Paul speaks about the unknown God found on an altar as he enters in the Greek city of Athens. Paul is committed to Jesus, God’s Christ crucified and resurrected. But who is this unknown God that Paul is speaking about? I have certainly talked about God as Creator, Christ, and the Holy Spirit over the years, and I do not abandon such talk. I believe and know that God has been revealed in the story of Jesus Christ, and there is always more to know about God. There is much about God I will never comprehend with my human mind and experience. And I need to learn from other peoples’ experience of God as well.

Several years ago I had Ashkenazi Jewish student for a Buddhism class. I give my class the assignment to make a field trip to the Thai Buddhist Temple at the corner of Rosco & Coldwater in North Hollywood. As a church, we made a Saturday morning field trip there years ago.

She refused to go because of Buddhist images; it violated her interpretation of the commandment not to worship graven images. In talking to her, she would even refuse to visit a Catholic or Orthodox Church on the same religious grounds. Catholics have statutes all over their churches. I gave her an article to read by my old mentor Dr. W. C. Smith, the grandfather of Comparative Religion, at Harvard University. He wrote an article arguing that no human has ever worshipped an idol or statute in human history. Our interpretations, like my student, are too simplistic and fail to understand how religious peoples comprehend the symbolic nature of images and icons. They are like stories, assisting in recalling the divine. She would not budge, so I had her write a 10 page paper, how Buddhists experience Buddhist images. We become trapped in our narrow views of God and how other folks understand the same phenomena that we call God. She could not conceive the rich heritage of religious images point to the divine, to God. Her fundamentalist Judaism blinded her to the rich heritage of spirituality of Buddhists. Any Hindu, Buddhist, Catholic or Orthodox Christian would tell you that they do not worship images, for images and icons are simply pointers or symbolic reminders of God. They call our attention to be mindful of God who is bigger than earthen vessels or human imaginations.

Maybe what idolatry consists of is placing human constraints on God or placing God in human boxes, for the prophet Isaiah writes, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the LORD. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” (Is. 55:8-9) Our ways and God’s ways are always very different, and this spiritual principle should be ingrained in our psyches.

We constrain and project our egos often upon God. We place human restraints of our imaginations, whether narrow or wide, upon God, and that is not God. Fundamentalists, for example, constrain God and often distort the nature of God as wrathful and angry. They use such a god to control people’s lives and force them to conform to rules and regulations that they hold valuable. They project upon God their own narrow views of morality and sin, often failing to talk about the gracious God who extravagantly loves and forgives us all.

We live in a multicultural and multi-religious society. LA is one of the most religiously diverse communities. We have Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikh, Jews, neo-pagans and wiccans, new age religions and spiritualities, atheists, humanists, nihilists and so on.

How can we as Christians carry on conversations with our neighbors with such differing religious and spiritual background? Oftentimes, we don’t engage our neighbors, or if we do, we try to convert them to one right only way of seeing and understanding God.

There is a reason for the banner on our east wall. It was a gift to Rev. Jeff Pulling for his service to the Valley Interfaith Council, but it remains in the sanctuary to remind us that this a house of prayer for all peoples. Peoples of differing faiths are always welcome here.

I have attended clergy and police meetings, and there are clergy from other religions than Christianity in attendance. And I find myself annoyed and cringing at fundamentalist clergy who insensitively lead a prayer or give blessing as Christians without acknowledging the meeting is interfaith. I find it ignorant, intolerant, and insensitive. I have prayed in interfaith settings, using the various names of God from other faiths: Allah, Adonai, Ishwara, Buddha, Goddess, higher power, the God of all, the God with many names. I live in an interfaith content and compromise recognizing the values of other religions and paths to God. I call this “compassionate pluralism.” I have prayed with rabbis, imams, Buddhist monks, Hindu priests, Sikhs, wiccans, neo-pagans to the Goddess, a native American and so on. Does this mean I have watered down my Christian devotion to God as creator, Christ, and the Spirit? If I call God father or mother, God or Goddess, does that change the nature or reality of the one whom I am trying to make contact with or the God for whom I have prayed to my whole life as a Christian?

Does God love Christians more than non-Christians? Sometimes in moments of lost patience, I might think God loves Christians far less than non-Christians. But that is the human me more than God. In those temptations, I remind myself that God made us all for greater things in life such as to love and be loved. God made non-Christians in God’s image as well. There is one God for all us with many names. All of us are children of God.

God keeps God’s self for Christians only. You get that feeling from listening to some Christians: But God is closer to every human being than they are to themselves. Our existence and being depends upon God being so close to us, within us. God is near to us, but we can distant ourselves from God. God is close not only when we have faith and trust in God, but God is close to us when we don’t believe in God, deny or ignore God.

But non-Christians don’t acknowledge the Bible, so they don’t know God, some will falsely argue. But Christians have proposed that there is the Book of scriptures and the Book of Nature, both of which reveal God. Thus, many non-Christians have access to God through the natural world.

Once we recognize that God is a mysterious oneness that dwells within us and within the world; we can then recognize that mysterious oneness in each other. When a Pentecostal Christian can proclaim that he or she is full of the Spirit, is that person closer to God than a Buddhist who is in deep meditation experiencing a calmness or oneness or a Native American who experiences a oneness with the Great Spirit as he or she touches the Spirit in the wind or in the beauty of the Earth. Many peoples of different religions experience oneness with God and speak about this oneness with different descriptions, names, and languages.

For myself to deny the oneness of God in my brothers and sisters of other religions is to deny my own oneness with God. I call this the path of compassionate pluralism. “Compassionate” because I am listening to God in other people of faith who are different from myself. “Pluralism” because there is no one way to know God or discovering God. If we listened to stories of God in our lives from everyone in this room this morning, we would have as many different stories on how we discovered God or how works in our lives or who God is. By listening to each other, we catch a greater glimpse of who God is.

Compassionate pluralism recognizes that God’s ways are greater than any human notions of God. It recognizes the word of Jesus: “Be compassionate as your Abba God is.” Compassion is to listen to the faith journeys of other peoples of other faith, for they are searching for God genuinely as any of us here this morning.

But how do we judge other religions as authentic. The same we judge authentic Christianity. We judge authentic relationship with God by the fruits they produce in people in relationship with God. Genuine experience of God leads to human transformation that bears fruit in how compassionate we are, how caring for one another and the Earth and all life, how we love and forgive one another, how we include, not exclude others from God, and how peaceful we are with each other.

Mother Teresa preached to her nuns and brothers, “We are supposed to preach without preaching not by words, but by our example, by our actions.” We teach about God more effectively through our actions of love than trying to force people to accept our own narrow experience of God. If we compassionately listen to each other, we discover a God whose mysterious love and generosity exceeds all our expectations and beyond our imagination and who we never get bored with because God is always new, extravagantly loving, and abundantly and warmly hospitable. This is the way of compassionate pluralism.

I would like t explore four events in life of Jesus during his last week in Jerusalem:  His procession into Jerusalem, the disturbance in the Temple, his Last Supper, and the Garden of Gethsemane.  Each of these could be explored imaginatively in depth, but I want to touch up these events because they present dense and dangerous moments in the life of Jesus. They tells us a lot about God’s mission in Jesus and reveal the depth of Jesus’ passionate involvement with us.

Jesus enters Jerusalem or to Warren Carter’s phrase “Making an Ass of Rome:” What we are celebrating today with the blessing and distribution of the palms this morning is Jesus entry into Jerusalem.  The conflict between Jesus and Pilate begins the day that Jesus enters in Jerusalem.

Prior to Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem is Pilate’s entry.  Within the LGBT community and Hollywood movie events such as the Oscars, dramatic entrances are important.  They are choreographed theater on red carpets, communicate success, attention to the gowns, and companions attending.  Roman entrances into city were triumphant.  No red carpets, but soldiers trumpeting, followed cadence war drums sounding the entrance of the conquering hero with Roman legionnaires  brandishing shields, and spears, and military insignia.  In this case, it was Pilate who represented the triumphant Roman Empire and Emperor Tiberius.  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.

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 reframes them in symbolic counter challenges.   His entrance into Jerusalem is to remind 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 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, not conquest and domination. God’s community does not consist by 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 crushed by military Empire of Rome.  He parodies Rome and Pilate with God’s empire whose kinship comes from love and service and sharing of goods together.

Jesus acting up in the Temple:  Jesus had problems with the Temple from the very beginning of practice of radical inclusiveness at table and his ministry.  He associated indiscriminately with independent minded women such as Magdalene and the Samaritan woman at the well, prostitutes, tax collectors, lepers and the ill. The religious authorities of the Temple and their Pharisaic collaborators were horrified at his coming in continuous contact with the unclean and sinners. They represent a Temple of orderly social and religious categories of people into pure/impure and holy/sinful.  At the heart of this system was the book of Leviticus, whose author biblical scholar Callum Carmichael points out is reflecting on the Israelite ancestors in the book of Genesis. Male homoerotic relations are abomination because they are deformity of Israelite masculinity.  The purity code in Leviticus is justifying what constitutes as normal masculinity.

Remember that the purity code in Leviticus is grafted onto animals and humans alike.  Its religious perspective divides humans and animals into pure and impure, deformed and acceptable.  It is also the book that spells out  and inspires the Pharisees and priests to categorize all people into holy/unholy such as mamzers (born out of wedlock), sinners, shepherds, gentiles, abomination, etc. It is the same book that details the rituals of animal sacrifice.

In referring to the Pharisees, Jesus says, “every plant that my heavenly Abba has not planted will be uprooted.” (Mt: 15:13).  Jesus’ demonstration against the Temple and the holiness schema promoted is deliberate. I cannot believe that it was an incidental target for starting an ACT UP style of demonstration. He made chords from ropes, overturned the tables and released the doves to be sold for sacrifice.  Doves were sacrifices for the poor who could not afford a sheep.  Jewish factory farms, similar to our own, were required to supply 140,000 doves a year for animal sacrifice.  Jesus’ demonstration disrupts the whole Temple system of animal sacrifice and the whole system of categorizing and stigmatizing people and animals. Jesus’ intention was to disturb the heart of the Temple system with the God of compassionate love and peace-making.

