We heard this morning in our centering prayer, Richard Feynman’s PS in his letter to his deceased wife D’Arline. Richard Feynman was a noted American physicist who worked on the atomic bomb, and he was a Noble Prize recipient in Physics. His PS —“PS Please excuse my not mailing this — but I don’t know your new address.” Death intrudes upon our lives, whether we like it or not. It is an inescapable fact of life. Everyone will die, and that includes each one of us. Feynman’s PS struck me funny the first time I read it, but it hits every person who has experienced lost and grief that they feel like Dr. Feynman. A dear one, just moments or day before alive, but the life force or spirit has moved on. Where do the spirits of deceased loved ones and friends go?
I co-wrote with a colleague Dennis Klass a book: Dead But Not Lost: Grief Narratives in Religious Traditions. It came from coffee each morning before class, where we shared our expertise in religion and the psychology of grief. The book is about the gap between the living and the dead and how people have tried to bridge that gap. First I need to tell you that Dr. Feynman was an atheist, for him there was no supernatural world for him to access his wife. But his love for deceased wife continued. Almost every human being has experienced the continued bond of love or friendship after someone has died. We all find ourselves there sometime in love, grief of love lost and closeness giving away to physical absence. I want to come back to this point shortly.
Our afterlife conceptions and theologies have been impacted by our modern cosmology, the story of the universe. Traditionally, the address was understood as God’s place as heaven, purgatory, and hell. It was this world, Earth, transitory illusory, sinful, and fragmented. The next world is real, eternal, and whole. Heaven was envisioned in sky with clouds, and that was where Jesus ascended to be with God. Hell was imagined as a place of fire underground. Heaven, hell, and purgatory were understood to be physical places until the 20th century. Because of death, in this this old model, we become cut off from the cosmos, for death separates us from time and space. God’s space is envisioned separated from the universe, above or outside of the universe. I think this is disincarnational as well as not connected to the story of the universe from the big bang on.

These afterlife images no longer hold our attention, and we are like Feynman’s dilemma of no knowing the address of his deceased wife. Where are our beloved deceased? What address can use to mail letters? Where do we find or speak to our deceased loved ones? Death is a stark physical absence. We miss our loved ones, and we would give anything to hear their voice, touch them, and be and share with them again.
My answer is simple but has a depth of unfathomable mystery as well. I look at human grief at loss of someone dear, and I find people across history and many cultures– bridging the gap between this world and the address of the departed.
For example, the Romans had feasts and picnics with the beloved dead at their tombs, a sort of Day of the Dead that Mexicans now celebrate. Other people have bridged death to access their loved ones through the dream world.
My colleague Dennis colleague Dennis Klass counseled, listened to, and remained a member of bereaved parents. Parents clung to pictures of their loved ones or some meaningful item, some wrapped the clothes of their loved one in plastic wrap to preserve the scent of their deceased. I have inscribed a Catholic Missal with words written by my deceased spouse Frank: ”You are my priest forever…” It is a linking object given to me, and I remember the occasion vividly. The missal stirs memories in myself, and I now can smile and feel his presence with that missal. We have all mementos because they are doorways to God’s space where are loved ones abide. And many folks will tell you stories how dead loved become present to them.

