Live the Resurrection! Don't Wait for It!

After preaching the following sermon I thought it should be more pointed: Resurrection today could be called "wokeness." For Romans chapter six to speak to us today, we must say: We have died with MLK, with all who have been lynched, with George Floyd and all who have been executed without trial by the police. We rise with them by being “woke.” We can't understand resurrection without "dying" to racial injustice. 

To translate or paraphrase the text, Romans 6:1-13, which appears below within the sermon, I had to work through chapters 3-8 with Greek, the NRSV, the Message, and the Jesus Seminar's Scholars' Version. I struggled with what Paul meant by sin and grace and justification, what Bonhoeffer and Barth meant by "religion," and what Tillich meant by "acceptance." 

New life for Paul is definitely "wokeness" in today's vernacular. 

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For all the 5 years I have preached here I have been writing my book, a memoir that became an entire autobiography of more than 500 pages. 

As I wrote I came to realize that I was writing not just my story but the story of the mainline prot churches to which I gave myself during my life.

Also it is the story of national and world affairs during the time of my life, from WWII to Vietnam, Watergate, through the cultural wars of civil rights for POCs, abortion rights and the rights of gays and lesbians and now transgender persons.

I thought the book was about me and that the last chapter would be the one about what I now believe, but I was wrong.

The last chapter is what happened in the church and the world and how in last few years we have learned that we did not understand who we were and are; how much we did not understand, and how fragile the church and the Christian faith have been. 

We didn’t understand our nation, or what killing native Americans, and what racism and slavery had done to our country and even to you and me in the 21st century. 

We didn’t know how delicate our democracy was and is.

Some of us now speak of being “woke” to these realities and truths, and hope that we are done with fake news and false narratives. 

Being “woke” is a way of talking about resurrection.

“Sleepers, Awake” could be my call to resurrection today.

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I re-wrote in my memoir last month about my becoming Christian in 1966. 

I was thinking about how strongly I was affected then by the teachings and death of Jesus.

But I don’t remember thinking much then about the resurrection of Jesus. 

Now I realize that my strong feelings of being deeply renewed in my own life was perhaps the intended purpose and meaning of the resurrection stories. 

In other words, our emotional experience of faith has something to do with resurrection itself.



When I was first reading the gospels 55 years ago, I was also reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian who thought Hitler was destroying both Germany and Christianity, who joined a plot to kill Hitler, and who was imprisoned and executed for his opposition to the Nazis.

Bonhoeffer wrote in prison: “To live in the light of the resurrection – that is the meaning of Easter.” [LandP, p. 207] 

Sharing in the resurrection of Jesus wasn’t about life after death, which is how we usually think of resurrection.

Rising from the dead was not about life after death, but about new life now. 

New life can rise from immersion in Jesus’ teachings and the stories of his life and death, so that I didn’t have to think about the resurrection of Jesus; I was experiencing it for myself. 

This I think is the meaning of being born “again,” or born “anew,” or born “from above” in the Gospel of John.

“Unless you are born again you cannot see the Kingdom of God,” John says.

Bonhoeffer would say with John, “If you live in the light of the resurrection, you can see and participate in the Kingdom of God.

Paul was writing about this experience of resurrection long before John wrote about being born again. 

[read religionless text of Romans 6] 

So how do we end our bad behavior and guilt?

Should we continue to live as before so that we can experience acceptance again?

That would be ridiculous! How can we who have “died” to the seductive power of corruption continue to live as if we were still in its grasp?

Or do you not get it that we who were baptized as a way of identifying with Jesus, were symbolically immersed into his death?

When we went under the water, we left the old ways behind; and when we came up out of the water, we entered into a new life in a new world!

If we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in rising to a new kind of life like his.

Our old self was crucified with him, so that we would be free of the demands of our old life! 

Christ has been raised to new life and is not going to die again; death no longer has any power over him.

We, too, have been raised to new life so that the old ways of living will no longer rule us.

He died to end hate and hurt, to live for love and good.

So you also must think of yourselves as dead to hating and hurting yourselves and others, and alive to love. 

Therefore, do not let the seductive powers of controlling behaviors lead you to submit to worldly desires.

Don’t let any part of your body or mind be an instrument for doing wrong, but make yourself an instrument of justice as one who has been brought from death to life. 

Treating others badly will no longer be your style of relating to others, not because you ignore the rules, but because you will know deep inside that you are acceptable and have been and are accepted.

This is a paraphrase and translation. I have expanded words like “sin” and “grace” to make them more understandable to us moderns.



And likewise we read in 2nd Corinthians 5:17: “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation:  everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!”

Paul speaks often of being “in Christ” which means to participate in his death and risen life. 

Before we can speak of resurrection, we have to speak of death.

Studying Romans 6 helped me understand the meaning of the slogan, “Christ died for our sins.”

This means nothing magical or supernatural, as in a trade with the devil, or as if God made a sacrifice to pay a debt of sins that we have run up.

Those are metaphors about old Hebrew practices of blood sacrifice and scapegoats which I read to you from Leviticus some months ago.

Instead, let us say that Jesus died in solidarity with all others who suffered and were killed by the Romans and other Empires.

Someone said about Bonhoeffer what was true of Jesus: Hitler could only kill Bonhoeffer once; No more could be done to him. 

Nothing could stop his teachings or end the stories of the friendship and love others experienced from him.

The Romans could kill Jesus only once, but not his words or the memories of him.

Resurrection is a kind of resistance by God and those who proclaim it against Rome and all empires like it.

We can say that Christ died because of our sins, as if our sins of rejection and hate and omission killed him.

His death in itself does nothing for our sins which are PAST; Forgiveness of sins is about cancelling the past  so that we can live into the future,

If we forgive others we allow them to rise from their past which is like a living death to them.

Resurrection is how we live from here on.



We experience those who have died as present to us, and so we tell stories about how we experience their presence,

The more powerfully we are affected by the loved one who has died, the stronger the sense that they are not gone from us forever.

Resurrection has become the symbol for the possibility of our transformation, in this life as well as afterward.

Before the war Bonhoeffer had written that we don’t say the words of the creed because we believe them; we believe them because we say them. 

I think this needs explanation: Because Christian faith may be understood as responding to what is perceived or identified as a call from Christ, it is only necessary for the one called to respond by saying “I believe.” 

I see that when I came to faith many years ago, I declared not exactly what I believed, but I was declaring that I believed, which became real and true by speaking it and by repeating it. 

Bonhoeffer also said: “No one wants to know about your faith or unbelief, your orders are to perform the act of obedience on the spot. Then you will find yourself in the situation where faith becomes possible and where faith exists in the true sense of the word.”

For Bonhoeffer this became ultimately true when he was martyred for his participation in a political action of revolt against Hitler as an act of Christian faith. 

