The term “Truth decay” was coined by Matthew Fox in his book Creativity for addressing how religion distorts the message and experience of the gospel. Today’s gospel ends our five week exploration of Jesus’ sermon on the Bread of Life. After his teaching, Jesus notices a reticence of some of his listeners and hears some plaints of his disciples, saying, “This is a hard saying; who can understand it?’ And Jesus responds, “Does this offend you?” It offends some, and they walk away.

In John’s Gospel, in particular, Jesus not only speaks in parables as he does in the other gospels, but he speaks on a non-literal level, a symbolic level about his mission and Abba God and himself. And generally there is a lack of understanding between Jesus and his audience and his disciples. Nicodemus confuses Jesus’ message about being born again in the Spirit. He literalizes the conversation, or the Samaritan woman at the well. But she fares better than Nicodemus because she persists in her conversation with Jesus and realizes that he is talking metaphorically about “living water” and eternal life.

At the end of his sermon on the Bread of Life, Jesus has confused and offended the fundamentalists among the crowds. He has proclaimed, “I am the living bread come down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever, and the bread that I give is my flesh.”

Immediately, the fundamentalists ask, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” It is cannibalism, it violates the purity laws. This problem of literalizing the message exists equally strong with contemporary fundamentalists. Truth decay happens in the politics as we listen to candidates for the presidency, but it also occurs in religion equally. In both cases, I would this decay of truth a crisis of imagination. Literalizing Jesus’ words distorts Jesus’ message. You do not exercise your imagination in interpreting Jesus’ words and stories literally. What is so threatening about using our imaginations?

Religious fundamentalism has an endless capacity for simplification, generating uniformity and authoritarianism, and hatred of those with imagination. It encourages neither understanding of, nor sympathy for, nor an expansive appreciation for the plurality of new possibilities. It fosters unconditional belief while actively discouraging any folks to think for themselves.

Matthew Fox tells a story that a county election of a new school board in New Hampshire resulted in a majority of Christian fundamentalists. Their first decree was that no teacher in the school district could use the word “imagination” in the classroom. Fox narrates how he asked some citizens why they were afraid of the imagination, and their response makes me cringe, envisioning Church Lady from Saturday Night Live: “Satan. Satan lives in the imagination.” They insecurely identify our imaginations with evil.

Christian fundamentalists oppose fantasy-role playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons or the myriad of computer fantasy quest games. What they attempt to preserve is their own socially constructed reality as God given, and they fear any other possibilities. Fantasy-role games, however, teach people how to imagine and play with possibilities.

I feel sorry for fundamentalists who exclude their imagination because they also exclude the powers of creativity. The response of the New Hampshire fundamentalist indicates a fear-based world, where imagination might reveal new possibilities, new dreams, many interpretations of texts, and hopes for ourselves and our world. It is the place where the Holy Spirit works to generate creativity and thinking outside the box.

Fear of imagination leads to a system where thought police censor us, and authoritarianism kills the imagination and transforms mind control into a god. It is the rule of law over Spirit. I have fought my whole life against such narrow mindedness and lack of imagination. For myself, imagination is the fount of our personal creativity of the artist, the poet, the musician, the gardener, and the many ways each of you express your creativity. We co-create our lives with the Spirit. Creativity and imagination are the playground of God’s Spirit.
When l look back at my childhood and education, I credit my imagination for stretching my mind, dreaming and freeing me to imagine what Jesus means by the reign of God. I fell in love with the English romantic poets in high school, fantasy works such as Lord of the Rings, and science fiction. They helped me to imagine a world where people might be free, loving, caring for one another, establishing peace, and living with nature. I have taught courses on religion and the Lord Rings, or with Gene Roddenberry’s series, or science fiction. I found students using their imagination anconstraints d the language of science fiction and Star Wars as means to express their spirituality and finding meaning in the world.

I understood that Jesus hardly ever spoke literally, maybe with the exception of the commandment: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” That could be taken literally, or when Jesus proclaims the forgiveness of sins. And his notion of neighbor was illustrated by the parable of the Good Samaritan, Our neighbor was the stranger, and he broke the imaginative constraints of his disciples by widening the definition of neighbor to include Samaritans, “a hated group” and a Gentile.

Jesus was a brilliant storyteller, and he spoke in parable and metaphor to talk about God as Abba. The name of God was so holy that Jews would piously replace the name of God with “My Lord” (Adonai). He spoke intimately that God was Abba, “daddy”—an intimate metaphor. God was like an intimate loving daddy, and he spoke of God as the father in the Parable of the Prodigal Son. This broke with traditional orthodox Jewish piety.

But Jesus used his imagination in the creation of his parables and stories, or when he symbolically acted out God’s reign through inclusive meals, washing the feet of his disciples, or riding into Jerusalem on a donkey. Through his own creative imagination, Jesus spoke to our imaginations, to inspire an imagined world where we and God meet, where we respond with awe and wonder, where our hearts and emotions are touched by Jesus and God. Jesus’ religious imagination has poetry to enchant rather than coerce, to touch our hearts and move us to imaginative engagement and action than command blind obedience.

Matthew Fox writes, “Imagination takes us to nothingness, to emptiness, to what is not yet and therefore to hat might still be. The space of elsewhere, indeed. No wonder the prophets relied so heavily on the imagination.” Imagination allows us to imagine the elsewhere from our social conditions.

I will make two bold claims this morning about our imaginations and scripture:

First, we cannot read or listen to the gospels or scripture without imagination. Fundamentalists try their best to read the gospels literally for a sake of notion that truth is unchanging and easily measured. This style spiritualizes Jesus, makes him safe and unchallenging. It strips power from the historical ministry and message of Jesus; it flattens the message of Jesus who spoke in poetry, parable, symbol, and metaphor. He performed archetypal and symbolic acts. His storytelling and symbolic actions entertain paradox and ambiguity, and through your imagination and faith, you fill in the ambiguity gaps with your own experience. You play with his words with your imagination, and the Spirit opens new meanings to stories you have heard so often and discover unexplored or surprising meanings.

If Jesus is a poet and storyteller, one can only approach Jesus’ poetry and symbolic saying with imagination, intuition, and our emotions. When we imaginatively approach these stories of Jesus and his stories and action, we perceive multiple levels of meaning and are enrichened a range of new possibilities that we have previously missed. The living word—Jesus—is encountered through imagination and prayer.

Let me give you a technique I use when I approach the gospel. It is called “imaginative composition of place:” This is a prayer or meditative technique used in reading scripture. You enter a scriptural text by imaginatively envisioning yourself in the story as much detail as you can visualize. I would ask folks in bible study on a given text: Where are you in the gospel story? Who are you in the story? What do you see around you? Jesuit Joseph Tetlow writes about this technique: “You do not merely imagine the event as though you were watching it on film….You enter into the scene as though you were a part of it, standing warm in the temple or ankle deep in the water of the Jordan.” Try this approach to scripture; it is like entering a virtual reality or the holodeck of Star Trek.

