Living Water.

John 7:37-53.    (June 21, 2015.)

I.

It is now the last day of the Sukkoth festival, to which Jesus had come at first inconspicuously, to avoid untimely arrest.  He has been teaching in the Temple for several days, and it is now the last and most important day of the festival.  For seven days they had this ceremony in which water was carried in a golden pitcher from the Pool of Siloam into the Temple as a commemoration of the way God gave the people water in the desert, and as a symbol of hope for deliverance and liberation.  

That is the context in which Jesus cries out, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink.”  He is basically saying that he comes himself to fulfill these prophecies, which are not truly about literal water, but have to do with enabling people to have life in the Spirit of God.

In other words, the people who trust in Jesus will receive in reality the symbolic and ceremonial benefit people are receiving from this water, ritually conveyed through the city to the Temple with solemnity and prayers and the singing of Psalms.  What this sign is pointing to, Jesus reveals and embodies.  He is basically saying that he is the whole point of this festival, and that the people should come to him for the true life that the ceremonial water represents.

He is now the way to remember, that is, to take to heart and integrate into our lives, God’s provision of water to the thirsty Israelites in the Sinai desert, enabling them to continue on their journey to the Promised Land.  To trust in him is to allow the water of God’s life to infuse and soften and relax every part of us, and enable us to attain God’s Kingdom.

If we come to him and believe, or trust in him, we receive this spiritual life.  The invitation to come to him assumes that in some sense we are separate from him, we are separate and alienated from our own life, our own true selves.  It is easy therefore for many to suppose that Jesus Christ must be out there somewhere and we have to physically relocate to be with him.  But I have found in my life that no matter where I go, I carry my own problems and issues, anxieties and fears, with me.  Physical movement by itself makes no difference at all.  

The movement that matters happens within us.  We come to Jesus Christ by finding him in our own hearts, for he is there already.  We come to him by digging beneath the mental clutter and the emotional distractions, by setting aside the whole psychic superstructure which governs our seeing and our acting.  This interior prison has been constructed and imposed upon us first by our own egos, and then by the collection of blind, imprisoned egos that constitutes society.  But all these “normal” ways of thinking and feeling, all our desires that we usually assume are just natural, are not.  They are conditioned.

II.  

To come to Jesus Christ means to find within yourself your own truest and deepest humanity, and to discover that it is at the same time the Presence of the Creator.  Jesus Christ is the Word by which all things were made, and he therefore resonates and echoes within everything, he informs and shapes all things.  He is the embodiment of God’s love and everything that exists bears his imprint, his voiceprint, in its very nature and essence.  The universe is therefore not random, but its purpose and destiny is encoded within it by the One who spoke it into being.  That’s why life emerges and triumphs everywhere.  

Whatever outward form coming to Jesus may take for us — like when we physically come to him for baptism or to his Table — it reflects and expresses our inward discovery of Jesus Christ, the truly Human One, within ourselves as created beings.  Unless that is happening, unless we are experiencing the new life of the risen Lord in our own souls, the fact that we physically move our bodies here or there doesn’t really matter.  Such physical movements are supposed to represent, reflect, and express something that is happening in our own consciousness.  

When we come to the Font for Baptism, or to the Table for the Lord’s  Supper, we have to know that we are coming to God.  We are coming to the God who self-empties on the cross out of sheer, infinite love for the whole world, and gives us this new life of resurrection.  The God with whom we are buried and raised up in Baptism, whom we are given to eat and thus who becomes us in Communion, is the God whom we become by the obedience of repentance, that is, by trusting in Jesus Christ and obeying his commandments.

Just having an experience of Jesus Christ in your heart isn’t enough either.  We have also to trust in him, which is to say, this experience isn’t fully real until and unless it has transformed our behavior.  This is not a mindless word game.  It is actual and real.  It changes your life.  It changes the world.  When the Lord says, “Let the one who believes in me drink,” he means that we don’t receive this life until we start expressing it in our actions with our bodies.  

That’s why I use the word “trust” so often to talk about faith.  We tend to imagine that faith is something we can have in our minds alone, that does not have to have any impact on how we live in the world.  Indeed, it is the great liability of Protestantism that faith is about what we think about what Jesus did back then, but has nothing to do with what we do now.

No.  We discover the Presence of the Lord within us when we make room by consigning to a dumpster whole trainloads of what we thought was our own identity.  It is into our interior spaces that have cleaned ourselves out of, that God can grow into.  How many times does Jesus remind us that this is about losing ourselves, even hating ourselves, and renouncing our possessions?  What he means is losing our old, false, blind, limited, broken, enslaved version of ourselves, so we can be open to our true selves in God.

III.   