Creating companionship for life:   Companionship is created when we share food together. Jesus has already entered Jerusalem, publicly making the Romans an ass. He disturbed the Temple system; he challenged the Pharisee’s and their practice of making their home table celebration as exclusive as the Temple—excluding the defiled, the impure, and the sinner from their own table meals.  Holiness companionship was based on exclusion. As a side note, how many Christian tables have exclusively functioned like the Temple or the Pharisaic tables.

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 are to be invited into the meals. It was populated with a diversity of people: 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, 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 in the 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.

Jesus’ meals were dangerous. There were no hierarchies at table, no one in charge or in power. There were only those who voluntarily served others, gladly washed the feet of their companions, who cheerfully 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 resources and the abundance of food created by the companions of the bread and the cup.  Our moments at table undo our ordinary patterns and behaviors.

At the last meal, Jesus gave his companions, literally “bread sharers” a gift of life. Let me give you an example by tell a story.  In an interview with a woman who survived Auschwitz was asked “Why did you survive when so many perished?”  She was separated from her family, stripped by the guards, humiliated, shaved all her hair from her body, and given a concentration uniform. She was part of a group similarly humiliated and abused prisoners.  Then a young girl broke ranks and placed a piece of bread in her hands.  “At that moment”, she said, “I decided to live.”  (Primavesi, Gaia and Climate Change).

Jesus gave his friends a similar gift, a piece of life-giving bread handed to them with love and unconditional forgiveness.  It was an intense moment of self-giving of himself, his life and blood for them out of an excess of unconditional love—mirroring Abba God’s unconditional love and grace. A piece of bread and a cup of wine were given to them as the young girl gave a piece of bread to the survivor woman in Auschwitz.  Jesus told them to live, for life would be given in his death the next day.  He created a ritual of life in shared bread and a cup.

One of the ways I look at our communion lines is to remember how in our cities the poor line up for distribution of food.  We, on Sunday, line up for an unconditional handout of grace, forgiveness, and love. We are all poor in need of God’s abundant grace.  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.

Final Preparation in the Garden:  Jesus finished the meal and invited disciples voluntarily to follow him to the Garden of Gethsemane. He knew it was only a short time before the Romans and the Temple police would find him and begin to punish him for defiance for God and God’s people. He was aware that he would be shortly betrayed by Judas, and Jesus sought some alone time in solitude with Abba God and asked a few disciples to stand nearby in prayer with him.  Anyone standing close to death would feel the challenges that Jesus had that evening.  Luke tells that he sweat drops of blood.  Did these drops remind him of sharing the cup of his blood with disciples earlier?  Would God’s vision of peace-making, nonviolence,  bread empowerment around the inclusive table, his affirmation there are no divisions between God’s beloved children and that there is kinship with all life?  Would they survive beyond his brutal death? Or did they remind of the blood sacrifices of the countless animals at the Temple? Would he be crucified and dead by the time that paschal lambs were slain for the Passover meals later in the day?

If Jesus is like most of us, he would find his mind adrift with these questions and the thoughts what was impending in an hour or just a few hours: humiliation, raped of his clothes, flogged nearly to death, mocked and abandoned, alone.  In the moments of doubts and pain, he surrendered to God with his whole heart, and heart to heart met God in love and profound emotional suffering.  As he tried to find his centeredness in Abba God, the noise of marching soldiers surrounding the garden to apprehend him, the ensuing clamor to arrest him broke his concentration. He would try to prevent any violence….

These are four window glimpses into Jesus the last few days of his life.  He disturbed the world in Jerusalem with his love of God and God’s disturbing message. He would be turned over to Pilate by the Temple priests with the charges: “He perverted the nation. He was blasphemer.  Jesus of Nazareth rebelled against the power and might of the Roman Empire. “

Jesus of Nazareth died as a no-body in a distant province of the Empire. But we know that God intended to disrupt the whole world on Easter Sunday when God acted up against all human sin and violence throughout all time! These are a few thoughts for us to think about as we enter the passion of Christ this week.

Christians have small imaginations, or they abandon them altogether for Christians have small imaginations, or they abandon them altogether for literalism and fundamentalism. This is the case of Nicodemus, a good man and a Pharisee and even a Jesus sympathizer. He is a religious leader in Jerusalem with influence and power. John’s Gospel describes him as a leader of the Jews—those in opposition to Jesus and his movement. There were Pharisees who were torn between the co-opted Temple leaders and the people based but dangerous Jesus movement.

Nicodemus comes “by night,” meaning that he does not want to be seen by any other Pharisees who might recognize him or anyone who might report him to the Temple leadership. But there is another symbolic level. Jesus, who is the light of the world, is nearly invisible to the Pharisee. He is unable to see the true light and meaning of Jesus’ message; he is blind and in the dark. But he has heard stories about Jesus, and his curiosity has led him to Jesus in the stealth of the night.

“Rabbi,” he speaks deferentially, “we know that you are a teacher who has come from God we know, for no one can do these signs that you do apart from God.”

Jesus throws him with a confusing or even shocking statement, Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”
Nicodemus’ literalism gets in the way: “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into a mother’s womb and be born?” The Pharisee is unable to think outside of his established traditions or outside the box. He is unable to stretch his imagination and wonders how is possible to be born again.

Jesus affirms that one can only enter God’s kingdom through water and Spirit. Water is physically connected to Earth and life. Water is both fluid and flowing. It decomposes rock and soil over thousands of years; it can carve the Grand Canyon over the hundreds of thousands of years. The Spirit, Jesus uses the word “wind,” blows where she wills. It is free, unpredictable and intensely dangerous. It is creative, bringing direction out of chaos and assists in the creation and evolution of life. The Spirit is the Sustainer of life.

Water and Spirit is about changing the topographies of our lives and the generation of the new and the novel. Jesus is speaking in a language that is confusing to Nicodemus’ fundamentalism. Jesus speaks in metaphorical language, the power of which generates multiple meanings to his audience. Nicodemus is a lawyer, who tries to tie the meaning of any religious law or sentence to a precise literal sense. This is a tension throughout the Gospel of John, for Jesus uses symbolic and metaphorical language. He is often misunderstood. So the metaphor of being born again escapes Nicodemus’ comprehension. The power of new creation—creating new selves through change and rebirth

In Numbers 21, poisonous snakes afflict the Israelites in the wilderness because they are talking against Moses, and God tells Moses to put a “fiery serpent” or “bronze serpent” on a pole so that those who are bitten, they could “look” at the bronze serpent and live. Jesus uses this story to illustrate the child of humanity “lifted up” on the cross, and whereas Moses’ bronze serpent would bring life, Jesus’ cross would bring eternal life to those reborn by water and the Spirit.

The Child of Humanity is lifted up on the cross because God unconditionally and graciously loves the world, the entire creation—humanity, the rivers and oceans, green trees and other life. Here is the famous line so often quoted: “God so love the world that God gave his only begotten child so that everyone who places their hearts in him may not perish but have eternal life.” God did not send Christ into the world to condemn the world but save the world. All includes our enemies and people we do not like. God does not share our hatred for enemies our enemies but loves them.

Many Christians, like Nicodemus, misunderstand the words of Jesus. They comprehend the words as exclusive—saving themselves and condemning all those who do not place their hearts in Christ.

Let me explain that Jesus’ revelation words are inclusive, not exclusive—metaphorical, not literal. God’s inclusiveness has either boundaries or walls in language or in practice: there are no outcasts for God. This means everything, every being, and everyone is included within the divine invitation to love.

Nicodemus could not hear this eternal truth about God. His religious tradition taught him that God was exclusive, choosing a few, choosing Israel and excluding Gentiles, excluding the unclean and sinners. He was blind to Christ’s message of grace and hope.

Jesus taught Nicodemus that his religious traditions need to be rethought and interpreted afresh in light of Christ’s revelation of inclusive love for the world. When we are born by water and the Spirit, we accept the mystery of God’s inclusive and unconditional love for us and the world. Everybody, everything, and every creature are included; there is nothing excluded from God’s love. This is radical inclusive of God’s love.

Being born from water and the Spirit means we locate our story in the creation of the world through the agency of God’s Spirit and God’s incarnation in Christ. This means we understand God’s coming in flesh was intended before creation. It was located in God’s divine love life and desire to share that community of love with all created matter, creatures, including ourselves.

God’s incarnation in Christ, his becoming flesh and blood, affirms that all bodies, all flesh, and the universe are good. It is God’s affirmation of love of Christ’s body and embodied existence in human and non-human forms. God’s incarnation in Christ links all bodies and the universe together, and the Spirit helps bodies to flourish for God’s love.

There are two quotations I want to link together. The first is Henri Nouwen:

Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless.

Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human…
Compassion is God’s ability through the incarnated and risen Christ and through the Spirit to feel with “creation groaning.” Creation and all life are interconnected in a seamless web. A good example is Chief Seattle’s axiom, “The Earth does not belong to us; we belong to the Earth.” We struggle in our rebirth from water and Spirit because it reveals to us that we all belong to inclusive relational matrix. Every connection is related to God’s Spirit a cosmic process of life and love that enhances the capacity for the full life of our God.

The second quote is from the Christian poet and activist, Diarmuid O’Murchu. He writes,

When you weep, we weep, When a tree is felled prematurely, an animal in pain because of crazy experimentation, a teenager rebelling against authority, a couple at the their wit’s end trying to make relationship work, an African woman burying the last of her seven children because of AIDS, a Peruvian farmer seeing his last piece of land swiped by a transnational corporation, we, too, feel the pain, the helplessness, the rage, the cruel injustice.

Being reborn is living in God’s kingdom; it is all about living compassionately and inclusively interconnected with everything, every being, and everybody. We are related as kin.

Inclusive discipleship is what Nicodemus could not accept. He was called by Christ to widen his perspective—to abandon his notion that God loved the few who obeyed God’s laws and regulations. This scared Nicodemus so much that he retired into his religious bureaucratic position with the Sanhedrin. We don’t hear about him again until the death of Jesus. He and Joseph of Arimathea buried Jesus’ body in the tomb. He had some respect for Jesus as a religious teacher but also feared the consequences of his message of God’s radical inclusive love.
God’s radical inclusive love means that God cares for everyone—people who makes us uncomfortable, that poor person who is mentally challenged and living on the streets, the people we ignore, those who are invisible to us.