I want to read a section from Dead But Not Lost:
The most sense (of bridging the gap with the dead) is presence. Sometimes the presence is undifferentiated, a feeling of “something there,” but just as often the sense of presence is quite specific, as in one bereaved parent’s report, “I just knew that Jim was watching over me through all that.” Memory is a special kind of presence. Often the living recall the words or deeds of the dead as guidelines for present behavior. At other times memory is reverie in which the time becomes more plastic so that past and present can merge. Living people also maintain contact with the dead through linking objects. Being near the object evokes the dead’s sense of presence. The objects can be physical—for example, an article that belonged to the deceased—or nonmaterial—for an example, a song that deceased liked.
Presence can appear or become real in physical absence. Christ is present in the remembered ritual of breaking bread and sharing the cup, yet he is physically absent. He is simultaneously present and absent like of our beloved dead.
A clue may be located in our traditional Christian notion of the communion of the saints. When we celebrate our Sunday eucharist, our dead are with us. The living and dead come together at the table. When we intentionally or unconsciously remember our loved ones absent through death, we open a door way to Christ’s space and presence.
If our deceased loved one are with Christ, they are closer than we are to Christ. If Christ is active and present in our world, then those with them are active in some fashion in this world–through memory and the love in our hearts. Then our loved ones are present as Christ becomes present to us in the linking objects of bread and wine and the open table.
Heaven and hell have evolved into states of being, states of joy and states of suffering. All of us have experienced emotional/physical states of joy and pain. This is built in our universe. We are trained here in our worship to learn how to live in infinity. Our lives are attuned to resurrected life but also aligned with the suffering of the cross.
We are mixtures of attunement and estrangement. We live in a world of change, birth, decay, death, and rebirth. The cycles of life and the seasonal cycles of nature provide us a clue to our lives.
As a Christian person of faith, I turn to Christ’s death and resurrection. It points to change, dramatic change of Christ dying on the cross, and God resurrecting Christ from the dead. The continuity of God’s Spirit points to life and transformation. This has an impact on traditional and fundamentalist understanding of the end of the world.
Jesus ascended to God’s space. I use God’s space rather heaven. It is how Jesus phrase “on earth as it is heaven.” Jesus envisioned God’s space as interlocking space, inclusive of heaven and earth, which intersect and interlock in many ways. This sounds to me like quantum physics and a quantum universe, not above or outside the universe, but intersecting with our space and time. At the end of time, they will be one universe: God space and our universe. God’s space is not above or under the Earth or outside; God’s space co-exists quantumly with our space, whereby our universes are knitted together, which builds matter and energy into molecules, plants, other species and us together. This quantum universe preserves our consciousness after death with the possibilities envisioned by God of learning to live into infinity.
God is not out there, or above, or beyond. Jesus’ revolutionary way of speaking about God as God’s kindom is to proclaim that the kindom of God or God’s presence is within us. God’s space is where the presence of the risen Christ and our deceased abide. But they break through into our universe whenever we do something to remember them.
There are two folks whose thought impacts my notion of death.
The first is St. Augustine who wrote these words: You have us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you. We have been created and intended to abide with God in God’s space.
The second is Wendell Berry—a great American author, farmer, and poet—who lived with the land and nature for some eighty years. Diarmuid O’Murchu writes,
People who work closely with nature, especially in environmental and ecological settings, often attain a high level of spiritual awareness. Their rootedness in creation awakens in them a sensibility to the sacred, which then becomes a catalyst for spiritual or religious exploration. (O’Murchu)
Likewise, Norman Wirzba, a Duke theologian, claims, “Gardens are places where people learn that death is not simply an end to life, but a vital ingredient and partner in furthering life.”
Wendell Berry speaks from a land wisdom from his rootedness in farming and co-living with nature. He speaks with a land wisdom, how God has given us God’s breath to breath. He hearkens to the Genesis story where God took a clod of clay and breathed into the clay to shape and form the earth creature (adamah).
He notes that at the end of our lives with our final breadth, God takes that breath back into God’s self. That unique breath abides in God. Our vitality, our energy, or consciousness is taken into God’s self at our death.

It is hard to practice radical compassion. Practicing compassion requires several movements. It often, when we are distracted or fully overloaded with many stimuli, we need to pause and take a breath.

Zacchaeus has two obstacles, one is physical and the other is socio-religious. First he is short of stature, and he cannot see over the crowds. Secondly, he is an outsider, a despised tax collector, he collects taxes for the Roman occupiers. Both obstacles are related. His shortness prevents him from overlooking the heads of the crowds. But his social occupation makes it so the crowds who hate him as a national traitor will not make way for him to see Jesus coming. No one will budge and stand aside for him to see. Zacchaeus is shunned as a social pariah and outcast by those who follow a sin management religion with clear walls and boundaries to exclude. I have maintained a sin management religion or church is graceless. Such a religion is graceless when it creates scapegoated folks, stigmatizes them as sinners, and excludes them the faith community. It minimizes, at the very least, grace or overburdens grace with a sin management strategy of connecting to God. But that type of religion is graceless, and it uses shame, guilt, and exclusion to rule people. It leaves out the heart of God, unconditional love. God loves us into loving.

When Zacchaeus, tax collector, climbs a tree to secure Jesus’ attention, he catches Jesus’ gaze in one of those moments of a pause, then noticing him in the tree and waving and trying to secure his attention. He sees the man in own particularity. His attentiveness is open, non-reactive curiosity.
Jesus pays attention to his surroundings, the people in the crowd as well as the man in the tree waving and trying to get his attention. Frank Rogers, in his book, Compassion in Practice: The Way of Jesus, writes:

…we pay attention. We simply notice non-reactively and non-judgmentally what others are doing and what they look like while they are doing it. We gaze upon them contemplatively, the way of the artist would observe them or as if they were character on stage or in a film. In the same way we cultivate a radical acceptance of our interior movements, we nurture a welcoming posture and expansive hospitality toward people we are beholding. This is how Jesus gazes upon people.

People present themselves to Jesus for healing physically or for acceptance from outcast/impure status. But Jesus also pauses enough during his ministry to notice people. I hold that Jesus’ saying in Luke 6:36 is central to Jesus’ teaching and ministry: “Be compassionate as Abba God is compassionate.” He takes the time to understand and assess their social situation.