When I was born in May, 1944, Bonhoeffer was in prison writing words that should concern us on Easter Sunday, 2021.

In prison he was thinking about the Christian faith and the Christian churches and how they had failed to prevent or stop Hitler and the rise of nazism.

So he said: the churches and the old ideas about God and the gospels  had become corrupted by becoming “religious.” 

What did he mean?

When trust in the God of Jesus becomes written beliefs, and when anything other than what the church teaches is considered “heresy,” and rules replace “good news,” then we are looking at “religion,” not faith. 

Commitment to following Jesus had become commitment to churches and leaders, and to one way of interpreting the Bible, with rules and rituals that only touched the surface of life and not its depths or heights.

When religion becomes just a part of life, one commitment among many,  when the Gospel doesn’t apply to the rich and powerful, then Christianity has failed, and we need, as Bonhoeffer said, a “religionless Christianity.” 

A religionless Christianity he said would require a new language and new ways of being church more honest to Jesus and to God and to each other.

It was in reading Bonhoeffer again and thinking over my entire life in the church, and being invited to preach here, on Easter Sunday, that I learned something new about the meaning of resurrection, not just what it means in the abstract, as a word or a concept, or a story from the Bible, or something we are supposed to believe.

What Bonhoeffer taught, and what some others had thought before and after him was this: What we believe or say we believe when we recite the creed, doesn’t matter.

Faith isn’t about believing anything. Being a Christian should be about rising to new life.

How do we do that? By walking away from what we thought was important and taking Jesus seriously and simply as a way to live, in community, marked by love.

This is the resurrection. We should live the resurrection, not wait for it.

On a personal level we will give up:

Wanting things, thinking they will make us happy.

Wanting success or power to control other people.

Manipulating or even paying others to do or not do what we want.

Wanting other people to live the way we want them to.

Giving in to the desire to argue or strike back at those we think have wronged us.

Ignoring those around us, even those we love, because we don’t want to be involved.

On a public level it’s political because Jesus’ death was political.

How we live together and treat each other are the business of both church and state.

It’s a bit like the show Law and Order, the Church should teach how to live, and the state should make it possible for us to live together, with equal justice, under law.

Having some Irish roots, I remind you that one of the meanings of “rise” is to rise up in solidarity against oppressors. In Ireland that is called “a rising.”

Now I ask you to rise, to rise up, to say together some semblance of what we believe, but mostly to declare that you believe – by dying to racism.

"Into the Words" or, How Words Become Symbols, How Jesus became Christ, and Why We Like Happy Endings

 John 1:1-5, 9-13, 16-18

Last week I watched the film of the Broadway musical, Into the Woods. It is a web of four fairy tales, Little Red Riding Hood, Jack and the Beanstalk, Cinderella, and Rapunzel, all woven together to present eternal lessons for life.

The phrase “into the woods” is a metaphor for living life. To go into the woods is to take on the risks of living. The song, No One Is Alone, tells us,

"

"Sometimes people leave you halfway through the wood.

Do not let it grieve you, no one leaves for good.

You are not alone. No one is alone.

Though it's fearful, though it's deep, though it's dark and though you may lose the path,

though you may encounter wolves, you can't just act, you have to listen you have to think.

Into the woods - you have to grope, but that's the way you learn to cope.

Into the woods to find there's hope of getting through the journey."

We are going on a journey “into the words,” or rather into the Word from the Gospel of John.

In 1998 I became Executive Presbyter and Stated Clerk of Great Rivers Presbytery in Peoria IL. I was responsible to 20,000 Presbyterians in 120 congregations. It was a great position and honor for me. When the previous executive left, so did the associate executive and the administrative assistant. All that remained was the bookkeeper. A volunteer served as receptionist. I needed to hire an Administrative Assistant first thing. We interviewed six women and one man, and I was impressed with Barb Hartwig.

When I asked how she would plan for a presbytery meeting, she gave us a big smile and a rundown of the dozens of questions, tasks, and people that would be needed. 

She wasn’t even a Presbyterian; she was hard-shell fundamentalist baptist. We would have disagreed about everything religious, but I saw in her what I wanted in an assistant. No one else did. She was extremely overweight and some on the search committee thought her unattractive. I had to argue with my search committee about our choice. I argued that like Samuel choosing David, it was a case of looking not at appearances but upon the heart. They gave in to me because I was the new leader.

She was a competent and creative assistant, who had a Swiss flag on her desk, which she declared to be neutral territory concerning religion and politics. I learned last week that Barb died last year.

This led me to remember an incident a year or so after we hired her.

The six of us who were by then working for the presbyery scheduled a staff retreat. To move the conversation to deeper level than day to day work, I used an exercise in guided imagery. I asked:

“If you entered an elevator in a tall building, and discovered that Jesus was in that                                           elevator, and you knew that you would be with him there, alone, for several long                                             minutes, what would you ask him or say to him?”

Several people wanted to know from Jesus what some of his teachings meant, or what he would think of current day issues. Barb was different. She said she would be overwhelmed by the glory of his divinity, and in tears, she told us that she would kneel before him and ask him for forgiveness, and what he wanted her to do.

The rest of us were stunned. This was not the way most Presbyterians would respond. We are called the “frozen chosen” sometimes, you know. So we talked about what Jesus meant to us and the effect he had on us in more personal and profound ways than we would have if Barb had not been there.

She moved the conversation from Jesus the teacher and leader to Jesus, the Son of God and Savior of the World. She moved us from the historical Jesus to the Christ.

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When I left Peoria in 2001, I left the churches and went to work for the Westar Institute, home of the Jesus Seminar, the world’s center for the study of the historical Jesus. When I went to Westar the scholars were engaged in a Paul Seminar and an Acts Seminar,  Later there was a God Seminar, and a Christianity Seminar, which this year begins anew as the “Christ Seminar.” These studies focus on the third and fourth centuries, up to the time of Constantine when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire in 381 C.E.  

So now Westar may take Barb seriously in asking when and how did Jesus as a human become “Christ?” Barb would have said that Jesus was always Christ, the Son of God, because that is what the Gospel of John says: He was in the beginning with God. So, what do we see in Jesus and what does he mean to us? What does it mean to call Jesus “Christ?”

We begin with a man, the historical Jesus, and the gospels tell stories that make claims about his mystical abilities to heal, to cast out demons, to bring the dead to life, to multiply loaves, and turn water into wine. The stories tell how he is chosen and called by God to bring in the rule of God on earth. 

This gets at the basic meaning of naming him Messiah or Christ. In a recent sermon here about Leviticus I spoke of the Messiah as one who is chosen or appointed by God, liturgically anointed in a ceremony. A horn or cup of blessed, scented olive oil was poured over the head of the leader who would be a spokesperson or representative of God. It was a kind of ordination and installation service such as we have, but we “lay on hands” rather than pour oil. That would be too messy.