What we do on Sunday morning is to celebrate God’s inclusive love. Jesus’ table companionship has lost its true bite and scandal. Nicodemus would feel comfortable in many churches where they practice an exclusive table, limiting access to the proper and the holy. This would be very true for Pharisees. They limited those who could attend their sacred meals—to the holy, men like themselves. Anyone with suspect status as impure or sinners would be naturally excluded from the meal. A state of ritual purity was required to attend their meals. Thus, a woman, let alone a menstruating woman, was not allowed to even sit at the family meal.

For Jesus and for us, there is no doubt that our table must be always open. Nobody was excluded from Jesus’ table. Prostitutes, tax collectors, sinners, lepers, the throw away people, the marginalized and the poor were welcome as guest into meal that celebrated God’s radical inclusive hospitality. Jesus did not try to reform their lifestyles with moralizing sermons; he preached God’s welcoming grace and love for each and every person. He felt that people welcomed with God’s compassion, care, mutuality and respect, forgiveness and unconditional love would naturally change their lives to God’s grace and acceptance. God’s grace has that power.

Jesus’ meals provided occasion for psychological healing of the damage cause by holy people who felt that these unholy people need to change and conform to our standards of holiness. People could dream of God’s kingdom, being born of water and the Spirit. They would have been encouraged to claim themselves as God’s beloved children. God’s kingdom was about sharing what we have with each other and those in need. There are no food shortages at God’s meal.

There are far-reaching consequences to such open meals that welcome everyone and let no one go away hungry. Some of us know firsthand what it means not to be welcomed in churches, to be beaten up by the Bible In the hands of religious people, to hear how much God judges and condemns me for whom I am because I was born this way. Jesus made those, who were excluded and cast away, feel at home. They experienced acceptance, love, no harsh judgments and condemnations. They were trained by Jesus to accept and appreciate God’s goodness and love in their lives and to welcome that with gratitude. In John 15:15, Jesus says boldly, “I no longer call you servants but friends.” Imagine what impact that had on those at meals, disciples and guests.

I want you hear these words this morning: “I no longer call you servants but friends.” These are Jesus’ words to you this morning. These are words of healing of those scars of exclusion.

They would come to understand that the companionship in God’s kingdom feels so right as Jesus welcomes them in God’s name. Being born in water and the Spirit does involve a personal transformation, and Nicodemus was unable to step forward into the light of Christ but receded into the shadows of his traditional religion.

We hear nothing more in the gospels about Nicodemus after his assistance in burying Jesus’ lifeless body, taken down from the cross. But I imagine, and hope rightly, that when Jesus was raised from the dead on Easter, that he also appeared to Nicodemus to guide him away from his fears and his commitments to an exclusive and limited vision for a new wondrous vision of God to the gracious, open-armed love of a welcoming God who sets no barriers between us and God’s self. Perhaps then Nicodemus could step into the light, choose to follow Christ and to become Christ’s arms, legs, eyes and heart in the world.

Transfiguration is a cornerstone of the rich spirituality of the Orthodox Churches. Orthodox Christians believe that just as Christ was transfigured on Mt. Tabor, so with the incarnation of Christ into the world, the divine image of God has been restored in humanity, all other creatures, and the world or Earth herself. The Spirit is transforming us even now with divinity or divine light that is breaking through all of us if we can see with the eyes of prayer and faith. In the I the gospel story, the radiance of God’s divinity breaks through in Jesus on the mountain top. For Orthodox Christians, it is through scripture and the recitation of the Jesus prayer numerous times a day allows us to see God’s light in one another or in the world: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.” Recitation of the prayer remains mechanical as long as we say the prayer with words. I tried this practice for a day, and it was hard to keep reciting this prayer throughout the day. You can repeat the prayer for a time, but it becomes tedious. It is hard to move from reciting the prayer silently in your mind and correlating it with you breathing. I admire those heroic Christians who have been able to do this for long periods of time. The prayer must become a part of us, and that will happen as we come to Christ better through the scriptures and secondly as we let the prayer take over us and let the tensions and anxieties of our lives recede.

I have thought for many years that Mark’s account of Jesus’ Transfiguration is a displaced resurrection appearance account. It is similar to the Orthodox Christian recognition that Christ’s divinity or God’s radiant light shines through him. Matthew and Luke follow Mark in incorporating the story within their gospels as a story of miraculous transformation of Jesus.

Jesus leads Peter, James and John up a mountain where he stands in conversation with Moses and Elijah – a symbol that the ancestors recognize Jesus as the one who has come to fulfill the Law and the Prophets. Remember in Exodus or in the movie Ten Commandments when Moses comes down from Mt. Sinai, and the Hebrews have constructed the a golden calf to worship. Moses re-ascends Mt. Sinai and brings back another set of the Ten Commandments, but scripture describes “the skin of his face was shining” (Exodus 34:30). He had seen God and was transfigured with God’s light.

What makes me think that this story originally circled in early movement Jesus as a resurrection story is that Jesus’ clothes and face are transformed brilliant white. And then there is God’s revelation that Jesus is God’s beloved child. God has broken into our world. The disciples witnessed Jesus’ risen divinity breaking into their world.

Peter, as impetuous as ever, witnesses the appearance of the prophets Moses and Elijah with Jesus. He quickly says, “Lord, it is good for us to be here; if you wish, I will make three tents or tabernacles here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” Peter responds immediately without taking some time to breathe and take a moment to appreciate the beauty and importance of the event. Unlike Peter, the other two disciples remain still, experiencing the transfigured radiance of Christ without any words. They breathe in the experience and remain still and mindful of radiating Christ without trying to grasp it or control it as Peter does. Peter wants to control the experience; in fact, he wants to prolong the experience of transfiguration of Jesus with Moses and Elijah by building three tabernacles. Sometimes in prayer, we desire the enjoyment and want to hold on the experience when God is calling us to a deeper experience.

It takes the manifestation of God to upstage and quiet Peter down. When God intrudes into the scene and affirms that Jesus is as God’s beloved Child with whom God is pleased, then Peter shuts ups and falls down to knees and conceals his face. Sometimes it takes an intervention of God to render us silent and without words when are filling up our prayer space with too much ourselves and not leaving enough room for God.

The disciples fall down facedown to the ground, terrified at the presence of God. And the transfigured Jesus looked upon the three and said, “Get up and do not be afraid.” “Do not be afraid” is a resurrection refrain used by Jesus in resurrection appearances. The disciples faced something we all face in prayer—how do we re-enter in to ordinary space. They came down from the mountain into the ordinary world of poverty, oppression, and the sadness of the human condition.

The challenge for the three and the challenge at those moments of prayer for us is to listen, to know that there are those times when we encounter God’s presence, we’re not in control. We can only listen and trust, perhaps place our heads down. When we pray and experience God, we allow ourselves to see God’s light in ourselves. In her book, A Return to Love,

Marianne Williamson writes,

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, “Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?” Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

These moments of light are with us throughout our lives, but our self-centeredness, our fears and anxieties blind us to the glimpses of transfigured grace of God in our lives and in our world. We cannot control when these moments of God’s light will shine and break through. We have to make room in our hearts, and be prepared for God for them. We have to be still in our hearts, and let God be God before we respond. Don’t be premature or hasty as Peter. Give God a chance to be God, and listen. God will come to each of us, often when we don’t expect it. We can experience them “anytime, anyplace, or with anybody.” God is in the ordinary world transfiguring the world with God’s gracious light.

Lent starts this Wednesday where we place ashes on your forehead to remind you from earth we came and the earth we return. It calls us once again to renew our spirituality, to be re-charged, to change our lives from our ordinary activities, and be mindful of our God. But I ask you to be prepared for God anywhere, anytime even when it is inconvenient, or in anyone even a stranger. This means we need to be mindful of the present moment.

For the disciples on the mountain, there were risks in their experience of the transfiguration of Jesus. There was the risk of spending too much time on the mountain, and there was danger of returning to their boats and fishing on the Lake of Galilee not letting themselves sufficiently transformed. The challenge that faced them was to go up to the mountain to experience God and return to the world changed and bring that experience of light within themselves back into the world.

Climbing up the mountain to experience God and the return down into the world is a metaphor for the prayer journey. I do this actually every time I walk the labyrinth path towards the center, letting go of ego—all roles I play in life—pastor, teacher, husband, friend, activist, and so on—are let go. I walk the stepping stones to the center of the labyrinth or the symbolic mountain top and bathe in the presence of God as a child of God. There when I let go of all the distractions of my life, I find that space is created within me where God’s light may shine into my heart and the depths of my spirit. God’s light shines into my heart because I have made room for God to enter and dwell. I bathe in that light for a while before I journey back to the ordinary world. I discover not only connection with God and Christ, but I become interconnected to the congregation and many folks in my life, and to the Earth. This divine image of being a child of God, Christ within me, radiates within my body and my heart and through all the interconnections with life. The challenge that I face and the three disciples confronted as well is how to bring that practice of divine transfiguration into the world of ordinary life and challenges. How do I share that practice of transfigured light with others? I have to walk back from the center of the labyrinth to re-enter ordinary consciousness—the world we live in.

Now I do not need an actual mountain top or the labyrinth to find God, they are useful props to remind me to let go and encounter the risen Christ. I can do the same thing by walking into our garden and sitting in our garden for a period of time with my dog Friskie or alone for a short period of time. Be still, and listening silently I can find time when God’s divine light and grace shines through, and I experience my interrelatedness with life. It is never forced time with the risen Christ. In fact, you relax into the moment, and let the presence of God to reveal itself in us. Encountering Christ is actually a “come and go” psychic experience. We climb the mountain to experience, and then we go back into the world. Practicing transfiguration is a come and go experience where we carve out time for God to be with God this Lent. By taking time for God, we practice a grateful generosity to God who is generous to us—bestowing life and love upon us. We experience our generous who invites us into intimate relationship. God becomes present to us, and we are transfigured. Being transfigured is a process of God changing us. This can happen also at our Sunday worship: we come to worship and we go to serve the world.

There are three stages to this transfigured awareness:

First is the awareness of God shining in us and telling us that we are God’s children and that God is pleased with us. We are meant to shine as children shine. We are destined to let God’s light shine within us. But discovering that light, we also find that light includes God, people, other life, and the Earth. God’s light is within all and links as kinship community.

Second stage as we re-enter the world around us we find out that it is not just some of us are God’s children; it is in everyone and other creatures and the Earth herself. We are all God’s children. We honor and show the goodness to fellow children of God as God shows us.

