Category Archives: Sermons

Love Wins: “Pentecost Queers” (1 John 4:7-11)

Love wins! Today is the 46th anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion in June 1969. It is certainly a victory for struggle for the right to marry and protecting LGBT families with kids.

Justice Kennedy writes for majority decision recognizing same-sex marriage as the law of the land:

The nature of marriage is that, through its enduring bond, two persons together can find other freedoms, such as expression, intimacy, and spirituality. This is true for all persons, whatever their sexual orientation.

As all parties agree, many same-sex couples provide loving and nurturing homes to their children, whether biological or adopted. And hundreds of thousands of children are presently being raised by such couples…Most States have allowed gays and lesbians to adopt, either as individuals or as couples, and many adopted and foster children have same-sex parents. This provides powerful confirmation from the law itself that gays and lesbians can create loving, supportive families.

Excluding same-sex couples from marriage thus conflicts with a central premise of the right to marry. Without the recognition, stability, and predictability marriage offers, their children suffer the stigma of knowing their families are somehow lesser. They also suffer the significant material costs of being raised by unmarried parents, relegated through no fault of their own to a more difficult and uncertain family life. The marriage laws at issue here thus harm and humiliate the children of same-sex couples.

No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.

The 14th Amendment has been used to define marriage a human right in American history since the 1880s, and it has been used consistently to widen that right to interracial marriage and now to include same sex marriage. These are profound recognitions of marriage equality and the protection of children of LGBT parents. The estimates of children of LGBT parents in 2000 were 10 million, and I am sure that it now exceeds that number. About Parenting– a website about parenting, foster care, and adoption– estimates that 2 million GLB folks in the US want to adopt children.

This inclusion of LGBT folks has a longer history than Stonewall. It goes back to Ruth and Naomi, Jonathan and David, and the Roman Centurion with his youth that Jesus healed.

Theologian Wendy Farley writes, “Christianity moves through history carried by te impulses of domination and exclusion. It despises uppity women, no-hellers, contemplatives, queers, and thinks less off those people outside Christianity outside. But without their witness to the nearness and tender mercies of Emmanuel, the memory of Christ is distorted.” (Farley) Another favorite theologian, Diarmuid O’Murchu, speaks of “Pentecost Queers” at the original Pentecost, those men and women who were outsiders, and the Spirit led to a revolutionary Jesus movement that had to take serious the radical inclusivity of Jesus ministry, and it was oftentimes disturbing and uncomfortable to the Jerusalem  church under James, the brother of Jesus. Frequently in Christian history, that inclusion went underground. I want to talk about few underground events that were precursors to the Stonewall Rebellion and the Victory we celebrate being included in marriage and families like everyone else.
But the desire to be married and have families among people who have loved the same gender has a long history.

For example, the story of Sergius and Bacchus, canonized martyrs and saints in the Catholic and Orthodox churches, is a story that we reclaim as part of the minority history of alternative relationships. Let me recount my meditational story from Centering prayer.

Now Sergius and Bacchus maintained a single household; soldiers in the Roman legion—Sergius as an officer and Bacchus as a lesser officer. Yes, gay saints in uniforms! They were denounced as Christians during the persecution of the Emperor Diocletian, the worst of the Roman persecutions where 20,000 Christians perished. They were ordered to sacrifice to the emperor but refused:
Immediately the emperor ordered their belts cut off, their military uniforms, and the gold torc taken from their necks which held their red Roman capes. Sergius and Bacchus were dressed in women clothes and paraded through the middle of the city to the palace, bearing chains around their necks. The emperor attempted to feminize them and mock their masculinity.

In a masculinist military culture, the parading with women’s clothes was to humiliate the couple. Their comment is revealing: “As brides you have decked us with women’s gowns and joined us together…” These are words of defiance, for they understood themselves married to each other and to Christ the bridegroom.
The night that Bacchus was executed, however, he appeared to Sergius:
“Why do you grieve and mourn, brother? If I have been taken from you in body, I am still you in bond of union…Hurry then yourself, brother, through beautiful and perfect confession to pursue and obtain me, when you finished the course. For the crown of justice for me is to be with you.”

Bacchus’ promise if Serge followed the Lord, he would not receive as we might expect a reward the beatific vision or paradise, but Bacchus himself. How many lovers have understood when their partner has died that they will be re-united with them in heaven! We can related with these Christian lovers?
The next day Sergius was forced to run 10 miles in boots in which nails had been driven in. But according to legend, an angel healed Sergius’ feet. The next day he was forced to run another nine miles with spikes driven into his feet. He was executed, but not before praying for forgiveness of his executioners. A gay soldier imitating Christ on the cross—forgiving those that killed him. Gay saints, we can be proud of….Sergius and Bacchus came to represent some of the foremost paired military Christian saints. Their feast is October 7.
Another point made in John Boswell’s book Christianity, Homosexuality, and Social Tolerance is that in the Greco-Roman world same-sex male couples were held up as models of fidelity and love. When Rome declined, he suggests that many men and women who loved the same-gendered entered into monasteries. And it takes me where I want to discuss Boswell’s The Kindness of Strangers—a book about the abandonment of babies and children. It was common practice to leave a child with any disability or physical deformity exposed to the elements and death on hillsides. Christians practiced this custom when they had too many children, too many girls to pay a marriage dowry, or physically disabled children to the elements. Boswell develops the thesis that same-gendered monasteries and convents, full of our folks, took in and raised many abandoned children in an age that had no artificial contraception and no adoption. He hypothesizes that they actually saved and raised hundreds of thousands of children over centuries. It is the kind of hospitality recovered in the last decade where gay and lesbians have adopted children in foster care. A lesbian couple in Florida adopted three severely disabled children handed over by their families to state care. Two gay men friends of mine in St. Louis adopted two half brothers, born cracked addicted. Boswell’s thesis continues in our community.

Love wins a major victory on Friday! But it will not win until a truth of Human Rights Campaign T-shirt I frequently wear with the words “Love Conquers Hate”. That means the murder of nine African-American Christians at Mother Emmanuel Church, including its Pastor, Rev. Clement Pinckney. Those nine welcomed into their prayer meeting a young white male, Dylann Storm Roof. They believed in an extravagant hospitality of Christ, and they were massacred because of racism.  The were martyred because they practiced radical Christian hospitality if welcoming a stranger into their midst.

The relatives of the martyred African-American women and men spoke in a preliminary hearing  charging of Dylann, they spoke of their pain and grief but extended forgiveness to the alleged murderer. The members of Mother Emmanuel Church are our sisters and brothers, they shared with us a profound belief in extravagant hospitality and radical inclusiveness of Jesus’ ministry. They practice forgiveness. We share those practices of radical inclusiveness and love. What lives on at Mother Emmanuel Church is the witness to the power of love. Love will ultimately win; it will conquer hatred and violence. This is the promise of the resurrection faith that we hold dearly.

President Obama gave the eulogy, confronting white supremacism and racial divide. He also spoke God’s “reservoir of grace,” surrounding the nine murdered and the relatives who extended forgiveness to the perpetrator. That “reservoir of grace” that drive for love and being loved has motivated our community to seek legal recognition for marriage and protection of our children and families.
We scored a victory with Supreme Court Friday. So I modify the title of the sermon from “Love Wins” to “Love Won a Victory for Love.” We have not yet achieved what my tee-shirt from the Human Rights Campaign “Love Conquers Hate.” We have still further to go for a victory not for all humanity but for all life on Mother Earth.

Message for Pride 2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now voice today June 2015:

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

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

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

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

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

Dancing with God–Trinity Sunday

Last week, I spoke on the birthday of the church, about the beloved community—a community of holy fools of God following Christ. Spirit as a mischief maker in our community is rooted in the imitation and following the holy foolishness of Jesus message about God’s reign.

The beloved community resists imitating churches throughout history who have been violent and intolerance of difference or non-conformity. I describe myself and hopefully yourselves as living an “embodied non-compliance” or “embodied mischief” to institutional Christianity. One of the erroneous perspectives of Christians is to visualize linearly the threefold divine community of Christ: God as Creator as old man full of wisdom and power, Jesus as the Christ who was sent to die on the cross and rise from the dead, and the Holy Spirit who becomes active in the world as Jesus has ascended to heaven.

But the mystery of the threefold divine community of love can be approached through what we know of the relationship of God to humanity and creation. And it can also be known through understanding of Jesus God’s Christ to us and through the Holy Spirit.

Our faith holds to a being –we name God with a divine unity yet threefold distinct constellations of energy force.

Orthodox Christianity understands God as three and one as a universal spiral dance (perichoresis) of a community of love. God is three: Parent begetting Child, God Child begotten, and the Holy Spirit generated from their love and as procession. It is a divine community of radical inclusive and polyamorous love, but this radical inclusive of three loving partners is metaphorically image as a spiraling, ecstatic dance (perichoresis) that breaks down all barriers of other by the dynamic and loving movement of interpenetrating communion. Leonardo Boff describes this dynamic:

Perichoresis means one person’s action permeates the other and allows itself to be permeated by that person. The interpenetration expresses the love and life that constitutes the divine nature. It is the very nature of love to be self-communicating, life naturally expands and seeks to multiply itself. Thus, the divine Three from all eternity find themselves in an infinite explosion of love and life from one to the other. (Boff)

It is a divine communion of radical inclusive love expressed in the creative image of line dancing. I want to think of folks participating in country dancing at Oil Can Harry’s in Studio City (CA). The partners in God are dancing circling with each other, changing positions in love, and the whole floor is whirling in a dynamic two-step dance. The partners inter-permeate or interpenetrate each other in an eternal and universe-spinning egalitarian dance. Each person spirally empties self and mutually surrenders to the other two, giving life, love, wisdom, goodness. The dancing of the three within God, circling in mutual love is dynamic and playful mystery of love, contagiously spiraling open and inclusively and lovingly pulling us into that dance of love. If God is dancing with all creation and us, God invites us to join in a community of dance.

