is with those for whom being at the table is pure gift, and who eat and drink in a profound state of gratitude rather than a state of entitlement. But what has this to do with the poor?

            Poverty in Jesus’ time was equivalent to divine condemnation, a sign that one had fallen out of favor with God.  You could be poor in many ways. Women were poor simply for not being born male. The sick and infirm were poor because they were perpetually unclean and cast aside in many instances.  Widows who could no longer be affirmed by being associated with a male were often discarded if a male relative could not, or would not, take them in. Poverty expressed itself in so many ways in addition to the simple poverty of not having enough.  For Jesus, the poor embodied those longing for what the Kingdom represents: acceptance, love, and dignity. 

            The reason it was so difficult for the rich to enter the Kingdom had nothing to do with riches directly; it was, and is true today, that the rich life outside the milieu of vulnerability. The rich and this designation would better be rendered “well-insulated”, find hope in maintaining independence and privilege. Jesus didn’t bash someone because they were wealthy but challenged them to become poor and relinquish living “well-insulated” lives to become more fully interdependent among the human community and God.

             Today’s gospel is a mandate for kenosis among God’s people.  Instead of being known by what we have, we can become known by what we trust God to provide and live this hope joyfully in sharing the poverty of our failures, of our humanity.

             Though we may not live in gated communities physically, how often do we refuse entrance to our hearts by someone whom we deem unworthy of our love and trust?  We may not live in great castles with deep moats, but how often do others who come to us, or seem threatening to our stability and peace, encounter the moats we have spent years digging around the place in our hearts when they should be encountering a “Welcome” sign? Very few attain this level of freedom without moats or guardhouses, but by God’s grace, we can make our moats a bit easier to cross or leave a sleepy guard on duty to our gated communities.   
            The poor for whom we make a home first is for ourselves, for our humanity that God created, affirmed as being "very good" and redeemed by becoming poor---God entering our humanity.  Before we can truly welcome the poor, we have to see our poverty as human and learn to live in profound gratitude and trust, so the welcome sign truly announces the Good News.

Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost

 Doors Narrow and Wide

            The image of the narrow way, or gate, is treated in both Matthew and Luke; however, Luke’s account, the one we are reading today, provides a fuller context than Matthew’s gospel, but Matthew’s gospel is important to consider as well when trying to understand what Jesus is saying.

            In Matthew, Jesus adds: “For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. ¹⁴ But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”  In this gospel, it seems the restriction isn’t so much the size of the opening but that it's difficult to find.  They both have an image of struggle associated with salvation. The context in Luke is Jesus answering the question, “Lord, are only a few people going to be saved?” Such a question was part of a current theological concern of Jesus’ time among the Jews as to who among the Jewish people were the “chosen ones,” the remnant to be saved.

            Typical of Jesus’ style of turning questions in an unexpected direction, he responds with an answer directed towards the questioner as a person rather than to the question with an abstract answer.  Jesus uses the image of one knocking on a door and the master of the house not opening the door because he does not recognize the petitioner’s voice. What began with a question of abstraction has become personal.   Despite the petitioner's protests, who identifies himself as part of a crowd who “ate and drank” with Jesus and witnessed Jesus in the streets, this casual association was not enough.  It is rather difficult to make it through a narrow door when part of a crowd.  Again, Jesus reinforces the personal dimension of salvation; crowds aren’t saved; individuals are saved.

            The protection of membership in a particular group, the Essenes, the Pharisees or Sadducees or whatever, isn’t enough.  Salvation is recognition, personal recognition by Christ. If the master of the house did not open the door because he didn’t recognize the voice of the petitioner, we also keep our hearts closed to the voice of God who is trying to enter our hearts.  How many times has Christ stood patiently at the door of our hearts knocking, and we have kept him out?  Is it any wonder then he cannot recognize our voice as part of a crowd? The narrow door isn’t narrow because God wants to keep people out; it is narrow because salvation is realized one person at a time; it is a relationship, not a theological abstraction, that is the way to salvation.

            Finally, Jesus adds the paradox that many who consider themselves first will be last, and the ones who are least will be first.  The pride that results from considering one's salvation guaranteed through association seems to Christ, at best, suspect. All of us who enter the narrow door do it one at a time, clinging on the hem of Christ’s robe who recognizes us because we recognized him when he knocked, and we opened the door of our hearts.  Ultimately, though the door may be narrow, as the hymn reassures us, "There's a wideness in God's mercy." We approach the narrow door alone but walk through it with Christ.

Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

 

"Lord, on the day I called for help, you answered me." (Ps. 138)

     I recall one of the stories of the Desert Fathers in which a young monk asks his spiritual father, his abba, why his prayers are so ineffective; he prays but rarely gets what he asks for. The monk asks his disciple to take an old, dusty basket and bring him some water.  The disciple obliges but gets no farther than a few steps before the basket leaks the entire contents of water out, and so he must return to refill it.  He does this several more times and soon realizes the futility of using the old basket to carry water.  He returns, sullen, unable to accomplish his abba's request.  He explains his great effort to try and keep the water secure but that the basket will not hold the water.  His abba nods in agreement. He asks the disciple if he noticed anything different about the basket since he took it to the river.  The disciple says "Yes, it is now clean."  The abba says "Yes, it has been cleaned by the water passing through it while you were filling it. God answers our prayers by first purifying our hearts, not granting us our desires. Only a pure heart can say with faith, "Your will be done."
     What we usually mean by "God does not answer prayer" is "I didn't get what I asked for." For some Christians (and anyone in a fix), prayer can be little more than a spiritual ATM.  Not to discount the need to ask God for those things we need and desire, but all prayer should be with the proviso Jesus used in the Garden: "Not my will, but your will be done"(Luke 22).  Suppose Jesus, in perfect communion with the Father, humbly submitted to his Father's will when scared, anticipating a gruesome death, and feeling abandoned. How much more should we be willing to pray under the condition that it is God's will?
     In today's gospel reading from Luke, Jesus is asked how we are to pray, and Jesus follows up with the "Our Father"--a prayer not invented by Jesus but passed along from John the Baptist, who taught his disciples a prayer from the wilderness. The Our Father can be used not simply as a text for our prayer but as a small catechism on how to pray:

"Father hallowed be your name."
Prayer begins with acknowledging God as Father, or more accurately, Jesus uses the word abba---" daddy" to bring into sharp focus the intimacy with which we can approach God.  God is both supremely holy, but through Christ and the Holy Spirit, supremely accessible to us; we should begin every prayer not only with the awareness of God's holiness but with the great gratitude that we are, as St. Paul says,"heirs of God", God's children (God has no grandchildren).

"Your kingdom come."
Other gospels add "your will be done, etc..."  To first pray for God's kingdom is to honor Christ's central mission, to make the kingdom realized by his disciples, and to spread this grace to all. We must, as Thomas Merton wrote, "will the will of God"; our prayer must first raise our consciousness to seek first the Kingdom before all else.  As my spiritual father said many years ago, it is necessary "to pray for the Kingdom of God to come, not the Kingdom of Todd"!

"Give us each day our daily bread."
The "bread" is understood by biblical scholars to point to the Messianic banquet, the eschaton, the final culmination in history of the establishment of the Kingdom for all eternity.  The prayer asks for that realization to be daily; the eschaton isn't only historical, it is eternally present and accessible by grace. We should earnestly pray for this spiritually sustaining need as we realize the need for physical nourishment.

"Forgive us our sins for we forgive everyone in debt to us."
This part of the prayer isn't so much a quid pro quo as it is an admonition to be mindful of the need to avail ourselves of God's mercy so we can extend it as part of the building up the Kingdom.  We need to continue to seek God's merciful grace, not as a reward for forgiving others, but we need to seek God's grace so that we can forgive others. If we live in gratitude for God's mercy to us, forgiveness can be genuine because it is an extension of the divine forgiveness of God. If this dynamic was working perfectly, I doubt we'd need to include it in our prayer, but it isn't, and we continue to find forgiveness tough at times, so our focus ought to be seeking God's mercy for our lack of mercy towards others.  The "Jesus Prayer" is a great help: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner."  This ancient prayer, far from being self-abasing, abounds in the awareness of God's great mercy and our constant need of it.


"Do not subject us to the final test."
The Greek word used for "test" is peirasmos, which suggests the trials of the Messiah; the afflictions of the mission of Christ; it isn't suggesting that God is the source of our temptations (God never is the source of temptation--James 1:13).  We pray to be fortified in the life of trials for the sake of the Kingdom and that we might not "be subject"...or perhaps a better word would be "subjugated" to the final test---be overcome by our struggles.  Make no mistake, anyone considering confronting the world's evil would do well to begin with the evil in one's heart.  Satan rejoices in the self-righteous protester who can use an agenda of "social justice" to embitter the heart and render it lifeless in the pursuit of effectively hating one's enemies, but for a "good cause."  Real spiritual combat occurs in the recesses of one's heart, not on the street facing one's enemies.  Do you want to destroy your enemies?  Love them! Where is the enemy now?

