His dominion is an everlasting dominion that shall not pass away, and his kingship is one that shall never be destroyed.

from thence he shall come again, with glory, to judge the quick and the dead; whose kingdom shall have no end.

Our Fundie friends, looking at the book of Revelation hear mention of the “Thousand year reign” and they imagine that something will happen on earth… and that kingdom will last 1000 years. And then things will change again. This millennialism (as it is called) has given rise to a bunch of nuts, really, throughout history; from the Montanists to Tim LeHey, fringe preachers and cultists have missed the numerological point: a thousands years is forever. It’s the day of the Lord. It’s now. That’s why the church, first in AD 230, and again later condemned millennialism as a heresy. That’s why the church added the line “whose kingdom will have no end” to the Creed!

The fun thing was, in most of my life (including for some time in Orthodoxy), I was a millennialist. Specifically, I was a pre-millennial dispensationalist. I had to read more than a couple of Orthodox writings – including some very early texts by St Andrew of Caesarea and a commentary translated from Russian by Fr Seraphim Rose

The Church is the Kingdom of God, here, present. And now is the millennium. Now: here. The Kingdom of God grows on the earth…

But what does it mean to say “Jesus is Lord” if the vast majority of Christians get hung up on some local leader, Caesar, Governor, Potentate, Satrap, or President? You may not offer a pinch of incense, but you do idealise and nearly worship the folks you like and demonise the ones you hate. And, sadly, trust the lot of ‘em to do what you want as if they can’t be expected to do what you do: do exactly what it takes to keep your job, continue earning your pay, and keep just enough people happy to stay employed, feed your family and pay your bills.

And you wonder why they fail, over and over again, to legislate our morality.

To proclaim today – or any day – the Kingship of Jesus is to disavow any connection with the rulers of the world…

To proclaim the kingship of Jesus is to confess that your passport/citizenship is nothing to you save as a tool to further the kingdom of heaven.

To proclaim the kingship of Jesus is to announce to your neighbours and the local civil authorities that you can’t be trusted.

A lot of my brothers and sisters are signing something called “the Manhattan Declaration”. It says they reject divorce and gay marriage and insist on religious freedom. While I disagree with them on the second item, they are right on numbers 1 and 3. I think they should go further: Churches should reject any cozening from the state. CHurches should burn the flags they have in their buildings. Churches should reign in soldiers they have in their midst (as the CHurch did through the first few centuries until the Roman Empire co-opted the Church) urging them to repent and go AWOL.

To proclaim the kingship of Jesus means to reject the machinations of empire.

To proclaim the kingship of Jesus means that the messages of fear, hate and violence that empire sends to you, on a daily basis, must be ignored, subverted, thwarted.

To proclaim the kingship of Jesus means to eat with your enemies, even if they killed your family destroyed your towers and burst your bubble.

To proclaim the kingship of Jesus means you are not bound by the laws of the nations around you.

To proclaim the kingship of Jesus means to die rather than submit to earthly empires contrary to God’s will.

It does not mean that we are to take up the worlds methods, however. Politics, protest marches, petitions, declarations are not the way of the kingdom of Jesus. We become the world when we do so: just another political movement, another option on the smorgasbord of culture. We co-opt the message of Jesus and turn it into right or left-wing political drivel.

We sell out.

Proclaiming the Kingship of Jesus means there is no boundaries you will not cross to love. And there is no border you will not cross to heal. There is no space you can be kept out of. There is no act you can not do (even death) to continue the process of reconciling the world to God.

To proclaim the Kingship of Jesus means realising – in the first person – that we fail daily in all of this. That we can never do it fully until Jesus is, again, reigning in our own hearts, that that will never happen until the End, that our sisters and brothers in this kingdom are also going to fail.

And that we love anyway.

• Job 1:1, 2:1-10
• Psalm 26
• Genesis 2:18-24
• Psalm 8
• Hebrews 1:1-4, 2:5-12
• Mark 10:2-16

It is not good that the man should be alone

When I left ECUSA for Eastern Orthodoxy, I was continuing a journey I’ve always been on. I was looking for the One Right Answer, good for All Time™. The modern sellers of Orthodoxy in America (equally ™) seem to push this. I’m not sure if this is the right way to use the term, but some friends of mine have been known to use the term “Byzantine Rite Baptists” – and I think it aptly describes these sellers. My experience was that they are as Literalist as the late Jerry Falwell. Their Orthodoxy is as coloured by their cultural assumptions and prejudices as my liberalism is. Their Christianity is as removed from that practiced in “The Mother Country” as mine is from 2nd Century Palestine.

But I tried, really… to live in the world they offered me: a God who never changes and who wrote the little spiral bound song book we used at every liturgy. It only works, really, if you don’t notice that “Those Orthodox over there” do it differently than we do. (Of course they do! We’re humans…) The Byzantine Baptists go rushing out to fix those folks over there. I’ve even heard one guy wanting to send American Orthodox evangelists to the Middle East to make our Elder Brothers and Sisters “do it right”! But my reaction was to see if there was a place where this might make sense.

It’s not good to be alone, though… so I do this with others – with you, today.

Then the LORD God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.” So out of the ground the LORD God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man…but for the man there was not found a helper as his partner.

Does this passage startle you? Does it trip you up at all?

Pretend for a moment you are a biblical Literalist (buy into the whole Six-Day Creation and Young-Earth movement for a while). This passage – like everything in the Bible – is God’s story about himself to us. He is using Moses to write specific words on the paper. These are God’s words, through Moses, to us. Read these verses and what do you see?

Pretend you are a “Higher Criticism” sort, or a cultural critic of the text. Hold the text at arms length as far as revelation about/by deity is concerned. But the Bible tells us a lot about the people and cultures in which it was written. (Or, at least, a lot about what they wanted to say about themselves.) What do these verses seem to say about what these people thought about the God they followed?

God wants to make man a partner…
So God tries all the animals out…
They don’t work…

Hold these verses in your imaginary Literalist mindset. Did God make a mistake? Get suddenly distracted?

Hold these verses in your imaginary Higher Criticism mindset. Did the ancient writers imagine that God made a mistake? Did they imagine that God got distracted? Where they just weaving a story and used the pretty animals as a plot device?

Look in the Gospel…

[The Pharisees] said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.” But Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you.”

Jesus is engaged in a debate here within the Jewish community regarding the content and application of the Mosiac law. Of two great schools (or houses) of thought present in the Jewish Community, the House of Shammai and the House of Hillel, Jesus seems to be siding with Shammai here and in other places on Divorce: either no divorce at all, or else only for extreme issues. Paul seems to take this line as well. But notice what Jesus says… “Because of your hardness of heart [Moses] wrote this commandment for you.” Not because God commanded it thus but rather as a concession.

Use your Literalist mindset and tell me what that means? That God’s law was, from the very beginning, not a “Perfect Law for all time” but rather a process? If Jesus is, himself, God, what does that say about Moses making up laws that are concessions rather than God’s real commandment?

