The Annunciation (Mid-week Message)

 

 

Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message

The Annunciation

March 25, 2015

Today, nine months before Christmas day, is the Feast of the Annunciation, the commemoration of the Angel Gabriel appearing to Mary of Nazareth and declaring to her that she would conceive and bear a son:  

In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth,  to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. And he came to her and said, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.” But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. The angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.  And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus.  He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.”  Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?”  The angel said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God.  And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren.  For nothing will be impossible with God.”  Then Mary said, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” Then the angel departed from her. (Luke 1:26-38)

Mary is a model for the joy and acceptance that connects us with God, Jesus, and all good.  The angel Gabriel greets her with the words, “Hail Mary, full of Grace, the Lord is with you,” words that have since become a prayer on the lips of those who see in Mary hope for a closer walk with Jesus and God.  Gabriel declares to her that she will become pregnant with a holy child who will bring about the great setting straight of things hoped for by Israel’s prophets.  She asks how this can possibly be, since she has never been with a man.  She obviously knows as well as we do about the birds and bees.  The angel replies that it will be a pregnancy without any man involved—God’s power alone will do.  Despite the dubious credibility of such an announcement and all the trouble such a pregnancy obviously will entail, Mary focuses on the hoped-for things the angel says this baby will be and do.  So she replies, “I am God’s servant. May it happen to me just as you have said.”

When Diana Butler Bass was here in Ashland a couple of weeks ago, she told a story of Phyllis Tickle, about a young man who answered her question “Do you believe in the Virgin Birth?” by saying, “Of course I believe it.  Even if the story may not have happened just like that, it is such a beautiful story that it just must be true.”   The image of Mary as a Virgin is about a woman sufficient in herself because she is in God: she does not need a man to complete her or make her able to fulfill her role. 

Having the Feast of the Annunciation just before Holy Week is a nice reminder:  Christmas is not the polar opposite of Easter; the Incarnation is not the polar opposite of the Resurrection.  They are, in fact, two sides of the same coin. 

Christians throughout the ages have honored Mary as the Theotokos (“God-bearer”) and the Mother of God to describe her bringing forth Jesus, who in his person was fully God and fully human, mixed like water and wine.   The daily fore-office that our small Morning Prayer group has asked to sing each day before Morning Prayer, the Angelus, is a commemoration of the Incarnation, retelling the story, and asking our sister Mary to pray for us.

God knows we need all the prayer we can get. 

Grace and Peace,
Fr. Tony+ 

Lift up Your Hearts (Mid-week)

Figure in posture of prayer (orans), Roman Catacombs, 2-6th centuries

Lift up Your Hearts

Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message

March 18, 2015

We hear it every week as part of the opening dialogue of Holy Communion:

 Lift up your hearts

We lift them to the Lord.

Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.

It is right to give God thanks and praise. 

This opening dialogue is called the sursum corda, Latin for “lift up your hearts.”  It sums up what is about to happen:  a Great Thanksgiving, in Greek, a Eucharist (eucharisto in Greek means “give thanks”). 

 When Protestants call it the Holy Communion, they are emphasizing coming together as one to share in common the one bread and one cup Christ gives us.  When Catholics (whether Roman or Anglican) call it the Mass, they are emphasizing how after coming together we are sent out into the world, since the word comes from the ending line in Latin ite missa est, “go, you are dismissed.”  When Eastern Orthodox call it the Divine Liturgy, they emphasize how such worship in a shared meal is a duty shared by all; leitourgia means a public work donated out of obligation to the greater good (Rite I’s language “it is very meet, right, and our bounden duty” captures the idea well.)   All three emphasize different aspects of the Eucharist:  gathering, sending, and our duty. 

But in essence, it is a thanksgiving.  Even when we talk about it as a sacrifice, it is a thanksgiving offering, a thankful fulfillment of our vows.  In Rite II’s words “it is good and right, and a joyful thing, always and everywhere to give thanks to” God. If we do not lift up our hearts in Eucharist, give thanks, and find joyful praise for all good things God gives us, it is not what it is meant to be:  a Great Thanksgiving. 

