Seating Charts and Invitations Proper 17C

Seating Charts and Invitations

Jesus is invited to share a Sabbath meal with a group of Pharisees. You would think they would know better, as Jesus frequently is a truly different kind of dinner guest – and often assumes the role of host wherever he goes. A man in need of healing appears from out of nowhere. Before healing yet another person on the Sabbath, Jesus challenges the Pharisees present as to whether or not they think it would be all right to heal someone on the Sabbath. They say nothing. He heals the man and sends him off, reminding the Pharisees that if they have a child or ox who falls into a well on the Sabbath, they would rescue them. Meaning, “I am on a rescue mission for all of humanity, all creatures, and God’s Green Earth itself! Even on the Sabbath!” 

Then, to put a fine point on rescuing all of humanity, not just one favored group, and why inviting Jesus to dinner is risky business, he goes into a strange rant on seating arrangements and who to and who not to invite to your dinner table. By now it should come as no surprise, we are to invite the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame ahead of family, friends, and neighbors. That is, the Son of God wants everyone at God’s table – which by the time Luke is relating this episode, the dinner table is all that is left of an Altar in in Jewish life since the Altar and Temple forever have been reduced to a pile of smoldering ashes. That is, the dinner table is where we are to meet God. And all humanity is to be represented. There is no longer Jew or Gentile, Israelite and Greek, male and female, slave and free, straight or gay, black, white, yellow or red. People are people. All are created, male and female, in the image of God. Jesus has been sent to remind us that God his Father wants everyone represented at the table. 

He then recounts a banquet parable. The usual guests are invited: those who are familiar and are in a position to reciprocate – who are affluent enough to invite you in return to their dinner table. Or, wedding feast. Or, birthday party. Or, Passover meal. Or, the Holy Eucharist. One after another, however, those invited are too busy to come: I’ve just bought out another farm and need to go see my new acquisition, says one. I just purchased a new team of oxen and need to try them out, says another. I just got married, and, uh, well you know, says yet another. When the host hears that everyone is too busy, he is disappointed, and angry, and tells his servant, “Go out at once into the streets and lanes of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.” They all come, and yet, there is still room for more! So, the Host instructs the servant, “Go out into the roads and lanes, and compel people to come in, so that my house may be filled. For I tell you, none of those who were invited will taste my dinner.” 

Of all the stories Jesus tells, I suspect this one appealed to Luke more than any other. Because Luke’s gospel, and his second volume, The Acts of the Apostles, is about how the young Church, the Community of God’s Love in Christ, will incorporate all people everywhere into the world Jesus the Son of God imagines it ought to look like – the kingdom of God. Will it exist as a small group of First Century Jews? Or, will it welcome and even invite a broad spectrum of all kinds of people as Jesus implies in this parable he shares with the Pharisees who have invited him to share a meal with them – their cozy little group of People of the Way who want to desperately follow God’s Way to every jot and tittle of the 603 commandments issued all the way back in Torah, the first five books of the Bible. 

Jesus’s proposed invitation list and seating charts must sound simply bizarre to them. Invite the great unwashed and unclean to our club? After approximately two thousand years, look around and it will be evident that the Church, capital “C”, has not done a particularly good job of opening the doors, and the Eucharist, to everyone everywhere without question or qualification. We think you need to be baptized to witness the power and the mystery of Christ’s Body and Blood. We think you need to be of a certain age. Or, somehow need all kinds of teaching and training to feel the Love of Christ Jesus that emanates from a truly open, welcoming, inviting Community of Christ’s Love. We sing, “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea; there’s a kindness in His justice which is more than liberty. There is welcome for the sinner, and more graces for the good; there is mercy with the Savior; there is healing in His blood.” Then we tend to narrow God’s mercy even though this hymn by Frederick William Faber (1862), and Jesus’s parable, both suggest a kind of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is to be fundamental to make-up of Christ’s One Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church? Turn to the Book of Acts and Luke tells story after story of the early church accepting Africans, Eunuchs, female Entrepreneurs, Gentiles and Foreigners of all kinds into the fellowship of the Community of Christ’s Love. Just how many congregations look like the Apostolic Church Luke describes and documents? 

And now there emerges something called White Christian Nationalism in America. The early church had few, if any, white Europeans among them. And as the depiction of Pentecost documents, people from all kinds of nations and cultures were invited, and gathered into the emerging Church from its very beginning. There is to be nothing white nor nationalistic in a community that claims to be a forerunner, a vanguard community, of a world committed to the reign of God’s mercy, forgiveness, and love – what Jesus calls the kingdom of God, to which he calls us to accept and live here and now. 

What ought we do or say as we watch citizens of color systematically removed from our midst and sent, we know not where? When we see women systematically removed from leadership positions? When we witness health care being reduced or even withdrawn from the very people Jesus says we ought to be welcoming, sustaining, and supporting? When we see food and meals, withdrawn from nourishing those who do not have the resources to secure more than one meal a day, if that? What do we say? What do we do? What do we think as we reflect on the foundational texts of the Biblical Tradition? How are we to treat those Jesus calls us to love: Resident aliens, strangers, prisoners, the lame, blind, and poor? How often do we go into the “roads and the lanes” and “compel people” to come to the feast of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ? What Jesus describes and works for every day and night is “true religion” that identifies and seeks to meet the needs of all people, no questions asked. All means all. Not just “white” people, not just “Americans.” Invitations and Seating Charts in his Father’s kingdom need to be inclusive of every single kind of human being that walks this Earth. 

These are just a few of the questions the fourteenth chapter of Luke raises. Jesus is insistent: Now is the time to act. Now is the time to include all those he cherishes into the mainstream of our daily life. Just how wide is God’s Mercy? Just how kind is God’s Justice that is more than Liberty? What are we to do or say? 

In our opening collect we pray today for God to: Graft in our hearts the love of your Name; increase in us true religion; nourish us with all goodness; and bring forth in us the fruit of good works. If not now, when?

 

Repentance: New Life in The Reign of God Proper 16C

 

Repentance: New Life in the Reign of God

As chapter 13 of Luke opens, Jesus is asked about Galileans whose blood Pilate mingled with their sacrifices – murdered in an act of sacrifice and worship, quite possibly seeking God’s forgiveness (Luke 13:1-9). Jesus knows what is on their mind, and replies, “Do you think those Galileans were worse sinners than any others? No, and unless you repent you will perish as they did!” Then he references others living in Jerusalem who died when a tower crashed down on them? Were they too greater sinners than anyone else in Jerusalem? No, and unless you repent something like that may happen to you as well. 

Then like any good rabbi, he tells them a story: A man had planted a fig tree in his vineyard. After three years it still had produced no figs. He orders the gardener to cut it down. “Why should it be wasting the soil?” The gardener intercedes on behalf of the fig tree. “Let me dig around it, place some manure in the ground, and let’s give it one more year. If it bears fruit, well and good. If not, you can cut it down.” It’s a story of forgiveness, grace and repentance, as those terms are understood throughout the Old and New Testaments of our Bible. 

To be in covenant with God our Creator, the story says, is to be in a relationship with the One God who wants to remain in relationship with us, even when we stray from God’s ways. God repeatedly calls Israel and individuals to repent. Repentance in the Bible means we have turned away from the Way of God, and therefore need to turn and turn until, as the Shaker hymn tell us, “we come down right,” walking in God’s Way again, not ours. The man who owns the vineyard and the fig tree is only concerned with profit and seems to have forgotten: as it is with God, so it is with us, and so it also shall be for the fig tree, a stand-in for all of creation. That is what is called arguing from the greater down to the lesser. 