Use your Higher Critical mind and tell me what this might mean about the people or cultures that wrote the law? Rather than divine inspiration does it seem the law is a process? Is it possible that Jesus feels this way?

I’m not asking new questions really. The rabbinic sages taught that the New Creature of Earth (the Hebrew adama meaning, literally, “Earthling” rather than a name) was at first androgynous. The failure to find a friend from the Earthling among the other creatures led to God’s division of the Earthling into two beings, Man and Woman. But first God tried the Animals…

Is God testing things? Trying things out? Did God fail to understand that the Earthling, with reason, understanding and skill, might not be interested at all in the creatures who don’t have that? I mean a dog is incredible comfort… “Man’s best friend”, even… but not much comfort when mourning or when feeling randy, or even when looking for a night out on the town.

Really? Try all the animals first?

And while Jesus seems to take God’s omnipotence and omniscience as a given, even whilst siding with Shammai, Jesus seems to deny the text of the Scriptures. He indicates here (and elsewhere) that the law is a process, a dialectic, a give and take in to which we (humans) are constantly maturing. Paul seems to take this line as well. It’s not a once-for-all-time standard, a thing that leaves us stuck in the past. It is a law that evolves and moves with us through time and culture.

And the God who is described as a Jealous God is later called “Love”.

So for me, standing here in time and space, 2000 years and several cultures away from these texts, I’m left to wonder what God is saying to us or what God as learned in that time about humans. What does it mean to hold in tension these ideas about a God who changes and evolves (or, about an evolving and changing understanding of that God) with the ideas we like: permanence, unchanging, foreverness?

One of the things that amuses me constantly about modern atheists of the strident sort is that they want us religionists to all be of a stripe. They often create – and try to force all of us believers into – a straw man and then set it on fire. When we try to point out subtle differences in meaning and readings and understandings… they (the Strident Atheists) often turn into more literalist fundamentalists than Jerry Falwell ever wanted to be. And they presume to tell us, the believers, that we’re doing it wrong.

But we’ve not changed, I think.

It seems within our tradition that there has been, for some time, since the beginning of our tradition, really, some 3,000 years ago – and really, since Abraham (some 4,000 years ago) – a dialogue with this God we follow. It started with Abraham bargaining for Sodom: we are getting to know him and he is getting to know us. Judaism and Christianity seem to agree thus. The latter even going so far to say that God became one of us to experience this world, to do it, and live it.

The point of this meditation here, on St Francis Day, is not to cast doubts on the text or on the Literalist or Higher Critical readings of the text. Rather I want to open our eyes to the spectrum, to the depth and width of this religion we try to follow. It’s not textual: it’s contextual. We’re not in a place to pull out a text and say “this says X”. Rather we can pull out a text and say “This seems to mean this…” and then we must decide how to live that meaning.

Judaism has, within it, a community known as the Jewish Reconstructionist Movement.

Reconstructionist Judaism is a modern American-based Jewish movement based on the ideas of Mordecai Kaplan (1881–1983). The movement views Judaism as a progressively evolving civilization.It originated as the radical left branch of Conservative Judaism before it splintered. The movement developed from the late 1920s to 1940s, and it established a rabbinical college in 1968.

There is substantial theological diversity within the movement. Halakha (Jewish law) is not considered binding, but is treated as a valuable cultural remnant that should be upheld unless there is reason for the contrary. The movement emphasizes positive views towards modernism, and has an approach to Jewish custom which aims toward communal decision making through a process of education and distillation of values from traditional Jewish sources.

Although the word “reconstruction” can mean something rather different in conservative Christian thought (which meaning I reject), I think of this community as – roughly – Eastern Christian Reconstructionim. What we say about the God we worship says a lot more about us than about Him. And we wrestle with that. As we seek to know and be known by that God, things with evolve and change – as they always have! But we do it together.

It is not good for the Earthling to be alone.

Indeed everyone is going to be salted with fire.
Mark 9:49

I like this passage, which in some translations talks rather overmuch about the “worm that shall not die and the flame that shall not be quenched.” Jesus is calling to mind the closing words of Isaiah, which do, in fact, talk about punishments for those who rebel against God, but it is verse 49 that attracts my attention just now. This passage – my understanding of it – is one of the central points of the Gospel. Everyone will be salted with fire.

Please note that Jesus promises everyone fire – not just the evil ones – but everyone will be “salted” with fire. Obviously, I think, there must be some meaning here that I’m missing. Who wants to be salted in Hell?

Jewish tradition has no concept of “original sin” as western (mostly Protestant) Christians tend to understand it. The Jews speake rather of a good inclination and a bad inclination that are given to everyone. The two inclinations (“Yetzer” or plural “Yetzerim”) are in everyone. In the most basic understanding we have:

Yetzer HaRa

(m.); “evil” inclination, the desire to commit sin; as in “Yoseph HaTzaddik cavash et ha-yetzer ha-ra shelo,” (“‘Joseph the Righteous’ conquered his ‘evil’ inclination.”)

Yetzer HaTov

(m.); “good” inclination, the desire not to commit sin; as in “Lekol echad yesh Yetzer HaTov,” (“Everyone has a ‘good’ inclination.”)

Source

But there is more: they are not only good and evil, like a devil and an angel sitting on my shoulders: Yetzer HaRa is the selfish nature that urges one to procreate – to have children, who are, in part, “little copies of me” – the drive to seek pleasure, to succeed and excel. But when it gets out of balance, it becomes hoarding wealth, having sex in ways that harm others, and drinking too much. Yetzer HaTov is the nature that urges one to give – the drive to share with others and to love. When it gets out of balance, it becomes having no healthy boundaries and not respecting the boundaries of others.

Traditional Jewish prayer asks God to make Yetzer HaRa subservient to His will and asks that the one praying not become subservient to her own Yetzter HaRa – the seeker requests to use Yetzer HaRa in the service of Yetzer HaTov, and to use both in the service of God. Jewish prayer asks for all of the person to be used in the service of God – the Yetzer HaTov and the Yetzer HaRa both come from God and can be used by God to further God’s plan.

These notions match up well with the Eastern Orthodox idea of “passions”. Of course, Eastern Orthodoxy is only Judaism under different rabbis. The Orthodox would ask for the passions themselves to be taken away then purified, returned to ther natural state. For the passions to be returned to ballance and subservience to God’s will. And the Holy Apostle Hermas says, that we are “to know that with every man, there is a good and an evil spirit.” Hermas, too, was trained in Jewish thinking!

The Hebrew word for life, Chai’im, has in it two of the letter yod (Chet, Yod, Yod, Mem). Yod is also the first letter of Yetzer. The Rabbis teach that those two yods symbolize the two yetzerim. When the Creation story says that God blew into Adam the Breath of Life (Genesis 2:7) – it comes with both of the Yods, with both of these inclinations. All life (Kol Chai’im) has both sides.

i bake bread a lot. Sometimes for my housemates, and often for communion.