Ancient Israel had priests and prophets and kings, all of whom were anointed. They were the anointed ones, or messiahs. After the rule of Zedikiah, the last king of Judah, ended in 586 BC people hoped for a new king, a special Messiah to come and restore Israel to its presumed greatness. “Make Israel Great Again” could have been their slogan.

Messiah is a Hebrew word. In Greek the word is “Christ.” I used to discourage people from using the word Christ as if it were Jesus’ last name. In the Bible it is mostly used as a title, as in “Christ Jesus,” of “Jesus, the Christ.” After thinking about Barb, I am not so sure. The title Christ is a kind of name and so many people speak not of Jesus, but of Christ. Christ has become his name.

But Christ is not only a title or a name. What has happened is that the stories, the words of the stories about him have turned the man Jesus into the Son of God – not a son of a god, but the Son of the One God. The writer of the gospel of John has transformed these words into “the Word,” so that Jesus is like a word spoken by God, and becomes the Word of God. Jesus is now the message of God, the revelation or revealing of God, so that we finally can know God, in knowing Jesus.

But we “know” Jesus not merely by following him as in the first three Gospels, or through historical or linguistic study as scholars do, but through a new way of seeing and thinking about Jesus, so that now we have a present, mystical relationship with him. Jesus has become a man who embodies the divine or supernatural, who continues to exist as a spirit, who can still speak to us, walk among us, and act among us. 

In this alchemical process of using mere words to turn a man into God, Jesus became and becomes a symbol as “the Christ.” A symbol is an image containing meanings beyond the actual thing or person depicted or named. A symbol may be a person, an act, a place, a thing, a fictional story, or an historical event. When we invest any of these images with profound and intense meaning, they become symbols, pointing beyond themselves. Because it is we who endow them or clothe them with meaning, we can say that we participate in those symbols and have a relationship with them. That is what gives them power and strengthens it.

Symbols, metaphors, and myths are the language of faith. The metaphor is our naming of one thing as if it is another thing. The bread as the body of Christ; the congregation as the body of Christ. Flowing water as life. The cross as the form of human life and death. These are powerful metaphors.

Myth is a fiction that carries a truth. That Jesus was baptized was an historical event. That the HS appeared as a dove makes the event a myth. It is an enhancement of the story that makes it a Christ event, not merely about Jesus the man.

Today we would say Christ is a “meme,” an idea or image with its own meanings, which is imitated and repeated. The meme is understood instantly and spread from person to person within the culture. In many ways all our memes together make up the totality of our culture.

In the gospel of John, and in the faith of Barb, Jesus is spiritualized and is more God than human. To spiritualize something or someone is to make them less material or physical but transcendent, or above and beyond what is real as we normally understand it. I used to think that was a bad thing, because it undermines the human, historical Jesus, but because of Barb I willing to reconsider it. 

As the mystical, eternal Christ, he becomes God personified, the Spirit of God in flesh among us, not only to glorify him, but to help us share in his divinity. To all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God. This is not a claim made by John, it is a description of how symbols and myths work. By believing, by entering the symbol and story, we experience the power that it carries.

There are other ways to describe the revealing of God in Jesus. The gospel of Mark tells how this happened in the baptism of the adult Jesus, so that it is as if he was adopted by God. The gospels of Luke and Matthew tell of how the Spirit of God enters Mary and fathers Jesus literally. The gospel of Matthew goes further and tells of the visit of the wise men to the infant Jesus on the twelfth day of Christmas. The wise men symbolize the “Epiphany,” or “manifestation,” or “making known” of God’s new work in the world, because representatives of the world outside the stable and beyond Israel  give him recognition as they would a king. Paul comes right out and says that Jesus was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be Son of God with power... by resurrection from the dead. (Romans 1:3-4). This made the human, historical Jesus nearly irrelevant to him.

What I have said about symbols is mostly from Paul Tillich. Tillich [in Dynamics of Faith] says another important thing about the symbols of faith. A sentence in one of his books has propelled my life in the church: A myth which is understood as a myth..., can be called a "broken myth.” In other words, once we understand what myth is and that a story is a myth, that story no longer works naturally or easily. The symbols are drained of their power.

Philosophers have called this feature of the last two centuries “the disenchantment of the world.” We used to see the world easily as magical or enchanted, a spirit world. Our world is disenchanted because reason and science are the new faith, the current myth of the age. Science seeks to understand the natural world. Those who believe that everything is ultimately understandable, live wholly within the myth of science and with the symbols of a scientific world.

The scientific world has eclipsed the ancient Biblical worldview. One great problem for the churches today is that day by day the Bible is becomes an older and more difficult to understand book. But the old words and stories can still invoke God, as they did for Barb. Life with God grows within the language of God, which are symbols myths, and not literal things or events. Life is best when it is rich in symbolism, rich in metaphor, rich in poetry, and even rich in the myth of the faith. Metaphor, not money, makes the world go 'round.

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A cartoon shows a Mom putting her child to bed. She holds a book and says, “I can’t protect you from everything, but I can read you stories that make you believe I can protect you from everything.” This is the function both of fairy tales and many Biblical stories.

*I conclude that we have to tell ourselves that our stories will end “happily ever after” because if we did not, we would despair. Yet we know that all stories don’t end happily. But because all stories don’t end unhappily, we do not despair, but we go on, into the woods, on our journeys, with hope that our story will end well. In Christian terms, life is symbolized by the cross, but not only the cross. Life ends in death, but life is not only death, it is life and all the joy and pain that it gives and requires. 

Amen.

Body and Soul; Spirit and Heart

Luke 1:26-55

This is an important text.

Protestants have not paid it much attention.

We put Mary in the nativity scene each year, 

and we acknowledge her sorrow when Jesus was crucified,

but other than that we have little use for the mother of Jesus.

Catholics on the other hand make a big deal of Mary.

She fills the need for a feminine side to God in a church that is in many ways

sadly masculine and even misogynistic. 

I have long struggled with the meaning of the spirit, spirituality, the soul, 

and even the use of “heart” in scripture and in our common use of it.

So much so that I wrote an article on spirit and soul 

that will be published next year in a little Biblical magazine.

My concern is that these words are too often used 

without explanation or definition. 

We don’t know what another person means when they use these words, 

so we have to look closely at them.

Because of my interest, the text of the Magnificat jumped off the page for me, 

        because here are the words “soul,” “spirit,” and “heart” in one text!

“My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.”

Later Mary says that 

“God has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.”

More about that later.

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About five years ago I preached here on the meaning of “spirit.” 

I had read and concluded that spirit is what transpires between us.

We cannot see spirit because it is our interactions with each other,

our exchange of words and looks, and gestures.

Because God is the word we use for being itself, 

spirit is the energy and creative energy that we know in our living.  

So God is Spirit and God is love, which is the most powerful of emotions and

thoughts and actions that we exchange with and between each other.  