Jesus pays attention to people. He comprehends people and their behaviors in their own context. Initially, Jesus does not react, but as he understands a person social reality, he responses without judgment and compassionately. And this was a common everyday experience around—people excluded for religious reasons and prejudices. Suffering and emotionally pained individuals were not invisible. Human beings have an uncanny ability to ignore the pain of others, and we make them invisible even when a person sits on the sidewalk with a side, “Am I invisible?”

He is open to their pain and suffering. He is initially non-reactive but becomes responsive to their human situation. His responsiveness includes a loving gaze, trying to understand their social experience. He reads their emotions, their bodily messages.

Bodies and bodily actions can communicate as much as words. Bodies carry the scars and wounds of our emotional and physical struggles. Facial gestures likewise communicate our feelings and struggles.

The gospel carries numerous stories of people’s pain, their grief and oppression, and their heart-felt sorrows. Jesus breaks rules and laws only for the sake of compassion. His healings on the Sabbath or the healing of the centurion’s boy are examples. Compassion is the driving force of his ministry.

When Zacchaeus catches his attention, Jesus recognizes the man’s humanity. He sizes him up. His shortness of stature and the crowd’s reluctance to allow him through indicate that this man in a sycamore tree is a socio-religious outcast. Zacchaeus is tainted because he collects taxes for the Romans, impure Gentiles and conquerors. He is a national traitor. “Zacchaeus

What is remarkable about Jesus to me is Jesus manifests compassionate for those he meets. It propels his ministry of radical inclusiveness and unconditional love in his invitation to an open table.

Compassion is dangerous. The Dalai Lama has said, “Compassion is the radicalism of our time.” Compassion for the outside or the suffering is always counter-cultural and resists cultural norms and power structures. Compassion creates upheavals, for it challenges the core of our prejudices. And we all have been conditioned to some form of social prejudice.

Jesus invites himself: “Zacchaeus, come down quickly, for I must stay at your house.” Jesus, who invites all sorts of suspect people and sinners to the open table, invites himself into the house of known public sinner in Jericho. I want to talk about Jesus’ action here.

Two weeks ago, I preached at the Convention of the Eastern Oregon Episcopal Churches. While preaching about the Great Feast in Luke chapter 14, I talked about Jesus’ open table that tolerates no outsiders.

The open table includes the virtues of extravagant hospitality, but it overlaps with compassion, forgiveness, and unconditional love. It occurred to me that Jesus was the open table, he embodied the open table and God’s grace. It is easy for us to understand Jesus as the open table. But his invitation to the open table transforms us also into God’s open table.

Therefore, when Jesus invites himself into Zacchaeus’ home, Jesus brings God’s open table into his house. He is God’s table, he incarnates God’s compassion and unconditional grace. The radical of his invitation into Zacchaeus’ house is not unnoticed by the crowds of Jericho. He went into that sinner’s house. You hear the voice of the crowd murmuring; “Jesus has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner!” The crowd is often the ones who are scandalized Jesus’ behaviors. Compassion is God’s interruptive, and I would add, God’s liberating grace. It forces the crowd to question their religious expectations and norms.

Jesus creates the open table space within Zacchaeus’ home; he brings the sacredness of compassion, hospitality, and unconditional grace there. Zacchaeus is surprised as well. He has been ostracized, treated as dirt and a traitor by the Jewish community of Jericho. He defends himself before Jesus: “Look, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor, and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold.” Jesus accepts the tax collector as he is. He does not require him to give up his profession. Jesus declares to Zacchaeus and the crowds, “Today, salvation has come to this house.” Jesus has alleviated the outcast status of the tax collector. His “today” declaration says to Zacchaeus and the crowds; he is a part of God’s community. Compassion not only alleviates suffering, but it transforms Zacchaeus.

Once more Jesus has messed up the socio-religious lines and barriers that protect the insiders from the sinful outsiders. But the real question is “who is the outsider?” Zacchaeus is the sinner and outsider to the Jericho crowds. But I would suggest that crowds are the real outsiders because of their exclusion of God’s table. God’s hospitality messes up Zacchaeus as well as the crowds. For what they believe and practice creates social walls and barriers, and it messes up psychologically and causes suffering to the tax collector but it also messes up those who excluded him.

God’s hospitality disrupts all religious barriers that human beings build. God’s hospitality disrupts those human walls and tears them down. All walls are broken down, even the walls between human and divine. By pausing, listening, and paying attention to the pain and suffering or the deep cries of another person moves us beyond pausing and listening to acting lovingly and with care. When compassion moves us to compassionate action, we see the real beloved child of God, a sibling in need. We unite with Jesus’ compassion and God’s compassion by becoming God’s compassion to another. But grace rebounds on us, for the grace of compassionate love transforms us as well. Our self-less love delights in our compassion connects to a wounded person like Zaccaheus. We recognize his humanity as Jesus did. We bring the open table of grace and hospitality to Zaccahaeus.