Jesus goes on to finish his thought.  He states, “As the Scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.’”  In other words, to receive these rivers of living water from God means having that living water flow through us outward into the world.  Back in chapter 4 he tells the Samaritan woman that the water he gives “will become in [people] a spring of water gushing to eternal life.”

In other words, the more we empty ourselves of ourselves, the more God’s life can come into us, and when God’s life comes into us it gushes through us into our relationships with others.  It is like when you siphon gasoline from one car to another (something I confess I have never actually done).  Apparently, you have to create a vacuum in the hose by sucking the air out of it.  The gas from one tank rushes in, and then by gravity flows into the second tank.  When it comes to God’s living water we have to become the empty hose so life can flush through us into our world.  If the hose is blocked, either by air or something else, there is no flow.

Whatever you think of that image, this is a very important point.  We come to Christ, we empty ourselves of ourselves, and then Christ comes through us.  We are to participate in God’s blessing of life to the world in Jesus.  We become extensions and expressions of Jesus Christ.

But the key activity here is the self-emptying, both for Jesus Christ and for us.  Our task as followers of Jesus is to work on one thing: to make ourselves clear channels for God’s love and life, to become so transparent and open, and to blow, scrape, dig, scrub, and otherwise remove everything within us that blocks this flow.  That is, to get rid of everything we have been taught to think is who we are — our traditions, habits, memories, loyalties, prejudices, assumptions, expectations, desires, fantasies, preconceptions, fears, anger, and self-image — so that our true selves, Christ-in-us, may emerge, expand, grow, and flow.

It is like we are thoroughly soiled, dirty, grimy, and muddy windows, who have become convinced that the opaque gunk that covers us in encrusted layers is what we are.  We have to be reminded that we are actually created to be transparent, and the sludge we think we are has to be wiped away so God’s radiant love can shine through us into the world.  If it does not shine through us it bakes and burns us, which is what we call God’s wrath.  Wrath is God’s love obstructed.  

Repentance is when we get to work removing the lifetime of crud that has accumulated within us, and getting back to our original nature as channels through which God’s love may pour into the world.  It requires faith and trust because we have no clue about who we are supposed to be.  We have to take Jesus’ word for it.

IV.

If we do not do this work in both its interior and outward dimensions, we remain in darkness and we project that shadow into our world.  That darkness takes the form of violence, bigotry, selfishness, hatred, anger, paranoia, greed, and murder. 

We are recovering from a terrible event this week.  This was the terrorist murder last Wednesday night of nine African-American Christians in Charleston.  In this we were reminded that one of the most virulent and corrosive cancers that breed in the darkness of hearts from which the light of God has been excluded is racism.  I invite all of us to look into our own souls as well over this, and identify and remove the attitudes and presumptions, and the practices, that we have that create disparity and suspicion between the  different races God has created and brought together in this land.

What happened in Charleston was not an isolated incident by a “crazy loner.”  It was part of a 400-year pattern ingrained in our history and culture from the beginning.  It will not be easy to eradicate.

But if we really believe that in Jesus Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, which means neither black nor white (nor red nor yellow), we will have to go through the pain of critiquing and rejecting many of our most cherished ideas, assumptions, values, and institutions.  We will have to confront privileges we don't even know we have, and inequalities we maintain without even thinking about it.  Most of all we will have to reject much of our own logic and reasoning, all of which is biased and perverted by this particularly virulent, evil demon.

This will have to be done humbly, confessionally, tearfully, and prayerfully.  But it will have to be done, if we want to follow a poor, Palestinian Jew named Jesus.

V.

For, when he says that “Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in the world will keep it for eternal life,” what do we not understand?  If we are going to participate together in God’s life of love, peace, and justice, we are going to have to recognize and eradicate the counterfeit existence we mistake for life, which is characterized by selfishness, violence, injustice, self-centeredness, and bigotry.

This is actually impossible for us.  It is only possible for God.  It only happens through prayer, confession, and forgiveness, when we have the courage to face ourselves and the desire to come to Jesus Christ.  

God created the world in goodness and blessing.  There is no room in it for our hatreds and narrow-mindedness.  So I have no doubt that, like the Israelites in the wilderness, the water of life will sustain us until we do come to the Promised Land of eternal life.  I know that the will and Word of God will be done, and justice and equality, peace and love will prevail in the end.  I hope that my own blindness and fear will be dissolved in that blessed water, and that we will all be washed clean of all that separates us from God, and from each other.

+++++++ 

 

 

  

 

Where Are You From?

John 7.25-36.   (June 14, 2015.)

I.

