Season of Creation: Oceans

I am divided this morning. Do I speak about our deep connection to the Earth’s oceans or do I address the beginnings of an oceanic apocalypse? I will speak to both, and with God’s grace, may I do justice our interconnectedness with our oceans and all life and the challenges to those oceans and to ourselves in the very near future.

The oceans originated as the planet cooled down, releasing steam that became the oceans of the earth. But there was another source of waters of the oceans as thousands of comets, made of ice struck the Earth, adding to the oceans’ water. I marvel as we are part of the Earth’s story, the formation of oceans and 2 billion years ago life arising in the oceans. The Season of Creation is an opportunity to celebrate God’s creation, that story, and how we fit into that story. This Sunday we look at the oceans.

Today’s reading is from Rev. Dr. Leah Schade, a Lutheran Pastor and author of Creation Crisis Preaching: Ecology, Theology, and the Pulpit. I already read her book before I attended her workshop at the Parliament of World Religions last October. She drafted me as a participant into the reading. Her refrain “I am water, I am waiting…” is so important to realize. It is even haunting. It raises a deep question for me: We are water. What is water waiting for?

We humans have our sense of kinship with water and the oceans. The oceans cover some 70% of our planet. Our bodies carry the markers of our kinship with the oceans. Our bodies are 65-70% water and we have sodium in the waters of our bodies. We enflesh ocean water in our bodies. Our flesh marks our profound kinship with all waters and the oceans, and if we did a genealogical or ancestry tree, we can trace our origins to that very day in the oceans when the first cells became alive.

The oceans are full of mystery, a myriad of life forms and species, and,
of course, beauty. When you were last on the beach, watched the waves come in, and the waters appear to be dynamic and alive with motion and life. People gravitate to the beaches not only because they enjoy the sun and water, but we are drawn there because we have a distant memory ofancestral kinship. We are interconnected.

There is a strong biblical tradition between the Holy Spirit and water, from the creation of water on this planet, to the formation of lakes and rivers, streams, to the water used to baptize Jesus and ourselves, to water we drink and bathe in. Water is a symbol of the Spirit, and the Spirit brings life and healing. Water is the vitality, and the waters of the Earth form the blood of the Earth. The Spirit is involved with life-giving faith (Jn. 1-15), baptisms (Acts 8:26-40, 11:1-18). She is the Spirit in the water flowing from the pierced Jesus’ body on the cross. As fire, there is the story of tongues of fire descending on the disciples in the upper room on Pentecost (Acts 2:1-4). The Spirit sparks the inclusive and multicultural mission of the Jesus movement to the nations.

For theologian Mark Wallace, God’s Spirit has been infusing the universe and the Earth, in particular, since their inception. It is in its Earth-centered mode; the Spirit is cruciform—that is, She suffers the pain and torment of the Earth and its life: “God as Spirit lives among us in great sorrow and deep anguish. She suffers and groans with creation, and she suffers in her connection to the oceans as we pollute it, trash, create climate change that warms the waters and kills the coral reefs, and as we hunt marine life to extinction.

From the viewpoint of green spirituality, the God who knows death through the cross of Jesus is the crucified God, but God is also the Spirit who enfleshes divine presence in nature and the elements of the universe. God the Spirit the Sustainer of life experience the woundedness of nature, of the oceans, and the suffering of marine life. .

Now let speak me about the spirituality inclusive of the ocean. A wonderful example is Rachel Carson, naturalist and author, and she recounts a formative epiphany in college that drew her to the sea:

Years ago on a night when rain and wind bear against the windows of my college dormitory room, a line from (Tennyson’s) “Locksley Hall’” burned itself into my mind—“For the mighty wind arises, roaring seaward, and I go.” I can still remember my intense emotional response as that line spoke to something within me seeming to tell me that my own path led to the sea—which I have never seen—and that my own destiny was somehow linked with the sea. And so, as you know, it has been.

Carson became a “biographer of the sea,” detailing direct, personal appreciation of individual organisms as well as her love for the Maine seacoast. Paul Brooks writes, “She felt a spiritual as well as a physical closeness to the individual creatures about whom she wrote: a sense of identification that is an essential element in her literary style.” She wrote three books on the seas, sea life and the shores of Maine. She took scientific samples of sea-life near the shore, examined them carefully and tenderly, so that she could release them back into the ocean without any harm. This expresses a profound reverence for life.

She addressed human harm to the oceans some sixty years ago: “It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself.” (The Sea Around Us)

In the later years of her life, Carson became a public champion for not only the oceans but for all human and non-human life:

In contemplating “the exceeding beauty of the earth” these people have found calmness and courage. For there is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of birds; in the ebb and flow of the tides; in the folded bud ready for the spring. There is something infinitely healing in these repeated refrains of nature – the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.

Mankind has gone very far into an artificial world of his own creation. He has sought to insulate himself, with steel and concrete, from the realities of earth and water. Perhaps he is intoxicated with his own power, as he goes farther and farther into experiments for the destruction of himself and his world. For this unhappy trend there is no single remedy – no panacea. But I believe that the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.

Carson models for us a spirituality of connecting with the natural beauty of the Earth’s oceans. Natural beauty and the experience of wonder was pivotal for spiritual development. When humanity replaced the natural with the artificial, Carson understood that humanity blocked its spiritual growth because we are ocean life that transitioned to the land. Yet we are still connected to the ocean. We human need nature to teach us the wonder of creation, it complexity and beauty.

At communion, after you receiving communion and the blessing, go the water in container in front of the altar. It is salt water, and touch the water and bless your forehead to indicate your connectedness to the oceans and concern for oceans ensouled with God’s Spirit.

The Oceanic Apocalypse:

The former NASA climate scientist, James Hansen, called our attention to climate change in 1988. Some listened to Hansen then, and more recently, he is co-authored a scientific study of the ice melting in Antarctica, yet to undergo review that we will find disturbing. They suggest the seal levels could rise 10 times faster than previously models suggested. It could reach 10 feet by the end of the century, and such cities as New York, Miami, London, Shanghai and Rio de Janiero, and other cities will be submerged. Some island nations will disappear, and many countries will experience massive population dislocation from the seashores on a scale hard to imagine.

Weeks ago we have witnessed massive flooding in Louisiana destroying more 40,000 houses. If we do not cut down the emission from carbon dioxide, methane, and climate warming gases, Hansen and his team share,

We conclude that multi-meter sea-level rise would become practically unavoidable. Social disruption and economic consequences of such large sea-level rise could be devastating. It is not difficult to imagine that conflicts arising from forced migrations and economic collapse might make the planet ungovernable, threatening the fabric of civilization.

This is an apocalypse, in my opinion. Let me first, say we need to vote in November for the Earth, for the oceans, and for life.

Just look not at the rising sea levels but examine what is actually happening within the oceans themselves.

But there are other Earth signs of the health of the oceans: the coral reefs are blanching and dying, the acidification of the oceans. Scientists discovered the congregation of 35,000 seals on one beach. This indicated the increased loss of artic ice. Melting artic ice and warming oceans jeopardize all plant and marine life, and other connected life. All life in the ocean may become extinct through global warming, over-harvesting of fish, or callous hunting tens of thousands of shark for their fins for shark-fin soup or medicinal properties. The prognosis for continued life in the oceans this century is bleak.

I can’t wrap my spirit around the fact what humanity will be like if the oceans die and all ocean life. The oceans, like the Earth, are alive. The Spirit of God is the sustainer of all life and universe processes that began at the Big Bang to evolve into galactic processes and then planetary processes that produced life in the oceans 2 billion years ago. God’s Spirit ensouled in the waters and early Christians maintained that Christ is in all the waters of the Earth. When we crucify creation, even a part of creation, we are crucifying the Spirit and Christ. We trample upon what is beloved and dear to God. There, I invite you this Season of Creation to re-invigorate your commitment to fight climate change, vote for candidates that support responsible care for the environment, and live with compassion with God’s Earth.

Mary and Martha: Non-Conformist Women (Lk. 10:38-42)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Breakfast with Jesus (John 21:1-19)

Eating with Jesus was always event. You never knew exactly what might happen and who would join this open meal, literally open to anyone and excluding no one. A homeowner, such as Simon the Leper, invited Jesus, only to have a woman , a known sinner, wash Jesus’ feet with her tears and dry his feet with her hair. Or the Last Supper where Jesus washed the feet of his disciples and shared a meal relating it to his impending death. Or you might be surprised by the locations of a meal—on the field with 5000, or at home of an infamous regional tax collector Zacchaeus, or in the home of a religious critic.