From our centering prayer video this morning, we learn about the Big Bang nearly 15 billion years ago. Scientist Neil DeGrassi ends with how big he feels as he looks and connects to the night sky and realizes that his atoms were forged in the fires of the Big Bang. The scientific explanation of the cosmic story inspires wonder in him, but I want to tell a refinement of the cosmic story, full of wonder, but one that is not against science but one that not many scientists include. There is the cosmic incarnation story embedded in the story of the creation and the unfolding of the cosmos and the evolution of life on the planet Earth.

A Franciscan theologian in the 13 the century John Duns Scotus claimed that the Incarnation was the first thought of God before creation. God’s Incarnation was intended before the Big Bang. That is when God actually decided to incarnate, materialize in the universe and to expose God’s vulnerable and unconditionally inclusive love for us and everything in the universe. God self exposes God’s self in Christ’s incarnation in Jesus.

We tell the story of Christ’s incarnation with Mary’s pregnancy and the birth of Jesus. But that story goes back 15 billion year ago. In the preface poem of John’s Gospel, we read, “all things came to be through him (this Word)” (John 1:3); that the Incarnate Word became human out of love, not primarily to make up for our sin but because of the infinite and unconditional love God had for creation.
In today’s scripture of the Letter to the Colossians, the hymn declares that Christ is “the first-born of all creation” (Colossians 1:15). Early Christians sang their faith convictions that Christ is the reason for creation and has a primacy in the story of the universe. The atoms of Jesus were also forged in the fiery furnace of the Big Bang. Divinity entered the atoms forged in the Big Bang.

The story of the universe is also the story of God and the utter availability of God as the incarnate Christ. Jesus is both the Incarnate Human One and the Eternal Cosmic Christ at the same time. The incarnate Christ is God’s active power and energy in the unfolding and evolving the universe.

This morning we heard an ancient hymn of a particular community in Asia Minor. One of the creative movements in the Christian movement’s reflections on Jesus as God’s Christ is their reflection that understood Jesus as God’s prophet of Wisdom and after his resurrection as Jesus Christ as God’s incarnate Wisdom operative in creation. The Colossian hymn affirms that Christ is the firstborn the dead, “that he is in everything so he might be pre-eminent,” and “in him the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and “through him to reconcile all things, whether on earth on in heaven,” and “making peace on the cross.” Christ, “the fullness (pleroma) of God is linked to creation, heaven and earth, as well as to the fulfillment and end of that creation.

The community, from which the Colossian hymn originated, recognizes that through Christ’s death and resurrection, the transformation of creation has a specific direction intended before the Big Bang and accelerated in the fleshly incarnation of Christ in Jesus. The incarnation of God with the fleshly and material reality of the human Jesus tells us much about God’s love for us and God’s creation. And the resurrection of Christ reveals the intended completion of the universe from the Big Bang. There was a strong conviction of the post-Easter community that what happened to Jesus on Easter morning would happen to them, all life, and the entire universe.

One of my favorite theologians Karl Rahner taught me so much how God’s grace is available to us and surrounds us and is in us. Rahner writes, “When the vessel of his body (Jesus) was shattered in his death, Christ was poured over the cosmos, he became actually, in his very humanity, what he had always been in his dignity, the very center of creation.” His divine atoms spread in time past, present, and future in the whole expanding universes, in the billions if not trillions of galaxies of the universe. He was now the cosmic Christ.

In the resurrection, Jesus becomes God’s agency of transformation for a new fulfilled, divinized, and transfigured creation; he is interconnected and interincarnated with all life and the Earth and the entire infinite cosmos. Easter affects everything alive and dead, the Earth and the complex web of interrelated processes and life, and the cosmological processes of the universe, past and present, into the future. The Colossians hymn ends with the mind-expanding vision: “he is the first born from the dead, so that he might come to have a place in everything. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell…” (Col. 1:19-20) God has never stopped loving, dreaming, and creating through the Christ. God intends to reconcile all life, all the universe with the fullness of God—where God will be all in all.

In the nineteenth century, the Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins, with a deeply Franciscan mind and heart, referred to a similar notion to the Colossians’ verse: “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” For Hopkins, the “dearest freshness” in all creatures has to do with the cosmic Christ who “fills the universe in all of its parts.”

The cosmic Christ is in every human being, in every form of life, and the life processes of the Earth, and cosmic fulfillment of the universe where God is all (pleroma) in everything. The Cosmic Christ determines each creature’s being and unifies all that is, bringing differentiation and union in the universe. Christ is found in the least of my family. It includes humans, nonhuman animals, nature and the planet Earth and the whole universe. We are interconnected and deeply connected to the cosmic Christ.

My students viewed the video the Journey of the Universe, which I also aired at church one Sunday. It was produced Brian Swimme and Mary Ellen Tucker, a student of the Catholic priest, geologian, and Earth lover Thomas Berry.

