Power to Become Little Christs

A Homily for Christmas 1 

December 29, 2013

From the words of the Gospel: 

"But to all who received him, ... he gave power to become children of God.” 

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Why is the process to Christhood so hard to achieve - if we ever get to Christhood? 

I’ll bet you remember that question. Ever since someone contributed that question last spring, and I agreed to address your questions during the year, this one has come up several times. Our scriptures may not answer all our questions. In fact, the real function is to question us rather than just to answer us. But this question about Christhood is one that scripture continues to address over and over.

  

In the reading from the Gospel of John this morning, it is the indeed the prime question… Why is the process to Christhood so hard to achieve - if we ever get to Christhood?

   

So let’s see what we can do with it. 

  

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Just to get started, let’s get a grip on the unique context of John, which is quite different from any of the other gospels. 

In particular, this account of the incarnation from John is quite different from the account of the incarnation we heard from Luke on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. 

  

Luke tells the story of Christmas on a very small and humble scale, as a drama acted out on the stage of the little town of Bethlehem, by a cast of three.  The principle role is that of a baby.  The location is a stable, the cradle is a manger, and when additional actors appear, they are only shepherds, poor, homeless shepherds, who turn out to be the ones who were filled with the wisdom of God, and who interpreted this wisdom to Joseph and Mary, who pondered these things in her heart. 

  

John tells the story of Christmas from the grandest possible scale.  This is a cosmic history,  sweeping from the dawn of creation to the realization of the glory of God in the face of Jesus the Christ…  (“In the beginning was the Word…”)

  

Luke stresses the newness of the Christmas event.  It is the story of a new baby and a new sign, of unexpected joy and the amazement of the shepherds.  On the other hand, 

John stresses the oldness of the Christmas story. It is eternal.  Jesus has not introduced a novelty; he has just laid bare the inner meaning of the universe, the Logos, translated, the “Word,” but also translatable as the “grammar,” the “self-expression” the “underlying logic and purpose” of the universe. It is a synonym of Sophia, which means “wisdom.” 

  

This Logos is not only with God, but IS God, and this inner meaning of being has now been exposed in and through a human person.  Everything Jesus stands for has always been there; but now it is profoundly visible and knowable.  Now the inner meaning of the universe greets us, loves us, confronts us, as a human being. 

  

That’s John. 

  

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Here is some further context. 

  

This was not the original Christian gospel.  The original Christian gospel was the proclamation of the death and resurrection.  It was in the death and resurrection  that the first disciples saw the fulfillment of the prophecy of Psalm 2 - “You are my son, today I have begotten you.” 

   

However, even before the Bible as we know it had been put together, Christians had become discontented with this concentration on the end of Jesus’ life. They wanted to show that he had also been functioning as Lord and Messiah (or Christ) in his teaching and healing.  They wanted to demonstrate that he had always been Lord and Messiah, that he had been born as God’s son, not only from the empty tomb but also from the womb of Mary. 

  

And so the stories of Jesus birth and infancy came into being through Matthew and Luke, woven beautifully from the threads of Jewish expectations in the Hebrew Scripture (which came to be called the “Old Testament”), threads which include oriental magicians, a star, shepherds (who among other things, represented the true Israel of God), a young maiden (which came to be translated as “young virgin”), and many other symbolic elements.  

  

And yet, embedded in these birth stories were the major elements of the gospel of the resurrected Christ.  From his conception, the Messiah (the Christ) was born to be a liberator, but the liberation he would offer was not to be merely political.  It would be, as Zachariah proclaimed, an inner liberation as well as an outer one, “for he will save his people from their sins - their inner failings and shortcomings.”  He would save people from themselves. 

  

It would be, as Mary sang, a liberation for the poor, the hungry, and the oppressed, and not just for the successful and powerful. 

  

And the means of the Messiah’s coming would anticipate the paradoxes of the rest of his life: out of poverty comes inner wealth; out of weakness, strength; out of humility, a new destiny; out of danger, wisdom and maturity. 

  

So these birth stories of Matthew and Luke were a little gospel in themselves. 

  

But John’s birth story is not about what happened one dark, cold night in a stable in Bethlehem, that transformed some shepherds and wise men. 

  

John’s meditation on the birth of Jesus is an eternal event, that transforms human beings in every time and place.  At its heart re the words, “To all who received him… he gave power to become children of God.”  Not just human beings born of the flesh, but divine beings born of God. 