Secondly, I want to claim that there is no possibility of faith or a heart to heart relationship with Christ or God without imagination. If you tap into your imagination, you move into a spiritual realm of faith, for heart will have little difficulty of envisioning a gospel story. Your emotions and passions are stimulated along with your imagination. The living word—Jesus—becomes alive, imaginatively connects deeply into your emotions and experiences of life. Suddenly it reveals or unveils or perhaps awakens to weaving your story and Jesus’ story into a new interwoven story in which Jesus and you participate. Imagination opens the paths of hope and love. Without imagination in prayer, we cannot travel the path of discipleship that invokes compassion, love, forgiveness, peace, hopefulness, and working for social justice and caring for the Earth and neighbor.

Jesus expresses God’s dream for us. When I say “God is incarnated in Jesus” in John’s opening prologue. Jesus is described as God’s Word (logos), and that Word was present at creation and has become enfleshed in our stories and our imagination. And the Spirit hovers over creation and continues to be in our creativity. Are not fundamentalists suppressing the Spirit and the incarnate Christ when they suppress the imagination?

The brilliant Austrian psychologist, Otto Rank, a member of Freud’s inner circle, taught that artists give through their creations a gift to God. Our many gifts of creativity originate from God, and they are places where we intimately encounter the Spirit and Christ. When we express these gifts of art and creativity, we express God’s grace. It becomes an act of generous gratitude and intimate and imaginative connect with Christ and the Spirit.

One of my favorite mystics is the 12th century Hildegard of Bingen, who wrote music, poetry as well as texts on gardening, medicine, and theology. She writes, “The Word manifests in every creature.” It was an expression of God’s greening grace—constantly creating, refreshing our imagination and inviting us to imaginatively appreciate the creative present of the Holy Spirit and Christ in our creative abilities and ability to love. God has touched our hearts through Christ and the Holy Spirit. And our art and imaginative creativity touches, in return, God’s heart.

Now you protest that you have little imagination and no artistic creativity. I will counter your protests with the claim that each of us are creative and that we artists of our lives. Let me give you examples: The two Gregories express their art in gardening; Cindy and the happy hookers with their work to knot a 170 scarfs for a women’s shelter by Christmas; Rev. Joe in his creating pyskany or decorated eggs; or Joe’s facilitating The Artist’s Way, the choral group and out musicians, our feeding program, our commitment to care for God’s creation, and all what we do personally and communally to realize God’s dream for us and all creation. My creativity comes out in ministry and my theological writings. We are all artists and poets of our lives. Tap into your imagination, live faith, and unleash the power of the Holy Spirit who colors outside the box and brings a creative play in our relationship with God.

On Pentecost, The Holy Spirit inspired Peter to quote the prophet Joel:

I will pour my Spirit on upon all flesh,
And your sons and daughters will prophesy, and your young men and women see visions,
And your old men and women shall dream dreams.
Even upon the slaves both men and women I will pour my Spirit.

Our imaginations need to be unleashed in our hearts and to be touched by the Holy Spirit.

Diarmuid O’Murchu borrows the Jesus biblical scholar John Domenic Crossan’s translation of Jesus Aramaic word, malkuta meaning kingdom as “a companionship of empowerment.” It was empowerment through mutuality and living in the presence of an unconditionally loving and forgiving God. Jesus empowered people through healing, including, forgiving, eating with them, and imagining with them a world living with God. He proclaimed that this was God’s dream for us. We often translate in our worship as ‘kindom” to capture the flavor of a movement of family of faith choice in Jesus’ use of kingdom.

The issue that Jesus confronted was his own experience of God whose love was unconditional and radically inclusive while his religion maintained a system of exclusions. This still is our problem today: a radically inclusive and loving God and an exclusive religions that try to limit access to God. We seem through history to deal with human religious leaders and groups who fall into the temptation to try to control access to God’s grace by making it exclusive.

There is a raging cultural war in Christianity not just about same-sex marriage or women’s right of reproductive choice. It crosses so many other issues social issues, including the homeless, climate change, race, undocumented immigration, peace, economic justice, AIDS, health care, and more. It lacks a compassionate heart for the stranger or for people suffering who are different from themselves. This type of exclusivist Christianity is very disturbing, for it seems to lack the passion and heart of Jesus’ message of a companionship of empowerment. It envisions an exclusive God and narrowly focused practice of Christianity that rules out so many. It seems heartless to me and lacking Christ. It is obsessed with a sin management strategy that pushes drives so many people away from God just as Jesus experienced in his ministry. It does not care if it excludes anyone who differs in the practice of their sin management Christianity.

I have heard so often from exclusivist Christians, “Have you been saved?” Their world is exclusively divided into saved and damned. But more importantly, such a statement plays on emotional insecurity of people. Such Christians play God, making a judgment who is saved and who is not. If there is ever a sin against the Holy Spirit, it is to use and make God wrathful and not loving, inclusive, unconditional in offering a share in the divine life.

The danger, confronting churches through history, is the distortion of the gospel of Jesus. Wendy Farley says it very well in her book, Gathering Those Driven Away,

Christianity moves through history carried by the impulses of domination an exclusion. It despises uppity women, no-hellers, contemplatives, queers, and thinks even less of those people outside Christianity altogether. But without their witness to the nearness and tender mercies of Emmanuel, the memory of Christ is impossibly distorted.

I grew up Catholic, a church driven and obsessed with sin management, guilt, and shame. It was hard to get to the core of the gospel as grace and not as judgment, punishment, and penance for sin. When I look back at Christian history, it makes me cringe in horror how many people have been harmed, driven away, excluded, or even killed in the name of Christ. They acted in the name of an exclusive god.

In his message of about an inclusive and loving Abba God, Jesus attempted to shift his people and religious tradition from religious exclusivity to religious inclusivity: “No one is out, everyone is in.” Those who have only known exclusion, the poor, the marginalized, the despised, and the disenfranchised. Jesus was not obsessed with sin management; he preached a gospel of grace, forgiveness, compassion, and love.

It is the upside down empowered companionship–transgressing all boundaries and tearing down walls of religious exclusion and ethnic and gender prejudice. I want to call Jesus’ life and ministry as “grace gone wild.” He preached a wild grace that could not be domesticated, controlled by anyone or any institution. It was totally under the inspiration and outside guidance of the Holy Spirit. He gathered back those people driven away and excluded from religion.

Companionship denotes community, mutuality, co-creating together and empowering one another to form a loving and hospitable community where everyone has a place at table. The meals, the healings, and parables of Jesus imagined a freedom, equality, and compassionate care. Jesus awakened the imagination of his disciples and audiences through stories and symbolic gestures—to empower the new vision of God. His parables are subversive stories to stimulate our imaginations to envision a world where we all are living with God in our midst.