Bread is the most amazing thing: flour – most often wheat – and water, really, along with yeast. That’s all it is. Through the process of stirring and kneading, flour and water together have an unusual property: the flour’s natural gluten protein separates from the starch and develops a structure – threads. But it’s flat and lifeless. Then yeast is introduced. Yeast survives by reproducing maddeningly fast, but it requires three things: warmth, food and water. The yeast that makes my bread rise today eats the flour and drinks the water and makes babies. The babies eat the flour and drink the water. Then there are babies having babies. Then babies having babies having babies having babies. And while this is all happening, everyone burps. The belching releases gases, and the gases make the bread rise: the selfish desires, the Yetzer HaRa, of the yeast raise my bread.

The Church Fathers and Mothers speak of each of us having evil and good within us. They preach about the Parable of the Wheat and Tares as referring to the good and bad within each of us and say that at our deaths, the demons will come and claim the tares and chaff from our souls. This also sounds like the words John the Baptist spoke – (Luke 3:16-17) “He will immerse you in the Ruach HaKodesh [the Holy Spirit] and in fire, He has with him his winnowing fork to clear out his threshing floor and father his wheat into his barn, but he will burn up the straw with unquenchable fire!” Remember that no kernel of grain is without its chaff – we each have parts of us that will be burned away in God the Consuming Fire.

My bread rises the most when I first put it my oven. The warmth of the fire speeds up the yeast’s reproduction. Babies having babies having babies having babies having babies-until the heat is too much and everything dies. The bread is not bread until the fire comes.

We will all be salted with fire – the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit will burn to purity all whom it fills, all who are immersed in it. It all makes an odd bit of sense if we consider the wheat=us equation. Leviticus 2:13 says, “You are to season every grain offering of yours with salt – do not omit from your grain offering the salt of the covenant with your God, but offer salt with all your offerings.”

My bread of flour and water and dead yeast, also contains a surprise ingredient: me. No matter how I wash and scrub my hands, parts of me enter the bread. My skin cells come off, moisture from my breath stirs the air. Small drops of perspiration add water. My bread is me; I flavor the bread.

It is hard for me to share my bread alone. My room holds six or eight guests maybe, so even if I bake all day, I’m limited in the scope, the reach of my giving. When I put my bread on the altar, it is so small, alone. But it is no longer me – but becomes Christ – as I am no longer me. As the bread is made Christ so am I. The bread on the altar is an icon of our salvation. The bread sacrificed to God, salted with the Spirit, feeds the multitudes. So are we, Little Christs salted with Fire, are sent as Bread and Life to the world.

The Bread and I are salted with the fire that descends in prayer, the answer to the upraised hands of the Church and the downward-bending hands of God.

(This meditation is based on an essay I wrote nearly 10 years ago…)

• Proverbs 1:20-33
• Wisdom of Solomon 7:26 – 8:1
• Isaiah 50:4-9a
• Psalm 116:1-9
• James 3:1-12
• Mark 8:27-38

God loves nothing so much as the person who lives with wisdom.

Whenever we start to read the Wisdom passages of the Bible we cross a gender line. I use that word here in its correct, linguistic meaning. The Hebrew word for wisdom, Hochmah, and its Greek analogue, Sophia, are both feminine words. Therefore the Bible’s authors and translators put in female pronouns. This is true of every available resource I have. Sophia/Wisdom/Hochma is a female.

This is picked up in the newage movement, insisting that Sophia/Wisdom is a Goddess oppressed by patriarchy. Oddly enough many of the same people who would go looking for the Goddess Sophia based on her pronouns are quick to point out that the use of Male Pronouns for God the Father are, simply, cultural baggage. (In my own neo-pagan past, a group to which I belonged taught Sophia was the Bride of the Logos. This creates an interesting transgendered image of Jesus, I think: marrying himself!) The Canadian Anglicans even have a hymn that praises Holy Wisdom. That it is sung to the ancient “Salve Regina” tune (Hail Holy Queen enthroned above, O, Maria) makes it a very funny pun.

We get into ever deeper symbolic problems when, in the East, at least, Sophia is seen at once as a sign of the Pre-incarnate Son of God and, in some ways, as a sign of the Theotokos. But also the Holy Spirit.

The problem, of course, goes back to the issue of gendered language. I am one with the Saints who offer us inclusive images of God, Father/Mother (as in Gregory of Nyssa). In a very real way they also offer us gender-inclusive images of God the Son, as Sophia/Logos (as in Julian of Norwich).

Again, I don’t think Wisdom/Sophia is a Goddess. Neither is Wisdom/Sophia a different hypostasis of the Trinity, a fourth lef, if you will, to a three legged stool. She does all the things that Jesus is reported to have done. She is with God, the Father, a reflection of his light, the fullness of him. She is, I think, rather clearly, only female because of language and culture (just as God the Father is so only because of language and culture). Certainly Jesus was a male but I think – as with so much of our theological language – what we say about the Gender of God says more about us than about God.

God loves nothing so much as the person who lives with wisdom.
If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.

What are we to make of these two passages together, since the one can not contradict the other? Mindful that “wisdom” is not “book learning” but rather God, himself, how does “denying self and taking up our cross” (note, it’s not Jesus’ cross – but each has her own cross to take) parallel with “Living with wisdom”?

What does it mean to equate “living with wisdom” with “taking up your cross?”

Year B, Proper 17 (22) Revised Common Lectionary

When Sare asked me to preach today I was very honoured. My own mission community meets only two Sundays a month and so I was happy to be able to help today! A little back story: Sare and I met and clicked in short order. Last year at the Diocesan Convention, one of the Episcopal priests ran into us in the parking lot and said, “You two are dangerous!” I think Sare is the more dangerous of the two of us, to be honest. But I’m glad she thinks I can stir up some Mischief on my own.

I said yes… and then I took a look at the readings for today. This passage from James is, for me, one of my favourites, if not my all-time favourite reading in the NT. I love the way the different translations play with the words. This passage says “cancerous evil” in one translation, or “sordidness and rank growth of wickedness,” in another. The King James bible, in all its stodginess, comes up with “filthiness and superfluity of naughtiness” here. I always wanted that on a tshirt.

Of course I wrote my sermon from my own translation… and the paraphase version used here is different. Forgive me a little back tracking…

In your worship guide and what you just heard read out loud, it says, “Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you are a listener when you are anything but, letting the Word go in one ear and out the other. Act on what you hear!…”

But in the Translations I’m used to, it’s a bit more succinct: “be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves.”

I told Sare I was going to teach you three Greek words for this sermon. But the words don’t make much sense without my translation, so let me ask you to remember my own, even shorter version:

“Be doers. Not hearers. Of the Word.”

Remember that: it’s kinda the point of the whole sermon. If you fell asleep now, but remembered that, you’d get the point!

“Be doers. Not hearers. Of the Word.”

The first word I want to hit you with is not in our text at all. The Greek word is “Rhema” and it means “teaching” – like a saying or a teaching of Jesus. Or, you might think of it as “what’s the good word today?” It’s often translated, in the Bible, as “Word”. The Gospel of Luke has the Angel bringing the “Word of God”, the Rhema, to the prophets.