Jesus then reverses the argument as he is teaching in a synagogue on the Sabbath (Luke 13:10-17), when suddenly a woman who has been bent over for 18 years comes in to worship with the community. I tried walking around the house bent over for just a few minutes. All one sees is one’s own feet, and just how dirty the floor is. If you are in a garden, you might see flowers that are low to the ground, but miss the large bushes of blue and white fluffy Hydrangeas, or majestic Oak and Sycamore trees. It is a limited view of the world and of life itself. With no prompting, Jesus immediately calls her over and proclaims, “Woman, you are set free from that which binds you.” And she stands up and praises God. The leader of the synagogue repeatedly tells anyone who will listen, “There are six days upon which you may work, come on those days to be healed, not the Sabbath.” Jesus then argues from the lesser to the greater, saying, “But on the Sabbath you untie your animals and lead them to get a drink of water. And ought not this woman, a Daughter of Abraham, bound by Satan for 18 long years, be unbound and set free on the Sabbath?” Everyone in the synagogue rejoiced at all the wonderful things he was doing. For the woman and everyone had re-turned to living life in the reign of God! 

“The wonderful things he was doing.” When one hears the good news, “Repent, for the Reign of God is at hand,” it is just the beginning. After hearing the good news, it is not what we think or believe that is of any importance – it is what we do that counts. Jesus demonstrates this by taking the initiative to remind everyone that Sabbath is a kind of repentance, a re-turning to the realm of God’s reign and God’s will. And that every day, especially on the Sabbath, God’s main concern is the well-being of all people, because God loves all people having created us in God’s own image. To liberate someone who has been bound by Satan for a long time trumps all other practices and rituals associated with keeping the Sabbath day holy.  It is not whether we keep the Sabbath day holy, but how we keep the Sabbath day holy that matters. Do we limit ourselves to “how we have always done it before”? Or, as Jesus and God his Father, through all of holy Scripture show us, we are to take the risk to perform surprising and daring deeds to free others from whatever binds them, whether it be exile, occupation, or random dangerous events. God forgives us and God loves us. Jesus was sent to remind us of this simple truth. So that repentance is not an act of contrition or confession, it is a turning away from business as usual and re-turning to the way of God – which Way is to love God and love our neighbor – all neighbors. 

In his book, The Good News of Jesus, William Countryman sums it up like this:

“Hearing the good news is a beginning. The rest of our life forms our response. To trust that God has loved us in this surprising way, to hope that God will go on loving us in this way, to love the one who has sought our love and to love ourselves for our own newly discovered or rediscovered loveliness, to love our world and our neighbor for the same reason – these acts of love form the bones, the skeleton, of life in the good news. We flesh them out in our daily experience of living in faith, hope, and love. As the good news shapes our lives, we and our world will begin to grow rich with the delight that God has intends for us…

“We learn to stay in conversation with one another and with our forebearers in faith. We learn to value the fixed points of sacraments and Scripture as well as to prize the surprises of life in the Spirit. We discover with delight that, however old we may be, we go right on growing and changing and maturing by the power of the good news. This is what the good news makes possible! You don’t have to earn your way by being perfect. You don’t even have to pretend to be perfect. God has chosen you in love, just as you are. All is forgiven.

“A new country lies before you. A new citizenship is yours. The frontier is open. The border guards have been reassigned. No one needs a visa anymore.

“Now take risks. Accept your new citizenship. Make a new beginning with God, with yourself, with your world, and with your neighbor. “ [i] 

The new life of the good news is like this: As we all were preparing for Holy Communion one morning at Trinity Episcopal Church, Wall Street, NYC, the Celebrant and two chalice bearers standing on the pavement before the communion rail, suddenly a visitor came in the door and all the way down the aisle – skipping the whole way. He stops and asks the priest, in a loud voice, “Is that the Body of Christ?” Yes, it is, said the priest. And pointing at a chalice the man who had skipped down the aisle asked, “And is that the Blood of Christ?” Yes, it is, replied the chalice bearer. “Then, I’ll have me some of that!” he said. With that, the priest gave him the bread, and a chalice bearer offered him the wine. The man then turned around, and skipped all the way back up the aisle and out the door with a satisfied grin on his face, ready to see the world in an entirely new light. The light of Christ. No one asked if he was baptized. No one questioned how he approached Holy Communion, or his behavior, or challenged any aspect of his appearance that morning. As citizens of the good news and the reign of God, we all seemed to remember that Jesus had given his life for the life of the world – the whole world. And that the man who skipped down the aisle was our neighbor. And that we had just made a stranger, a strange one at that, very happy, judging by the look on his face and his exuberant departure. And that’s how we make a new beginning with God, with ourselves, with the world, and with our neighbors!

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[i] Countryman, L,William, The Good News of Jesus (Cowley Press, Cambridge, MA:1993) p. 108-109

Are We Acting in Faith? Proper 15C

 Are We Acting in Faith?

The Bible is unflinching in challenging us to interpret the world we live in. Thus, we find Jesus, in an already difficult and disturbing outburst, asking this most pivotal question of faith: Why do we not know how to interpret the present time? For those of us living in the United States today, this is undoubtedly the most challenging task facing our public life. It divides not just the country whose name begins with the word “United,” but as Jesus declares in Luke 12:49-56, the divisions are upending families and households: “Father against son, and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.” As it is with the present time in a dangerously ununited United States, so it was a mere three generations into the life of what came to be called the Christian Church when Luke was writing a Gospel and The Acts of the Apostles. 

In fact, in a few weeks we will hear the tone sharpened when Jesus announces, "Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.” [Luke 14:26-27] All his speech about kindling a fire, a stressful baptism, carrying a cross, becoming a disciple, is framed as a response to “the present time.” Jesus has read, marked, and inwardly digested the warnings of the prophets of Israel: God is not impressed by worship, sacrifices, and prayers that are not backed up with action. Which action is meant to counter the unjust, and therefore ungodly, actions of a society that ceases protections for its most vulnerable citizens, often described in the coded biblical phrase, “widows, orphans, and resident aliens.” 

When the Poet-Prophet Isaiah describes Israel as God’s personal vineyard [Isaiah 5:1-7], we hear the interpretation of the present time is that of everything falling apart: instead of producing fruits worthy of becoming fine wine, the vineyard yields only wild grapes. Why? Because where the Lord asked for there to be a just society, one sees only bloodshed; where the Lord asked for righteousness – mercy, forgiveness of debts, love of neighbor – one “hears only a cry.” It is a judgement issued more out of sorrow and disappointment than anger. Instead of a community that cares for the well-being of all of society, to include even those nomadic resident aliens seeking safe refuge, one sees the people driven into debt, ancestral farms foreclosed and usurped by predatory urban “despots,” and the cry of a people who have lost their homes, and many snatched off the land and carried off to foreign lands to be slaves and servants of other nations. 