Third, stage is that the change. If we let the light shine through us, then we live God’s love and compassion. We live compassionate action in the world because God’s compassionate light for us is already in us. And we want to share the light of the love respectfully with and for others. As we let God’s light shine through, our light has contagious impact on others—allowing others to experience the same.

This week when I saw the Dalai Lama, there was a quote on the screen: “If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.” If we implement this practice, we implement what we Christians understand as grace. We practice light of being a child of God and realizing the divine light of God’s image to manifest itself in us.

These three stages is what Lent about. Discover your light as beloved children of God, enter each day into your ordinary aspects of your lives and realize that there are other transfigured children of God around us. Finally, share the light in compassionate action—forgiveness, peace-making, love, and gratitude. By sharing God’s light within yourselves. God will continue to spread that gracious light to others. And we now start to enter the depth of God on the cross, resurrected Light of Easter, and the creation of the mission of living that light in the world. Love is what God made you for, and love is what the transfigured light you are.

You cannot be a follower of Christ and read the scriptures literally, as a fundamentalist. Actually, fundamentalist interpretations shrink the richness of the text and distort our experiences of God.
I have longed wanted to preach a sermon on how does Jesus read the scriptures. What principles does he use to interpret his sacred texts and ours?

It raises a more fundamental question. How did Jesus interpret his own scriptures? What principles did he use? You notice that I do not use “read.” Jesus probably did not read or write though Luke portrays that he can read from the scroll of Isaiah. Jesus probably could recite large passages from the Hebrew scriptures from memory. Very few folks in his culture—less than 5% of the population—could read and write. Other great religious founders such as Siddartha Gautama the Buddha and Mohammed the Prophet both were unable to read. Inability to read means that they did not have access to learning how to read and write. It was specialized area for the more wealthy folks in the ancient world. Papyri paper would cost a person in the ancient world the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars for parchment.

But many rabbis and learned religious leaders did not read the scriptures. They learned the scriptures by memorizing scrolls of the scriptures. They memorized thousands of lines and repeated them in lessons. Even today young Tibetan Buddhist monks memorize thousands of lines of scripture, and they are tested on their ability to remember particular lines and use them in arguments for debate.

Jesus learned his scriptures in this fashion and studied various interpretations of the particular scriptures from itinerant rabbis and teachers.

When I ask the question “how did Jesus interpret the scriptures?” I am asking a significant question. Many Christians ask “what would Jesus do today?” But they fail to inquire about how Jesus interpreted his scriptures.
In fact, I have never heard a sermon ever discuss how Jesus used or understood his scriptures. As disciples, should we not imitate the style or principles of interpretation that Jesus employed? Should we not read the scriptures as Jesus read them? This morning’s gospel presents us with some of the principles that Jesus used to interpret his Jewish scriptures. Perhaps the principles that Jesus used may instruct our own readings and avoid the pitfalls of fundamentalist interpretations.

The story this morning illustrates two ways of interpreting the Jewish scriptures: The Pharisees and Jesus’ way.

Jesus went through the grain fields on the Sabbath. His disciples were hungry and they began to pluck heads of grain to eat. The Pharisees saw this, they said to him. “Look, your disciples are doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath.” The objection comes from the scriptural commandment not to work on the Sabbath.

The Sabbath celebrated the seventh day when God rested from creation and delighted in creation. It anticipates the completion of God’s designs in creation. Rest on the Sabbath recognized God’s reign over the created world. The Sabbath celebrated also the deliverance of the Hebrew slaves from Egypt. It is first used when the Hebrews are in the wilderness and God has supplied food “as much as each of you needs” and double for the Sabbath. The Sabbath celebrated God’s provision of sufficient food. Jews celebrated the Sabbath, and they remained distinctive from their Gentile neighbors. Each week they took the time to rest on the Sabbath and remember the goodness of God in an evening meal. Jews today celebrate a Sabbath meal each Friday evening and continue to observe the Sabbth until sundown on Saturday.

The emphasis on food with the Sabbath is found in today’s gospel. God’s sovereignty extends over the food producing earth. The disciples are hungry while traveling through the fields and pluck grain to eat. The Hebrew scriptures allowed that the hungry could take some pick some food or glean the field after the harvest. The disciples’ action to alleviate their hunger raises profound issues. Work on the Sabbath was not permitted according to the law, but the Sabbath also celebrated God’s provision of food that alleviates hunger.

The disciples violate the commandment to observe the Sabbath. The Pharisees assess the actions of the disciples as serious violations of God’s covenant. Jesus’ disciples have acted contrary to the will of God. If Jesus has allowed them to act this way, he cannot be from God. Jesus’ credibility and authority as a religious teacher are at stake.

Jesus does not defend his disciples’ behavior to gather food out of hunger. Rather, he contests the Pharisees’ logic of their scriptural interpretations. They literally interpret the commandment and never allow for other interpretations than their own. The Pharisee are fundamentalists, practicing an embattled form of spirituality that protects what they cherished from selective retrieval of certain commandments and practices from the past.

Religious fundamentalists do not regard this battle as a mere conventional political struggle, but experience it as a cosmic war between the forces of good and evil. The Pharisees practiced a holiness like the Temple priests, keeping themselves holy at all costs and maintained the practice of tithing and maintaining purity as the priests practiced. Ordinary folks could never practice such purity and holiness without hardship.

What we know from the gospels is that Jesus was constantly in conflict with religious fundamentalists and legalists in his culture? They criticized him for breaking religious rules and laws that they considered to be important to their understanding themselves as holy and pure.
Jesus disputes the narrowing down of interpretation of the scripture and tradition of Sabbath observance. He suggests that they do not understand the scriptures. “Have you not heard…”

The first scripture that Jesus cites is David on the run for his life from King Saul. The future king and religious hero, David, breaks the law by entering the house of God and commandeering the sacred bread of presence, reserved only for the priests to eat. Jesus pointed out that they ate the bread reserved only for the priests. Jesus draws the parallel between his disciples and David and his companions. They break literally the law out of basic human need, hunger. The Hebrew scriptures always allowed violations of the Sabbath in time of war, emergencies, or to save life.
Jesus cites a second example of Sabbath violation. “Or have you not heard in the law on the Sabbath the priests in the Temple break the Sabbath yet are guiltless?” The priests are guiltless, but some Sabbath work must be permissible if the Temple is to function. The Sabbath ideal gives way to something greater or more importance, the service of God.

Then Jesus does two remarkable things in his argumentation with the Pharisees. He points out exceptions to strict observance of the Sabbath. A restrictive interpretation of scripture does not allow for exceptions. It is my interpretation only, not yours. We hear this often in contemporary debates on marriage and homosexuality from Christian fundamentalists.

Fundamentalists claim that there is only way of interpretation, and that it is their understanding and all others are liberal, secular interpretations. Other interpretations are wrong.

Jesus has presented two arguments against the Pharisaic fundamentalists. First the disciples’ actions in taking food is legitimate. After all, the Sabbath is the day that celebrates God’s provision of the food-producing world, God’s provision of manna in the desert, and the Sabbath year of justice and economic renewal in forgiving debts.

Jesus then says, “I tell you something greater than the Temple is here.” He refers to his mission from God to Israel. If the Temple priests can set aside divine commands, how much more can Jesus with his disciples violate that commandment for the sake of God’s reign.

Despite all of these arguments, Jesus attacks the narrowness of the Pharisaic fundamentalists: “But if you understood what this means, ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless. For the Child of Humanity is Lord of the Sabbath.” He blatantly states that his disciples are guiltless in the eyes of God. God has always mercifully made exceptions to the law human necessity. The Sabbath ideal of not working has become a narrow law without exceptions. It becomes do not do or avoiding certain actions; rather, the Sabbath is about committing oneself to living God’s compassion within the world.

Scriptural literalism neither takes into account the intention of God in this commandment to observe the Sabbath, nor does it comprehend God’s greater revelation of God’s mercy and justice. Mercy and justice, Jesus claims, are the interpretative lens for comprehending scriptural texts. The necessities of life should not be restricted by literalist obedience to the scriptures. Meeting human need is the divine will for the Sabbath celebration. It celebrates God’s gracious generosity and compassion for us.

Mercy and justice expresses the divine intention of the Sabbath. Fundamentalists, who presume to do the divine will, by literal and aggressive adherence to the Sabbath, cannot allow for mercy and justice to enter their interpretation of the Hebrew scriptures. They use scriptures as weapons to keep people in check and fail to understand divine mercy and compassion to provides resources and food to people in need. They measure their own holiness by a literal and strict observance of a commandment.

In John’s gospel, the Pharisees bring a woman caught in adultery, they literally bring a woman to justice while ignoring the male accomplice. Blame the victim and further victimize her. Jesus starts writing in the sands, prophetically illustrating how God’s laws are not meant to be written in stone but written in sand. They can change with the wind blowing, or they can change for the purpose of compassion.

Fundamentalists feel that they are battling against forces threatening their sacred values. If we allow Jesus and his disciples such leeway here, what will be next infraction? We will slip down the slippery road of relativism.

The Pharisee battle with Jesus was over the control of God. They boxed God into a set of rules and regulations. But God cannot be boxed in because that is a form of idolatry. It attempts to control God and God’s grace. How many fundamentalists in the ancient world and in our culture have attempted to regulate God and God’s grace! In the prophet Isaiah (55:8) God states, “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, Nor are your ways My ways.” And Jesus broke the boxes and walls to point to the freedom of God’s unconditional love and grace. No human can control or regulate God’s grace.

When we critically examine the dynamics of religious fundamentalism whether the Pharisaic opponents of Jesus or contemporary fundamentalists—we discover that fundamentalism exhibits deep intrapsychic conflicts. Fundamentalists read scriptures from a perspective rooted in fear and threat.

In a massive study religious scholars Martin Marty and Scott Appleby argue that fundamentalisms all follow a certain pattern, and their spiritualities emerge as a response to a perceived crisis. They discovered that fundamentalists whether Christian, Muslim, or Jewish have certain common features – common fears, anxieties and desires – and that they share a reaction against scientific and secular culture. They are engaged in a conflict with enemies whose secularist policies and beliefs seem inimical to religion itself. Fundamentalists do not regard this battle as a conventional political struggle, but experience it as a cosmic war between the forces of good and evil. They fear annihilation, and try to fortify their beleaguered identity by means of a selective retrieval of certain doctrines and practices of the past.