I quoted from Mister Rogers who said, 

“If you could only sense how important you are 

to the lives of those you meet....

  There is something of yourself that you leave at every meeting 

with another person.

  And that person gives a part of what you gave to them to others.” 

Exactly.

So Spirit becomes a huge web of thought and feeling and doing 

that can catch on in society like a virus,

and can become a dominant thought or feeling of the whole culture.

In the ‘80's I was concerned that the popular  “spirituality” was mostly about the personal self

and was opposed to the great Biblical concern for social justice. 

I figured spirituality had to be about seeking justice in society 

as much as it might have to do with such practices as 

personal prayer and meditation. 

Howard Rice, a Presbyterian professor, in his book, Reformed Spirituality said: 

“Spirituality is the pattern by which we shape our lives 

in response to our experience of God 

as a very real presence in and around us.” 

Another writer [Gordon Wakefield] says that“spiritual” describes

“those attitudes, beliefs and practices 

which animate people’s lives....” 

Thus pattern and these attitudes are the values by which I define God.

For me  “Spirituality” is the experience of 

living in the moment of human interactions 

that are bristling with virtues and values, 

tempered by human sensibilities. 

In our spiritualities we feed our spirits so that we understand 

our experiences and accomplishments as reflecting, exhibiting, flaunting, 

                or affirming who we see ourselves to be.

But we need to acknowledge that spirit isn’t always positive or good.

Sometimes it is negative energy.

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Soul is a confusing word.

We often use spirit and soul interchangeably. 

We use soul to describe our essence, which we might call also our life spirit.

We commonly speak of soul as a ghost-like gift of God at birth 

that returns to God at death. 

The soul is often described as no more than that part of ourselves 

believed to survive bodily death. 

But to the Jews and to Jesus in his time,

“Soul” was simply the “life” of the living.

Soul is not something we have, but something we are.

I conclude that spirituality is how we name 

the religious experience or religious interpretation of our lives — 

of our souls.

So if you say “I believe in God or Jesus as the Christ,”

that is the beginning of your spirituality and your identity as a person. 

Soul is the inner core of our identity.

Soul is our distinct personality; it is how we would identify our individuality.

You might say “I am a Christian. I am a child of good or not so good parents,

I am a father or mother who tried to do well, I am or was poor or rich, 

Or these good and terrible things happened in my life.”

Spirit then is our active individuality as seen and experienced by others.

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We also speak of “heart” as life and as a metaphor for our feeling alive

and for all the feelings of being alive.

Often heart is described as the seat of the will. 

Will is an odd word. Mostly we speak of writing a will, which is 

the directions of what we want done with our stuff after we die.

A “living will” is what we do and don’t want done to us medically 

when our end is near.

So the human will is our intention to do something, our determination, 

our conviction. 

To some extent it is our character and our faith.

The will is an intersection of body, mind, soul, spirit, and heart.

Recently I read the memoir of a neurosurgeon, James Doty, 

entitled, Into the Magic Shop. 

He calls the brain, “the magic shop.”

I was surprised to read that in fact 

the heart directs the feeling functions of the brain.

I learned about the vagus nerve, a bundle of separate nerves, or fibers that

connect the brain with the various body systems, like electrical wires.

They do carry tiny electrical pulses.

I never knew what a nerve was and I had never heard of the Vagus Nerve.

Through these nerves the heart, lung, stomach and of course the sex organs

communicate to the brain — and in greater number 

than the brain communicates to those organs and systems.

I have a diagram of these connections; you can find one online. 

The shocker is that the heart and the lungs, the stomach and the bowels and gonads 

        can be said to “think” on their own and to “speak” to the brain. 

The brain then speaks to them, giving instructions to them, 

mostly to speed up [sympathetic] or settle down [parasympathetic], 

based on the data received through our senses. 

These internal body and mind communications are our life! 

They are well described as body and soul, and heart and soul,

just as the love songs by those names tell us.

Mary speaks of "the thoughts of our hearts."

We speak of acting on "gut instinct" and letting our sex organs direct us.

Can you see how I needed to understand these common words?

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The Magnificat is very physical and bodily 

because it is about Mary’s pregnancy.

She is a young, unmarried girl, promised to a man named Joseph.

It would have been a scandal in Nazareth 

if they had engaged in intercourse before marriage, 

and so she is called a virgin, 

or at least the word used here is for “young girl,” which can mean virgin.

The story of Mary and Joseph, and the Holy Spirit 

are told to answer questions like: 

“How did Jesus become the Son of God?”

and “How did Jesus become the Messiah?

A long, boring genealogy is provided to show that Joseph 

is descended from King David, which adds complications to the story.

The genealogy shows that Mary is also descended from David, 

just to cover all the bases.

Several important points are made in this story:

Mary, a poor, young pregnant girl engaged to marry a common carpenter

is chosen by God to become the means by which God 

enters the world physically.

She is said to be proud and humbled all at once.

In a world run by men, and by men with total power over others, 

Mary is singled out and lifted up.

This isn’t a story about success at the top!

This is about elevation of the lowly, of those who have nothing except God. [anawim]

It is helpful to think, with a number of scholars, that the gospel of Luke 

was written by a woman, or by a man using a source written by a woman.

It is helpful to see that this hymn or song is in fact borrowed 

from several psalms in the Hebrew scriptures and reads like a psalm.

She speaks of how God has done great things for her, as many psalms do.

But then it shifts into a direction which prefigures great trouble in the entire gospel story.

It is “good trouble,” as Congressman John Lewis described standing up to oppression.

Few good, middle-class protestants have chosen to see what is here.

“God has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.

  God has brought down the powerful from their thrones,

and lifted up the lowly;

  God has filled the hungry with good things,

and sent the rich away empty.”

I am not kidding. Thousands of preachers have totally ignored the Magnificat, 

        and thousands more have preached from it without commenting on verses 51-53. 

Jesus didn’t come for the comfortable.

Jesus is for the lowly, like his Mother.

From his cross, he tried to bring down the powerful from their thrones.

If you have nothing, you will see this as ultimate integrity.

If you are comfortable God enlists you in the tasks

of filling the hungry with good things and sending the rich away empty.

----------------

But there is a big problem here: Gabriel is given to say,

“He will be called great and the Lord God will give to him 

        the throne of his ancestor David..., of his kingdom there will be no end.”

This is how the author of Luke introduces the idea of “Messiah,” 

a Hebrew word. The Greek word is Christ.

It has a basic meaning of anointed or chosen, 

consecrated to perform special tasks or take on special roles for God. 

Priests and prophets are anointed, not just kings.

Now we know that the church in its earliest history took the wrong road.

We can see that many of our biggest problems today 

        are "baked into" the Bible and our religion.

We made Christ, who opposed kingly rule and violence, a king with armies.