Gratitude and joy, thanks and hope are at the heart of faith in Jesus.  Jesus himself was joyful.   He found quirky humor and took pleasure in and thanked God for things that might drive some of us to distraction.  When faced with a uniform wall of rejection of his message by “the wise” and its acceptance by the naïve, he laughed at the joke, and praised God for it:  

 “At  that same hour Jesus rejoiced in the Holy Spirit and said, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will” (Luke 10:21).   

I wonder whether he said that word “gracious” with an ironic smile.    

Lift up your hearts.  It is meet and right, and a joyful thing. 

Grace and Peace,

Fr. Tony+ 

Smiling Jesus, Jack Pachuta, from a Romanesque Fresco 

in Boston Museum of Fine Art, about 1300.

The Gospel in Miniature (Lent 4B Gospel)

The Gospel in Miniature

Fourth Sunday of Lent (Year B)
15th March 2015

Laetare Sunday
8 am Spoken Mass; 10 am Sung Mass
Homily Delivered at Trinity Episcopal Church, Ashland, Oregon

   The Rev. Fr. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D., homilist  

Numbers 21:4-9; Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22; Ephesians 2:1-10; John 3:14-21

God, Take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen.

I’m sure you have seen it.  At a professional baseball or football game, in real stadiums or televised, in the bleachers:  a pair of fans holding up a banner reading simply “John 3:16.”  I once saw one at a professional golfing tournament.   Jan Robertson reminds me that such a banner is carried each year in the Ashland July 4^th Parade. 

The text is not quoted.  You as a viewer are expected to either nod your head in knowing agreement or be intrigued enough to look it up and be brought to true faith.  “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who has faith in him may not perish but may continue to have eternal life” (John 3:16).

The banners at sports events and parades—I suppose it’s a kind of evangelism, the sort that makes people want to put Jesus fish on their bumpers, or, worse, stickers that say “God said it; I believe it; that settles it.”    It seems to be aimed at calling sinners to repentance, the disobedient to submission, and a few chosen ones from the damned mass of humanity to a special, rare, and exclusive salvation. 

 

But I wonder—with the cryptic reference unavailable to all but those who supposedly are already “saved,” maybe the real reason is to speak in a code language and show a secret handshake to like-minded people, so members of the ultimate “in-crowd” can recognize each other.   

It is unfortunate that the verse has come to be used in this way.   I love this verse, as, I think most of you do.  Martin Luther called this verse, “the heart of the Bible, the Gospel in miniature.”    It has deep meaning.  But it is not the meaning that the banner-carriers see in it. 

They understand it as a call for the act of a profession of belief in the doctrine that Jesus is Savior and Lord, who was punished in our stead by suffering death to pay the penalty we deserve by our sins, death and torture at the hands of a just God.   They see assent to such a teaching as the act God requires for salvation.  Become a Christian as we understand that word, they think, or suffer eternal damnation. 

But this misses the point of the verse and its context. 

John’s Gospel here has Jesus speaking to Nicodemus, a devotee to Mosaic Law but a secret follower of Jesus.   Jesus has told him about being born from on high. Nicodemus has misunderstood and thought this was some kind of second physical birth: it’s all about ethnic background, identity at birth, and your relationship to God’s covenant people.  Jesus corrects him and says this is about starting a spiritual life in God, which is like the wind or breath.   He or the narrator then adds that Jesus should know about such things, since he came from above.

And then comes today’s verses: just as Moses lifted up the bronze snake in the desert to heal the Israelites suffering from snake bites, Jesus would be lifted up on the cross for all the world to see, and those who see him and trust him are saved from destruction.      

Two points here that most of the banner carriers miss:

First:  God loves “all the world.”  It is not just the chosen people, part of covenant by virtue of birth, by who they are.   The birth from above, the spiritual birth Jesus is talking about, is for everyone. 