If you place one hand on the wrist of your other arm, you will feel your pulse. If you utter word “grace” to each beat and continue to be mindful of the beat, you are hearing the divine dance of the trinity entangled in creation and in you. This reminds me that God’s dance is the green grace of life, and it points out that we do not live alone or for ourselves but live within the web of all life entangled with God.

There are two aspects of the divine threefold community that we carry as image and likeness in ourselves. Perichoresis or divine interrelating is a way of life, it is art of being ourselves. It is the instinct or drive to communion within ourselves and all life and towards God. Let me speak about God’s image and likeness and communion as concrete aspects of divine life in ourselves.

So interrelationship and communion are the traces of God within ourselves. These must be reflected with ourselves and creation.

Our scriptural heritage at the beginning of Genesis maintains that we are made in the image and likeness of God. How are we made in the image and likeness of God? Earlier Christian writers affirmed it was maleness the decisive factor. But what about women? Are they not made in the image of God? Some argued that women reflected the image of a male God only if they were controlled by the male husbands or male clergy if they were nuns.

Others have argued that it is our intellect and rationality reflect the image of God. I think this falls short, for it removes the richness of our emotional lives that connect us to God and one another. I want to suggest another aspect that
Our modern western heritage promotes a strong individualism with an emphasis on achievement and successes. We are seen as the pinnacle of God’s creation, and everything is about us. We think of ourselves as individuals, perhaps members of society of individuals or of the United States.

The poet Wallace Stevens writes, “Nothing is itself taken alone. Things are because of interrelationships.” Everything is related to everything else.
See ourselves as part of the web of life, an incredibly vast, complex, subtle, beautiful web that amazes us can call forth our concern.

The Earth Charter from the 1990s states as its first principle, “Respect Earth and life in all its diversity. Recognize that all beings are interdependent and every form of life has value regardless of its worth to human beings.” (Earth Charter)

We have forgotten that humanity was made from humus, or the soil, and that Adam and Eve, son and daughter of the Earth and our ancestors, came from Adamá, land of fertility.

If we withdraw in prayer into our center, we discover that we are not alone. The root of existence is God, and we are immediately and wonderfully in touch with God.

The spiritual practices of peoples of faith—Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, or indigenous peoples—lead us to discover that we exist in relationship to everything else. We are interconnected to a vast network of relationships where God abides, animates, and sustains those relationships.

There is no such things as a self that is separated, isolated, or individual. Even physics points us that nothing exists in isolation, but exists in relationship to something else, and that something is also related to vast number of something elses as well. This is goes to the farthest parts of the unimagined vast universe.
All life is interrelated to us. Prayer allows us to enter the cosmic dance of God as community. We meet the God: “For in God, we live and move have our being.” (Acts17:28)

Brian Swimme, a mathematical cosmologist, in Hs wonderful book and documentary, Journey of the Universe, that are isolation and loneliness are unreal cosmic states. Spiritual author Kathleen Fischer notes,

For we are born from the Earth community and are deeply bonded to it, relatives of atoms and bacteria, roses and sparrows, insects and whales, galaxies and planets. …

Every child should know she is the energy of the sun and feel her face shining with the joy found in it this primordial relationship. Sunlight streams though the oceans and hums in the forests. We learn from the sun’s generosity in bestowing energy, discovering the in its underlying impulse of the universe our own urge to contribute to the wider community. Swimme tells us to contemplate the solar system in which the Earth is swung around its massive cosmic partner, the sun, “is to touch an ocean of wonder as you take the first step into inhabiting the actual universe and solar system and the Earth.” Yes we are pilgrims, but each moment of our journey we are filled with the light from the beginning of time, from the birthplace of the universe fifteen billion light years away. Suffuse with the vision of the universe, we might be moved to pause on our journey, lifting our faces to the sun to take in energy of God’s love.

We human beings fall prey to a false perspective that we are alone and isolated selves, we get caught in desperate attempts to immerse ourselves in consumerism and materialism, failing to appreciate how are connected to a universe of interconnected realities. We are interrelated to everything and never separated.

This realization of our interconnectedness and interrelatedness I would suggest is what is our likeness and image of God. We are interrelated as a community of life.

The second aspect of God as threefold community of inclusive love is the drive we have towards community. Our interrelation with God who reveals Godself in creation and to us in history invites us to deepen the bonds of connection or love with one another. Our interrelatedness to the Earth and other life and to one another includes a sense of community. Community that reflects the divine community of love is always radically inclusive. It is neither exclusive of humanity only nor is exclusive of only certain types of people. Jesus’ teaching is instructive here: “Be compassionate as God is compassionate to you.”
Compassion is the nature of our God, and we are invited to imitate compassion.

One of the best definitions of compassion I have found is by Henri Nouwen:

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

Compassion includes several related notions: radical inclusiveness and hospitality; identification with the suffering, the poor, and marginalized life; to engage the suffering of others and alleviate their suffering; feasting together to celebrate God’s reign in our midst.

Radical inclusive love and hospitality welcomes those who are different from ourselves into relationship of care and sharing. Compassion keeps open to outside, always vigilant to expand include the excluded. It builds on the nature, reflecting the image and likeness of God as interrelated to everything but deepens that interrelationships into an explicit community of equality and love.
Ideally we move into deepening our community, always welcoming and caring for the stranger and those who are different, and love for one another, we celebrate the diversity of the community of life. The divine communion is open and inviting, thus it critiques social exclusions and hierarchies. We image in an imperfect way that original grace of divine inclusion of creation and the final welcoming fully of all created life into the love life of God.

At the heart of the threefold divine community of love is there divine sharing and participation of the actions of love together. The experience of the one is also simultaneously the experience of all three. From all eternity, they are interwoven and interrelating, and that means they are interwoven and interrelated in our living out the grace of our image and likeness of God.

Pentecost: Church as Spiritual Resistance

Today we celebrate the birthday of the church. I want to offer some reflections on what church is and what it is not. Many churches fall into the “what it is not” category. I want to speak of a church alive as the beloved community and truly alive to the Spirit. Most churches are not alive but promote unhealthy notions around Jesus and ministry.

One example was the Arizona Congressman who maintained last week there is no obligation to the poor stated in the bible. He was criticizing Francis I for his care for the poor. He quotes 2 Thessalonians 3:10:

For even when we were with you, we gave you this command: Anyone unwilling to work should not eat. For we hear that some of you are living in idleness, mere busybodies, not doing any work. Now such persons we command and exhort in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work quietly and to earn their own living.
Paul here is not saying that if you are poor, you need to work. Nothing should be given to you.

Here exactly is the misuse of scripture to support a heartless political policy that would deny food stamps to families and their children, healthcare, and social benefits while the 1% in our country become richer and greedier with deeper tax cuts. In the US, the Bible is used by fundamentalist to preserve and justify the status quo of not caring for the poor or other unpopular issues.

Paul is criticizing those who are not working but who have actively become busybodies in the community. These people are capable of work, but use their time to create trouble and gossip in the community. This verses from Paul have nothing to do with whether social welfare—such as Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, and social services and helping the homeless, the elderly, the disabled, and the vulnerable–should be available in our society. The political agenda to cut social benefits for the poor and the burdened middle class for the extremely wealthy 1% stands against the interpretation of this verse and most of the bible where God exercises a preferential option for the poor and the marginal.

I nearly gagged on this statement from this Arizona congressman. There are nearly 2000 times the word “the poor” is used in the scriptures. He deliberately distorts the Bible to justify his political ideology of greed and lack of compassionate care for the poor. This is not Christianity, and those churches that promote such position for not caring for the poor and vulnerable are not what churches are or should be. Many churches, I am sad to say, have become servants of corporate America and the wealthy and the fail to listen to the gospels.

I want to share God does not reject you video. It has been banned on tv in several states. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRcv9u9x3z8

I want to say what I believe in my heart that Christ’s church should be place where God’s fools come together. Where are fools for Christ who follow the path of God’s kindom today? Where is the beloved community to be found? I often had been labeled a “troublemaker” by folks and more recently the MCC hierarchy. I took the criticism as a badge of doing something correct in following Jesus in discipleship and integrity.

Many church leaders promote the beatitudes as I read one UCC pastor Robin Meyers characterized as type of “cereal box” Christianity. He argues that the beloved community is an “embodied force opposed, a beloved community of defiance, a joyful but resilient colony of dissenters from the forces of death—both physical and spiritual—that destroy and marginalize creation.” (Meyers)

Meyers speaks of the beloved community, a church who promotes a “resistance as for of direct or indirect action opposing anything in the dominant culture that brings death and indignity to any of the human family, or to creations itself.” Both definitions include the poor and creation, harmed directly by human actions, apathy, and callous actions. Are you surprised at the oil spill of a hundred thousand barrows into the ocean coast hurting the environment and ocean life when the company has been cited for over a 100 safety violations in the last decade?

God’s call to us, individually and as community, is right here this morning. This is a place of grace where the gospel of Jesus Christ calls us to a joy in sharing his ministry in a world that is broken and hungry for grace.

Many churches like individuals fill the empty space of our lives and communal lives with lots of things, but fail to hear the real message to fill the empty spaces of church and our lives with God’s grace.