In Luke we see that John the Baptist is given the role of prophet,

while Jesus is intended to fill the Davidic idea of Messiah.

But Jesus as teacher and as example is a prophet;

he is king only by the rule of love, not of might.

So the gospel begins in a good place with Mary and her Magnificat,

but even there quickly turns to the idea that Christ will become a caesar. 

The image of Jesus as a king means he will use force: 

“The zeal of the lord of hosts will do this,” Mary says.

This is the idea of “redemptive violence” 

built into this psalm as if God will solve our problems with ultimate violence.

The opposite idea is prophetic realism, 

which says that violence never works, never achieves the aims it seeks. 

Rather wisdom and expertise should rule. 

Both divinely sanctioned violence and the call to nonviolence 

        are present and in conflict within the Bible.

These are two conflicting ideas in our two political parties today

directly descended from the Hebrews, the Romans, and the Greeks,

2,000 and 2,500 years ago.

A catholic Jesus scholar friend of mine says that 

the Magnificat is “political dynamite” 

because it speaks of oppression will bring justice. 

Justice is a legal and political term, it is controversial: 

whose justice do we want? For whom? And on what principles?

Should government protect the rights of religious groups to worship 

or seek to protect worshipers in a pandemic by limiting their worship? 

This is a political question today that is a direct descendant 

of the justice issues of 2000 years ago.

But we are given the law as understood in the great commandments:

“You shall love the Lord your God 

with all your heart and with all your soul 

and with all your strength and with all your mind, 

  and [you shall love] your neighbor as yourself.”

Love and Politics

Love usually seems so soft and sentimental; even saccharine. We usually attribute the worst of behavior to politics. Love as risking ourselves or surrendering something of ourselves for another seems so far away from the politics of April, 2020.

And foreign aid has always seemed a cold kind of caring, usually with international political ends attached. Wars to those of us in the U.S. seem far away, except to the few, usually from lower social and economic brackets, who have lost someone in one of those wars. Even then, mostly we conclude that the war must have been right and good for our loved one to have died in it.

So I am shocked to read an obscure little sermon given by Paul Tillich at a prayer meeting at Riverside Church in New York City, in 1940. (Translated and shared by Tim Mize of the Paul Tillich discussion group on Facebook) Tillich speaks of how the European war – in which the U.S. was not yet participating – following a Great Depression, made everyone more conscious of death. (It was probably the case that not “everyone” was so moved.) He says this reminds us how death “not only affects our personal lives, it also affects our securities, our institutions, our tradition, our future, our preferred values and our faith.”

He speaks of refugees as “symbols of human existence, as symbols of our finiteness and transitoriness. But also consider them as symbols of love, which is stronger than death. You have already done this by receiving them into your country and giving them every possible help. You have rendered them this service as an expression of love and hope.” He pointedly adds that “It is love that defeats death, not help without love. Where help is given without love, it only creates more hardship.” Help would be mere charity, something extra given so that the giver will feel less sadness and guilt.

Tillich’s words made me see that offerings like One Great Hour of Sharing, begun in 1948 as an ecumenical response to the refugee, hunger, and rebuilding needs in Europe, and great foreign policy programs like the Marshall Plan at the same time were not entirely of practical motivation with hopes of return, but powerful expressions of love for peoples of all nationalities, races, and religions, allies and former enemies. I know that I preached this, but I think I understand it more deeply now. Government programs and private giving are expressions of love, or they are not.

I promote love and other high values as the sign and presence of what we call God. (If God is love, then love is God!) Love seems so much smaller and further from us today. This should bother religious believers, for it means that God is far from us today.

I think of our immigration policies, driven not by concern or love, or a desire to rescue others from death, but by fears of difference, unknowns, and loss of security and privileges. Likewise our foreign policies towards Central and South America, China, and now even Europe, are driven by a strange need to separate ourselves from others rather than uniting with them. Love and God are far from us.

We have politicians who speak of love, who can speak lovingly, who can lead us in directions of love. Oddly, we don’t want to listen to them or elect them. If we do not begin listening for love and responding to it, then death will rule us like darkness on a moonless night.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here is the ending of Paul Tillich’s sermon:

Love is stronger than death, even in our days when death has gained a power over humanity as never before: death in the form of war, death in the form of mass suggestion, death in the form of persecution and abuse, death in the form of personal despair, hunger and loss of life. The people with whom you form a church before God in this hour carry in their souls and often also in their bodies traces of death, which they will never completely lose. Receive them into your community as a symbol of death, which is a constant element of all life. 

Receive them as people whose fate should remind you of something, which in self-satisfied affluence is often forgotten: that the end is always present, that we must learn to endure the majestic but terrible image of death. And death not only affects our personal lives, it also affects our securities, our institutions, our tradition, our future, our preferred values and our faith. 

Among these refugees are some who have had to suffer death in this way many times. They were driven from country to country, from nation to nation, from language to language. Think of them as symbols of human existence, as symbols of our finiteness and transitoriness. But also consider them as symbols of love, which is stronger than death. You have already done this by receiving them into your country and giving them every possible help. You have rendered them this service as an expression of love and hope. They thank you for it and -- whether you believe it or not, I know it -- they thank you for more than the actual help, however necessary it also was. It is love that defeats death, not help without love. Where help is given without love, it only creates more hardship.

The world is under the rule of death. To receive these refugees, to receive them in the name and power of love, is to raise a sign of that which is stronger than death. It means that separation and isolation, which inevitably lead to death, are defeated. It testifies to a new beginning in the ashes of a burning world. It testifies to the rare victory over death that is possible in our time. It testifies that love is stronger than death. 

The Rule of Law -- A Political Sermon (03/01/20)

SCRIPTURE:

Around the year 586 before Jesus
the Babylonians defeated the ancient Israelites
and destroyed the temple in Jerusalem.
About 20,000 people there, 1/4 of the population including many leaders,
were exiled to Babylon over a period of about ten years.
While in Babylon (near present day Baghdad)
these Jews wrote much of their history and laws.

About 50 years later the Persian king Cyrus conquered Babylon
and released the Jews from their captivity.
Ezra, a leader of those who returned,
launched a long and sometimes secret campaign to rebuild the temple.
The majority who remained had not worshiped God or followed the law
while the leaders had been in exile.
The story is that on their return Ezra organized the priests
and planned to read the law, most of the book of Deuteronomy to the people.

Selections from Nehemiah 8-13 (edited)

All the people gathered together into the square. 
The scribe Ezra brought the book of the law of Moses, 
which the Lord had given to Israel. 
The priest Ezra brought the law before the assembly, 
both men and women and all who could hear with understanding. 
He read from it facing the square from early morning until midday, 
in the presence of those who could understand; 
and the ears of all the people were attentive to the book of the law.... 

And the Levites helped the people to understand the law, 
while the people remained in their places. 
So they read from the book, from the law of God, with interpretation. 
They gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.