Second: the comparison of Jesus being raised on the cross with Moses raising the bronze snake on a pole does not make a lot of sense in the transferred punishment understanding that the banner carriers place on John 3:16.    We read the story about Moses and the snake as our Hebrew Scripture lesson today.   The interesting point in the story is this: a bronze representation of the very thing that is afflicting the Israelites, fiery snakes falling from the skies, is what becomes the instrument of their healing. 

So how does that compare to Jesus on the cross, to “the Son of Man being lifted up?”

If looking at the bronze snake was looking at the source of the problem resulting in healing, then looking at Jesus on the cross is in some way doing the same thing according to this passage.

Jesus on the cross is the symbol, like the snake, of the source of our problems.  Jesus’s sufferings are the example par excellence of how rotten we human beings treat each other, of how badly we distort God’s good creation.   It is by looking at the nature of our evil, losing false conceptions about the heart of darkness and cruelty in us at times, that we embrace Jesus, the God who loves us so much that he chose to become one of us and suffer such evil.  Trusting this loving God on the cross, we are healed. 

We read in Deuteronomy that anyone who is hanged on a tree is accursed.  Paul says that thus Jesus became a curse for us, became sin for us. This does not mean that Jesus was bad or evil.  It means that the very fact that we humans did this thing to him, the fact that we are capable of such cruelty to each other, points to our need for transformation and enlightenment.  In looking at this horror, we see the nature of our ills, and in trusting the one so cursed we find redemption and reconciliation with God and each other. 

That’s why the passage continues, “God loved the world so much that He sent his only son.” Note:  it’s the world we’re talking about here.  In John’s Gospel, that means the wicked world, the big, bad, dark world that rejects the light.    It doesn't mean the good and glorious creation that God declared in Genesis 1 to be so very good.  Rather, in John, the phrase means:    “God loved bad guys so much….”  “God loved messed up humanity so much…”  “God loved those who dwell in darkness so much…” “that he sent his only son, so that everyone who trusts him, finds faithfulness in him, gives their heart to him, should not perish, but live eternally.”  The Greek of the passage is clear—the people who trust Jesus have already attained the unending life his sending was intended to provide to the world. 

The point is the universality of God’s love and of God’s gift to all.

But a gift is a gift only if it is accepted by someone.  That is what looking at Jesus, or looking at the snake, is all about.  Salvation is there.  Healing is there.  You just have to turn your hearts toward its source and trust.

This is not a call to a formal acceptance of a doctrine of salvation by grace, or transferred punishment. It is an invitation to trust Jesus, to be in relationship with him. 

“But what about people who decline the invitation?” You might ask, thinking of how the banner carriers take this very issue as the point of departure for their use of this passage as a club to beat up on others rather than an affirmation of God’s universal love. 

The passage is clear:  it is not at all that God or Jesus will come some time in the future and judge them, condemn them, and send them to everlasting pain.  No, the passage says clearly Jesus came to save, not to judge or condemn. 

The refusal of people to accept the gift freely given won’t bring judgment or condemnation.  Rather, it is their very act of refusing that means they are, at least for now, as good as condemned, because they cannot enjoy the blessings of relationship and trust. 

Sisters and brothers at Trinity:  Jesus of Nazareth taught the arrival of God’s Reign, of God being fully in charge, right here, right now.  His teachings demand much from us, but in giving us compassion, make us able to be instruments of God’s compassion.  His cruel death on the cross came from our sick system of society, something that in some ways remains very much with us to this day. 

But his rising from the dead verified his teaching, and though it did not undo anything that had been done, or erase the profound solidarity and love God showed us in condescending to be one of us, it meant the cross was not meaningless, and that life is not random or pointless.  Christ’s victory over death saves us by pointing all the more to God’s love and the sickness of broken humanity.  If Jesus on the cross is like the bronze snake, it is because we are the snakes that are biting ourselves, ruining God’s good creation. 