Berry noted three principles operative in the journey of the universe;

 Differentiation is the primordial expression of the universe.

 Subjectivity: A capacity for interiority increases the unity of function through ever greater complexification of being.

 “Communion” of each reality of the universe has the capacity of living in communion with every other reality. The universe is a communion of subjects.

The cosmic incarnate Christ is operative in all these evolving principles. Christ is birthing God’s body, the body of Christ, in all creation through ever complexification and the directionality of evolution and cosmological processes. Christ is reconciling all into God’s fullness. When Thomas Berry speaks about the universe as a communion of subjects is speaking about the continued work of the cosmic Christ and the Holy Spirit to divinize the universe, to bring the fullness of God into all.

We no longer have a world of inherent value, no world of wonder, no untouched, unused world. We think we have understood everything. But our human actions indicate we have not. Berry says, “To wantonly destroy a living species is to silence forever a divine voice.” We have been silencing the voice of God, the incarnate Christ in suffering and groaning of the Earth.

All of creation, has been obedient to its destiny, Gerard Manley Hopkins writes, “each mortal thing does one thing and the same … myself it speaks and spells, crying ‘What I do is me, for that I came’” (When Kingfishers Catch Fire). Wouldn’t it be our last and greatest humiliation of our human arrogance of being above and exceptional that we listen more closely to Jesus’ words that the “first being last,” (Matt. 20:16). And we realize that all other creatures have obeyed their destiny unblinkingly and with trustful surrender to God. And we have not in our pride, greed, and belief in human exceptionalism over all other creatures.

The late Thomas Berry called for an “ecologically sensitive spirituality.” He writes,

The universe story is the quintessence of reality. We perceive the story. We put it in our language, the birds put it in theirs, and the trees put it in theirs. We can read the story of the Universe in the trees. Everything tells the story of the Universe. The winds tell the story, literally, not just imaginatively. The story has its imprint everywhere, and that is why it is so important to know the story. If you do not know the story, in a sense you do not know yourself; you do not know anything.

Berry argues,

Our children should be introduced to the world in which they live, to the trees and grasses, to the birds and the insects and the various animals that roam over the land, to the entire range of natural phenomena.

 In using this term “living” in speaking about a tree as a living being and in speaking about the Earth as living being, we are indicating that some of the basic aspects of life, such as the capacity for inner homeostasis amid diversity and the diversity of external conditions, are found proportionately realized both in the tree and in the comprehensive functioning of the planet.

Berry notes that we need to create an Earth language to connect to nature and the web of life. It is an ability to pay attention to nature and life as plant and nonhuman animals around. Each plant and each creature bears something of the freshness of the incarnate Christ in unique ways, not as distinct but connected together as a communion of life, united by the cosmic Christ who dwells in all creation as God’s spoken love to all of us.

Almost twenty years ago, there was book published by Leonard Swidler, Jesus was a Feminist. Jesus was neither a feminist in our contemporary meaning, nor was he a patriarch. I would place Jesus in another category, knowing very well that he broke a lot of categories. He troubled his cultural gender boundaries; for he created unsettling gender space. His companionship of empowerment or kindom created new dislocated space outside the gender categories of household. He could hardly be an advocate for traditional family values or married life or the patriarchal household. God’s companionship of empowerment was not known social space; it never was before in history. Jesus understood very well that God’s kindom was no social location, it was no-place, it was outside space yet to be created and realized. Many of his radical sayings challenged gendered household space and roles.

Think for a moment his identification with eunuchs in Matthew 19:12, proto-transgendered folks who were outside male space. Jesus’ opponents used the gender slur of “calling him a eunuch,” much like word “faggot” or “queer” was used against us in earlier times.

But like the word “queer,” Jesus took the slur of eunuch and identified with it. He had a brilliant strategy of taking a slur used against him, appropriate it, and disturb his opponents by being comfortable with it. Jesus announced that there are eunuchs for the kindom of God. To take on the label of eunuchs, Jesus further unsettles the masculine codes of his opponents. By denying the very nature of masculinity and marriage, his use of the image evokes castration anxiety. He recalls the wonderful image in Isaiah 56:4-5:

For thus says the Lord, “To the eunuchs who keep My sabbaths, And choose what pleases Me, And hold fast My covenant. To them I will give in My house and within My walls a memorial, And a name better than that of sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name which will not be cut off…
Jesus deliberately disturbs the gender codes at a primal cultural and religious level for his opponents. To be a man in his culture was to be an honorable man, who was in charge of his household and owned land, dominated his wife, servants, and children. But he created a counter-cultural space, calling male disciples to become itinerant, share the goods, and to leave their families for the mission—to be outside the patriarchal household. There was only one household, with one parent God, and we were God’s beloved children.
Jesus queered his responses and ministry against religious critics. He queered, that is interfered with, troubled the categories that were rigid and exclusive for God’s kindom. He disturbed his religious critics with a larger, more inclusive vision of God’s companionship of empowerment. Radical inclusive was new to tribal thinking or even Roman imperial notion. Both have entrenched hierarchies.

