If a church claims Jesus, I believe that they must claim his message on the reign of God. Many churches focus on Jesus and saving souls, but I wonder how many of these churches Jesus would claim as his own. Are they what he imagined? Jesus has been transformed into the savior of souls while churches have failed to realize that the story of Jesus is transformative, and that the message he preached is radical and transformative. The gospel of Jesus is a dangerous memory of his priorities and values. I want to make a bold claim that Jesus—God’s Christ—would rather be an example for us to model ourselves upon rather than be worshiped each Sunday without the living the values he held valuable.

Did I really say this? Yes Jesus has been a model for me for most of life, and I followed him by making his values and his priorities my own. You have heard me on a number of occasions describe Jesus as rule-breaker and his indiscriminate eating habits with people who were impure, outcasts, and sinners. Oftentimes, Christian churches present Christianity as shame –based religion, and I wonder what would happen if they could follow Jesus’ spirit of compassion, generosity,forgiveness and kindness and abandon shaming and exclusion as punishments for outsiders. If a church were Christian, they make Jesus’ practice and message of God’s reign. When Jesus speaks of the kingdom of God or God reign, he is speaking about his experience of God in his life and the values of God enfleshed in his ministry. They give us an example of his priorities and values, and these, I would argue, must be central to following Jesus. Many churches have forgotten this because these values of Jesus are too dangerous.

I am going to explore Jesus’ experience of God as subversive and mischievous. God, in fact, is untamed and wild, outside, mischievous, and undomesticated. This does not mean that God is not compassionate and loving. It means our God does the unexpected, the unpredictable, the surprising, and even the unthinkable. God always surprises us.

Let us this morning look at two Jesus’ parables, the mustard seed and the woman who places the unleaven into fifty pounds of flour. These parables tell us much about Jesus’ experience of Abba God but also a lot about himself. I want to suggest that from the beginning Easter was unconsciously built into his parables and actions about God’s reign from the Holy Spirit. The surprise of Easter expresses how God surprises the disciples, and that same God provides surprises in these two parables.

I heard once in class a professor say, “Jesus preached God’s reign, and what we got was the church.” If the church were only Christian as I indicated in my centering prayer reflection…. Church preaching often presumes that it is the focus of Jesus’ preaching, but this is self-serving. Jesus founded a movement but he never intended a church, at least, as many churches are—focused on power and control. Jesus was focused on the wild surprises that God has in store for us. This is certainly a bold claim made by your pastor preaching this morning.

Now the parable of the mustard seed is from today’s scripture. Matthew pairs this parable with the parable of woman who hid the yeast in the unleavened bread. She stealthily place corruption of impure leaven into the flour to make leaven bread. The image includes the woman’s stealthily or secretly adding what is considered impure to the pure. God uses the impure to subvert the pure. This is one of the many images Jesus used for God and how lives and interacts with us.

In Leviticus 19:19, there is a prohibition of not planting two types of seeds in the same field. A mustard seed grows by spreading under all of the other plants. What it does is it spreads so far unseen until it covers under the garden. This is why Jewish gardeners hated it, it just took over, no matter what you did, it went where it wanted to go. (Jeff picture of a field of mustard) It works in small steps with small seeds to slowly but surely take over the garden, unnoticed, from underneath. Each flower on the plant can produce thousands of seeds. The potential of each flower to multiply is incredible, almost wildly unstoppable.

For Jesus, God’s reign is a subversive movement. It takes over like a pesky weed or mustard plant where it is not wanted. God’s reign is a movement of people empowered or what I described earlier as empowered companionship. It is institutionally out of control. It attracts birds which spread the mustard seeds to other locations where it is not particularly desired. The power of love is subversive and dangerous like the mustard seed; the power of God’s love is stronger than the power of violence. And no matter what precautions farmers take, they still cannot stop its spread.

But the mustard plant is not entirely useless; it has medicinal properties for healing. Thus, Jesus points out the main character of God’s reign as empowered companionship. It has dangerous take over properties with medicinal capabilities of healing.