Today’s gospel, Jesus flees from the crowds after the feeding by boat since they wanted to make him king. But there is no way to escape them. Thus, he instructs them in the beginning of the Bread of Life midrash or sermon. Jesus says, “I am the Bread of Life. Whoever comes to me will never hunger and whoever places his faith in me will never thirst.”

There is no room for exclusivity in his teachings and ministry, and he rejects the attempt to make him king. Jesus rejected power over people as kings or priests exercised. Power was shared, for he empowered them to act on God’s dream of inclusive love and understand that the greatest would be a slave to all.

Central to companionship of empowerment is sharing food. Jesus shared food with a wide range of people at the table or in field feeding thousands; these were meals of radical inclusiveness, marking not merely a revolutionary concept with far-reaching implications but deep expression of companionship of empowerment. Companionship is made possible when people gather around the sharing of food. Friendships are formed and deepened, love and care are reinforced. We help and serve one another in love and because of love.

Celebrating a meal of God’s grace of forgiveness and unconditional love provided occasions for healing empowerment to take place. People began to dream of a new future with God. They did not dwell on repentance, guilt, and shame.
For Jesus, the open table is a symbol of communal sharing in which nobody is ever hungry. The open table was a place of God’s wild grace operated. For Jesus, there seems to be no doubt the table always had to be open. Nobody was to be excluded. From highways and the byways all are brought into the banquet—prostitutes, sinners, tax-collectors, the outcasts and the marginalized of every type.

Anne Primavesi has noted for many churches today: “The table companionship of Jesus has lost its true bite and scandal. The salt has lost its taste.” There are so many conditions placed around the communion table: the correct words and gestures by an ordained clergy, open to baptized members of that church or denomination, correct beliefs and doctrines, correct state of purity to receive the bread of life and drink the from the cup of life. When you take mirror to other church practices of exclusion around the communion table, you upset and offend Christians. They give back justifications for their actions, just as the Pharisees justified why only the pure could sit at their tables or the priests justified who could be excluded from the Temple. Whatever justifications are used, it is still excluded. There is a wonderful line from the prophet Micah 4:6: “Beloved, I will assemble the lame and those who have been driven away.” No question the Pharisees and holiness groups in Jesus’ era would exclude the lame from their gatherings. But God goes on to say, “I will assemble those who been driven away.”

How many people have driven away from churches and from God’s communion table? Hundreds of million! Because they are insubordinate women, a different race or ethnicity, LGBT, homeless, have a fetish lifestyle, a different religion, fight against climate change and find God expressed in nature, or some other difference. Jesus’ unconditional invitation to the open table is lost within such church eucharists. Christians from another denomination or non-Christians are not welcomed at the table. The inclusive God’s table has become exclusive. The invitation of grace of the open table, subversive and radically inclusive, is no longer accessible to everyone. Insiders are welcomed, outsiders are excluded from the inclusive God.

Radical inclusion means God’s wild grace! Many clergy from exclusivist denominations or churches will give you theological excuses for their practice of limiting access. You have to be baptized first before you come to the table. Or you belong to another church. Or you don’t believe the doctrine we believe.
The only possible reason for exclusion from the communion table is when someone disrupts the safety of the sanctuary. Over the nearly eleven years as pastor, I can recall a few such individuals at this church who threatened the safety of the sanctuary or assaulted someone at service, were drunk or high, or inappropriately touched someone. I have spoken to such individuals that such behaviors violated the hospitality of the sanctuary and not acceptable. In a couple of extreme occasions, we have to ask someone to leave. Or even threaten to get a restaining order on attendee who assaulted myself and JJ during the service.

Hospitality is another form of inclusivity, but as family members we welcome folks to the dinner table of God. When you enter a home, you are welcomed to share a meal. That was my Greek grandmother’s notion of hospitality who welcomed anyone coming to her home.

Do we invite people to service and then tell them that they are not welcomed at the dinner table? As a newly ordained Catholic priest, I celebrated the eucharist at my family’s home. Do I follow Catholic legal exclusion of my Greek Orthodox grandmother from communion because she is not Catholic? Do I exclude my niece from communion because she had not made her first communion from communion? Both actions would been harmful to my family.

I invited a Hindu classmate to dinner, and she came for mass before dinner. She came to the table for communion, and I did not turn her away. Or a Japanese Buddhist friend who I also welcomed at the table for communion? He was so touched that he was baptized and became a Catholic several months later. Hospitality touches people who then decide they want to be part of God’s family because of their extravagant welcome and inclusion. I like the UCC welcome:

No matter who you are or where you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here. We believe in extravagant welcome. This is why we insist that God’s communion table is open, not closed, and God’s gift and claim in baptism are irrevocable. We advocate justice for all.

To the horror of Jewish exclusivists and Christian exclusivists, Jesus sat down, indiscriminately eating and drinking with suspect men and women who were sinful and impure. He told them that they were “beloved children of God,” already forgiven before they even asked God. He was accused of being drunkard and sinner because he associated with sinners. He did not care about sin management but making God’s grace thoroughly accessible and inclusive to all. He proclaimed a universal salvation based on a divine mercy and love like the father of the prodigal son who ran out to greet his son, hug and kiss him. God’s extravagant love exceeded the example of the father in the parable.
Just as the religious exclusivists—the fundamentalists, the Pharisees, scribes, and Temple clergy—were upset and brought charges against him, so today when we proclaim the inclusive grace and love of God many churches become upset. They have invested too much time and effort in their sin management strategies to control the faithful and become wealthy. They control access to God’s table, and I believe in my heart that is not what Jesus did during his ministry. He did not exclude Judas from the table at the last supper, nor Peter who foretold of his denials, or disciples who suspected would flee at the first sign of danger.

Jesus died because of his meals symbolized that there are no more outsiders! He died because of the people he shared an open table with. Everyone is in—irrespective of religion or any condition. Radical inclusiveness is a core value of empowered companionship with God and with one another. It is accomplished not me but by a community who is welcoming, caring, and inviting.

Christians for centuries have maintained that Jesus died for our sins. There is truth that creedal statement. He died because of human sinfulness. Human sinfulness—exclusive religion and ruthless political power—arrested, tortured, humiliated, and crucified Jesus. But Jesus died for God’s wild grace of radical inclusive love! That is why I understand the mission of our church and the Christian church as “gathering in those who have been driven away.”

US Christian religiosity exceeds any developed country. So if that is the case, we might expect that American churches would be heavily involved in charitable donations and volunteer work with the poor, the homeless, and the oppressed in the US and outside. Unfortunately, that is not true.