Here is wonderful quotation from Rev. Peter Gomes, an American Baptist minister, and African-American clergy who grew up in Plymouth MA where the Pilgrims first landed, and became chaplain at Harvard University:

Good news to some will almost inevitably be bad news to others. In order that the gospel in the New Testament might be made palatable as possible, its rough edges have been shorn off and the radical edge of Jesus’ preaching has been replaced by a respectable middle, of which niceness is now God. When Jesus came preaching, it was to proclaim the end of things as they are and the breaking in of things that are to be: the status quo is not to be criticized; it is to be destroyed. (Peter Gomes)

The Christianity that I see promoted on the television, radio, and internet sickens me. It is anything but the gospel of Jesus. It proclaims a Christ that is distant from the poor, immersed in the mall and in the latest war, or in fearful responses to change and inclusion such LGBT folks, peoples of color, or undocumented migrants. Or a Christianity takes the scriptures literally to advocate environmental exploitation or radical exclusion justifying the exclusion of those that fall victim to the social circumstances of losing a job, becoming addicted, or just being different.

Writer Ann Lamott, pens, “You can safely assume you created God in your image when it turns out that God hates the same people you do.” Isn’t that statement very true? God does not hate anyone, neither should we.

I can look past at my life and see multiple threads of embodied non-compliance or perhaps better framed in language I use, “embodied mischief.” It is embodied mischief to institutional Christianity, its orthodoxies, and misrepresentation or perversion of God’s grace. I have witnessed this in the Roman Catholic Church, the MCC, and numerous other churches where we find justification for so many positions but forgetting the basic gospel message of compassion and care for the poor and the vulnerable. I am not a good game player when it comes to integrity or ego-centeredness of leadership, the institutional church, or even myself.

Peter Gomes is correct that Jesus preached the gospel not to just criticize the status quo but to destroy the status quo that disenfranchises people from God’s grace and the necessities to live, flourish, and the well-being that God intends for all of us. That is the rough edges of the gospel, and it produces reactions how God disturbs our world. Do we forget that we are commanded to love our God with our whole heart and our neighbor as ourselves.

When the Holy Spirit descended on the men and women that day hidden in the upper room on Pentecost, people heard a babbling in other languages and perceived an intoxication of emotional feeling and joy. But they witnessed an intoxicated of foolishness for Christ. They became like Christ “holy fools of God.” They came out with courage and stepped out of their roles to witness to an event that disrupts their whole lives since the death of Jesus and his resurrection. You see God’s resurrection of Christ created a faith born of wonder, loosing fear, hope, unconditional love, and radical amazement and absolutely fabulous “foolishness” for God.

The beloved community is resistant not only to the practice of Christianity as lived by many Churches and Christians but also resistant to the dominant cultural threads of consumerism, gospels of prosperity, corporate greed, and separation of yourselves from others. Christianity is not a set of beliefs but a relationship with Jesus Christ. God does not save or reward those with correct beliefs or orthodox practices; God saves those who dare to love beyond the boundaries and barriers that culture, religion, and society set up to exclude.

I read about the board of a church in Massachusetts that warned its newly hired pastor, “no politics from the pulpit.” It reminds me the story in Luke when Jesus preaches in his hometown synagogue, he upsets the neighbors and residents of his hometown so much that they attempt to murder him by throwing over the cliff.

We have spiritualize and sanitized Jesus to make acceptable to the widest audience; our message is condensed to correct beliefs and salvation while we ignore the dangerous message of the gospel of concrete care and relationship to a kindom of nobodies. Jesus’ message is dangerous, and the grace of that message becomes real to us a beloved community when a preacher unleashes the powerful memories of grace and liberation. The gospel creates resistance, if not outright rebellion, to currents of softening the message of unconditional grace that frees us to become a community of resisters or mischief-makers. Jesus addressed hunger and poverty and oppression within his society. The voice of Jesus, along with the voice of the preacher, must coincide to represent the dangerous memories of Jesus’ resistance and rebellion of the good news.

The shortest verse in the gospel is “Jesus wept.” He wept not because of wrong beliefs, but wept and continues to weep for heartless religion that fails to promote compassion, encouraged a fundamentalism that builds walls of exclusion, emboldens leaders to become prelates and not servants, and makes unconditional love a commodity for sale, and denying people accessibility to grace. And he wept and still weeps for uncaring institutions whose sole purpose becomes greed and exploitation, pushing violence and war over precious resources, and will treat people as throw-away and disposable.

The vision of Pentecost is to follow the Spirit of God. The Holy Spirit does not differ in her actions than Jesus. If Jesus was a rule breaker for the sake of compassion and God’s radical inclusive love, She breaks also boundaries for compassion, she breaks religious rules as Jesus did on a daily basis. She colors outside the lines, creating holy mischief not for the sake of creating foolishness but a foolishness for humanity but a profound wisdom of God’s nature. A person seized by the Holy Spirit knows what it means to be a holy fool, living the good news of Jesus Christ and fighting for a just kindom and a compassionate society of care, forgiveness, and unconditional love. ‘

My prayer for you this morning is that you allow the Holy Spirit, allow the Spirit to to make you a holy fool, to live the message of compassionate care for the poor, and to break rules in your discipleship to follow Jesus—God’s Christ.

Doubting Thomas: What does He really Doubt

The Gospel of John is one of the most beautifully written gospels. It stands in Greco-Roman multiculturalism. But what I want to talk about the clashing cultural beliefs about death and afterlife in John’s community. I will use the example of the Beloved Disciple and Doubting Thomas. They make the case for counter positions. This is not just a historical exercise of reconstructing this morning. It also reflects a deep divide and compromise.

Celsus, a non-Christian writer, criticized the appearance accounts of the risen Jesus. He actually mocks Christians.

If Jesus had wanted to demonstrate his power was truly divine, he ought to have appeared to those who maltreated him and to the one who condemned him, and to all everywhere.

Celsus makes a point that I thought as kid when I heard the Easter season resurrection readings each Sunday. Why didn’t Jesus just appear to the high priests, Pilate, and the masses in Jerusalem that chose Barabbas over himself?
Let me explain: The community of John, somewhere in Asia Minor such as Edessa or in Syria, is composed of Greek-speaking Jews and Greek converts. The appearance accounts of the post-mortem Jesus risen from the dead were a terrifying prospect. In Matthew, the women at the tomb are told by angels to “stop fearing.” And the second apparition of Jesus, some of the assembled disciples are doubtful.

Even before Jesus appearance in the upper room, the Beloved Disciple runs to tomb and looks into see Jesus’ funeral shroud thrown aside into a bundle but observes the funeral napkin rolled up neatly. He places his faith in Jesus and his words without seeing the risen Christ. In today’s gospel, the disciples neither fear nor doubt when Jesus appears in the upper room. I always thought it might the case of suddenly facing the risen Jesus with feelings of guilt and shame over abandoning him or Peter denying him three times. From that encounter, the Beloved Disciple and the disciples on Easter Sunday are full of faith trying to convince Doubting Thomas of their experience. Thomas was not present during that resurrection appearance, and he expresses doubt. The resurrected dead body makes no sense to him. What is a clue to the gospel today is Thomas’ need for a physical demonstration of the physical reality of Jesus.

In Luke’s story of Jesus’ appearance to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, Jesus is not merely a ghost without flesh and bones. When they recognize Jesus in the breaking of the bread, Jesus says,

Look at my hands and feet that I am myself. Touch and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have. And when he said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. But they were still incredulous. (Lk. 24: 39-41)

It was logical for the disciples to believe that Jesus had died and thus they were now experiencing a ghost or the soul of Jesus separated from his body.The community of John suffered division among its members—the primary group affirming that Jesus really died in the flesh. The other group asserted that Jesus did not have a real fleshy body on either side of death, either on the cross or after burial. They denied the reality of the earthly and physical Jesus or the resurrected Jesus. In 2 John v.7, a letter from that same community that wrote the fourth gospel mentions deceivers who have left the community and “who do not confess that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh.” This is the later community who claimed Thomas as their apostle. We have writings from this group of Christians: The Gospel of Thomas and The Acts of Thomas. Some speculations went as far to deny that Jesus died on the cross, it was an apparition, not real flesh and blood man.

Many Christians at the time of the writing of John’s Gospel, somewhere between 90-100 CE, some 70 years after the death and resurrection of Jesus and well after the death of the all Jesus’ immediate disciples, had conflicting views of the afterlife. Early Christianity proclaimed the resurrection of Jesus yet it inherited traditions of a variety of religious notions of the afterlife, few of which included the resurrection. Some included the ascension of Jesus, angelic body of Jesus, and the exalted and transformed body of Jesus,

On one side of the afterlife, there is a group of Jews that held to resurrection of the body at the end of time. This notion comes from the ancient Persian notions of the end of time in which God will resurrect the dead and unite the body and soul for a final judgment. This seems to be held by the followers of Jesus and some of the Pharisees such as St. Paul.

The prevalent Greek notion stresses the soul over the body. Many Christians held Jesus had risen from the dead as a spiritual being, in a spiritual body of light. For them, the body was corruptible, mutable and mortal flesh, while the soul, the spiritual body, was eternal. The earthly body was bonded to the material body, and it weighed down the soul. Upon death of the body, the soul was released to go to God. For those emphasizing the soul, the post-resurrection body of Jesus is something other than the very same flesh in which he was crucified. Both the resurrection of the body and the release of the spiritual body were two methods that early Christians tired to describe Jesus arisen from the dead.

Doubting Thomas is described as not having faith (apistos) in the tale of the physical resurrection of Jesus from the grave. There is division between the immediate disciples of Jesus who have experienced Jesus as fleshy human being, now resurrected, and Thomas who holds an alternative position of the release of the spiritual body of glory.