Jesus has sort of snuck into Jerusalem for the Sukkoth festival, avoiding arrest by the police who are looking for him.  But after he is in the Temple for a few days, he does begin to teach and attract crowds.  In his teaching he is saying the same kinds of challenging things that had already gotten him into trouble, in this case it’s mainly about the leaders’ interpretation of the Sabbath.

The people listening begin to realize that this is that guy from Galilee who is on the “most wanted” list, and yet here is he, opening teaching in the Temple.  And they wonder if maybe the authorities aren’t arresting him because they know that he is the Messiah.

That doesn’t make any sense to me.  I suspect the crowds are being cynical about the inaction of the police at this point.  The real reason Jesus was not being handcuffed and led in a perp walk out of the Temple is probably that the authorities know that it might spark a riot for them to arrest anyone in the holy precincts of the Temple, let alone an intriguing and somewhat popular rabbi.  And they make up that idea that the leaders aren’t arresting him because they know he is the Messiah just to taunt them.  They know that the cops standing around the edges are just biding their time until they can get Jesus by himself to snag him.

On the other hand, the people themselves do not necessarily believe Jesus is the Messiah because, as usual, they are hung up on another tidbit of trivia.  Last time it was Jesus lack of academic credentials.  This time it is his hometown.  Anything to avoid the issue.  Anything to distract themselves from what Jesus is actually saying and doing.

Just like last time when Jesus had to proclaim that his knowledge comes not from books or teachers or schools or webinars, but from God, here too he has to say that he himself is sent by God.  He comes from God.

It is as if he says, “You know where I am from, eh?  I am from Nazareth, you say?  And of course the Bible says on the one hand that the Messiah will come from Bethlehem or on the other hand that no one will know where the Messiah comes from.”  (That’s in a fascinating book called 1 Enoch that was considered part of Scripture at the time, but didn’t make it into our Bible, probably on account of sheer weirdness.)  

Jesus’ contemporaries see a man sitting in the Temple.  This man has a history and a hometown, a birthplace, and, it is assumed, human parents.  He is Jesus of Nazareth in Galilee, whose parents are Mary and Joseph the Carpenter.  Everybody knows from biblical scholars on down, that there is no prediction in the Scriptures of a Messiah coming from Galilee.  Ergo, this guy could not possibly be the Messiah. 

It is interesting what Jesus does not say here.  He does not say, “Well, few people know this but I was actually born in Bethlehem, as my mother can tell you.  Here’s my birth certificate.”  No.  He doesn’t engage this argument at all, any more than he answered the people who questioned his education.  He simply says, “Well, I came from God.  If you knew God, you would know me.”  

II.

It doesn’t matter where Jesus was literally born.  What matters is where and from Whom he comes, and by Whom he is sent.  In the same way, neither does it matter where each one of us was born, or who our parents were, or what nationality or family or tribe we come from.  Our citizenship is in heaven, says Paul.  Jesus is sent by God and he in turn sends us, his disciples, into the world with the same mission: to reveal and enact God’s saving love for the whole world.

Where we know ourselves, our true selves, to be “from” makes a big difference in how we live our lives and what our lives mean.  We may limit ourselves to where we are literally from, and construct our identity on our history and traditions and commitments.  By this reasoning I am from Bloomfield, the son of a Presbyterian minister.  And knowing no more than this is enough to place me in a series of well-defined boxes and categories.  If I define myself this way I truncate my horizons so thoroughly that I can see nothing beyond urban, northeastern New Jersey and the Calvinist theological tradition.  There are way worse places to be, but I don’t necessarily live in either one of those places anymore.

But if we’re going to be real followers of Jesus, of the guy who said it doesn’t matter on which mountain you worship and it doesn’t matter what town you come from… the guy who is infamous for breaking down every wall and barrier and hierarchy separating people from each other and from God… then we have to stop defining ourselves by our own narrow categories.  I have been to Bloomfield 3 times in the last 58 years.

I am not on a mission from Bloomfield; I am not even on a mission from Calvin!  As disciples of Jesus Christ we are on a mission from God!  And as Jesus well knows nothing gets more effectively in the way of a mission from God than these other places we are literally from, these other definitions and categories and labels and boxes and file folders.  That’s why his mission may be described as kind of post-Jewish, and even that is too limiting.

The point is not to replace our idea of where we are from with some more accurate location, like replacing Nazareth with Bethlehem… but to bust out of all coordinates altogether.  So it doesn’t matter whether you are from a Roman Catholic, Pentecostal, Calvinist, Lutheran, Methodist, or even Jewish or Buddhist or Islamic background.  It doesn’t matter if you are literally “from” any of those places.  Those are trivial accidents compared to where we are really from, which is God.

III.