Johann Baptist Metz, a German theologian, who as young man fought in the Second World War. But the German holocaust of Jews and other minorities deeply impacted him as he became a priest and a theologian. He asks a very relevant question for modern Christianity, “Do we share the sufferings of others or do we just believe in this sharing, remaining under the cloak of a belief in ‘sympathy’ as apathetic as ever?” You might ask this question to different Christian churches, and you will discover some disappointing answers. And maybe a few good answers!

What Metz designates as “Bourgeois Christians,” I would term as “capitalist Christians,” who are unwilling to donate monies and volunteer time to any cause that does not agree with their central beliefs. Bourgeois Christianity fosters an individual obsession with personal sin and salvation rather than with collective concern with social suffering. It has a commitment to church doctrine rather than engagement with human suffering. Sin management has become more important than human suffering, let alone the suffering of other life from climate change.

Bourgeois Christianity fosters an individualized response, conditioned by their central doctrinal beliefs. And the sad part is that it fails to understand compassion as a viable response to global calamities. They may be willing to provide feeding the homeless and the poor with the proviso that they attend a worship service. But they often are unwilling to give anything to strangers or people suffering. While some churches, and our church, contributed to the suffering and destruction wrought Hurricane Katrina striking the New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Many did not, for New Orleans is party town of full of sinners. .

Charity and giving becomes extremely selective: Fundamentalist Christians will donate to a pastry shop that refuses to bake and sell a wedding cake for a same-sex couple, and they will refuse the pan-handler in the street by ignoring and walking on the other side. Capitalist churches will ignore human suffering from severe weather events or earthquakes or AIDS in Africa. But they will contribute to support the Uganda government legally criminalizing LGBT folks or people living with HIV. They support missionaries of hate at home and abroad, but where is God’s love or the ministry of Jesus in their charity?

At the core of capitalist Christianity is the rejection of “compassion” and ultimately, the radical inclusive ministry of Jesus. The inclusive ministry of Jesus has been distorted into a salvation religion that separates out the sheep from the goats, but they fail to hear the words of Jesus.

A lawyer asks Jesus asks the question: “What must I do inherit eternal life?” Jesus returns the question with: “What is written in the law?” asks him “The lawyer recites the verse: “You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart, and with all your soul and with all your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.” The lawyer suspects that Jesus understands neighbor differently than the traditional view that restricted neighbor to fellow Israelites and restricted by Pharisees to the pure like themselves. So he asks Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” This is question becomes the occasion of Jesus’ parable of the God Samaritan.

First, it is the only parable that takes place in a specific location: The road to Jericho. Jericho is a lush and green town. It is the Palm Springs of ancient Palestine. It was called the “City of a Thousand Palms” because the surrounding area is desert. It was a sort of oasis city. King Herod had a winter palace there. There was wilderness from the road from Jerusalem with a lot of caves, inhabited bandits and dispossessed peasants.

Jesus draws the listener into his parable, in particular, into the perspective of the wounded traveler. The passing travelers set up the expectation that one will be the neighbor. The first two are a Temple priest and a levite; both are from the same Israelite tribe, the difference is that priests trace their ancestral lineage back to Moses’ brother Aaron for the claim of priestly inheritance. Jesus uses the phrase for the priest and the levite: “upon seeing him (the wounded traveler) passed by on the other side.” The priest and the levite pass the wounded traveler. According to a verse in Leviticus, a priest may not touch a corpse without incurring contagion of impurity. The same goes for the levite who avoids the impurity and contagious situation for the sake religious ritual. Jesus’ audience are probably thinking Jesus will have some anticlerical punch line.

Never would they dream of the shocking scenario that Jesus has in store for them. “A Samaritan,” the word falls of the lips of Jesus, and his audience experiences scorn or gasp in horror. Surely this hated Samaritan will do likewise and pass on the other side of the road. Samaritans hate Jews as much as Jews hate Samaritans. Instead, the Samaritan is overcome with “compassion;” he does not pass the wounded traveler. He had compassion, literally “his heart was moved” for the man. The Samaritan provides a shock. There is no Jewish person rescuing the wounded man. The Samaritan cares for the man’s wounds with oil and wine, places him on his mount, and takes him to an inn. He instructs the innkeeper to care for him and promises to further reimburse the innkeeper for additional expenses. A hated enemy is moved with compassion for a fallen enemy and cares for his needs to nurse enough him to health. He overcomes the emotions and fears engendered by centuries of cultural prejudice to identify with the wounded traveler

Jesus queers the response with the unanticipated and subversive introduction of the compassion of the Samaritan. He challenges the lawyer on three levels: First, Jesus challenges the traditional commandment to love God and love your neighbor by indicating that the lawyer’s understanding has to be more inclusive. Secondly, when Jesus turns to the lawyer and asks him, “Which of the three proved to be the neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?” the lawyer is forced to say, “The one who showed him compassion.”

If your substitute “LBGT,” an African American, or an undocumented Hispanic worker for the certain prejudicial audiences, you capture the original shock of the parable. The Samaritan is labeled “good and a “neighbor.” Jesus shatters ethnic barriers of centuries old hatred and violence between Jews and Samaritans. Jesus chose a known and hated outsider to test his vision of radical inclusiveness, and the Samaritan becomes Jesus’ hero of radical inclusiveness and in history as “good.” And this moral lesson lives on in the number of Christian institutions that carry the name “Good Samaritan:” hospitals, nursing homes, suicide or crisis hot lines, orphanages, food pantries and care for the homeless and the vulnerable.

Diarmuid O’Murchu calls the parable of the Good Samaritan an “inclusive transgression on a truly provocative scale. Richard Kearney describes it as

Love of the stranger as infinitely other! And wonder at the very strangeness of it all…the spiritual epiphany of welcoming, the poetic shudder of imagining, the ethical act of transfiguring our world by caring for the stranger as watch the world become sacred.

Let me rehearse the conclusions of the parable: The priest and Levite striving to be faithful to their religion—the same religion as Jesus—walk on the other side of the road to make sure that they do become ritually contaminated. Jesus chooses a known and hated outsider to test his vision of radical inclusiveness. Other examples of Jesus’ encounters with Samaritans is the Samaritan woman at the well whose response to her encounter goes back to her village to tell people of her graced encounter with Jesus and the ten lepers healed healed by Jesus, in which the only healed leper to return and thank Jesus was a Samaritan. Jesus knew first hand what it meant to be an outsider, growing up with up with the suspicions that he was illegitimate and denied access to his village synagogue.

Johan Metz, who wrestled with Christian complicity in holocaust in post-war Germany, asks “Do we share the sufferings of others or do we just believe in this sharing, remaining under the cloak of a belief in ‘sympathy” as apathetic as ever?” In other words, do we do something about human suffering or just like the idea of sympathy and do nothing?