I pray that this week we may reflect on this passage, so public and popularly misused, and find in it the point John’s Gospel is trying to make:  God loves everyone, and is compassionate.  In following Jesus, in trusting him, we can also be compassionate and overcome the sickness that often infects us and our society.    Thus victory is won, brokenness healed, and rescue achieved.

In the name of God Amen.

Sharing Time with Others of Faith (midweek message)

Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message

March 11, 2015

Sharing Time with Others of Faith

I just spent an hour with a parishioner who has been home bound with illness, who is in pain that draws the person daily toward depression.

Just being together was tonic for us both.  In the words of the old saying, sorrow shared is sorrow halved and joy shared is joy doubled. 

I think this is why Jesus calls us to be church, to be a community of faith, love, and service.  Life can be very very hard at times.  Simply spending time with one’s companions on the way and talking helps soften what otherwise might be intolerable. 

The Iranian mystic poet Rumi wrote the following about sharing friendship with those who have faith:

Don’t take a wooden sword into battle.

Go, find one of steel;

Then march forward with joy. 

The saints’ protection is Truth’s sword,

Your time with them

Is worth as much as the cup of life itself.

All the wise have the said the same:

The one who knows God

Is God’s mercy to His creatures… 

Companionship with holy ones makes you one of them.

Though you’re rock or a marble, you’ll become a jewel

When you have grown into a man of heart. 

Plant the love of the holy ones within your spirit;

Don’t give your heart to anything,

But the love of those whose hearts are glad.

Don’t go to the neighborhood of despair:

There is hope. 

Don’t go in the direction of darkness:

Suns exist.

Grace and Peace,

Fr. Tony+

Crazy Jesus (Lent 3B)

Crazy Jesus

Third Sunday of Lent (Year B)
11th March 2012
8 March 2015; 8 am Spoken Mass; 10 am Sung Mass
Homily Delivered at Trinity Episcopal Church, Ashland, Oregon

   The Rev. Dr. Anthony Hutchinson, homilist  

Exodus 20:1 – 17; Psalm 19:7 – end; 1 Corinthians 1:18 – 25; John 2:13 – 22

God, Take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus goes crazy and starts turning over tables.  He causes this disturbance in the Temple, the center of religious and public life of his nation.  His act has prophetic overtones.  The prophets had always criticized the formalism of Temple ritual and its hypocrisy if pursued absent social justice.  They had used such phrases as “I don’t want your sacrifices!  All the animals on the hillsides are mine!  If I were hungry, do you think I’d need your gift?  Besides, your hands are full of blood!”  The prophets had underscored their message with startling acts like marrying a prostitute or walking around naked for a year.  Here, Jesus turns tables over, uses a small whip to drive the Temple’s duly authorized concessionaries, and yells something about his Father’s House.  The act says the whole system of oppression in his homeland is corrupt and wrong, deeply offensive to God.  The Temple and its authorities are part and parcel of the sweetheart deal with the Romans, and the system of squeezing the poor for their land and living to profit the Romans and the local elite Quislings supporting them.  In fact, the Temple is the center of the problem. 

The disturbance in the Temple courts was almost certainly an act of the historical Jesus, and was probably the immediate cause of his arrest and death, as pictured in Matthew, Mark, and Luke.  John’s Gospel moves it to the beginning of Jesus’ ministry in order to make room for the story of the raising of Lazarus to be the reason for Jesus’ death. 

But in so doing, John also suggests something that is obvious to us as we read the Gospels.  From the point of view of those around him, Jesus was always a little crazy.   

John isn’t the only Gospel writer to suggest this. In Mark 3, we read the story of what happened when Jesus first returned to Nazareth after he began his ministry:  his family sends out big guys to forcibly restrain him and carry him back home, because they and others think that Jesus “has gone out of his mind.”

The fact is this: from the point of view of moderate, sensible morality and social norms, Jesus was crazy.  He said crazy things, and did crazy stuff. 