And Nehemiah, who was the governor, and Ezra the priest and scribe,
and the Levites who taught the people said to all of them, 
“This day is holy to the Lord your God; do not mourn or weep.” 
For all the people wept when they heard the words of the law. 

The people heard the law and pledged to adhere to the law of God,
and to observe and do all the commandments of the Lord our God
and his ordinances and his statutes. 

Then the leaders of Judah came up onto the wall, 
and there were trumpets and cymbals, harps, and lyres, and the singers sang.
The people offered great sacrifices that day and rejoiced, 
for God had made them rejoice with great joy; 
the women and children also rejoiced. [always a second thought]
The joy of Jerusalem was heard far away.

SERMON:

We in the churches have been told that the law of ancient Israel was a bad thing,
that there were too many of them
and that they diminished the lives of the people.
Jesus objected that requirements and obedience to laws
sometimes prevented people from helping those in need.
But here we have a story of the people who re-discovered the law
and found in it something of great importance that they had lost.

The great theologian Karl Barth, in the crisis in Germany at the end of WWI
said that the preacher must stand with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.
That is what the preacher must do today,
or find herself or himself totally irrelevant and unimportant and ultimately, faithless.

I was listening to the news on television and reading newspapers on my phone
a few weeks ago when I suddenly realized
that what has been happening in Washington DC
echoes a big story from the Hebrew Scriptures.
Words and actions by the president and the attorney general,
and support of their actions by Republican Senators
have been criticized for creating a crisis
by denying and opposing “the rule of law.”
The rule of law is the idea that all people and institutions,
including the rich and powerful, are accountable to fair and just laws
in a system of elected legislators to create laws,
an executive branch to administer those laws, and courts to oversee them.
This system is established by an accepted Constitution, for the good of society.
In such a system no one, even one in authority, is above the law.
This system is under threat and in crisis
when a president declares the right to do as he or she pleases,
ignores existing laws and norms,
and when a legislature and when courts allow the president to behave in such ways.

So listen to Deuteronomy beginning in Chapter 6 which outlines
the laws and the principles underlying the laws of ancient Israel.
You aren’t likely to read Deuteronomy, so I have done it for you.
Here I will give you a summary of what the people of Jerusalem
would have heard when the forgotten laws were read to them,
causing them to weep.

Now this is the great commandment—the statutes and the ordinances—
that the Lord your God teaches you to observe, 
so that it may go well with you, 
and so that you may multiply greatly 
in a land flowing with milk and honey, 
as the Lord, the God of your ancestors, has promised you.
Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. 
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, 
and with all your soul, and with all your might....

The next sentence tells us why this is important:
If we diligently observe this entire commandment 
before the Lord our God, as he has commanded us, 
we will be in the right.

This means that obeying the law puts us on the right side of God.
If we understand that God is not a person, not an object,
not the subject of anything,
but rather the spirit behind our highest human values,
then we see that our human American rule of law
is no different than ancient Israel’s rule by God’s law.

Ancient Israel and later ancient Rome
and tribes such as the Haudenosuanee (Iroquois) of New York
were the inventors of Constitutions,
modern representation and democracy, and the rule of law.
The law is good because it expresses the values
which manifest our idea and construct of what we call God.
Therefore to mess with the rule of law
is to undermine and threaten all that is holy and sacred
and is to be treated with awe for our lives to have meaning.

So the Israelite law begins with the command:
You shall not exalt yourselves.

So now, O Israel, what does the Lord your God require of you? 
Only to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways,
to serve the Lord your God [by obeying the law!]
with all your heart and with all your soul... 
for your own well-being.... 
For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, 
is not partial and takes no bribe, 
executes justice for the orphan and the widow, 
loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing. 
You shall also love the stranger, 
for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. 

Do you hear the issues of our present day
and our violation of these ancient laws?
All who have ears, hear today’s news in the book of Deuteronomy.

These are the statutes and ordinances that you must diligently observe:
There are laws on what foods to eat and which cannot be eaten.
This was the ancient way of bringing preventive health care
to the people.
There are detailed laws on giving tithes for the temple
and the government.
(This was early socialism, the novel idea
that we are not isolated individuals
with no no responsibility for our common life together,
that we should share the cost for all the things
that help us create and maintain communities,
our common basis for economic growth and social progress.)

Every seventh year you shall grant a remission or cancel all debts.
Economics has never been a science.
This shows an early understanding of how unregulated
buying and selling leads to economic inequality
which must be made right somehow.
Such cancellation of debt probably never happened as written here,
but there are numerous laws here to alleviate the poverty
of those who lost their lands and wealth to weather or oppression.

You shall appoint judges and officials throughout your tribes, 
in all your towns that the Lord your God is giving you, 
and they shall render just decisions for the people. 
You must not distort justice; you must not show partiality; 
and you must not accept bribes, 
for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and
subverts the cause of those who are in the right. 
Justice, and only justice, you shall pursue.... 

When you have come into the land
and have taken possession of it and settled in it, and you say, 
“I will set a king over me, like all the nations that are around me,” 
you may indeed set over you a king 
but you are not permitted to put a foreigner over you.... 
Even so, he must not acquire many horses for himself..., 
And he must not acquire many wives for himself, 
also silver and gold he must not acquire 
in great quantity for himself. 

There are laws forbidding all magic and superstitious nonsense
and con games.
This was the way they protected reason and science such as it was.

God continues to give laws against lies and for truth:
I will raise up a prophet; 
I will put my words in the mouth of the prophet, 
who shall speak to them everything that I command.... 
You may say to yourself, 
“How can we recognize a word that the Lord has not spoken?” 
If a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord 
but the thing does not take place or prove true, 
it is a word that the Lord has not spoken. 
The prophet has spoken it presumptuously; do not be frightened by it.

There are laws against crime and to protect the rights of the accused:

You shall establish three Cities of Refuge. (chapter 19) 
[In the case that] someone has killed another person unintentionally
when the two had not been at enmity before: 
(Suppose someone goes into the forest with another to cut wood, 
and when one of them swings the ax to cut down a tree, 
the head slips from the handle and strikes the other person
who then dies;) 
the killer may flee to one of these cities and live.... 

This law will sound familiar to many of you:
You must not move your neighbor’s boundary marker, 
set up by former generations, 
on the property that will be allotted to you 
in the land that the Lord your God is giving you to possess.

A single witness shall not suffice 
to convict a person of any crime or wrongdoing 
in connection with any offense that may be committed. 
Only on the evidence of two or three witnesses 
shall a charge be sustained. 
If a malicious witness comes forward to accuse someone of wrongdoing,
then both parties to the dispute shall appear before the Lord, 
before the priests and the judges who are in office in those days, 
and the judges shall make a thorough inquiry. 
If the witness is a false witness, having testified falsely against another,
then you shall do to the false witness 
just as the false witness had meant to do to the other. 