By asserting where he is from, Jesus encourages us to reexamine where we are from as well.  By whom are we sent here?  The deeper question implied here is, “Who am I talking about when I say ‘I’?”  The people think Jesus is talking about himself as a many from Nazareth.  He’s not.  His “I” is God speaking through him.  The man from Nazareth exists as little more than a perfect channel or vessel for the God who is pouring into the world through him.        

Now, the police understand the blasphemy laws and this statement by Jesus crosses the line, and they try to arrest him.  But they are unable, probably because of the non-cooperation of the crowds, but the gospel just says it was because Jesus time had not yet come.

“Yet many in the crowd believed in him and were saying, ‘when the Messiah comes will he do more signs than this man has done?’”  They arising and hearing about the signs, what we call miracles, the symbolic and supernatural actions that point beyond themselves and beyond this mortal agent to the God who is inspiring them.  And they are coming to trust in him far more deeply than they could even trust a regular mortal human.  They are still tallying up the number of signs, but in our condition sometimes we require a preponderance of evidence, a lot of instances and examples.  Just one is not enough to break through our shells of cynicism and blindness.

This kind of talk about Jesus among the crowd scares the wits out of the Pharisees and the priests, and they again send the police in to arrest him.  People are easy to control.  You appeal to their fears, you stoke their anger, you intimate about their shame; you divide them from each other and make the suspicious; or you just plain inspire terror by acts of gruesome violence and cruelty.  The leaders now how to control people.  They know how to control people from places like Judea, Galilee, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt.

But they don’t know how to control people from God.  That’s a different thing.  People who know they are not from this world, who are citizens of a different commonwealth, who understand themselves to be in relationship with the Creator, who are working through repentance to become ever more perfect channels of God’s living Presence coming into the world?  Those people are harder to control.  It is harder if not impossible to get such people to be content as compliant, docile, cooperative profit centers.  They’re not good producers.  They’re not team players.  They’re dangerous.

IV.

Jesus continues speaking.  He starts talking about his departure, when his work here in mortal form is done and he will go back to where he came from, back to God.  “You will search for me, but you will not find me, “ he says.  “And where I am going you cannot come.”

The religious authorities interpret him literally, of course.  They think he’s going into hiding to get away from them, maybe into exile, or even on a world-wide mission tour.  They think he is talking about escaping.

But Jesus going “to him who sent” him does not mean that he is going somewhere remote and far away.  To return to the Father means in a sense going everywhere.  Instead of being a single drop, he will merge again with the ocean that is God.  Instead being an objective, mortal, historical human being, he returns to his essential subjective, immortal, transhistorical being, dwelling in our hearts and minds, and in everything as God.  And the reason his listeners can’t follow him is that they have no clue what he is talking about.

The “you” who cannot follow him are those who still know themselves to be from Bloomfield, or wherever; they still identify with their ego-centric selves, they still hold on to their individualism, they remain loyal to the traditions and habits and ideologies of this world.  They don’t believe there is anything beyond this world, and you can’t go someplace you can’t imagine.  

These people will search for him but they will not find him because first of all they are searching only to arrest him and secondly because they are looking in the wrong places.  Because they are looking in “places” at all, places in this world.  They’ll be looking in Bloomfield, Nazareth, Atlantic Highlands, Tinton Falls.  But where Jesus is going is beyond place and time, and inclusive of all places and all times. 

When he says “Where I am you cannot come,” he means that you, as a  mortal, ego-driven, blind, sleepwalking, sinful, spiritually dead entity, cannot possibly enter into union with the great I Am, God, the Creator.  You have to lose that you, you have to leave that you behind, then you discover the I Am flowing within and through you, the real you, the you way beneath and deep within and high above the you you think is you.

Then we discover that God finds us everywhere, and because God and we-in-God are everywhere, we do find God in Bloomfield, Nazareth, Atlantic Highlands, and Tinton Falls.  So in Jesus Christ God is not just breaking down the walls we have built between Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female, as Paul says.  He is also breaking down the walls between here and there, now and then, and you and me.

V.

This is not just mystical mumbo-jumbo.  It is another way of saying what Paul says in Romans 8, that there is nothing that can ever separate us from the love of God being poured into the world in Jesus Christ.  

Jesus is urging us and empowering us to move from being located and limited beings, defined by small stories and little places, confined within very short spans of time.  In him, by trusting in him, believing in him, we emerge out of that set of boxes and find ourselves much larger, with hearts and minds that connect and integrate with and embrace in joy a whole wide creation.  In Christ it is impossible to reduce something, let alone another human person, to an inanimate object, to be used, abused, dispensed with, exploited, judged, and wasted.  For we come from and are destined for a place beyond all places, in union with all.  And in him we realize that it is all holy and precious.