Meals provided Jesus with occasions to stress the central themes of his message of God’s companionship of empowerment. The themes of forgiveness, unconditional love, shared abundance, compassionate care, inclusivity, healing, the mutuality of discipleship, love, and non-violence. Jesus loved food and wine, and he took the opportunity to break all the etiquette rules and purity codes for meals held by Pharisees and other religious groups.

For outcasts, throwaway people such as tax collectors and prostitutes, these meals were therapeutic and liberative. The open table was healing for many participants. The meals were egalitarian, where all were equals and where all were beloved children of God. They shared stories of their pain at religious exclusion and social shunning at these meals and dreamt about God’s empowered companionship and the type of new society created. They experienced healing from destructive elements of Jewish religious fundamentalism with its stress on a judgmental, patriarchal God. Religious people stigmatized them as sinners, and Jesus told them were forgiven before they even came to sit down at table.

The table of radical inclusivity was revolutionary. Around meals, they found companionship with Jesus and God and with one another. In the nourishing and healing environment of meals, they discovered friendships and some felt call as disciples. Jesus’ meals as healing and empowering occasions have been overlooked by the church over the centuries.

In addition, Christians have read the Last Supper not in the context of Jesus’ meals but the only meal and gave it undue importance, making it an exclusive event for justifying an exclusive male priesthood. For Jesus, his last meal with the disciples was important but so were all his meals with folks. Its particularity was his emotional preparation of his female and male disciples for his death for God’s reign. All Jesus’ meals symbolized the inclusivity of all into God’s reign.
But meals with the risen Jesus were even more eventful. They were to be inclusive, healing, and empowering. The two disciples on the road to Emmaus invite a stranger who had accompanied them on their journey to join them for an evening dinner. When the stranger broke bread, the two grieving disciples recognized Jesus in the breaking of the bread. He symbolized his continued presence in community with remembered events and the breaking of bread. His walking on the road to Emmaus and joining them for dinner addressed their grief over his death and ritualizing his mission and presence.

Or today’s gospel, after two appearances of the risen Christ, the disciples went back to what they know best, fishing. Did they have to get away from the intensity of feelings from community scoffers, doubters, or their own feelings of guilt from abandoning Jesus to the Temple police and ultimately final crucifixion? Jesus surprises a group of disciples at the Sea of Galilee; they returned to their ordinary lives and have gone fishing.

Easter night and the following week, Jesus appeared to his disciples in the upper room. The first meeting was mixed in its emotions, happiness in Jesus as risen from the dead, deep shame and guilt at abandoning Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, and Peter, both for his denying Jesus three times and his abandonment of him. Peter brashly professed his faith and commitment as a disciple to the ministry of Jesus. He faced Jesus with shame and guilt over his betrayal. Jesus forgave him and started the process of healing.

Jesus appears as a stranger, and he calls out to them: “Have you caught any fish yet?” Then he instructs to cast the net on the right side of the boat, and they did so and caught a multitude of fish. The beloved disciple recognizes the stranger: “It is the Lord!”

Peter strips off his clothes and swims to shore. The disciples bring the fish to Jesus who has lit a charcoal fire to barbeque the fish and serve bread with the meal. None of the disciples were bold enough to ask. “Who are you?” The stranger reveals himself in the serving a meal of fish and bread.

This meal on the shore of Lake Tiberias was thus no ordinary meal. Jesus was not presiding over the meal, but preparing the meal for several disciples. This is reminiscent of Jesus’ action at his final meal where he washed the feet of his disciples—the duties of slave and women. Here again he takes a service role in cooking fish for breakfast for the few disciples after a night of fishing.

Jesus’ risen presence is revealed at meals, and these risen meals also include healing and empowerment. There was unfinished business between Jesus and Peter. Even though Peter betrayed him and abandoned him, Jesus is there to restore his relationship with Peter. The grace of unconditional love and forgiveness counters the past failures of Peter. The breakfast on the beach was to continue the healing of Peter and to empower him as whole as possible for the on-going mission of God’s companionship of empowerment.

Peter got a lump his throat and became speechless for a moment; he was more embarrassed by his denial of Jesus than his nakedness, dripping with water. He is confronted with his own guilt and shame in letting down Jesus in the moment of his greatest need—his own death. He promised Jesus faithfulness and reliability. Instead he abandoned Christ; he lied and denied that he even knew him to save his own skin. He faced Christ stirring the charcoal fire and looking him straight into his eyes. He melted with shame and guilt. But Jesus served him breakfast and reminded him of the many times that they shared meals of forgiveness and love during his ministry.

Peter knew that this appearance was meant for him and about his relationship with Christ. There was unfinished business yet to be dealt with. Maybe for a moment, he wished he was anywhere but there. When they had finished breakfast, Jesus spoke to Simon Peter. Now, we are getting to the point of the story. This story is about the rehabilitation of Simon Peter. But Jesus’ questions to Peter are wider than this event; the risen Lord asks these questions of ourselves. This may be the important question asked in the Bible.
“Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?” Love meaning self-sacrificing love, love “more than these.” And write “boats, nets, fish, food, family, and friends.” Jesus was asking what are you prepared to do for me? Peter answers, “I love with the love of a friend.” He is not able to love unconditionally as parent loves a child. Jesus said, “If anyone wishes to follow me, let that person take the cross and follow me.”

Why did Peter deny Jesus three times in the first place? I think it was because he, like all of us, loved life and the things of this life such as family, friends, fish, boats, nets, etc. Peter loved this life, and he didn’t want to die. It is simple as that. That is why I think Peter denied Jesus in the first place. He loved the things of his own life way more than the possibility of his premature death for God and Christ. But Jesus probes Peter of his reliability. Are you prepared to deny yourself and give up everything to follow me? Can I rely on you and your word to continue my mission?

Peter’s threefold profession of his friendship love for Jesus parallels his threefold denial, that Jesus is giving Peter the chance to fill the hole he has dug for himself with three huge shovelfuls of love.

But there is more. Jesus is not only trying to bring Peter back to where he was before but to move him beyond that. Jesus looked Peter in the eyes intently. Peter answered, “Yes, Lord, I love you as a friend.” Then Jesus said, “Feed my lambs.”

Jesus wants to be assured that Peter loves him. Jesus is not sure about the reliability of Peter’s love and so Jesus asks Peter a second time, “Do you love me as a friend?” Jesus changes the verb from self-sacrificing love to where Peter is at and uses Peter’s verb to love as a friend. Even this friendship love requires reliability and consistency of word.

By the third time, “do you love me as a friend?” Peter feels hurt and responds, “Lord, you know everything, you know that I love you.” The risen Christ entrusts those whom he loves to one who loves him.

Jesus says, “Feed my sheep.” He goes on says, “Very truly, I tell you when you were younger you were able to fasten your belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you, and take you where you do not wish to go.” Jesus predicts, “Peter, you may love me as a friend, but over time that love become unconditional love that I now share with you.”

Suddenly it is clear. Jesus has made this encore appearance for Peter’s benefit. In the same way, he returned for Thomas in the upper room, to move him from doubt to faith, he now returns for Peter, to move him from faith to active discipleship.

Jesus also asks us that same basic question: Do you love me more than these? Do you love me more than your family, your friends, your occupation? This is a personal question for each one of us. We, too, like Peter, will come to that time and place in our lives when Jesus will ask us that fundamental question: Do you love me unconditionally more than these things and people? Do you love me more than your own life?

There is a consequence in saying “yes”. Jesus says, “Feed my lambs and tend my sheep.” The Latin word for shepherd is Pastor. How do Christian pastors feed the lambs and tend sheep?

The first purpose of a pastor’s life, of a shepherd’s life, is to feed the lambs in the community and to help them grow into good disciples. Pastors are called to remind the community of their mission, radical inclusive love—the vision of God’s unconditional grace.