Many capitalist Christians cannot be blinded to travelers on the road to Jericho and let their beliefs and doctrines prevent them for caring and showing compassion. They forget this parable of Jesus, or take a narrow, exclusive notion of neighbor. I saw a video of town meeting in Sarasota, where a woman, who is probably identified as a Christian, gets up and makes an outrageous claim that the “homeless are not human.” I have heard similar claims in the public media on driving the homeless away from our neighborhoods, denying social programs such as social security and healthcare, food stamps. Let’s make cuts to social welfare programs.

So many Christians have been obsessed with sin and sin management, they accept that humanity is sinful and not deserving the grace of God. This sin management view is the distortion embedded in the thinking and practice of many Christians, like the priest and levite, that my purity status is more important and religious ritual as well. Christian obsession with sin management is destructive because it promotes exclusiveness, violence, and detaches us from the stranger who is our neighbor. My personal salvation is more important than feeding or caring for the poor.

What matters to God is not human sinfulness but human suffering and the failure to respond to such suffering! There are so many people wounded on the side of the road to Jericho. The road to Jericho is everywhere. Do we see as the Samaritan sees with the compassionate heart? Is the vulernerable and the poor truly our neighbor?

Metz speaks about the dangerous memories of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection “Where is God?” There is clear cut answers found in the gospels: God is on the side of the suffering, the poor and vulnerable. Remember Jesus;’ words: “When you do this to the least of my family you do to me.”
The dangerous memories of the gospels are pivotal for our response to human suffering. What do we do when we remember Christ’s word: “Go and do likewise.” We must remove the blinders of whatever privileges we have and see as the Samaritan sees. We engage face to face human suffering and not walk away, but care for the wounds of the stranger half dead and care for the suffering stranger. We move from being strangers to neighbors.

Martin Luther King Jr. made this prophetic observation in New York City in April 1967:

On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come and see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not constantly be beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar, it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars need restructuring.

Only compassion for strangers teach us the depth of the radical inclusive love of God’s kindom. Do as Jesus instructed: “Go and do likewise.”

In his book, The Wrong Messiah, Nick Page writes,

The story of Jesus’ birth, therefore, is not one of exclusion, but inclusion.. Joseph’s relatives made a place for Jesus in the heart of their household. They did not shun Mary, even though the status would have been suspect, and even shameful (carrying an illegitimate child): they brought her inside. They made room for Jesus in the heart of a peasant’s home.

Right from the pregnancy of Mary, God’s inclusivity is at work, and Jesus is born as the inclusive love of God for all into an exclusive world.
The religious institutions of Jesus’ day seem no better than our own–both then and now. Stigma is a social-identity devaluation of a person or group of people due to a characteristic mark or feature, whether it is real or imagined. Often the imagined stigma marker is as harmful as any real characteristic. Stigma markers or stereotypes can be transferred from one group persecuted to another. I found this to be true when fundamentalist Christians took stereotypes used against Jewish folks 1920s and 30s and applied them to gay men in the 1990s.

Two biblical scholars Jerome Neyrey and Bruce Malina have studied the labeling of Jesus with sorcery and demonic accusations by his religious critics. Jesus’ opponents accused him of performing or driving out evil spirits by demonic power: They claim that Jesus “is possessed by Beelzebul! By the prince of demons he is driving out demons.”( Mark 3:22) Neyrey and Malina in their book–, Calling Jesus Names: The Social Value of Labels in Matthew, write.

But a criminal or sinner is a person judged “out of place” and socially transposed into a new and negative place, often permanently. Thus, socially negative and unacceptable people are subject to public transformations of their personhood, the result of which is the creation of a special person who cannot be trusted to live within the purity arrangements shared by the group. Such people do not live by the rules of society. The rule-breaker is thus an “outsider,” qualitatively different from others in the group. This definition of the deviant person and his or her outsider status takes place by means of a process of labeling.

There is no question that Jesus’ religious critics saw Jesus as a rule-breaker, and even the Temple priests accused him of blasphemy. Religious institutions and people then and now use labeling as social degradation rituals, or negative stereotypes, to reject, exclude, and isolate “unwanted people” from themselves. Most religions have social mechanisms how to exclude people that are polluted, impure, or sinners. There are always people excluded if you have a religious attitude that some people are more holy than others.
Let me tackle the stories this morning and push further my observations about stigma creating religious communities.

Today’s gospel is a writing technique used by Mark. It is been called a “Marcan sandwich” by biblical scholars. It takes one story and inserts another story within the original story: Here the story of Jesus resurrecting Jairus’ daughter and the women with the gynecological discharge.

The two stories are linked together by the number 12. 12 is the age in which the young girl, the unmanned daughter of Jairus, biologically has reached the age where menstrual cycle begins and is considered ready to be engaged and be married. 12 is the number of years the older woman has been afflicted with the continuous flow of blood. Both women are dead, one dead to the community because of her impurity and the other physically dead. Were these two stories linked together by Mark because of the number 12? Or because one was symbolically dead and the other was physically dead? Probably! But there are symbolic issues here we need to unpack. These stories may be historical, but I think that they are richer in meaning if we understand them as parables. The two stories are deeply interwoven with these two women.

First, in Judaism, a woman is considered unclean during her menstrual period. Now the older woman has the added stigma and shame because her gynecological disorder causes constant bleeding. A woman could not attend the synagogue or enjoy normal sexual or social relations during her period, and with the continuous discharge of blood, people avoided her.

Fundamentalists would have judged her unclean and a sinner. Ancient Jewish physicians gave up on her; neighbors and family members would have followed religious tradition, asking what sin did she do to deserve this punishment? We can safely assume that she probably suffered from depression as well.
She heard about Jesus as a renowned healer. She seeks him out, breaking the boundaries of entering a crowd of people, and she creeps up to Jesus in the crowd, and her inner voice says, “If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.”

The woman initiates the physical contact that drains power from Jesus. She creeps within the crowd stealthily and does not want to draw attention to herself. Her covert approach to Jesus indicates her recognition of being a social outcast and looked down as a sinner.

What made her touch Jesus’ cloak? Diarmuid O’Murchu offers a possible explanation: “Has the New Reign of God caught up with her to a degree that she does not give a damn about rules and regulations? She desires one thing, and—worthy or unworthy—she is going wholeheartedly for it.”

I think she is caught up with God’s grace. She is tired of being looked down as a sinner and cut off from the community. She boldly initiates the touch. She is empowered to become visible in a religious world that made her invisible.
Jesus senses a drain of divine energy. He turns around and looks directly at her, and with a gaze of realization of her illness and exclusion, his gaze turns into compassion. It may be the first time in years that anyone has looked her in the eyes. Something has happened; it is not only a healing of her discharge but a transformation at the depth of her being. Her empowered action has transformed her image of herself. She has moved from a disempowered outsider to an empowered woman stepping outside the rules and regulations that bound her. I want to point out that Jesus now oozes out divine power as the woman’s flow of blood ceases. It is as I they traded places. Divine energy and blood are considered life force in this culture. His flow of divine energy ends her flow of blood.