If the disciples had said to the absent Tomas, “We have seen the spirit of the Lord,” there would be no problem. There are many common stories of ghostly appearances in the Greco-Roman world. For Thomas, the body was the negative accompaniment of earthly life, and death was release of the spiritual body from its limitations. The post-mortem soul could participate in all embodied functions such as eating and joy.

But the disciples in the upper room said to Thomas, “We have seen the Lord,” meaning in the same physical body with which he died. Thomas and his later faction of Christian community hold that the body traps the soul. He is weary of any talk about the fleshy existence of the risen Jesus. Greeks believed very much in an immortal soul.

Yet John’s community is different from the other communities which developed gospels. It affirms in the opening hymn that we recite during the Christmas Eve service; “the word became flesh and dwelled among us.” Incarnation is about the flesh and blood of a very human Christ.

No cultured Greek would ever ask to stick his hands in the wounds in Jesus’ arms from the spikes or the holes in his feet or the wound in his side from the centurion’s spear.” Would anyone here in Thomas’ position ask the risen Jesus? “Let me put my fingers in the holes in your body from crucifixion.” But does the insistence of Thomas, which we traditionally understand as doubting really doubt as much as holding a different viw of the resurrected Jesus?

The wounds in Jesus body indicate that the earthly fleshy Jesus, who has died, now survives the grave. The retention of the holes in the body of Jesus would not necessarily authenticate that the risen Christ is Jesus who died on the cross. So Thomas asks to touch the risen body, rather than just seeing the risen apparition.
Thomas’ doubts express his not placing faith in Jesus and his words at the resurrection of Lazarus in the tomb. “I am the resurrection and the life; that anyone who has faith in me shall live even if they die.” (Jn. 11:23) Thomas is expressing a position that the resurrection of Jesus is just purely spiritual. He emphasizes the spiritual body of Jesus, not the flesh while the disciples are holding to the resurrected Christ in the flesh. When Jesus appears to Thomas, he has faith in the risen Christ affirming ‘My Lord and My God!”

Let’s step back and review a few points.

The risen Christ is neither a resuscitated body nor a ghost or a spirit. What bodies can go through walls and appear in the midst of the disciples in the upper room!
It is a body that can’t be touched. Jesus says that to Magdalene, “not to cling.”

There are stories in the appearance accounts where the disciples do not easily recognized Jesus until he does something familiar from his earthly life. Mistaken as the gardener by Magdalene, Jesus says “Mary” in a recognized familiar tone for her to respond with “Rabboni.” Or there are the two disciples not recognizing Jesus as he walked with them on the road to Emmaus until he breaks bread with them. Or Jesus on the beach cooking fish when the Beloved Disciple realizes that is the Lord. Then Peter strips down and jumps into the lake and swims to shore. There is something discontinuous as well as continuous with the risen Jesus from his previous fleshly existence.

What we see in the original witnesses is human attempt to make sense what happened on Easter with the cultural stories and notions of death and afterlife various had at their disposal.

But there is a deeper issue that stands at the center of today’s gospel between the Beloved Disciple who looked into the tomb, seeing the rolled napkin and placed his faith in Jesus’ words and the absent Thomas who refused to place his faith in Jesus until the risen Christ asked him to place his hands in the wounds wrought by Roman torture and crucifixion.

For some of the Pharisees and Jesus’ disciples, they believed in the resurrection of the dead at the end of time. It seems Paul believed that when a person died, that person would not be raised until the end of time. And then there was the Greek position that the soul was trapped in the body, and when a person died, the soul was released to join God.

Both positions have come to be our modern Christian position on death. At memorial services, we speak of the spirit of the deceased joining God. Many of us have had the experience of the dying of a dear one, dreaming about her or sensing the presence of the deceased through something remembered or a song or an anniversary or place that generates a vivid memory. The deceased person is physically absent but present to us, and that is real. Something of our life force, spiritual energy, or soul joins with God and Christ.

But God created us with bodies, where we learn and appreciate a physical world. Christ too was incarnated in the flesh and experienced what it means to be human, experience our joy and our pains. We believe that the material universe was created for an intended purpose to be joined to God in unimaginable ways. This is the vision of the future for all of us—spirit and physical flesh united and recreated anew with God’s flesh and Spirit.

Early followers of Jesus proclaimed the resurrection of Jesus as the foundation of their faith; and it is certainly the foundation of my discipleship in following the Christ. Thomas’ position of a spiritual resurrection of Christ was probably the understanding of Paul in his vision of the resurrected and glorified body of the risen Christ.

It says to me that both the Beloved Disciples and Thomas were each partially correct in some fashion, offering us a vision of the risen Christ who united physical body with spirit. They were attempting to comprehend what happened Easter morning within their own languages of the afterlife. Both the followers of the Beloved Disciple and the disciples of Thomas hope to share the resurrected life of Christ. Some looked to an afterlife with fleshy bodies and others imagined spiritual bodies like angels. We will answer that question in the afterlife or something more unimaginable than we can conceive. It maybe the new speculations will talk about the quantum body of the crucified and resurrected Christ. All these are speculations, our attempts to understand something beyond our comprehension.

The tensions played out between these two perspectives leading the Christian movement to a clear proclamation of the real fleshiness of Jesus during his life and in his afterlife. It stands as sign of our fleshy connection to the resurrected Christ and our fleshy connection to the pain and sufferings of people, other life, and the Earth. We all shared a fleshy origin, and our flesh and bones are important to our spiritual journey and facing our mortality.
But for me I recognize this story of doubting Thomas. I recognize the disciples on the first night of Easter and on the eighth day after. I look to the resurrected Christ who carries the wounds of his crucifixion and all other crucifixions continued today. The world needs answers to our crucifixions and crucified Earth. The world looks to us for something tangible for our world to hope. It is the mystery of resurrected life with the wounds that Christ carries. God cares not only for the crucifixion of Jesus but all crucifixions whether it is brokenness of homelessness, the woundedness of poverty or mental or physical illness, or the human ravages of the Earth and its degradation, the world is looking to us to turn the passion of Christ and all crosses into compassionate change.

I look to Christ’s resurrection as the source of compassion for the world. Compassion is the inner message of the resurrected Christ. We are called to live our faith in the risen Christ who says, “Blessed are those who have not seen but placed their faith in me!” (Jn 20:29)

Easter is the Source of Our Green Faith, John 20:1-18

It is amazing how many Christians fail to see Easter as the greening event par excellence in biblical history. Even the Green Bible that has each sections of the Hebrew and Christian marked in green for environmental issues, but it does not mark out today’s gospel in green. Why do Christians miss the obvious, for me at least, dimension of ecological spirituality and themes in the resurrection story of Magdalene discovering the risen Christ in the garden?

Maybe it is my Catholic heritage that opens my eyes to environmental significance of the story. In Catholic Easter vigil, the paschal candle is dipped into the baptismal waters, signifying ancient symbolism of fertility and new life. For Christians, symbols of fertility and rebirth aptly signify the risen Christ, the new life of Easter. Christ is born to new life as we all hope and dream for ourselves.

There are so many clues that point to themes around earth, life, gardens, risen from the tomb, the dead cross and the green garden. The resurrection garden stands in contrast to the Garden of Gethsemane and even the Garden of Eden. It symbolizes the new life that God intended for us from the beginning.
If your green imagination is challenged, think about C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe of the Chronicles of Narnia. The long winter of the Witch’s reign is broken under the warmth of Christ’s springtime. The springtime here signifies new life, new growth, and the restoration of nature by the death and resurrection of the Aslan/Christ figure. Seeds sprout, fruit trees blossom with colors, lilies and flowers in bloom, birds chirping and life filled with hope. All these herald life; they point to God as creator and Spirit. It is time of birth and renewal.
Unlike many Christians who continually throw the Earth into God’s trash bin for a heavenly salvation for themselves alone, I see glimpses of hope in Easter: so marvelously inclusive and extravagant.

And let me tell you that many folks who fight for the Earth and all life are either there with Jesus on the cross Good Friday or with Jesus’ corpse in the tomb. They are so aware of the polluted rivers, the toxic waste dumps that harm us and other life, the extinction of millions of plant and animal species, the radioactive spills into the Pacific Ocean, the thousands of coal plants pumping unceasing carbon and toxic pollution into the air to warm our climate. I can’t help associating the unbreathable atmosphere in Beijing where millions of people have to wear masks against the heavily polluted atmosphere with the experience the asphyxiation that Jesus did on the cross. Humans tortured Christ and other humans through asphyxiation. Or Jesus being slaughtered at the time of thousands lambs for Passover celebrations. He suffered as animals suffered merciless killings or the extinctions of species. Global warming is and its ravages will continue to be a reality that we and our descendants have to live with for generations.

It is hard to maintain hope when you stand before the cross of the crucified Jesus and not think that the Roman Empire and religious fundamentalists have won; or lay in the dark tomb with Jesus’ corpse, realizing the body has been scarred and remains lifeless. This is where many environmental activists are today. They have been shocked out of hope by human degradation of the Earth and all life on the planet. Many mourn the passion of the Earth. Our mission given to us this is Easter to be people of hope and to share that hope with those Earth caregivers who still at the foot of the cross and mourn in the tomb. It is easy to fall into such thinking for myself when I look at the on-going news reports of the growing climate change and unusual severe weather events.