He is instructing him on how to become a Pastor, open-hearted and open to the new requirements of serving the post-Easter Church. He had to reliably live up to his word with courage. Peter learned that he had to think before acting. We finally got to the core. Jesus knows everything, including the death by which Peter was going to die, by Roman crucifixion, being lifted up onto his own cross.
Jesus knew that eventually, in his old age, that Simon Peter was going to mature and that his love for Christ would move beyond friendship love to unconditional love and that he would die by crucifixion. It did come true. Simon Peter died a martyr’s death, on a cross, upside down, in Rome, under Nero. Peter who had denied Jesus three times at the home of Caiaphas would be faithful to Jesus onto death. Jesus knew the future and prophesied about Peter’s death. At his death in Rome, Peter thought that it would be too much of an honor for him to be crucified in the way Christ was crucified so he requested to be crucified upside down. Peter learned the humility to follow Christ.

Will the real Prodigal Stand UP? (Luke 15:13-32)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Henri Nouwen writes,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Wilderness: The Making of God’s Upside-down Kin-dom (Luke 4:1-3)

Today we hear the account from Luke of Jesus’ journey into the wilderness for forty days. Wilderness was the wild place, the waiting place, the place of preparation. It also connected then, as it does now, to very basic spirituality: a place to grapple with God, a place to learn dependence on nature and its provisions, a place of extremes or contrasts, of wild beasts and desert.

Displaced peasants fled into the wilderness from the imperial Roman system that stole their lands for larger plantations. The wilderness was a place of safety as well as to carry out raids against the system. Many had to become bandits to rob from the rich to share what they secured for those impoverished by the system.

Jewish religious revolutionaries sought out the wilderness as a staging platform to fight against the Roman Empire and the Temple authorities. The hopes for liberation lived from the stories of liberation, especially the story of Moses who fled into the wilderness, called by God to return to Egypt to liberate his people.

Pious groups, like the Essenes, created the Qumran community, a priestly and pure settlement in the wilderness, waiting for the messianic drama and climax. Individual religious figures like John the Baptist made the wilderness their starting point where his baptismal ministry would be forged.

Jesus went to the wilderness. He has had a profound experience and revelation of God’s beloved child during his baptism. I suspected that he needed time to process the meaning of the event. In the wilderness, today’s gospel focuses on the temptations that Jesus faced for his future mission. I will talk about those later, but I want to speak on what we usually don’t’ focus: the wilderness.

A number of authors suggest that Jesus learned and accepted his messianic ministry in the wilderness; some of have suggested that he learned his lifestyle there. My observation is that the wilderness presented him with opportunities to learn about the “wild grace” of God, his dependence upon God, and perhaps an itinerant, carefree lifestyle. In a wild habitat, the Spirit is everywhere, and one needs to pay close attention so not to miss the Spirit.

Passionist priest and earth theologian (geologian) Thomas Berry recognizes at the heart of nature there is “a wild component, a creative spontaneity that is in its deepest reality, its most profound mystery.” He comments on the wilderness:

Wilderness we might consider as the root of the authentic spontaneities of any being. It is that wellspring of creativity whence comes the instinctive activities that enable all living beings to obtain their food, to find shelter, to bring forth their young: to sing and dance and fly through the air and swim through the depths of the sea. This is the same inner tendency that evokes the insight of the poet, the skill of the artist and the power of the shaman. (Berry)

The wild, especially in the wilderness, presents a sense of sacredness. If the natural world reflects the image of God, then the wilderness reflects a wildness of God that we witness in the action of the Holy Spirit as coloring outside boundaries and human categories. Nature is wild, and the Holy Spirit, and we come from the wild—original life from the surging oceans, then our hominid ancestors from the savannahs of Africa. Wilderness is a type of out of bounds or wild gardening by God, and we discover in the wilderness the wildness of God in the uncultivated and disordered wilderness. I believe that Jesus discovered this insight about the wildness of God/

Wendell Berry, American novelist and ecological activist, understands “wilderness as a place” where we must go to be reborn—to receive the awareness, at once humbling and exhilarating, grievous and joyful, that we part of creation, one with all that we live from and all that, in turn, lives from us.

Wendell Berry writes of the three principles of the “kin-dom of God.” I will suggest that Jesus learned these three principles of the kin-dom of God:

The first principle of the Kingdom of God us that it includes everything in it, the fall of every sparrow is a significant event. We are in it whether we know it or not and whether we wish to be or not. Another principle, both ecological and traditional, is that everything in the Kingdom of God is joined both to it and to everything else that is in it, that is to say, the Kingdom is orderly. A third principle is that humans do not and can never know either all the creatures that the Kingdom of God contains or the whole pattern or order by which it contains them.

Wendell Berry described the kin-dom of God as, the Great Economy or what Jesus includes in his notion of the companionship of empowerment, for Jesus expressed the economy that God designed in creation. It is a considerate economy found in nature, and all human economies need to fit harmoniously with that companionship ship economy. It is an extension of the Great Economy of companionship of empowerment into the natural world. Berry perceives an ecological and economic sustainability within the words of Jesus. He sees an inclusivity of human and nonhuman animals and nature as part of this kin-dom.

The image of wilderness most characterizes our relationship with the Spirit. Jesus discovered he wildness of the Holy Spirit in the wilderness across the Jordan. And in in the wilderness, he discovered how God sees life so differently from human beings.

The wilderness experience revealed how God colors outside human categories and religious boundaries, for God’s grace is wild, untamed, and disruptive of human exclusions. God’s grace and love were wildly inclusive, beyond human imagination. God’s inclusivity was incarnated in his own flesh and blood, and he sensed that in his intimate moments with God in the wilderness. He intuited a sense of God’s inclusive love for all humans and for all other life. God’s providential care was expressed in God’s love for the lilies of the field, and God’s sustaining the life of the birds of the air and for animals in the wilderness.

For Jesus, God’s empowered companionship denotes community, mutuality, co-creating together through the mobilization of diverse gifts. It includes the virtues of forgiveness, unconditional love, non-violence, compassion, sharing goods, and care for the vulnerable. God’s inclusive love was extended to humanity and nonhuman animals.

The wilderness retreat helped Jesus to distance the option of empire and power games of domination and conquest that he witnessed with Herod Antipas, the co-opted Temple rulers, and the Romans . He affirmed the counter-option of the companionship of empowerment. Let me read quotations of authors that capture what Jesus learned in the wilderness:

There are no more outsiders! Everyone is in—irrespective of their religious state or condition. Radical inclusiveness is a core value in the new companionship. And then comes the bombshell, the queerest twist; the final act of inclusiveness is done by one regarded as a radical outsider, and a hated one. (a Samaritan who shows compassion for Jewish man beaten and left for the dead on the road to Jericho). Diarmuid O’Murchu

Here is the radical act of inclusion envisioned in his retreat in the wilderness. This would significantly impact the style and flavor of his ministry.
The three temptations in Luke’s Gospel are temptations to a style of messiah, exemplified by the rulers of the Temple and the Roman Empire. The Roman emperors were proclaimed as gods and saviors in conquering the world through the force of the Roman legions.

The first test is the temptation for food: He rejects the temptation for his own self-interest and comfort. He will not have a regular place to lay his head to sleep. He will be itinerant and dependent upon Abba God. Jesus will be hungry and dependent upon the gracious gifts of others to receive shared gifts. This temptation is based on false notions of scarcity, for it points to the abundance of shared goods by disciples of the companionship of empowerment. Empire takes food, and its logic is one of scarcity, abundance for the elite and taking away of what is necessary for life of the poor and the peasant. God’s logic is shared abundance for all is celebrated in the new meals, not of scarcity of food or grace but an extravagant abundance of both. Scarcity is the logic of the ruling classes, the 1%. for Jesus, God’s table had to always be open to everyone. Scarcity, privilege, and exclusion were not God’s ways, but abundance, inclusiveness, and compassionate care.

The second temptation is the possession of power and domination: It is the logic of empire, mainly the Roman Empire.

To resist empire—as-such we must know what we are up against. It is something inherent in civilization itself. Non-imperial civilization is something yet to be seen upon earth. John Dominic Crossan

The logic of God’s kin-dom is not imperial domination and ruling, but service of the greatest as the least and the least the greatest. Those who wish to be disciples must choose the lowest position at table, that of a slave, in serving the rest. The first will be last, and the last first. He would tell his disciples, some of them with their notions of power share similarly those notions with the Romans: You are to take the role of the lowest, a slave in service to all. This is the counter-vision that Jesus learned of the upside-down kin-dom in the wilderness. It is humble service over dominating power and coercion of Empire.