What most people call wretched he calls blessed.  “Blessed are the poor!”  “Happy are those who mourn!”  “Blessed are the hungry and thirsty.”  Crazy. 

“Give up your life if you want to save it.”  Say what? 

“Do not repay people in kind for bad things or abuse.  Love them.  Pray for them.  Repay their bad with good.”   Really?

“Leaders should be like servants, at the beck and call of others.” Not normal. 

“If you really want to see God’s Reign, embrace powerlessness.  Be like a child.”   “The first will be last and the last first.” 

As he is being killed, he prays for those abusing him.  “Forgive them, they don’t know what they’re doing.”  That’s just crazy. 

At the last general convention of the Episcopal Church, Bishop Michael Curry preached it this way: 

 “Jesus was, and is, crazy! And those who would follow him, those who would be his disciples, those who would live as and be the people of the Way, are called and summoned and challenged to be just as crazy as Jesus. …We need some Christians who are as crazy as the Lord. Crazy enough to love like Jesus, to give like Jesus, to forgive like Jesus, to do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with God -- like Jesus.  Crazy enough to dare to change the world from the nightmare it often is into something close to the dream that God dreams for it.  And for those who would follow him, those who would be his disciples, those who would live as and be the people of the Way!”

Paul in today’s epistle says it this way:  “The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Cor 1:18).   

Paul says it clearly:  to most people, the word about Jesus’s death on the cross is folly.   Those who trust in it, fools! Idiots!  Dumb, dumber and dumbest! Crazy!  Paul knew all about this, he had been called all this and worse over the years.

This is what Christian saintliness is all about.   Being a fool for Christ.  Being crazy like Christ. 

As Bishop Curry says,   

“Now it may not be obvious at first, but we actually have a day to remember crazy Christians. I think we call it All Saints’ Day. It’s not called “All the Same Day,” it’s All Saints’ Day, because, though they were fallible and mortal, and sinners like the rest of us, when push came to shove the people we honor as saints marched to the beat of a different drummer.  In their lifetimes, they made a difference for the Kingdom of God. As you know, we are even working on a book to help us commemorate them. We are calling it Holy Women, Holy Men.  But we might as well call it The Chronicles of Crazy Christians.”

It is important to know what craziness Jesus calls us to, what kinds of fools he wants us to be.  

Some see the scene of Jesus getting angry and whipping the currency changers and understand it as a call to “righteous” anger, and the “appropriate” use of violence.  But that misses the whole point of the scene:  Jesus knows that power lies with the moneyed interests here.  The Temple police will restore order through their own use of force, and a few minutes later they’ll be back at their business.  Jesus knows that this prophetic act is probably going to get him killed.  It is not about losing his cool, being overcome by anger, and bullying others through force.  The moneyed people are the bullies here, not Jesus.  And I doubt he let himself be overcome by anger, as if he needed some anger management class, as if this act were some kind of pastoral abuse.    Again, this was a calculated act of disobedience, of non-cooperation, to make a point.  It was not a serious effort to overturn the system through force.  It was an effort to make people see the violence and cruelty at the heart of the system of power, and in so doing help bring closer the Reign of God. To be sure, Jesus got angry at times.  But this is not a problem with anger management.  It is a measure of his overall passion in all of life. 

Jesus wants the system of corruption and oppression to end.  He witnesses as a prophet in a memorable act, one that points to the violence buried in all the niceties of the religious system.  He does it despite the obvious cost, the Romans occupiers labeling him as a political opponent, and the cross they are preparing for him.

Jesus was crazy because he was in love with God.  Jesus was crazy because he loved the suffering ones he saw about him.  People like Pilate and Herod and Annas thought he was a fool, an inconvenient crazy man.   

Look at the world around us.  Oppression of the poor.  The rejection of the alien and stranger.  Homelessness.  Widespread gun violence.  The degradation of the natural environment of our beautiful world—caused by our incessant drive for comfort and wealth.  The risk that in our generation our atmosphere will be ruined irreparably.  War.   Child and spouse abuse, subjugation of women and minorities.  Harshness, bullying, unfaithfulness, violence and unfairness.  If we, seeing such things, do not go crazy, I wonder whether we belong to Jesus at all.  I wonder where our love and true joy is. 