The second part of the gospel sets up the short narrative of one who, because he was persistent in appealing to his friend, got what he needed.  So "For everyone who asks, receives; and the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened." We need persistence in prayer to cleanse our hearts like the water sifting through a dirty basket; it takes a lifetime of seeking and knocking to realize whom we sought was always with us, and the door has always been open.

Pentecost

 

The Language of the Holy Spirit

". . . they were confused because each one heard them speaking in his own language."

The first action at Pentecost had to do with the paradox of a single group of men from a particular region speaking so that others who spoke many other languages heard them in their own language.  Perhaps the message was one of universal salvation.  Scripture simply says the Spirit ". . . enabled them to proclaim. . . .  the mighty acts of God." What could be mightier than the gathering of all nations to the loving call of God?

Too often, the call one hears in one's own language can lead one to assume God's call is exclusive to him or herself, that the others couldn't have got it right because God is speaking so personally to me! But the language of the Holy Spirit, which is heard in all languages, is the language of the Cross and the Empty Tomb.  The language of the Holy Spirit is loving sacrifice and triumphing over death.

The Spirit's long embrace of love is "as a flame of fire."  This simile suggests it is a passionate, dynamic, and living presence.  Candles, "eternal flames" of remembrance, and the sanctuary lamp all mirror the reality of a living, present God.  Each of us, born like an unlit candle, becomes light with God's touch at baptism and is the sustaining presence that burns brightly in dark places where light is sorely needed.  As Jesus proclaimed, "I am the light of the world"(John. 8:12), so too we are called to live as "Children of the light"(Ephesians 5:8-19). This light, as St. Paul reminds us takes the form of the many and various gifts of the Holy Spirit; yet, 

As a body is one, though, it has many parts, and all the parts of the body, though many, are one body, so also Christ. For in one Spirit, we were all baptized into one body,
whether Jews or Greeks, slaves or free persons, and we were all given to drink of one Spirit. (1Cor.12:12-13)

And in "this one body," we work out our salvation light's gift of God.  Too often, diversity is looked upon with suspicion by the institutional church and among Christian denominations.  Instead of looking at one another with a sense of mystery and awe at the diverse workings of the Holy Spirit, we assume error because of the difference.  Very often, this difference is mistaken as disunity; what, in fact, it is is a lack of uniformity.  What living system exhibits uniformity?  When, then, is the difference error?  The Spirit is also our teacher, and what is not of God will always manifest itself as a force pulling people away from the peace, love, and hope of Christ.  St. Paul writing to the Galatians (Gal.5:22) declares: "...the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, ²³ gentlenesses, and self-control. Against such things, there is no law.”  

 In 1 Corinthians, Chapter 13, after discussing the “many gifts, one Spirit,” Paul writes elegantly of the primacy of love as evidence of the Spirit’s presence:

If I speak in the tongues^[a] of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. ² If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge. If I have a faith that can move mountains but do not have love, I am nothing. ³ If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast,^[b] but do not have love, I gain nothing....Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.¹³ And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.

Love is the language of the Holy Spirit and the sure sign of God’s dwelling and the source of our comfort, instruction, and salvation.

The Solemnity of the Ascension of Our Lord

 

Now What?

Ascension has all the makings of a story’s end.  Jesus, who has been crucified, and is now resurrected, is once again with his disciples teaching them to anticipate the arrival of the Holy Spirit. Then in a moment of great transcendent glory, departs “lifted up into the clouds”.  We have been following the story since Christmas and Jesus’ birth. Now it is only fitting that as we watch him ascend, there is a feeling of completion; the drama will certainly end with the arrival of the Holy Spirit.

In truth, the story continues, though, to the Eschaton and the righteous judgment of humanity and the end of earthly history.

The ascension completes the human ministry cycle of Jesus but begins the reign of Christ within the Church. The Kingdom is more than a representation of Christ to humanity, it continues as God’s presence among us. For Christians, the Holy Spirit gives us communion with God the Father and Son, we now “abide” with God. For non-believers, we become more than simply messengers of a doctrine, we have the potential to be Christ’s presence.