There are rules of Warfare, for treatment of captives, (chapter 20)
the Right of the Firstborn and rules for inheritance.
And this about neighbors:

You shall not watch your neighbor’s ox or sheep straying away 
and ignore them; you shall take them back to their owner. 
You shall do the same with a neighbor’s donkey; 
you shall do the same with a neighbor’s garment; 
and you shall do the same with anything else 
that your neighbor loses and you find. 
You may not withhold your help.
You shall not see your neighbor’s donkey or ox fallen on the road 
and ignore it; you shall help to lift it up.

When you build a house, you shall make a railing for your roof;
otherwise you might have guilt if anyone should fall from it.

There are laws concerning Sexual Relations, adultery, rape,
prostitution, loans and debts, marriage and divorce, kidnapping.
There are rules for the prevention of contagion!
There are laws for making loans and collecting on them.

You shall not withhold the wages of poor and needy laborers, 
whether other Israelites or aliens who reside in your land 
in one of your towns. 
You shall pay them their wages daily before sunset, 
because they are poor and their livelihood depends on them.

Parents shall not be put to death for their children, 
nor shall children be put to death for their parents; 
only for their own crimes may persons be put to death.

You shall not deprive a resident alien or an orphan of justice; 

When you reap your harvest in your field and forget a sheaf in the field,
you shall not go back to get it; 
it shall be left for the alien, the orphan, and the widow, 

Suppose two persons have a dispute and enter into litigation, and
the judges decide between them, declaring one to be in the right
and the other to be in the wrong. (Chapter 25)
If the one in the wrong deserves to be flogged, 
the judge shall make that person lie down 
and be beaten in his presence 
with the number of lashes proportionate to the offense. 
Forty lashes may be given but not more; 
if more lashes than these are given, 
your neighbor will be degraded in your sight.

You shall not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain.

You shall not have in your bag or in your house
two kinds of weights, large and small. 

You shall offer First Fruits and Tithes gratefully.

In conclusion, this is the book of Deuteronomy,
this is the ancient rule of law, much like our own,
               or rather ours is much like theirs because built upon it.
This suggests how I understand God, not as the giver of law,
but the creative power behind the law.
We must live by the rule of law,
even as we contest laws which we deem to be unfair or unjust
                because behind the law lies God.
We cannot live without the rule of law, which makes us human.
The alternative is unthinkable.

Overwhelmed and Happy from New Orleans and the Jazz Ed Network

Just to list all of the great groups I heard at the JEN (Jazz Education Network) conference in New Orleans is mind-boggling. One of the themes was women in jazz so I heard Sarah Coswell, and SAGE, the initials of a quartet of individually top-notch players. I heard impressive middle school kids from the Tucson Jazz Institute and from the Jane Addams Middle School in Seattle. I heard the Shake Em Up jazz band led by Marla Dixon (trumpet) with Chloe Feoranzo (clarinet), and the Bria Skonberg (trumpet) quartet with Roxy Coss on sax. She led the New York City Hot Jazz Camp I attended 2 years ago.

I heard the Brubeck Brothers who don't often play together in a fantastic concert honoring their father (100th anniversary of his birth). A surprising and delightful concert was given by Simon Rowe, formerly head of the Brubeck Institute, now director of the San Francisco Jazz Conservatory, He and his outstanding faculty (for this year) from the conservatory played Brubeck tunes -- Chad Lefkowitz is now my favorite tenor sax player, and Matt Wilson is my favorite drummer as well as a friend. An improvised chamber music group from Montreal led by Jean-Michel Pilc gave an interesting take on free jazz: a group that just plays without reference to any music, key, or plan. The festival ended as it began three years ago with the Preservation Hall Legacy Band, members of which are related to original Preservation Hall players -- My hero Louis Ford played clarinet beautifully again this time surprising us with a solo of Georgia Cabin by Sidney bechet, a tune I didn't know. Louis introduced Charlie Gabriel, helped up the steps to the stage to show us that he can swing and honk at 87.

Saturday I made my way to Frenchmen Street (northeast of the French Quarter beyond the Jazz Museum in the old Mint) where I visited The Spotted Cat, Bamboula’s, Snug Harbor, the Royal Hotel, D.B.A., and the Three Muses. I heard the Hot Club of New Orleans, G and The Swinging Gypsies (a fusion Django/pop group), Chance Bushman, who sings and tap dances leading the Ibervillionaires, and Marla again with the Shotgun jazz band, which revived In the Gloaming for me. So many great players and I have so little ability to praise them all adequately. All of these players can be heard on YouTube.

At the conference I heard inspiring presentations by scholars from around the world. A theme of “less is more” (concerning improvization) came through everything I heard. My friend and teacher Evan Christopher says on the one hand that a clarinet player can’t play too many notes, but also that the groove comes first from clapping and stepping. Street bands of people without musical training, playing two notes are the beginning of jazz. (I have heard such bands in New Orleans!) An analysis of Louis Armstrong’s solos reveals that he surprisingly played mostly 1-3-5's with few 7ths. Notes in the margins of Ellington’s scores say things like “Jazz is freedom of expression.” Pilc spoke of taking music off the paper and into life.

I want to think a lot more deeply about issues of race in America. In New Orleans I realized that race is more basically the history of slavery, our destruction of native cultures, reconstruction, Jim crow, segregation, up to and including Black Lives Matter as a be response to our systemic practice of policing and imprisonment, housing and other segregated practices. In the North I think Whites view Blacks without much awareness or understanding of the impact of the slavery tradition. I was struck by the renovated old bank and business buildings in NO. I was staying in an apartment building that had been a "homestead savings bank." Many hotels in the Central Business District had the names of such old institutions including "the cotton exchange." I realized that a person of color would not have been allowed in these places except to clean them. Today there is significant "race mixing" but with some omnipresent tension, ameliorated by black and white working well together for some, and by conscious expressions of respect by whites and blacks both to maintain peace and to make it. The presence of native street names and the preservation of memories of native tribes in rituals related to Mardi gras are reminders of how and why those people's are mostly gone. There is a good reason why our race problems are called “America’s original sin.”

Hope for and Participation in a Better World

December 15, 2019  Isaiah 2:2-4 and Mark 1:1-10

Isaiah presents to us a vision of what God wants for the world.
All the people of the world will come to God,
and Isaiah speaks of everyone coming to Jerusalem,
For if God had a house it seemed that it would be in Jerusalem.
Everyone will learn God’s ways
and God will arbitrate all disputes.
Because God will settle all disputes, and there will be justice for all,
there will be no need for war or the weapons of war.

John the Baptist twists the vision of Isaiah a bit.
Isaiah says God is going to bring all people together, in peace, in Jerusalem.
John the Baptist says that God is coming to judge the world
make war against evil and destroy all the hurtful evil people in it.
That’s how we will get justice.