Again, this word isn’t used in our reading today but we need it to compare to the second bit of Greek –

Logos.

It IS used in our passage today, and it is also translated as “word”.

Logos means something more abstract and at the same time bigger than our English “word”. Logos is more like the idea behind the saying. You have a idea in your head – a logos – and you speak it out loud – rhema.

Logos is also very important because in some places it’s a Title for Jesus: Jesus is the Logos of God. It’s the thing that makes it “alive”. You can say our American idea of “Liberty” is a logos, that shows up in the writen rhema of the declaration of independence. A logos is abstract, but it is real. It is so hard to take out of Greek that most theologians stick with using “logos” itself.

Hold those two words in tension for a minute – a logos and a rhema. The Idea in the Mind and the thing we speak out loud on our lips.

If Jesus is the Logos… you might say the Church is the Rhema. The Church is supposed to be the living manifestation of Jesus’ logos.

So… a story…

About ten years ago, I was a member of an Episcopal parish that was deeply committed to making present Jesus’ teachings. Every Sunday we welcomed strangers through the door as if they were sent by God (they always are!) and on Friday nights we opened a food pantry to all of our city and we gave away thousands of dollars of food to anyone who came. We set the food around the altar to show: this wasn’t us, but rather God feeding the world through us. Last time I heard a report, on a Friday night the gave away nine tons of food!

I was a member for nearly five years and had many close friends. It was an amazing parish.

Except for one thing that was terribly important to me: they didn’t believe all the right things. In fact, they left the creed out of the service entirely! They didn’t know a lot of “normal” Christian teachings. They rejected some outright! Some people in the parish (even on the parish council) were not baptised! One Sunday I preached and a woman said to me “Well that’s ok if you believe in Jesus… but what about those of us who don’t?”

And I became very uncomfortable.

And for a long time I struggled. I wanted to be in a “real” church, you know… where we believed all the right things and rejected all the wrong things. These people were doing the right things: feeding the hungry, welcoming the stranger, but they didn’t say the right things at all.

So I left – in kind of a huff, if you must know the truth: royally angered some friends and even lost some. And I went and joined the One True Church. I know some of you here have been members of one of the One True Church groups before as well – I don’t need to tell you which one it was: they all function the same. These folks said all the right things and believed all the right things and knew when to stand up and bow and when to make the sign of the cross… you know. Like a real church.

And some of them even made fun of my former congregation (cuz they’re kind of famous for being odd). And I too joined in that making fun of people who were not right. I have to confess that if I was still a member of the One True Church I’d never be friends with Sare in the first place, and chances are all y’all would be on the list of people we made fun of.

But never once again – in the places I traveled – did I see the stranger welcomed like God had sent her.

And never once again – in the circles in which I moved – have I seen the hungry feed from God’s altar by God’s own hands in human form…

Jesus says in the Gospel reading today that “These people make a big show of saying the right thing, but their heart isn’t in it.”

And I think I begin to get the idea. See: even in the One True Church there were places of Hospitality, places of welcoming and generosity. But once I got hung up on the whole “real church” thing, looking for all the “right” things, I lost my heart. Even today, in the One True Church (you’ve probably seen it yourself) there are people who get hung up on saying the right things and will even accuse other members of their own denominations of being “impure” and not “really” Christians. You’ve seen it in the Episcopal church as well -heard it from both the left and the right!

Back to the passage in James… and the very short version I wanted you to remember.

“Be doers. Not hearers. Of the Word.”

Let’s make it even shorter and easier to remember.

“Be doers. Of the Word.”

I told you that “Word” there is the greek word “Logos” and I told you that “Logos” is one of the titles in our tradition for Jesus. And if Jesus is the Logos, the living idea, … the Church is the Rhema: the concrete thing.

The “how” is right here in our passage.

“Be doers. Of the Word.”

It’s that word, “doers” and it’s our third greek word.

In Greek it’s a very important word: poetas. And even through in every translation I can find it says “Doers” I think you can guess the real meaning, just from the word. “Poetas”. It’s a poet, an artist, a craftsperson. It’s a creator.

Whatever this “Logos” is, this Jesus Concept… the writer is telling us to spin it out, to be artisans, to be creators ourselves to make it manifest. He even gives us some examples at the end there, “Reach out to the homeless and loveless in their plight, and guard against corruption from the godless world.”

Sare tells me she started with four people here. And this is how much y’all have grown in such a short time.

Last week when I came to visit… and well before you knew I was going to be here today, preaching… we passed the peace and a bunch of you came up to me, seeing a stranger, and introduced yourself. You knew how to reach out.

That’s why you’ve grown.

The Church I was in in – that I left so suddenly – they grow by 3 or 4 new members a month. They are the most lively Episcopal parish in the San Francisco area.

And no… no parish I visited in the One True Church was ever as large.

But this is not a numbers game…

It’s about being poets of the logos.

It’s about knowing that God is love and you’re supposed to dance that into some real meaning in your own life. Weave it into new clothes or knead it into new bread to give away. Write it into a new song that will have all your neighbours singing. Make it up as you go along.

You’re already doing it here: James is calling you to it again. Open your eyes to see Jesus – the logos – right here in your midst calling you to poetry.

One other thing you need to know: all the “you” words in this passage are, in the Greek, plural. Being from the south, I hear these words as “Y’all”. This is nothing you can do alone you have to do it here, together, in community. Be doers. Not hearers. Be poets of the Logos. Live the new life together.

Last week I heard Sare give you a thing to think about for the coming week. I don’t know if that’s a weekly practice here, but let me invite you to become dreamers: after all, you must dream before you write poetry! How will the poetry of the logos manifest in your shared life here?

You and Sare are doing a new thing here. God has put the new life in you – and feeds that new life at this altar ever week.

How will you… All ya’ll… make it happen?

The full texts can be found here.

[G]iving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything…

The Greek here uses the Greek word “Eucharist”. It’s the same word for our liturgy today, it’s the same word for every liturgy or communion rite. It’s what Christians are known for: Eucharist, giving thanks.

One of the tractates of the Talmud advise pious jews to expel from their company anyone who begins her prayers “We give you thanks, we give you thanks”, rather than the traditional, “Blessed are you Lord, our God”. Liturgical scholar John Koenig theorises this is (in part?) because of such Jewish Messianic prayers as are found in the Didache beginning exactly, “We give you thanks…”

It may be that the prominence of these table prayers [with 'thank you' - DHR] in the church attracted the critical attention of some early rabbinic authorities. Mishnah Berekot 5:3 reads “He who says (in prayer) ‘We give thanks, we give thanks’ is to be silenced.” In examining this passage, Alan Segal recalls for us the double use of eucharistoumen (“we give thanks”) first over the cup of wine and then over the bread, at the beginning of the eucharistic prayer in Didache 9:2-3. Segal entertains the strong possibility that the target of the rabbinic admonition in Berekot 5:3 is a church table liturgy, presumably still taking place within a Jewish context…
The Feast of the World’s Redemption by John Koenig (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 2000)

Followers of Jesus were known for giving thanks.