I want to speak about an empowered African woman who was stigmatized by the church:

At the World AIDS Day celebration in the Roman Catholic Cathedral in Bujumbura in 1995, the priest said, in the course of his sermon, “We must have compassion for people with AIDS because they have sinned and because they are suffering for it now”. At that point something propelled Jeanne Gapiya to rise from her pew and walk up to the front of the church. “I have HIV”, she declared, “and I am a faithful wife. Who are you to say that I have sinned, or that you have not? We are all sinners, which is just as well, because it is for us that Jesus came.”

The priest condemns the sin while superficially encouraging compassion. The church and priest have stigmatized the woman for living with AIDS. But the African woman, like the women with the hemorrhage, acts up against his statement, affirming she is both HIV and a faithful wife. She asserts an inclusive claim of all of us as sinners and making it clear that she became HIV not because of her adultery or promiscuous sex. It was her husband who never disclosed his HIV status and infected her the other covert wives he has.

Now let me unpack this further. When Rev. Joe returned from Melbourne at the World AIDS Conference, he reported that AIDS faith activists have pointed to religious stigma as the number one cause of the spread of HIV/AIDS globally. I am working with Joe on a book chapter on AIDS and theology, I explored the observations of the religious stigma and AIDS.

2/3 of the twenty-eight million people living with HIV/AIDS in Africa belong to Christian churches, and the majority of cases are married women. If you are African girl, you may be safer single than married. You see churches brought their European and American sin management practices and theologies to Africa and fought against polygyny (many wives for one man) and forced monogamy upon African tribal populations. Polygyny went underground, and men continued to have several wives in different towns and locations. And they seldom told their wife about other wives. If a husband became HIV+, he also did not share his sero-status. Or there is prevalent myth of being cured HIV/AIDS, by having intercourse with a young virgin. Many teenage girls die slightly older than the daughter of Jairus. This is the conditions for a massive pandemic of AIDS.

The second destructive Christian policy was identifying AIDS with gay men, sex workers and sin. The Conference of African Catholic Bishops have just declared gays and lesbians “enemies of humanity” in response to the inroads that marriage equality has made globally. Sex workers are habitually condemned by churches when Jesus had a number of prostitutes in his movement. The churches’ narrow view of human sexuality contributes to the spread of HIV.

Sin management theologies of various churches dominated in African churches, and they have made it dangerous to disclose your HIV status in a church because you were ostracized and excluded just as the women with the continuous blood discharge. Blood status of the woman with the flow of blood and blood status of HIV/AIDS both result in exclusion from the community. May young girls in Africa like the daughter of Jairus and married women have sero-converted to HIV/AIDS when churches refuse to talk about human sexuality, HIV transmission, and prevention except abstinence. Abstinence does not work in our culture, and it does not work in a culture where women and young girls do not have control over their own bodies.

African feminist theologians have criticized the churched for ignoring any attempts to fight HIV/AIDS stigma, but it has promoted stigma with the notion that HIV/AIDS is God’s punishment for sin. This is the same strategy that most of the churches practiced against gay men in the US in the first two decades of the AIDS pandemic.

Where did the African churches learn these theologies of sin management and stigmatizing AIDS as sin? From the US and European churches that established missions to Africa. For example, Ugandan government’s attempt to impose the death penalty on gay men originated from such churches as IHOP, International House of Prayer, and its missionaries to Uganda.

When you are excluded from church and from tribal life in Africa because of HIV/AIDS, you are socially dead. And you are cut off and impoverished further with little opportunities for work. And you die. And what happens to your children? What happens when your husband dies and you are too weak to work and bring in food for your children. Where is the church? Absent and separated from the reality of suffering from HIV/AIDS.

I wrote in my first book:

A leather jacket of HIV+ individual reads, “God is HIV+.” The inscription asserts God’s solidarity with HIV-infected people, their marginalization, and suffering. Queer Christians witness in their in their love-making, “To reject people living with HIV illness is to reject God.”….

In the 1990s, I and a growing number of churches in America realized that Christ was living with HIV/AIDS and that our churches had HIV/AIDS. We acted up when churches called us sinners. Many were shunned and excluded from churches because they were gay men living with AIDS. Where was Christ? Certainly not with the churches who showed no compassion.

African feminist theologians are acting up and are claiming the Compassionate Christ. I want to read you a quotation from Dr. Muse Dube, a biblical scholar who gave teaching in the university to devote her time as activist to fight AIDS in Africa:

We, the church of this era, will ask, “When Lord did we see you sick with AIDS, stigmatized, isolated and rejected, and did not visit or welcome you in our homes? When Lord did we see you hungry, naked and thirsty and did not feed you, clothe you and give you water? When were you a powerless woman, a widow and an orphan and we did not come to your rescue?” The Lord will say to us, “Truly, I tell you, as long as you did not do it to one of the least of these members of my family, you did not do it to me.”

I say Amen to her and all those Christian feminists who act up and will not tolerate the sin management strategies of church that silence women and others about the HIV-status. It is not safe to say you are HIV+ or living with AIDS, you shunned by your community and by your church.

Dube repeats the words of the compassionate Christ in the gospel. Jesus broke all sorts of boundaries because he believed that there were no outsiders anymore in the reign of God. Nobody is outsider, everyone is to be considered included. Inclusivity is the ultimate message of God’s grace: that is, Christ is in everyone. Gospel based compassion tolerates no outsiders. As churches in the US began to hear the gospel in the lives of gay men living with AIDS, they realized the harm committed by themselves and other churches towards people living with HIV/AIDS because they imposed the stigmas of sinner, unclean, and outcast. They abandoned the moral theologies and codes as they saw the face of Christ in folks dying and the love they shared with companions and friends. Compassion cries out to look with the eyes of Christ and see those suffering and labeled sinner and see Christ. Compassion, and the compassion Jesus invited his disciples to practice, included hospitality and radical inclusiveness into the community.

The prophetic edge, and the most dangerous memory of Jesus for us today, is radical inclusivity. Gospel inclusivity tolerates no outsiders. This is difficult to practice. My prayer for African-feminist theologians is continue the path of empowered activism, to speak up against patriarch sin management strategies of churches and be as bold, to ACT UP and break the rules, no longer remain silent and exercise their power to speak against the prime cause of the spread of HIV/AIDS—the African churches.