   

Those who received the “thought,” the “wisdom,” the heart of God - not just those who believed that in Jesus, God was with us, but to those who trusted in the potential within us 

as it was manifest in Jesus, and who were open and inspired to realize that potential in themselves - to them he gave the power to become sons and daughters of God, to become collectively the Messiah (the Christ) of their own age, the agents of liberation of prisoners of sin, poverty, and oppression of their own time.  

  

To receive the Christ is to be the Christ, to participate in the Divine nature, to share in the Divine vocation of transforming the world.  That is the huge, mystical, cosmic reality of the Christmas story in the Gospel of John. 

  

As St Athanasius so succinctly put it, “God became man, so that man could become God.”  Or St Peter elaborated in his second epistle, “God has granted us all things that pertain to life and godliness… that through them you may become participants in the divine nature.”  Or St Paul, “I have been crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me.”  

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For those who just want a sentimental Christmas that celebrates the birthday of baby Jesus, the Gospel of John disturbs us. For those who take solace in quips like, “We’re only human,” John pushes out of our comfort zone.  Even for those who believe that in Jesus, God is with us, John invites us to a totally new possibility - the potential of God within us. 

  

At this point Christmas loses its cuteness, its greeting card quaintness, and becomes a time of challenge.  To truly see Christ is not to imagine him in that poor and lonely stable, but to see him in ourselves, and in one another.  The stable is where we live and work. The shepherds are our friends and neighbors.  The call is to transform the world. 

   

So the question for today is Why is the process to Christhood so hard to achieve - if we ever get to Christhood?

How could we answer that question?  How does it touch us?  What does it invite us to do, or be, or change?  Now that we’ve got a taste of what that means for John, what does it mean for you?  Or what new questions do you have now?  Let’s take a few minutes to share. 

  

[DISCUSS] 

  

For myself, the challenge to Christhood is not so much in trying harder to act like Christ outwardly. It’s in the simple act of remembering that I am a little Christ.  Since my deepest identity is not obvious to me on the surface, I have to take time to retrain my consciousness, or as Jesus would say, to “raise” my consciousness. 

  

Partly I do that in the same way I used to try to become a man - I took time to look at things the way my Dad did, which is what I think people are doing when they stop and ask, “What would Jesus do?” 

  

But I also have to practice things like Centering Prayer, walking the labyrinth, and slowing down, and other practices that simply create a space for my consciousness to be raised, practices that make it possible for me to experience my real self, my Christ self. 

  

And the other challenge for me is to remember that I can’t do this by myself. I live in an individualist, competitive culture.  But I have to remind myself  that Christhood is a collective process.  It is not I, but we, who are called to Christhood - together. 

So my calling is not just to be Christ to others, but to see Christ in others, and to receive Christ from others, and to inspire Christ in others, and to remind others of their deepest and truest identity. 

Christhood is all for one, and one for all.  And that collaborative interdependency is another whole process of remembering and retraining.  It is also a confession that I am not complete, I am not whole, without you. 

  

But that’s the great cosmic miracle of transformation, that for John is the true miracle of Christmas… "But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become their true child-of-God selves, who were born, not of blood nor of human will, but of God.”

   

Unto Him be worship and power, dominion and splendor, for ever and ever.  Amen.  

John or Jesus?

A Homily for Advent 2A 

December 8, 2013

From the words of the Gospel: 

"Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near."

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Should we follow the Lord because we love him or out of fear for what he will (or might) do if we don’t?

That’s one of our “one-question-I-want-to-ask-God” questions that someone turned in last spring.  It’s was the focus question for the sermon last week, and it is the focus question for the sermon today. The Advent readings, especially early in the season, lend themselves exactly to questions like this. 

   

So here it is: Should we follow the Lord because we love him or out of fear for what he will (or might) do if we don’t?

   

It may seem like a simple question with an obvious answer, but like we talked about last week, our hearts have had years of conditioning that keeps this question alive and burning inside of us.  

  

So let’s listen to Matthew, and to John, and to Jesus, and then to our hearts, and then to each other, as we work in this question… Should we follow the Lord because we love him or out of fear for what he will (or might) do if we don’t?

  

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For Matthew, that might have really been a tough question.  Of all the Gospel storytellers, Matthew is the most likely to resonate with John the Baptist.  And yet, Matthew belongs to the Jesus movement, not to the John movement.  Matthew is a good Jewish Christian, who values obedience to the Jewish law and the ethical and ritual purity that comes through faithful following of the law. 