For example, the traditional blessing said in memory of the dead in Judaism is called Kaddish. It begins “Exalted and sanctified is God’s great name” and continues on without mentioning ether the departed or death. And it never uses the word “thanks.” There are important Jewish reasons for this liturgical development but let us imagine taking Paul at his word here, what, in death, might we give thanks for rather than simply bowing in awe before God?

How does the Christian community look, giving thanks always for all things?

At our weekly meetings, the community in which I live often wrestles with some seriously heavy issues. There can be some yelling, or intense discussion. There can be tears. It’s normal for families. But it’s hard. Yet we usually leave each meeting in a totally up space. Perhaps not “happy” or “bouncy” but up. How?

I think one thing that works is we close out our meetings with “kudos”. We go around the table, not in turns, but just shouting out, “Kudos to Jennifer for pancakes this morning.” “Kudos to Robert for helping me to cook tonight!” “Kudos to Jay for the new internet router!” THe community spends 3 or 4, sometimes 5 or 10 minutes giving thanks to each other.

And suddenly things are ok.

Imagine this in a theological, liturgical way. The Didache says “Before all things we thank you that you are mighty,” where do we go from there? How would you begin each day’s prayers making Eucharist, literally, giving thanks for all things?

Alexander Schmemann, one of the American Saints we commemorate in this parish, says that the human being is the priest of all creation, standing in the middle of the Temple of this world making Eucharist out of all things. It is our job – really – to stand up and say thanks over every thing available to us.

That’s not all of course, you know that in Catholic and Sacramental thought there is something special about the bread and the wine after the thanksgiving is said over them…

So also, I will venture to say, there is something special about the tree you see or the friend or enemy you see on the street after you make Eucharist with them in place of the bread or wine. When you take some of the most painful parts of your life and make Eucharist with them they are transformed in a way we can not see or understand into the Body of Christ.

We give you thanks.

It’s not just a credo or even a (Jewish) liturgical innovation: it’s a way of life.

How do you give thanks, and where?

• Revised Common Lectionary:
  
  • 1 Samuel 15:34 – 16:13
  • Ezekiel 17:22-24
  • 2 Corinthians 5:6-17
  • Mark 4:26-34
• Eastern Rite:
  
  • Romans 2:10-16
  • Matthew 4:18-23

When Gentiles, who do not possess the law, do instinctively what the law requires, these, though not having the law, are a law to themselves… God, through Jesus Christ, will judge the secret thoughts of all.

‘PRAZDZNIKOM! A Blessed Feast to you! (I wish we had a word in English that did duty for “S’prazdznikom!”) Today is the feast of All Saints of America as well as the Patronal Festival of the Mission here in Buffalo! We’re Dancing today in honour of the holy men and women of all ages and times who have followed the Holy One in glory on this continent and South America as well.

Some have openly declared their faith as Christians, others have never done so: but we say the light of Christ burns in them and draws them to the Holy One – and draws us, too, to that same Holy One through them.

In today’s (ER) reading, Paul is making it clear to his Jewish readers that it’s possible for people outside the visible community of God to be followers of God. And visibly so! It is Paul saying what my friend, Ana,says often: “Sometimes the Pagans are better Christians than the Christians.”

Today’s feast is a way to acknowledge these people as clearly and as powerfully as we can:

Come, let us praise the saints of all the Americas,
holy hierarchs, venerable monastics and glorious martyrs,
pious men, women and children, both known and unknown!
Through their words and deeds, in various walks of life,
by the grace of the Spirit they achieved true holiness.
Now as they stand in the presence of Christ Who glorified them,
they pray for us, who celebrate their memory with love.

Come, let us assemble today
and glorify the luminaries of all the American lands,
the glorious martyrs and holy bishops who confirmed our faith,
the righteous dwellers in the wilderness and guides of the spiritual life!
Let us cry out to them in joy:
All Saints of the Americas known and unknown, pray to God for us!

Known and Unknown… the Eastern tradition today (as the Western one did, until recently) has as strong, vital tradition of local commemoration. Someone whose holiness is recognised in their life, at least among local people, or whose holiness in death is seen by all those around him or her. Although they are not named “saints” by any larger body, the local folks invoke them as such, telling stories to their children about the holiness of Fr X, the local pastor, or the miracles of Mrs Y a wise prophetess who could pray and God would hear and answer her prayers. Only recently – especially in the west, but also in the eastern communities, and only among a certain class of intellectual folk (and I include myself there) have we tried to assure ourselves of the “purity” of our faith by banishing those people we think might be “heretics” or “not really good enough.” When we see people praying to Holy Man X, we scratch our head and try to correct their missteps. We want to keep things “right” and “pure”.

As the brightest sun,
as the brilliance of the Morning Star,
the precious feast of the saints of North and South America has dawned for us,
to illumine us and to set our hearts on fire,
to imitate their godly lives,
and to follow their example of zeal for God.

Come, let us assemble today
and let us praise the elect of all America!
Having fought the good fight, you have persevered in the faith,
receiving your crowns of victory from God.
Beseech Him to deliver from every calamity and sorrow
all who keep your holy memory in faith and in love!

One of the Patrons of our Community is Our Lady of Guadeloupe. She’s called “The Queen of the Americas” by the Byzantine Catholics and her feast day is on 12 December. If you know her story, you probably understand the punchline to this Joke: You’ve seem images of her, I’m sure, flowing in the clouds on the back of an angel. The type of the image is exactly that of most other Mexican devotional images of a certain period. It looks rather like an icon of the period. And there are doubters from within the Church from from as early as 1556, 25 years after the reported miracle: when the participants were still living. The natives (easily misled, of course) are made to “believe that the image painted by Marcos the Indian is in any way miraculous.” And so, of course, when Secretary of State Clinton visited Mexico this year, she is said to have asked, “Who painted it?” But this devotion continues to grow – and prayers are answered and miracles happen. Who cares if the apparition happened exactly as told; or even if the icon is, as some believe, simply a way to get the local Aztec natives to see the Virgin (and hence, her son) as the manifestation of the local idea of Holy? In answer to that question we sing her hymn every Sunday.

My own patron Saint, Raphael Hawaweeny, was glorified 100 years after his death by two local synods of Orthodoxy. But he had been prayed to, with icons of him even in churches, for most of the last century, so evident was his holiness to all who knew him or knew of him and his work.

And all communions of Christianity are filled with examples of Holy Men and Women we might wish had shut up sooner – such as John Chrysostom or Martin Luther before they gave voice to the Antisemitism of their cultures or Martin Luther King before he had extra-marital affairs, or Raphael of Brooklyn before he allowed his faithful to pray with Episcopalians and then withdrew the permission in a most astonishing manner… maybe we need to admit that the “real” Saints are not perfect. Neither should we expect such perfection of anyone save Jesus.

We want our faith to make sense, some times: to be filled with logical beauty and sensible perfection. In fact, in this fallen world, God makes a bigger mess than that, and expects us to laugh. Have you heard the beauty of a Russian Choir singing the Tchaikovsky Liturgy? Most churches throughout history have been blessed by something rather smaller and messier. So it is with our saints.

