This is a shared sermon on Oct. 5th St. Francis Sunday by two Druid/Wiccan priests and dear friends of our church. Enjoy Michael and his husband’s James sermon.

At that time Jesus said, “Father, Lord of heaven and earth! I thank you because you have revealed to the unlearned what you have hidden from the wise and learned.” (Matthew 11:25)

Francis of Assisi is one of the most “popular” of all the saints. He may be seen in gardens around the world. He is enshrined on bird baths and bird feeders. The prayer that we associate with him, “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace,” is arguably one of the most popular prayers circulated to this day. He is associated with cardinal works of mercy to the poor and marginalized. He is the patron saint of animal lovers, peace-makers, and environmentalists, and even viewed by some neo-pagans as the last great druid. It’s rather amazing how the 21st century has learned how to back-engineer almost anything to prove our current viewpoint. But I digress . .

Animal lover . . . peace-maker . . . environmentalist. . . worthy attributes indeed . . . But these are not the aspects of Saint Francis that I want to speak about today. So often, I think, most of us have a tendency to view the saints as persons who were superheroes; who were capable of gritting their teeth and doing the Right Thing in the face of total adversity. As such, I find them to be totally unlike me. The problem here seems to be not so much that I can’t do the Right Thing, but that more often than not, I’m not certain what the Right Thing is!

In this wireless, interconnected Global Village we live in today, we are assaulted by conflicting values and oppositional demands. The necessity of doing the Right Thing is constantly upon us, even in the simple demands of day to day living: regular or low-fat, recycle or not recycle, welfare or no welfare. Although this might seem simply to require a certain fluidity on my part– a refraining from deciding, as it were–in actuality I know I must eventually make a decision. And when I do, how can I know I’m Right?
So the aspect of Saint Francis that speaks to me most strongly today is this: he was a man who Didn’t Get It Right! Yes, you heard me correctly . . .Throughout the course of his life he steadfastly refused to join the ranks of the wise and learned–of those, who were certain of the Right Thing. He remained a fool for God, and as such, was always open to rethinking the Holy Spirit’s inspiration. I’d like to tell a couple little stories that illustrate my point.

When Francis was a very young man–that is, before he really had any inkling of the vocation God had in store for him–he thought he might like very much to be a knight. In fact, we have in the records a dream that Francis had about this time: He is in a large room full of knights’ armor and the trappings of chivalry. And Jesus is there with him. Jesus says to Francis, “Francis, I want you to be my knight.”

There is evidence that this somewhat idealistic endeavor was fueled by the popular literature of the day in which knights in shining armor vanquished dragons, rescued fair maidens, and generally did the Right Thing for the sake of good. Remember, this is the late 12th century – – the Golden age of Chivalry. Francis conveyed this hope to his father, who was a prosperous cloth merchant in Assisi, and I imagine that his father found this to be a very pleasing scheme. At the time Assisi was engaged in one of its many wars with the neighboring city of Perugia, and for a middle-class merchant to have his son fighting for the city, outfitted as if he were a lord, would have had some appeal to Francis’ father. So he bought him the armor, swords, lances, gowns and horse that would be required.
But Francis was already who he was and when the day came to ride off to Perugia, he noticed that among the company there was an impoverished nobleman who had no armor, horse, etc. So Francis give his entire outfit away, and marched off to Perugia unarmed.

Needless to say, the encounter proved disastrous for Francis, and he was captured and imprisoned. When he was finally ransomed, he was ill with a high fever. If Jesus had wanted him to be a knight, Francis reasoned, something was clearly going wrong. Perhaps, like a fool, he had gotten the message wrong. He continued to search. What could it mean to be Jesus’ knightly champion?

A few years later, after he had gone off to live the life of a hermit, he had one of the more remarkable experiences in what was to be a most remarkable life. While praying one day before the crucifix in the ruined church of San Damiano, the figure of Jesus came to life and spoke to him saying, “Francis, rebuild my church, which, as you see, is falling down.” Francis looked around him and saw that, indeed, the church of San Damiano was falling down. He immediately began putting stone on stone, rebuilding the church. Again his father was upset, so he renounced his family. The people of Assisi thought he was a fool. Slowly, again, he began to understand that he’d gotten it wrong. It wasn’t until much later in his life that he understood that Jesus had meant for Francis to rebuild his Church, with a capital “C”.