God’s movement is bigger than any church or churches attempt to control God. God lives and acts in the world as a pesky weed with healing properties, uncontrollable with dangerous properties of taking over as well as healing.
We could possibly listen to the parable as one woman spoils the flour with yeast or leaven. It might culturally mean something like this, “one bad apple can spoil the whole bunch.” But this parable like the mustard seed is far more dangerous.
Jesus’ audience would have been shocked by his teaching. Some might have blanched. God’s reign is like leaven or yeast. Let me give you the full impact of this metaphor.

In Mark 8:15, Jesus warns his disciples, “Take care, beware the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod.” Leaven naturally is corruption, and it makes sense to speak of the leaven of the Pharisees, Herod, or even Caesar. But how can God’s reign be like leaven or corruption or impurity? Paul speaks of the saints, “Clean out the old leaven that you might become fresh dough as you are really unleavened.” (1 Cor. 5:7) To the Jewish audience, leaven is primarily unclean, impure, or corruption. It is banned from the house seven days prior and during the most important festival of Passover. Leaven was yeast, a bacteria that led to the fermentation and the rising of dough. It was a religious symbol of decay and impurity.

A woman took and hid leaven in three measures of flour. Three measures in the ancient world was about fifty pounds. Imagine buying fifty one pound packages of flour at the supermarket. That is probably more flour than all of us use in a year—except for Layne he goes through fifty pounds of flour every two weeks.
The parable was even more offensive as it starts. How can a weak woman have anything to do with God? That’s a male domain. How can the woman keep it concealed? Most bread in the ancient world was flat bread: like Syrian bread, pita bread, or tortillas. How long before the men realize that this bread is leavened, rising, and expanding? Fifty pounds of dough rising and expanding could get of out of hand quickly. Imagine all the bread that would be made.

But Jesus parable would be radical his hearers to imagine and conceive of God first as a baker woman. God stealthily is working to expand God’s banquet into a huge messianic feast to include all peoples, pure and so- called impure.
Jesus’ metaphor of God as a baker woman does place God not out there but very close to us, hidden and unrecognized as She pulls us, kneads us into shape, maybe even slamming the dough on a board. It is not a very comfortable process for us. And then the baker woman God places us in an oven—a fire—perhaps a refining fire that gives heat and energy. Then the baker woman God blesses us, breaks us, and gives us to others. It is not easy being shaped as dough and baked into a leavened loaf of bread. The broken and shared leavened loaf becomes nourishment for others.

But this parable presents good news to women, for it gives women a major role in God’s reign and the fact that they also bear the image of God as women. Women are naturally impure because their monthly cycle from the perspective of the Hebrew Bible. But Jesus’ radical story does not end with the imaging of God as a baker woman.

He associates God with leaven, yeast—a bacteria that represents decay and fermentation. The baker woman introduces leaven until all the dough has become leavened, In other words, the dough is thoroughly corrupted. The baker woman corrupts the purity of the unleavened.

For Jews, leaven was impurity, a symbol of moral evil. Unleaven is the proper religious symbol for God. For pious Jews, they aimed to be holy as God is holy. Now Jesus has turned the religious symbol of unleaven upside down. For the Hebrew scriptures, unleavened bread symbolically represented holiness. He has perverted the symbol, turning it inside out and upside down.

Jesus has subverted the whole religious order within the eyes of all the Jewish holiness groups: scribes, Pharisees, the Essenes, and the Temple priests. Jesus’ one sentence parable redefines the God. God becomes unclean. No wonder the charges of the chief priests of the Temple before Pilate: “We found this man (Jesus) perverting our nation…” That is a remarkable charge. He has corrupted or leavened our religion, what we consider sacred.
Imagine the radicalness of this parable, for it abolishes the category of pure and impure, sacred and profane. Those map grids are human categories to build a fence around some folks and fence out others. It justifies religious practices, regulates grace. Religious or grace gatekeepers are terrified by the image that Jesus preaches. What will happen to our specialness, our special holy relationship with God? We control accessibility to God. It is the scandal of radical inclusiveness—what if we are all included in the banquet.