I want to remind of the final words of Rev. Joe Shore-Goss sermon when he came back from the World AIDS Conference:

The future of HIV reduction and a better world is if we can teach everyone that there is no need for boundaries. If the world could only say no matter who you are or where you are on life’s journey you are welcome here. Then to look into our neighbors eyes, the most marginalized, the most scared and frail and say “what can I do to help you make your life better.” For these lessons, these lessons of love and acceptance can only come from within their own culture and their own community; otherwise, it is just the west imposing their liberal beliefs upon them.

But his words are not only for other areas afflicted with HIV/AIDS, they are for us if we are to prevent ever again what happened to gay men with HIV/AIDS or any other group stigmatized as outsider, branded as sinner, and excluded  The Compassion of Christ lives in you!

I wrote the following words in 2010 and added an addendum to the message:

We are now in June, and June commemorates the Stonewall Rebellion.  Prior to Stonewall, gay men dressed up in suits and lesbian women in conservative dresses on the Fourth of July to parade around the Liberty Bell in silence. They hoped for social acceptance.

On June 27^th 1969, Stonewall happened. Transsexual activist Sylvia Rivera wrote:

The cops, they just panicked. They had no backup. They didn’t expect this retaliation. But they should have. People were very angry for so long… I saw other people hurt by the police. There was one drag queen, I don’t what she said, but they beat her into a bloody pulp…They called us animals. We were the lowest scum of the Earth.

I met Sylvia Rivera at a demonstration at Soul Force demonstration in front of the Catholic Basilica in Washington, D.C.  No gay men were willing to part of the transgendered affinity group. I, an MCC clergy student from New York City, and a seventy-two year old lesbian joined the transgendered affinity group.  I honor Sylvia, and our own church member Joe Armetta who was there in his blue jumpsuit at the night of the Stonewall raid by the police, and the rest of the heroes and heroines who said “Enough!”

Stonewall was the loud battle cry heard around the world. It was the queer Exodus event when we stood up and fought for human rights and dignity.  The story of Stonewall is our Passover celebration—remembering that LGBT folks would no longer docilely be harassed, beaten, and murdered.  That clarion call was not only heard throughout the major cities of the United States but all over the world. Stonewall is now celebrated in many countries on all six continents.  Some celebrations in countries are still harassed and threatened with state violence sanctioned by religion.

Now voice today June 2015:

But as we anticipate a historic victory from the Supreme Court that has been decades in the making and that will allow marriage equality in all fifty states. I want to quote a prophetic book: Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution  (2013).  Hear the final words of Linda Hirshman from her book.

No one said better than Niccolo Machiavelli, “It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.”  As this most marginalized group of Americans fought for full inclusion in the social order, they didn’t only change their world; they changed everyone’s world. Because they were different, the makers of the gay revolution could not take the easy path of showing they were acceptable citizens under an old order. They had to change the meaning of the core concepts of citizenship—morality, sanity, and loyalty—itself.

Although it’s always hard to say exactly when a new order comes in, from the long view of history, gay men and women made a new world. And we all living in it.

The Spirit of rebellion is the Spirit of Freedom. It is the Holy Spirit who works in peoples across this planet as they struggle for the basic human rights given to us by our Creator God.  Let us celebrate what freedom we do have, pray for those without much freedom as we have currently gained, and fight for the day when all human beings are equal not only before God but also before all governments.

God bless our LGBT ancestors who started us to the path of revolution and victory. God bless you as we all anticipate a joyous pride month with another victory not only for us but humanity. 

Jesus preached the kingdom of God. In today’s gospel, we catch a window into the subversiveness of Jesus. He is most anti-king king. When Jesus preached the kingdom of God, his audience would have images and association kingship—such as Kings as David from Jewish history or immediately Herod Antipater or Tiberius Caesar. People would have imagined Jesus’ kingdom with notions of royalty, power, luxury, and privilege. The Emperor Constantine declared Jesus Christ the Pantocrator (Ruler of the entire Universe), hoping that Christians would understand his own title Emperor as mirroring the imperial rule of Christ. For centuries after, Christians worshipped Christ the King and eventually set aside the last Sunday before the start of Advent to honor the Christ the King.
Some of Jesus’ disciples and later Christians missed the intentions of what Jesus meant by God’s kingdom. David Boulton in his book, Who On Earth is Jesus?, writes,

The historical Jesus was a first-century Jew in a Hellenized Roman empire, immersed in a monotheistic Judaism…. The kingdom he preached and promised was a kingdom conceived in with the particular, distinctive religious and social culture, expressed (and subtly modified) in the language of the culture. His glimpse of an alternative reality, his envisioned paradise regained, was a kingdom; the king was God. There was no other language available to a Galilean peasant-artisan unacquainted with Philo and Plato….

.Some of Jesus’ disciples literalized his message about God’s kingdom, and even his Jewish opponents and the Romans literalized their understanding of God’s kingdom. All those followers of imperial Jesus literalized his kingdom message to support an imperial Christianity, often violent, prone to military aggression and spiritual conquest, and globalization.

But as I have said so often, Jesus was not a literalist, he spoke in metaphor and parable, fully of irony and paradox, often with a flair what we might call “camp” with a critical, prophetic or queer edge. He preached God’s dream for us, a world order that was inclusive, without hierarchy, without violence; sharing of goods, wealth, and food; filled with love. He understood that this alternative reality that he called kingdom was to understand that we lived as if God was really part of our world, living in our midst. His expectation was that we lived with love for neighbor and enemy alike, forgiveness extended beyond what we could imagine, practicing compassion as God’s compassion for us, and peace-making. It was a place where the first were last, and the last and least were the most important. The only human competition was that his disciples would compete to be the least in humility like a child and utmost generous of their service, time, and whatever they would share.

Many Christians for ages have interpreted “kingdom of God” with a patriarchal lens or male conception of kingdom and power fused together. Christians like Constantine and the succession of Christian leaders have elevated Jesus to King of the Universe, the imperial Christ. They used it to divinize their kingship, papacy, or leadership. Or most recently, kingdom is used to spiritualize the gospel. In other words, Jesus’ kingdom message is not about political reality but spiritual and heavenly reality, that is, the world to come in heaven. This has allowed Christians to support that status quo and ignore the poor.
Kingdom is certainly a political and social symbol used by Jesus. It has personal and spiritual dimensions. When Jesus, however, spoke the Aramaic malkuta dismayya or “kingdom of God,” it has the meaning of God’s ruling or predominant actions. Diarmuid O’Murchu translates it into the English idiom, “empowerment,” but qualifies it even further with “empowerment through mutuality.” The famous Jesus Dominic Crossan scholar, with whom I spent time at CSUN last Tuesday, translates it “companionship of empowerment.” Now these translations by “empowerment through mutuality” or “companionship of empowerment” open up new images of God not as patriarchal ruler and judge but co-creator in our midst—Emmanuel, God with us.