As he interprets the present time, Jesus sees these historic injustices and lack of support for God’s people compounded by the occupation of the vineyard by a brutal and resource devouring Empire centered in Rome, overseen by the emperor-god, Caesar. Jesus warns those who respond to his call to “follow him” in all his attempts to restore justice for the debt-ridden and poor, to dismantle the rapacious systems of governance and taxation, and somehow drive out the foreign legions to restore the vineyard, to restore Israel as God’s own people and land, and to reestablish a just and free society for all. He warns that the path toward a restored and productive vineyard will be met with conflict and resistance before justice, mercy and peace has any chance of being restored. To put it bluntly, to be a disciple of Jesus, one must be willing to be kindled into a fire capable of dismantling and burning to the ground all systems of injustice that seek only to consolidate the wealth and resources of the land in the hands of the few, the affluent, and a politically-repressive leadership. 

As one searches for the good news one needs to hear Jesus’s assurance to those who choose to leave the comfort of social and family ties and trust in the assured outcome: “Truly, I tell you, there is no one who has left house or wife or brothers or parents or children, for the sake of the kingdom of God, who will not get back very much more in this age and in the age to come eternal life.” [Luke 18:29-30] His is a bold claim, but a claim rooted in Jesus’s people’s history. 

Enter the treatise called Hebrews, which is believed to have been addressed to a struggling Christian community rooted in the very heart of the prevailing darkness, Rome. And it is this treatise called Hebrews that reviews the history of biblical faith. “Now faith is the reality of things hoped for, the proof of things not seen.” Rather than a claim about personal belief, Hebrews makes the highly provocative claim that faith itself moves in the direction of the realization of those things that are presently beyond demonstration, but nevertheless are real. 

Hebrews examines the lives of Abel, Enoch, Noah, Sarah and Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as those who face difficult times, and yet acted out of faith and changed the life of human civilization. Hebrews goes on to say, “By faith the people passed through the Red Sea as if it were dry land, but when the Egyptians attempted to do so they were drowned. By faith the walls of Jericho fell after they had been encircled for seven days. By faith Rahab the prostitute did not perish with those who were disobedient, because she had received the spies in peace. And what more should I say? For time would fail me to tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets-- who through faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, obtained promises, shut the mouths of lions, quenched raging fire, escaped the edge of the sword, won strength out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight. Yet all these, though they were commended for their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better so that they would not, apart from us, be made perfect. “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.” [Hebrews 11:29-12:2] 

All of which is to say, what we do now, as we interpret the needs of the present time, has eternal consequences, whether or not we see the fruits of our labor. Walter Rauschenbusch, a Baptist pastor and American theologian observed, “The man who wrote this little treatise…saw the history of humanity summed up in the life spirits who had the power of projection into the future. Faith is a quality of the heart which sees things before that are visible, which acts on ideals before they are realities, and which feels the distant city of God to be more dear, substantial, and attractive than the edible and profitable present. Hebrews 11 calls on Christians to take up the same manner of life, and compares them with men and women running a race in an amphitheater packed with all generations of the past who are watching them make their record. But he bids them keep their eye on Jesus who starts them at the line and will meet them at the goal, and who has set the pace for good and fleet men and women for all time” [i] 

This great cloud of witnesses watches us now, in this present time. What do they see? Are we interpreting the present time and acting accordingly? Are we ready to pick up our crosses to follow Jesus and all those who came before him into the reality of God’s reign? 

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[i] Rauschenbusch, Walter, The Social Principles of Jesus (The International Committee of the YMCA, London:1916) p.189

Faith, Worship, & The Christian Life Proper 14C

 Faith, Worship, & The Christian Life

Faith. It’s a word that gets thrown around. And it is, writes the author of the treatise known as Hebrews, central to a God centered life. As I write that, it seems quaint. Almost unheard of, that a person would live a God centered life rather than the more modern and more popular self-centered life as advocated by Ayn Rand and her disciples among Libertarian and Conservative political movements. 

Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16 tells us: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Not to get into the weeds of translation and the Greek text, but the argument has been made, persuasively, that it ought to read more like, “Now faith is the reality of things hoped for, the proof of things not seen.” [i] By striking a contrast with the customary understanding of this verse, in which it asserts the obvious truth that faith involves confidence about things that cannot presently be verified, what Hebrews actually asserts is that in faith the believer already anticipates the final outcome (the reality) of what is believed. That is not to say that believing makes something true or that whatever one actually believes will happen, but that faith itself has a kind of eschatological power. Similarly, “conviction” speaks to a personal belief that something may happen, whereas the Greek means “proof” that it will happen. Rather than a claim about personal belief, Hebrews makes the highly provocative claim that faith itself moves in the direction of the realization of those things that are presently beyond demonstration.[ii] 

The originating example of this movement of Faith, the originating story of the Bible, concerns Abraham and Sarah – who are moved by faith to leave everything behind them – home, family, friends – and journey toward two promises of a new home and nearly infinite progeny! As we all know, they never see either one.Bbut faith moves their unlikely progeny, (astonishingly so given their advanced ages – “and he as good as dead!”), become twelve tribes who multiply for generations in Egypt, and another two generations in the wilderness before the proof of those two promises is a reality. Jesus does not see the fullness of the kingdom of God he proclaims, yet, as it was for Abraham and Sarah, so will be the future fulfillment of the kingdom of God. 

In all the examples marshalled in Hebrews, God is the object of Faith. And as the First Letter of John (4:7-21) reminds us, God is Love: “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. … Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another.  No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us, and his love is perfected in us.” 

Faith is God’s love moving in us, through us, and all around us. Just as important as it is to know God and God’s love as the object of Faith, we need to know what the opposite of Faith is. Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor, author, and teacher asserts that the opposite of love is not hate, but rather indifference. It was the indifference of neighbors who saw the evil that was happening throughout Europe that allowed the Nazi driven Holocaust to happen. There was no significant uprising until it was too late. In his memoir, Night, Wiesel writes that those in the camps believed that even God could not know what was happening. Yet, when they were released from the camps, they learned that the whole world had known. And in particular, the US State Department had hard evidence of what was going on, and chose to do nothing until Japan eventually drew us into the war. 

The subject of Faith is God/Love. The Opposite of Faith, therefore, is indifference. Love is a verb, not a noun, not a feeling or belief, but what one does! It is in faith that we act in the direction that God and Christ call us to prove what will be the ultimate reality for all people – a world of mercy, love and justice. 

Worship. The poet-prophet Isaiah explores the connection of faith with worship. Specifically, the Temple worship in Jerusalem. Isaiah announces that God is not happy with the sacrifices at the Temple: “What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the Lord; I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats. When you come to appear before me, who asked this from your hand? Trample my courts no more; bringing offerings is futile; incense is an abomination to me.”( Isaiah 1:1, 10-20) There is also a harsh word for the people’s prayers, “When you stretch out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood.” Thus, the expression, there is blood on our hands – not only for what the people do, and what is done on our behalf by our leadership, but for what the people of God and our leadership are not doing. 

Why this condemnation of worship and prayer? Because both tend to be self-centered. We often  use worship, sacrifices, and prayers to manipulate God to do what we want. Which is backwards. We are there in the Temple, the synagogue, the church, to learn just what it is God wants from us. What God wants us to do. And for Isaiah, it is all quite simple: “Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.” We are to love our neighbors – to love those who are vulnerable, and in need of a helping hand. 