Jesus told parables to allow people to see God as he experienced God. For women, this parable is good news for them. They are like the baker God and carry that image in themselves. On one level, this parable states clearly, God’s reign is impurity, it corrupts and makes impure. How righteous persons object to this bold proclamation of Jesus! I pointed this out in a meeting of clergy once, and one MCC clergy was so upset with me that I dare name God corruption. God is perceived as corruption when the religious system has become too narrow, fundamentalist, and exclusive. Ironically, it is corrupt! Corrupting the corrupting is like my definition of queer in the queer theology I write. People, especially of an older generation, object to the word “queer” because it was used as abusive epithet against themselves by homophobes. But if we go to an English dictionary: queer as verb means “to spoil or interfere with” For those who have found themselves outside of the church because of sexual orientation or gender differences or even as women who thought themselves as equal to men, or divorced and remarried couples. To spoil an exclusive system that is already spoiled for themselves is a good thing. It is to place leaven into the flour. Here Jesus uses a similar type of speech to pervert an already corrupted vision of God and Jewish religion based on purity codes.

The parable also explains Jesus’ blatant disregard for religious purity codes. Jesus becomes a friend of the unclean, outcasts, lepers, sinners, and women. These throw-away people find themselves accepted as friends of God without the religious need to become clean or pure. Jesus imagined God as baker woman; he understood God’s reign covertly happening and subverting how we conceive the divine. He also knew that his movement to present God anew would spread like pesky weed with healing properties.

Jesus in today’s gospel seeks some solitude after hearing the news of the execution of John the Baptist by Herod Antipas. He withdrew by boat with some of his disciples on the Sea of Galilee to wilderness location. But the crowds followed on the shore line so that when he went ashore there was crowd already of nearly five thousand men, not counting the women and children in attendance. He had heard the story of the horrific meal of King Herod, who at royal banquet granted the wish of Salome for her dancing and prompted by her mother to ask for the head of John the Baptist upon a platter. The image for us is grisly, and it was certain grisly for Jesus. It was banquet of death.

As it got late, the disciples came to Jesus and said, ”The hour is late, send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves.” I hear the voices of Christians about the poor. “Let’s send them away; let them get their own food. If they don’t have enough monies to buy food, that’s their problem.” Or the disciples were too tired and wanted some away time alone with Jesus. Or they had little faith that they had enough resources to feed the crowd.

But Jesus reacts to the disciples’ phrase “buy food for themselves.” He responds to the disciples: “They need not go; give them something to eat.” Jesus astonishes his disciples because he expects them to provide food for five thousand men plus accompanying women and children. They hardly have enough food for themselves—five loaves of bread and two fish. Jesus’ compassion prevails.

And here is a lesson for the disciples and for ourselves. The disciples focus on scarcity in a time of great need while Jesus stresses the expectation of God’s extravagant and gracious abundance. When we open our hearts to compassion to the people we encounter and who are in need, and if we give what we have, God will be multiply the gifts to meet the needs of the crowd.
Jesus looks up in prayer, his heart full of compassion, and he breaks and blesses the loaves and gives them to the disciples for distribution to crowd sitting on the ground. And all the people ate and were filled. Leftover fragments filled twelve baskets. First, this miracle, however achieved by the multiplication of the loaves or Jesus convincing families who brought food with them to share their provisions with those without food, signifies God’s extravagant hospitality. What is made clear by Jesus’ action is that God wants to be a generous host and provide abundant life. Jesus provides a banquet of life while Herod officiates at a feast where John the Baptist’s head is served on a platter. God is the host who cares enough– not to leave go away in hunger.

Jesus takes the loaves, breaks the bread, blesses them, and gives them to the disciples to distribution. Each Sunday we hear from one of our celebrants at the altar the same ritual formula: Jesus took bread, broke bread, blessed it, and gave to his friends, saying “This is my body which is broken for you.” The early Christian worshippers would remember Jesus’ final supper as they heard this story as they gathered at table to remember and relive the story. This has more levels than with first reading.