Jesus never defines any notion of queer, but his actions and message are shockingly queer. He shocks with a radical inclusive vision of God with us, and this disturbs the cultural and religious system that Jesus lives with. It imprisons people, creates hierarchy, separates insiders from outsiders, holy from unholy, sinless from sinner.

If I could have been present to Jesus during his time and engaged in conversation, I would describe to him the meaning of queer as “to disturb the world and its categories and rules with God.” And I suspect he might respond, “I am very queer.” Queer works will as interpretative window into Jesus’ ministry and message of God’s reign.

I do think Jesus delighted in creating such gender dislocation of alternative space, outside space that mess with cultural gender definitions. He was continually at odds with his dominant Jewish patriarchal culture and the Roman hyper-masculinist culture of domination and male virility. We see hypermasculine codes and misogyny because Hillary Clinton is a woman candidate. We have not progressed sufficiently on gender equality.

Jesus troubled almost everything in his culture with God. A Norwegian gay biblical scholar Halvor Moxnes, uses the word “queer.” Jesus queered the cultural codes, the gender codes, for queer challenges fixed definitions and codes of gender and cultural normality. Queer does not indicate another category, but points to an “alternative” space and dislocation, a not yet space coming into existence. It is the space of God’s reign breaking in, and that is new.
Moxnes describes the women who followed Jesus as “irregular women.”
They were most likely not bound in marriage, or they had some freedom within the relationship to leave their husbands. They were not childbearing, or had reached the stage of life when they were free because of their age. Thus, their sphere of possibilities had opened up. (Moxnes)

Women accompany Jesus; they support him financially. There is an insider group of women (Lk. 8:2-3), who provide monies and resources for Jesus and his male disciples out of their means (Lk. 8:13) Women disciples journey outside the confines of their homes, accompany him to the cross, and are the first witnesses to his resurrection. Women spatially break the cultural categories of women as respectable daughters, wives, and mothers. Women space is in the household, and Jesus women travel outside the household space into public space unaccompanied and unveiled.
These women are more than “irregular,” perhaps transgressive women who were able to follow Jesus just as his male disciples were. They are liminal, if not disrespectful women, crossing the gender-threshold into male space. Jesus notes that barren women are “blessed” (23:29), and barren women are shamed in the Jewish gender codes. He associates and empowers a Samaritan woman, with five previous husbands and living with a sixth. He does not condemn her. How many churches would condemn and ostracize her, exclude from church? He associates with prostitutes. How many clergy associate with prostitutes? Perhaps, only those clergy, who hire them for sexual service. Jesus disturbs religious categories then as he continues to queer our society with a vision of God who disturbs the world.

Luke the evangelist participates in the masculinist culture codes of Greco-Roman ideology, but he inherits from the Jesus tradition the “discipleship of equals.” There has been a storm of dispute by scholars on the reading of women in Luke’s gospel. Some scholars have claimed that Luke has a positive view of women while others maintain that he has a negative of women as leaders in the Jesus movement. For example, Luke omits the story of the outspoken Gentile woman who wins an argument with Jesus (Mk. 7:24-30). There are no call stories to discipleship for women recorded in the gospels; and they remain at the narrative fringes of the gospels. Yet Luke has to accommodate the fact that irregular women were present in the Jesus’ history. There are more women visible in Luke’s gospel, but they are generally silent. It is only we realize that these were queer women, who broke gender categories for the sake of Jesus’ message of God’s kindom. We give voice and recognize their queerness.

The story of Martha and Mary (10:38-42) has germinated a very productive and conflicting discussion on whether it supports women’s leadership role or submission to male leadership in the Jesus movement and later missionary activities of the church.

First, it is a story about hospitality. Martha is the dominant figure who welcomes Jesus into her household. There seems to be no male head of the household. Perhaps a younger brother, Lazarus, in the later story of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus in John’s gospel.

Mary is more marginalized person initially in the story. Martha appears to be extravagantly preparing a feast for Jesus while Mary has chosen to sit at the feet of Jesus listening to his teaching. She has broken female stereotypes ad assumed a male disciple position, sitting at the feet of Jesus.

But this is a story about more than hospitality. These two women are irregular women. Mary is silent and passively listening to Jesus’ instruction while Martha is fussing and distracted in her service (diakonia). The Greek used for service is diakonia, and it does not specify domestic service but “designates a commissioned spokesperson or agent, a ‘go-between’ who ministers on the behalf of God.” (Carter) Diakoinia is a loaded word for Jesus’ followers. It is the root word for deacons and deaconesses. Diakonia is the communal service at table that was an essential part of Jesus’ tablefellowship of an open table where people of all kinds joined, talked about their pain as outsiders, shared a meal with God’s presence and acceptance. Diakonia was the service of the greatest as the least, where those disciples would take on the position of the least, women and slaves in washing the feet of the guests. Deacons and deaconesses became later installed positions in Christian service.