The tomb represents our groundedness with the Earth. It is the primal matrix of the soil from which we evolved. In Genesis, we were named adamah, earth creature because we came from the soil. We were bound to the soil. Dr. Daniel Hillel, a soil physicist, notes that humanity is associated with the soil:

The ancient Hebrew association of man with soil is echoed in the Latin name for man, homo, derived from humus, the stuff of life in the soil. This powerful metaphor suggests an early realization of a profound truth that humanity has since disregarded to its own detriment. Since the words “humility” and “humble” also derive from humus, it is rather ironic that we should have assigned our species so arrogant a name as Homo sapiens sapiens (“wise wise man”). It occurs to me, as I ponder our past and future relation to the earth, that we might consider changing our name to a more modest Homo sapiens curans, with the word curans denoting caring or caretaking, as in “curator.” (“Teach us to care” was T.S. Eliot’s poetic plea.) Of course, we must work to deserve the new name, even as we have not deserved the old one.

Jesus, like of all us, is tethered to the earth, and through our embodiment, we are tethered with Jesus in the tomb when we die. But we know that we join God’s Christ, alive and part of the mystical body of Christ. We know that existed in the biosphere, he breathed oxygen as we do, he ate food as we do, and many other actions we commonly do.

And the resurrection is the promise that all life has a future in God, not just us. God is calling us and all creation to communion with God’s self, in ways for us inconceivable. Yet God communicates that history is not predetermined but an open future.

Easter, then, is God’s victory over it all. The life, death, and resurrection of Christ is the decisive for all of us—the world, all life, the Earth, and the universe. What happens to Christ raised from the tomb will happen to all—transformed into resurrection life. Easter reveals the fullness of the matrix of all life with God; it is the web of grace that links all life, human and other life and the Earth together. That web is God’s Spirit, the Spirit that pulsed new life and energy into the risen Christ.

Creation is all interconnected bodily together through the Spirit. Creation is not just the beginning of the universe, it is the on-going evolution of cosmic and biologically processes, the coming of the incarnate Christ—now dead but risen to the new life intended for all—and the Spirit the navigator subverting all human distortions and destructiveness of life. That last point I hold on for dear life as I engage in Earthcare and fighting for the Earth and all life. It is too easy to become overwhelmed emotionally, loose hope when you see on daily basis human arrogance and human denial, exploiting the Earth recklessly, contaminating the waters and ground water, polluting the atmosphere, raping the mountain tops by harvesting coal, undoing the EPA just trying to protecting human well-being from human created diseases and cancers, greed and short term profit over the expense of all others.

Human violence, self-centeredness and callous disregard for other life, and exploitation of the Earth and the community of life will not be the last word. The crucial issue of God’s incarnation, death and resurrection, reveals the seamless web of interrelationship of all life. At the intersections of this seamless web of interrelated life is God’s incarnated Child. The incarnate risen Christ weaves the web of interdependent life into his body. And the divine community of life and unconditional grace will have the last word. Resurrection, Life, Greenness!
We are all interconnected and interrelated. We are all siblings, human and other life. We are together in the body of Christ. Diarmuid O’Murchu, Irish priest and writer, envisions:

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

What becomes stressed by Easter is that God’s ultimate act of compassion is Christ, his life and death, and then the resurrection. All the efforts of God at creating; incarnating, interrelating with us, all life, and creation; reconciling and sustaining and spiriting us to new birth and new love—all this is the outpouring of God’s unconditional love for all creation. It links us together in solidarity with all others. This the web of grace within we were created and within which Christ’s resurrection strengthens us together with the universe. God became human and materials so that humanity, all life, and the universe would become divine.

God will be victorious over human violence, greed, and selfishness. God will have the last word. I hold onto to this hope with all my faith and commitment though I see such human foolishness and arrogance.

The Resurrection of Christ is also about the transformation of the universe. Jesus’ resurrection is the hope that defies all hopelessness—even the hopelessness of Earth caregivers and activists. God proclaims that the relational matrix of the divine community of life outpouring an unconditional love and invitation to participate in that flow of love. On Easter, God announces radical inclusiveness. Nothing that we imagine as inclusive is inclusive enough for God. There will be no more outcasts: not any human, no other life, nor the Earth herself. Everything falls into God’s matric of interrelating graces. All creation! We now belong to the reign of God’s inclusiveness. God cares, and invites to care for all and to proclaim the hope of a new belong for all. We all belong to God.
God will not abandon creation and all life, but will continue to be presence to creation and all life and weave them continuous into a matrix of interconnected grace.

Christ’s resurrection was a wakeup call to his disciples, birthing a movement of compassion, forgiveness, peace-making, love, non-violence, radical inclusiveness, and extravagant love. It a wakeup call to God’s green grace that flows from the heart of divine love, birth in creation, thriving in evolutionary chaos and organizing life into more complexity, incarnating God’s self, and re-embodying in ourselves and all life, listening to the invitation of love at the end of this journey of all towards God.

Alleluia, God will triumph over all: climate deniers, fundamentalists, human exploiters, politicians committed to undo any efforts to stop climate change. God will be victorious.

Easter Message: Easter: Gardening as Spiritual Practice for Earthcare

for the message with pictures of our church garden: clik on http://www.scncucc.org/voices/2015/03/ucc-conference-church-life/easter-gardening-as-a-spiritual-practice-for-earth-care/

Rev. Dr. Robert Shore-Goss

“…or speak to the earth, and it will teach you.” — Job 12:8

Gardens have been sacred spaces for many religions. For Islam, there are three gardens: the garden of Creation or Eden, the gardens of this world, and the
Paradise garden at the resurrection of the dead. The Buddha was enlightened in a grove under a Bo tree in Bodhgaya, and he preached his first sermon ever in Deer Park. Japanese Zen Gardens have become a familiar landscape in American botanical gardens. The etymology for the ancient Avestan (Persian) word “Paradise” (pairidaēza) means orchard or a hunting park.

The Jesus movement became an urban movement within three years after the death and resurrection of Christ. It forgot its garden and rural roots and when it was propelled into an imperial religion under Constantine, urban Christians stood against pagans (paganus, Latin for rustic or country-dweller). Christians as they expanded throughout Europe during the late Roman period and in the Early Middle Ages cut down the trees of sacred groves of competing indigenous religions. It forgot that Jesus’ burial tomb was in a garden.

I love our church garden, it is surprise in an urban setting with desert landscape and indigenous California plants. I sit in the garden for prayer each day, often with my companion dog Friskie. He loves the garden fragrances and enjoys chasing the birds eating the bird seed. The garden teaches me about abundant life, the language of grace. I share this reflection with you at Easter as a time to re-covenant ourselves as individuals and churches to Earth-care and environmental justice, for me the Earth is one of God’s gardens.

The first truth about gardens is that they are created; they are relational. In Genesis 2, we have the primal myth about God and gardens. It is metaphorical history that speaks about a grace relationship between God gardens, and ourselves. Unlike the first chapter of the priestly account of creation in Genesis 1, where God speaks creation into existence, the Yahwist poet communicates that God didn’t speak the garden into existence but knelt down and fashioned a garden it out of dirt and placed our primal ancestors in the garden to live and care for the garden. It was a graced God’s space, but we alienated ourselves from the garden. This is perhaps more true than myth about contemporary humanity in the last two centuries as we have further disconnected ourselves from nature and gardens. For myself and many of the congregants, our garden is God’s graced space, and it grew of our decision to make the Earth a member of our church and our hope to restore our connection to the Earth. We have a remarkable garden in the urban space of North Hollywood. It is landscaped with flowers and indigenous California plants but also includes vegetables that we harvest and share with church members. Our folks tour the garden before to witness the latest blooms and sit in the garden to talk after service.

Our garden is truly a gift, literally because every plant has been donated by members, by stakeholders using our facility, and even by strangers. Gardens are gifts of natural beauty, with an abundant network of life. Gardens are works of art intended to be enjoyed. We co-live with them and participate in them whether as gardeners or visitors. We have a relationship with a garden whether we cultivate and care for the plants or are a visitor meditating and enjoying the garden.
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I have watched our church gardener for years, tenderly caring for each plant, watering, pruning, planting or transplanting, fertilizing, mulching, or enjoying. It is his spirituality, and he communicates with and listens to each plant. Our gardener is a member of our pastoral team, and he takes seriously that he has a pastoral responsibility to the Earth since we made the Earth a member of our congregation. He listens to the plants in the garden and is attentive to their needs. I commented to him several weeks ago how much his listening skills and compassionate care for congregants have matured with remarkable attentiveness and kindness to church members. I attribute this growth in pastoral skills to his listening and attentiveness to life in the garden. The garden has provided him with a pedagogy of listening and care, transferable also congregants.

The second truth about gardens is that they create a holy place where the sacred and nature come together. I experienced profound truth that God loves gardens and creates gardens. Dorothy Francis Gurney writes, “One is nearer God’s heart in a garden/ Than anywhere else on earth.” Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw also observes, “The best place to seek God is in a garden.” How many of us find now God in our own gardens, church gardens, botanical or urban gardens, or the wilderness gardens of the Earth? I treasure my daily prayer time in our garden, often spent with companion dog.

Early Christians grasped the depth of meaning of the garden scene between the risen Christ and Magdalene. They understood that God is a gardener, for God began the gardening process of creation, and God the Gardener is lost in a kind of revelry or enjoyment on the Sabbath in Genesis. Since the garden is so lovely and so interesting, there is no other place that God wants to be, for God wants to attend to the garden and the gardeners. God’s hands are dirty from garden care fashioning and creating. In the poetry of the book of Genesis, God the Gardener takes clay, breathes into clay, and fashions the first earthling–adamah. Dr. Daniel Hillel, a soil physicist, observes that the feminine Hebrew noun adamah indicates humanity’s origin and humanity’s destiny. In other words, we are tethered to the Earth from beginning of our lives to the end of our days. This is a profound truth of earthly embodiment and foreshadowing our destiny to return to the Earth until we resurrected from Earth tomb as plants arises from the soil.