Discipleship means recognizing and affirming that, in and by Jesus Christ, the Word of God, we are one with all, interpenetrating and sharing together in a timeless dance of love.  There is therefore now no such thing as fear for us, no such thing as bigotry or hatred, no such thing as exclusion or condemnation.

Instead, in Jesus Christ we are people of shalom and justice, healing and restoration, goodness and love, who know where we are from and where we are going.  

+++++++     

Whose Glory?

John 7.14-24.  (June 7, 2015.)

I.

It is the middle of the Sukkoth festival, probably about 4 days in.  Jesus, who has come to Jerusalem inconspicuously, decides to go public by sitting down to teach in the Temple.  By this time we know that he is himself the true and ultimate Temple, the place where God and humanity meet, the place where sins are taken away and life restored to the world.  So from within the old Temple, the new Temple begins to take his place.  He will be the real Temple, where these things are actually accomplished, not just pointed to in ceremonials.

As he is speaking, the people start debating about peripheral trivialities.  They are wondering about Jesus educational credentials.  Jesus does not have a bachelor’s degree from an accredited institution, nor does he have a Master of Divinity degree from a school approved by the Association of Theological Schools.  This means he is unqualified to be ordained in the Presbyterian Church (USA), by the way.  Whether or not Jesus would have passed the ordination exams is an open question.  I doubt it.  Neither had he studied with any of the established reputable rabbis of his day, or graduated from any of their rabbinic schools, as far as we know.

Therefore, the question arises as to why the people should listen to him at all, since he has no academic credentials and basically claims to have received everything he is teaching directly from God.  I know how well that would go over in any presbytery, but fortunately Jesus doesn’t bother with trying to gain acceptance from any religious institution.

I am not going to say we are wrong to have standards and procedures, since I have seen some pretty inept and even mentally ill people come through our system and attempt to be ordained.  But I am saying that we could be more attentive to the Spirit and the gifts of the Spirit, and a little less slavishly obedient to the demands of professionalism, much of which appears to me to be about making sure there are always enough jobs for people with PhDs.  But that’s just me.  Apparently.

Jesus responds by basically saying, “no, I don’t have a diploma or the imprimatur of some respected rabbi.  What I teach does come directly from the One who sent me, namely God.  And if you want to verify this then the way to do it is not to call my references, of which there aren’t any, but to resolve to do the will of God.  The truth cannot be evaluated from outside, objectively, impartially, in some theoretical, unbiased manner.  It can only be recognized by being lived, that is, in a completely subjective, partial, biased, and committed manner.”  The Kingdom of God, he says in Luke, is not to be found over there or over here, that is, outside of you; it is within you.  We have to live in it to understand it.  We have to be doing it to get it.  We don’t learn to swim by reading books about swimming; we dive into the water.  If we want to know if what Jesus is saying is true we have to test it with our life.

II.

One of the criteria for this is: Whose glory are we seeking?  Are we seeking our own glory?  Or are we about devoting ourselves to getting out of the way so God’s glory can shine through us?  Who benefits?  Who gets the credit?  Who gets the appreciation?  “Those who speak on their own seek their own glory,” says Jesus.  They get the big salaries and the grandiose titles, which is the way we measure glory today.  They get the fame and the recognition, the adulation, the celebrity-status.  It is all about them.

The whole point of Jesus’ mission is self-emptying so that people who look at Jesus don’t see this guy from Nazareth, but God.  God shines in and  through him so completely that his followers realize that he is invisible and the One they have come to know in him is God.  Jesus’ whole mission is to become a nobody, and therefore the perfect conduit, channel, medium, vessel of God.  God fills him so powerfully that he is God, the living embodiment and incarnation of God, the Word of God who became flesh to dwell among us.  He is the full expression of the One who sent him.

He is calling his disciples to the same kind of life.  Eternal life is not an extension into the future of our mortal existence, which would be a living hell.  It is losing yourself in God, it is being swallowed up, overwhelmed, taken over, dissolved into God.  It is becoming God, as the early church affirmed.  Eternal life is losing your little, limited, narrow identity and being made one with God’s infinite identity.  We do not honor the great saints of the church because they were such good people; we honor them to the degree that their humanity was fulfilled in becoming transparent to God.  They do their best to be anonymous and inconspicuous.

The Lord goes on to say that this is the whole point of the Law.  It was to get people resonating with God’s will and setting aside their own will.  But Jesus notes that the religious leaders have turned it into an extension of their power and their glory.  “None of you actually keeps the Law,” he charges.  “None of you are becoming nothing so God can be everything in you.  None of you are setting aside your own will so God’s will may be done in you.  Instead of following God you’re actually trying to use God’s Law to kill me, or at least to shut God out of your life.