The liturgical cycle reflects this well. Most of our time is spent after Pentecost. This is the time to compare our lives with the life of Christ and his ministry.  In the Advent-Christmas cycle, we revisit God’s incredible love for humanity and the birth of Jesus. Then, in the Lent-Easter cycle, we celebrate the mystery of Jesus’ death and resurrection, ascension, and the spark of the Holy Spirit which sets the Earth ablaze with God’s Kingdom once again. The final chapter has not been written, and there is much work yet to be done.

Sixth Sunday of Easter

 

Keeping Our Word

Jesus’ farewell address has the curious phrase, “Whoever loves me will keep my word.”  We all understand how to keep our word, but how is it that Jesus is asking us to keep his word. In the Gospel of John, Jesus is the Word, in Greek, the Logos of God.  The Son in the Trinity is the Word of God; the Son proceeds from the Father as God’s Word, his expression of perfect love for all creation.  Just as words that come from us reveal ourselves to the world, so the Word (Jesus) proceeded from God the Father as a revelation of God’s true nature.

Keeping Jesus’ word is nurturing God’s promise of salvation that Jesus’ life embodied as a sign of grace, God’s great love for His creation in general, and humanity in particular. The world can know God most intimately through Jesus the Christ, though God reveals Himself in many other ways and to many other peoples; however, it is our faith that tells us God’s preeminent and perfect revelation of Himself is through Jesus.

The second part of today’s gospel anticipates the gift of the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit.  Jesus refers to the Holy Spirit as The Advocate or someone who acts on another’s behalf.  The Spirit, then, is the means by which we can keep Jesus’ word to us and God’s Word to humanity.  Jesus’ reference to peace in declaring, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give it to you.”  The world offers us a sense of peace that can only be temporary; the peace of Christ is eternal peace, but it isn’t a peace that leaves us in a type of protective spiritual bubble that inoculates us from the difficulties of life.  The Reverend A.J. Muste, a famous American clergyman who preached peace, said, "There is no way to peace. Peace is the way."  

 We stand upon the foundation of peace that allows us to face the world in all its chaos and turmoil because keeping Christ’s peace means venturing into a violent and broken world with Good News when all around us is falling apart.  William Blakes’s famous line from “The Second Coming,” “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” is the bad news of the peace the world gives.  The peace of Christ is the center that holds for eternity and extends out into the world, and draws everyone in like foundlings brought from a storm into a warm, protective, loving home. Alleluia, Christ is risen!

Fifth Sunday of Easter

 

A New Commandment?

Jesus tells his disciples that he will leave them shortly. He doesn't have a set of instructions, an organizational plan, or even a set of inspired writings. He simply gets their attention by declaring he is giving them a new commandment: "Love one another". 

It is interesting that he doesn't repeat an earlier reference to the "greatest commandment" in response to fancy rhetoric from a Pharisee to love God and neighbor.  This commandment is more to the need of the community of the faithful. Because if the community is not animated by love, love of God and love of neighbor grows out of fiction. What Christ is trying to establish is what grounds the community: love. Doctrinally, the Church is founded on Christ, which is all well and good; but it isn't a very practical statement without this "new commandment". Just as the popular phrase "believing in Jesus" isn't helpful in understanding what one must do with this belief, reciting doctrine or dogma can't substitute for love. Christianity is not merely a creed.

In our first reading, we get a sense of the heady times in the early Church. That although "it is necessary to undergo many hardships", people saw the love of Paul and Barnabas that drew them to worship Christ, which is to say, to join them on this "way".  They "opened the door of faith" by inviting them to share the journey, a journey animated by love.

It is easy to get lost in the rhetoric of Christianity and forget the commandment left us by Jesus to love one another as the very practical way of suggesting that if we are not a model of the Trinitarian love we profess, our faith is a sham. If we don't love one another and walk together sharing the hardships of being a community of faith, then the mission becomes a philosophy club with weekly rituals and catchy phrases.

Fourth Sunday of Easter

"I Know My Sheep"

If you knew God was speaking to you, it is likely you would listen. It is even more likely that you would be trembling in fear and, like countless times in the Bible, have to be encouraged not to be afraid. 

In the Gospel of John, we hear Jesus speaking as the Good Shepherd, which makes us sheep. Sheep have the reputation for being rather dull, but I suppose if you look at the course of history from the outside, say the way an alien race might see us, perhaps the sheep would come out ahead.