And when he understood that, perhaps he also began to understand what it might be to be Jesus’ knightly champion.

Francis was also famous for his bodily austerities. He would throw ashes into his beans so that he couldn’t enjoy them too much. He called his Body “Brother Ass” and was known to roll naked in thorns and snow to discipline his body. As he lay dying (while still a young man of 44), he may have had an understanding that, again, he’d been foolish and hadn’t Got it Right. He asked “Brother Ass” to forgive him, and perhaps realized that he’d squandered one of God’s greatest gifts by not being a little bit kinder to himself.
So what are we to make of this famous saint? He has been called “the Other Jesus” by some. He is revered and loved universally, by Christians and non- Christians alike. And yet, he didn’t seem to Get it Right.

Perhaps this is what Jesus is talking about when he suggests that the foolish and unlearned may know something that the wise and learned don’t know. Perhaps certainty and Being Right are not what Jesus wants from our lives.

Maybe Saint Francis shows us something completely different, something that looks more like perseverance in the face of uncertainty. Maybe the lesson I can learn from Saint Francis is the lesson that faithfulness is more valuable than Being Right; that humility and unknowing are a more appropriate response to God than certainty and knowledge. Perhaps abandoning the pride of self may be the way to begin to understand God. Or, in the words of Saint Francis’ famous prayer, that it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

If you are one of those Christians that need to live by boundaries, borders and walls, this sermon is not for you.  Today in Matthew’s gospel, we see that Jesus tackles the question of clean/unclean and pure/impure.  As much as Jesus fought in his life against the exclusions and maps of purity/impurity, Christians continue to imprison his ministry of grace and freedom in a quagmire of purity codes, pollution language, and exclusionary behaviors.

All cultures, especially, religious cultures have their own maps of what is pure and impure.  For the Hebrew scriptures, there are ethnic and gender boundaries, often claimed to be divine boundaries between clean/unclean and pure/impure and often connected to righteousness/sinfulness. For example, my heritage of being Scottish, Irish and Greek would make me unclean in the eyes of Pharisee. These purity maps are meant to exclude things, foods, certain actions and behaviors, and peoples.  In food, you do not mix certain foods to together such as dairy and meat or with animal products. So bacon cheeseburgers, while tasting great, violate the Jewish kosher laws on two levels: eating bacon and mixing cheese or dairy with meat. You don’t mix various two types of cloth in the same garment.

Mixtures of categories are forbidden because such mixtures, claimed by practitioners, confuse what it considered God-ordained categories with discrete boundaries.  The concept of natural/unnatural is one variant of this purity code.  Sins against nature are hardly sins against the environment but what the majority or the religious authorities consider unnatural.  They are unnatural only because the plurality or religiously powerful have the authority to say what is unnatural or natural. According to St. Paul, long hair for a male is unnatural and short cropped hair is unnatural for a female.  I wonder where wigs fall into such schema. I suspect they are unnatural because they confuse categories, especially when you cross dress, another unnatural action of confusion.  Here is an example of a sin against nature!

Our garden violates the purity or kosher laws because we mix plants in same fields. Not surprising, we are, of course, an unnatural church because we cause confusion by not separating out the plants of certain types in their own fields.  We mix dessert succulents and landscape with tomatoes and other plantsin the same bed.  We are church that fails by confusing the boundaries on the level of gardening but also on many other levels of gender categories and sexual orientation codes because we believe in inclusiveness.  And radical inclusiveness violates purity codes.

Inclusiveness is so messy for the religious obsessive folks and compulsive purists or Christian fundamentalists.  In fact, it is a nightmare…..What is pure becomes polluted, what has been sacred suddenly become profane….I read how one fundamentalist Christian, who is a baker, refused to make rainbow cupcakes because it would taint his relationship with Jesus. It might lead to the false impression that he accepted LGBT folks or same-sex marriage.

The struggle to live as God has outlined begins in the heart:  it is justice, mercy, faith, love, and compassion.  Sacred tradition cannot be hardened into unchanging traditions of stone tablets while Jesus understand that religious laws and customs are written in sand.