The people respond that he must be possessed by a paranoid spirit because no one is trying to kill him, as far as they could see.  But the world itself, as it has been engineered by the leaders and wealthy and powerful and successful to keep people asleep and enslaved, unaware of God and unaware of their own blessings and destiny, unaware of their own true nature, is lethal to the truth.  Their systems and regimes are designed to eliminate any liberating awareness of God.  Killing God is the point of civilization.

III.

Then the Lord illustrates his point by talking about his last venture to Jerusalem, and its consequences.  Back in chapter 5, he heals a lame man on the Sabbath and instructs him to carry his mat, for which he and the man came very close to being arrested.  It’s like, no good deed goes unpunished in this system.  This action, combined with the disturbance he had caused in the Temple a year and a half before, throwing out the merchants, made Jesus a person-of-interest for the authorities.  He is considered so dangerous and threatening to the status quo, that Jesus can’t travel openly in Judea without being liable to arrest.   

He uses the example of circumcision.  It was permitted to circumcise on the Sabbath.  But his point is that if you could do that, why would the logic not extend to healing the whole body of a person on the Sabbath?  

The Sabbath laws are about redeeming society from the economic injustice of the market.  One day in seven had to be devoted to God.  It was a day to undo the damage done to creation during the other 6.  When we get to the Sabbath years and finally the Jubilee, we see that the point is recovering the blessing and wholeness with which the world was created by restricting and limiting economic activity.  Sabbath was about shutting down the market for a day and reaffirming that “the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein.”  That’s what the Hebrew Scriptures mean by not doing any “work” on the Sabbath.  It is not about physical inactivity, but economic justice.

When Jesus heals a person he is exactly in line with what the Sabbath is really for: to bring back into alignment and balance and wholeness that which had been kicked out of equilibrium.  In this case it is a person’s body; with the Sabbath it was the whole society.  Sabbath is a witness to the fullness and integrity, the health and well-being that God intends for creation.  Healing is the whole point of Sabbath, and these leaders have reduced it merely to forbidden “work!”

Finally, Jesus exclaims, “You think I’m breaking the Law by doing precisely what the Law intends?  Seriously?  Think about it!  Do not judge by appearances.  Do not judge by what these experts and leaders are telling you.  Look at the case for yourself!  Judge with right judgment, that is, with justice!  You tell me if healing is prohibited ‘work,’ or an example of the blessing for which the Sabbath was given!”

IV.

You see, the Sabbath is also in time what Jesus is in life: a place that has been emptied of our ego-centric, personality-driven agendas and illusions and institutions, and left open for God to shine through.  It is a time of blessed emptiness so we can be free of the slavery of the market and the empire and the rules and regulations of the leaders, and be present and open to the Creator.

The Sabbath is a time to give God the glory; but the leaders had made it into a glorification of their own power and control.  That’s why it is easy to mistake Jesus for a prophet who comes to reform the Sabbath practices of Israel.  The Sabbath is a gateway into God’s life, it is the place where God’s life opens into human community.  Jesus restores the Sabbath so that it functions as a time from which God’s love and justice pour into all the other days and commitments of our lives.  It’s a time of healing and lifting up the excluded and turning our attention again to the Creator and Sustainer of all.

And for acting and talking like this, of course, the authorities want to kill Jesus, like they have already throttled and nailed down the Sabbath.  Because nothing is more threatening to the powers-that-be than time or people who are not in their control.  Nothing is more dangerous to them than the idea that there could be Something bigger than their system and regime.

So, from this teaching in the Temple we understand that true spiritual life, eternal life, happens when we follow Jesus’ example, and the example of the Sabbath, and become empty and clear and open vessels that God then fills.  For God abhors a vacuum.  And once we are able to shove out of our consciousness and our polity and our time all the extraneous garbage, clutter, stuff, and furniture that we have filled it with, all the values and habits and fears and ideologies and addictions and desires and allegiances, all the things we are carefully taught to cherish and to hate, all the authorities we have vomited into power over us… once we have cut and scrubbed and swept and scraped all that falsehood and projection away, then the light of God and the breath of God and the Word of God expand to fill up that space.

We need to open up spaces and times for this, so we can say with the Lord that what we do is not ours, it is not our initiative or our idea, it is not something springing from our imagination or intellect, but comes from the One who sent us.  We need to be clear channels, transparent windows through which the Lord may shine, by seeking not our own glory, wealth, power, fame, pleasure, or will.  Rather, we need to become less and less, as we seek only and always the glory of the Creator.