Jesus calls us to be his fools.  He invites us to love God and our neighbor so much that we go crazy too.    That’s what he means when he asks us to pick up our crosses and follow him.  This is an invitation to joyful craziness, not sorrowful and grudging acceptance of pain.  Love justice, do compassion, and walk humbly with God.  

Jesus wants us to be crazy, like the saints.   

Let’s not disappoint him. 

In the name of Christ, Amen. 

Soul Mirror (Mid-week Message)

 

Soul Mirror

Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message

March 4, 2015

Those of you who attend Fr. Morgan Silbaugh’s Bible Study class will recognize his answer to the oft-heard evangelical claim “the Bible says”:  “and what else does the Bible say?”   The great truth behind this witticism is this:  the Bible is a library, not a book, and in different parts it teaches differing things.  

So how we read it in part reflects who we are.  Though the Psalmist says, “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path” (Psalm 119:105), often it is a mirror to our soul.  What we see in it tells us what kind of people we are. 

An example is Jesus and how he used the scriptures of his day.  Law, purity, and an urge to be separate from gentiles were the standard lens through which scripture was read.  This is understandable, since there are so many verses that deal with such things. 

But when Jesus comes upon an obscure passage in the Psalms, he sees other possibilities.  He reads:  “I will not accept a bull from your house, or goats from your folds. For every wild animal of the forest is mine, the cattle on a thousand hills.  I know all the birds of the air, and all that moves in the field is mine (Psalm 50:9-11).  This minor detail and others like it buried in the Psalms and Isaiah become for Jesus a center point that spins off other ideas and reflections about God.    Similarly, the prophets’ critique of the priestly system clearly speaks to him. 

Jesus ends up saying things like, “God counts the sparrows, so how could he not know about you?” “God cares for the wild flowers and the birds, how could he not care for you?”  “God has compassion and equanimity, sending the blessing of rain and sunshine on both good and bad alike.”  He ends up thinking that good and justice are communicable, not impurity. 

Do you avoid reading the Bible because it offends your sensibilities?  Or do you read only the “good parts,” or at least the parts you think are good?  Or do you read it with an open mind, realizing that some parts correct and remedy other ones, and that the general drift is one toward forgiveness, nonviolence, kindness and compassion?  When you read it, does it lead you to the loving and compassionate God that Jesus called Abba or Papa?  Does it convince you that violence is evil, and that justice and compassion are basic requirements for human life?  Or does it lead to you to a condemning, jealous, vicious, and violent deity, distant and inhuman? 

Jesus said, “Your eye is the lamp of your body. If your eye is healthy, your whole body is full of light; but if it is not healthy, your body is full of darkness” (Luke 11:34; cf. Matthew 6:22).   How someone reads and experiences scripture often tells us more about that person than it does about God. 

How do you read scripture? 

Grace and Peace,

Fr. Tony+   

Ties that Bind (Trinitarian March 2015)

Fr. Tony’s Letter to the Trinitarians

March 2015

Ties that Bind

In the Disney version of Pinnochio, the puppet who wants to become a live boy is led to a mysterious place called Pleasure Island.  In this scary amusement park, all rules are off.   Pinnochio is ready; he has already sung his ode to no restraints:

“I've got no strings
To hold me down
To make me fret, or make me frown
I had strings
But now I'm free
There are no strings on me

…I've got no strings
So I have fun
I'm not tied up to anyone
They've got strings
But you can see
There are no strings on me.”

In Pleasure Island, Pinnochio discovers the unpleasant truth:  a life without restraints, without personal obligations and ties that bind, is a life that robs us of our humanity.   It is a place where boys are turned into sad and crazed donkeys.  