The third temptation is to throw himself down from the pinnacle of the Temple. It is a temptation to test God. God does not need to be tested but trusted. It is not wonders and miracles that will generate faith, but the great miracle of all, changed lives—the transformation of people, who have become more compassionate, and who are reaching out to outsiders as brothers and sisters in love and care. It is God’s grace that is effective in people’s lives:

The logic of domination, violence, reward, and punishment that prevails in the everyday world is challenged and replaced by a new logic, the logic of grace, compassion, and freedom. Peter Hodgson

Grace is ordinary and unseen, but more effective than the powerful signs.
All three temptations have bearing in shaping Jesus’ ministry of God’s empowered companionship when he returns to society. They were rejected as style of ministry. It chose not the privileged position of religious leaders then and now in many churches. Remember the priest who walked by the man beaten and left for dead on the road of Jericho. Just imagine a high priest, or now a bishop, elder, or moderator who refuse to take up Jesus’ model of humble service, willing to wash the feet of his disciples or serve at table. These temptations were countered by a new vision of service and inclusiveness with forgiveness and compassion.
Jesus would begin his ministry by preaching the good news of the forgiveness of sins without requiring any penance, he would invite the pure and impure to sit at table to eat at God’s table, he would heal on the Sabbath because compassion was greater than the law.
So in the synagogue at Nazareth, Jesus recites from the scroll of Isaiah:

To preach good news to the poor.
To proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the
blind.
To set at liberty those who are oppressed.
To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.

Jesus preached a new vision of God’s compassion for those who are not included in the vision: God care for the poor, the captives, the blind, the oppressed, and those enslaved through indebtedness. Jesus proclaimed a new freedom of God’s Spirit for a new era. It was the freedom that the Holy Spirit, who is God’s wildness,” and whose wildness was passed into the message, ministry, and person of Jesus.

The Transfiguration (Lk. 9: 28-36)

This story is traditionally read as a miracle story during Jesus’ ministry. But all indications from a careful reading this story is a resurrection or Parousia story. This story in the gospel attempts to help the disciples come to an understanding of the difficult moments of Jesus ministry, his arrest, and death. And his death leads to the victory of Easter Christians have called this event the “transfiguration” of Jesus. Transfiguration means to change forms or transform, but it is a transformation into something more beautiful or spiritually elevated. So Jesus’ face changes, and his clothes are transformed dazzlingly white. This event occurs on a mountain top, usually, a place of encounter with God.

These are other indications of a resurrection appearance. Moses and Elijah appear with Jesus on the mountain top, and they converse with Jesus about his death. These two figures, Moses the lawgiver and Elijah the prophet, are religious prophets in past history. Climbing up a mountain is significant to Jews of Jesus’ time. Mountains are places where God is met. Think of Moses on Mt. Sinai where he receives the covenantal law. Elijah is taken to heaven by a fiery chariot in a whirlwind.

There was a common belief that these two prominent figures from the Hebrew Bible would return to earth at the end of the messianic period. Todays’ gospel story is thick with biblical allusions and symbols. Moses and the exodus are part of Jewish history of liberation from slavery in Egypt. Here is a comparison to the death of Jesus as the new exodus, a liberation from oppression and the bonds of death to resurrection. Elijah is a prophetic hero from the past, and at the end of his life, he is transferred by a fiery chariot in a whirlwind or tornado into heaven.

When Peter is mentioned in the gospels, you know to expect something will go wrong. He is well-intentioned but brash and does not often think through what Jesus says or does. Peter wants to do something to capture the moment, to make it possible to stay there in this light, in this understanding, in this encounter with God. He was wants to build three shrines or tents to honor the three religious figures. His babbling indicates how uncomfortable was he at what was taking place.

A radiant white cloud covered Jesus and, Moses, and Elijah, and the three, and a voice rendered Peter silent, proclaim Jesus as the beloved child and said to them, “listen to him!” They fell to the ground in terror. Jesus touched them, told them to get up and not to be afraid.

Like Peter, silence often makes us uncomfortable, but if we are not silent, how will we ever hear the voice of God? Can we be simply still ourselves and be silent in the face of the wonder of that surrounds us? How can we listen if we are babbling like Peter, how can we really hear if we are not first silent? If we are not still enough to take in what is being offered to us?

God reminds the disciples to commune or listen with nature. God says, “Be open. Receive. Don’t share yet. Don’t freeze this moment. But be aware. Enjoy the moment. Keep your eyes on Christ. And receive.”

This practice of stopping and listening is difficult, for it takes practice for those who are not used to being receivers, but it can be done when you relax the business of your mind and remain receptive.

300 million Orthodox Christians read this story of the transfiguration of Jesus as very important to the practice of their spirituality. They turn to the Earth as a location to encounter the Incarnate Christ transformed into the comos. They understand nature has the potential to become sacramental or transfigured and how God becomes present in nature from this story. Nature is generally empty, but it is also sacramental. Orthodox Christian spirituality has much to offer our own on encountering the natural world.

The heart of Orthodox Christian spirituality consists of the vision and the experience of the world as sacrament. This means that the world becomes a place for the transfigured presence of the risen Christ. To know and accept the sacramentality of the world in a truly effective way for encountering God yet, that experience transforms the way we feel and act toward creation and God present within it. All encounters with trees, rivers, oceans, deserts, and mountains can become “transfigured.” What they mean by “transfigured” it to be transformed into something beautiful, or in this case, something wonderfully magnificent and divine, God.

Nature is an icon. For Orthodox Christians, an icon is pictorial representation of sacred—God, Christ, and Spirit–or saints or event from the scriptures. They are not just for beautiful decoration of a church. Icons teach us as we see and contemplate them. They remind us what we are and what we should be. They show us the importance of matter and of material things. But they also show us the transfiguration of matter under the power of the Holy Spirit.

Some have called icons a window into the sacred. When you gaze at the icon, you see something beyond the representation. In the Greek Orthodox tradition, you bring the silence of James and John in today’s gospel story. It is the proper response at what you are really gazing. The icon calms the mind, it brings an inner stillness as a wakefulness or deep look at the heart of the icon to listen and see God. We experience that presence within the icon.

Today’s gospel about the transfiguration of Christ on the mountain top is an important lesson for training us to not only appreciation and experience transformation from engaging icons. The Orthodox Christians also understand nature as an icon of God’s presence. If we take the attitude of James and John’s silence, not Peter’s response, we come to nature with silence and awe. We come to an experiential realization of the presence in all created things.

Humanity has de-sacralize nature, taken the sacredness out of nature. And we commit ecological atrocities to the Earth and sin against God. Today’s gospel and the ancient practices of silent meditation and prayer in the Orthodox churches point to an openness to meet nature as the site of the holy. When they speak of nature as containing sacred presence, it is just like realizing that our blessing and consecration of the bread and grape juice at worship on Sunday. They become windows or icons into the sacred. The sacramentally charged nature of creation defies all sacrileges on our part, reminding us at all times that the world embodies the divine, the triune God. Ordinary nature can be transformed and revealed the transfigured Christ.

The Ecumenical Patriarch of the Orthodox Churches Bartholomew has been called “Green Patriarch” by the Orthodox churches. For the last 25 years and well before we heard about “climate change,” he has carried on a campaign to sensitize Christians to the issues of human harm and degradation of the Earth.

It follows that to commit a crime against the natural world is a sin. For humans to cause species to become extinct and to destroy the biological diversity of God’s creation, for humans to degrade the integrity of Earth by causing changes in its climate, by stripping the Earth of its natural forests or destroying its wetlands, for humans to injure moral ground, other humans with disease, for humans to contaminate the Earth’s waters, its land, its air, and its life with poisonous substances—these are sins.(Bartholonew I)

He names pollution, destruction of forests, contamination of waters and streams, releasing toxic carcinogens and other toxins into our atmosphere, change of climate and the extinction of species, these are sin. It is sin against God’s creation and God’s body.

The Ecumenical Patriarch has tirelessly convened symposia around the world, including one in Santa Barbara, on degradation of global bioregions at most risk. He launched September 1^st as Creation Day to pray for the healing of God’s creation. That starts the ecumenical practice of the Season of Creation, which we as a church observe for four weeks, ending with the blessings of our companion animals. Like Pope Franics, he has been a vocal champion around the world for Earth protection and Earthcare.