In Luke 12:32-40, just after the story about the self-centered man whose sole concern is to build more, bigger, fuller barns, Jesus puts a fine point on it: “Sell your possessions, and give alms.” And later in Luke Volume 2, The Acts of the Apostles, we see a community living in Jerusalem doing just that: “All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.  Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts,  praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.” (Acts 2:42-47) 

That is, worship and prayer are not a means by which we manipulate God to do our bidding. Worship and Prayer are the means by which God seeks to change us – to lead us in the Way of Love. The Way of Faith. And Worship and Prayer are the means by which we give thanks – Eucharistia – that God invites us to be those people who proclaim and live out of God’s Love for all persons, all creatures, and all of creation. The invitation to “sell…and give” in Luke, together with the call “to be dressed and ready,” suggests that our use of financial resources is inextricably related to our conviction that the future and our destiny lies ultimately with God. Then living our of our Faith about the future affects how we live in the present. 

When we allow worship and prayer to help us become those who trust in God’s reign, makes possible that our lives will be God centered with love for all our neighbors. Amen.

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[i] Newsom, James D., Texts For Preaching: Year C (Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville: 1994) p.465-66

[ii] Ibid, Newsome

Experiences of God Proper 13C

 Experiences of God

“The wrath of God is his relentless compassion, pursuing us even when we are at our worst. Lord, give us mercy to bear your mercy” – Maggie Ross

Luke more than any of the four evangelists seems concerned with the problem of “Affluenza.” Although we tend to think that most of Jesus’s most ardent followers as those who were land poor, homeless, collaborators with the Empire like tax collectors, the lame, the sick, and the demon possessed. Yet, Luke, writing to a church a generation or two after the Crucifixion, and perhaps a decade after the destruction of the Temple and all of Jerusalem, which now has attracted people of wealth, land holders, the oiko despotos, and there are inheritances at stake. 

Luke tells the story of a Prodigal Son which revolves around the inheritance of two sons. And this story which begins with a question about an inheritance: someone in the crowd asks, "Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me."  [Luke 12:13-21] Jesus is a shrewdie. He knows what we all know. There are family members who no longer speak to one another because one of them got the tea cup, and the other got the saucer. 

I’m no probate judge, he says. “Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one's life does not consist in the abundance of possessions." What I am is a rabbi, a teacher, and I tell funny stories. There was a man whose farm produced abundantly. What shall I do, he says to himself? I will build more and bigger barns to store all “my grain and goods.” Then I will say to my Self, “Self, we have accumulated all this grain and all this stuff. Let’s eat, drink and be merry. I am set for years to come! Relax!” When suddenly from offstage comes the Voice of God: “Self, you are no self. You are no soul. What you are is a fool. Look at you celebrating all by yourself. You’ve got no friends, no neighbors. All you have is barns full of stuff, and tonight your life will be taken from you. Whose will it all be now? That’s the question for all of us. Whose is it now? Psalm 24, which follows right after the 23^rd Psalm, reminds us, “The Earth is the Lord’s, and everything therein.” We are just temporary stewards of what is the Lord God’s to begin with and for evermore. 

In case we have all forgotten this comes the punch line: “So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God." Grain is no good stored in barns. Everyone listening to Jesus knows that much. There are rats. And mold. It rots. It’s no good unless it is sold or given away for those who can use it for the daily bread we are meant to pray for. He just taught them how to pray. And he didn’t say to pray for a freezer full of bread, and meats, and veggies for the future. Pray for bread that is given daily. The man in the story could be feeding all those who have no daily bread. That’s what it means to be “rich toward God.” For those called to love God and love neighbor, it’s all pretty simple. We don’t need more and bigger barns, larger investment portfolios, and offshore bank accounts. We need to keep the grain, the goods, and the wealth in circulation for it all to do any good. 

As to helping our neighbors, as the hymns says, as the Letter to the Colossians says, “all are neighbors to us and you.” To those of us “made new” in Christ, “there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!” [Colossians 3:1-11] Or as it might be written today: There is neither black, brown, yellow, red, or white, nor male or female, gay or trans! We are all humans created in the image of God! All deserving daily bread, forgiveness of debts, and to be spared the times of trial. The danger is not in having great wealth, it’s having what the text says in Greek, pleonexia – literally “the desire of gaining more and more.” It was a problem then, and surely is a problem today. It is placing one’s life, one’s security, in the abundance of possessions.

 

As Father Brendan Byrne, SJ, writes in his commentary on Luke, The Hospitality of God, the theme is prominent in Luke’s gospel is that “nothing is more destructive of life and humanity than preoccupation with acquiring, holding onto, and increasing wealth. The problem is not so much the possession of riches as such. It is that the desire to acquire and enhance them, fed by insecurity, prevents people from attending to the relationship with God that brings the only security that counts. Such desire also erodes the concern for the other that is the basis of true community. Attachment to wealth is incompatible with living, sharing, and celebrating the hospitality of God.” [i] Like the man in the story, you end up celebrating all by yourself. 

And now, the rest of the story. Jesus turns to his disciples, which of course means us – we the baptized ministers of his Community of Love we call “church.” The underlying message is to seek the kingdom, for “life is more than food, and the body more than clothing.” [Luke 12:22-34] Consider the birds who have neither storehouses nor barns – but God our father feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds? And consider the lilies of the field, how they grow – “they neither toil nor spin, and yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these!” Solomon, of course, represents the culture of conspicuous consumption. We are told in 1 Kings 4:22 that “One day's food supply for Solomon's household was: 185 bushels of fine flour 375 bushels of meal 10 grain-fed cattle 20 range cattle 100 sheep and miscellaneous deer, gazelles, roebucks, choice fowl,” and a partridge in a pear tree. While others in the kingdom starved, Solomon’s household ate really really well. 

Finally, Jesus urges us, “Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions and give alms. Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys.  For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” 

How are we to know this? Some eight hundred years before Jesus and Luke, Hosea reminds people that the more they stray from God’s Way, the more God loves them – like a mother with her only child: “The more I called them, the more they went from me; they kept sacrificing to the Baals, and offering incense to idols. Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk, I took them up in my arms; but they did not know that I healed them. I led them with cords of human kindness, with bands of love. I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks… I am God and no mortal, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath.”[ii] The God of the Old Testament is a God of Love.

When we suffer from “all kinds of greed,” when we worship idols of money and possessions, our God suffers with us and wants to hold us with “bands of love, with cords of human kindness.” God calls us to a life in his kingdom, and wants to know, where is our heart? Where is our treasure. Jesus issues a call to a fundamental reallocation of material and social goods according to our knowledge of God’s justice, for this is what can make us “rich toward God.” [iii] This will make us a people who love God and love neighbor. It is this love that characterizes God’s reign, God’s kingdom. And it will be this love that shapes us as a Community of Love.

---

[i] Byrne, Brendan, SJ, The Hospitality of God (The Liturgical Press, Collegeville, MN:2000) p.114-115

[ii] Hosea 11:1-11.

[iii] Ringe, Sharon, Luke (John Knox Westminster Press, Louisville: 1995) p.179

Prayer & The Kingdom of God’s Love Proper 12C

 Prayer & The Kingdom of God’s Love

Jesus was praying “in a certain place.” (Luke 11:1-13) The men and women disciples traveling with him ask him to teach them how to pray, just as John taught his disciples. What follows is a version of what we call The Lord’s Prayer, though our usual liturgical version is based largely on that presented in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew. The prayer is followed by a funny story about bread, scorpions, and the Holy Spirit. It seems it’s always about bread! 