Marty and Appleby rightly understand that people or peoples or groups feel deeply threatened by the present and future possibilities. Change is frightening, and the future becomes terrifying. Fundamentalists are challenged people, disenfranchised people, displaced people, embattled people, refugees from the present world, and fragile peoples in all walks of life.

In a state of intrapsychic turmoil, people cannot bear uncertainty or ambiguity. They want defined doctrines, established borders, legal fences to protect a sacred enclave where the law may be stringently observed.
What fundamentalists do when they feel under threat is to simplify, choose the easy answers. They read scripture literally and simplistically, and faith becomes assent to clear cut values without question and doubt. Psychoanalytically, such people go through a regression, eliminating ambiguous middle or the twilight space. They divide the world into safe and threat, good and evil, life and death. To be a fundamentalist is to see the world perpetually in these terms to cling to certainties drawn from sacred texts or the pronouncements of charismatic leaders.

Now back to our Gospel! Jesus was not a fundamentalist. He refused to interpret his scriptures from a perspective of fear and threat. Behind the conflict with the Pharisees over the Sabbath is the underlying question how do we experience God? Do we experience God as a ruler-maker, who expects us to literally obey the rules and commandments? Do we box in God’s grace and mercy? Or do we humbly admit God’s grace is wider than we can imagine; it is not found chained to past and narrow readings of the scripture. We admit that God’s grace is to be found in the past and the future, and we stand up unchained, unshackled—encountering our God in the ambiguities of life, when in the deepest moments of doubts and uncertainties because God’s messenger took on a human body and experienced them in his flesh and yet trusted in faith in the one who sent him. Can you stand with freedom and faith and trust God’s unconditional grace?

The drift of Jesus’ presentation of the Beatitudes might be paraphrased by Jesus as “Blessed are those following me, for they shall be called Christ-Followers.” I could spend time on each of the beatitudes in depth, for they become a charter of compassionate values proposed by Jesus to his followers.
I want to focus on particular: “Blessed are the peace-makers, for they will be called children of God.” During the Vietnam War, I and many students opposed the war that seemed senseless, with body counts on television every night. It seemed grotesque and senseless killing, contradicting everything I believed as a Christian, a Christ-follower. By first year in divinity school, a group of Jesuit priests and students joined nearly ten thousand protesters at the Boston Federal Building on Tremont Street.

I had been reading and studying a book on non-violence of Jesus by Samuel Brandon, Jesus and the Zealots, how he denied the Zealot or Jewish nationalist movement to Roman occupation. Various branches of the movement used assassination, killing, and violence to overthrow the Romans. One branch the Sicarii, translated “dagger-men” or assassins, were Jewish terrorists who would slip a short dagger into a targeted Jewish collaborators or Roman in a crowded market to create an panic and anxiety. Josephus, the Jewish historian writes about them:

… a different type of bandits sprang up in Jerusalem, the so-called sicarii, who murdered men in broad daylight in the heart of the city. Especially during the festivals they would mingle with the crowd, carrying short daggers concealed under their clothing, with which they stabbed their enemies. Then when they fell, the murderers would join in the cries of indignation and, through this plausible behavior, avoided discovery. (Quoted in Richard A. Horsley, “The Sicarii: Ancient Jewish “Terrorists,” The Journal of Religion, October 1979.)
The Sicarii might be today labeled urban terrorists, targeting Temple priests and Jewish leaders who cooperated with the Romans. At that time, biblical scholarship attempted to link Judas Iscariot with the Sicarii and another disciple of Jesus, Simon the Zealot. Though the Sicarii were the descendants from earlier Jewish resistant movements before the birth of Jesus, they did not fully exercise their program of terrorism until a full decade after the death of Jesus.

The question that confronted me as seminarian and committed follower of Christ was what was my obligation to oppose the war. I was studying in Cambridge, several blocks from Harvard Square where the Students for Democratic Society protested. The extremist wing of the SDS were the Weathermen who believed in violence or bombing to achieve their ends.

Naturally, I found myself not drawn to the SDS or the Weatherman wing, but my opposition originated from the verse in the Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are the peacemakers…” Christ-followers could protest and be non-violent.
Going back to the Federal Building protest in Boston, there were 10,000 protesters and a large contingent of Jesuit seminarians and priests. I sat back of an elderly priest from Boston College. On the other side of the streets, there was the Boston riot police, hundreds of policemen with riot helmets and their batons drawn. They seemed to be ready to tear into crowd. I can still see some of the faces of the policemen; they seemed terrified and angry at the crowd. Thousands of protesters sat down non-violently to close off access to the federal building. They were warned to clear out and given a time period, and then the police charged and hitting protesters indiscriminately with the billy-clubs. The elder Jesuit priest sitting down peacefully and praying his rosary beads was struck by a police officer forcefully across his scull, and he bled profusely. Several of us carried the dazed priest away to an ambulance. There is often a price to pay for non-violent protest.

I found myself anxious and fearful at the charge of the riot police. I am not sure how many young and old folks were injured that day. There was no counter-violence from the protesters. That day I realized how much contrast that there was between Jesus’ spirituality of non-violence and the institutional culture’s spirituality of violence. Jesuit peace activist Father John Dear writes,

“Blessed are the violent,” the culture declares. “Blessed are the proud, the arrogant, the powerful, those who dominate others, those who oppress the poor, those who support the systems of domination.” They supposedly own everything—yet they shall inherit nothing. (Dear, Jesus the Rebel)

The culture of violence only breeds further violence. The heroes and heroines of non-violence express what Jesus exemplified in his ministry of God’s kingdom. He incarnated God’s spirituality of non-violence, peace-making, and compassionate love.

Shortly after the incident at the federal building protest, I made a Buddhist retreat at a Trappist monastery with a Japanese Buddhist teacher. I was drawn to Buddhism as I studied the Buddhist religion formally at Harvard because it was the most non-violent religion in human history. The followers of Christ were non-violent for nearly three centuries, and the followers of Christ were pacifists, challenging the military might of the Roman Empire. It took Constantine to co-opt the early Jesus movement from non-violence into an institutional culture of violence and domination. Subsequently, Christianity with some noteworthy exceptions has been one of the most violent religions in history.
For example, Francis of Assisi preached, “While you are proclaiming peace with your lips, be careful to have it even more fully in your heart.” That day at the protest I had to learn not to make the police the enemy and to forgive them for their violence as Christ did on the cross: “Abba God, forgive them for they know not what they do.” Christ forgave the Romans who flogged him mercilessly, who nailed his wrists and ankles to the cross, who pierced him with a lance, and the culture of violence that crucified him to silent his voice.

God’s spirituality of peace-making and non-violence crosses history, cultures, and other religions. The folks that I speak about today are children of God. Let me demonstrate to you this morning the lineage of God’s spirituality of non-violence. God’ spirituality of non-violence crosses cultures and history/ Mahatma Gandhi, one of the 20th century major architects of non-violence, went to London University in England. He explored various religious paths while in London. He became acquainted with the writings of the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, especially his book What I Believe, where he talks about his conversion based on Jesus’ sermon on Mount, the life of Francis of Assisi, the tale of Barlaam and Josaphat, and the Buddha in India.

Let me tell you the story of Barlaam and Josaphat. It is a story very popular in medieval Latin Christianity, the Greek and Russian Orthodox Christianity, Armenia Christianity, and Arabic and Persian languages as well. Barlaam, an Egyptian monk, went to India to preach the gospel of Christ and renunciation of wealth to live poorly among the poor. An Indian prince, Josaphat, heard is preaching and gave up wealth and family to become a monk to preach the gospel of Christ. This tale in the lives of the saints was partially responsible for the conversion of Leo Tolstoy to Christianity. In fact, Josaphat is a canonized saint in Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches.

Tolstoy had a profound influence upon Mahatma Gandhi who rediscovered non-violence from his Indian religious roots of ahimsa, non-violence with Buddhist and Jain traditions. His appropriation of non-violence became the central feature of his spirituality to combat white supremacism and racism in South Africa and then later in his struggle to help free India from English domination and oppression. Gandhi once observed, “Jesus was the most active person of nonviolence in the history of the world and the only people who don’t know Jesus was nonviolent are Christians. ….”

Later young Martin Luther King Jr, with the encouragement of gay activist Bayard Ruskin, studied Gandhi’s writings on nonviolent struggle for freedom. It became the main core of King’s struggle for civil rights of African-Americans until his assassination. King and his non-violent Christianity became the basis of the civil rights movements of the feminist movement, the farmer’s boycott Cesar Chavez, and the gay/lesbian civil rights movement.

I was introduced to the story of Barlaam and Josaphat while studying in class at Harvard with Wilfrid Cantwell Smith, the father of Comparative Religion at Harvard University. As Dr. Smith traced the translation of the fable through Latin, Greek, Armenian, Arabic and Persian translations, he came to the translation of Josaphat in Persian as “Bodisaf.” Bodisaf is related to the Sanskrit Bodhisattva, and it was clear that the Bodhisattva referred to Saiddartha Gautama the Buddha. The Buddha was and is still is a canonized saint in the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. I always like this as a Christian, as well as some Buddhists claim that Jesus is the future Buddha Maitreya, the Buddha of Love who will return at the end of time.

When the Dalai Lama came to Harvard in 1979, I met with him with three other students who were studying Tibetan language. The Dalai Lama was influenced in his struggles for non-violence and peace-making for nearly most of life when the Chinese invaded Tibet in 1949. He has represented the non-violence of Buddhism, but his strategy was shaped by Mahatma Gandhi in India and Martin Luther King Jr. in the US.

Let me add a few more heroes to the list. One is the Buddhist activist Aung San Suu Kyi, who was the daughter of the Burmese General Aung San, who was understood as the George Washington of Burmese independence from Japan and the English. I had her husband Professor Michael Aris at Harvard, and we read parts of her manuscript in developing Gandhi’s and the Dalai Lama’s, and the Buddha’s values of non-violence.

I could go one and speak about the intersection of the Jesuit activist non-violence and poet, Father Daniel Berrigan, with Martin Luther King Jr. and their connection with another Buddhist peace-maker Thich Nhat Hanh. There are other Christians that I could mention—Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, Oscar Romero, and many others. These are circles of overlapping practices of God’s spirituality of non-violence.

