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. 

   

Christ the What?

A Homily for Christ the King Sunday 

November 24, 2013

From the words of the Gospel:  "There was also an inscription over him, "This is the King of the Jews."

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Today is another special day in the Church Year. Today is called ?????? 

(Christ the King Sunday) 

It is the last day of the last season of the Church year, which begins with the anticipation of the coming of Jesus as a baby, and ends with the anticipation of the 

coming back of Jesus as Christ the King. 

The Gospel Reading for the day is the story of the passion, the death, of Jesus.  However, the focus of the day is not on the passion, but on the references to Jesus as King. 

It’s not a day for celebrating an historical event, like the birth, or the death, or the resurrection, or the ascension of Jesus. It is more like the celebration of an experience or an idea, like the Holy Trinity, a doctrine which we celebrate on Trinity Sunday. 

Or even better, it’s like the celebration of Jesus as the Good Shepherd, which we celebrate on Good Shepherd Sunday.  Jesus as the Good Shepherd was a direct comparison of Jesus to those who had been anointed as the shepherds of Israel in the past (rulers and kings of Israel in the past), shepherds who had cared more for themselves than for the people, particularly the poor and needy; shepherds who, in fact, had oppressed the poor and needy.  Unlike them, Jesus was celebrated as the Good Shepherd.  

The experience we celebrate on Christ the King Sunday is very similar.  It is our experience of the Jesus of history as the Christ of faith, and the truest King of the truest Kingdom, compared with all the other rulers, who, even if they promise security and salvation, 

always fall short. 

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So how does that work for you? How do you relate to the archetype or the image of “King?”  How does that image help you to relate to Jesus?  How does it help you on your own spiritual journey?  That’s not a question that was turned in last spring when everyone wrote down their “one-thing-I-would-like-to-ask-God” questions.  But it seems to be the only direct question to ask on Christ the King Sunday. So let’s see what we can do with it. 

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What we first have to admit and honestly face into on this Sunday, is that it’s a giant leap for many people from the experience of the Jesus of history to the experience of Christ as king. 

For the religious people of his day, Jesus was, frankly, a big disappointment.  Jesus disappointed every group that tried to capture him for its purpose.

He disappointed the Zealots, hell bent on freeing the Holy Land from the pagan occupying power - the Romans.

He disappointed the Pharisees, who were a devout minority dedicated to the maintenance  of the distinctively Jewish way of life.  He disappointed the baptists, (those who, like Jesus, had followed John the Baptist) because his way was in sharp contrast to the rigid asceticism of John.

As Tony Kelly, an Australian Catholic theologian says:  “To the devout, he was irreligious. To the learned, he was untutored.  To the revolutionary, he was too idealistic.  To the priests, he was a meddling layman.  To the aristocratic establishment, he was a cause for alarm.”

For the world, the death of Jesus was just another death of just another revolutionary religious leader, of just another failed peasant revolution and religious movement. 

So for many, it is a giant leap from a teacher/ leader/ healer/ trouble-maker named Jesus,  squashed (executed) by the emperor,  to Christ the King.  

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Luke is taking that leap even more than the storytellers who wrote in the decades before him. In Mark, and then in Matthew, Jesus says things like, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  Not very “kingley” of him. 

In Luke, however, generations later, Jesus says things like, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do,” and “Today, you will be with me in Paradise.” 

Luke is taking the leap more than the storytellers who came before him. 

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So what happened? How did the Jesus the disappointment and the executed failure

become Christ the King? 

If Jesus wasn’t a military or a political King of a geophysical kingdom, what kind of King was he?  What kind of King is he? 

Historically, Jesus adopted the powerless ones, those whom he called the poor, the least, the 'lost sheep' of Israel.  And they adopted him. 

  The sinners,
  the prostitutes,
  the lepers,
  the demoniacs,
  the beggars,
  the diseased and the crippled,
  the hungry,
  the widowed...

All those his society had excluded, even the religious leaders themselves.  

And Jesus protected his realm. Historically, one of the things that a king does is to protect his dominion. Even the president of the United States is the Commander and Chief of the Armed Forces, and is charged with protecting our country’s welfare, and safeguarding national security. 

The historical Jesus protected the people who needed to be protected.  Not the the priests, the scribes, the Pharisees, or the Saducees.

Not the people who had the most power, or the most influence, or the most wealth, but the powerless, the oppressed, the marginalized.  

And the way Jesus protected his people was not through brute force, but through calling attention to injustice, through exposing the domination systems. 

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The Jesus of history even liberated God.  Historically, kings kept the people of the realm connected with the God of the realm.  The better the king could function as a prophet and priest, the better king he was.  

Unlike even the greatest kings, the Jesus of history liberated God from the false images and expectations imposed on him by the people... 

Jesus’ way of life implied that God was not really interested in your wealth, your status, your virtue, your sacrifices, or even your sin.

His teaching and ministry made it clear that God was happy with your trust, (or the word traditionally used, faith).  If you had that, you had everything. 

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So you begin to see how the transformation happened?  The historical Jesus had the power 

to give dignity back to the oppressed. The historical Jesus had the power to free God himself from the false images imposed on him by the world. As the power and the presence of the Jesus of history became an ongoing experience for those who followed him after his death, they were able to see him as the Christ of faith, and as Christ the King - Christ the true King, the King anointed by God to change the world, to bring wholeness,  and love, and strength, and hope, and salvation,to a broken, hurting world that needed such divine healing, such divine caring, such divine salvation, such a divine King. 

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So how does that work for you? Does that help you relate to the archetype or the image of “King?” How does that image help you on your own spiritual journey? 

[DISCUSSION] 

It’s a great starting point for me. It works for me that Christ is King of the Universe if it means that, for all who follow him, Christ is King of our hearts, the true King of the true Kingdom ruled by love and compassion and wisdom.  

And for me, there are other qualities that transform the Jesus of history into Christ the King. 

One, for me, is that Jesus was centered.  All kings are understood by their people to be the center of the universe. They even build the palaces in the center of the town. I see the historical Jesus as a centered person, whose center was within.  

His kingship was centered within him.  When everything else was crazy and chaotic and spinning out of control, he was spiritually centered.  His confidence, and well being, and sense of purpose were grounded in deep, centering prayer and communion with God.  

That works for me, as a person who wants to be entrust myself to that spiritual center, as a person who wants to learn how to be centered myself.  

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And it works for me, that the historical Jesus blessed the lives of others.  

Historically, the worst kings were the ones who were more interested in their own personal power, prestige, position, or wealth for themselves.  And the truest kings were the ones who sacrificed their own interests for the sake of serving and blessing the people with whose welfare they had been entrusted. 

It works for me that the historical Jesus had no interest in being served, that he knew himself to be blessed to be a blessing to sinners and saints, rich and poor, Jews and Gentiles, male and female.  That he shared the sacred fellowship of the table with all types and classes. 

That’s the mark of a true King to me.  That’s the kind of King the universe needs if we are ever to become all that we have been created to be.  

For some, it’s a great leap from the executed teacher/healer/ peasant revolutionary, to Christ the King.  For me, the profound and ongoing experience of Jesus as one who is centered in God, as one through whom God is so profoundly manifest and revealed,  as one who protects, as one who blesses - in my mind and in my heart, that transforms the Jesus of history into the truest kind of king - Christ the King, the kind of king who blesses you and me to share his royalty, the kind of king who blesses you and me to be a blessing to others. 

That works for me. That image is very helpful to me on my spiritual journey of looking for Christ in, being Christ to, and receiving Christ from every person I meet. 

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