Although Jesus launches right into a prayer, a close reading of the text suggests that the first step very well may be to find ourselves “a certain place.” As the final petitions are in the second person plural, “us and we,” Jesus is suggesting that we pray together. In his Jewish world, that requires a minyan, ten or more people. The “certain place,” then, appears to be with the Community of Love he is building. Elsewhere, Jesus appears to reduce the minyan to two or three: “wherever two or three are gathered in my name, I am in the midst of them (Matthew 18:20). Our certain place may not be a place at all. It can be wherever two or three or ten or more are gathered. We, the Community of God’s Love, are that place wherever and whenever we are together. At the time of Jesus, and even more so the time of Luke following the destruction of the Temple, finding a place to gather could be dangerous given the intention of the Roman Empire to put an end to Jesus and his followers who choose to follow the will of a higher power. 

Jesus begins our prayer quite simply: Father. This was Jesus’s personal address to the God of all creation, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of the Passover and Exodus, the God of the Wilderness Sojourn. That is, Jesus invites us to become part of his family, God’s family, and we are granted permission to address God as he does: Father. The Community of God’s Love becomes our fictive family – not related by blood or marriage, but on our mutual affection and mutual support for one another, and all those in need. 

“Hallowed be your name.” Holy, Revered, Honored be God’s name. How might we hallow God’s name? It begins with loving the God who loves us and all that God has created, and loving everyone and all that God has created ourselves. That is, we are to love one another, all others, in the sense of support and meeting the needs of others. 

Then comes the Big Ask: Your Kingdom come! I am quite sure we say this without really grasping that for which we ask. On this earth alone there are many kingdoms, with many kings or queens or presidents or whatever kind of leadership is in charge. We pledge allegiance to these kingdoms. But in this prayer we ask for something entirely different: we want God’s kingdom to come. Here. Now. Jesus’s whole ministry begins with him saying that God’s kingdom is at hand. Which is a way of saying it is here for those who recognize it and accept it and are willing to step into it. We are not praying for some distant future, nor some time to come after death. We are talking about living in God’s kingdom here and now, which can mean bucking the empire. 

The most basic element of God’s kingdom here and now is expressed in the very first petition: “give us each day our daily bread.” This recalls the wilderness sojourn during which time manna, a flakey kind of “bread,” was sent by God to his people each day. When they entered the land of promise the manna stopped. There were no real preservatives, no refrigeration, so grain would be ground and dough made in the evening. The next morning you take it to the community oven or furnace, or to a baker, to be baked for that day’s bread. A daily reminder that it is by the grace of the God whose name we are to hallow that we have been given the ingredients, the skills and a community of love to help insure there is bread enough for all. And enough to share with others. Yet even now, we store up food meant for children here and abroad, lock it up in a warehouse, let it pass its expiration date, and destroy it – while there are children and adults throughout our country, and far away in Gaza, who pray for a crust of bread even now as we come to break bread at the Lord’s table. [i] Just as the recent Reconciliation Bill cuts SNAP and school lunches for millions to give tax cuts for the country’s most affluent billionaires. 

At the very heart of our prayer is forgiveness: we ask for our sins to be forgiven “for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.” I read poetry when waiting for the bar-b-q coals to get ready for grilling. I recently ran across the following line penned by W.S. Merwin about the danger of the Gray whale facing extinction due to over hunting:

Gray whale

Now that we are sending you to The End

That great god

Tell him

That we who follow you invented forgiveness

And forgive nothing 

Forgiveness, says Jesus, is to be at the heart of our prayer. And yet, as Merwin observes, we often forgive nothing. Look at how we over hunt the Grey whale and other species. Look at how we routinely and without thought poison the environment. We rarely ask for forgiveness, and rarely offer forgiveness out of our outsized sense of hubris. It is meant to be the heart of God’s kingdom, what the Bible calls Jubilee: “a wholly new basis for human interaction – the polar opposite of the systems of debt and obligation, patronage and merit, honor and shame, that characterize life under various human institutions and authorities. In the realm of God, those old rules are cancelled, and all things are made new. This is a prayer to be both spoken and lived.” [ii] 

We are to conclude, “and do not bring us to the time of trial.” This could be reference to that day when we all must give an account as to how we have or have not lived into this vision of God’s kingdom for which we pray. Jesus calls us to follow the ways in which he offers endless examples of just how to live into this vision here and now. It may also refer to the trials we may face as we oppose the very systems of indebtedness and injustice that seek to grind up the people of God into so much fodder for corporate and industrial greed, power grabs, and endless conflict and wars. Jesus knows as well as anyone that to live the Jubilee of God’s kingdom can lead to trial. And crucifixion. That is one reason why following Jesus is called The Way of the Cross. 

To illustrate the need for shamelessness and perseverance in the prayer he teaches us, comes the story of a neighbor who needs bread in the middle of the night to provide hospitality for an unexpected house guest. He wakens a neighbor, who is reluctant to get out of bed, but who eventually opens the door and provides the very bread we are to pray for daily. In the dark of night in today’s world, there are many who knock on our door asking for just a crust of bread, let alone three loaves. We pray and pray as Jesus instructs us. But the question remains, what do we do? It seems that now is the time of trial. It is always now. What we do or do not do will make all the difference as to whether this prayer changes us to be more like the unchangeable God we call Father who promises to give us the Holy Spirit if only we will ask, seek and knock. Amen.

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[i] US News and World Report, July 17, 2025

[ii] Ringe, Sharon H., Luke (Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, KY (1995): p. 165

Being Martha Proper 11C

 Being Martha

Nestled between the parable we call The Good Samaritan and the Lord’s Prayer, in a section of Luke’s gospel focused on hospitality, is this brief story about two sisters in Bethany, a village just outside of Jerusalem (Luke 10:38-42). It only occurs in Luke’s gospel, which paired with his volume 2, The Acts of the Apostles, seems in part to be a guide for how Gentiles might be incorporated into the Jewish world of Jesus, and his Father’s “kingdom of God.” A world in which hospitality toward strangers, wanderers, and even resident aliens is a hallmark of what it has meant to love God and love neighbor all the way back to the nomadic days of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses. 

It is an odd little story, and can seem out of place coming after the extravagant and generous hospitality of the Samaritan in the previous story, and the forgiveness of sins and debts we pray for in the Lord’s prayer following. Most of us have heard it interpreted from a protestant reformation point of view, extolling the devotion of Mary, reclining at the feet of Jesus listening to his “word,” his proclamation of the need for repentance and accepting the invitation to enter into the life of his Father’s kingdom, while demeaning the “works” of Martha preparing a meal for Jesus and his disciples as wrote, routine, tradition, and devoid of true faith. “Faith, not works!” proclaimed reformers like Martin Luther. Luther, who wanted to rip the Letter of James out of the New Testament – a letter that loudly proclaims that Faith without Works is Dead. 