God’s spirituality of non-violence and peacemaking, despite institutional cultures of violence, continue to flourish under the Holy Spirit who does not respect religious institutional boundaries. Let me finish with the Jesuit John Dear,

Then as we share in paschal mystery (of Jesus’ cross and resurrection), we not only promote the coming of justice, but we welcome God’s reign. As we willingly suffer for justice, refuse to retaliate with further violence, and pursue the truth of justice and peace until our dying breath, we rejoice, we share the lot of the saints, the prophets, the martyrs, and Jesus himself. In this joy, the non-violent reign of God is at hand. (John Dear, Jesus the Rebel)

May God’s spirituality of non-violence triumph, for blessed are the peace-makers, they are the children of God. I have been proud to rub shoulders and read the spiritual insights of these children of God.

The practice of praying next to water is older than most religions. It seems easy to pray when we stand at spectacular waterfalls such as Niagara Falls or Iguaza Falls between Argentina and Uruguay. Or when we walk on the beach of the ocean, it is easy to find ourselves connected to the largeness of the ocean and praying. These natural wonders inspire awe and beauty, two keys for experiencing God in the world. We can understand Psalm 104 that praises God for a seascape, teeming with abundant life and creatures. Prayer besides water may be easy for humans to give God thanks for life and beauty of our oceans. But is still easy for us who have distance ourselves from water?

Today’s gospel speaks of Jesus’ entrance into the waters of the Jordan River. John the Baptist lived on the edges of civilization at the Jordan River, with the desert and wilderness close by. To be baptized by John the Baptist meant to travel from civilization, whether from a city or a rural village, to the river and the edge of wilderness. The four gospels introduce us to the wild baptizer, John the Baptist at the edges of civilization. He eats locusts and wild honey, and he drapes his body with the furs and leather skins.

Jesus travels to John the Baptist from Nazareth in Galilee because he hears of John’s ministry and is drawn to his ministry of renewal and repentance. Jesus enters the waters at the edge of the wilderness where the wild baptizer will immerse him the flowing currents of the Jordan River. He enters the wildness of the waters.

His baptism is not just a ritual cleansing for sin; it is a unique conversion moment whereby Jesus connects with the Earth Spirit and experiences what it means to be a beloved child of Abba God. It is a baptismal or water covenant in Abba God’s recognition of Jesus as beloved child. The sensible world of natural elements places us in touch with the higher mystery of God. And it did this for Jesus as he entered unclothed into the waters of the Jordan. The life-giving waters bathe the body of Jesus in the radiance of God’s abundant life, and water surrounding his body form an earth covenant.

Water is an important symbol in all of the world religions because every living creature depends upon water to live. Our bodies contain 60 -70% water. Hydration of our bodies is essential to life. We cannot survive five days without water. Water is a richly complex substance without which there would be no life on Earth as we know it. Water is the Earth’s blood, its vitality, and water then becomes literally part of our blood flowing through our bodies and most of other life.

Water falls down in rain, it flows in streams and rivers, enters the ground, and it can bubble forth from the water table. Life was born in the oceans 3.2 billion years ago. There is an intimate connection with water and life. Without water, there is no life, yet water has the power to destroy as well as to create. How many people drown each year from flooding?

Water is the means of cleansing, spiritual and physical. We bathe or shower in water, we wash ourselves in water. We swim in water. We play in water. Water not only purifies objects for ritual use, but can make a person clean, externally or spiritually, ready to come into the presence of God. Catholics bless themselves with holy water from fonts when they enter a place of worship and prayer. They renew a water covenant with God.

In his book, A Watered Garden, Benjamin Stewart details four ecological characteristics of water for baptism: waters of life as a oasis, living water as pouring and flowing, pooled waters as mysterious depths, and a place that welcomes what might call the untamed or wild nature of water.
Jesus reminds us of the mystery of living water and its connection to Earth Spirit in conversation with the Samaritan woman. Jesus speaks in John’s Gospel of the living water from God’s abundance that is able to renew and sanctify all of creation. Jesus said,

Everyone who drinks this water will become thirsty again. Anyone, who drinks the water, I give will never become thirsty again. The water I give him will become a spring of water, springing up to eternal life.

Jesus uses the image of water as indispensable to life, then he points to himself as the ‘living water’ which he offers eternal life. Water is vital to human and all life, and in dry or desert climates, water becomes an oasis of life. Baptismal waters give life to us. Jesus becomes an oasis of water. In fact, water becomes a sacrament of li from God, or to use Jesus words in John’s Gospel , “eternal life.” We need to have plants and stones in areas when we baptize anyone. That might mean our garden oasis becomes a more appropriate place for baptism–with its water and plant features a natural sanctuary for initiation into God’s baptismal waters.

The second ecological feature is the symbol of living waters as flowing. That day as Jesus entered the flowing waters of the Jordan, he understood the action that John performed upon himself, not as repentance for sin, but as entering into the waters of God’s life. Environmentally, his immersion under flowing waters of the Jordan River signified a new birth of consciousness. Stewart observes that pouring and flowing of waters express a rich mystery:

When new Christians are made in flowing baptismal, all of those associations –the overflowing blessings of God, the nourishing water over landscape, the always new quality of flowing water, and the life-giving power that flows to us from beyond our control—wash over the newly baptized and deepen our significance of baptism.

The baptism of Jesus, and our own baptism into God as Creator, Beloved Child, and Spirit as Sustainer of Life, communicates vividly the goodness and power of God in this world. We are baptized into living grace. And just as the rainbow became a sign of God’s covenant, flowing water becomes another covenant with us.

The third ecological characteristic is the mysterious depths of pooled waters, great lakes, and oceans. Deeply pooled waters hold mysteries, and we cannot the full depth of the dangers and the euphoric experience of connecting with life infinitely greater than ourselves but intimately weaves all life together in a grace-filled ecology on interrelatedness. Such deep and great pools remind us that the Holy Spirit hovered over the primal oceans of the earth billions of years to create a spark of cellular life. Above the waters of the Jordan, God appeared to Jesus in the form of a dove, the Holy Spirit, the Earth Spirit. Earth Spirit is my translation of an early title of the Holy Spirit as the Sustainer of life. Many early Christian writers understood the baptism of Jesus had ecological significance. They recognized that water as the bearer of the Spirit. Maybe we should recapture this notion that as Jesus was immersed in the Jordan waters and surfaced that he was linked to the Spirit as the beloved child of God and child of the earth. He was led by the Spirit into the wilderness for 40 days in prayer and living with wild animals as the gospels tell us. There was an intimate bond between Jesus and the Earth Spirit, and he grew closer to life on Earth.

Both God and the Spirit were present in the natural elements of the river, and the dove brought Jesus into the wilderness for forty days. There he experienced his identity in the wilderness, and he was surrounded by untamed wild life and the beauty of the stars in the clear skies. In the forge of the baptismal waters and time spent in the wilderness, God transformed the Jesus into the beloved child and the prophet of compassion, leading back to begin the ministry to preach the good news to the poor, the sick, and the oppressed.

Stewart speaks of the fourth characteristic as the welcoming the nature of water as untamed . When Jesus was immersed into the Jordan River, his hair was messed us. Many clergy will tell you stories how messy baptisms are; you splash or pour water on someone, whether adult or infant. You get wet, it messes you up. Stewart writes,

…baptism into Christ is a radical thing; it profoundly rearranges your life. The water, poured out, disrupted the careful grooming and neatness of the baptismal party as if something of the wilderness baptism of John had flowed…

The waters of the river Jordan represented death of an old self and new birth from the waters of the Spirit. It was a moment of revelation, disrupt Jesus with a profound personal transformation: He was the beloved child of the earth, the beloved child of God.

In a former life as a Catholic priest, I was asked to baptize an infant girl of a single mother. I asked the mother the name of her child as I cupped waters with my hand from the baptismal font to pour on her. The mother answered, “Tangerine Cotton” and I splashed water on the infant, causing her to cry. As a newly ordained priest and too unconsciously white, I instructed the mother that you had to have a saint’s name. So we compromised with the name of Anne, the mother of Mary, so her name became “Cotton Tangerine Anne…” The wildness of grace disrupts life as we know it. It gets messy for baptizer and his notions of white Christian hegemony and the baptized alike. There is a disruptive quality to baptism, and it expresses the wild grace of God who transforms us and messes up our lives.

Yet becoming a baptized Christian is a messy thing, our ordinariness is disrupted. But there is a truth here. When we are welcome the living waters of the earth, the wildness or untamed Spirit, that led Christ to the Jordan and into the wilderness, will also create great mischief or disruption in our lives as we try to follow Christ as a disciple. It is flourishing and the disruption of transformation by the welcoming waters of Christ’s baptism.

We have become distant with water and nature. Somehow we need to regain those natural elements into out initiations in Christ’s path of compassionate love. Many Churches have unfortunately moved baptism from its natural environments outdoors into indoors in the church as repentance for sin or ritual initiation into church membership. We have lost something natural and valuable in the process by removing baptism from its natural surroundings in nature.

Maybe it reinforces our alienation and distance from the natural world. We are less mindful of the importance of water as we busy ourselves with life and forgetting our connections to other life.

Water is a human right, despite what anyone otherwise claims. People can survive without food longer than they can without water. Our baptism into the waters of Christ is baptism into the experience that Jesus had the Jordan River, stressing his ministerial and incarnational responsibility towards God’s creation.

We are linked by baptism to the body of Christ and that body of Christ is linked to the elements of the Earth, water, clean air. Our baptism stresses that we are entrusted with mission to protect and co-live with the Earth, the waters of the Earth, the air we breathe. The Earth Spirit who appeared at the baptism of Jesus continues to baptize into the waters of the earth and call us explicitly to work for water justice and water rights. What does this water covenant with God mean to us today?

In our modern world, we carelessly pollute water tables with toxic chemicals and waste so much water. Fracking uses carcinogenic chemicals and chemicals that cause infertility to break up congealed oil in rocks to mine for our greed in consuming fossil fuels. California State is considering fracking in a state where water is so valuable. Can we afford to pollute our water sources by pumping hundreds of thousands of gallons of water with toxic chemical into underground shale to extract oil and gas. Are we not contaminating the Earth Spirit who is present the waters of the Earth? We pollute the oceans with our garbage and sanitary waste and radiation.

Sea-level risings will change the shape of the land maps of the world and displaced hundreds of millions, if not billions of climate refugees. These are only a few of the water events that will impact life on planet Earth.