Of note in Genesis 2, God takes human beings and places them in a garden, and it is paradise because it is the place where humans can walk, talk, and intimately meet God in a graced space, and we can enjoy the beauty of the garden together. Hillel writes,

The ancient Hebrew association of man with soil is echoed in the Latin name for man, homo, derived from humus, the stuff of life in the soil. This powerful metaphor suggests an early realization of a profound truth that humanity has since disregarded to its own detriment. Since the words “humility” and “humble” also derive from humus, it is rather ironic that we should have assigned our species so arrogant a name as Homo sapiens sapiens (“wise wise man”). It occurs to me, as I ponder our past and future relation to the earth, that we might consider changing our name to a more modest Homo sapiens curans, with the word curans denoting caring or caretaking, as in “curator.” (“Teach us to care” was T.S. Eliot’s poetic plea.) Of course, we must work to deserve the new name, even as we have not deserved the old one.

Gardens provide not only a Sabbath delight to God but also to ourselves because they are created space for intimate encounters that have been made fragrant to the smell and pleasurable to our senses. We have two primary relationships to a garden—actually as care-taking or as visitor invited to take care and preserve the garden. God loves and takes delight in gardens whether it is the immense garden that we describe as universe or the smaller Earth garden named Eden. And I understand this mystery as I and others sit in our meditation garden to pray and meet God or meet Christ each other in the garden while we share refreshments and conversations on a Sunday morning.

Czechoslovakian writer and gardener Karel Apek writes the following in his lovely book The Gardener’s Year. He describes a gardener, but I want you this Easter to imagine that he is speaking about God the Gardener.

I will now tell you how to recognize a real gardener. “You must come to see me,” she says; “I will show you my garden.” Then, when you go just to please her, you find her with her rump sticking up somewhere among the perennials. “I will come in a moment,” she shouts to you over her shoulder. “Just wait till I have planted this rose.” “Please don’t worry,” you say kindly to her. After a while she must have planted it; for she gets up, makes your hand dirty, and beaming with hospitality she says: “Come and have a look; it’s a small garden, but —– Wait a moment,” and she bends over a bed to weed some tiny grass. “Come along. I will show you Dianthus musalae; it will open your eyes. Great Scott, I forgot to loosen it here!” she says, and begins to poke in the soil. A quarter of an hour later she straightens up again. “Ah,” she says, “I wanted to show you that bell flower, Campanula Wilsonae. That is the best campanula which —– Wait a moment, I must tie up this delphinium . . .”

In the above description, I enjoy the delightful image of God as a female Gardener, poking, tilling, fussing, watering, fertilizing, and tenderly caring and fussing over her garden with a wonderful hat. As I earlier claimed, gardens are pure gift. We receive them as networks of abundant life, and they are places of life-giving beauty—splashes of color, designs that still our soul, and intoxicating scents that incite enjoyment. They still storms of raging emotions for a few moments, and they center us on beauty of life and the one who has graciously given life. For myself, our garden teaches me about God’s grace, it is a convergence of the scripture of the natural world and our written scripture. It speaks of resurrected life of Easter grace and God’s beauty.

Now Golgotha, the place of the skull, where Jesus was crucified and others were murdered by the Romans, was not far from the garden tomb, where the crucified Jesus was laid to rest. Golgotha was near the garbage or refuse heap of Jerusalem. In reflecting on our garden, I have grown to understand Golgotha as composter, a place of death where God uses the compost of Jesus to raise Jesus up from the garden tomb and bring new life to the Garden of the Earth.

On Easter morning, Mary Magdalene stood weeping outside the empty tomb in the garden, and she found no emotional peace in the garden. She spoke her emotional anguish and grief to one she thought was a worker in the garden. Jesus appears to her in the garden, symbolic of Eden resurrected and restored to a new fullness and the cosmos yet coming to life fully within God. She recognizes the gardener as her Teacher only when he calls her by name.
What Easter morning proclaims is the good news that, out of destruction and death, Jesus rises from the earthen tomb as the new Adam or resurrected adamah from the soil. God the Gardener, who planted a garden in Eden and then raised Jesus to new life in a garden, is still at work creating life and beauty in our world. No wonder at the empty tomb in the garden did the risen Christ appear to Mary Magdalene as the gardener. Her mistaken identification of the risen Jesus as the gardener bears much prophetic truth. Jesus, in fact, is the Gardener who transforms our lives now and finally and becomes at the same time the ultimate Garden where we meet the God of life anew and profoundly.

Magdalene’s inclination is to touch or to cling onto Christ. She reaches out to cling to Jesus, but Jesus tells her that she cannot continue to hold on this way as his resurrection transformation is not completed until his body becomes transformed from one plane of existence into the entire eco-system. The resurrection of Jesus is not only the radical transformation of the crucified Christ but the “green” transformation of all things in God. All things become divinely interconnected through the risen Christ as he described himself to his disciples at the Last Supper as the vine connected to the branches and Abba God is the vine-grower or the gardener. (Jn. 15:1-ff.) This strengthens the irony of Magdalene’s mistaken identity of Jesus as the gardener. The risen Christ now assumes the divine position of being God’s garden and the Gardener at the same time. Ultimately, what gardens and Christ’s resurrection have in common is the gift of abundant life. The sense of gift is the heart of the Easter experience–bringing surprise, abundant life, hope, and emotional peace and tranquility.
Magdalene and the other disciples were called to follow in the steps of the Christ the Gardener. They were invited to participate in the important job of co-creating and co-participating, co-creating, and co-living with the Spirit in giving life to the garden and bringing that garden to the fullness where God intends. As gardeners, Christians co-create gardens to help others find and meet God.

But God’s garden, the Earth, is dying, and human beings are responsible for killing the garden through our impact on climate change. Our reckless greed for fossil fuels and reckless exploitation of the Earth’s resources at the expense of other life has jeopardized God’s garden. One of the contributing causes is humanity’s disconnection with the Earth; we have separate ourselves from the web of life. We are separated from gardens and need to reconnect with gardens as intimate part of faith experience.

The most urgent need of today and the next decades is the transformation of humanity to reconnect intimately with our garden the Earth. Our arrogance has led to a radical disconnection and alienation from the Earth, and we have ravaged, exploited, and damaged the Earth garden and its life. We as Christians need to foster a gardening spirituality that not only connects us with our foundational experience of Easter but overcomes our arrogant separation from nature by learning to reconnect reverently to the web of interrelated life. The key to human immersion is to re-discover the wonder, enchantment, and beauty of God immanent in the natural world. I have witnessed as people fall in love with nature, they will fight for what they cherish and love.

Thomas Berry, a Christian eco-theologian or self-described as a “geologian,” points out that humanity must learn to listen to the language of the Earth. Natural phenomena—plants and other life—have their own language, and the natural world resonates with the voice of the Creator and Gardener. Just as the gardener in my church learned to listen to the voices of each plant and the birds in our church garden and just as I sit attentive in the garden, listen to the voices of the Earth in the garden and pray. I discover the resurrected Gardener who teaches me what Thomas Berry describes as “wonder-filled intimacy” with all life and the planet Earth.

All human resources are required to heal, nurture, cultivate, and restore health to God’s garden. It is the fundamental revelation of Easter that we follow Christ as disciple gardeners. We create gardens and cultivate and care for gardens, for gardens are on a spiritual quest. Human beings have sought the Garden of Eden as place where God and humans once co-lived. But God has promised us something greater—what God intended with the garden of the universe and the Garden of Eden—is to create them into a cosmic resurrection garden—where we walk once again with intimacy God in the garden.

We in the United Church of Christ are called to be healers of the wounds of the Earth—making amends for our sins of consumptive greed and for placing our heads in the sands. It starts with a personal conversation and mistaken identity that began on Easter Sunday when Christ appeared to Magdalene in the Garden and invited us to participate in God’s mission of gardening the Earth. Easter is about gardening the Earth and nurturing life on the Earth for God. One of my favorite quotes that I will conclude my Easter Garden reflection:
When crated the earth, God “made room” for us all and in so doing showed us the heart of divine life, indeed all life, is the generous and gracious gesture. As we Garden, that is, as we weed out the non-nurturing elements within us and train our habits to be more life promoting, we participate in the divine life and learn to see and feel the creation as God sees and feels it.

Help commit yourself and your church this Easter to become gardeners of the Earth for Christ the Gardener and re-covenant your congregation and yourselves with the risen Christ and the garden of the Earth. You can do so by forming an Environmental Justice team in your congregation, join or create Environmental Team in your Association and/or Conference, and definitely connect yourself and your community to the Environmental Ministries of the United Church of Christ. Explore the denominational Environmental Ministries website. (http://www.ucc.org/search_results?q=environmental+justice) Take a virtual tour that is explore the site and its multiple levels of resources, play with the site, led the Spirit and your curiosity direct yourself. I did and that, and the Holy Spirit brought me into the UCC by the wonderful resources and documents that I discovered as a gardener of the Earth. Make sure your conference website and church website has listed environmental justice resources and interconnections. Let the Spirit help you discover as Mary Magdalene did that Easter is the celebration of God’s Garden and risen Christ as the Gardener.