The Earth and all its life forms and processes are not just objects to be exploited but a vast sacrament revealing God’s presence as Christ was revealed on the mountain and God spoke through a cloud over the risen Christ. The sacramental principle is the understanding that world around can break open, become transfigured, and reveal the radiant presence of Christ. In other words, nature becomes an icon of the sacred, the place we can encounter the risen Christ. Mountains, clouds, water, gardens, lakes and rivers, the wilderness can become spiritual windows to envision Christ.

Where are our icons? I first look to the gospel. The stories point to nature where Jesus experienced an intimacy of Abba God. The gospel becomes a visualized icon to experience the risen Christ.

Nature and God’s incarnation in Jesus are intertwined. Jesus is born in a cave. His parables are full of natural images: the good shepherd, the vine, the mustard seed, planting seeds, and so. Jesus experienced Abba God under the night stars in the countryside, in the olive groves, at the Jordan river, the wilderness,

Jesus is experienced on the mountain top, but the cloud becomes a manifestation of Abba God who declares that Jesus is the beloved child. And there is Jesus’ baptism in Jordan. Or in the wilderness. Jesus found God at night under the stars in countryside. Or in the gardens: the garden of Gethsemane and the resurrection garden where Jesus was buried.

You can nurture an opening of your mind which acts like a portal of connection with them and they will use this portal to commune with you. Sometimes this connection can happen quickly, surprisingly so, and some will need some time. A type of trust is needed to develop, not with the tree or whatever your source, but you must trust in your mind to become relaxed and vibrantly receptive.

The natural world becomes a window to experience the transfigured Christ in the world. The natural world is a window to find manifestations of the presence of God. When I speak of God is green, it means that the face of Christ is found in all living things.

This Lent make it a practice to visit our church garden. Find a plant that captures your attention. It may be the shape or color or something personal. Note the shape and color of the main body of the plant. If the plant has blossom, relish and enjoy the richness of the color. Try to develop a relationship with the plant, and give it a one word description. Focus on the word and the plant. Express your gratitude for this plant.

Try to be still to appreciate the plant. Be still and listen to the plant. Plants have a different language than ourselves. Listen to the plant, try to envision that this plant is God’s creation, it Remember when God look at the plants, God said it was good. This plant is precious and valuable to God. Remember how Jesus was transfigured on the mountain top; the risen Jesus is here today. In the plant and in you, and in your interrelating, there is the risen Christ. Honor the Christ in you and in the plant. Recognize that this is sacred moment together. Before you leave for reflection, repeat your holy word. By bookmakring it, the next time you visit the plant, use the word and it will transport into the experience where you left off. Thank God for this time with a beloved creation of God.

What might happen this Lent? Here is a description of Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas give us a clue.

I also began to connect with nature. I began to see that God loved not only my body, but also the whole ‘body” of creation. My prayer began to change. It was like turning my pocket inside out; whereas once I found God merely in the silent inward contemplation, now God began showing up around me—in the pond, the rocks, the willow tree. If you spend an hour gazing at a willow tree, after a while it begins to disclose God.

Christmas Eve : Grace at the Inclusive Margins (Lk. 2:1-20)

(I diverged from the text last night and went in other directions for the message. I figured that I would share it.)

On this Christmas Eve, we believe that the infinite Creator God who is absolute mystery–beyond all our conceptual thought, beyond our imagination, and beyond our language; this God has drawn near to us in the birth of Jesus. This was a decision of God to incarnate before creation happened. The first thought of God in the depths of eternity, well before the Big Band fifteen years ago, was to incarnate as Christ to communicate God’s compassion and love for us and all creation.

God has embraced us as humans by becoming human, and humanity has been graced with this divine embodiment. Christmas says joyfully that we are not alone. The universe is not accident; even though its chaotic development, unfolding in an evolutionary process beyond our current human understanding but under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

But Christmas for us celebrates the marriage of the divine and the human: The infinite and finite were woven together in the conception and physical birth of Jesus.

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

By the time of the birth of Jesus, Joseph had welcomed Mary and her unborn child into his family. The story begins with no room, no hospitality for the family and Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem, the city of David. Jesus is born in a cave used for sheltering nonhuman animals. Jesus is born in the womb of the earth, and his dead body would later be placed tenderly in another cave or womb of the Earth. Earth and heaven are united in the body of Jesus at birth, connected in his birth in the cave and re-connected as he laid in the cave tomb. Christmas, in one sense, is all about interconnections between Jesus and ourselves, all creation.

Jesus begins his first moments after birth by being placed in a feeding trough in a cave with animals. Ironically, he will end his life with crucifixion as the lambs are slain in the Temple for Passover. He is surrounded by animals in his birth and dies like a paschal lamb during the cutting of the throats of the lambs and draining their blood in the Temple by the priests, so that the lambs can be kosher, holy.

His life started in the marginality, outside human residences in Bethlehem and ends outside of Jerusalem on a cross. Jesus’ birth was in a cave used to shelter nonhuman domesticated animals as we portray in our Christmas crèches. He died outside the city, near the garbage heap of the city. It is the human act of ultimate inhospitality. Jesus was born as an outsider and died as an outsider. He lived as God’s outsider preaching a message of breaking down walls of exclusion. Today we welcome Jesus in our hearts.

In this child of both human, earthly, and cosmic destiny, he will inspire us as he inspired laying those who visited him in the manager to embrace our inner Christ child.

The marginal location of the birth of Jesus makes it accessible to the marginalized shepherds outside of the town of Bethlehem. Angels appear to the shepherds, announcing “Today in the city of David, is born a savior, who is Christ the Lord.” The shepherds are told to search for a sign—a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. This, of course, is an unusual sign for a Savior and Lord, born in a cave with nonhuman animals.

And in Luke, shepherds, outsiders and despised Jews, came to venerate him in a feeding trough as Savior and God’s Child. The shepherds too found the inspiration of hope for today and the future, for an innocent child in a feeding trough illuminated by a star and the arrival of expectant shepherds who experience wonder. Later stories from his mother about the incident might have been the inspiration for Jesus to tell his audience the parable of The Good Shepherd. No Jewish person at the time would ever speak of shepherds as “good”—let alone apply it to God. Jesus also identified himself as the good shepherd, who would leave the ninety-nine for the one lost sheep.

And then there were the three Magi, non-Jewish religious seers who brought gifts for his birth. As Jesus asked stories about that time in Bethlehem, his parents narrated the events. Mary and Joseph told stories about the Magi, for God worked through them, providing necessary funds to flee to Egypt from Herod’s massacre of the holy innocents in Bethlehem and live for a couple as refugees. God’s grace came also from outside of Israel, for Israel was not the only people that God blessed and graced. God’s inclusive love was universal beyond all tribalism and beyond all religious barriers and exclusions.

Both shepherds who were poor and unclean outsiders and the Magi who were unclean Gentiles were directed by God a new message of universal compassion. The stories at his nativity were imprinted in Jesus being and his message: “Be compassionate as God is compassionate.” He would incarnate God’s compassion in the world.

God’s first thought before creation was to incarnate Godself in Christ. This means that incarnation and birth of Jesus originated from God as divine love for all creation and for ourselves. It was not primarily a divine rescue mission to save from sin. That was secondary. The birth of Christ was originated from God’s love.

God became flesh and lived among us. Through the incarnation, God learned and experienced human sensory experiences. God experienced birth in all its liquidity and messiness. God experienced the sensations of hunger, sights, sounds, crying, and smells of a newly born child. Smells in the stable had originally triggered my thought processes about God and smells. The night God’s birth into the world irrupted into a world of amazing barnyard smells. How many have you ever been in a barn or stable? You are bombarded with a range of animal smells, hay, excrement, and so on. Yet our crèches romanticize and sanitize the event and do not carry the barnyard scents of sheep, goats, and cows.

And in Luke, shepherds, marginalized Jews, came to venerate him in a feeding trough as Savior and God’s Child Shepherds from the nearby hills visited the newborn at the manger. Pastors from the slopes beheld a different lamb, a lamb born to save the world from selfishness and violence. The shepherds came and found the child wrapped in swaddling clothes in a manger. They left giving praise and glorifying God.

Heaven and earth come together in a two-way revelation in a baby born in Bethlehem. The baby begins receiving revelatory experiences and sensations that all new born babies experience: an eruption of sensations, smells, noises, tastes, touch, and sights. The baby begins a journey to become human, experience what an ordinary human being experiences with sensations, experiences, emotions, and reflective processes. The divine has taken on embodied life, experiencing what it means to be human. On the other hand, God reveals to the shepherds the true mystery of God’s incarnation in a place unexpected for God.