We know that water is essential to life. Here are some statistics. Global water quality is impacted by lack sanitation facilities, and over a million children died in 2013 because of poor sanitation.

UN data indicates that one billion people globally have no access to drinking water. 1/7 of the people on this planet!

We talk about the commoditization of water as something corporations can own and sell. We charge for water, when water is freely bestowed upon us by the Creator God as the Creator bestows grace upon all life. What will a bottle of water like this cost us in 30 years?

We don’t have enough water to support the population of the greater Los Angeles County without taking some steps to conserve water. Water shortages will increase as we change the climate of the planet.

The Christian Church, including our own, has a God given covenant towards creation, and we are invited to exercise Earth care in public life, in order to protect earth, to appreciate water and air as gifts of the Creator intended for everyone. Let me end with a line from the prophet Amos about our baptismal or water covenant with God: “let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness as an ever-flowing stream.” Amos 5:4

The popularity of the Magi story in Christian art and imagination is because it includes a journey following a star, it has the intrigue of king—ruthless enough to kill his father-in-law, several wives, and two sons—now wanting to kill a newborn child, revelation from an angel, and the decision not to go back to Herod. Look at the crèche and many others; they frequently include the three wise men or magi. The magi denote people with specialized and superior knowledge, magic, astrology, and astronomy. But the Magi are true seekers of truth of God’s presence and compassion in the world. Two characteristics that jump out magi are: 1) They embark upon a journey to discover the truth about life, even crossing religious boundaries to engage the mystery of incarnational inclusivity. 2) They are changed by their journey and live with more openness to radical inclusive love.

Incarnational Christian spirituality is about God’s wild and radical inclusive love, breaking down barriers and removing obstacles. It means God entering created life, embodying an openness to overcome human exclusive categories and obstacles. Jesus, God’s Christ, has been used exclusively to deny and beat down other peoples and their religious.

Incarnational spirituality for Christian is betrayed by exclusive engagement with other religions. Christian exclusivism asserts that there is no salvation outside of Christ,

Here are some of the lines thrown at me by Christian excluivists: Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” (John 14:6) In the book of Acts 4:12, Peter preaches, “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved.” This makes it perfectly clear to some there is no salvation outside the church or outside of Christ. What it breeds is Christian arrogance, exclusivism, intolerance, judgmentalism, violence, and just bad behavior towards other religious traditions.

Christian exclusivism fails to listen to the Holy Spirit and fails to understand the true nature of Christ as God’s incarnate one. I would suggest that “the word became flesh and pitched his tent among us” (John 1:14) indicates a certain flexibility and fluidity of God’s gracious revelation in Christ. Tents are mobile, and if I am raising the tent, it may not look the same a second time—even further mobility. This image of incarnational mobility resists tendencies towards Christian dogmatism, for God’s incarnation is not about constructing boundaries but the dissolution of barriers, and that includes between the followers of Christ and people of good and sometimes great faith in other religions.

There is an example of St. Francis of Assisi. He is patron saint of nature, a lover nature. But he practiced an extraordinary reverence for life, and this, in my opinion, places him as magi.

While popes and kings of Christendom in the Middle Ages called for Christians to take up arms to rescue the Holy Land from Muslim control, to die holy deaths for Christ against Muslim infidels, there was a singular counter voice. It was Francis who followed in Christ’s footsteps as a peacemaker. The crusades were terrible wars inflicted upon Muslims. To this day, there is a vivid remembrance of the Christian crusades as a war upon Islam. There was much Islamophobia, born of fear of Muslims in the Middle Ages, as there is today in 21st century America.

But one single man, Francis, who did not believe in war and sickened by the slaughter, decided to visit the Sultan of Egypt, Malik-al-Kamil. His initial goal was to convert the sultan to Christ and even face death and martyrdom. But his attitude was significantly different from the Christian crusaders who killed Muslims rather engaging in conversation with them. The difference for Francis from the crusaders was: He neither considered Muslims as his enemy nor the enemy of Christianity. He considered them as brothers and sisters of Christ.

Francis approached the Muslim sultan as approached all peoples, whether lepers or a pope, or animals or God’s creation. Francis approached all his brothers and sisters with love and careful attentiveness. He met the sultan with the attitude that here was my brother. Francis asked himself “how would Christ engage the sultan?” He did not insult the sultan, Islam, or the prophet Muhammad. He talked why he was a Christian and listened to the sultan about his religion. We don’t the exact conversation that Francis had, but we do know that he did not insult the sultan or his religion. He would not have come out their meeting alive. He respected him as a brother, a fellow seeker of God and truth. It was probably the first time the sultan met a real follower of Christ.

Francis learned some new things about Islam. And I imagined that he joined his brother the sultan in prayer because Muslims piously pray at least five times a day. When he returned to Assisi, one Franciscan commentator mentions, he encourages Christians to pray as often as Muslims. He understood and respected how Islam created in its culture and practice, a daily awareness of God through its rhythms of prayer.

Francis of Assisi encouraged Christians to learn how to live peacefully with Muslims. He took the model of Christ as a way to engaged the sultan and Muslims—the way of non-violence and peace. Here is the first Magi that I want to share. He treats an enemy demonized by popes, cardinals, and kings.

The second Magi is the Dalai Lama. He is understood by Tibetan Buddhists to be the incarnation of the bodhisattva Avolakiteshvara or Chen-re-zig in Tibetan. He is a prophet of compassion in the 20th and early 21st century. He has publicly maintained that “kindness is my religion.”

In a conversation on compassion between himself and another Magi, the Anglican bishop, Desmond Tutu—both recipients of the Noble Peace Prize, the Dalai Lama spoke. Let me excerpt a section of a book The Wisdom about Compassion, Victor Chan:

“I myself, I’m believer, I’m Buddhist monk. So for my own improvement, I utilize as much as I can Buddhist approach. But I never touch this when I talk with others. Buddhism is my business. Not business of other people. Frankly speaking”—he stole a glance at the archbishop and declared firmly—“when you and our brothers and sisters talk about God, creator, I’m nonbeliever.” He laughed, perhaps a little self-consciously…..

Tutu replied, “Let me just say that one of the things we need to establish is that”—long pause—“God is not a Christian.” He paused again and turned to look at the Dalai Lama with a mischievous glint in his eyes….

Tutu continued, “The glory about God is that God is a mystery. God is actually quite incredible in many ways. But God allows us to misunderstand her”—at this, the audience went wild; the applause was loud and spontaneous—“but also to understand her….”

“I’ve frequently said I’m glad I’m not God,” Tutu continued. “But I’m also glad God is God. She can watch us speak, spread hatred, in her name. Apartheid was for a long time justified by the church. We do the same when we say all those awful things we say about gays and lesbians. We speak on behalf of a God of love.”

“The God that I worship is an omnipotent God,” Tutu intoned, opening his arms wide. He paused to let this sink in. Then he said, sotto voce, “He is also incredibly, totally impotent. The God that I worship is almighty, and also incredibly weak.”

“But the glory of God is actually mind-blowing. He can sit and not intervene because he has such an incredible, incredible reverence for my autonomy. He is prepared to let me go to hell. Freely. rather than compel me to go to heaven.”

“He weeps when he sees us do the things that we do to one another. But he does not send lightning bolts to destroy the ungodly. And that is fantastic. God says, ‘I can’t force you. I beg you, please for your own sake, make the right choice. I beg you.’

“When you do the right thing, God forgets about God’s divine dignity and he rushes and embraces you. ‘You came back, you came back. I love you. Oh how wonderful, you came back.’”

The dialogue between Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama is a shared conversation of mutual respect between two great magi, sometimes with mischievous engagement, but profound attentiveness to each other. One of the highlights that Desmond Tutu shares is his comment , “God is not a Christian.” I would imagine that Jesus would have easily spoken the words, “Abba God is not Jewish.” Two prophets of compassion, fellow Magi—one a Buddhist non-theist and the other a Christian Trinitarian—find common religious ground in searching for the truth of non-violent compassion and forgiveness. They can even find agreement about mischievous God language of compassion and kindness.

The final Magi or so-journer I want to speak about is myself. During my college years and then in seminary, I was deeply influence by The Way of All the Earth by the theologian John Dunne.

Passing over is a shifting of standpoint, a going over to the standpoint of another culture, another way of life, another religion. It is followed by an equal and opposite process we might call back “coming back,” coming back with new insight into one’s own culture, one’s own life, one’s own religion.

Dunne’s notion of passing over into the stories of religious figures such as the Buddha, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr, Dorothy Day, Albert Schweitzer, Mother Theresa, Troy Perry, Rev. John McNeill, Thich Nhat Hanh and Aung San Suu Kyi and many more and then coming back to one’s one life and religion meant that if you engaged religious figures and their insights, you would come back transformed—changed by the engagement. I was transformed by the above mentioned religious figures and more. It was an inevitable that I became a religious hybrid—a magi and seeker of compassion.
Over time, I became a Buddhist Christian or rather a Bodhisattva Christian. A bodhisattva takes a vow similar to the following:

By the virtue collected through all that I have done, may the pain of every living creature be completely cleaned away. May I be the doctor and the medicine and may I be a nurse for all sick beings in the world until everyone is healed. May a rain of food and drink descend to clear away the pain of thirst and hunger, and during the aeon of famine may I myself change into food and drink. May I be a protector for those without one, and a guide to all travelers on the way; may I be a bridge, a boat and a ship for who those who wish to cross (the water). (from the Buddhist poet Shantideva)

I took a similar vow years ago. Rev. John McNeill also took the bodhisattva vow in his dedication and fight for justice for LGBT folks within the Catholic church. It is a vow to live compassionately in the world, to care for other life and to maintain a true reverence for life as taught by experience of God in numerous incarnations of compassionate action.

In my passage and engagement of the incarnational Christ, I have fallen in love with the Earth and all Life. I try through my contemplative practice to see life through the eyes of Christ as Francis did. I attempt to live the non-violent compassion of the Dalai Lama, and I tried to take the reconciliation program of Desmond Tutu to built bridges between racist supporters in South African and the oppressed peoples of color. I try to build bridges wherever possible.

What I have done in my sermon today is to show how God’s incarnational inclusivity in Christ breaks down barriers between religious communities and how people of faith can find incarnational values of our God in each community or perhaps scandalously in all religious communities dedicated to the truth of compassion, non-violence, and loving care.