The earth rejoices and the heavens are glad,
O venerable Saints of America,
praising your labors and lives, your spiritual fortitude and purity of heart.
By driving away a multitude of demons
and enlightening many people with the light of the Faith,
you have confirmed our land.

So the question stands, as the prophet says, Who are these like stars appearing? They are around us in many ways and shapes and forms. The man at the deli counter, the woman at the bar, the saint at the laundromat or the wise man on the Subway.

One night, walking to a lecture by Matthew Fox, I met an Angel. And once, drunk and walking home at 2 AM, I gave my chain to a woman who said – her hands overflowing with my donation – that she was the Virgin Mary.

What are we to do? We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses. Some of them gave their lives for a great good, a self sacrifice for their fellow people. For some – St Raphael – the holiness may shine out in entirely predictable ways. For others, we may be surprised to imagine who we might see at the final banquet. Even though they may have rejected God in their time, we can see God in their lives.

So a blessed feast! S’prazdznikom! May they all pray for us – the ones we expect and the ones we do not expect, the ones we imagine and the ones we reject. The ones who comfort us and the ones who challenge us, the ones who confirm our faith and the ones who rejected it out of hand – but still managed to make some part of the Kingdom visible. God knows the secrets of their hearts in Jesus Christ. It’s all good.

Rejoice, O mountains of Pennsylvania and Peru
leap for joy, O waters of the Great Lakes and the Amazon;
rise up, O fertile plains of Canada and deserts of Mexico;
for the elect of Christ who dwelt in you are glorified,
men and women who left their homes for a new land!
With faith, hope and patience as their armor,
they courageously fought the good fight.
Comforted by the beauty of Christ’s Holy Faith,
they labored in mines and mills, they tilled the land,
they braved the challenges of the great cities,
enduring many hardships and sufferings.
Never failing to worship God in spirit and truth
and unyielding in devotion to His most pure Mother,
they erected many temples to His glory.
Come, O assembly of the Faithful,
and with love let us praise the holy women, men and children,
those known to us and those known only to God,
and let us cry out to them:
Rejoice, All Saints of the Americas and pray to God for us!

Eastern Rite Readings:

• Vespers:
  • Genesis 14:14-20
  • Deuteronomy 1:8-11
  • Deuteronomy 10:14-21
• Matins:
  • John 21:1-14 (Matins Gospel 10)
• Liturgy:
  • Acts 20:16-18, 28-36
  • John 17:1-13

Revised Common Lectionary

• Acts 1:15-17, 21-26
• Psalm 1
• 1 John 5:9-13
• John 17:6-19

And now I am no more in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you.

E ARE IN A between time, a liminal time. Christ has ascended into heaven (on Thursday) but the Holy Spirit won’t be here until next week. In the Eastern Rite liturgy we’ve stopped singing, “Christ is Risen from the dead” to begin every service. For the last 40 days this has replaced the prayer, “Come Heavenly King”. But, as of yet, we do not sing “Come Heavenly King” either. There is, in fact, no opening prayer: services just start… and this 9 days without opening always feels to me as if it were a dead time. Ironic since we are still celebrating the 50 Days of Pascha. Kneeling is still prohibited and, in the old rite, there was no fasting now. Among the Antiochians there is still no fasting in this season. But the even-older tradition of the church was for there to be a 10 day fast leading up to Pentecost… all things change. Perhaps that switch back and forth – fasting, no fasting, fasting, no fasting, is another reason these few days seem liminal and vague.

In liturgical space, Jesus has ascended but not yet prayed the Father to send the Holy Spirit. In one Gospel Story, though, the Holy Spirit came after the Resurrection, Jesus breathing it on the Apostles. In the others it’s an assumed thing. Only Luke gives us this break and his version of ascension and tongues of fire has become the official liturgical story of the Church.

And so we have a vague time.

In the more-modern western Churches, today is celebrated as “Ascension Sunday”. Throwing a feast day onto the nearest Sunday is ok, I guess, but I don’t much like interrupting the calendar’s flow without good reason. Traditional western liturgy has this as the Sunday within the Octave of the Ascension and/or the Seventh Sunday of Easter. I like that. But the Eastern Rite has this Sunday commemorating the Holy Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council, held in Nicea in 325. This Gathering of 318 Bishops from all over the Roman world and beyond represented the first time the Church as it then was gathered together in such a meeting. Prior to this there had been, of course, regional meetings and local ones. But this was an international event and that Paschal season of 325 can be said to be the birth of the “institutional” church, the church as a functionary of Empire.

The RCL Readings for today include part of the traditional ER Gospel. The full RCL three-year cycle includes the entire ER passage. It’s Jesus’ prayer for the Church. While I doubt these words are authentically Jesus from the night of the Last Supper, recorded, as it were, by dictation, I do not doubt these are Jesus words. Like many of the more rambling passages in this Gospel, this seems to be a “delivered” passage, one spoken to the community by Jesus through a prophet. I note especially that Jesus says he is “no longer in the world” but coming to the Father. I don’t think this would have had any meaning before his passion…

Just this last weekend (the weekend before Ascension) several things fell through and a couple of things changed in existing relationships. I felt stranded, lost and terribly alone. As often happens to me at such times, I started to grasp at friends in a rather needy way. Since I’ve recently committed myself to a life with less drama – and since drama is mostly in one’s own head (and projected out on others) I decided to examine this feeling of Neediness, this experience of Chaos resulting from a sense of being abandoned by people (who hadn’t really abandoned me, I need to be clear).

And with the Ascension on Thursday and us in this liminal space before Pentecost, I feel something like what the Early Christians must have felt, right there in the first 75 or so years. No matter which version of that time you accept as historical (the folks who accept the literal story of the Gospels, or those who deny even the Resurrection or those who fall some where between the extremes) that first century, of Apostles passing away and Jesus not coming again on the clouds, of the Temple’s destruction and Israel’s collapse, of the Bar Kochba revolt and the expulsion of Christians from the Synagogue… in all that Chaos, it must have seemed as if they were strangely alone or, at least, in a rather different place than had been expected.

I’m projecting my feelings of abandonment on them exactly now because we are liturgically commemorating that feeling. We do not have the john of Pascha – nor the regular comfort of O Heavenly King. What are we to do? What does Jesus mean when he promised to be with us for ever?

And how?

What does it mean to the Apostle who laid his head on Jesus’ breast now? What does it mean to the Mother who held her dead son in her arms? What does it mean to Peter (do you love me?) now? What does it mean to Mary Magdalen? I will be with you always…

Is it possible that, post-Resurrection, the Apostles felt even more alone because their Ever-Living Jesus was gone?

The Roman ecclesial community and those who follow her traditions says (liturgically) that Christ left his presence in the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar to be with us until eternity. Would John have reclined his head upon the tabernacle and found such comfort? Or Mary have washed it?