Many Christian scriptural texts are firm in Jesus’ rejection of rabbinical notions of purity and impurity and their schemas to categorize people. They present Jesus’ ministry as a continual violation of scrupulous ritual codes of exclusive and purity.  Jesus sat and ate with sinner, tax collectors, and prostitutes, the unclean and clean, men and women of suspect purity status. He broke all the purity maps of holiness groups, and those groups hated him for breaking what they considered sacred and measured their holiness by adhering strictly to them.

The early crisis after the death and resurrection of Jesus was whether his  Jewish followers could even eat or sit at table with non-Jewish followers of Jesus. This sounds so much like the attempt of particular states to exempt homophobic exclusions of business in extending housing and other services to LGBT folks.  It is matter of religious codes, outdated. Ifw e asked “what would Jesus do?”  He would clearly break them/

In Acts, there was controversy in which the Holy Spirit gives Peter a vision of animals of mixed purity status and reveals that they are all holy to God before he visits the Roman centurion Cornelius and his household.

I have heard so often how churches and church leaders have scolded folks for cross-dressing. “You should dress appropriately to the gender in which  God created you. God makes no mistakes.  It is wrong; it is unnatural to undergo a sex change procedure or take hormones to alter your gender.”

Yet in Acts of the Apostles, Philip, part of the liberal wing of the Jesus movement, baptizes a non-Jew, in fact, an African proto-transgender person, the Ethiopian eunuch as a follower of Jesus. The Eunuch is an African, a non-Jew, and a non-male or non-female, a third gender as the first non-Jewish convert to the Jesus movement. You don’t hear churches speaking about the gender variance of the Ethiopian eunuch.  What is called unnatural in the human world, is often natural in the biological world. Joan Roughgarden is a transgendered woman ecologist and wrote a book entitled Evolution’s Rainbow,  where she documents the gender variance, transitions, and diversities within nature. What we call “sins against nature,” it appears our Creator God is continuously guilty of creating such gender diversities to enrich biological life.  God is the worst offender of the so call, sins against nature.

Remember the baptismal formula in Paul: “There is neither Greek nor Jew, male or female, free person and slave.”  In Christ, there are neither identities nor any other markers such as race, gender, ethnicity, sexual or gender identities, for we are all children of God.  There are no exclusions that separate the children of God. We are all siblings.

Let me take you one step further in the inclusive confusion of categories:  In Ephesians 5:22-23:  “Wives be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church the body of which he is savior.”  This text has been used my men to dominate their wives. But I also have heard this text at transgender and same-sex weddings.  It is an ecclesial transgender confused scripture.

Insofar women are part of the body of Christ through baptism, they are called to be Christ to others, so they must be as grooms and husbands to the brides and wives, whether it be a man or a woman.  The church consists of men and women.  This text justifies not only all sorts of transgender but also same-sex relations. How many women grooms have married their brides while one of the first weddings I officiated in the 1970s was a gay man in full blown wedding dress with husband I a tuxedos and two lesbians in tuxedoes standing up for them.  In this text from Ephesians, this is normal.

But the image is very queer. Christ a male is literally the head over the body—his church, which consists male, female, gender variant, intesex, heterosexual and bisexual, and so on.  The body of Christ and traditional baptismal theology are some of the queerest concepts in Christianity. The logic of Christian inclusiveness not only confuses the homophobe and transphobe but those who understand that marriage is between one man/one woman. This is Christian traditional baptismal theology. Churches came to the conclusion if we baptized LGBT folks, we must recognize their calls to marriage and ministry.  It is simply logical.

Christians today have re-animated the purity of codes of the Jewish fundamentalists of Jesus time.  Were not these purity codes supposed to be abandoned by Jesus during is ministry?  Those who oppose same-sex marriage use the argument that marriage ordained by God is one man/one woman, and that this is pure while same-sex marriage pollutes marriage.   Changing your gender is unnatural because it pollutes the gender codes of God.  God made you the way you are. Men are naturally superior to women because men reflect the image of God more unless women are subjected to their husbands. Only fundamentalists accept this premise.