The connection between hospitality and food crosses many cultures. For the ancient world, welcome at table expresses a companionship. We become bread friends.

The early Christian eucharist meals did not just use bread and wine or grape juice as we do on Sunday. Let me list the items that they consecrated the bread and used oils, honey, fruit, and cheese with the bread. These eating of the eucharist might include spreading honey on the consecrated bread or dipping in olive oil with some balsamic spices. This would horrify many literalist Catholics and Christians who have taken the communion meal into a different social meaning than the early Christians who participated.

They often served fish at the eucharist because they remembered today’s gospel of the fishes and the loaves or remembered that Jesus barbecued fish on the Sea of Galilee after his resurrection while Peter and John were fishing. In my wildest Christian imagination, I often thought of serving sushi or sashimi at worship. But that would not go over with everyone. Some Christians substituted water for wine mixed water for the consecrated drink. Because of their abstinence orientation, the Montanist Christians in the second century substituted a yogurt drink for the wine.

Some of the Christian eucharist meals were pot luck, everyone bringing a dish. And they were called love feasts or agapes. It seems that water was substituted for wine out a sense of abstinence from alcohol, and Paul encouraged some of his followers to use wine rather than water.
These love meals or thanksgivings remembered all those occasions that Jesus invited people indiscriminately to sit down at table. These occasions alarmed religious fundamentalists because Jesus upset their understanding of people classified as worthy and unworthy, holy and unholy. In one of favorite books—Our God has No Favorites, Anne Primavesi and Jennifer Henderson write:

One bastion in particular has to be demolished if we are to be free to witness at our celebrations to the all-inclusive love of God. This is the separation of the ‘worthy’ from the ‘unworthy.’ The mean weapon of attack is the rediscovery of Jesus himself as the prophetic disruption of conventional separateness in his own day and within his faith tradition. There are two main areas in his life where this can be seen. One is his teaching in parables. The other is his scandalous behavior in eating and drinking with tax collectors and sinners. In both, to use Sally McFague’s words, “he epitomizes the scandal of inclusiveness for his time.”

When in arguments with Pharisees because of his refusal to judge people, Jesus speaks this line: “You judge by human standards, I judge no one.” (John 8:15). He correctly reduces their religious claims of judgment to what they really are—human projections upon God of their own values. Pharisees and sinners inhabit separate worlds, fenced off by religious judgments and practices that exclude. Pharisees cannot ever conceive sitting down and eating with sinners. There is never any sharing together at table in the name of God. It is their religious judgments and classifications that discriminate against people not like themselves. Their complaint against Jesus: “This man receives sinners and eats with them.” (Mk. 2:16, Mt. 11:19)

And this is Jesus’ scandal. It is not that Jesus only sits at table with sinners, tax collectors, prostitutes, and the outcasts. He sits down on the ground to have a meal with more than 5000 male suspect sinners, not including their wives and unmarried women that they lived with, and the children—even some born outside of marriage and considered mamzers, bastards. The scandal of this meal with so many sinners and suspect peoples hosted in the name of God and indiscriminate invitation to all would be too much to handle for religious fundamentalists of Jesus’ day and our own day.

But let me go back to Jesus’ meals and fellowship. In the feeding of the more than the 5000, Jesus makes clear the distinction of God’s hospitality and religious fundamentalists. God’s hospitality and love are all inclusive, no exceptions. In the Parable of the Great Supper, Jesus illustrates God’s etiquette in inviting the poor, the blind, the lame and since there is still room all those from the highways and byways. God’s house is to be filled…..

Richard Rohr quotes Gandhi,
There are so many hungry people in the world that God could only come into the world in the form of food.” It is marvelous, that God would enter our lives not just in the form of sermons or Bibles, but in food. God comes to feed us more than just teach us. Lovers understand that. Richard Rohr, Eucharist as Touchstone

The scandal of the Christian churches is the limits that they place around God’s table. Some churches use the Lord’s Supper as an instrument of discipline and exclusion. They deprive certain Christians from participation in the table and communion: LGBT folks, divorced and remarried Christians, Christians from other denominations, the riff-raff, young people with tattoos and piercings, people with addictions, and anyone classified as unworthy, and of course non-Christians.