This is the great paradox of faith.  The less we become the more we become.  The less concerned we are about ourselves, our institutions, our traditions, our possessions, our religion, the more space opens up in us for God to fill.  The less we are obsessed with the myriad distracting details the piling up of which constitutes what we take for our life, the more we make space within and among us for the infinite mystery of eternal life.

V.

Jesus says, “Those who seek the glory of the One who sent them are true, and there is nothing false in them.”  Seeking to serve and belong to God alone in itself will cause what is false in us to evaporate.  But it means letting go.  It means letting go of our fear.  It means letting go of our expectations and desires.  And it means letting go of our memories and nostalgia.

Faith means this stepping into what appears to be nothing, risking everything, and finding, perhaps even to our surprise, that Something wonderful will hold us and fill us, guide us and guard us, restore, renew, and heal us.  It means finding joy and fullness in precisely those places that seem so empty.

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Good Man or Deceiver?

John 7:1-13.  (May 31, 2015)

I.

After chapter six, where Jesus manages to alienate almost everybody, he stays in Galilee for about six months.  He does not go back to Judea and Jerusalem because the authorities there are seeking an excuse to arrest and kill him.  Galilee is under different jurisdiction.  Jesus knows that being arrested and killed is his plan, but he also knows that the time for this has not yet come.  He has a lot more to say and do before his death.

It appears that Jesus goes back to stay with his family for a while, because he gets into it with his brothers.  Now, scholars have different opinions about exactly how these people were related to him: brothers, half-brothers, or cousins.  Suffice it to say that they were his relatives.

And if it is true that prophets are not accepted in their own countries, they are even less accepted in their own families.  And these relations of Jesus seem to have nothing but disdain for him and his work.  Knowing that Jesus has managed to get himself into trouble with the Judean authorities, they taunt him by suggesting that he go to Judea.  

I imagine the kind of things might cruel brothers say, about “Mr. Special Messiah, Mr. Bread of Life, Mr. I-used-to-have-disciples-but-they-all-left-when-I-told-them-to-eat-me, who now has to live in the basement because his sponsors cut him off and the cops are on his trail.  How is the Messiah-gig working out for you now?  Why don’t you go to Judea so all your ‘disciples,’ if there are any left, can see your supposedly amazing works!  You sure don’t have any more disciples around here.  Don’t you want the whole world to see what you are doing?  Or maybe you don’t want the whole world to see where you have ended up, living here with your mother.”

In any case, Jesus responds that his time has not yet come but their time is always here.  He uses the Greek word kairos for time.  It means time as an opportunity, as distinct from regular clock-time, for which they had a different word.  

He means that, while it’s not the right moment for him to act; yet, on the one hand, his brothers always have the opportunity to wake up and get with his program.  On the other hand, he could be using irony here to say that their time or “opportunity” is always here and they keep squandering it by going along with the agenda and standards of the world, which means it isn’t really an opportunity at all.  All they have are fake and counterfeit “opportunities” to keep doing what they are doing in blindness, bondage, and unconsciousness.  It is as if he is saying, “My opportunity may not have come yet, but what passes for opportunity with you guys is the same dead end jobs, endless debt, with Caesar’s troops on your back and the Pharisees always on your case to make sure you don't carry the wrong thing on the wrong day.  Good luck with that.” 

II.

He goes on, “The world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify that its works are evil.”  Jesus’ siblings are still in synch with the values and practices and habits and traditions of the world.  They are still in sleepwalking, ego-centric, blind existence.  They are still going along with everyone else in the normal unconscious, clueless routine, working hard to make somebody else rich.  Whatever taunts and insults they offer him would have been little more than inconsequential noise to Jesus.

As for him, his life in synch with God has placed him in dissonance with the world and its rulers.  His life of love and justice only serves to highlight the corruption and hatred that dominates in the world.  He is an annoyance; a living judgment against them.  The last time he was in Jerusalem he healed the lame man on the Sabbath, an act which revealed the silliness and arbitrary legalism of the system.  They come down on this guy for carrying his mat on the Sabbath, while ignoring the new life he has received.  It shows everyone that they are paranoid control freaks for whom real redemption doesn’t matter so as much as inane and meticulous details of their law.

Then he says to his brothers, “You all go up to the festival.  I am not going this time because it is not time for me.”  The festival was called in Hebrew, Sukkoth, or, in English, “Booths” or “Tabernacles.”  It happens in the autumn, after the Day of Atonement and Yom Kippur.  Tabernacles commemorates the wilderness wanderings of the people when they lived in tents.  Synagogues still celebrate it today by building booths or trellises outdoors.  

But there is also evidence that Sukkoth had another meaning.  It was also historically a holiday about the Messiah, the King, coming into the Temple.