Christians use the language of clean/unclean/ pure and impure, pollution, sins against nature. Categories of natural/unnatural, abomination, pollution, dirty, unclean, sinful, disgusting, diseased  are applied to people living with HIV and AIDS. Even our community uses such as “cleanub2”, referring to being HIV.  We speak of drug addiction as unclean, free from drug addiction as clean.  Let’s keep America pure and protect our southern border, means let’s keep Caucasians in power and protect ourselves from ethnically different or in this case the invasion from the south of tens of thousands of refugee children.  This is xenophobia, a racial attitude of fear of the   We do not worry about the Canadian menace and invasion except on South Park. Mixed marriages were 50 years  understood as polluting the categories of race, by mixing or Catholic-Protestant as mixed marriages.  Segregation in the US and apartheid in South Africa were racialized purity codes.

Let’s keep the body of Christ pure.  Inclusion is never about purity and walls to exclude. It is about inclusion, tearing down barriers and walls that exclude. Or some would call it Christian confusion of the categories, following in the footsteps of Christians. Fundamentalist Christians appropriate the ultimate purity category: Are you saved? Or are you damned?  They proclaim their group saved while they arrogantly look down with condemnation and arrogance, proclaiming “You are not saved.”

After the debate of clean/impure dispute with the Pharisees, Jesus enacts a border crossing out of the geographical areas of Israel to the regions of Tyr end Sidon in Phoenicia. He encounters the Syro-Phoenician woman.  But here we learn the true nature of radical inclusion. What we consider as radical inclusive is neither radical enough nor inclusive enough.  He is approached by the Syro-Phoenician woman who addresses Jesus as he Jewish Messiah and pleas for a healing of her daughter.  Jesus, at first, passes by her pleas for healing, and then answers her: “It is not fair to take children’s food and throw it to dogs.”  What appears as a racial slur does not stop the woman.  She comes right back: “Yes, Lord even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.” Jesus is invited to stretch his radical inclusiveness even further to include Gentiles.  At that  moment, he realizes he has fallen easily into mental trap of exclusion, and this is not consistent with his message God’s grace. He does and proclaims the woman’s faith is great. This becomes a parable of warning to us as church folks to be weary thinking that we are inclusive enough. We are never inclusive enough, only God is.  And God calls through the ministry of Jesus to fight against the bigotry and exclusions from such religious prejudice and sinfulness.

Who do you say I am?” Jesus asked his Jewish disciples. Peter responded with a Jewish answer: “You are the Messiah” (Matt. 16:15-16). Given the plurality of religions in the United States today, it is perhaps inevitable that other religions, even those not historically connected to Christianity, would recognize the pivotal nature of Jesus of Nazareth for Christian faith and human history and comment on his life and times.  “Who do Buddhists think Jesus was?”

Dalai Lama  is most arguably, the most famous Buddhist in the world, the  spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists.  So his book, The Good Heart: A Buddhist Perspective on the Teachings of Jesus, is where I draw his view of Jesus.  The Dalai Lama claims his reverence for Jesus stems from his understanding of Jesus as a fully enlightened human being, a bodhisattva.  He is very humble about his attempts to understand Jesus and his words.”   The Dalai Lama understands Jesus as a great teacher who taught humanity how to have a good heart.

For him, someone who is passionate commitments about the religious life and advocates to his disciples and others a common humanity grounded in compassion and love, an unshakable openness to life and people,  sacrificial love to end suffering has good heartedness. He has advocated to many Buddhist monks and clergy to read the teachings of Jesus.  They can learn good heartedness from Jesus.

Thich Nhat Hanh presents a different vision of Jesus in Living Buddha, Living Christ. He too likes Jesus. He likes him very much indeed, and does not hesitate to tell readers, especially Christian readers, why. Yet his is a very different approach to Jesus from the one taken by the Dalai Lama.

Nhat Hanh is interested in emphasizing the activist side of Jesus’ ministry, and that interest emerges in the descriptions he gives of how Buddhism, true Buddhism, and Christianity, true Christianity, relate to one another. He uses his philosophy-of-religion approach to demonstrate how congruent Buddhism and Christianity are on this point, and how congruent the life and teachings of Jesus and the life and teachings of Gautama are when it comes to their core messages: “I do not think there is that much difference between Christians and Buddhists.”

First, Nhat Hanh is more interested in right understanding than in the good heart. By all accounts, mind you, Nhat Hanh has a good heart and endorses others’ good hearts. reflectiveness of the Beatitudes.  Jesus represents nonviolence in action. He writes,

Nonviolence does not mean no action. Nonviolence meant we act with love and compassion.