Here in the great unchurched Pacific Northwest, we often hear the phrases “I am spiritual but not religious,”  “I believe in God, but not organized religion,” and “I love Christ but not the Christian religion.”   The sentiment is understandable.  Churches and the institutions of religion, with their rules, methods of exclusion, and guilt-inducing narrative loops, are often the instruments of oppression and dehumanization.  As Marcus Borg often said, “When someone tells me they don’t believe in God, I ask them to tell me about the God they don’t believe in, and find that I don’t believe in that God either.”  Well, when people say they don’t want Church, or religion, and they say what it is they don’t like, I find myself nodding in agreement. 

But the word religion shouldn't be rejected out of hand.  The Latin re-ligio means that which binds us firmly.  And the idea in Latin is not about bondage in the oppressive sense of slavery or some kind of sexual kink. It is about the gentle ties that bind us to each other, our community, neighbors, those who have gone before, our families, and to all those around us.   Granted, it is about the obligations these ties impose.  But it is also about the meaning and sense they bestow to life, and how this makes us more human. 

Diana Butler Bass, who will lecture here in Ashland this month and is the focus of our Lenten reading program, describes what she sees as a “Great Awakening” going on in world faith traditions, a shift of orientations and ways of putting things together.  When she talks about “Christianity after Religion,” she is describing a Christianity after the old extrincisist way of putting Christianity together, the institution-, authority-, and dogma- focused Christianity of our youths.  She is not describing a Christianity shorn of all ties that bind, or Christians with “no strings to tie them down.”  In fact, Butler Bass stresses the new ways of Christian believing, belonging, and behaving that are coming to life in this awakening: they are marked by personal conviction, relationship within community, and spiritual practices.   I think she is talking about “Christianity after bad religion,” not the end of Christian faith itself at all. 

Grace and Peace,  Fr. Tony+

Embracing the Good and the Bad (Lent 2B)

 

 (Icon by Smith Catholic Art)

Embracing the Good and the Bad
Second Sunday of Lent (Year B)
1 March 2015; 8 am Said Mass Rite I 
Homily Delivered at the Parish Church of Trinity Ashland (Oregon)

   The Rev. Dr. Anthony Hutchinson, homilist  

Gen. 17:1-7, 15-16; Psa. 22:23-30; Rom. 4:13-25; Mark 8:31-38

 God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen.

Today’s reading from Mark’s Gospel tells the story of what happens just after Peter first says that he believes Jesus is the Messiah.   Jesus tells him that what he has been taught about this hoped-for figure is wrong. Contrary to common expectations, the Messiah has to undergo great suffering, be rejected by the religious and social leaders of his people, and be killed.  Peter can’t accept this, and tells Jesus off, and says he is out of line.  Jesus replies by rebuking Peter, saying that he is his adversary and not his disciple, using the graphic Aramaic word Satana, or Satan.   Then comes the saying that disciples must learn to pick up their cross and follow Jesus. 

Those of you who are familiar with the Jesus Seminar’s work in reconstructing the sayings of the historical Jesus will recognize a problem in the passage:  it has all the shape of being the product of the later faith of the Church.  In fact, most careful biblical scholars note that it has typical signs of the editing and narrative style of the first Gospel writer, Mark.  The Jesus Seminar fellows marked the sayings in the passage as almost certainly not coming from the historical Jesus.  In the phrasing of Marcus Borg, these words come from the post-Easter Jesus, not the pre-Easter one. 

But interestingly, there are some reasons for seeing the elements of the story as coming from the historical life of Jesus.  More thorough-going scholars like John P. Meier admit that the story is Mark’s, but that at least some of the details behind the story probably go back to Jesus’ life.  It is hard to conceive of post-Easter Christians making the story up of Jesus calling Peter a Satan, especially right after Peter confesses Jesus as Messiah.   The problem of course is identifying what context these sayings would have had on the lips of the historical Jesus. 