When did the Lord’s Supper become an instrument of deprivation and exclusion? When did Jesus’ vision of God’s radical inclusive love or indiscriminate invitation at table become abandoned? We might trace it to the early divisions between Aramaic followers of Jesus in Jerusalem and the Greek speaking followers. Ever since churches make splits and divisions from one another, refusing to listen to Jesus’ prayer at the Last Supper that they may be one.

Our weekly celebrations symbolize the wild, gratuitous, excessively abundant and shockingly excessive welcome of God. We celebrate our meal as representing all the meals had before his death, his final meal before his death, and all those meals when he resurrected: with the two disciples on the way to Emmaus, in the upper room, on the beach of the Sea of Galilee with Jesus barbecuing fish.

Many Christian churches telescope their table celebrations to represent Jesus’ Last Supper, claiming that the twelve apostles were there. This allows them to distort Jesus shocking practice of God’s hospitality and replace the open table with the closed table. Nowhere does it say that there were only twelve apostles at that final meal. It says that Jesus was with his disciples—this means male and female disciples, their children and probably several companion animals as well. His final meal– like all his other meals, was open to all. If the churches take Jesus’ witness to the indiscriminate love of God in his open table practices, then they could not possibly close their tables to the stranger, the sinner, the outcast, and the poor.

The real scandal of the table is the churches’ distorted representations of Jesus as discriminating at God’s table to privilege the elite, only the male gender and ordained, and the powerful. This scandalizing exclusion for the sake of power would scandalize Jesus because these practices were performed in his name and distorted the true nature of Abba God as indiscriminate love for all.

At the table, those with vestments and stoles are just as needy as the poor stranger with dirty clothes and who lives on the streets. The link between hunger, bread and life brings us all together to eat at God’s table.
At our weekly table celebrations, we learn to live our lives as gifts as we accept God’s hospitality in gratitude. To receive communion with God is already to give back not only to God but to others without any strings attached to our giving. We embody God’s hospitality. There is not only an invitation to practice hospitality but a participation in God’s hospitality to the world. What we realize each week is that what God gives to us is excessive, extravagantly more abundant that we need or deserve.

The problem of hunger still affects millions of people globally as well as on the streets of North Hollywood. Jesus the Lord looked upon the crowd of the 5000 plus people in the wilderness and had compassion for the crowd. And the disciples picked up the fragments from the divine picnic in the wilderness and fills twelve baskets, and this indicates the wildly shocking and excessive abundance of God extended to all.
When we celebrate our feast around the table, Christ is present in our hall—instructing us as he instructed the disciples in the wilderness. “Give them something to eat yourselves.” Our table feast will never be fully complete until the Lord comes again once when there are no longer any hungry people in the world.

“If God wants to get through to us, and the Trinity experience wants to come alive in us, that’s when God has the best chance. God is not only stranger than we think, but stranger than the logical mind can think. Perhaps much of the weakness of the first 2000 years of reflection o the Trinity….is that we’ve tried to do it with the logical mind instead of prayer….” Richard Rohr.

Many clergy avoid the celebration of this Sunday—Trinity Sunday. They will complain that it is doctrine, or too complicated to speak about, or it is just a mystery we will never understand. I will not bore you with any of those approaches. I want to speak about the heart of what it means to be human and who is God. First principle, we cannot speak about one without the other.

Ever since human beings have first asked questions, we have realized how incomplete we are—how incomplete our knowledge is: we want to know how everything originated, how we got to where are, and where we destined? Destined usually means what happens to us after we die. Does something survive the death of our bodies? What is the purpose of life? Why are we here? Why should we live our lives morally? You get the idea. All those questions –you have asked sometime during your lives.