He explains Christianity to Christians: “Jesus taught a gospel of nonviolence. Is the church today practicing the same by its presence and behavior?”

Three elements of the socially engaged Christ:

Awareness or mindfulness:  Jesus meditates and prays, and this make him more aware of his present surroundings and people around.

Identification and Understanding human suffering: Through prayer and mindfulness, Jesus becomes aware of suffering; he identifies in solidarity with human suffering and pain.

Action to relieve suffering: The final step of mindful awareness and  compassion, is action to relieve the pain and sufferings of others.

Let me finish how Buddhists see Jesus.  There are more Buddhist monks and clergy who have read the four gospels about Jesus than Christian clergy have read about the Buddha.  May be if we did we could establish a profound conversation with Buddhists, become faithful friends, and cooperate to end suffering in the world.

Hindus:

Shaunaka Rishi Das is Hindu scholar and Director of Hindu Studies at the Oxford University Center on Hinduism.  He tells this story:

I’ve an Indian friend who, when he was seven ,moved with his family from India to England, where he was enrolled at a new school. On his first day he was asked to speak to the class about a saint from his Hindu tradition. Enthusiastically he began to tell the story of the saint called Ishu, who was born in a cowshed, was visited by three holy men, performed many amazing miracles, walked on water and spoke a wonderful sermon on a mountain. http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/hinduism/beliefs/jesus_1.shtml

He observes astutely, more than Christians that Jesus Christ was not a Christian but Jewish. Believe or not if you did a survey of Christians in the pew or in the classroom that they will tell you Jesus, Mary his mother, and the disciples were Christian.  The word Christian was not coined until a 100 years after the death of Jesus.

For Hindus, Jesus is a sadhu, a holy man, a sage or saint.  He represents the essence of God on earth. Hindus look at Jesus’ teaching and behaviors.  He is humble, in control of his senses and his mind, compassionate, and non-violent.  Jesus teaches humanity about universal love of God and human beings.

Shaunake Rishi Das writes how Jesus influenced his own spiritual journey.

I read such passages as Luke 5: “forsake all and follow me”. I remember distinctly, as a 14 year old, developing my own understanding of what that meant. I had formed a sense of mission and vocation by reading the Bible, seeing that the love of God should be shared with others. The greatest commandment – to love the Lord our God with all our heart, all our words and all our deeds, and love our neighbour as ourselves – struck me as an instruction, as a plea and, actually, as a necessity. Considering how to do to that, how to forsake all and follow God out of love, has provided me my greatest challenge in life. Ibid.

He became a follower of Krishna and a better Hindu because of Jesus but venerates Jesus as aSaint, a manifestation of God on earth. He wonders if Jesus went to Belfast Ireland whether Protestants or Catholics would allow him in their churches unless he identified him as Protestant or Catholic.

Another Hindu teacher, perhaps the greatest teacher of non-violence in the 20^th century is Mahatma Gandhi He understood Jesus. These are his words:

What does Jesus mean to me? To me. He was one of the greatest teachers humanity has ever had….Is all the grandeur of his teaching and of his doctrine to be forbidden to me? I cannot believe so. My interpretation of Jesus…is that Jesus in his own life is the key to the nearness of God; that he expressed, as no other could, the spirit and will of God.  (Ellsberg)

If Jesus were here today, he would bless me people who have never heard of him. He was an example of loving one’s neighbor as oneself, promoting the good and welfare of people, and living love among the people.

Finally, I want to introduce you to the Muslim Jesus that appears in the Qur’an. He is mentioned in stories over 300 times and his mother Mary is the only woman mentioned in the Qur’an and remains a model for Muslim of a courageous and loving mother. Now Christians will find their stories of Jesus in gospel quite different than the Muslim Jesus. For example , the night Jesus is born (not in a stable) but in the middle of the desert, He is able to talk from the first moment. Jesus is the next greatest Muslim prophet. He turns clay birds into real birds as child. But the Romans try to crucify him, and God takes him directly into heaven.  Humanity is not saved by Jesus’ death and resurrection as Christians claim but submission to God.