In the gospel reading, Jesus does not lead with a conditional statement: “If my sheep hear my voice”, he says “My sheep hear my voice”; it is a declaration. As a matter of fact, real sheep (not metaphorical ones) have been reported to be a good as people in distinguishing others in a crowd (Sheep 101.info). So why use sheep to make his point?

As in most of Jesus’ figurative statements, he uses something familiar to his audience; however, like Paul and Barnabas in the first reading, his audience was divided: some followed, and some thought he was a nut.

The Gospel of Christ isn’t a very attractive philosophy. Following is, for us, a becoming, a transformation into someone who recognizes Christ by his “voice”. Where do we hear Christ’s voice?  Most clearly, we hear the voice of Christ in those who are oppressed, who are marginalized and unjustly punished, who are poor in spirit and materially poor (the two often go together).  It is the “least of these”; but to put this phrase in context from the 25th Chapter of Matthew, the “least” are his disciples. Following Christ puts us at the end of the line, so the poor become not always those outside our community, but those inside our community as well. It is in our poverty, the ordinariness of our daily lives, that Christ speaks, and we respond.  Last week, Christ said to his disciples “Feed my sheep”; we are those sheep; we are those shepherds.

Good Friday of the Lord's Passion

 We Call this Friday Good

Good Friday is when we recall that even Jesus' closest disciples fled into the night and sought refuge away from the Roman and Temple authorities for fear that they too would be arrested. What a spectacular failure of faith.

Today is a day we move deeply into meditating on our need to tell God, like Jesus, hanging on the cross to pull off another miracle, save yourself and save us! No? We’re out of here! I’m not going to end up like that!! 

     Peter’s famous denial three times echoes Jesus’ earlier query, also three times: “Do you love me, Peter?” Peter responded then: “You know that I love you!” Now, fearful of his life, he replies “I know nothing of this man you refer to!” This person is the disciple upon whom the Church is built: Peter, called “Rock” by Jesus, crumbles into sand at the crucifixion. 

     The cross is a spectacle of human folly, failure, and faithlessness. "Yet, in spite of that", as T.S. Eliot wrote, “We call this Friday good.” Its goodness lies in God’s total submission to his love for humanity in the person of Jesus. It is the goodness inherent when we willingly suffer for another person, perhaps a stranger, or even an enemy. Today, we contemplate how we respond to being asked to suffer for another, or whether or not the possibility of suffering sends us scurrying into the night, renouncing God. 

     “How could God allow such suffering ?” many ask and imply this is the cardinal weakness of Christianity. Perhaps the better question is “Why would God be willing to enter into our world of suffering?” The mightiness of God isn’t a lifeboat dropping out of the sky for survivors floating in a tempest; it is God falling into the water next to us to show us the way to dry land. 

     God with us, “Emmanuel”, means God suffering for and with us. God does not want to “save” us as much as he intends to be with us. We want to be “saved”, just as Jesus wanted to escape suffering; it's only natural. No one suggests that to follow Jesus we should seek out pain, but rather following Jesus we will enter the suffering of a suffering world with a resounding affirmation: “Yes” to being with the poor and hopeless, the excluded, imprisoned, tortured, and sick. “Yes” to the suffering of the world, and all its messiness and dysfunction. The Cross’s affirmation is entering into the heart of the suffering world and walking with those who suffer to find God calling us into his embrace, arms stretched out on the cross, now embracing us in all of our horror and pain, failure, and humiliation. Today we come to the cross to be embraced by Jesus’ crucifixion and to be resurrected with Christ.

Palm Sunday of the Lord's Passion

 

A Passion for Humanity

Today we begin Holy Week. We see the Passion from Jesus' entry into Jerusalem to rolling the stone to seal the tomb. On Monday we rewind to six days before Passover, followed by Tuesday and Wednesday with the Passover meal and Jesus' subsequent betrayal by Judas. Holy Thursday is Jesus washing his disciple's feet and telling them "If I, therefore, the master and teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to wash one another’s feet." Good Friday, we, once again, meditate on The Cross. So today and Friday, we speak of the Lord's passion, of God's love of His creation.