We experience a dual revelation: First, our humanity has judged to be worthy of the embodiment of the living and loving God. Secondly, tonight’s Christmas story unfolds the deep truth that we are not alone in the universe. The universe is not mindless evolution; it is more than matter and energy, stars and black holes. It radiates the Spirit of God, for as God embodies God’s self a human body, God took on the materiality and energy of the universe. That means not only God has undergone change but ourselves and our universe. We can sing with the angels: Glory to God in the highest, and peace to humanity. For we know in our hearts the great mystery that God became human so humans can become divine. God gave us part of God’s divine life.

God’s incarnation means change for us. As I mentioned earlier, God’s incarnation meant a change in God’s being. God became more lovingly accessible to us through embodiment. God became Emmanuel, God with us. But it also means change in ourselves. It means God coming into being results in us becoming co-creators with God in the world around us. Every moment holds the potential for new birth because this birth is the birth of the Light in the world of darkness. The darkness, even the darkness in ourselves, cannot overcome the birth, and as long as we hold the candle of our faith in front of us, guiding us, we cannot be overcome. We too will be born anew, giving birth to the divine child within ourselves.

On Christmas Eve, when we want absolutely nothing to change, when we nostalgically want to relive our Christmas past, but we are, in fact, celebrating the greatest change ever—change in our God and change within ourselves. Change is not something that we as Christians should ever fear. Change is the nature of our lives as Christians. We must not fear change but embrace change and become agents of change under the influence of God’s Spirit. God’s brings the “new” into the world every moment, and the birth of Christ signifies the reality of change. We change and are open new possibilities in the birth and the death of Jesus; it is the foretaste of the change of resurrection where God can bring our physical and spiritual bodies together as well as the universe into a fullness of change –where God will abide in all. We will be born into the fully divine universe.
We can journey to those places that become Bethlehem for us, the places where God is abiding in our midst. God invites us to recognize the birth of the Christ child in our midst.

The Christian martyr Oscar Romero wrote,

We must not seek the child Jesus in the pretty figure of our Christmas cribs. We must seek Jesus among the malnourished children who have gone to bed tonight with nothing to eat. No one can celebrate a genuine Christmas without being truly poor. The self-sufficient, the proud, those who, because they have everything look down on others, those who have no need even of God – for them there will be no Christmas. Only the poor, the hungry, those who need someone to come on their behalf will have that someone.

We are once again invited by our loving Creator to come, worship, and adore….and experience the change of birth…It is a change of vision where we can see the face of love’s pure light in the face of the poor, the homeless, and the suffering.

May the Blessings of Love’s Pure light be with you this Christmas.

Moments of Grace (Lk. 1:39-55)

When the Angel Gabriel offered Mary the opportunity to become pregnant and carry God’s Child, it is often unnoticed how God gives Mary, a 12 or 13 year old girl, a choice. Pregnancy in the ancient Middle East (and even today) is seldom a woman’s choice.

I suspect that her sharing of her consent to God and resulting conception and pregnancy did not go well with her parents. Remember Nazareth is a small village of 300-400 villagers, and everyone knows everyone other’s business. And scandal such as pregnancy of a betrothed village girl would be known in a very short time.

Then there is the fact that she is pregnant and betrothed, and Joseph is not the father. I have often read the Luke account with the Matthew account of Joseph’s dilemma in discovering Mary’s pregnancy and that he is not the father. He considers his options: marry her, quietly put her aside, or bring this to public and religious court in the synagogue: condemnation and stoning to death.

But I want to note a small phrase used in today’s gospel, “with haste.” The phrase indicates a state of urgency or perhaps even panic on the part of Mary. What is the cause of her panic? She needed distance from the whole family scandal and find someone who might understand her.

Here are some of the moments of grace that come from Mary’s consent to carry God’s child.

A moment of grace and deepening faith: African American biblical scholar Renita Weems in her book, Just a Sister Away, notes how pregnant women have a physical and emotional need to be in company of other pregnant women. It is to share their experience together, confronting fears, sharing joy and hopes for children. It was a moment of shared blessings.

Two pregnant women come together with only a partial understanding of what happened with their pregnancies. Shared individual experiences of grace now becomes a communal experience of grace. The dynamics of God’s grace becomes compounded when we share our grace with each other. Their two stories interweave with the common chord of God’s miraculous grace. Elizabeth, who was barren, now in the final trimester of her pregnancy, and Mary, who conceives Jesus through the power of the Holy Spirit, they come together.

A hidden story is revealed as the two women, the elder woman cursed with barrenness for years and women and men’s scorn and the young teenager, pregnant out of wedlock, a situation filled with personal danger. They face each other guarded gratitude to the one who lifts the lowly from despair.
Elizabeth goes first in responding to Mary, for Elizabeth’s fetus leaps for joy. She then pronounces the sign for Mary: Blessed are you among women, and blessed s the fruit of your womb!” As she gives hospitality to Mary, Elizabeth is drawn into the hospitality of God. Mary is just becoming aware of the full dimensions of her assent to God and the fetus she is carrying in her womb has a special future ordained by God. In their meeting, we witness faith of both women increased in hospitality, shared grace, and faith strengthened. This is the beginnings of the faith community oriented towards God’s mission in Jesus.

Inspired by the Spirit, Mary sings a prophetic canticle or song of liberating truth. A pregnant, unwed girl, speaks liberating and even radical truth:

My soul magnifies your greatness, O God, And my spirit rejoices in you, my Savior.

Mary’s soul has humbly accepted the invitation of unprecedented grace to carry God’s child, and her acceptance magnifies the greatness of God. Her bodily response over time actually makes God more than God was before. There is something new happening in the life of God: God will embody God’s self in her womb and take on human flesh. And the incarnate one will be born in a cave with nonhuman animals and placed into a manger, a feeding trough. And her spirit rejoices because ultimately it is this transformation within God that will save her and others whose voices have been silenced.

For you have looked with favor upon your lowly servant, and from this day forward, all generations will call me blessed.

She is from a poor peasant family, a nobody in Palestine and in the powerful Roman Empire. She becomes controversial in her own family and is at risk of rejection and perhaps even stoning to death because she accepted God’s offer and became pregnant while betrothed. I am sure in the midst of her explanations to parents, family, and to Joseph her betrothed that consequences of her acceptance to bear the child of God were not seen as a blessing. Mary carries the stigma of otherness, a pregnant unwed mother from a poor family, and we understand the stigma of otherness among Christian Pharisees.

Mary queers the patriarchal economy that understands women’s bodies as not belonging to themselves. She is free to answer as an equal to God’s invitation to bear Jesus; she has ownership of her body and remains an active agent in making a decision for herself and a decision to accept God’s offer. But she models for us authentic queer discipleship, for she accepts her otherness not as a burden but as a grace.

God and Mary break the patriarchal and exclusive economy of grace, for Jesus is conceived without male agency and outside of marriage by the Holy Spirit overshadowing her. These two points are backgrounded by many churches in the idealization of the Virgin Mary and Christmas. Both Judaism and early Christianity perceived the Holy Spirit as the feminine principle in God. Some early Christians genderized the Holy Spirit male rather than female because of the implications of same-sex conceptualization of Jesus. Yet if God’s Christ was conceived in a non-heterosexual manner and born out of wedlock, what does this say about narrow regimes of Christian marriage and sexual morality? What does it say to the many who are excluded from heterocentric economies of grace?

You have filled the hungry with good things, while you have sent the rich away empty. You have come to the aid of Israel your servant, mindful of your mercy—the promise you made to our ancestors—to Sarah and Abraham and their descendants forever.

Mary’s vocation is a thoroughly queer vocation; she stands with the underside, the marginal, and the outsiders—those yet unimagined as outside
A twelve or thirteen year girl lifts our eyesight to the profound realization that God breaks boundaries of male power and agency. God breaks the boundaries religious people build. Mary conceives Jesus outside of marriage and religious values. She realizes the grace of otherness and how God uses her otherness to transform her and the world.

But moments of grace generate other moments. Author Nick Page writes, “The story of Jesus’ birth is not one of exclusion, but inclusion…Joseph’s relatives made a place for Jesus in their heart of their household. They did not shun Mary, even though her status would have been suspect and even shameful (carrying an illegitimate child) they brought her inside. They made room for Jesus in the heart of a peasant’s home.”