Jesus is a strong example of what moral and obedient human being can be. He has only three possessions: a robe, a bowl for water, and a comb to comb his hair. Muslims can perceive Jesus as a word of God, not the Son of God because Muslims believe that Jesus nor any person can image God who is pure Spirit.  He is understood as a great prophet who will come at the end of time to fight the final battle against evil as the end of the world comes.  While we Christians and Muslims have different views of Jesus, we also share Jesus. See The Muslim Jesus on youtube.

Hans Kung a theologian gave a talk at Santa Clara University about 10 years ago.  He said, ”There is no peace in the world until there is peace among religions.”

I receive criticism in emails for my openness to other religions by conservative and fundamentalist Christians. They fall into an easy trap of demonize what they do not understand or take the time to have conversations with their neighbors who practice a different faith tradition.  We do not have the luxury to be in opposition but to find common ground between religions if we as humans are going to deal with greatest crisis of the 21^st century. Climate change will impact all, no matter what religion you belong.

When Jesus says in John’s Gospel that “I am the way,” I do not use exclusively to separate Christians from non-Christians. I understand his saying inclusively by remembering the above and Jesus can be a bridge for common values between religions.  We need to find common bridges, and my suggestion this morning is that we use Jesus as a bridge to understanding other peoples of faith because they too have reverence for Jesus even though their understandings may expand our own or make us uncomfortable.

Can we afford the time to fight between ourselves and not make peace among religions while all life is threatened by the climate changes effect human recklessness and profit?