The ultra-Protestant traditions offers us the idea that this presence is the Bible + Jesus “spiritually” in our hearts. Does this work for you? How about for the fist generations of Christians that would not have even had a Bible to use here?

To these, the Eastern tradition adds the icon, the holy image, as a sign of Christ’s presence…

Yet, the Bible itself – and the Church Fathers – partially affirm all of these options, but goes further still. They underscore that Christ is present with us in the stranger, in the person on the street, in the other. St Benedict tells us to prostrate before the stranger as if he were Christ himself. Indeed, he is! Jesus says doing to the “least of these” is also “doing to him”. And although some commentators have read the “least of these” to mean other Christians, no one has read it to mean “Bible” “Bread” or “Painting”.

I’d always thought to take my own sense of abandonment – stemming from any number of times when I was younger and felt abandoned by those adults I loved – and offer it to Jesus for help: Jesus present in the sacrament, or in the Bible, or what have you. Imagine my shock to discover that he wants me to turn to him present in the world, active, needing my love, my service, my action…

The fathers of the first ecumenical council will tell you Jesus is God and Man and they will get rather explicit about hot that might be so and how it might play out. But they will also tell you that no amount of their right-doctrine will save you if you don’t see Christ present in front of you. That God becoming human means that humans are God’s icon, present, God’s presence.

Even in this vague time, when it feels like it’s not quite right… but not quite wrong either… Not quite heaven, but no longer just earth, God’s here. When we’re feeling alone, lost, stranded, God has given us his very self.

There.

Here.

As close to you as your lover.

As far away as the homeless man on the street.

He is with us, always.

Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?

HE Sixth and final Sunday of Pascha is called the Sunday of the Blind man. In the Eastern Rite, we use the Reading of this story from John. I have to admit that it reads to me as a bit of comedy – with the same sort of conversation being repeated several times. “This can’t be the blind man!” “It is the blind man!” “How come he’s not blind any more?”

But it opens up with those questions… Why did this happen?

I was listening to a discussion of the novel from CBC Radio’s Ideas podcast. At one point the presenter of the episode, Hassan Santur, was discussing the current fad of seeing one’s life as a story, a narrative with a beginning a middle and an end. The writer he was interviewing insisted that for some (including the writer) life was experienced not as a narrative but as episodes. We don’t move from one part of the story to the next in a smooth story arc, but rather it is from episode to episode, discrete chunks of time and events.

Narrative people tend to view their lives as a whole story. The I at the present is the I in the past and will be the I in the future. Episodic people tend to view themselves as cyclical/non-continuous. Episodic people are not the same person as the person that lived ten years ago, five years ago, three years hence.

As I listened, I began to hear recognise my own experience of life – not an extended Narrative but rather episodes of Good and Bad, fun and not fun. I confess a small sense of jealousy of those who have a Narrative…

Today, thinking of the Episodic Life of the Man Born Blind: from one moment to the next his entire life changed, even his own parents didn’t know what to say about him. Indeed, if there’s one thing the Man Born Blind could say, the story of his life changed totally in that one contact with Jesus as it’s recorded for us. What happens to us who come into contact with Jesus on a weekly basis?

When I tell the story of my life in hindsight, I have to admit the episodic rather than narrative nature of the path. It is impossible for me to tell the story in one Arc. I can break my life into two names – and each of those into a couple of “subnames”. I can tell my life in a series of religious episodes of several different religions. Geographically, it breaks up into Georgia, Alabama, Georgia, NY, Georgia, NY, NYC, SF, A’ville and Buffalo. Romantically it breaks into a series of relationships and a time with no relationships and now Brodie. Within each relationship I can spot cyclical and repetitive patterns but point out the differences between my doing of one thing and then of the next thing. On each cycle, I am different.

But some how, the same.

Something changes.

Something moves.

Some things remain.

I’m impressed by people who claim to be narrative. Their life has followed one unalterable story arc – to hear them tell it. They, inevitably, look down on people who have a different experience: we need help. We need to be fixed. We need to have a plan. To get a grip on things. And I think they need to be less boring, less control oriented, and more realistic.

Because the longer I know Narrative individuals the more I see the story they tell themselves – inevitably that they are “self made” and in control of things – is a lie: they are nearly delusional.

Thinking of the Apostles and the Martyrs we find the same lack of Narrativity. St Paul freely talks about the times his plans had to change because he wasn’t in charge. Peter is warned in the Gospel that he may go “where he wants to go” now, but later he will be taken where he doesn’t want to go. The saints all tell stories of their encounters with God has, at the heart, suddenly realising they were not in control of their lives.

Look at the Gospel today… the Apostles ask Jesus to tell them the story of this man’s life. Was he born blind because he sinned? (I would assume that means in a “past life” and that some part of the Early Church, at least, believed in some form of reincarnation.) Was he born blind because his parents sinned? Who was in charge of the story of this mans life? Who is telling it? Himself? His Family? “Nature or nurture?” Jesus response is “Neither: God is telling this Man’s story and, for what it’s worth, this man has lived in darkness so that you might see the light.”

I am not… you are not… we are not in control of the story of our lives. No matter what Oprah and therapists might tell you, God is writing the story that you read, as you make the choices you make – not because God is “large and in charge” but because you can’t make choices alone: none of us lives in a vacuum. Our free will, even, is hindered in its operation by the very choices of others made around us. In this complex dance of will and will, person and person, God is the actual writer who brings all of our stories into play, all of our dances woven together.

And ultimately the purpose of those stories is so that we all might give God the glory, although we sometimes avoid the real truth and purpose of our lives.

How this plays out in reality is more of a dance of grace than most people want to admit. The famous “not really Kurt Vonnegut Commencement Address, that’s been floating around the net since 1997. Here’s the quote:

Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don’t.

It is Ironic to cite these words in the context of a loss of control because, of course, Kurt never said those words. They were written by a journalist who later referred to “the lawless swamp of cyberspace” because it wrested her words from her control. All of our life is that way: wrested from our control – it never was, at all, within our control at all. Notice that the Gospel Healing story does not come at the request of the Man Born Blind! It doesn’t come at the request/intercession of the Apostles. They are seeking only to know who is telling the story. Jesus’ answer is, clearly, God is telling this story.

How do we live ourselves into a place where we are not telling the story but rather the story is God’s for his glory, his beauty, his telling?

I think it’s important that the story of the Man Born Blind arrives on the last Sunday of Pascha. We’ve been moving through this festive season rather like a dream. I’m usually exhausted by the time we get here. Christians may love this season, but we’re not up to living in it yet for eternity. The party gets old. Singing “Christ is Risen” grows to be a burden. The Church year moves on – we are not yet Immortals living in the Kingdom of Heaven. The cycle changes again.

The story of the Man Born Blind is the story of us waking up to our reality: we are not yet in heaven. We are here. Yet we are not in control. God is. The Man Born Blind has brought us to the realisation of our own lack of narrativity. We can not sustain the arc we want to imagine. The church isnt’ perfect and the world isn’t yet ready for a feast. The Man Healed of Blindness is confronted with the reality that his own community – his own family – is rather messed up. And, for all that this was for the “glory of God”, his healing has brought a lot of crisis into his life and the lives of those around him.