The King of the Upside Down Kingdom Palm Sunday) Mark 11:1-11

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disarming Ourselves: The Way of Jesus

Jesus is a dangerous religious figure. His message has been distorted so often into something that he would not recognize or he would be horrified that those in his name would claim as the inspiration of violence. We have Mennonites a Christian sec who have rejected violence of all sorts, and on the other hand, we have violent fundamentalist Christians who believe in the wholesale slaughter of non-Christians such as Muslims or the wrong kind of Christians such as ourselves. There is a Orange County lawyer trying to place a measure on the California ballot the execution of anyone who marries another person of the same-gender. This position, he claims, is biblically based on the Leviticus verse: “If a man sleeps with a man like a woman, it is abomination, and they should be put to death. In Terrence McNally’s play Corpus Christi, when Bartholomew and Matthew tell Jesus/Joshua that the priests will not marry them citing the Leviticus verse, Jesus/ Joshua says to them with some appropriate humor, “Why would memorize such a horrible verse?”

Jesus was dangerous man to the Romans. A second century theologian and clergy, Origen wrote extensively a number of works. He quoted a saying of Jesus that came down outside of the gospels. Listen to the saying: “Who is close to me is close to the fire, who is far from me is far from the kingdom.” It is dangerous to be with Jesus and to follow Jesus—to risk catching fire. One of favorite theologian Johan Baptist Metz describes following Jesus and living his message as the “dangerous memories of Jesus.”

Jesus rejected disciples who wanted to steer his movement towards violence. His priority was the love of God but he yoked this love of God to unconditional love for fellow human beings. We Christian call this the “Golden Rule” because it is the core of Jesus’ ministry. In his sermon on the mount, Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.” (Mt. 5:9) Later he preaches,

You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist one who is evil. But if any one strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also; and if anyone would sue you and take your coat, let him have your cloak as well; and if any one forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to him who begs from you, and do not refuse him who would borrow from you. “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, (Mt. 5:38-44).

Jesus remained an example of non-violence to his disciples and future disciples. I will name a few who followed Jesus the peacemaker in early Christianity and later a few contemporary followers of peace-making. Jesus was dangerous because he modeled the non-violence of God to the fullest. He live, taught, and died non-violence. He demonstrates to us what it means to be non-violent even to death on the cross. To the Romans, Jesus’ rejection of war and violence were threatening because Roman authority was based on the threat of military force, terror, and crucifixion. Jesus was building a movement based on love and non-violent resistance to coercive and military authority. He was considered a trouble-maker, a religious fanatic. The Romans cruelly tortured him, humiliated him, mocked him, paraded him a sign of masculine weakness before Roman power, and then crucified him on the cross. This was to break Jesus kingdom movement, dishearten and break the spirit of following Jesus in this dangerous movement.

John Yoder, a Mennonite theologians writes.

The cross of Jesus is the extreme demonstration that agape seeks neither effectiveness nor justice, and is willing to suffer any loss or seeming defeat for the sake of obedience. In short, Christians are to live and love like Jesus, (and) know that in spite of the way things appear, God’s purposes will prevail with the coming of God’s kingdom: the resurrection of Jesus is proof that love cannot be conquered even if evil does its worst. With this assurance, Christians do not need to seek control, to make things come out right.

Yoder believed in radical love and forgiveness that Jesus lived, preached, and died for. He was one of the great Christian activist for non-violence in the 20th century.

Jesus’ disciples and later generations of Christians did not use the cross as a symbol of their faith; it was a symbol of Roman violence and the horrible death of Jesus the Christ. They adopted the symbol of the fish, the memory of his multiplying the fish for people to eat together and his meals that celebrated forgiveness, unconditional love, and non-violence.

The followers of Christ in the first three hundred years renounced war and violence in all their forms. Origen, a 2nd century Christian theologian wrote, “We Christians do not become fellow soldiers with the Emperor, even if he presses for this.” Christians were menace to the Roman state. Tertullian, a Roman centurion in North Africa, converted to Christianity and publicly promoted the conversion of Roman legionnaires to Christians so that they would not fight.

Another Christian theologian and clergy, Hippolytus of Rome promoted a subversive Christian discipleship of non-violence, “A soldier of the civil authority must be taught not to kill men and to refuse to do so if he is commanded, and to refuse to take an oath. If he is unwilling to comply, he must be rejected for baptism. A military commander or civic magistrate must resign or be rejected. If a believer seeks to become a soldier, he must be rejected, for he has despised God.”

The Roman Empire was maintained by the force and threat of its military. Christians in their pacifism threatened the very power and existence of the Empire whose Pax Romana or peace was based on constant war and cruel violence, enslaving women and children and crucifying the men. Christian provided a subversive theology that threatened the strength of the Roman Empire. In 274 CE, there was a Roman soldier in Numidia, present day Algeria, who had a son Maximilianus and who was drafted into the military. He told the pro-consul Cassius Dion, that he was a follower of Christ: “I cannot serve as a soldier. I cannot do evil. I am a Christian.” He refused his father’s pleas to serve in the Roman legion and the pro-consul, and Maximilianus is the first conscientious objector martyred in history. (Kurlansky) He was turned into saint by the Church.

The emperor Constantine converted as he was going into battle, and he a vision of Christ’s cross with the words in hoc signo vinces or “in this sign, conquer.” The cross was painted on the shields of Constantine’s troops and they won the battle of the Milvian Bridge, leaving Constantine as the sole Emperor of the Empire. Constantine’s mother St. Helena conveniently found the true cross on which Jesus was crucified buried in the hills where Jesus was supposedly was executed. It was believed to be made of wood from the Garden of Eden. Constantine was later made a saint, and in the Greek Orthodox Church, he is considered a saint equivalent to the apostles. This marks a watershed moment when Christianity moved from a pacifist religion to a violent religion. The lethal instrument of the cross used by Romans to terrified and intimidate conquered populations, used to crucify Jesus, now once again became a symbol of violence.

After Constantine made Christianity the state religion, the Roman Empire changed Christianity from a non-violent religion to religion of violence and using violence and warfare to promote itself. Jesus’ teachings of non-violence, forgiveness, unconditional love, and peace-making were dismantled. Christianity lost its non-violent edge and became violent. Later it would promote crusades, bishops and popes engaged in conquest and persecution. It became the Church waving and carrying the cross, the instrument of death of its founder and God’ child Jesus Christ.

But towards the end of Constantine’s reign, there were others who clung to Jesus’ message of non-violence. There is a story of Martin who served in the Roman legions for two years and converted to Christianity. He refused to take up arms in an impending battle. He said, “I am a soldier of Christ, I cannot fight.” (Kurlansky) Martin was accused of being a coward. He offered to go ahead unarmed of the legion into the battlefield. But the Gauls negotiated a peace.

Two more groups I want to mention because it unmasks the violence on institutional Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant. The first is the Cathars in Southern France in the 12th century. They were an alternative form of Christianity whose members took a vow dedicated to the non-violence of Jesus. They were often vegetarians, because they did not believe in the killing of animals; they refused and did not believe in warfare and capital punishment. Catholic Christianity mounted a crusade to exterminate whole villages of Cathars in Southern France then followed by the Inquisition who tortured and murdered Cathars. You might ask what was their crime? They were exterminated mercilessly because of their commitment to live the non-violence of Christ.

Other Protestant groups such as the Amish, the Quakers, the Mennonites, and the Church of the Brethren who was the Famous Renaissance writer Erasmus were persecuted mainline Protestant denominations in the 17th century, and many of those churches fled to America seeking shelter from persecution and death. There were a number of Christian churches that took up Jesus’ practice of non-violence, and the violent Protestant and Catholic churches attempt to persecute and exterminate them. Their witness to the non-violent Christ became a danger to these churches and still do.

I want to suggest a bold statement: Peacemakers point to the peacemaking ministry of Jesus. Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Dorothy Day, Daniel Berrigan, John Dear, the Buddhst monk Thich Nhat Hanh, Dalai Lama, and Wang Weilen. The last Wang Weilin, the press called him “tank man” and the “unknown rebel.” To this day, the world does not know the name of this Chinese student in Tiananmen Square during 1989 non-violent uprising and protest. He stood in before a column of tanks and refused to meet the Chinese soldiers with non-violence. Every time the lead tank tried to drive around him, he stepped in front of the tank. He brought the column of Chinese tanks to halt, and this was filmed and broadcast all over the world. Two weeks later, the nineteen year old student was arrested and executed. He modeled the non-violent Christ, and he was crucified because his non-violence threatened to topple authority based on military force and violence.

Peace-making and non-violence are dangerous. Jesus embodied the non-violence of God in this world. He was dangerous because his gospel revealed that God “….loves enemies, the ungrateful, and he selfish, the good and the evil, the just and unjust, in all inclusive embrace.” (Walter Wink) God reveals to us an alternative way to violence and war, tried by the God’s incarnation Jesus Christ, disciples in history, non-violent Christian movements and churches only to follow the way of cross, crucified and killed.

I leave with you the most profound depth of our God who exemplifies a community of self-giving and unconditional love, gracious inclusion of us, and models for us a non-violent communion focused on sharing its divine nature of non-violence. I repeat the saying of Jesus preserved by Origen: “Who is close to me is close to the fire, who is far from me is far from the kingdom.” How can Christians be non-violent disciples of the non-violent Jesus Christ within a violent Christianity claiming to follow a violent Christ? This has been a long distortion of the gospel message of Jesus, and those who preserved Jesus’ message of making-making have come to the fire of Jesus and have suffered for their faithfulness to the vision of no-violent love, enemy love, and peace-making.
As we move closer to Easter Sunday, I want to end off with a meaningful idea of Christian peace activist John Dear,

If the God peace raised the revolutionary, peace-making Jesus from the dead, after Jesus had been executed by the state as a criminal, then the God of peace affirmed Jesus’ way of active non-violence and peaceful resistance to systemic injustice. We his followers, then, are called to embark on that same path of non-violence. The gift that the risen Christ gives to his community is the gift of his peace.
The peace of Christ be with you!