Martha is not distracted with kitchen duties as traditionally preached but she is focused with her duties that included care for followers, teaching, and preaching. She is fussing over what she needs to do while her partner in ministry Mary is sitting at the feet of Jesus. Her problem is with what she perceives as Mary’s slackness. Martha is an overzealous disciple committed to the goal of hospitality.

I understand Martha’s role of fussing very much on Sunday morning.
Jesus’ loving reprimand is a reminder to take some time out, not be anxious, and just chill out like Mary. The work will get done. And I need to often to remind myself of Jesus’ words to chill out.

A queer reading might build on the liturgical nature of the text. Mary intrudes on male space, receiving a theological education that authorizes her leadership. She is one of those irregular women following Jesus, preparing herself as a disciple. But Martha also is a person in charge of the household, trying to ensure that hospitality is extended to all. Martha, I am sure, in the post Easter Jesus movement probably became a house church leader and presider or presbyter.

I need to point out that many of the Pauline house churches were led by women. They took serious the baptismal formula: “There is neither male nor female, Jew nor Greek, nor freed and slave in Christ.” (Gal. 3:28) The irregular women in Jesus movement took this serious, and Paul panicked in his letters to Corinth as women became prophets and leaders not only in the church households but extended that leadership into public male space. Paul panicked while Jesus enjoyed disturbing or queering cultural space of the household and the public.
Irregular women are paradigms of discipleship in Gabriel’s annunciation to Mary the mother of Jesus, Martha and Mary, the women at the tomb, and perhaps the unnamed partner of Cleopas in the encounter with the risen Jesus on the road to Emmaus, or Lydia in Acts of the Apostles. Irregular women were equal to irregular men in God’s kindom.

They became deaconesses, presbyters, and even bishops in the first and into the second century CE. And I am glad that the United Methodist Church in its western region elected its first lesbian bishop this week, Karen Oliveto.
And I rejoice that women are celebrated with men as irregular men and women dedicated to Jesus’ very queer vision that there is an equality of discipleship in his movement for God’s reign. May all churches attain the gender equality that Jesus envisioned.

In Jesus’ stories in Luke’s Gospel, the Parable of the Prodigal Son is his longest and perhaps, equally famous as the Good Samaritan Parable. There are three main characters in the parable–the youngest son, the eldest son, and the father. I ask you to take a moment and figure out with which one or ones you identify. Prodigal means lavish, extravagantly wastefully, profligate, giving something on an overly lavish scale. I suggest that each character in the story, and I would include the narrator, are all prodigal.
Let’s start with the youngest son, who asks for his inheritance from his father. A father usually does not bestow his inheritance until his dying. Then the oldest son gets two-thirds, and the remainder one third is divided up among the other brothers.
One writer, Kenneth Bailey, writes

For over fifteen years I have been asking people of all walks of life from Morocco to India and form Turkey to the Sudan about the implications of a son’s request for his inheritance while the father is still living. The answer has always been emphatically the same… the conversation turns as follows:
Has anyone ever made such a request in your village?
Never!
Could anyone ever make such a request?
Impossible.
If anyone ever did, what would happen?
His father would beat him, of course.
Why?
The request means—he wants his father to die. (Bailey/Nouwen)

The son is requesting in the parable not only for his inheritance but the right to do whatever he wishes. What the youngest son is saying: “Father, I can’t wait for you die…give me my due, right now!” His request is insulting in its request and not offering his father the cultural reverence due to him.

Another point is that the younger leaves his father’s household. It is a blatant rejection of his father. It is an insult, offensive, rejection of the social tradition. His leaving for a distant land is commonly understood of youth today wanting to see the world. But in the ancient world, this is heard as a drastic rejection of social conventions of his people and his father’s household. For Jewish listeners it indicates a rejection of his people for the impure Gentile world.

Of course, the younger son squanders his inheritance with prodigal living. How many friends did he make as long as he had some inheritance to spend? When he no longer had any monies left, he stopped existing for his newly found friends. We all know some of these fair weather friends. Such friends left him when he was in need, hungry, and certainly lonely. They were no longer there for him. It was so bad when no one gave him any food or shelter, he gave himself to a citizen of that country who sent him to feed the swine. He was so hungry that he would gladly have eaten the pods feed to them.

The younger son reached rock bottom—lonely, doing the most menial job in society and with swine—an animal considered unclean by his own people. He was lost, totally isolated, and abandoned. He has reached rock bottom. At that moment, he probably felt regrets at what he did to his father and though how secure his life was earlier in his father’s household. And his father called him, “my beloved son,” while he hugged him. Think of those moments in your life when he felt that there is nothing lower and emotionally distraught than this. I can’t sink down any further. We all been there. He thought, “How many of my father’s hired servants have bread enough, and I perish with hunger!”
The younger son rehearses what he will say to his father: “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you, and I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me like one of your hired servants.”