Pascha has disrupted our world – but life can never be the same again. The chaos is even more distressing now than it was before – because we can see the reality of not being in control. But that’s the blessing as well. We cycle into a new place – same as the old place – but it is us who have changed. The New Man stands ready.

Sir, I see that you are a prophet.

T HAS To be one of the great toss-off lines in the Bible. Jesus shows up, proclaims his messiah-ship and then accuses the woman of serial monogamy. (Why else would she be coming to the well in the middle of the day if not to avoid the gossip of housewives?) and she turns and says, “I see. Yer a prophet.”

Or maybe, “I get it: yer a prophet.”

When this pericope of The Samritan Woman is read properly we should even get a laugh there.

While these stories of the lectionary may or may not be historical, they are certainly not presented in historical order. This lesson is given to us now, leading us to the baptismal time of post-pentecost: and it is a teaching lesson. The laughter we hear should be directed inwardly – for which of us ever arrived at “Jesus is Lord” without first deciding “this man is a prophet”? And as we laugh at our own short comings in perceiving Jesus, we can hear the rest of this story.

There are a couple of things going on here – one I’m quite good at, and one I’m horrible at.

There have been many times in my journey when I’m convinced that Jesus is a prophet or a “Good Teacher” as the saying goes. I’m especially thinking of the times when I was a pagan and, convinced that all religions teach the same thing, I lumped Jesus in with Confucius, Plato and Moses. And anyone is welcomed to do so. Our woman here is lumping Jesus in with Moses, Isaiah and Jeremiah. “Worshipping God in Spirit and Truth”, “Loving Enemies”, “Seek God first and all things will follow”, these all make good sense.

But we have to mutilate the Gospel to get there – cutting out the passages where Jesus says annoying things like “I and the Father are one” and “I am the bread of Life” and “Before Abraham was, I Am”. And, to do so, we have to assume we know a lot more about Jesus than did the earliest Christians (and even one generation away, some of them were taught by people who knew this man in the flesh.) Or else, you have to say, this man was clearly a raving lunatic. Because if he is a prophet, he’s also making some looney-tunes claims on top of everything else.

And while even the itinerant schizophrenic man on the corner might occasionally say something very wise, he’s still not the sort of person you’d trust for showing you the way to God.

But what if itinerant schizophrenic on the corner actually is God?

One of the hymns for Matins today says

Finding the woman of Samaria by the well of Jacob, Jesus, who covers the earth with clouds, asked water of her. O the wonder! He who rides on the Cherubim converses with a woman who is a harlot. He who hung the earth upon the waters, asks for water. He who pours out springs and pools of water, seeks water, as he wishes truly to draw her who is hunted by the warlike foe, and to quench with the water of life the thirst of her who is aflame with foul desires, as he alone is compassionate and loves mankind.

God has come to earth asking for water: coming to us to ask for care and sustenance. How astounding is that? God stands before us and asks our help. What do we do to learn from him?

And that’s the important point in the first part of the story, I think. This man is not just “a prophet” but the “Savior of the world” as the other Samaritans say at the end of the story.

But there is something else going on here.

His disciples came and were astonished that he was speaking with a woman, but no one said, “What do you want?” or, “Why are you speaking with her?”

Speaking with a woman – without a chaperone – is a bit of a risk for a Jewish man. But full daylight and out in public and all, it’s ok. And his disciples show a proper respect here to their teacher’s decision: John Chrysostom says,

Still in their amazement they did not ask Him the reason, so well were they taught to keep the station of disciples, so much did they fear and reverence Him. For although they did not as yet hold the right opinion concerning Him, still they gave heed unto Him as to some marvelous one, and paid Him much respect.

The Apostles know enough not to Question Jesus about what he is doing in reaching out beyond his own people to draw these others to God. And, indeed, elsewhere (for example, in the ER Apostolic reading for today) when God reaches out to strangers it is God’s faithful followers who know best to keep their mouths shut and watch God’s work in silent praise.

I, on the other hand…

I must confess that most often I want to make sure that God’s going it right, you know – that he’s drawing you along the right path and, by that I mean that he’s drawing you along the same path that he drew me. This says less about God than about me – because, minus God in that equation, I must be right, yes?

I read recently about a survey of people leaving Church for various reasons. The reasons most often cited were Judgementalism and Hypocrisy among Christians, failing to live up to the teachings of Jesus. Then this same survey gets cited by clergy, “church growth” specialists, liturgists and cultural critics as clear evidence that we need to “fix” church, make it “relevant” and “more accessible”.

Anyone see the humour in this yet?

A group of people who claim to follow God in the way of Jesus are judging their sisters and brothers for judging.

And then others come along and say, “See, we told you we needed to change things!” And start to judge those who were there first.

The level of hypocrisy goes up geometrically rather than arithmetically.

Of course, wanting to spread things around, I’m sure the first group judged the second group too.

And I’m either calling people on their BS or else judging them as well… Without naming names:

A lot of folks in the liberal and conservative camps of most denominations (including Orthodoxy and Indy Catholicism) are quite happy to judge one another.

A lot of folks on the liturgical spectrum (from traditionalist to revisionist) are quite happy to judge each other.

A lot of folks in the “Emergent Church” and the “Institutional Church” are quite happy to judge each other.

A lot of folks in various ecclesial communities are quite happy to judge each other across denominational lines.

Romans and Orthodox are quite happy to judge the rest of us (and then say, “Well, if it’s true we’re not being prideful and judgemental”). But a lot of Protestants are quite happy to judge the RCs and EOs as well.

And if you’re wondering how I’m using “judge” here: we’re daring to question Jesus about the way his followers are working out their salvation with him. We’re quite willing to cross a line the Disciples were not willing to cross in Samaria. We’re failing “to keep the station of disciples” out of our fear and reverence. We’re quite happy to KNOW how God will act in someone else’s life – and to point out God’s missteps if he should shatter our expectations.

Maybe God is really working in the lives of Fred Phelps and Peter Akinola, Robert Duncan and Ted Haggard. Maybe God is really working in the lives of Jack Spong and John Dominic Crossan, Jay Bakker and Kevin Thew Forrester. Maybe God is really working in the lives of “them”. And we have to explore the slightest possibility that “we” are wrong.

Maybe.

In the RCL Lections for today, Philip is sent to teach the Gospel to a Eunuch.

Philip is both Jewish and a Hellenised citizen of the Roman world. While Eunuchs are a common part of his Roman life, Judaism, at least, teaches that to be a fully active participant in the Jewish community one had to get married and produce offspring. Eunuchs, of course, could not do that. Although my available references conflict as to the status of Eunuchs in the Jewish tradition, this much is true: they could not have children. Philip is breaking a cultural barrier in reaching out to a non-Jew and a Eunuch, no less. And doing so firm in the knowledge that, following his departure, God will continue to work out the salvation of the Eunuch in his own time and way.

How many of us trust God to do that without judging God for doing it?