  

Matthew is the one who quotes Jesus as saying things like, “I did not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it.”  Matthew is among those who believe that a day is coming when all the nations will be judged, when, as he tells it, they will be separated like sheep and goats, some to eternal reward and some to eternal punishment. 

  

So among all the Gospel storytellers, Matthew is the most likely to resonate with John the Baptist and with his fiery, end-of-the-world kind of preaching.  But Matthew didn’t join the John movement, which was still alive and well in his time. He was a leader of the Jesus movement.  So he is careful to tell the story from the perspective of the Jesus movement, which saw John merely as a forerunner of Jesus.  

  

He starts with the Mark version he has in hand and elaborates on the superiority of Jesus, who, for Matthew, fulfills John’s prophecy, pretty much the same way as he fulfills the Jewish law. 

And that’s what we get from the storyteller we call Matthew.  If Matthew’s Jewish Christianity had become predominate rather than the Gentile Christianity of Luke and John (especially Luke), we might all have a different perspective of John and Jesus. 

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But Gentile Christianity, as well as the modern “quest for the historical Jesus,” (the literary analysis by bible scholars which has begun to recover the Jesus of history, the Jesus as he was in his own time, before the memory of his life and teachings was projected and elaborated in different directions as we now have in our bible) - Gentile Christianity and the modern “quest for the historical Jesus” expose the contrast between the historical John and the historical Jesus. 

  

They see John and Jesus more like this…  John, on the one hand, still had one foot in the Old Covenant, where God was so often portrayed as jealous, vengeful, and as inclined to punish as to succor.  Many of the storytellers of the Hebrew history told of a God who punished Adam and Eve, Cain, Lot's wife, the people of Sodom, Noah, David, the Israelites, and on and on, up to the new era.  John also, from this perspective, seemed to suffer from his own lack of imagination to see how Messiah would deal with sin. John could only see lines separating good from evil, sheep from goats, wheat from chaff, and God punishing those on the wrong side. 

Jesus himself, on the other hand, took a different path.  Even though he was thoroughly Jewish, Jesus did not stick with the stream of Judaism he received from the one who had baptized him in the Joran River.  He forgave sins.  He ate with sinners. He stood by a notorious sinner when a righteous mob turned on her.  He touched the untouchable, healed the unworthy, loved his enemies and commended his people to do the same.

John expected Jesus to burn the wicked with "unquenchable fire."  Instead, he died on the cross for them.  John expected Jesus to hold a "winnowing fork," not a loaf of bread.  He saw Jesus taking an ax to fruitless trees, rather than giving the tree one more chance, as Jesus put it in one of his parables. 

In other words, from the perspective of the Gentile Christianity we know from storytellers like Luke at near the turn of the second century, and from the perspective of the Bible scholars who have uncovered the first century Jesus of history in our time, John had it exactly wrong  He didn't see what a break with the past Jesus represented.  John speaks to the hardness of our hearts. Jesus softens and changes our hearts. 

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So there you have it:  Matthew’s version of a Jesus who fulfilled the spirit and the prophesy of John the Baptist,  and the version of the scholarly quest for the historical Jesus, in which Jesus is pretty much the opposite of John the Baptist, and which is more like the version of early Gentile Christianity. 

  

For better or for worse, even the church of Gentile Christianity soon enough began to resemble John more than Jesus.  Driven by the institutional need for uniformity and control, the early church, particularly in the West, soon enough began to turn to fear and guilt, and a heavy emphasis on sin, as the way motivate its flock and keep everyone in line. 

To this day, we lose touch with the radical Jesus who, although he never thought of himself as anything other than Jewish, represented an outrageous break with the past. Jesus actually disrupted that "old time religion" - and still does. 

  

He spurned tradition, created a cadre of change agents and insisted that all things become new.  While we value continuity, elevate historic tradition, reward pillars of stability, fight to prevent change, and use fear and guilt to keep each other in line. 

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So where does that leave you? After listening to Matthew, to John, to Jesus, to second century Gentiles to modern day scholars, and to the institutional church, what do we hear when we listen to our own hearts?  What do we hear when we listen to each other? 

  

Let’s take a minute to see.  After a moment of quiet, let’s share what touches us from the Gospel reading for today, or from the question - Should we follow the Lord because we love him or out of fear for what he will (or might) do if we don’t?  What are your thought or feelings or observations?  Where does this touch you?  