I am going to suggest that Jesus who told this parable and criticized for associating with sinners and unclean outcasts, lived the pain of being stigmatized as a fellow outcast. When I imagine Jesus speaking this parable to me, I also hear his in voice: “I have been there as well! I know what it is like to be there. It is a lonely place.”\

But I hear in his voice, a tinge of surprise and hope in the journey of the younger son. Jesus continues the story of everyone’s experience as well as his own.
When the young son was still a long way off, his father saw him and was moved with compassion. He ran to his son, hugged him with his arms around him and kissed.

Jesus’ description of the father is his own experience of Abba God. He remembered the words of the prophet Isaiah:

Can a mother forget her baby, at the breast, feel no pity for the child she has borne? Even if those were to forget, I shall not forget you. Look, I have engraved you on the palms on my hands. (Isaiah 49:15)

Abba God for Jesus was a maternal father, he had compassion. To have compassion means to have a womb-like love. The Hebrew word for compassion is derived from the word for “womb.” Spiritual writer Henri Nouwen writes, “What I see here is God as mother, receiving back in her own womb the one whom she made in her own image.” Remember Jesus’ own words in the sermon on the plain in Luke’s Gospel: “Be compassionate as your Abba God is compassionate!”

Now the elder son hears a commotion and discovers that his father has welcomed his own brother back into the household. He was angry and refused to go into the house. His father comes out and tenderly tries to soothe the anger of his son. The eldest son angrily says, “Lo, these many years I have been serving you; I have never transgressed your commandment at any time, and yet you never gave me a young goat; that I make merry with my friends.” Hear the resentment in the voice and tone of the eldest son. I have often found such resentment in religiously righteous people.

His father replies, “My son, you are always with me, and all I have is yours. But it was only right we should celebrate and rejoice because your brother here was dead and has come to life; he was lost and is found.”
The key to this parable of Jesus is his own words and the message that Jesus lived out, despite the harsh criticism and his death for the compassion that he extended to sinners and outsiders: “Be compassionate as Abba God is compassionate!”

Jesus is speaking two groups of people represented by both sons:

Those represented by the younger son, who rudely felt entitled to his father’s inheritance and rejected his father, and who left his country to buy friends and have a good time, spending everything.
And those represented by the eldest brother, who resented the father’s welcoming back his lost son, who is angry for doing the necessary things that will secure his father’s inheritance, who hates his brothers, and now is angry with his father for compassionate welcome back of his younger brother.

Henri Nouwen writes,

To associate and eat with people of ill repute, therefore, does not contradict his teaching about God., but does, in fact, live out this teaching in everyday life. If God forgives the sinners, then certainly those who have faith in God should do the same. If God welcomes sinners home, then certainly those who trust in God should do likewise. If is compassionate, then certainly those who love God should be compassionately as well. The God whom Jesus announces and in whose name he acts is the God of compassion, the God who offers Godself as an example and model for all human behavior. (Nouwen)

Jesus knows something of the eldest brother. Diarmuid O’Murchu in the poem for Centering prayer echoes the eldest son’s complaint.
The rules are all broken, strange words are being spoken,
That young guy called Jesus has life upside down,
We must all be inclusive –it scares me illusive,
It robs the uniqueness I too long have known.

Many of Jesus’ religious opponents criticized him: “Look he is a drunkard, he associations with sinners and tax collectors.” Jesus pokes fun of this position of his critics. His critics place himself in the position of the youngest son in the parable. Jesus is prodigal as well the youngest son. Both are sinners: But Jesus turns the world upside for the eldest brother as well and critics:
“Can you deal with God imagined as the father in this Parable? In fact, God is more prodigal in God’s love for us. God’s hospitality is so extravagant and so indulgent of us.”

One of my favorite theologians, a Jesuit Karl Rahner” “God is the prodigal that squanders himself (Godself).” Let’s apply this to Jesus’ parable. The father exceeds his younger son as a prodigal, he is true prodigal by his extravagantly lavish display of compassionate love and hospitality. The real prodigal in the story is God.

In other words, Jesus invites his hearers whether they identify with the younger brother as a sinner and outsider or the eldest son with righteous resentment at God’s mercy and forgiveness to become like the compassionate father of his parable. We are invited to model the compassionate love of the father in the parable.

As young man, I realized that no matter what I did or thought I did that was sinful, God was always there to love me. I was convinced numerous times that at the core of this universe is love, so prodigal in its unconditional love and outreach. God is the true prodigal who squanders so much love on each and every one of you. We are invited to imitate the prodigal love of God as community.

“No matter who you are or where you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here.”