This despite the fact that the only other mention of the two sisters occurs in John’s gospel. They call upon Jesus to come to the aid of their ailing brother, Lazarus. Jesus is delayed. Lazarus dies. The women are sitting shiva, neighbors are visiting, when word comes that Jesus is at the edge of town. Martha jumps us, marches out to meet him half-way and chastises him. Had you come when we called our brother would still be alive, she says. Jesus assures her that her brother will rise again. Not impressed, she says, oh yes, on the Day of the Resurrection of all faithful people, but I mean now. “I am resurrection and I am life,” says Jesus, “Do you believe this?” At which moment Martha becomes the first person in John’s gospel to confess, “Yes, Lord, I believe, you are the Christ, the Messiah, the Anointed One who is coming into the world.” A much more powerful, more assured declaration than Peter’s confession at Caesaria Philippi. How could this same Martha be saddled with a reputation as the least spiritual of the two sisters? How could her confession not be the preeminent confession of all the New Testament? 

One needs to sit with the stories in Luke and John and listen to them over and over again before being able to hear what is going on that day in Bethany. It is Martha who invites Jesus, we are told, “into her home.” Yes, women could be successful businesswomen. Yes, women could own their own home. Mary, we are told, reclines at Jesus’s feet listening to him. Martha is busy with “her many tasks.” She asks Jesus to send Mary to help her. This prompts Jesus’s strange reply, "Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her."   

Strange, that in a world in which hospitality was a cardinal virtue, and just after a parable in which generous hospitality is championed, that is doing many things for the strange man lying by the side of the road, doing “works” to insure that the stranger might live, Jesus appears to be saying that Mary is doing the “one thing,” “the better part,” suggesting that Martha has chosen a lesser set of tasks and ought not be worried about her sister. And in teaching the Lord’s Prayer after this episode, he tells a story that says if someone knocks on your door in the middle of the night asking for a few loaves of bread, no matter how inconvenient, you ought to get up out of bed, open the door, and provide for that person’s needs. What is Jesus up to? Or, what is Luke up to? 

Sitting with the story, we notice that Jesus does not tell Martha to come sit down and listen to him. Nor does he tell her to stop doing her household tasks – literally deaconing, serving, waiting on other’s needs. Luke simply does not tell us what happens next. It is possible that Jesus recognizes that Martha understands that these are unusual times, given the Roman occupation, roads lined with crucifixions, taxes at an all-time high to feed the empire, the rich and the greedy who need more and more pairs of shoes as Amos proclaimed some seven centuries before (Amos 8:1-12). And he can see that Martha has a full grasp of the kind of hospitality he encourages toward all newcomers, outcasts, and even dreaded enemies like the Samaritans and Gentiles. In fact, she does not appear to be trying to curry his favor. She is not trying to earn God’s favor. Martha seems to understand it is not her hospitality at all, but it is God’s hospitality she enacts with no expectation of reward or thanks. 

Indeed, some thirteen hundred years later, the Dominican Meister Eckhart when preaching on just this story suggests that when Jesus addresses saying her name twice, “Martha, Martha…” it is not out of exasperation, but in recognition of her seeming spiritual completeness: the first ‘Martha’ recognizes her temporal completeness providing for the needs of all, and the second ‘Martha’ refers, suggests Eckhart, to her relationship to eternity, not some sequential future eternity, but what he calls the “equal eternal Now.” Martha lives comfortably in both worlds. She is at home in God’s kingdom, which Eckhart calls “the circle of eternity,” and in this world of daily needs. Martha already seems to know that the ‘way to God’ is not a ‘way’ at all. It is not a destination, but rather a way of being – a way of being home in God. Her actions, her works, her activities are without a “why.” Friends of God like Martha have nowhere to go and need no means of getting there because they are already Here and in the Now: she lives out of an already-arrived-ness which involves no means, no why, no reward, no return. 

“Now listen to a marvel! How marvelous to be without and within; to embrace and be embraced; to see and be seen; to hold and be held – that is the goal, where the spirit is ever at rest, united in joyous eternity.” (Meister Eckhart Sermon 86) 

Eckhart goes so far as to translate the opening of the story from the Latin Vulgate, “Our Lord Jesus Christ went into a little castle and was received by a virgin who was a wife.” By ‘virgin’ he means one who is “free of irrelevant ideas, as free as he was before he existed.” And by ‘wife’ he means someone who is free and unfettered in affections, near both to God and to self, who brings forth much fruit every day (works of faith) one hundred and one thousand-fold. Thus, a virgin wife bears fruit out of the ground of God’s eternal Word – which is, Jesus Christ. Christ who lives in the “little castle” of our soul. 

So it is that in the medieval church, Martha became the very icon of the living Christ, patron saint of hospitals, doctors, nurses, women’s communities and all who serve God by serving others. Concludes Meister Eckhart: What I have been saying to you is true, as I call on Truth to bear witness and my soul to be the pledge. That we, too, may be castles into which Jesus may enter and be received and abide eternally with us in the manner I have described, may God help us! Being Martha is being at home in God with Christ. Amen.

The Gerasene Demoniac & Empire Proper 7C

 

The Gerasene Demoniac & Empire    Proper 7C

I’ve been pondering our story of a naked, demon possessed man in the gospels (Luke 8:26-39), and St. Paul’s assertion that for those of us who dare to claim we are of the Body of Christ there is no male and female, no free and slave, no Jew and Greek (Galatians 3:23-29). Were Paul alive and writing letters today one can safely imagine he would add, “there is no liberal and conservative, no red states and blue states, no MAGA and Woke people, but in the Kingdom of God Christ lives, died, and rose from the dead for, we are to Be and Act as One in Christ for the sake of the life of the world. In Christ there are to be no such divisions. 

Meanwhile, we are seriously considering to enter into the widening war between Israel and Iran. Mike Huckabee, our Ambassador to Israel, and an Evangelical Zionist Christian who believes that a Middle East War will precipitate a return of Jesus, urges our president to listen to the voice “he will hear from heaven,” and take advantage of an opportunity “we have not seen since President Truman,” who ordered the drop of two nuclear weapons on Japan, destroying two cities and killing somewhere between 240,000 and 260,000 people, not including many more civilians and soldiers who died in the subsequent weeks, months, and years due to injuries, burns, and radiation poisoning. The ambassador seems to feel this is the time to drop The Bomb on Iran. And bring Jesus back – as if we have the power to do such a thing. 

Enter a man possessed by demons. We might take the story of this man as primitive, but no one in his or her right mind can deny that there is set before us any number of demonic options of how to proceed as a nation that many want to call, or categorize, as Christian. As I was running the other morning the following quote popped into my consciousness:

“My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.”

John Dominic Crossan, Who Is Jesus? Answers to Your Questions About the Historical Jesus 

Crossan, also wrote, God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now, in which he argues that in contrast to the oppressive Roman military occupation of the first century is the non-violent Kingdom of God prophesized by Jesus, and the equality and breaking down of all “us and them” categories advocated by Paul. Crossan contrasts these messages of peace with the misinterpreted apocalyptic vision from the Book of Revelation, which has been misrepresented by modern right-wing theologians and televangelists to justify U.S. military actions in the Middle East. Seriously, does anyone believe that Jesus, who on his last day walking upon this Earth made clear to Pilate, the Empire’s local toady, that he had no army, and had no plan to fight; that he came to announce the kingdom of God as a kingdom of justice and peace for all people with respect, mercy and love for every human being; does anyone think that Jesus, our Jesus, would justify military action anywhere as a solution to anything whatsoever? Let alone trigger his return. 