I would like t explore four events in life of Jesus during his last week in Jerusalem: His procession into Jerusalem, the disturbance in the Temple, his Last Supper, and the Garden of Gethsemane. Each of these could be explored imaginatively in depth, but I want to touch up these events because they present dense and dangerous moments in the life of Jesus. They tells us a lot about God’s mission in Jesus and reveal the depth of Jesus’ passionate involvement with us.
Jesus enters Jerusalem or to Warren Carter’s phrase “Making an Ass of Rome:” What we are celebrating today with the blessing and distribution of the palms this morning is Jesus entry into Jerusalem. The conflict between Jesus and Pilate begins the day that Jesus enters in Jerusalem.
Prior to Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem is Pilate’s entry. Within the LGBT community and Hollywood movie events such as the Oscars, dramatic entrances are important. They are choreographed theater on red carpets, communicate success, attention to the gowns, and companions attending. Roman entrances into city were triumphant. No red carpets, but soldiers trumpeting, followed cadence war drums sounding the entrance of the conquering hero with Roman legionnaires brandishing shields, and spears, and military insignia. In this case, it was Pilate who represented the triumphant Roman Empire and Emperor Tiberius. It communicates Roman greatness and military power, reminding the crowds that they were conquered by the powerful Roman legions—the greatest power in the world blessed by the Gods.
But Jesus intends to literally make an ass of Pilate and Rome. He choreographs his own dramatic and symbolic entrance into Jerusalem. He adopts some of the Roman trappings but queers them or rather reframes them in symbolic counter challenges. His entrance into Jerusalem is to remind the Jews of their religious history in which God enters the holy city to serve, not dominate. He chooses an ass, not a war horse in which Pilate rode into the city. He uses dramatic parody of the Roman triumphant procession to point out to his disciples and the people. Matthew remembers the line from the prophet Zechariah: “Tell the daughter of Zion, your king is coming on an ass,” (9:9). The rest verse states that your king comes triumphant and victorious, and humble riding an ass.
Jesus is recognized as a king, or more likely anti-king. He is teaching humility, non-violence, and peace-making, not conquest and domination. God’s community does not consist by military domination but is constituted by a new a kinship as children of God—not be wealth, prestige, gender, or ethnicity. It is constituted by God as Abba, parent in love with all and equally.
Jesus lives what he teaches—as meek and lowly in heart. He identifies with the suffering poor, the throw-away people, the powerless and humiliated—those crushed by military Empire of Rome. He parodies Rome and Pilate with God’s empire whose kinship comes from love and service and sharing of goods together.
Jesus acting up in the Temple: Jesus had problems with the Temple from the very beginning of practice of radical inclusiveness at table and his ministry. He associated indiscriminately with independent minded women such as Magdalene and the Samaritan woman at the well, prostitutes, tax collectors, lepers and the ill. The religious authorities of the Temple and their Pharisaic collaborators were horrified at his coming in continuous contact with the unclean and sinners. They represent a Temple of orderly social and religious categories of people into pure/impure and holy/sinful. At the heart of this system was the book of Leviticus, whose author biblical scholar Callum Carmichael points out is reflecting on the Israelite ancestors in the book of Genesis. Male homoerotic relations are abomination because they are deformity of Israelite masculinity. The purity code in Leviticus is justifying what constitutes as normal masculinity.
Remember that the purity code in Leviticus is grafted onto animals and humans alike. Its religious perspective divides humans and animals into pure and impure, deformed and acceptable. It is also the book that spells out and inspires the Pharisees and priests to categorize all people into holy/unholy such as mamzers (born out of wedlock), sinners, shepherds, gentiles, abomination, etc. It is the same book that details the rituals of animal sacrifice.
In referring to the Pharisees, Jesus says, “every plant that my heavenly Abba has not planted will be uprooted.” (Mt: 15:13). Jesus’ demonstration against the Temple and the holiness schema promoted is deliberate. I cannot believe that it was an incidental target for starting an ACT UP style of demonstration. He made chords from ropes, overturned the tables and released the doves to be sold for sacrifice. Doves were sacrifices for the poor who could not afford a sheep. Jewish factory farms, similar to our own, were required to supply 140,000 doves a year for animal sacrifice. Jesus’ demonstration disrupts the whole Temple system of animal sacrifice and the whole system of categorizing and stigmatizing people and animals. Jesus’ intention was to disturb the heart of the Temple system with the God of compassionate love and peace-making.
Creating companionship for life: Companionship is created when we share food together. Jesus has already entered Jerusalem, publicly making the Romans an ass. He disturbed the Temple system; he challenged the Pharisee’s and their practice of making their home table celebration as exclusive as the Temple—excluding the defiled, the impure, and the sinner from their own table meals. Holiness companionship was based on exclusion. As a side note, how many Christian tables have exclusively functioned like the Temple or the Pharisaic tables.
There is no question that for Jesus the table had to be open and inclusive. I cannot accept the readings of the Last Supper as an exclusive meal. It goes against the very nature of who Jesus was. People from the highways and byways are to be invited into the meals. It was populated with a diversity of people: outcasts, prostitutes, abominable people, tax collectors, those folks that terrify Pharisees and Christians alike. He did not moralize, berate them how to change their lives, threaten them that could not share the table if they did not change their ways.
Jesus disrupted their normal behaviors in an oppressed world. He would assist them in the presence of Abba God to undo their defensive selves, centered on themselves and their own survival. In Christianity’s Dangerous Memory, Diarmuid O’Murchu describes Jesus’ parables, healings, and ministry. It is equally applicable to his meals and his to Last Supper:
They defy the criteria of normalcy and stretch creative imagination toward subversive, revolutionary engagement. They threaten major disruption for a familiar manageable world, and lure the hearer (participant) into a risky enterprise, but one that has promise and hope inscribed in every fiber of the dangerous endeavor.
Jesus’ meals were dangerous. There were no hierarchies at table, no one in charge or in power. There were only those who voluntarily served others, gladly washed the feet of their companions, who cheerfully assisted folks at table to heal from the years of religious abuse and oppression. Jesus encouraged them to dream a future with hope, with God with resources and the abundance of food created by the companions of the bread and the cup. Our moments at table undo our ordinary patterns and behaviors.
At the last meal, Jesus gave his companions, literally “bread sharers” a gift of life. Let me give you an example by tell a story. In an interview with a woman who survived Auschwitz was asked “Why did you survive when so many perished?” She was separated from her family, stripped by the guards, humiliated, shaved all her hair from her body, and given a concentration uniform. She was part of a group similarly humiliated and abused prisoners. Then a young girl broke ranks and placed a piece of bread in her hands. “At that moment”, she said, “I decided to live.” (Primavesi, Gaia and Climate Change).
Jesus gave his friends a similar gift, a piece of life-giving bread handed to them with love and unconditional forgiveness. It was an intense moment of self-giving of himself, his life and blood for them out of an excess of unconditional love—mirroring Abba God’s unconditional love and grace. A piece of bread and a cup of wine were given to them as the young girl gave a piece of bread to the survivor woman in Auschwitz. Jesus told them to live, for life would be given in his death the next day. He created a ritual of life in shared bread and a cup.
One of the ways I look at our communion lines is to remember how in our cities the poor line up for distribution of food. We, on Sunday, line up for an unconditional handout of grace, forgiveness, and love. We are all poor in need of God’s abundant grace. We should be so undone by God’s love for us as to break our self-centeredness for the revolutionary moments of self-giving and love to others.
Final Preparation in the Garden: Jesus finished the meal and invited disciples voluntarily to follow him to the Garden of Gethsemane. He knew it was only a short time before the Romans and the Temple police would find him and begin to punish him for defiance for God and God’s people. He was aware that he would be shortly betrayed by Judas, and Jesus sought some alone time in solitude with Abba God and asked a few disciples to stand nearby in prayer with him. Anyone standing close to death would feel the challenges that Jesus had that evening. Luke tells that he sweat drops of blood. Did these drops remind him of sharing the cup of his blood with disciples earlier? Would God’s vision of peace-making, nonviolence, bread empowerment around the inclusive table, his affirmation there are no divisions between God’s beloved children and that there is kinship with all life? Would they survive beyond his brutal death? Or did they remind of the blood sacrifices of the countless animals at the Temple? Would he be crucified and dead by the time that paschal lambs were slain for the Passover meals later in the day?
If Jesus is like most of us, he would find his mind adrift with these questions and the thoughts what was impending in an hour or just a few hours: humiliation, raped of his clothes, flogged nearly to death, mocked and abandoned, alone. In the moments of doubts and pain, he surrendered to God with his whole heart, and heart to heart met God in love and profound emotional suffering. As he tried to find his centeredness in Abba God, the noise of marching soldiers surrounding the garden to apprehend him, the ensuing clamor to arrest him broke his concentration. He would try to prevent any violence….
These are four window glimpses into Jesus the last few days of his life. He disturbed the world in Jerusalem with his love of God and God’s disturbing message. He would be turned over to Pilate by the Temple priests with the charges: “He perverted the nation. He was blasphemer. Jesus of Nazareth rebelled against the power and might of the Roman Empire. “
Jesus of Nazareth died as a no-body in a distant province of the Empire. But we know that God intended to disrupt the whole world on Easter Sunday when God acted up against all human sin and violence throughout all time! These are a few thoughts for us to think about as we enter the passion of Christ this week.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Jesus intends to literally make an ass of Pilate and Rome.  He choreographs his own dramatic and symbolic entrance into Jerusalem.  He adopts some of the Roman trappings but queers them or rather reframes them in symbolic counter challenges.   His entrance into Jerusalem is to remind the Jews of their religious history in which God enters the holy city to serve, not dominate. He chooses an ass, not a war horse in which Pilate rode into the city.  He uses dramatic parody of the Roman triumphant procession to point out to his disciples and the people. Matthew remembers the line from the prophet Zechariah: “Tell the daughter of Zion, your king is coming on an ass,”  (9:9).  The rest verse states that your king comes triumphant and victorious, and humble riding an ass.