Mary is not the passive but a pregnant virgin, chosen to bear God’s child, not as constructed by many Christians as the bearer of Christian sexual morality. The real teenage Mary bursts into song–singing about the end of human oppression and religious tyranny in the name of God. She anticipates the powerful will be brought down, the hungry fed, and the rich sent away empty. God will turn the heterosexist world upside down by the baby growing inside her womb.
Mary anticipates that God’s promise of Jesus’ birth will continue to turn the world upside down and that those who are excluded will have their rightful places in God’s reign. As Jesus preached and challenged religious bigotry and oppression, a woman in the crowd raised her voice and said to him, ‘Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that nursed you!’ But Jesus said, ‘Blessed rather are those who hear the Word of God and obey it!’” (Luke 11: 27-28)

Blessed are we who take the model of Mary’s courage and otherness to thank God for our diversities as transformational grace, for she truly became a breath of heaven when in all her humanity boldly said “yes” to God’s grace of Jesus the Christ. . But blessed are we who hear God’s Word and live it with the boldness and courage of Mary. May heaven continue to breathe through us that queer grace that Mary carried to birth and transform countless lives.

Christmas Message 2015

Mary, More Radical and Challenging Than We Iimagine

Vanilla theologies portray Mary as a passive and obedient “yes” person to God. Such theologies glorify her passive and subordinate role to a male God. Mary’s subordination as a woman has been abusively misapplied by a number of churches to keep women subordinate to men and docile to male church leaders. But there have been other consequences beside religious male domination. Mary has been socially and theologically constructed as a model of women, mother and virgin, an ideal woman that no woman can ever achieve. For centuries, Christian values around Mary claimed that women should not know “carnal pleasure.” She became the chaste icon of sexual morality within a heterosexual economy of grace that damages women as well gender-variant and non-heterosexual. Mary experienced no carnal pleasure in conceiving Jesus and had no labor pains during the birth of Jesus. Christian constructions of Mary supported heterosexuality while denigrating sexuality altogether by holding her as a “perpetual Virgin” and denigrating alternative sexualities and sexuality outside of marriage. Thus, Orthodox, Catholic, Anglican, and a few Protestant churches use Mary for an entrenched sexual moralism. The Spanish and Portuguese conquerors forced indigenous peoples to adopt the sexual mores of Catholic Europe under the banner of Mary, the Virgin Mother. Mary became the sacred representation of how women are to live and subordinate themselves to men, church, and society. She became an icon of a heterosexual economy of subordination of women and indigenous peoples to a vision of imperial Christianity.

In recent decades, there has been a tug of war over the image of Mary– between fundamentalist Christians holding to the above values and opponents who want to recover Mary’s original voice as a real flesh and blood peasant woman in history. I naturally am inclined to the latter position. I think Mary has an affinity to women, gender variant, the poor, the migrants and refugees, folks who are different religiously and anyone falling into a category of “other”, including nonhuman animals on Earth. She is the voice of resistance at this season. Her voice this season may echo ours as we read and listen anew to her story and the words of her song of resistance and envisioning a new world.

Mary comes from a poor family, and she is a teenager when the angel Gabriel announces the offer from God to bear a child. And she accepts the offer without hesitation. God complexifies her life beyond anything she can imagine. And Mary responds with a song of praise, and it is this Canticle (Luke 1:45-55) that I want to focus my Christmas reflections to celebrate Mary as queer model for ourselves this Christmas.

My soul magnifies your greatness, O God, And my spirit rejoices in you, my Savior.

God is bigger than we can imagine, and our God is not bound by male structures, heterosexist power, structures of economic greed, and the fossil fuel lords. God has the ability to surprise Mary and us by coloring outside the lines of heterosexuality and stepping outside of religious boundaries. Mary welcomes a vocation to stigma and otherness, and she takes seriously that God will work through her otherness to transform herself and her world through her child.
Mary’s soul has humbly accepted the invitation of unprecedented grace to carry God’s child, and her acceptance magnifies the greatness of God. Her bodily response over time actually makes God more than God was before. There is something new happening in the life of God: God will embody God’s self in her womb and take on human flesh. And the incarnate one will be born in a cave with nonhuman animals and placed into a manger, a feeding trough. And her spirit rejoices because ultimately it is this transformation within God that will save her and others whose voices have been silenced. .

For you have looked with favor upon your lowly servant, and from this day forward, all generations will call me blessed.

She made a decision for God, and that choice places her at risk. Elizabeth reminds Mary of Gabriel’s earlier message, “God is with you. Blessed are you among women.” The young teenager comes to see that God is working through her stigma and otherness to transform herself. She accepts her vocation to bear God’s holy word with a glad heart and the challenges from her parents and Jewish society..

For you, the Almighty have done great things for me, and holy is your Name. Your mercy reaches from age to age for those who fear you. You have shown strength with your arm; you have scattered the proud in their conceit; you have deposed the mighty from their thrones and raised the lowly to high places.

After accepting God’s invitation to bear the messiah, Mary prophetically sings how God will upset the social world, bringing down the mighty and elevating the lowly. God’s action will literally queer the world by turning it upside down, for Mary will bear a child who will challenge the world, disrupting the social world and conventional notions of God. God will disrupt through her pregnancy the notion of compulsory heterosexuality as the only means to salvation. God scatters religious bigots who pride themselves upon their excluive privilege or even their Christian privilege but exclude the infinite diversity of sexualities, gender variances, or other religious traditions found in their midst. God disrupts fundamentalist Christians who promote that there is no salvation outside of Christianity as they fire-bomb mosques and harass women in their Islamic garb. .
You have filled the hungry with good things, while you have sent the rich away empty. You have come to the aid of Israel your servant, mindful of your mercy—the promise you made to our ancestors—to Sarah and Abraham and their descendants forever.

Mary’s song is a radical proclamation of good news for women, indigenous peoples, undocumented, those outside of heteronormativity, and for the Earth and the community of life, for she now praises God for turning the world upside down. She praises God who has promised compassionate solidarity with those who suffer from personal, political, racial, and environmental injustice.
Mary’s vocation is a thoroughly queer vocation; she stands with the underside, the marginal, and the outsiders—those yet unimagined as outside
A twelve or thirteen year girl lifts our eyesight to the profound realization that God breaks boundaries of male power and agency. God breaks the boundaries religious people build. Mary conceives Jesus outside of marriage and religious values. She realizes the grace of otherness and how God uses her otherness to transform her and the world.

Mary anticipates that God’s promise of Jesus’ birth will continue to turn the world upside down and that those who are excluded will have their rightful places in God’s reign. As Jesus preached and challenged religious bigotry and oppression, a woman in the crowd raised her voice and said to him, ‘Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that nursed you!’ But Jesus said, ‘Blessed rather are those who hear the Word of God and obey it!’” (Luke 11: 27-28)

This Christmas I finally share this youtube video with you: “Breath of Heaven.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icilgwdHiZg

Selling Salvation (Mark 12:38-44)

This morning’s gospel we hear two stories connected together. The first is Jesus’ criticism of religious scribes, perhaps Pharisees or some functionaries of the Temple. They wear long robes, demand they be greeted with respect, and have the best seats of honor in the synagogue or at a banquet. Jesus say, “They devour widow’s houses, and for the sake of appearance say long prayers.” Hear Jesus’ criticism, “They will receive the greater condemnation.” In the first story, Jesus addresses religious hypocrisy.

Over the years, I have heard so many sermons on how Jesus praises the poor widow who gave her two copper coins worth a penny to the treasury over the many rich people who gave large sums. Her gift is insignificant but to God her contribution is valued because God has seen her heart and what she has contributed. She has given all her life savings.

But I want to come back to the story of the widow’s contribution. There is another way to view this story.

The Didache, meaning Teaching (of the Twelve Apostles) a Christian text from the 2nd century CE, gives some criteria for determining the legitimacy of a genuine religious person:

Now about the apostles and prophets: Act in line with gospel precept. Welcome every apostles on arriving, as if he were the Lord. But he must not stay beyond one day, In case of necessity, however, the next day too. If he stays three days, he is a false prophet. On departing, an apostle must not accept anything save sufficient food to carry him till his next lodging. If he asks for money, he is a false prophet.