I would boldly suggest humanity is God’s scripture. What does that mean? It means that the clues for comprehending God are found in the deepest part of who we are. We write down our heart experiences, and these become scripture—the Bible. Does this mean that God does not reveal God’s self in the Bible? Not in the way you may have been taught. God is not literally the words or the truths of the books on the pages or particular verses of the Bible. I will say the Bible give us clues to find and experience God. God reveals God’s self in personal and communal encounters, and the scriptural text provides us a doorway to experience. For example, I take a biblical text, I read it a number of times, I use it in prayer, and it becomes the means to encounter God in prayer. God is experienced in the prayer and context of your life. The word starts the process, but something more happens in prayerful awareness of God’s presence.

When Moses was called to the top of Mt. Sinai, we read in Exodus 34:5-6, that the Lord came down in the cloud and stood there and proclaimed God’s own name: “compassionate, gracious, slow to anger, slow in anger, abounding in steadfast in love and faithfulness, forgiving, and so on.” This is God whose extravagant love is poured out in grace, love, and forgiveness upon us. God’s reveals that loving kindness is at the very heart of who God is. But these are words written down in scripture by an unknown author. They are not real to us until we experience this nature of God for ourselves in our hearts, in the experience of our lives. God reveals who God is in prayerful and human encounters.

Once we have had an experience of the loving kindness of God for ourselves, we can presuppose that there are other clues to question, “who is God?” One of the simplest and most profound answers is: “God for us.” God for us has created all that is, and we are part of that creation. If God is for us, then we have another intimation that God created all this universe and continues to create in evolutionary processes. Jesus tells us that God is boundless compassionate care and love that reaches out to us humans but compassionately cares for every sparrow that falls to the ground. God cares for us and for other created life.
I was at a pool party when a group of guys were denying the existence of God because of evolution. I jumped into the midst of the conversation, with the hope of mischievously subverting the line of conversation by claiming that evolution, indeed, proves the existence of God. And it was no fundamentalist answer! As they looked at me, I said God was to be found in the chaos and the dead ends of evolution because those complex moments create something anew—something novel. The Creator Spirit is the power that brings the novelty of evolution and life.
Whenever something new in the creative evolutionary process arises, whenever life is awakened to something beyond itself in new birth, the Creator Spirit is at work. God is always creating something new, and God’s self was not out there but within each of us and all life and the processes starting from the big band to evolution in the present. What is the nature of human experience of God if it is not relationship? Or what I want to describe as God for us.

If God for us is found in the ever new situations we find ourselves, God reveals God’s self as relationship to us. God is for us, for life, for the Earth, and for the universe. God is unspeakably close to us and the life processes of the Earth, and God continues to reach out and invite us into relationship with God’s self. How does God relate to us? Our human existence is encompassed by abundant divine grace and extravagant love—it is the presence of God freely oriented to creation and all. One of my favorite authors Denis Edward expresses a deep truth: “Grace is the heartbeat of the universe. It is God bent over us in love.” Grace is directed to us from everything in creation, and as we think about it,

God’s Spirit is that amazing grace there in the midst of the universe. We are never abandoned by God, we swim in an ocean of God presence within us and without.

Specifically, the Spirit communicates the divine invitation to live in a world of grace. We can accept that invitation or ignore that invitation by filling ourselves or focus in on our own importance or the details of life. Yet we live in a cosmos full of divine invitation, presence, and self-giving in the experience of the wonder of the universe, every act of human kindness, every choice for life and compassionate care for those less fortunate and hungry, for other life, and for the Earth. We can encounter the Spirit’s invitation to be in relation with God and all there is if we take the time to be mindful and listen to the within ourselves. . We experience God in friendships, companionship with our pets, in loss and death, suffering with others in pain, in beauty and solitude with God.