Passion.  The word evokes reckless adventure, impulsive romance, gestures too big to fulfill, and the brief but intense relationship of Romeo and Juliet.  This word places Jesus in the tradition of the foolish Romantics—an itinerant preacher from the margins schooled by his radical cousin (John the Baptist) and led to make one final, dramatic gesture to get his message out: die as a martyr.  But Jesus’ death was unlike the death of many of the martyred faithful to come.  His death wasn't for a cause, but for a relationship.  God fell hopelessly in love with humanity and inserted Himself to be with His own creation to deliver this message of healing, love, and forgiveness.  God’s power isn't the power of Zeus with lightning bolts from the heavens, but God’s message is now simply “Return; I love you”.

Throughout Holy Scripture, God has struggled and seemingly failed many times, just as His people have.  It has been an on-and-off-again cosmic love story between the Creator and His creation since humanity was first created and was given a choice not to love God.  This dance between Creator and created culminated in His great and defining act of love: self-sacrifice on the cross.

Today’s gospel reading recounts this journey to the cross with Jesus as God leading the way, experiencing the pain and abandonment of His creation, the physical pain of gruesome, ignominious death, giving into the abyss of his own un-created end-all for love.  But in this remarkable journey, he found a few responding with courage: Simon of Cyrene shared some in your suffering, the women who gathered at the foot of the cross and stayed there long after the men had scattered for fear of being arrested, the felon who believed because he, of all people, responded to the suffering of an innocent man, and finally the Roman centurion who saw in this suffering man God’s love.  This is pretty intense stuff

Rather than struggling to believe, many struggle to disbelieve because God’s affirmation of his creation, of saying “yes” to the cross, is the ultimate folly for a world seeking safety over communion.  God as Jesus, crucified, dead, and buried.  Stay tuned.

Sixth Sunday of Lent

 

"Has no one condemned you?"
She replied, "No one, sir."
Then Jesus said, "Neither do I condemn you.
Go, and from now on do not sin anymore." 

The speaker in Isaiah is God, trying to redirect His people's attention from the pains of the Babylonian exile and towards a new exodus---a return home that has echoes of last week's Prodigal Son parable.  God is making a way in the desert, bringing water to barren soil, renewing life from death. Today's Old Testament from Isaiah is almost a response to Psalm 137 "By the rivers of Babylon; there we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion." God is pleading with His people to "Remember not the events of the past, the things of long ago consider not" to re-establish His relationship with them.

I think it was more than a preoccupation with a sense of loss; it was a sense that God had spoken through the prophets, especially Moses, and that is where they sought comfort and understanding.  The prophetic reality of Isaiah, however, was calling them to abandon defining themselves by their history, and look to God now and realize God is calling them to a living relationship.  Like all great prophetic literature, the past is only useful insofar as it points forward.

Today's gospel of the woman and man caught in adultery and Jesus' response is an excellent illustration of being called to the present.  They dragged the woman to the feet of Jesus in an attempt to catch him pronouncing the death penalty that was prescribed under the Holiness Code of Leviticus (20:10), but in so doing, Jesus would have been guilty under Roman Law of carrying out capital punishment, which had been banned for the Jews.  If Jesus pronounced a pardon, he would have been guilty of heresy.  Jesus, however, brilliantly escapes this trap with the legendary reply: "Let the one among you who is without sin cast the first stone".  This took the steam out of the crowd and foiled the plan of the religious leaders to trap Jesus. Alone with the woman, Jesus does not condone the sin of adultery but merely says that since she was not condemned by anyone else, so he will not condemn her.  He only admonishes her to "sin no more".

Using the Law as a tool for announcing God's condemnation of a sinner was looking back and missing the reality of God's present love and concern for humanity.  Using tradition and text as a tool of power still has its hold on religious authorities in the Christian church today.  Jesus was sent to fulfill the law in his person; text becomes the Word only when it is faithful to the living and present reality of a relationship with God in the Holy Spirit. Sin is an occasion for communal grief and prayer, not condemnation, for "we have all sinned and come short of the glory of God".  By grieving sin and loving the one who sins, we heal.  We can only love the sinner by loving ourselves first as God loves us.  Loving means not encouraging sin, but supporting the struggle.  The unrepentant sinner separates him or herself from the community, but the community still longs for a homecoming, still longs for a renewed relationship.  As a community of sinners, the best we can do is keep picking ourselves up and leaning on God's unending grace.  Our response to ourselves is Jesus' response to the woman (and equally pertinent to the man not dragged before Jesus) is go, and sin no more.  We can only hope to begin a righteous life if the journey begins with love and support.  Lent is the ideal time to make this beginning because Easter is a celebration of this resurrection.