Christian Responsibility for the Hungry (Lk. 16:19-31)

Blessed are the hungry, for they shall be satisfied. Lk 6:21

It is our second Sunday of Lent where we snuff out the candle of hunger in our Lenten Wreath. Hunger besets our world. Here are some sobering facts: Over 800 million people suffer from malnutrition. Most people suffering from hunger are from developing countries, but people die from malnutrition in our own country. 5 million malnourished children die from hunger each year. (Catholic Relief Services) We live in the world’s wealthiest nation with vast agricultural production, and more than 40% of American households do not have enough to eat. Yet we live in a country where 1% of the population owns 40% of the wealth of the country. In Jesus’ time, 1% of the Romans owned 16% of the wealth. The 1% of the wealthy Americans have the ability to feed all the hungry in the world. And the scandal is how many children and people in our country are hungry. These include the homeless; the elderly on fixed income who can’t afford medication costs, utility costs and rent, and food—usually, food suffers; families who live below the poverty line. That is 18% of the people who live in the San Fernando Valley, that is 810, 000 persons around us. Or since the Supreme Court declared that corporations are to be considered as people, I find an extremely troublesome dilemma. Walmart has just raised the minimum wage from $7.25 to $9 hour for some four hundred thousand employees but do not allow them two work full time to secure benefits. This has created the situation that nearly $7 billion dollars in food stamps, medicaid and health bills, and subsidized housing is paid for these folks so that Walmart to be profitable and that Walton family to be one of the richest families in the world at the expense of the poor and those paying taxes. There is something unjust in this situation.

Hunger in our country and around the world is related to poverty, drought, famine, and extreme weather events, and war. Both hunger and poverty remain as a social concerns for Christians to assist those that Jesus called “the least of my family.” (Matthew 25:45).

Too many Christians read the Bible from the side of the powerful or socially comfortable, usually as a sin management text. But I have found the Bible a dangerous book to read, especially, the gospels for myself. I will give you an example: “Give us this day our daily bread” from Jesus’ prayer. The powerful and rich spiritualize the interpretation to refer to the Lord’ Supper or eucharist. Reading from this from below, from the perspective of the preferential option for the poor, Jesus’ prayer refers to hungry and the need for food
I always try to read scripture from the side of the poor, the suffering, and the vulnerable because God continues reveals God’s concern for the suffering, the hungry, barren women, eunuchs, the poor, the outsider, lepers, and the vulnerable. If we read the scriptures from the side of suffering, it makes a real difference how we understand the poor and the hungry as blessed or special in God’s affections.

Lent is a time of mindful reflection on our daily actions. I want to focus on the suffering and pain of the hungry. The world Bank and a number of International organizations issued a report last year, The State of Food Insecurity in the World (SOFI) 2014, has issued a millennium development goal for the next decade and a half to cut in half the numbers of malnourished people globally and to achieve the goal of ending hunger worldwide by 2030. This is morally right and just to end hunger of “the least of my family.” But we could end hunger today if people were committed.

Today’s gospel from Luke (16:19-31) is Jesus’ parable about a poor man Lazarus and wealth (Dives). The focus of Jesus’ story is the disparity between extreme wealth and poverty, abundant luxury and hungry suffering. The “gate” describes this is a wealthy mansion or palace with a wall to keep the poor outside. Jesus has brilliantly sketched the disparity of the 1% and lower spectrum of the 99%.

He describes the rich man dressed in “purples and fine linens,” indicating royalty and extreme wealth, who “feasts sumptuously each day.” In contrast is Lazarus, lying (or the word in Greek means “thrown down” or “afflicted”). He is “thrown down” by the forces of unmentioned misfortune. In others words, Lazarus is crippled physically and spiritually, he is constantly hungry and suffers from sores from a skin condition—malnutrition or chronic disease. Even the dogs come and lick Lazarus’ sores. He has lost his ability to beg for food.

Jesus communicates how hungry he is as longing to satisfy his hunger with the scraps fallen from the rich man’s table. This phrase indicates a custom that we would not recognize today. In the ancient Greco-Roman world, the wealthy used loaves of bread as napkins. They wiped their hands on bits of bread and then let them drop to the floor for the household pets.(Herzog) This communicates conspicuous consumption and luxurious waste to Jesus’ peasant audience where every scrap of food was precious, especially when you had nothing to eat.
He sits outside the gate of the rich man’s house. He suffers from sores and is very hungry. Lazarus hopes to receive some of the scraps of bread fallen to the floor when the wealthy man’s servants threw the garbage into the street.

The rich man’s crime is his absorption in his life of luxury, wealth, and abundance. You can imagine the table of the rich man, spread with a choice of food, delicacies, fruit and vegetables, and the best of wine. The rich man is walled in his estate with the poor and Lazarus outside the gate. The household dogs are let in to clean up the scraps while Lazarus receives nothing.
From the parable, Lazarus is neither virtuous nor non-virtuous. It is his condition of extreme poverty and hunger that is the focus of Jesus’ parable. Nor is the rich man particularly wicked. There is fixed and inseparable barrier between the two. The rich man is not even aware of the poor man’s existence—let alone hunger and suffering.

Lazarus is the only person given a name in any of Jesus’ parables. His name means “helped by God.” He is the focus of God’s attention. Jesus brings this out in the reversal after death. The rich man dies and is buried according to religious tradition. But Lazarus dies was either thrown into the garbage heap of the city for the birds and dogs to devour. The rich man goes to Hell, and the Lazarus is carried by angels to the side of Abraham. I can’t help remembering the verse from Mary’s prophetic song in accepting becoming the mother of Jesus: “God has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; God has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.”

Jesus uses the reversal in the afterlife to stress how cares for the poor and hungry—those who are suffering, for now there is an even greater chasm than the previous wall between the rich man and Lazarus. The rich man cannot alleviate his punishment but asks Abraham to send Lazarus to his brothers to warn them. Abraham mentions that they already have the Torah and the Prophets—the scriptures. The rich man knows that this will not be enough to change the hearts of his wealthy brothers, for they will read the scriptures from the perspective of the wealthy, ignoring the multiple times that the scriptures says God care for the poor and suffering and the hungry.

The fundamental crime of the rich man is blindness to the hungry and suffering man outside the gate and his failure to hear God’s message in the scriptures that God cares especially for the poor and suffering. This point becomes very relevant to the many Christians in opposition to food distribution to the homeless or any other services given away without paying or earning the service—from health care, to welfare services, to educational subsidies. And the 1% get richer, and the chasm between the 1% and the 99% has become wider in the last three decades and even during the latest recession as many middle class folks have been squeezed out of the middle class.

Christians and businesses owned by Christians have pushed municipal governments to ban feeding the poor and the homeless. Nearly 40 cities have made it illegal to distribute food to the homeless. Even LA City Council was looking at such a banning of food distribution programs a year and a half ago. Some claim that food distribution programs to the homeless in the parks aggravate the situation by preventing the homeless from seeking help in recovery programs. Such restrictions or blaming the food distribution of food to the homeless not seeking recovery programs. Such blaming the poor results from bad theologies that claim I am prosperous because God has elected me and that you are poor because you have brought upon this yourself. There are people in congress who want to cut food stamps programs, and I want to shout them at the top of my voice that this is wrong. Jesus said, you are doing this to the least of my family.

As Christians, we have a responsibility to ensure that every person has access to basic material necessities, including food. We model this at table each Sunday where everyone is invited to come forward and share communion. No is excluded. This value emerges from the biblical notion of God’s preferential option for the poor and the vulnerable. How can we help the poor access food? How can we help them access a greater variety of food and other services?
We as Christians believe that feeding hungry people is an honorable and socially just endeavor, that farming is a noble vocation that gives great pride to those involved in it. We believe that we are responsible for promoting justice in our own lives, in our communities and in the world. We do this for the sake of our neighbors, future generations and all of God’s glorious creation. We believe that all of our actions have an effect on the common good of creation and that we carefully consider our personal and eating choices we make.

Jesus shared meals constantly as celebration of God’s forgiveness and presence in our midst with sinners, tax collectors, and prostitutes. He was accused of being a glutton and a drunkard. He drank wine to party with folks, yet there are Christians who rigorously will abstain from wine and all alcohol. Some have good reasons to abstain from alcohol because it has controlled them. The same can be said for many of us who are controlled by food.

We celebrate the Lord’s Supper every Sunday by sharing consecrated bread and grape juice. Is everyone called to the table? Is everyone’s presence expected at the table? Who is called to Christ’s table? Does Christ have any expectations of his disciples when they gather at his table? How are the disciples expected to treat one another? Paul face such questions in the Corinthian community. There were a few wealthy members who brought food for an agape meal with the breaking the bread and sharing the cup in memory of Jesus’ last supper. These wealthy folks refused to share the food that they brought with the poorer members of the community who went hungry. Hear Paul’s words: “Whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be answerable for the body and blood of the Lord.” (1 Cor. 11:27) The “unworthy manner” that Paul mentions is to selfishly not share with the brothers and sisters what you have brought.

We here on Sunday model a meal where all are welcome, no matter who you are or where you are on your journey, you are welcome to the table of God’s abundant grace. It is a free gift of God’s unconditional grace given to us. The meal models the hospitality that Christians who have been welcomed to the Lord’s table need to extent the same hospitality to those who are hungry, poor, in need, suffering, and vulnerable. When we become the like the rich man by ignoring the hungry and homeless on the streets. I passed a sign of a homeless person on the street on my way with Joe to Pantages Theater. The sign read, “Am I invisible?” It was the cry of the least of Christ’s family, calling for people to take note of his plight and assist him. How many of us walked by without seeing because we are so-absorbed in our own luxuries?