At the most, it would be that Jesus could see that he was probably headed to no good end, that his teaching was going to get him in deadly trouble with the Roman authorities, that he still embraced his calling, and that he believed that his followers similarly had to embrace such risk.  Again, at the most, the historical Jesus might be alluding the "son of Man" as a reference to the Messiah, but this is unlikely. 

“Son of man” is a phrase that has a long and complex history in scripture.  But the most basic point is this:  in Jesus’ native language, Aramaic, it simply meant a “human being,” and was a way of referring to oneself in a humble, self-deprecatory way.   On the lips of the historical Jesus, “son of man” means something like “this humble person you see before you,” or “this average schmo, me.”    Only later, after Good Friday and Easter, did the Church see this quirky way Jesus had of referring to himself as a claim to be the Messiah:  they linked Jesus’ use of it to a passage in the Book of Daniel that refers to a coming future saving figure as looking “something like a human being,” literally, “a son of man.”     It took Easter to make them see the phrase with new eyes, just as it made them see Jesus’ references to God as “Abba” or Papa not a teaching of the intimacy of each and every person with God, but rather a claim to Jesus’ unique divine sonship. 

At the least, the saying would mean something like “this humble human being before you is going to get himself killed.”   And the following saying about disciples taking up their cross would be “and you too must embrace such a lot.” 

If indeed these sayings go back to the historical Jesus, then, they must mean something like, “Human beings, if they live how they’re supposed to, are bound to suffer.  And you must embrace this fact or you’re not really understanding my teaching, not really following me.” 

Embracing the bad that goes along with the good God gives us, then, would be the point of this teaching by Jesus. 

The idea is very close to what we find in the Book of Job.  When Job’s wife tells him to curse God and die because God has been so unfair to him, Job replies, “You are talking like a foolish woman. If we are willing to accept good things from God and bless him, shouldn’t we be willing to accept hard times from him as well?”  The narrator adds, “ In all this, Job did not sin in what he said” (Job 2:0). 

Accept the good and bad that God gives you.  Do not struggle against God’s way of bestowing good things.  The idea is implicit in sayings almost universally attributed to the historical Jesus:  “Love both your neighbor and enemies alike.  Act as the children of your father in heaven, who gives his blessing of rain and sunshine equally to the righteous and the wicked” (Matt 5:45).  “Do not worry about what tomorrow will bring. God cares for the sparrows and wildflowers.  God will care for you” (Matt 6:25-34).  “Do not judge so that you will not be judged.” 

This isn’t to say we need to reject feelings of hurt and pain when we suffer.  Feelings will come, and that’s O.K.  That’s one of the great lessons from the Book of Psalms, that has about every emotion under the sun.  

But trusting in a gracious and good God, a loving Abba or Papa, means trusting.  That means we need to have equanimity and patience.  It means acceptance.

Acceptance is not gritting your teeth, holding your nose, and putting up with the intolerable.  Acceptance is embracing what is, good and bad, and letting that embrace be part of our love for God and God’s love for us.  Acceptance is not judging, but watching and being present. 

There is a traditional Chinese story that tells of accepting the way things are, the Tao:  A farmer had only one horse.  One day the horse ran away. The neighbors came to commiserate over what they saw as his terrible loss. The farmer said, "What makes you think it is so terrible?"  Later, the horse came home--this time bringing with her two beautiful wild horses. The neighbors became excited at the farmer's good fortune. Such lovely strong horses! The farmer said, "What makes you think this is good fortune?"  The farmer's son was thrown from one of the wild horses and broke his leg. All the neighbors were very distressed. Such bad luck! The farmer said, "What makes you think it is bad?"  A war came, and every able-bodied man was conscripted and sent into battle. Only the farmer's son, because he had a broken leg, remained. The neighbors congratulated the farmer. "What makes you think this is good?" said the farmer.

When Jesus says he will suffer terrible things and we must be willing to suffer terribly too, I think he is calling us to acceptance.  And this is because our Father in heaven is ultimately good and kind, despite what may appear before our eyes.  Trusting God, having faith, means acceptance. 

Thanks be to God.  Amen