Saturday, April 27, 2013

Help! ... I call him Jesus.


A Homily for Easter 4C 
April 21, 2013


From the words of the Gospel:
"You do not believe, because you do not belong to my sheep. My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me."

On Easter, everyone wrote a question on a card that they would ask God, which I said I would balk about during the homily time.  Thirty one really good questions were turned in.
The question for today is: 
  
Why, if most people believe in God, do they hate each other?  They may choose to call him or her what ever they want, but he is the same.  He wants peace and love through the whole world.  Why?  Is it a human thing?  And free will?  Why?  I do not understand because I am one of them.  Help! Because I am broken.  (They call God by different names.  I call him Jesus.)

Well, what do you think? 

I think it’s a huge question with lots of room for disagreement.  But I think it’s a question we might all want to ask God.   And I think it would be good, as usual, to start with the scripture for today and see if we can at least pick up some clues, and then come back. 

All the scriptures for today have one focus.  Every year, the fourth Sunday after Easter is called _________ ??? (Good Shepherd Sunday.)  And the focus is on God and Jesus as the Good Shepherd. 

The Reading from Acts is a story of Peter acting in the power and compassion and spirit of Jesus to raise a little girl from the dead.  (Or actually to “resuscitate” a little girl from the dead.)  This reading is actually part of a series of Sunday readings from the book of  Acts  which more or less stand on their own, but it’s not hard on Good Shepherd Sunday, to see the courage and compassion of Jesus, the Good Shepherd, working through Peter.

The Psalm for today is “The Lord is my Shepherd,” a Psalm about God’s shepherding of the psalmist, who in the end, is anointed by God as a shepherd himself!   

The reading from Revelation is about Jesus as the sacred Lamb who becomes the sacred Shepherd. 

And the Gospel of John is a snippet from a Good Shepherd discourse by Jesus, 
which identifies Jesus as “the Good Shepherd.”  

The point of Good Shepherd Sunday is to contemplate the ongoing presence of the resurrected Jesus as One who shepherds his sheep.  

The experience of the apprentices of Jesus who first used this metaphor to describe him, was a sense of his ongoing presence, guidance, patience, protection, compassion, and leading as they faced the challenges of discipleship.  

And their experience can be our experience as we get to know Jesus for ourselves.  If we pay attention, we notice that we are not alone in this world. The early followers of Jesus, in the freshness of their experience, invite us to ask ourselves when, in the for better and the for worse of life, have we sensed that we are being shepherded from beyond?  This is an experience we can hope to celebrate, too. 

To go deeper, however, John's language about Jesus as a good shepherd is not just a sweet pastoral image.  In the generations before Jesus, the prophets were exposing the leaders of Israel as “bad” shepherds.  They increasingly condemned the leaders of Israel for exploiting the people rather than caring for them.

Ezekiel says, 
“Therefore, you shepherds, hear the word of the Lord: ... I am against the shepherds; and I will demand my sheep at their hand, and put a stop to their feeding the sheep; no longer shall the shepherds feed themselves. I will rescue my sheep from their mouths, so that they may not be food for them.... I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep... I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, but the fat and the strong I will destroy.”

True to their reputation, the leaders of Israel in John’s time had collaborated with the Roman empire to oppress the marginalized - even their own.  In contrast, Jesus was the ideal leader, the “good” Shepherd. 

In fact, in the Gospel reading for today, John uses the term “the Jews” to refer, not to all Jews in general, but to the religious leaders. Remember:  John himself was a Jew, and the early Jesus movement was Jewish.  So the “Jews” that John refers to as the unbelievers,  are not ALL Jews, but the “bad shepherds” (the corrupt leaders) and those who follow the “bad shepherds,” in contrast to Jesus the “good shepherd” and to those who considered themselves followers of Jesus. 

It is one of the tragedies of history, however, that as Christianity turned into a Gentile movement, scriptures like the Reading today from John, became the basis for polarizing Gentile Christians against their own Jewish heritage and their own Jewish brothers and sisters.  

And in just such way, history has repeated itself over and over, from century to century, from religion to religion, from nation to nation. (Christians against Jews, Christians against Muslims, Muslims against Christians...)  