The term apostle is loosely used in the 2nd century for one “sent on a mission.” Paul was not one of the twelve apostles, and yet he called himself an apostle. Prophets and apostles were held esteem, and they were welcomed by various communities, and they were accorded leadership roles in Christian worship. They were also worthy of financial support in the form of assistance.
But the Didache was very aware that Jesus instructed his disciples to go out two by two and they should take nothing for their journey, except a mere staff– no bread, no bag, no money in their belt.

What would happen today if we evaluated televangelists as authentic Christians from this text? I can think of the Georgia Minister of a megachurch who maintained that he needed a 65 million dollar check, or Joel Olstein who has an 11 million dollar home. Or the hundreds of millions of dollars each year Pat Robertson makes from the millions who watch his Christian Broadcast Network and contribute to him from their fixed incomes. “You should see the thousands of social-security checks that are sent over to CBN, (Christian Broadcast Network)” one former employee told Newsweek. The Christian Broadcast Network receives notation of nearly $300 million dollars, and those donations do not go to feed the poor and homeless.

Or how Catholic German Bishop Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst spend $42 million renovating his episcopal residence and spending $20,000 alone a bathtub? 1.1 million dollars went for landscaping and fountains. The bishop of bling was removed by Pope Francis I.

Or two ministers at the former MCC church, Glory Tabernacle Christian Center where the Pastor has BMW and the Associate Pastor a Mercedes? The ostentatiousness of religious leaders is certainly problematic to me but also to Jesus. Do religious leaders need more money, plush residences, or high-priced cars than the people are called to serve? How many the above examples and others would fail the criteria of the Didache instructions on dealing with itinerant prophets and apostles?

Christian communities have valued spiritual leaders through the millennia, and there have been leaders and churches that have grown wealthy from the business of religion, selling salvation.

Conscious of these Christian leaders, I look at the story of the widow’s contribution, and I see another conclusion from Jesus that has often been overlooked by years of sermons on this passage. We have made Christianity a salvation religion, forgetting the valuable message of Jesus has abut God’s companionship of empowerment (reign of God)?

Jesus points how the Temple administration preys upon the piety of the vulnerable and the poor, extracting monies that the poor cannot afford to pay. Jesus commends the devotional piety of the poor of giving their all to God. This is commendable for the genuine gift of the poor, but what Jesus condemns is the pressure of the Temple or church administration “devouring” the meager savings of the poor. They pressure the poor to contribute not what they can afford but on what they need to survive upon.

Let me read how this scripture is sadly alive:

A viewer wrote Pat Robertson that she and her husband have been tithing for many years, as they “both love the Lord and give willingly and our tithe is over 10 percent.”

But she noted that, “we never have an extra penny after our monthly bills are paid.”

“Our old car just broke down and we had to borrow money to fix it,” she said. “We both need dental work, but we can’t afford it. I constantly have to use our credit card to pay for medical needs … What could we be doing wrong?”

Robertson showed zero concern for the fact that she could barely pay her medical bills, because the obvious solution is for her to “ask God to show you some ways of making money.”

“There are many ways of making money, even at 80 years old. You know, you can get on the telephone and people are hiring … there are all kinds of things you can do. For example, you may have a bunch of junk lying around in your garage that you can sell on eBay, and get some money that way,” he said.

He then chided her for complaining about her bills. http://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/pat_robertson_tells_80_year_old_tithing

Here is an example of what Jesus describes a religious person “who devours the houses of widows.”

The above examples illustrate how the religion of Jesus confronted the greed of religious leaders, taking advantage of the poor then, and still now the church leaders of our time pressure people with the notion of salvation. The salvation business of churches has long been used to oppress people, to mute silence of the very poor over the wealthy, and the wealthy and the religious leaders conspire to get wealthy. Maybe Robertson should send some of his personal wealth to help the 80 year old woman or television empire of 300 million dollars could spare some to help viewers. But no, he tells her to get a job at 80 years old so she can pay tithes to him in the name of Jesus. What would Jesus do? Overturn the Christian Broadcast Network as the new Temple. .

Now do not get me wrong, I do think clergy and church leaders should be paid a fair and equitable wage. It is the exploitation and the outrageous salaries and extravagant living that Jesus would object.

In our own society, capitalism has been made into a religion that the very wealthy export. It has impacted Christianity in the negative.

Let me give you a couple of examples: Prosperity Christianity preaches a gospel about tithing and giving more, and that God will reward true faith with financial blessings. This preached by many evangelists. What happens when something bad happens? You lack true faith. Poor people live on the streets because they have lacked true faith. This is double-victimization of the poor. True faith is rewarded with great financial blessings. Televangelists model extravagant wealth selling this idea of prosperity intertwined with salvation.

Other versions are: The more generous you give, the more God will reward you in heaven. I consider this another version of the medieval practice of selling indulgences. It plays on the fears of pious.

This practice of pressuring vulnerable people for monies is the practice that Jesus is critical in today’s scripture. I read today’s gospel as an instruction to his disciples. Jesus warns his disciples with the widow’s giving beyond anything she afford. On another occasion, he bluntly says, “You cannot serve God and mammon,” the Aramaic word for money. He is right. Greed and the gospel cannot co-exist.

I read recently about a group of 40 Catholic bishops on November 16, 1965 while the Vatican II was being held. They gathered in an ancient Christian underground basilica, the catacombs of St. Flavia Domitilla to celebrate a mass. The church marked the location where two Roman soldiers were executed for converting to Christianity, and it connects to 10 miles of catacombs under Rome. One of the concerns of Pope John the XXIII was to make service of the poor a key part of revitalization of the Catholic Church. I loved John XXIII.

Some 40 progressive bishops and cardinals from Europe and Latin America world gathered secretly and signed a commitment, named the “Pact of the Catacombs.” They committed themselves to “try to live according to the ordinary manner of our people in all that concerns housing, food, means of transport, and related matters.” They vowed to renounce fancy vestment, personal possessions and titles. They were commitment to make the church of the poor for the poor. The manifesto read:

We will seek collaborators in ministry so that we can be animators according to the Spirit rather than dominators according to the world; we will try to make ourselves as humanly present and welcoming as possible; and we will show ourselves to be open to all, no matter what their beliefs. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/pact-of-the-catacombs_563930c3e4b0307f2cab1c23

One of the signers was one of my college heroes, Dom Helder Camara, the Brazilian Archbishop of the slums of Recife. I was introduced to his writings in 1968 in a philosophy class taught by a French atheist and existentialist philosopher. Archbishop Camara deeply felt the gospel call of Jesus to live in service to care for the poor and the homeless. Archbishop Camara once said, “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist.” It is okay to feed the poor, but you step on dangerous ground when you ask “why are they poor?” The wealthy are committed to keep the minimum wage to sub standard as they make even greater wealth. It depends on keeping people poor.

The bishops who signed the Pact of Catacombs kept this underground for years. They feared that openness would result in being labeled as communists by wealthy Catholics and bishops. It was dangerous to mention this document in the Catholic Church or in public until Francis was elected pope. One signatories of the document was a former Archbishop of Buenos Aires, who assassinated by the military and wealthy for his commitment to the poor.

Francis has lived the dream of the Pact of the Catacombs, a “poor church, for the poor.” Before he was elected pope, he as cardinal and Archbishop of Buenos Aires did not have a car and driver as most Catholic bishops, he used public transportation. He lived in an apartment and did his own cooking. Next to rare among Catholic bishops.

Francis has shunned the extravagant papal garments or the red Prada shoes of Benedict XVI. He decided not to live in the elegant papal apartment in the Vatican but lives in a room in the Vatican guesthouse. He has open the Vatican for 40 homeless men from Rome to eat, bathe, and be sheltered. This is a first in Vatican history.

Jesus’ instruction to care for the poor is one of the central practices of the Christian church. Beware of the greedy religious leaders who “devour the homes of widows.”

Rev. Dr. Robert E. Shore-Goss

Category Archives: Sermons

Season of Creation: Oceans

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Mary and Martha: Non-Conformist Women (Lk. 10:38-42)

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Breakfast with Jesus (John 21:1-19)

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Will the real Prodigal Stand UP? (Luke 15:13-32)

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The Wilderness: The Making of God’s Upside-down Kin-dom (Luke 4:1-3)

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The Transfiguration (Lk. 9: 28-36)

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Christmas Eve : Grace at the Inclusive Margins (Lk. 2:1-20)

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Moments of Grace (Lk. 1:39-55)

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Christmas Message 2015

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Selling Salvation (Mark 12:38-44)

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