This is contrary to Isaiah’s vision in which all people will be saved.
Isaiah was what we call a Universalist.
All people who responded to God would be saved.
If you didn’t respond,
you were simply excluded from all the good things of life.

[This is the same message as everybody’s favorite in the Gospel of John 3:
“God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,
so that everyone who believes in him may not perish
but may have eternal life.
God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world,
but in order that the world might be saved through him.
Those who believe in him are not condemned;
but those who do not believe are condemned already....
This is the judgment, that the light has come into the world,
and people loved darkness rather than light....”]

[I should note that the Gospel writer John was not the same as the Baptist.
There is yet another John, writer of the Revelation at the end of the Bible.]
---------------------------------------

Here is what many scholars now think happened:
Jesus became a disciple of John the Baptist but for a short time.
John preached that God was coming in the future to judge all people.
The only escape was to commit to God,
and show that commitment through baptism.
Jesus joined John by being baptized.

Have you ever noticed that Jesus didn’t baptize anyone?
This is puzzling because one definition of a sacrament
is that it is an action instituted by Jesus.
But Jesus didn’t do it; John did.

Jesus didn’t baptize because he abandoned the teachings of John.
Jesus didn’t demand of people that they repent the way John did.
Jesus didn’t ask people to repent or to change
because his message was different.
Jesus preached that “The kingdom of God has come near;
He probably didn’t say “repent, and believe in the good news.”
I think the word “repent” was added here to connect him to John.

So John said that God was coming soon.
But Jesus said: “the kingdom of God has come near.”
Or he says the kingdom is in your midst or among you,
or he tells parables about the Kingdom
comparing it to various things in nature
or the ways people can treat each other with kindness or mercy.
Live as if the Kingdom were here now,
as if God and not the Romans were in charge, now.
God is ready to intervene in our lives anytime.
Jesus appears not to have worried much about the future.
Jesus’ vision of the Kingdom of God was a lot like Isaiah’s.
People living under the rule of God in peace.
People gathering around a table, sharing the gifts of God.

Jesus had been a disciple of John, but left John and started his own group.
He only asked fishermen to become fishers of people, not to be baptized.

What happened?
The gospel writers conflated or meshed
the messages of John the Baptist and Jesus.
The result was adding new endings to some of Jesus’ parables
that put into his mouth the ideas
about God coming to judge in the future;
ideas that really belonged to John.
Between the time that Jesus was crucified and the gospels were written
the followers of Jesus experienced frightful, destructive times
in which many thousands died at the hands of the Romans.
Jerusalem was destroyed and many who were not killed
fled elsewhere for their lives.

The experience of this devastation meant that the new Christians
saw everything differently.
Jesus’ message of living the love and peace of the Kingdom
now looked – weak.
So – The gospel writers included in their narratives about Jesus
speeches attributed to him that sound like John

Things like “Two will be in the field; one will be taken; the other left.
Two women will be grinding meal together;
one will be taken and one will be left.”
The stories about Jesus coming again are mostly a message of FEAR.

Many scholars do not think that these are the words of Jesus,
but that the early church wrote them
searching for ways to deal with their dire situation after Jesus had died.
Jesus was gone and had left his followers with teachings
to live in the Kingdom of God now, as if God ruled the world.
We all know how hard that is to do.

One way to express the hope of that better world to come,
was to say that Jesus, because he was the Christ, would come again.
But in the story of the first coming of Jesus, we still find
peacemaking and non-violent resistance to the powers that be.
Jesus’ message wasn’t entirely lost,
but something had gone terribly wrong with the Christian vision
and we are still suffering from it.
Christmas is not about John’s message
of judgment, punishment, and destruction.
Christmas recalls Isaiah’s vision of right living under God.
Christmas is about Jesus’ vision of a better world growing out of our hearts
in communities of trust where people share a meal around a table.
----------------------------------------------------------------

A better world for all is not a perfect world.
A perfect world is not what life is about.
If we think of all the issues before us, we can find solutions
if we hold to a simple, common vision of a better world,
but with compromises.
So for example, In a perfect world there would be no war,
but this is not a perfect world.
Therefore, we need to be careful what wars we get into,
and we need to restrain ourselves when we go to war,
which is now a stated goal of our military
even though such restraint fails again and again.

Another example. In a perfect world, it is logical to think
that there would be no homosexuality or transsexual changes.
There would be only people who know themselves clearly
as men and women, who are attracted to each other.
But this is not a perfect world, and so we have to find ways
to live with the reality that a small percentage of God’s children
are differently oriented in their sexuality.
It used to be that almost no one would admit to that reality,
but now we mostly all do.

Another example. In a perfect world there would be no abortions,
and no unwanted children, – but this is not a perfect world.
We need to improve the abilities of parents
to raise and educate their children.
We need to help people reproduce responsibly,
And some abortions will be allowed, because it is not a perfect world.

You get the idea.
The question always before us is
How will we live with the realities God seems to have given us?
Only God could bring a perfect world.
The better world is our responsibility.
There are no absolutes.
Only difficult ethical decisions on a case by case basis.

The better world is possible because
we have been given the abilities to make a better life for everyone.
The better world will require hard work, difficult conversations,
compromise, and continual modifications
of laws and policies until we get things not right, but better.
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In order to have a better world, we need a vision of a perfect world.
Sadly I see that there are many people in our country and elsewhere
who have no vision for a better world
or they don’t want a better world, except for themselves.
Or they only want to tear down the world we have carefully built
to improve the lives of as many as possible as much as possible.
“Let those who have ears, hear,” as Jesus used to say.

Dominic Crossan, a great student of the historical Jesus, has in retirement
traveled all over the Biblical world, and he discovered something.
He says: “We know that the prophets and Jesus had a goal and vision
for life that can be summarized as ‘justice’.”
They spoke of the household of God and the Kingdom of God,
where God rules by justice for the poor and oppressed.
But all of the temples, and monuments, and tombstones of ancient Rome
tell us that their goal and vision for life,
that the purpose of their empire was VICTORY.
It was winning. Nothing else, If you won, you had achieved the ultimate.
That was the purpose of life in the Roman Empire.

The vision of Isaiah, and the vision of Jesus is for justice
for the poor, the sick, the imprisoned, the hungry and thirsty.
Jesus tells us how to get there.
He says:  Live now the way you hope things will be in the future.
The Empire of God is in your midst; it is among you.
Make the future present just as we have made the past present
in our celebration of the birth of Jesus.
When we see Jesus in the poor, sick, in prison, or hungry and thirsty,
that’s when the Kingdom of God comes near to us.
In Christmas we celebrate the birth of a king born into poverty,
forced to be a refugee, a member of an oppressed people.
In Christmas we proclaim a king who does not command,
who does not lead armies or make war, but is the prince of peace.
How best should we observe his birth?