The title of my sermon this Christmas Eve is taken from a meditation I read several weeks ago by Franciscan priest and spirituality author, Father Richard Rohr. He writes,

Christmas Eve is an invitation to fall in love with God so that what is impossible might come to pass in our broke, frightened, and confused lives and world. I know that tonight I am ready to fall in love with God again and embrace the Christ child…maybe you are too. And so we sing together this love song

My goal tonight is to invite you and myself to fall in love again with God and embrace the Christ child within you. We sing our Christmas carols, and they are really love songs. We ponder our primal connection with God by listening to an all too familiar story about the birth of Jesus. We find ourselves emotionally drawn into the familiar story that inspires and sets our imagination and hearts on fire. Or to put in terms that I like: It sets our inner child free to respond to a call of grace.
St. Francis of Assisi, one of my favorite Christian saints, originated the Nativity crèche with animals present. Francis believed that the birth of Jesus, God’s incarnation, was already salvation, breaking boundaries down between the divine child and creatures, human and animal creatures. Once the divine community of love—that we call God—took on human flesh, then not only humanity but all other life and creation in its entirety became even more precious to God because God became physical matter or embodied. God incorporated the embodied Christ from the moment of conception into God’s self.

We have been trained to think that the incarnation took place in the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem or the Mary’s pregnancy in Nazareth some 2000 years. But the incarnation is not separate from the process of creation, the big bang 15 billion years ago, and the salvation of all the universe in the distant future whenever that happens. For God, it is a singular event –outpouring of love and compassion to all.

The author to the Ephesians at the end of the first century CE describes how God designed a plan with Christ for the fullness of time to gather up all things in heaven and earth (Ephesians 1:9-10). From the beginning before time and space, which we call creation, God planned with Christ to bring a “fullness or completeness” to creation with Christ. I want you to ponder on this point; it was made a by 13th century Franciscan theologian John Dun Scotus, and I want you wrap your mind around this fact that he proposes: The first idea in the mind of God ever was to dream and think about Christ, and God has never stopped ever reflecting and loving the Christ and their love together has generated the Spirit—a threefold community of divine love for all time as we can imagine.

This divine community of love chose that the incarnation of Christ would start with creation of the universe, spinning off into galaxies of stars, our own sun and solar system, on earth with the first sign of light, water, plants, trees, air, and every kind of other life. God’s incarnation took place in the big bag explosion of creation and through the evolution of some 15 billion years in the proto-matter and energy of the emerging galaxies of stars before that the flowering of incarnation took place in the womb of Mary and the birth of a child in Bethlehem. One theologian calls this “ancestral grace.” Let me explain how this ancestral grace of creation ripens in a cold morning hours on the outskirts of Bethlehem.

I don’t know about you, but I am overwhelmed by the love I experience in the grace of God’s love life that from the first thought in the mind of God was Christ, creation, and us. Wow! In a wonderful book—The Body of Christ— environmental theologian Sallie McFague claims, ”salvation is the direction of all of creation, and creation is the very place of salvation.” When we stop dividing creation, incarnation, and salvation and understand them as one movement of divine grace and love originating from the first thought in the mind of God. In our Christmas hymns, we sing praise to Emmanuel, God with us. We celebrate creation, Christ’s incarnation, and salvation altogether. God with us has been always here in and with creation.

Emmanuel, God with us, is born of a young woman of 13 years or so. Emmanuel, God with us, is helpless, vulnerable, dependent upon Mary and Joseph for his survival. He feels the cold and the dampness of winter in a manger. The family has taken refuge in a primitive cave from the wintery night. We believe that God took physical flesh so that we humans could fall in love with God with a human face, body, and limbs. We have difficult as humans to fall in love with God as infinite energy or extravagant graciousness out there. But we fall in love with God now for us, loud cries, and tears of a baby. God is radically and inclusively available to us. There are no barriers or obstacles, God is vulnerably there as a helpless newborn.

The paradoxical mystery of the Incarnation becomes real in the Christmas story that we re-tell each year. What I mean by paradox is that we bring seemingly contradictory points of view to make sense of the mystery before us. For instance, the incarnation of God in human flesh is one of those paradoxical mysteries. UCC biblical scholar, Walter Brueggemann, calls this paradoxical event, “the scandal of the particular.” As I mentioned, one such particular scandal is God’s taking flesh and living among us. The physical and the spiritual co-exist together in one body; or the eternal and infinite God are united in a human body.

As we try to unwrap the Christmas mystery, I want to throw into the mix an additional paradox. As God takes flesh in the womb of Mary and is born into the world, we encounter the mystery that the radical inclusive, unconditional love and grace of God takes shape in the world. Our infinite God becomes flesh in the fragile life and body of a child; his family and life are later threatened, and they flee from Bethlehem. The mystery is the scandal of radical infinite inclusive love—given to us as a gift—take on a particular physical reality. This is shocking to many non-Christians who want a superman Christ, not a vulnerable child.

To embrace this mystery challenges the way we see things. We are invited to view life differently. We have been taught God is out there or up there in heaven, distant from us. But actually, Emmanuel—God with us—points not out there but in our midst. God is available here tonight. And the mystery is that God has always been very near to us from the beginning.

Once we restore God’s incarnation to the center of our faith lives, we catch a glimpse that our views of God are too narrow. Our practice of Christian spirituality has a lot of walls that protect us from life around us and from God with us. Our lives have been too sheltered from love and life, connection to what ultimately matters. It has been covered over by our ego-centeredness. We have placed the birth and life of Jesus in a mission impossible perspective of God sending Jesus down to rescue us from ourselves. There is some truth to that, but there is another stronger point of view. The birth of Jesus, and his later life, is about celebrating and affirming the ancestral grace that started of all this. God’s love is so extravagant and abundant that it cannot be contained, but it flows into creation, incarnation, and salvation—fully being incorporated into the divine community of love. We carry that incarnation, that ancestral grace, in our bodies as well.

The birth of Christ is God’s communication and invitation to fall in love with Christ and the divine community of love. Christ is God’s wild love for us, or rather God’s radically inclusive love for all creation. God offers us an invitation to enter a loving relationship with Christ.

There is some startling consequences when we meditate on God’s incarnation—God’s birth unwrapped from mystery to break down all barriers and walls. All inclusive love originates from the divine community of radical inclusive love, and we are made a part of that community love.

The first consequence is God’s dissolving the boundaries of divine and human. God reveals God’s self, no longer in spoken word but revealed and embodied in flesh. God breathes air with a body, feels, experiences vulnerability and emotions, and all the experiences we share as human beings. God comes out as radical love, shattering all human boundaries and conceptual walls surrounding God. God becomes flesh because God wants us to know that God love us. It is also the fact that God wants to experience what we experience as creatures. God became flesh to allow creation—all life—to share in God’s eternal life. Early generations of Christians claimed that God became human to allow humans to become divine. This is the ancestral grace of creation ripening through history until a pregnancy of a young girl Miriam in Nazareth and the birth of a divine child in a stable in Bethlehem. God is with us and for us.

God’s radical inclusive love breaks down the walls between rich and poor, the powerful and the weak, insider and outsider. Humans exclusively divide the human world, peoples, and other life into categories: race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, classes, age, ability, religion, and so on. Our exclusions are the result of human sinfulness to separate ourselves from others by noting their differences from ourselves.

The human life of God” begins with images of homelessness and poverty. Two peasants are not in control of their lives, for they are subject to the administration of the Roman Empire. They are immigrants, undocumented traveling to make themselves legal statistics in the Roman Empire, but without any rights and privileges of citizenship. They are powerless, marginalized, and poor. They are in our midst as undocumented persons who carry the image of Christ.

God with us is birthed to dissolve exclusions, tear down walls, break down barriers and remove boundaries. Emmanuel was destined to become a rule-breaker and rebelliously tearing away obstacles. Jesus manifested God’s radical inclusive love in his lifetime, and I often why so many of us got it wrong by becoming exclusive and creating walls. Jesus came to include, never to exclude, for that is the very nature of God made incarnate to include us all.

What is so alarming about the nature of God’s as radical inclusive love is that its openness to include so much wider than any of us can imagine. Humans want to privilege itself with divisions, with categories, walls of prejudice and self-importance. We are not like that! We not related to…fill in the blank with whatever group of people make you feel uncomfortable—leather folk, homeless, the mentally ill, people from different cultures, religions, and races. We are better than them, were privileged, we are special, we are part of the in-group. Radical inclusivity means what it says. It is the intentional inclusion of all persons who have been marginalized and all those people who make us uncomfortable.

Yet there is more to this inclusivity. The incarnate Christ is born in a stable. Being born in the stable is not an exclusive group. Instead of saying humanity is superior to animals, the incarnate God blurs the edges once more with openness. But it is more radical when we realize that Christ was born in a stable with animals present. The divide we human make between us and animals dissolve in the incarnated Christ. Christ came to other life as well as for us humans. This time God says humans and other life are precious to God’s self because all creatures are loveable to God and have intrinsic value to God’s self. The consequences are staggering since the incarnate one says salvation is not just a human event as we were taught in our churches. Salvation is a cosmic event whereby all creatures, all creation, is included, not just exclusively humanity. Jesus would be later designated the Lamb of God; he died for all animals as well as human beings.

God’s arms are extended openly to all with compassion, mercy, forgiveness, and love. Our God is wide open with love, and this sends streaks of panick among religious conservatives with boundaries, walls surrounding God’s extravagant grace and exuberant welcome. They want to focus on sin and holiness to make distinctions and to set walls between us. But this is not way of God who includes. It is humans uncomfortable that everyone may be admitted to the table.

Jesus is the incarnation of God’s wild grace. And this means for us this Christmas the realization that to celebrate the birth of Christ includes a new vision of what is. It is a God-centered vision that all life is reverenced from the simplest to the highest. Incarnation is grace coming to a logical definition within history. We’re all saved by God’s compassionate love, without exception. Rohr writes,

Resurrection is incarnation coming to its logical conclusion. If God is already in everything, then everything is from glory and unto glory. We’re all saved by mercy, without exception. We’re all saved by grace, so there’s no point in distinguishing degrees of worthiness because God alone is “all good,” and everything else in creation participates in that one, universal goodness to varying degrees. There is no absolute dividing line between worthy and unworthy people in the eyes of God, because all our worthiness is merely participation in God’s.