The self-seeking behavior of a few, the generalization to the many, the fragile process of self-differentiation and identity formation by groups, culture gaps, socioeconomic gaps, power differentials, generalized fear, generalized resentment, generalized stereotyping, polarization, prejudice, suspicion, hatred, violence, war. 

And yes, in spite of some of the early, immature images of Gods (even the Hebrew God) as a Warrior God, the irony is that they all believe in a higher power, who (or which) ultimately calls them all to compassion and unity, until, as Jesus says in John, “there will be one flock, and one Shepherd.” 

From a slightly different angle, in reflecting on the question of the day, there is also the need of the ego (both personal and collective) to be right, often by proving others wrong, and by oversimplifying all reality into black and white, right and wrong, good and bad, so that we can more easily define ourselves as “good” and others as “bad”, rather than as the honest fact that we are all a mixture of both, and that the real “enemy” isn’t out there where we project it, but within ourselves.  (“We have met the enemy, and it is us.”) 

The fundamentalist mentality, which infects all religions, is simply the mentality that is driven by this ego need to oversimplify right and wrong, and to paint ourselves as right by painting others as wrong, to see “heaven” as a reward reserved for those who are right rather than as the utopia, the nirvana, the beatific vision of all people, all creation, coming together, healing our divisions and overcoming the things that divide us, both from within and without; the restoring of human beings with human beings, the integration of hearts and minds, bodies and souls, the reconciliation of all creation with itself and with God. 

So how would you answer the question? 
Why, if most people believe in God, do they hate each other?  They may choose to call him or her what ever they want, but he is the same.  He wants peace and love through the whole world.  Why?  Is it a human thing?  And free will?  Why?  I do not understand because I am one of them.  Help! Because I am broken.  (They call God by different names.  I call him Jesus.)

The simplest response I can think of is that most of humanity still functions at the level of consciousness where our egos are our masters rather than our servants. 

And the simplest antidote I can think of is the vision that raises our consciousness to see destiny to which we have all been called, even though it remains largely dormant.  As Jesus put it, “Repent (metanoia, raise your consciousness), for the Kingdom of God is at hand.  It is within you.” 

DISCUSSION - What do you think? 

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

Friday, April 19, 2013

"All the Way to Heaven is Heaven" ~ Catherine of Siena


A Homily for Easter 3C 
April 14, 2013

From the words of the Gospel for today:
"So they cast their net, and now they were not able to haul it in because there were so many fish." 

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Four of the questions received for this homily blog are a cluster of "heaven" questions.  They all seem to be asking the same thing, more or less, about heaven.  They are:
  1. Does someone still go to Heaven even if they break one of the Ten Commandments? 
  2. How can we make sure there’s a heaven? 
  3. How to knock on the door so you’ll open it? 
  4. What must I do to be accepted into your eternal kingdom? 

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What if we hold on to our “Heaven Questions” for a few minutes, listen to the Scripture for today, and then come back to them?  

The Scripture Readings today are about:
  • Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus in Acts. 
  • The saving of the writer of the Psalm from Sheol (the place of the dead).
  • A vision of praise to the Lamb by all creatures in heaven and on earth in the Revelation to John. 
  • And two encounters with the resurrected Jesus, combined in the Reading from the Gospel of John.  (One about the resurrected Jesus meeting his followers while they were fishing, and one about his challenge to Peter to feed his sheep.) 
Note that the Psalmist refers specifically to sheol ("hell"), or the place of the dead; and the Revelation to John refers specifically to voices in heaven.  We might read into these scriptures our own images of heaven and hell, but neither of them in their time imagined the same thing we do in our time. 

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We imagine heaven as a place of reward, and hell as a place of punishment. 

The Psalmist, however, uses the word Sheol, which is often translated “Hell”, to mean simply the place, whatever it is and wherever it is, of the dead. The good, the bad, and the ugly - we all go to the place of the dead when we leave this world.  That’s the image of the Psalmist.  And the writer of the Revelation uses the word “heaven” in the old fashioned sense of  “the place where God or the heavenly beings reside.”  

The most original meaning of the word “heaven” is simply “the firmament” or “the sky” or “atmosphere.”  Later it came to mean, “the place where God, or the gods, and other heavenly beings dwell.”  It even came to mean a place where earthly saints and heroes went to live when they left this world.  