[DISCUSS]

What came to me in my personal reflection, was that there is a natural tension between the language of responsibility and the language of grace.  I think that John the Baptist probably had an understanding and appreciation of grace.  And I think that Jesus had an understanding and appreciation of responsibility. 

Here is a story from a contemporary author, William Muehl, that puts grace and responsibility together for me in an interesting way: 

  

One December afternoon… a group of parents stood in the lobby of a nursery school 

waiting to claim their children after the last pre-Christmas class session.  As the youngsters ran from their lockers, each one carried in his hands the “surprise,” the brightly wrapped package on which he had been working diligently for two weeks. 

  

One small boy, trying to run, put on his coat, and wave to his parents, all at the same time, slipped and fell.  The “surprise” flew from his grasp, landed on the floor and broke with an obvious ceramic crash.  

  

The child… began to cry inconsolably.  His father, trying to minimize the incident and comfort the boy, patted his head and murmured, “Now, that’s all right sone.  It doesn’t matter.  It really doesn’t matter at all.” 

     

But the child’s mother, somewhat wiser in such situations, swept the boy into her arms and said, “Oh, but it does matter.  It matters a great deal.” And she wept with her son. 

  

Responsibility says that what we’ve done and what we’ve left undone, does matter.  That is matters a great deal. 

Grace weeps with us. 

Unto God be worship and power, dominion and splendor, for ever and ever.  Amen. 

Unlearning Fear

A Homily for Advent 1

December 1, 2013

From the words of the Gospel: 

“Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.”

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Should we follow the Lord because we love him or out of fear for what he will (or might) do if we don’t?

   

That’s one of our “one-question-I-want-to-ask-God” questions from last spring.  

   

The answer might seem obvious to us if we answer it with our heads.  We might say, “Well, of course, we should follow the Lord because we love him.” But our hearts have had years of conditioning that keeps this question alive and burning inside of us.  

   

I remember vividly an early experience in my childhood that revealed just how much I had been conditioned to follow God out of fear. 

   

It a middle-of-the-night experience that woke me up from a deep sleep. 

I was already dreaming about it when I woke up to a light, and a deep rumbling, 

and a tremble. In two seconds my eyes were wide open, as my whole room grew lighter and lighter, and trembled more and more, and the rumbling became louder and louder. 

   

It wasn’t a long time, but it seemed like forever.  The whole experience became more and more intense, and I became more and more overcome by fear that this was the end of the world, and I wasn’t prepared! 

   

Until finally I woke up enough to recognize that, on my residential street, a large eighteen-wheeler truck was pulling up next door - engine rumbling, lights coming in through the window, shaking the whole house as it approached in the dark.  

Scared me to death.  And revealed just how much my relationship with God had been conditioned by fear. 

   

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It’s an old dance, the dance between love and fear.  And it goes all the way back to the early Jesus movement. 

   

By the time the Gospel of Matthew was written in about a few decades and generations after Jesus, the idea of Jesus coming back in the clouds to judge the world, sending some people to eternal reward and some to eternal punishment, had been fully developed. In fact, leaders like Matthew were trying hard to defend it. 

   

The reality was that the early followers expected Jesus to come back, as many of the Scriptures put it, “in their own generation,” but he didn’t come back, and in the next generation he didn’t come back, and in the next generation he still hadn’t come back. 

   

So leaders of the Jesus movement were trying hard to encourage the early Christians to hang in there, to trust that the time was at hand, and that Jesus would indeed return like a thief in the night to separate the sheep and the goats, and to assign them their eternal destinies. 

   

Other leaders of the Christianity over the next few centuries, went back and forth between teaching about a God of love, and a God of retribution - a God to be loved and a God to be feared. 

   

So it’s an old dance, and even if we know better, we come by our fears honestly.   

   

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The origins of the idea so vividly expressed in our Gospel storyteller today were a combination of two or three different ideas that were typical of troubled times. 

   

One was the idea among the Jews, who were more and more marginalized,

and vulnerable to more and more oppression by their world, that the day was coming, 

hopefully sooner than later, when God would intervene in history 

in some ultimate and cataclysmic way, and make things right - judge their enemies and vindicate all of Israel, whether in this world or another. 