Jesus is recognized as a king, or more likely anti-king.  He is teaching humility, non-violence, and peace-making, not conquest and domination. God’s community does not consist by military domination but is constituted by a new a kinship as children of God—not be wealth, prestige, gender, or ethnicity.  It is constituted by God as Abba, parent in love with all and equally.

Jesus lives what he teaches—as meek and lowly in heart.  He identifies with the suffering poor, the throw-away people, the powerless and humiliated—those crushed by military Empire of Rome.  He parodies Rome and Pilate with God’s empire whose kinship comes from love and service and sharing of goods together.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jesus’ meals were dangerous. There were no hierarchies at table, no one in charge or in power. There were only those who voluntarily served others, gladly washed the feet of their companions, who cheerfully assisted folks at table to heal from the years of religious abuse and oppression. Jesus encouraged them to dream a future with hope, with God with resources and the abundance of food created by the companions of the bread and the cup.  Our moments at table undo our ordinary patterns and behaviors.

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

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

One of the ways I look at our communion lines is to remember how in our cities the poor line up for distribution of food.  We, on Sunday, line up for an unconditional handout of grace, forgiveness, and love. We are all poor in need of God’s abundant grace.  We should be so undone by God’s love for us as to break our self-centeredness for the revolutionary moments of self-giving and love to others.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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