And finally, through the influence of Persian religion in the century before Jesus, the word “heaven” was used to describe a place where all good, deserving people go when they die, along with the great saints and heroes, while the word “hell” became a place of punishment and torment for the wicked.   

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In the Gospel of John, Jesus existed before all time and all space - before the heavens and the earth.  (“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and through Him all things were made.”)  And in John's portrait of Jesus, he was dipped in time and space to accomplish a mission here.  "I came," he says, "so that you might have life, and might have it more abundantly." 
Not some future reward in some remote place called heaven, but “life,” "abundant" life, eternal life, divine life, “Kingdom of God life,” an alternate reality that is already at hand, already within us. 

In the Reading for today, this abundant life is just on the other side of the boat, just over there on the shore where Jesus already has a fire going and soul food ready to cook, and where he is teaching his teachers to feed others, to share the abundant life as generously and compassionately as they have received it. 

John’s stories about literal literal water are really about “living water”.  His stories about literal blindness are really about spiritual blindness.  His stories about literal breath are really about Holy Spirit.  His stories about being born again are about spiritual transformation.  His stories about abundant fish are really about abundant life.  His stories about the Jesus of history are really about the Christ of faith. 

For John, to believe in Jesus as the manifestation of Divine Life is to drink from the well of living water, to gain our “sight”, to be spiritually transformed, to receive abundant life - now.  To be in the world, but not of the world. 

For John, we aren’t waiting for eternity, we’re in it.  

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So now that we’ve spent a little time with the Readings for today, let’s review one more development that affects the way we imagine “heaven” - the shift from the Gospel of Jesus 
to the Gospel about Jesus, including the Gospel about Jesus according to St Paul.  

But first, let’s just remember our questions:  
  1. Does someone still go to Heaven even if they break one of the Ten Commandments? 
  2. How can we make sure there’s a heaven? 
  3. How to knock on the door so you’ll open it? 
  4. What must I do to be accepted into your eternal kingdom?

Those are the questions.  And here is a final consideration. 

The Jesus of history didn’t point to himself.  His teachings always pointed to one thing - the Kingdom (the Commonwealth) of God. He didn’t teach about some future place where the good people would be rewarded.  He taught about the Kingdom (the Reality) of God, which is “at hand.”  It is, in fact, “within you.”  Whether you are Jew or Gentile, slave or free, rich or poor, male or female, the Kingdom of God is “within you.”  This Gospel of Jesus was especially aimed at empowering the poor.   
That was the Gospel of Jesus.  The Gospels that developed over the next few decades were gospels about Jesus. 

One of the gospels about Jesus was the gospel of how his death and resurrection saves those who believe in him and/or follow his teachings.  And one variation on this gospel is that Jesus is coming back someday in the future to take all the good people with him to heaven. 

Another gospel about Jesus is the gospel that the Christhood he revealed is our own destiny.  The mystery of the ages, says Paul as he reflects on his conversion experience, is “Christ in you.”  As we die to ourselves, the Christ life takes over.  “I have been crucified with Christ," he says, "nevertheless I live, yet it is no longer I, but Christ who lives in me.” 

Not in some future heaven, but now, through a process of transformation, whether it is sudden and dramatic like his, or subtle and gradual like most of us. 

Or as John told it, when we believe in Jesus as the true Messiah, the only begotten Son, then we receive the divine spirit of Jesus, we too become “children of God” born not of the flesh, but of God himself.  

These gospels of Paul and John and others range from the good news of how individuals can enter the Kingdom, or go to heaven, when they die, or when Jesus returns, to how the whole human race, indeed the whole creation, can be transformed into our Christ selves. 

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So there it is, the questions, the Scriptures, the development of the Gospel.  And the way we answer the questions makes a difference - a huge difference - in how we understand and live the Christian life, in how much we follow the Jesus way in fear, or in love, in how much we follow the Jesus way to save our own skin, or to participate in the transformation and reconciliation of all creation.  
Perhaps there are no right or wrong answers, but there ways to live with the questions that are more life giving than other ways. 

So what do you think? 
  1. Does someone still go to Heaven even if they break one of the Ten Commandments? 
  2. How can we make sure there’s a heaven? 
  3. How to knock on the door so you’ll open it? 
  4. What must I do to be accepted into your eternal kingdom?
Unto God be worship and praise, dominion and splendor, forever and ever.  Amen.