   

For them, it was a day to look forward to. Until prophets like John the Baptist taught that God had a bone to pick with his own people, and that the coming judgment of their enemies would apply to them too.  

   

At the same time, there was a growing idea of a resurrection of humanity into some after life, or into some larger life. This idea came more from Egyptian and Persian religions, but it was easily adapted by the Jews of Jesus time, and by the Jesus movement itself. 

   

And, unlike the way we often imagine resurrection, this idea of the resurrection of humanity included all of humanity at the same time. Not individually, but collectively humanity would be raised up together again after death into some new kind of life. 

   

When the early Jesus movement incorporated these ideas with their experience of a resurrected Jesus, and their teaching of Jesus’ resurrection, often in literal terms, and their conviction that Jesus was coming back soon as the finale to the whole movement of decent from heaven, death, rising, ascending, and coming back again to establish an eternal Kingdom - when the early Jesus movement incorporated all of these things together, it created a scenario of the Last Day, of the Judgement Day, with which we are all familiar. 

   

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If we turn back the clock several decades, digging through the layers of teaching built up by the early Jesus movement, to the time of the historical Jesus himself, what do we hear  What was the teaching of Jesus himself? 

   

And by now, as much as we have talked about it, you already know the answer to this. The one thing that Jesus always taught and talked about was … (the Kingdom of God). 

   

Not a Kingdom off in the distant future, not a Kingdom some people can earn their way into, but a Kingdom that is radically inclusive of all people, a Kingdom that we can all wake up to, a Kingdom that we can all “realize” (that we can all “make real”) in our own life and times. 

   

A Kingdom that is “at hand.” A Kingdom that is already “within us.” And yet a Kingdom that is always coming toward us (“thy Kingdom come”). 

  

Jesus’ experience of this profound, mysterious Kingdom, this Commonwealth, this Domain, this graceful subjection of all things to the will of God, this spiritual reality, was the one thing that he tried in hundreds of ways to describe and teach to his apprentices. 

   

Yes, it comes on ordinary days, to ordinary people, eating, drinking, marrying, grinding grain, working in the fields, living ordinary lives. 

   

And it comes like a thief in the night, when we least expect it. 

   

It comes, exposing our deepest fears and most darkest secrets, but it comes, opening us up not to blame, but to pity (as a favorite saint, Julian of Norwich put it) for the destructive ways we act our own wounds and inflict our own pain on ourselves and others. 

   

And yes, Jesus does come again, and again, and again, at every Eucharist, in the bread and the wine, the gifts of God for the people of God, and around every corner, like a hungry person, or a neighbor ill-clothed, or someone sick or in prison. 

   

So in the words of the Gospel Reading for this morning that best reflect the words of Jesus himself, “Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.”

   

The question of the day, one more time, is “Should we follow the Lord because we love him or out of fear for what he will (or might) do if we don’t?”  

   

Let’s take a minute to discuss what’s on your mind or your heart at this point.  What do you notice?  What touches you personally? 

   

[DISCUSS] 

   

A good way to close, perhaps, is to recognize that Christianity isn’t the only religion to struggle with loving God out of fear  or loving God out of love.  

   

One of my all time favorite saints is actually a Muslim Sufi, Rabia Basri, born in the late eighth century, whose conviction earned her a legend that says, One day, Rabia was seen running through the streets of Basra carrying a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other.  When asked what she was doing, she said, "I want to put out the fires of Hell, and burn down the rewards of Paradise. They block the way to God. I do not want to worship from fear of punishment or for the promise of reward, but simply for the love of God."

   

This story is probably a legend, but one of Rabia’s actual prayers was: 

"O God! If I worship You for fear of Hell, burn me in Hell, and if I worship You in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise. But if I worship You for Your Own sake, grudge me not Your everlasting Beauty.”

So Christianity is not the only religion to struggle with this question. 

   

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For myself, I can tell you that some twenty years after being scared out of my mind by an eighteen wheeler pulling up next door to my house, I had a near death experience when my car nearly went over an icy bridge. 

   

But this time, as I saw my life flash before my eyes, and imagined my car and me falling and crashing into the ravine below, I was at peace. 

   

I won’t tell you about the cat in the back seat who I had to clean up after that incident.  But I was at peace.  

   

I am grateful for that experience, which tells me that my answer to the question about following God out of fear or out of love, is moving from my head to my heart.  

   

Unto him be worship and praise, dominion and splendor, forever and ever.   Amen.