For Jesus, God was king unlike all kings and rulers. God’s rule was “queer,” meaning “not fitting in, strange, at odds with, out of place, disruptive, revolutionary, dangerous, outside the box, or my word “mischievous.” It is a topsy-turvy non-ruling but luring us through unconditional gift and love.
The Temple high priest and his colleagues brought Jesus before Pilate with the charges: “He perverted the nation.” Here “perverted” means inverting religious values, hierarchies, breaking all sorts of purity codes and religious laws for the sake of compassion. Jesus was always out of place, a peasant was meant to be quiet and subservient to the rulers of the Temple.

Let’s examine today’s gospel a little more carefully. Unfortunately the distribution of palms on Palm Sunday has become a spiritual blessing for us today. Many Christians tie up their palms into a bow and hang the palm crosses in their homes. And I am not opposed to anyone doing so. But Palm Sunday has a deeper meaning than just the palms. Jesus rides on donkey into Jerusalem accompanied by a ragtag group of male and female disciples.

Jesus enters Jerusalem or to use biblical scholar Warren Carter’s phrase “making an Ass of Rome:” The conflict between Jesus and Pilate begins the day that Jesus enters in Jerusalem on the back of a donkey and praised as the “Son of David.”

Roman entrances into city were always triumphant. No red carpets, but soldiers trumpeting, followed by cadence war drums sounding the entrance of the conquering hero. In this case, it was Pilate who represented the triumphant Roman Empire and Emperor Tiberius. Days before rode on a war horse from the sea resort of Caesarea followed by marching his Roman legionnaires with standards, Pilate entered Jerusalem as conqueror and made it clear to the populace that the Rome in charge of their city and their lives. They paraded and displayed extravagantly the power of Tiberius Caesar and Rome. It communicates Roman greatness and military power, reminding the crowds that they were conquered by the powerful Roman legions—the greatest power in the world blessed by the Gods. Augustine was the true Son of god, the god Apollo, and the savior of the world.

But Jesus intends to literally make an ass of Pilate and Rome. He choreographs his own dramatic and symbolic entrance into Jerusalem. He adopts some of the Roman trappings but queers them or rather mischievously reframes them as symbolic challenges. His entrance into Jerusalem reminds the Jews of their religious history in which God enters the holy city to serve, not dominate. He chooses an ass, not a war horse in which Pilate rode into the city. He uses dramatic parody of the Roman triumphant procession to point out to his disciples and the people. Matthew remembers the line from the prophet Zechariah: “Tell the daughter of Zion, your king is coming on an ass”(9:9). The rest of the verse states that your king comes triumphant and victorious, and humble riding an ass.
Jesus is recognized as a king, or more likely anti-king. He is teaching humility, non-violence, and peace-making, empowerment through mutuality and service, not conquest and domination. God’s community does not consist of military domination but is constituted by a new a kinship as children of God—not be wealth, prestige, gender, or ethnicity. It is constituted by God as Abba, parent in love with all and equally.

Jesus lives what he teaches—as meek and lowly in heart. He identifies with the suffering poor, the throw-away people, the powerless and humiliated—those whose spirit is crushed by Roman military. He parodies Rome’s imperial power and Pilate with God’s rule that promotes unconditional love, humility, and mutual service and respect for the least and the expendable..

Another example of this last week of Jesus’ life that reveals God’s actions among people as empowering mutual companionship is the Last Supper. Companionship is created when we share food together. Companionship was based on exclusion. As side note, how many Christian tables have exclusively functioned like the Temple or the Pharisaic tablefellowships.

There is no question that for Jesus the table had to be open and inclusive. I cannot accept the readings of the Last Supper as an exclusive meal. It goes against the very nature of who Jesus was. People from the highways and byways were to be invited into the meals. It was populated with diversity: outcasts, prostitutes, abominable people, tax collectors, those folks that terrify Pharisees and Christians alike. He did not moralize, berate them how to change their lives, or threaten them that could not share the table if they did not change their ways.

Jesus disrupted their normal behaviors in an oppressed world. He would assist them to realize the joyous presence of Abba God to undo their defensive selves, centered on themselves and their own survival. In Christianity’s Dangerous Memory, Diarmuid O’Murchu describes Jesus’ parables, healings, and ministry. It is equally applicable to his meals and his to Last Supper:

They defy the criteria of normalcy and stretch creative imagination toward subversive, revolutionary engagement. They threaten major disruption for a familiar manageable world, and lure the hearer (participant) into a risky enterprise, but one that has promise and hope inscribed in every fiber of the dangerous endeavor.

There were no hierarchies at table, no one in charge and in power. There were only those who voluntarily served others, gladly washed the feet of their companions, who assisted folks at table to heal from the years of religious abuse and oppression. Jesus encouraged them to dream a future with hope, with God with shared resources and the abundance of food created by the companions of the bread and the cup.

Jesus’ Last Supper, like all his meals, undid social ordinary patterns and hierarchical behaviors, introducing people into a new egalitarianism, an equality before one another and God. On the other hand, Roman and even Jewish religious meals had definite social hierarchies from seating at table, first served and so. No Roman official like Pilate would ever serve food to another person, especially with a male lesser of status or serve even his wife. No religious Jew would invite men and women together at table, suspected impurity and sinfulness. The seating in Jewish religious meals would observe hierarchical seating of men and women off to the side. Hierarchical leadership was the norm during Jesus’ time.

And then there is the radical service of Jesus at table that evening– washing the feet of his male and female disciples. This was the service of only household slaves or women. No free male would do such a washing service because it demeaned his masculinity and patriarchal authority. Jesus turns the social hierarchies inside out, breaking down the gender boundaries and social hierarchies. For Jesus, this exemplified that there are no social hierarchies and gender hierarchies in God’s reign. There is only table fellowship of mutual service and equals, revering those who were the socially least, and inviting the disciples to imitate Jesus in his act of foot-washing.

One of the ways I look at our communion lines is to remember how in the cities the poor line up for distribution of food lines created by dominant society. We, on Sunday, line up for Sunday communion in no special order and the celebrants receive community last. This is Jesus’ etiquette at table of God’s reign where we experience an unconditional handout of grace, forgiveness, and love. We should be so undone by God’s love for us as to break our self-centeredness for the revolutionary moments of self-giving and love to others. We live and experience God’s mutually empowerment and companionship at table. And this is Jesus’ message of God’s reign among us and its transformational impact upon people. Imagine if people lived that way, God’s revolution would take place overturning the tables in the Temple and overturning Roman oppressive rule. God’s activity changes the rule of empires with a logic of grace, love, forgiveness, mutual service, and forgiveness. No human empire can withstand the mischievous the presence of God’s reign; it was a dangerous message of Jesus that resulted in the complicit agreement of the Temple leadership and Pilate to remove such a dangerous person who might infect other people with the notion of God’s unconditional grace and love. Welcome to the upside down and topsy-turvy reign of God.