Then I asked myself, who is the demon possessed man, chained and shackled by others, separated entirely from his home community, living among the dead in the tombs? Might he symbolically represent Israel, and any other of the client states of Rome, oppressed by an Empire just as the Hebrew children were by Pharaoh in Egypt? Like those Exiled to Babylon after destruction of the First Jerusalem Temple? Like those in the first century under a military occupation such that home is no long home, but a land oppressed and forced to feed the needs and greed of the Roman Empire, causing great poverty, loss of family lands, and unhappiness? 

We note that the demons identify themselves as Legion, “because we are many.” Is it too far fetched to think they represent the Roman legions who occupy the homeland? And they ask to be sent into a flock of un-kosher pigs, which tells us that Jesus is in Gentile territory and interested in helping a Gentile who has been ostracized from his home community. Again, if someone mentioned that the Tenth Roman Legion was responsible for burning down all of Jerusalem and the Temple, and that the Tenth Legion’s emblem was a Boar, is it to far fetched that those watching this drama unfold might see the irony and the hope that this young Jew might be the one who could end the nightmare of Roman occupation and send it headlong into the sea? 

Jesus is there in the region of the Gerasenes to demonstrate that Paul would eventually “get it,” and recognize that in the kingdom Jesus comes to announce and inaugurate is to be a peaceable kingdom as Isaiah had envisioned some six hundred years earlier. He reaches out to this dangerous looking demon possessed man and recognizes him as a human being like any other, someone’s son, someone’s brother, perhaps someone’s father. Even the townspeople seem to have recognized him as someone who has some relationship to their community, or else they likely would have treated him like a mad dog, and put him down. But they do not. 

As soon as they see him properly dressed, demons gone, in his right mind at the feet of Jesus, they are afraid. They see that the power of love and mercy is stronger than any Empire, than any and all attempts to divide the community into acceptable and unacceptable persons. Others were upset that pork belly futures had literally sunk into the roiling surf. They asked Jesus to leave. 

But before he can even get back into the boat, the boat which the night before had nearly sunk in a storm, the man whom Jesus had accepted as one more human being deserving of respect, and justice, and God’s mercy and shalom, begs Jesus to take him with the others, the oft bumbling disciples who were frightened out of their wits the night before, and even more so when they saw this man, naked and wracked with demons. 

But Jesus says, “No. Go back to your city and tell people what the God of the Exodus, the God of Return from Exile, the God who will be with me as I hang on a Roman cross, and like you, will raise me from the dead; tell everyone the things our God, my Father, did for you.” And he did. And with no ire for those who had chained him and tossed him into the wilderness, he proclaimed to one and all the good news of Jesus Christ the Son of God. 

When we find ourselves isolated like this man; when we feel surrounded by demons of all kinds; when we find ourselves being encouraged to draw lines between ourselves and others; when home suddenly no longer looks or feels like home anymore; when it seems as if more violence is the only answer to a world of violence; what are we to do? Will we have the courage to respect the dignity of others – all others? Will we truly love our neighbors as ourselves – no exceptions? Will we proclaim a new kingdom, a new world, of justice and peace for all people? Can we find ways to allow Jesus to open us to the world he imagines; the world which his Father and our Father wills? For in such a time as we now find ourselves, this is what this story is meant to inspire us to become: the Body of Christ. Amen.

Trinity & Communitas Trinity Sunday (C)

 

Communitas    Trinity Sunday (C)

Bob Dorough, teaching about the number “3” on Schoolhouse Rock, used to sing:

Three is a magic number.

Somewhere in the ancient, mystic trinity

You get three as a magic number.

The past and the present and the future,

Faith, hope, and charity,

Give you three.

A man and a woman had a little baby, yes, they did.

They had three in the family.

That's a magic number. 

Three makes a family. A family is a small community. Community: from the Latin “communitas,” commonly referring to an unstructured community in which people are equal. A root understanding of community then is an unstructured group in which the people, or in the case of the Trinity, the personae, are equal. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, then, can be seen as such a family or community in which the essence of the community is that the three are equal. Or, as we take some liberty with that equality, they are One. 

Those third- and fourth-century Christians who were under command to make some creedal assertions about the nature of Christian communitas referred to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as personae, as in a Greek play in which a single actor assumes the persona of two, or three, or more characters simply by changing masks – masks that represent the various characters the actor is playing. Those hammering out the creeds adopted as a metaphor the language of the theater, that artistic discipline which at its very core plumbs the diverse depths of human nature in story and narrative. 

So here, in our creeds and our theology, the single actor (God) is capable and has been perceived, and experienced in history, as having three basic, somewhat distinct personae or characteristics: that of a nurturing Father whose essence is Love; a Son who lives and acts among us as a representative of the essence of the Father; the Holy Spirit which sustains the actions of the Son as an ongoing essence of who we are, both as individuals and as a community of the Father and the Son. Trinity, then, means to express a communitas of three personae, the essence of which is Love. 

Paul, in his letter to the emerging church in Rome, recognizes this when writing that the peace, or Shalom, of God, is present in the Christian communitas because God’s essence, which is Love, has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. That is, in Christ, we are to become a community of God’s love in all that we say and all that we do. 

In this sense, what we call Trinity is the work of Christ and the Holy Spirit infusing those of us who dare to call ourselves Christian with the Love of God. At the same time, these personae of God’s Love – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – are, in a sense, a communitas, or family of three. The famous Rublev icon depicts this family of three somewhat androgynous Beings in that all three have long hair tied back with a long braid down their backs. In the background is a tree, perhaps the tree in the original garden, perhaps the tree upon which hung the world’s salvation, or perhaps the tree of the renewed and resurrected garden imagined by the revelation of St. John   the Revelator, with the crystal river flowing through the middle of the city, with trees from which hang leaves meant for the healing of all nations. 

When we try to speak of God, the God who has created all that is seen and unseen, a universe of some 14 billion years of light and love, we have no choice but to speak in metaphor. We speak of past, present, and future as a way of describing what we mean by “time.” This does not really give us a full picture and understanding of time; it doesn’t account for perceptions like when time seems to stand still or speed up. Certain times dissolve us into tears, other times give us great joy. Past, present, and future, then, gives us a framework to help us understand at least a part of what time is like. 

Ritually, we speak of this family or community of love as “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” Others call these three personae “Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer.” Former Presiding Bishop Michael Curry sometimes invokes the “Loving, liberating, and life-giving God.” The New Zealand Prayer Book describes our God as “Earth-maker, Pain-bearer, and Life-giver.” All are attempts to describe this sacred Family: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

 A family, and yet a unity. Three experiences or co-equal essences of the One God. Of Love. 

The deeper truth of it all is that the revelation of God is not dogma, not theology, not a doctrine, not a creed – not even a belief. For us, the revelation of God is a person – Jesus Christ, a person whose every story and teaching gives us some deep truth about the life, love, and the will of our God. Jesus reflects the very truth of creation – creation that is not static but ever unfolding with newness and more diversity. Things yet unseen come into being. And if we let ourselves enter into the diversity of God’s Triune Being, we learn that we are ever-changing, just as the whole universe is constantly coming into being. 

Paul tries to sum this up when he writes, “We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.… the love of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (Romans 5:11-5). This gift of the very Spirit of God’s love constantly transforms us into a community that reflects God’s love. Of course, as important as is the giving of this gift, so is the receiving. Like all of creation which continues to unfold, when we allow ourselves to receive the love of God that the Spirit pours into our hearts, we become love made new. 