God relates to us through the capacity of God’s taking on material flesh and blood. We learn that God wanted to know what we know, feel what we feel, suffer what we suffer, experience death as we experience death. There is no question in my mind that God’s loving kindness, compassion, and love meant that God for us intended to incarnate God’s self not because of some primordial original sin but because of God’s original love for us and for all life before the big bang. Most Christians would say God became human and flesh to save us from our sins or redeem us from an original sin passed on genetically ever since. I would claim an alternative grace perspective: God became incarnated in Jesus to communicate God’s grace and love for us. God’s love existed before human sin, and out of that love, God for us intended to become one with creation, with us. I know that God’s love for us is stronger that our straying away. God wanted to participate in human and fleshly life, for God wants to tell us that God rejoices with us and suffers with us. God is with us and always near us.

God’s incarnation is the most intense expression of the compassionate Creator for Christians who feel a need to express the experience of the nearness of God or the within nature of God in our hearts. To throw out this is to lose that the most visible and extraordinary expression of God’s love in the world. The incarnation writes God’s love not only into the DNA of the human Jesus but onto our own hearts and our human DNA into God, for God’s incarnation is embedded in the DNA of all life everywhere. God’s DNA was created in the proto-gases of the first seconds of the big bang and continued to pervade in the universe in all the DNA of life. The God of the living is the God of all life. If God is anything than personal, there is no relationship with us. If God for us is love in action, this means God for us is the giver, the gift, and the giving.

The God we worship is so relational—relating to all that is, in all processes of the universe, in evolution, and now incarnated in a human belonging to God: Christ. We find in the ministry and life of Jesus the compassionate face of God. Jesus said and lived his teaching: “Be compassionate as your God is compassionate.” Jesus, God’s incarnate face, reveals the God is compassionate care.
So who is God? God is for us when God created the universe in the big bang. God is for us in placing the Spirit inside that process of big bang and the novelties of creation. God’s power is one of love, not power over; God is relational, erotic in our desires to merge with another and merge with God, God is playful and persuasive when we realize that God is speaking to our hearts and inviting us to deeper communion with God. God has been described as the liberating connectedness of love that is within and without the universe and all life. God’s DNA incarnates in the womb of Mary, taking on human flesh. There is God’s enfleshment in Mary’s womb, in the birth of Jesus, his compassionate life and in his forgiving and welcoming ministry, in his feelings of joy and sadness, in his disappointment and hopes, in abandonment and torture, and on the cross. God is for us when Jesus is raised to the full aliveness of God and God’s interrelationships with everything. God’s incarnation did not stop with Jesus becoming flesh. It continued with Easter and the giving of the spirit to impregnate each of us with Christ. We carry Christ in ourselves as Mary carried him in the flesh in her womb. It is up to us, like Mary, to say yes to God’s Spirit to incarnate Jesus the Christ in each of us. The compassionate, relational human is now carries the risen Christ in herself and himself.

God for us is love in action, compassionate care. The divine community of love is present in every action from the big bang and expansion of the universe, in the creative novelty of evolution, in the birth of Jesus in Mary’s womb, in his care for the poor and the sick and the outcast, on the cross, and the fullness of resurrection from the tomb.

God for us is expressed in the gifts of unexpected love. It is a contagious love within our human biology, and if we humans allow ourselves to realize that we are the life scriptures that God writes compassionate love to us, then we become daily surprised God’s love in us.

As many of you know, I have faced health challenges with the production of my blood cells. When I met with the bone marrow specialist at Kaiser and the City of Hope, he outlined a strategy to restore the production in body. He set a strategy of the last resort, and we are far away from this option at this time, is a bone marrow transplant from siblings, my two sisters. When I spoke to my sister Karen, and she without a thought, said “sure, I will do whatever it takes.” To hear those words choked me up, and I walked into our garden and cried at the unselfish offer of life-giving bone marrow. She called me the next day to tell me that my other sister Debbie would do likewise. I experienced God’s compassionate care, God for us in the generous actions of self-giving and gift. This is what I mean by God writes scripture in our hearts and actions. How often God for us writes in your hearts and loving kindness in our feeding program, in acts of generous and abundant welcoming, care for the garden and for this church. You are the living scripture of God for us as Jesus Christ and the Creator Spirit, continue to surprise the stranger and the person in need with the gifts of love and self-giving. God bless you!

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.