So when Jesus says he’s not going to the festival and that it is not his time, what he means is that it is not the right time for him to go to Jerusalem and take on his role as the anointed King.  The people who witnessed when he fed the 5000 on the mountain wanted to make him King 6 months before.  That of course was not his time, and neither is this Sukkoth.  He is choosing not to make his big entrance now, even though Sukkoth would have been a good time for it.   

So his family starts off on the three-day journey to Jerusalem without him.  But then he also departs, later, by himself, with no fanfare.  The text says he goes “in secret,” and it doesn’t mean in disguise or surreptitiously so much as privately, quietly, more or less incognito.  He is inconspicuous and unobtrusive.  He doesn’t want to draw attention to himself until he gets there. 

III.

This is just as well.  The authorities are looking for him.  They are still angry about his last two appearances in Jerusalem.  In the first one he caused a disturbance by throwing the merchants out of the Temple.  In his second visit he healed that man by the pool and told him to carry his mat… which got both of them into trouble with the Sabbath police.  So there is still a warrant out for him. 

The people are divided in their opinion of Jesus.  Some say he is a good man and others say he is deceiving the crowds.  But this is all happening under the radar because the authorities are listening, and expressing a positive opinion about Jesus is to invite unwanted attention.

In a sense, Jesus has been forced underground.  Not only does he have to hide, but people are not allowed to talk about him.  It is a situation that has similarities with ours in several ways.

In an age like ours, when Christianity is plummeting in popularity and power, claiming to be a follower of Jesus is becoming more costly.  It used to be that “Christian” was just what everyone was who wasn't Jewish.  It was like the default religion of America.  It therefore included a lot of people who had no interest in actually following Jesus, but who were only hanging around church for other reasons not related to faith or discipleship.  Going to church was considered a vaguely patriotic duty.  Church was a place to make good business and political connections.  At one time, before TV and cable and the internet, the local church was the center of people’s social and entertainment life.  Before the emergence of psychology, priests and ministers were the closest things to therapists anyone would know.  

This meant that a lot of the people who were involved in church were not disciples of Jesus at all.  They were here for these other reasons.  This explains how the church managed to support and endorse and justify all kinds of behavior that would make Jesus puke or cry or both: wars, torture, slavery, genocide, lynching, economic injustice, and so forth.  A large percentage of the people going to church did not have the slightest concern for what Jesus actually teaches.  They didn’t know and they didn’t care.  Preachers who didn’t want to be unpopular wouldn’t bring it up.  People didn’t come to church to follow Jesus, they came to be good citizens.

All that has been gradually disintegrating for at least 60 years, and now we are getting to the point where it is becoming more socially acceptable not to be a “Christian.”  And so those who were all about social acceptability are not coming to church any more.

I am not at all sure this is a bad thing.  Just as Jesus himself feels he has to be inconspicuous, these days I too sometimes feel I have to not mention Jesus right off because the behavior of people calling themselves Christians was so atrocious.  I’d rather try and show people the real Jesus in my behavior, than have to explain that what many Christians have done in the past had nothing to do with Jesus. 

IV.

So in some ways we’re getting somewhat closer to sharing the context of the New Testament.  The people who originally hear this story in the gospel about Jesus going to Jerusalem almost undercover understand immediately.  That’s what their life is like in the Roman Empire.  And that’s what our life is getting to be like here, at least a little.

I wonder if people aren’t making the same kinds of evaluations today.  Some say Jesus is a good man.  Maybe they are reading the gospels, or are learning about Jesus in a Comparative Religion course in college.  Maybe they encounter good followers of Jesus who are kind, compassionate, forgiving, and generous to them.  Maybe they have a Christian grandparent who loves them unconditionally.  Maybe they are attracted to Jesus and might want to follow him if someone introduces them to him.

But others say he is deceiving the crowd.  Maybe they think that Jesus says and does some things that look and sound good, but his real agenda is just to cause trouble.  Maybe they see that he is undermining loyalty to the nation and the religious institutions and authorities.  Maybe they see that Jesus’ teachings are dangerous to the economic elite.  Maybe they want to go back to the days when what passed for “Christianity” was popular precisely because it ignored Jesus and supported the State.

I think we have to quietly find people who are open to Jesus, and bring them to him.  That is, bring them to the place where his life and teachings are shared, studied, proclaimed, and followed.  That is, here: in the gathering of disciples.  This will have to be done carefully and sensitively.  Maybe it will have to happen quietly.

But it is always a matter of joy!  It is always a matter of joy when we find people who are waking up to the truth of God’s love and want to be a part of it.  It is always a matter of joy when we find neighbors who are ready to follow the Lord Jesus.

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