One last name for this Community of Love we call “Trinity” was coined by Evelyn Underhill, someone who wrote extensively on the mystery of God. She calls the Trinity “The School of Charity.” As Paul also wrote to the Corinthians, “Faith, hope, and charity, abide these three – but the greatest of these is charity” (1 Corinthians 13:13 KJV). We who are created in the image of God – imago Dei – are to become those people who abandon self-love and the greed and acquisition that grows out of such self-love, and become more like Jesus, God’s divine charity in human flesh and blood. We are to become a giving, sharing, self-emptying community of God’s divine charity, sharing the unending, unqualified love of our creator with all people and all nations, especially with all those who are utterly unlike ourselves. We are to be students of the Trinity so that we may become the School of Charity, a communitas of equals, and like the Trinity, ever-changing, yet the same, as a Community of Love. Forever and ever. Amen.

See The Son Rising Ascension 2025

 

See The Son Rising

Almighty God, whose blessed Son our Savior Jesus Christ ascended far above all heavens that he might fill all things: Mercifully give us faith to perceive that, according to his promise, he abides with his Church on earth, even to the end of the ages. Once upon a time, in a universe far far away, I was awakened from sleep in a cabin near a lake in northwest Connecticut by the voice of friends in a canoe on the lake singing the dawn of a new day, “See the Sun rising, see the Sun rising. Years later as I recalled that singing, and while pondering the new dawn that day of Jesus’s Ascension, I began to sing, “See the Son rising, see the Son rising,” calling us to a new dawn of being the Christ’s witnesses here and now, “to the end of the ages.” 

Storyteller Luke is the only one of the Gospel writers to describe the Christ’s ascension. Curiously, Luke offers two differing accounts: one at the end of The Gospel of Luke, and one Volume 2 at the beginning of the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, his account of the early days of the people of The Way – the Way of Jesus – becoming what would eventually be called Christ’s One Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. It may surprise us to learn that the Feast of the Ascension has less to do with Jesus than it does with us and with the Church. 

In Luke’s first account at the end of the gospel, we find Jesus issuing final instructions to his disciples, which by the time he had reached Jerusalem was a crowd considerably more than twelve men, and as Luke has chronicled, included women, many of whom were the primary supporters of Jesus’s efforts to gather a community of God’s love, peace and justice for all people. What Jesus calls the kingdom of God, or the kingdom of heaven, on Earth. 

As he had all along, especially following his resurrection [i], he “opened their minds to understand the scriptures,” the sacred texts of Israel: “that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.” [ii] Who is meant by “You”? The antecedent is not clear. We might presume it is this enlarged crowd of disciples and camp followers. Or, it has been suggested, one might answer “the Jewish community,” since this commission reconstitutes the people of God in Jerusalem and gives them the particular responsibility to begin at Jerusalem and proclaim the gospel to the non-Jewish world. [iii] Note that they return to the Temple to worship, praise God every day as they wait for the Holy Spirit Jesus promises will empower them to proclaim God’s intention for there to be a world-wide community of God’s love and Shalom – Shalom being justice, mercy, compassion, forgiveness, and peace for all people – not some people, not most people, but all people. 

“At still another level,” writes scholar and commentator Robert Cousar, “the “you” is directed to a broader company of readers, ancient and modern, who at the end of the narrative are drawn in as participants in the story. They/We are to be witnesses, who are not allowed to put the book down like a good novel and return to business as usual, but are mandated to proclaim the story, to call for repentance, to declare divine forgiveness. They/We, like the original hearers, are to be recipients of the power [of the Holy Spirit] that the Father promises, an indication that God intends for the plans to be completed and the divine strategy to work.” [iv] That would be us. The Church Universal, and the local church congregation. Because of how As Luke portrays it, The Ascension is more about the Church and our assigned mission than it is about Jesus. 

This assignment is so important, that in Luke’s Volume 2, The Book of the Acts of the Apostles, he portrays Jesus’s departure a second time to make sure we understand our mission. Although some details are differed, the essential message is the same. Only this time it is clear that enlarged group of disciples has not fully understood the scriptures and are focused on only one political issue: “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?" [v] Displaying a tremendous degree of patience, Jesus once again seeks to open their minds to understand the scriptures pertaining God’s intention for a world of Shalom in which there is justice and peace for all persons in which the dignity of every human being is to be respected:  and “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth." Then he is gone. Or, so it seems. As Psalm 47, a psalm of enthronement suggests, he is to be enthroned with God his Father, so that he may “abide with his church on earth to the end of the ages!” That is, they/we are not alone as he sends the Holy Spirit, God’s Holy Ruach which hovered over the face of the waters in creation, and has led and inspired God’s people throughout all the scriptures to which Jesus seeks to open our minds. 

It seems as if Luke thinks that they/we still not get it as we see them remaining stationary, gazing up into the sky. Suddenly, two men dressed in white robes appear. Though not identified by Luke, is it too much to assume that this is an immediate appearance of the Holy Spirit kick starting them, and us, to be the witnesses to the ends of the Earth Jesus commands them to be? "Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven." There’s no time to stand around gazing up into the heavens. There is work to be done right here. Right now! Which, as the story picks up in the Book of Acts, they do, immediately replacing the recently departed traitor, Judas. They cast lots, and the lot fell to Matthias as he joined the Eleven. One might say, the whole thrust of the story of the Ascension is the birth of the infant Church with all of us like them commissioned to be witnesses to the end of the ages. 

Ascension Day isn’t about Jesus leaving us - It is about Jesus abides and reigns among us and within us. Now! Just as Jesus fills all things, Ascension is meant to fill us, his community of love and with Hope – Hope that one day, God’s Dream, God’s intention, of a world-wide spirit of Shalom, inspired by God’s Holy Spirit of mercy, compassion, forgiveness, and care for all persons and all of Creation. That we may become witnesses to these things! 

It is said that the Blessed Augustine, Bishop of Hippo Regius, in Roman North Africa, once said: Hope has two beautiful daughters: Anger and Courage. There is such a thing, says the Bible, as righteous anger [vi]- what we see as injustice, what we hear from hate speech, and feel when wounded and frightened - is not a sin! It is Hope inspired by injustice and hate that gives us courage to continue the work begun back in the Gospel of Luke and in the Book of Acts. Luke bears witness to how a once frightened cohort of disciples became inspired by Hope, born of the Holy Spirit, to be witnesses to the ends of the Earth, and the world has never been the same. 

May we be so inspired on this day of our Celebration of the Feast of the Ascension! May we join the Christ, who even now abides with us as he fills all things, as witnesses and participants in the dawning of God’s reign of Shalom, on Earth as it is in heaven! Amen.

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[i] Such as the conversation on the road to Emmaus, Luke 24:13-35

[ii] Luke 24:44-53

[iii] Cousar, Robert B., Texts for Preaching Year C (Westminster John Knox Press (Louisville, KY: 1994) p.329

[iv] Ibid, Cousar

[v] Acts 1:1-11

[vi] Ibid, Cousar suggests, for example, the story in I Samuel 11 in which Saul’s righteous anger inspires the frightened people of God to rise with Hope and head off the threat of an oppressive regime. p.324